Justice & Legal

FOUR AGENCIES, ZERO CHARGES

Four federal and state probes into Alaska's two Dan Sullivans yield zero charges, zero ballots, one denial.

By MitchInvestigations · the afternoon edition, 30 October 2026

Clause by clause, all together now, once through the paper trail. On 31 August, the Washington Examiner reported that Alaska Democrats had found a candidate named Dan J. Sullivan — a Democrat-affiliated man running under Republican branding, sharing a name with the state's sitting Republican senator.

Then the apparatus arrived. On 23 October the Justice Department sued to block certification of Alaska's Senate result — read the condition twice — only if the Republican incumbent loses. On 27 October, Peltola's lawyers filed a motion to dismiss that very suit, Democracy Now reported. Two days later, on 29 October, the New York Times reported that Peltola's campaign had recruited the second Sullivan directly. Peltola denied it that day and has denied it every day since.

Thursday brought the paperwork. The Department of Justice sent out dozens of subpoenas, The Hill reported — more subpoenas, by any count, than ballots currently in dispute, which remains zero. Peltola stood in a bar in Juneau and said what she now says on a loop: "I knew nothing about any other candidate on the ballot except for me and the incumbent." Sullivan told Fox News she is "still lying." CBS sent a reporter to the second Dan Sullivan's street; his neighbors could not agree whether he is "a nice guy" or "a hoaxer" — which is more consensus than four agencies have reached on whether he is a criminal. And the Guardian's First Thing newsletter, filing the story for its own readers Thursday morning, included the one sentence that outruns all the subpoenas combined: ballot stacking, it noted plainly, "is not illegal."

Four government bodies. Dozens of subpoenas. Zero ballots altered, zero charges filed. Follow the document to where it actually stops: a lawsuit that only activates if the Republican loses, aimed at a scheme a wire service already calls lawful, answered on schedule by a woman who says she knew nothing — and four agencies deep, nobody has yet filed a single page that says otherwise.

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Justice Department charges Comey a third time, days after a judge ruled it illegally fired his daughter.

By LouOne More Question · the afternoon edition, 30 October 2026

My wife told me to leave it alone. I did not leave it alone.

I was up past midnight with this one, not because it's complicated — it isn't — but because I kept doing the arithmetic in the dark and getting the same answer. Two investigations into the same leak, both closed with nothing. A third one, open as of Monday. I'd write that down as my case notes if I could find where I put the notebook, so I'm doing this from memory, and you can check it against what's printed, because I did.

Here's what I keep running into, and maybe you can tell me where I've got it wrong. The two investigations that looked at this same leak closed without charges — no indictment, nothing. Did the people running the third one have anything in front of them that the first two didn't? Were there new documents nobody had the first two times? Because if there weren't, what's different about the file now.

I went out to the car around one in the morning, the way I do when I can't sleep — the fan belt's been making that sound again — and I ended up standing there with the glovebox open, going through it for no reason except my hands needed something to do. There's an old inspection sticker in there, a parking ticket I never paid, the registration, and an owner's manual I've never once opened. Four things. I know exactly what's in there because it's small enough to know, start to finish, in under a minute. A federal leak investigation isn't a glovebox. It has more people looking into it than I have hands. And it still came up with nothing, twice, before somebody opened it a third time.

The charges against Comey — two counts about leaking information related to national defense, where the charges themselves, the Guardian wrote, provide few details about what Comey is alleged to have leaked — were filed Monday, the same day Judge Jesse Furman ruled that Comey's daughter, Maurene Comey, had been illegally fired from her job as a federal prosecutor in New York, a job she'd held for a decade, with work the Guardian calls widely praised. She worked the Epstein case. She was let go in July of last year. The filing date and the ruling date land on the same square of the calendar, and that's not me reading something into it — that's what the paper printed.

He's on camera about it from that same week. "I'm still innocent. I'm still not afraid of these people and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary." That's him, saying that about himself, which a person is entitled to do, and I'm only passing it along, not grading it.

His lawyers are due in front of a federal judge this Friday, asking that the third case be thrown out before it goes any further. Nobody had to stand in front of a judge to throw out the first two. This one needs a courtroom. What does a case need a hearing for, that the other two never needed one for?

I was about done for the night — glovebox shut, coffee cold, notebook still missing — when I remembered the other thing. Actually, hang on, one more before you go. The judge who ruled Monday that Comey's daughter was illegally fired — that was the same Monday they filed count three against her father. Same calendar. Same square. Was it?

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Judge calls third Comey prosecution a possible exercise in futility; prosecutors suggest a fourth charge anyway.

By LouOne More Question · the afternoon edition, 30 October 2026

My wife told me to leave this one alone. I did not leave it alone. I was up past one in the morning, running the week's dates over again, Monday through Friday, the way you check a receipt against a till slip that keeps coming up short no matter how many times you re-add the column.

Monday, the record says, the Justice Department filed a third criminal case against James Comey, accusing the former FBI director — per The New York Times — of leaking classified information from about a decade ago. Two earlier FBI investigations into that same leak had already closed with no charges at all. That's not a guess on my part. It's the sequence, in the order it happened: the same leak, two dead ends, and now a third filing.

That same Monday, a federal judge ruled the Justice Department had illegally fired Comey's daughter, Maurene Comey, from her own job as a federal prosecutor. She'd held that job for a decade, the judge found, with consistently strong reviews, right up until her firing in July 2025. I don't have a question about that part. I have the date, and the date is Monday, same as the other one.

Friday is what kept me up a second night. Comey's lawyers were back in court, and according to The Hill, their argument was that the Justice Department had simply waited too long to bring these charges. CBS reported that prosecutors and the defense faced off over that same motion. ABC reported the judge had not yet ruled on whether to throw the case out.

Here's where I went out to the car. I keep a folder in the glovebox — registration, insurance card, the receipt from the one time the fan belt went — and Friday night I sat out there with the dome light on, laying the court reporting next to itself the way I lay those receipts side by side when a bill doesn't match what I was quoted. According to the Washington Examiner, Judge Trevor McFadden pressed Comey's attorneys on whether dismissing this case could turn into what he called a great exercise in futility, if a grand jury later comes back with an indictment over more recent conduct. That's on the record, from the bench, Friday afternoon.

And at that same hearing — this is the part I kept rereading — The New York Times reported that prosecutors suggested they may seek additional charges against Comey. I asked the man at the corner store this morning if he could explain why a department would float a fourth charge the same day a judge wonders aloud whether killing the third one would accomplish anything. He sells lottery tickets and cigarettes for a living. He didn't have an answer. Neither do I.

Oh — one more thing, before I let you go. Two investigations into this leak closed without charges. The third is being argued over right now, this week, on the grounds that it came too long after the fact. The New York Times didn't say what a fourth charge would even cover. Does anything in the record say what it's supposed to be about?

My wife's probably still right. I should have left it alone.

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White House credits Melania Trump's ceasefire for evacuating civilians it reported were eating grass.

By MortThe Records Bureau · the afternoon edition, 30 October 2026

Call this one the obituary for the easy version of the story.

It was born October 11, when the White House announced an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, each side agreeing to leave the other's power grid alone. It turned out to be bunk within a day.

It was reborn October 23, in Oleshky, a Russian-occupied city in the Kherson region, where the Guardian reported people were surviving on weeds. The White House said Russia and Ukraine had agreed to halt operations in the city starting October 29 so humanitarian aid could move. On October 27 the halt took effect, and Melania Trump, who brokered it, called the situation inside the city "dire."

On Friday the ceasefire did the one thing a ceasefire is supposed to do. Hundreds of civilians trapped in Oleshky evacuated. CBS reported that Russian strikes on the surrounding area had kept food, water and medicine out of the city for months. The New York Post ran the evacuation under a headline that, in the same breath, carried the detail that locals had been reduced to eating grass. Melania Trump posted that she hoped the mission would "end the suffering and begin a new chapter of durable peace."

That is one headline carrying both the credit and the evidence against it: the rescue, and the sentence describing exactly what the rescue was rescuing people from. A reader does not need a tally to see which half of that sentence the White House led with.

Preceded in death this month by one ceasefire that did not survive its first news cycle. Survived by a city that still has no working supply of food, by hundreds of people now standing outside its walls instead of in it, and by a White House statement that files the entire month under success.

In lieu of flowers, read the second half of the headline.

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THE INJUNCTIONS

Fourth court order this month tells Justice Department to stop threatening the people counting the votes.

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 31 October 2026

I had the wrong building, then the wrong floor, and I'd like to get that out of the way first, because everything I'm about to read you came to me sideways.

Friday morning I went downtown with one question. The woman at the first counter could not have been nicer about it: wrong floor. The second counter said wrong agency, try the clerk. The clerk said they don't keep anything that comes out of Washington, that'd be the court. The court said look it up, it's public. So I stood on the steps in the rain in the one raincoat I own, which is also the raincoat I own in August, reading the pages I'd folded into the pocket. Four rooms, each one pointing at the next. I'm told that's normal.

The pages are out of order. Hold on. Here.

October 17th, the Guardian prints a letter from senior Justice Department officials to election officials in California. Local officials who process and tabulate ballots submitted by suspected noncitizen voters, it says, are putting themselves at risk of criminal investigation and potential prosecution. The department's phrase for the offense is "knowingly tabulate." I circled it out there on the steps, because I couldn't work out who, in a room holding ten thousand envelopes, is the one who knows.

Five days later, October 22nd, a federal judge in California finds Homeland Security violated the Voting Rights Act, sending agents door to door asking people their immigration status and whether they had voted. Then the subpoenas: three employees of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder's office ordered into federal court on November 4th, which is the day after the election. Then October 26th, a $1 million reward announced for reporting voter fraud, past or upcoming. It is still sitting there. A million dollars offered for the thing, and the thing hasn't come in.

I want to show you a small thing. The fellow who runs the store on my corner took a run of bad twenties this summer. He taped a card by the register: fifty dollars to anybody who tells him who's passing them. Nobody has come in for the fifty. So last week he told the kid at the register that any bill that looks off goes in the second drawer, don't ring it, and if the kid takes a bad one it comes out of the kid's pay. I asked how the kid is supposed to tell. He said that's what the drawer is for. Tuesday the line was out the door, the dog and I were in it, and the kid rang everything. Was the kid passing bad money, or was the kid standing there?

Friday evening, Judge Trina Thompson, on a suit brought by unions representing California election workers, issues a temporary restraining order: the Justice Department is barred from threatening or coercing election workers to stop processing ballots, and barred from demanding that officials segregate or decline to count ballots the federal government deems may have been cast by ineligible voters. The order runs through November 16th.

That is four federal court orders in nineteen days against this administration's handling of Tuesday's election: October 12th, a New York judge halting taxpayer-funded television ads promoting the president and ordering the rest of a $20 million purchase cancelled; the 22nd, the Voting Rights Act ruling; the 28th, another judge freezing that same $20 million; Friday, the restraining order. And a report published the 27th found 53 of the 60 battleground House and Senate races sit in districts or states with at least one Trump-appointed judge on the bench.

Excuse me — you've got your hand on the door, this takes a second. The counting is Tuesday the 3rd. The three subpoenaed workers are in court Wednesday the 4th. The protection ends the 16th, and the letter is still the letter. So when a clerk picks up an envelope the government hasn't deemed anything about yet, and won't until afterward — I'm sorry to keep coming back to this, it's been in my teeth since the steps — which word in that letter is the one they'd be charged under, the department's own, knowingly?

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THE CONDITION

Justice Department sues to block Alaska's certification, surges agents, then says it is not assuming a crime occurred

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the evening edition, 31 October 2026

There is a crime in this somewhere, you would think, and the United States Attorney in Anchorage will not name it. Michael Heyman confirmed a criminal investigation and a civil one on Friday, and said he is "not making any assumptions on whether a crime has been committed or not." Hold that order. The suit asking a court to withhold certification of Alaska's Senate race was filed a week ago; the relief it asks for arrives only if Dan Sullivan loses. The ballots it challenged numbered zero. The grounds have been arriving since, in instalments: law enforcement surged, and a Friday filing asking that every ballot ranking Daniel J. Sullivan be segregated for voter confusion. Segregated, not counted. And how does setting a ballot aside establish that the voter who marked it was confused? The filing does not say. A condition precedent is the event a promise waits upon; until it occurs, nothing is owed. Here the event is not a finding ... it is a Republican defeat. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Peltola's campaign recruited the second Sullivan; she denies knowing of "any other candidate" besides herself and the incumbent. On 27 August, two months before her campaign recruited anyone, a Washington Examiner column called the decoy Sullivan Democratic voter suppression. Alaska votes Tuesday.

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The promise that the Iran war will end "soon" turns thirty-nine days old, no details added

By MortThe Records Bureau · the evening edition, 31 October 2026

The promise that the Iran war will end "soon" turned thirty-nine days old on Friday, and it has not yet been supplied with a single detail.

It was born September 22nd, on the floor of the United Nations, where the president told the General Assembly he had "a big decision to make": whether to annihilate Iran or strike a deal with it after November's midterm elections. The next day, CBS News asked the Iranian-American activist Masih Alinejad what she made of a head of state weighing the fate of her country against a campaign calendar. The promise did not yet have an age. It only had an audience.

The war had already missed one off-ramp. Days later, Iran offered seven days to reopen the Strait of Hormuz; the offer was declined, and the bombing it might have averted was moved to after the midterms. The president's ambassador to the United Nations told Fox News, that same stretch, that $6.48 diesel was Ukraine's doing. The war stayed on the calendar. The explanation kept moving.

By October 15th the promise had learned a new line. Speaking to reporters, the president said the war "will end very soon," then supplied the only specification it has ever received: "as soon as I want it to end." That is not a date. It is a veto, held in reserve and dressed up as a forecast.

On October 28th, at a rally in Lubbock, Texas, he told the crowd, "You'll see Iran in a couple of weeks, if you don't mind" — campaigning through an economy the wires described only as uncertain, the war carried alongside it, unresolved, into the midterms.

Then Friday came, and Qatar's mediators returned to Tehran to push, again, for a deal that has not arrived. The president met them with the same word he used in September and the word he used in October: soon. No terms were offered. No date was named. None of the wires report the decision itself being announced — only its timing, tucked between one election and the one after it.

A promise renewed on schedule but not once redeemed is not a forecast. It is malarkey with a release date that keeps slipping to the next release date.

In lieu of flowers, ask your senator for the date this war's authorization comes up for a vote, and ask again when the answer is "soon."

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Students marching over classroom rats enter weekend three; now showing at American rallies, three days before the vote.

By MortThe Records Bureau · the evening edition, 31 October 2026

The accurate name for what French schoolchildren are doing died on 20 October, at a rally in Kansas, at the age of roughly seven weeks. It is survived by a third weekend of marches, by an interior minister's warning, and by an American election on Tuesday. It was preceded in death by the arrest count.

It was born in September at a single school in the economically deprived suburbs of Paris: teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, dilapidated buildings beset by rats and falling debris. Democracy Now! reported on 6 October that nearly 2,000 high schools had been blockaded or closed.

The renaming began the following week, and renaming is penny-ante work. On 18 October the Washington Examiner reported the president telling France to "close your borders" while police arrested 1,800. On the 20th, from a stage in Kansas, the Guardian reported him attacking "migrants and communists," turning the demonstrations into a cautionary tale for American voters while his party faced midterm losses. France 24 published a fact-check on the 21st: the immigration claims were false. Inside four days the thing had been called rioting and looting, then called somebody else's invasion, and the students got a vote on neither name.

The count went next. Fox News filed one Saturday's arrests at 135, and later in the month at nearly 1,000. The Morning Star reported on 25 October that more than half a million people marched over school funding and the soaring cost of living, that the government put the arrests near a thousand, and that tear gas and water cannon met the Paris march near its endpoint. Of the figures in circulation — 135, nearly 1,000, 1,800 — one of them is the number of people who spent that night in a cell. The footage runs the same either way.

Which brings us to tonight. The New York Post reports a third weekend beginning and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez warning of a "very high risk" of disorder, especially after dark on Halloween. The schools are still the schools. The rats are still the rats. Three days from now Americans vote, and some of them will have seen all this on a screen behind a podium, under a caption written in Kansas.

In lieu of flowers, ask whoever shows you the footage what the marchers asked for, and check the arrest count twice before Tuesday.

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