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Trump revenge tour meets Indiana RINOs; Vivek sweeps Ohio; media coordinates vaccine-safety hit on FDA; Fulton County lawyers up against grand jury subpoena squinting at the lights coming on; more.
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Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup includes: Indiana’s redistricting defectors got demolished in primaries; corporate media coordinated a vaccine-safety hit on FDA; Vivek sweeps Ohio; Fulton County lawyered up against a federal grand jury subpoena; and a Democrat polycrisis is brewing.
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BOOM. Last year, Indiana’s Republican supermajority filed a bill to redistrict the state into sane, non-racist districts that would have given the GOP +2 seats in the House of Representatives. It sailed through Indiana’s house, but sank in the senate after 21 Republicans voted with 10 Democrats to stop it. Seven of the defectors were up for re-election this year. Yesterday, NBC reported on Indiana’s primary: “Trump exacts revenge in Indiana over redistricting vote, with five GOP legislators defeated.” Revenge!
They weren’t just “taken out”— they were atomized. In five of seven contested primaries, Trump-endorsed challengers defeated sitting senators by margins that would make Kim Jong Il’s election commission blush: 75-24, 65-35, 61-39, and a pair of 18-point routs.
Trump-aligned groups spent over $12 million on the effort, which is a lot of money for state senate races, but a steal for the satisfaction of watching five rogue RINOs all simultaneously discover that Mike Pence’s endorsement has the political impact of falling off a cheap Home Depot ladder.
The Senate defectors claimed their voters preferred “fairness,” and they were called by their higher duty to their own constituents to vote down the pro-GOP map. Incumbent Greg Walker gave a passionate floor speech in December, calling it “the most consequential vote of my Senate career.” That was true.
They just learned the hard way that their voters have a different view, and had a chance to express their preferences. The New York Times’ take:
“Trump’s loyal and energized supporters turned out to punish the incumbents,” Politico reported, “showing that his endorsement remains the gold standard of GOP politics.” David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth (which put more than $2 million in the race) said, “It’s a sign that the party’s ready to follow the president on this and get younger, newer leaders in the state Senate.”
80-year-old Jim Buck survived the travails of Indiana politics since 1994. He made it through the Tea Party wave, through Obama, and through Trump 1.0. Then he voted against the redistricting map, and —even worse, if that’s possible— Mike Pencecalled him “a man of integrity and one of Indiana’s most conservative state legislators.” Yesterday, he got beaten like a drum (by 30 points) by a relatively unknown Tipton County commissioner endorsed by President Trump.
Incumbent senator Greg Walker was planning to retire. He held on specifically for the redistricting fight, cried like a little girl on the Senate floor about the future of the party, and was primaried by 18 points. Meanwhile, challenger Blake Fiechter quit the race in February, convinced he was toast. But after a White House visit in March, Blake un-quit. (Whatever Trump said to him was either the best motivational speech in history or the scariest.)
Five of seven defectors went down in flames. And one of the two survivors, Spencer Deery, now faces a recount, having ‘won’ by only three votes (his challenger said she is confident she’ll win after provisional ballots are counted). The only clear survivor got help from a spoiler who split the protest vote. The five ousted incumbents were veteran lawmakers all, having served a combined 70 years in the Indiana Senate. Indiana Governor Mike Braun:
They had deep connections, established fundraising networks, and the personal endorsement of a former Vice President who remains a religious relic for never-Trumpers. They also had, as it turns out, the political instincts of a GPS that keeps driving you through the bad part of the hood.
They fooled around and found out. They never should have believed corporate media reports of Trump’s alleged unpopularity. Like Mark Twain, reports of the President’s political death have been slightly exaggerated.
Republican legislators in other states will now think very carefully before crossing the leader of the GOP (Porlanders: the President) on redistricting or anything else. Of the sixteen anti-redistricting senators who survived last night, zero have publicly defended their December vote. Trump just rewrote the chamber’s incentive math for the price of five primaries. Their silence in 2026 says more than a thousand outraged X posts.
🔥 Related: yesterday, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy swept Ohio’s gubernatorial primary. BBC: “Vivek Ramaswamy wins Republican nomination for Ohio governor.”
In the general election, Vivek will face Dr. Amy Acton, Ohio’s former Director of Public Health during the pandemic. In spite of trad-media claims of a “neck and neck” contest, the deck is stacked against her for at least five reasons.
First, Ohio is a red state (R+7, Trump crushed it in 2024). Second, Vivek has a massive financial edge, having primed his campaign with $25 million of his own money. Third, Ohio hasn’t elected a Democrat governor since Ted Strickland in 2006. Fourth, Amy has never even run for any elected office, not even for animal control. So.
But fifth, and most significantly, her baggage. Ohio conservatives remember Dr. Acton as “Dr. Lockdown” and as “Ohio’s Female Fauci.” She’s going to spur some strong feelings.
Were Democrats confident, they’d have run a stronger candidate. Amy is a disposable throwaway serving the useful purpose of forcing Republicans to invest in the race. Meanwhile, Vivek is charismatic, money, prior electoral experience for president(albeit unsuccessfully), and has a national name-brand without Acton’s pandemic negatives.
Media’s political analysts are calling it a “razor-thin race,” and projecting it will be one of the most closely watched campaigns in the midterm cycle. Frankly, I don’t see it. If nothing else, angry Ohioans who remember school closures will turn out in force, finally having a chance to get a lick in against their local covid dictator.
Whatever you think of him, I predict it’s Vivek’s race to lose. All he needs to do is avoid unforced errors.
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Yesterday, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNBC, and Reuters all broke the same story within a few hours of each other— with the same narrative. Someone made phone calls. The synchronized headline: the FDA “blocked publication” of studies finding covid and shingles vaccines were “safe.” Four outlets. Same language. Same day. Probably born as a press release. The New York Times claimed, “F.D.A. Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe.”
The Times is, apparently, a mind-reader. “The withdrawal of the studies is the latest step by the administration to try to limit access to vaccines,” it reported as a fact, rather than what it was: an inference about the administration’s intent. It then listed a parade of horribles: slashing research funding for mRNA vaccines, publishing “unvetted information casting doubt on vaccines,” and “blocking information about their safety.”
Ironically, Secretary Kennedy gets more credit for his anti-vaccine work in the Times than from most MAHA commenters on X.
What the Times didn’t say was that the four safety studies —two on covid jabs and the other two on shingles shots— were conducted and written by FDA insects during the Biden era (2022-2024). Nor was this “news.” In February, when career FDA staffers sought approval to submit the Shingrix studies for a conference, “agency officials did not sign off in time.” The Times claimed the FDA’s top brass ordered the authors to withdraw two covid ‘safety’ papers that had already been accepted for journal publication.
Pro-jab ‘experts’ quoted by the Times called the alleged withdrawal orders “censorship,” “sabotage,” and “data suppression,” and claimed that, at any previous time, this would have triggered hearings and resignations. Ha. Censorship? Don’t make me laugh. Resignations? We know this isn’t true because outright liars, sycophants, and bunglers at CDC and FDA were not fired during the pandemic.
💉 The irony was so thick you could cut it with a cardboard knife. These so-called ‘experts’ never criticized the FDA under Biden when it approved these vaccines at warp speed, assured us they were “safe and effective” before the clinical trials even ended, and greenlighted boosters based on studies of eight mice.
They can take their “follow the science” hysteria and shove it where the needles don’t probe.
Buried in every single one of these coordinated stories was one little sentence from HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon, who explained that the studies were withdrawn because “the authors drew broad conclusions that were not supported by the underlying data.” None of the stories grappled with the details of this explanation, except to reject it out of hand.
For me, any paper concluding the covid vaccines are ‘safe’ is immediately suspect. There’s just too much anecdotal data at this point, including thousands of published case studies on injuries. But these studies went much further, attributing magical, snake oil-like health powers to the jabs. One of the Biden-era FDA studies statistically compared a 21‑day post‑shot window to the next 20 days. That’s it. That was the whole basis to conclude the shots were totally safe.
Smells like cherry-picking time ranges to find the result you want, to me.
When studies critical of the covid shots or that showed data inconvenient to the narrative were sidelined between 2020–24, the same professional classes largely shrugged, rationalized, or actively helped police the boundaries of acceptable speech.
The Times piece never asked its quoted experts how many skeptical or cautionary analyses they saw quietly buried during the pandemic, or what they did about those. (That, of course, is a rhetorical question; the answer is they did nothing.)
Altogether —the timing of simultaneous publication, the staleness of the ‘news’ from February (at the latest), the absence of any supportive quotes, the self-flattering double standards and selective outrage, the intellectual indolence to investigate the reasons the Trump FDA doesn’t like the studies— make this an obvious midterm political maneuver, not any kind of legitimate scientific criticism.
The good news is that covid shots and questions about their safety remain frontpage news. It isn’t going away. The covid‑vaccine file is still open— and swampy officials are still nervous enough about the public reaction to become hysterical when their ‘safety studies’ get round-filed.
Through all this hysteria, what they are really mad about is that they’re losing control of what they always assumed was their unimpeded property: the monopoly on gatekeeping of academic literature. TRUTH. IS. WINNING.
Nice try, corporate media. Forgive me for laughing and moving on to the next story.
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Speaking of things that are definitely not over. On Monday, the New York Times reported the terrific news, “Trump Administration Demands Names of 2020 Election Workers in Georgia.” The sub-headline complained, “The Justice Department again appears to be using the investigative power of the federal government to rehash debunked claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election.”
For the past five years, we have been repeatedly assured by corporate media, the Democratic Party, and various highly credentialed experts that the 2020 election was the most spotless, pristine, mathematically flawless democratic exercise in the history of human civilization, and possibly in the whole Milky Way Galaxy.
We have been told that counting the ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, was an operation so pure and incorruptible that it made the Vatican look like Tony Soprano’s strip club. If you so much as raised an eyebrow at a sudden 3:00 a.m. ballot dump, or wondered why a burst pipe required everyone to stop counting except for a few highly dedicated volunteers pulling suitcases out from under tables, you were immediately branded a threat to Democracy Itself.™
But all is not well within this immaculate monument to civic perfection. Snags have appeared.
🗳️ Within the last few days, the Department of Justice —now under Todd Blanche’s management— issued a grand jury subpoena to the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections. The DOJ is asking for something fairly straightforward: the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of the roughly 3,000 election workers and volunteers who touched the ballots in 2020.
Short of an arrest warrant, a grand jury subpoena is about as serious as it gets. A standard civil subpoena —the kind you see in lawsuits and Congressional inquiries— can be challenged, negotiated, and routinely delayed for months or years while lawyers argue about scope and relevance. Courts apply a balancing test and often narrow the scope of what must be produced. The recipient has considerable leverage.
But a grand jury subpoena is a different animal entirely. For one thing, it confirms that someone is in the crosshairs of a federal criminal case— and not just an FBI fishing expedition. It also carries the full weight of federal criminal law. Compliance is presumed mandatory.
The standard for quashing a grand jury subpoena is extremely high— courts almost never do it, because grand juries are supposed to be able to investigate broadly. Refusing to comply without a judge’s order can result in contempt of court, which can lead to jail. There is no “we need a little more time” option.
🗳️ Now, if you had just overseen the most secure and magnificent election in American history, you might assume you’d be proud of your work. You might expect these Fulton folks to step forward, take a bow, and perhaps ask for a commemorative plaque or at least a lapel ribbon. “Yes, I was there! I scanned the ballots! I defended Democracy!”
Instead, Fulton County is reacting to this request with the kind of panicked, multi-lawyer defensive maneuvering usually reserved for people who have just been asked to explain some accounting irregularities at Enron, or cockroaches who just realized they can check in, but they can’t check out.
Instead of celebrating their chance to prove how wonderfully pure their work had been, Fulton County officials immediately ran to a federal judge with a 27-page motion begging the court to quash the subpoena. They claimed the DOJ is trying to “target, harass, and punish” them. “Let me be clear,” said Robb Pitts, the totally-not-DEI chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, “we will not be intimidated” by this “outrageous federal overreach.”
Whew. Good thing he made that clear.
This is a fascinating response. If the 2020 election in Fulton County was entirely above board —if every signature was matched, every machine functioned perfectly, and every ballot was handled with the utmost integrity— why is the prospect of the Justice Department simply knowing who worked there considered an existential threat?
🗳️ To prove its innocence, the county has hired the notorious Abbe Lowell —one of the most expensive and prominent defense attorneys in Washington, D.C.— to fight the subpoena. For context, Lowell has recently represented prominent ne’er-do-wells like Hunter Biden and Bob Menendez, among others. It’s almost like somebody said we can’t afford to lose this fight.
As their legal basis, the county’s lawyers argue that the statute of limitations for election crimes in 2020 has expired. This is the legal equivalent of saying, “We definitely didn’t steal the cookies, but even if we did, you still can’t punish us because it happened more than five years ago, so please stop looking in the Oreo bag.”
That defense is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the County’s unblemished innocence.
🗳️ To be fair, Fulton County is having a pretty rough year. Back in January, the FBI raided their election hub and hauled off roughly 700 boxes of 2020 election documents. Fulton County is currently suing —in a separate lawsuit— to get those boxes back, presumably because they need them for a very important municipal papier-mâché project.
The left-wing advocacy groups are, of course, having a collective meltdown. The Brennan Center for Justice called the subpoena a “fishing expedition” (even though it came from a grand jury). Democracy Docket, a website dedicated to ensuring that Democrats never lose an election, called it a “major escalation” by the Trump Administration.
Step back. Consider the bigger picture. We are constantly being told that transparencyis the bedrock of our democracy. We are told that our election systems are robustand fully open. Yet the moment the federal government asks for a list of the people who actually ran the election in a county famous for its, shall we say, creative vote-counting techniques, the immediate response is to lawyer up, cite the statute of limitations, and wildly accuse the DOJ of harassment.
I think Manuel Noriega used the same playbook.
Gosh. It just makes you wonder. If the 2020 election in Fulton County were truly the most secure in history, why are they guarding the employee roster like it’s the nuclear launch codes?
Who knows. Maybe they are just very, very modest. Or perhaps, when you spend five years insisting that there is absolutely nothing to see here, the last thing you need is someone switching on the lights.
🗳️ Nobody outside the grand jury room knows where this is going. But the scale and persistence of the effort —the warehouse raid, a civil lawsuit, and now a subpoena for 3,000 names— suggests that whoever is driving the bus believes there is something real to find. Here’s my lawyer’s take.
The most obvious reason to demand the names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails of every single person who worked the 2020 election in Fulton County is to build a comprehensive witness list. Obviously, before you can interview people, you first need to know who they are. The county has never voluntarily produced a full roster, so the grand jury is forcing the issue. This is standard investigative groundwork: get the list, start making calls, and see who is willing to talk and who lawyers up.
But worse for Fulton County, there’s another common play that could also easily explain the subpoena: looking for a cooperating witness.
With nearly 3,000 names on that list, the odds favor that at least some of those workers saw something irregular, were pressured to do something they were uncomfortable with, or just want to tell their story. Prosecutors in complex criminal cases almost always build from the bottom up— find the low-level participant who is nervous, offer them immunity or leniency, and work your way up the chain. The sheer breadth of the request (everyone, not just supervisors) suggests they are casting a wide net, precisely to find that person who can crack the case like a piñata.
The worst case for the County is that one or two cooperating witnesses provide testimony that implicates supervisors or officials— and those supervisors, facing their own legal exposure, flip upward. Federal prosecutors call this “building the pyramid.” Start at the base and work upwards toward whoever was giving the orders. The subpoena for worker names is the foundation of that pyramid.
If the physical evidence about which we’ve heard so much —the ballots, machine logs, and tabulator tapes— show discrepancies, then a cooperating witness who can explain how those discrepancies occurred transforms a forensic anomaly into a criminal conspiracy. That is the difference between “the numbers don’t add up” and “here is the person who told me to run those ballots through again.” The former is a political argument; the latter is an indictment.
🗳️ The county’s statute of limitations argument is a dead loser.
Fulton County’s lawyers are making a lot of hay of the fact that the statute of limitations for 2020 election crimes has expired. That’s true for most standalone offenses. But it is not true for conspiracy charges, which have a longer clock and reset every time a conspirator takes an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.
The SOL argument also fails if the investigation considers conduct that continued beyond 2020— for example, if records were altered, destroyed, or concealed after the election. The FBI’s January raid focused partly on record retention violations, which would be a separate and more recent offense. So the SOL argument, while real, is not even close to the slam dunk Fulton County claims it is.
🗳️ But there’s an even more alarming possibility— alarming for Fulton County, that is.
The theory that should make Fulton County most nervous is that the grand jury may just be using 2020 as a predicate —establishing a pattern of conduct— while the real target is what happened in subsequent elections, such as 2024. If the same workers, supervisors, or systems were involved in later elections, and if there is evidence of ongoing misconduct, the 2020 data becomes the foundation of a much larger case rather than 2020 alone.
This would completely explain why the DOJ is still actively pursuing this years after the fact, and why they raided the warehouse in January rather than simply closing the file.
The county’s claims about political persecution arise mostly because the subpoena was signed by Dan Bishop, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina, who Pam Bondi appointed as national coordinator for election-related crimes. For context, back when he was a Republican Representative in the House, Dan voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory on January 6, 2021— in other words, a true believer.
And don’t forget: Dominion —Fulton County’s e-voting provider in 2020 and 2024— has been bought out and rebranded out of existence (it’s now “Liberty Vote” under new Republican management). Liberty Vote has Dominion’s records and could easily be voluntarily cooperating with the DOJ, and nobody would know. (Smartmatic is fighting for its corporate life in federal court on foreign bribery charges.)
The pincers are closing from multiple directions.
The Fulton County situation is a microcosm of a broader Democrat polycrisis. Democrats spent four years using the legal system as a political weapon against Trump —two impeachments, four criminal indictments, civil fraud cases, state prosecutions— and now the instrument is in other hands. The norm against weaponizing federal law enforcement has been thoroughly shredded— by Democrats. It is now intellectually impossible for them to argue that investigating a political opponent’s election conduct is inherently illegitimate, when they just spent four years doing exactly that.
Should I explain the Democrats’ polycrisis tomorrow? Let me know in the comments.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Navigate humpday, then circle round in the morning, for more essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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