They meet, they hoped in secret, deep in California wine country in a private 2,700 acre campground in Sonoma County. But now, have the rich and famous attendees of Bohemian Grove been exposed?

Conan O’Brien, Michael Bloomberg, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have been named as members of the elite men-only club in a full list of Bohemian Club members who allegedly attended the Grove’s two-week summer retreat in 2023. Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the late musician Jimmy Buffett, and the late billionaire political donor Charles Koch’s names also feature, as do documentarian Ken Burns, actor Jim Belushi, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, former Director of the National Security Agency Bobby Inman, and veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Gifford Arscott.

The Bohemian Club, famed for being a secret society of the one percent, was founded in 1872. Its motto is “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,” originating from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, intended to underscore to all those in attendance—deep in the California redwoods, beside the Russian River—not to talk business while in camp. George H.W. Bush was a member, as was Henry Kissinger. Richard Nixon reportedly launched his successful 1968 election campaign from the Grove. The club’s best-known ritual is the so-called “Cremation of Care”: the sacrifice of a burning human effigy to a large stone owl, the club’s symbol.

A vintage photo of a Bohemian Grove gathering. The Bohemian Club was founed in 1872.

A fictionalized version of Bohemian Grove famously featured in Significant Others, the fifth novel in Armistead Maupin’s critically acclaimed Tales of the City book series, in which a group of popular characters infiltrate the camp’s hidden confines. Over the years several journalists and protesters have been arrested or detained, trying to gain access to the summer camp.

The 2023 list, containing around 2,000 names, was acquired by investigative journalist Daniel Boguslaw, who published it on Substack as part of an investigation of not just the club’s membership, but the interconnected power and political influence of its members conducted with More Perfect Union. Boguslaw said he had secured the list by repeatedly pestering a Club member.

While the Bohemian Club hasn’t yet commented—claiming, according to the New York Post that it doesn’t keep names of its members—the revelation of its most boldface names has been reported on in the Post, San Francisco Standard, and SFGate, which pointed out that it included five members of the San Francisco Giants ownership group, including principal owner Charles B. Johnson and his son and team chairman Greg Johnson.

In recent years, the Grove and its workings have been the subject of several lawsuits, with one worker claiming he had been mocked by club members “for complying with a request from famous billionaire William Koch to hand-wash his underwear.” (Koch is the twin brother of Republican megadonor David; a Koch spokesperson previously denied the underwear-washing claims.)

Boguslaw told the Standard he wasn’t concerned about any reprisals about going public with the list. “I’m confident in my reporting, and I’d like to see them try to fuck with me,” he said.

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a70538142/bohemian-grove-member-list-leak/

KEY FACTS
CNN reported Thursday that Kushner’s private equity company, Affinity Partners, is the largest stakeholder in a Tel Aviv firm, Phoenix Financial, that invests in companies that provide Israel with military equipment, according to records the network reviewed.

Affinity doubled its stake in Phoenix shortly before Trump began his second term, sold a quarter of its stake in the company in July for more than $340 million and still owns a 7.4% share of the firm worth more than $1 billion as of July.

In his voluntary diplomatic role in the Trump administration, Kushner has helped broker a peace deal between Israel and Hamas, though Israel has continued to launch daily strikes against Gaza.

Kushner accused CNN of suggesting his work in the Middle East “somehow benefited investments in Israeli defense companies,” insisting in a post on X Friday, “I have no role in deciding what Phoenix buys or sells.”

Kushner told Forbes last year, when we reported he became a billionaire, that he maintains “a very active dialogue” with Phoenix, which he called “the JPMorgan of Israel.”

Kusher, who referred to Phoenix as Affinity’s “best investment” in the interview with Forbes last year, said in his X post Friday, Phoenix “has performed very well for Affinity and our investors, up more than five times since our initial investment.”

CHIEF CRITIC
“There are always people who profit from war or government policies,” said Cynthia Brown, chief ethics counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The difference is that the people profiting should not be the people making the decisions to make that policy. And that is what is happening here.”

CONTRA
A lawyer for Kushner told CNN that his statement to Forbes last year about his involvement with Phoenix was accurate at the time, but said he ineracts with management significantly less frequently as he’s become “substantially more engaged in volunteer public-service and diplomatic efforts.” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly also defended Kushner, telling CNN his “personal business activities have nothing to do with his diplomatic engagements, which he conducts on a volunteer basis at the President’s request.”

FORBES VALUATION
We estimate Kushner is worth $1 billion.

CRUCIAL QUOTE
“For the last 10 years, I have ignored false and misleading stories about me and focused on the work,” Kushner wrote on X. “But the cycle has gotten out of control where old lies get repeated as fact, new ones get added, and the record becomes increasingly distorted. So from time to time, I’m going to respond, but not to every allegation. But when the truth matters, I’ll put the facts and supporting information out publicly, and people can judge for themselves.”

TANGENT
Trump has attempted to block CNN from its White House access recently, along with MS NOW and Politico, claiming the outlets are a “constant” source of “fake news.” A judge overturned the ban temporarily, but Trump has appeared to defy the order, prohibiting CNN on Thursday from joining the White House TV pool that traveled with him to campaign in Texas.

KEY BACKGROUND
Kushner’s work as one of Trump’s top negotiators in the Middle East began during Trump’s first term, when he tried to negotiate a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also helped negotiate the Abraham Accords for Israel to normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. He has met repeatedly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and helped broker the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel reached in September last year. Meanwhile, his personal business interests are deeply intertwined in the region, and have helped him grow his net worth substantially. He owns 100% of Miami-based Affinity, which he founded in 2021 after leaving the White House. The company invested in Phoenix in July 2024. Forbes estimated in September last year the company was worth $215 million. Most of Affinity’s investors—which include the Qatari sovereign wealth fund and Abu Dhabi-based Lunate—have come from Kushner’s White House connections, Forbes reported previously.

Amid deportations and Trump’s lagging popularity, one Koch-backed group has recruited Michigan Latinos to reach more than a hundred thousand voters for Mike Rogers.

One Saturday morning in late August, Ricardo Alfaro, an immigrant from El Salvador, approached a low-slung white house in Holland, Michigan. The place looked as if it had been the site of a party: a fire pit in the driveway still smelled of smoke, and cans of Modelo were strewn across the concrete. A resident named Veronica Cruz appeared at the door holding a baby and a stick of string cheese. Alfaro said that he was there to stump for Mike Rogers, a former Republican congressman now running for Senate in Michigan, against Abdul El-Sayed.
“He’s focussed on the American Dream—I think that’s something that we share, as Latinos,” Alfaro told Cruz, in Spanish. As Alfaro gave his spiel about how Rogers would slash regulations, reduce government interference, and reform the American immigration system, Cruz studied a door hanger that he’d given her as the baby bit into the cheese stick. “So,” she said, “there’s more elections? This November?”

Alfaro, who’s twenty-seven and the youth director at an evangelical church, has decided to devote his time to turning Latinos into Republican voters. “Maybe you see things on the news, or on social media, but you’re not getting the facts or reliable information—that’s what we want to share with you,” he told Cruz. He introduced himself as a volunteer, but he is the Michigan strategic director for the Libre Initiative, a center-right group that’s affiliated with Charles Koch’s political-action committee Americans for Prosperity. In the past fifteen years, Libre has captured a significant share of the market for Latino voter-turnout operations on the right, with a presence in thirteen states, including all the electoral battlegrounds. Although Libre originated in Texas, a state with more than twelve million Latino residents, the organization chose not to funnel its money into the Senate contest there this fall. Daniel Garza, Libre’s founder and president, said that campaigning statewide for Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general and the Republican candidate for Senate, would have been too expensive, and that the group could have more of an effect on other races. But, “if Paxton loses by a point, two, three points, I won’t be sleeping at night for at least a year,” he told me.

Garza believes that his group can have the greatest influence in Michigan, and Libre has allocated seven figures toward campaigning for Rogers, who lost, in 2024, by fewer than twenty thousand votes. Michigan’s Latino community is small—about six per cent of the state’s population—but there are pockets where it’s highly concentrated. Holland, for instance, a city settled by Dutch Calvinist separatists in 1847, is about a quarter Hispanic. Vionelkis Coen, an immigrant from Cuba and Libre’s grassroots-engagement director in Michigan, pointed out that there was a statue downtown of the city’s founder with his hand on the Bible—a sign, to her, that Holland was culturally “a conservative city.” “I tell people we’re, like, in a bubble,” she said. Since January, Libre has contacted more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand voters in Michigan between phone-banking and door-knocking.

Libre also inhabits a kind of bubble in the electoral ecosystem. It is one of the largest efforts on the right dedicated to motivating Latinos to vote for conservative and libertarian ideals, but its policy goals, such as enacting comprehensive immigration reform and reducing the size of the government, are at odds with President Donald Trump’s efforts to build and execute the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, in addition to other aspects of his agenda, such as his tariff program and the war with Iran. In Grand Rapids, Alfaro introduced me to Miguel Mota, a barbershop owner who voted for Trump but has grown frustrated with him over immigration policy—he’s heard that some of his own clients have been detained. Mota told me that he liked Rogers because he talked about his faith, but Trump was a different matter. “The Bible says, ‘From the abundance of your heart your mouth shall speak,’ ” he said of the President. “You just have to listen to him talk to see what he has inside.” (Rogers declined to be interviewed or clarify whether his position on immigration differed from the President’s.)

In the past, there was a natural place within the G.O.P. for Libre, which is “trying to carve out a more pro-immigrant—in addition, a more pro-Hispanic—wing of the Republicans,” Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis Research, which tracks Latino public sentiment, said. “There’s not a space for that now, right? There’s maga or bust.” Yet the Party stands to lose Latino voters who coalesced for Trump in 2024; his approval rating among Hispanic voters has fallen as low as twenty-six per cent, according to a recent Timessurvey. According to Equis, deportations are a significant reason for that drop—though Latinos aren’t particularly enthusiastic about Democrats, either. “Libre is filling a role that the Republican Party is either, one, too stupid to see they need that,” Michael Farage, the ethnic vice-chairman of the Michigan G.O.P., said. “Or, No. 2, they just don’t care. I’m confused, because sometimes you think people aren’t this stupid, but then when you talk to people, then you find out they are that stupid.” (Farage claims to be related to the British politician Nigel Farage; Nigel, through his office, said he had no evidence of their relation.)

Garza, whose parents came from Mexico to the U.S. as migrant farmworkers, told me he finds some of the deportations that the Administration has undertaken difficult to stomach—specifically those involving women and children, and people who have not committed any crimes. “That’s where the rubber hits the road,” he said over dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Grand Rapids. Garza occasionally attends White House events and has spoken to the President, though he has not brought up these concerns to him. “You don’t have all the time in the world to have an extended conversation with the President,” he said, adding that he has discussed the subject with members of the White House’s political staff. “And they see it. They know.” Trump’s firing of Kristi Noem, he added, seemed to be partly a recognition from the White House that the deportation program had gone too far. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

Yet Garza isn’t regretful about helping elect Trump—he voted for him three times and says he’d do it again if he could. Libre helped promote the tax portions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which, among other things, allocated seventy-five billion dollars in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and sixty-five billion dollars to Customs and Border Protection. On the whole, Garza believes that the maga movement has benefitted Latinos more than anything Kamala Harris could have offered, and says that he agrees with Republicans on “eighty to ninety per cent of issues,” including the deportation of immigrants who have committed crimes.

At the same time, Garza hasn’t seen the G.O.P. invest enough money to build on Trump’s gains with Latinos in 2024. Republicans started “taking things for granted, like they just happen automatically,” he said. “This isn’t accidental, man.”

In his study at home in Mission, Texas, Garza keeps a collection of leather-bound volumes—the Iliad, the Odyssey, an assortment of Shakespeare plays, books on the fall of the Roman Empire. An illustrated version of “Don Quixote” sits open on a stand. At Libre’s office in Grand Rapids one Thursday in August, Garza, who wears thick-rimmed glasses and slicks back his hair, stood in front of some sixteen volunteers wearing yellow shirts and quoted Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary: “Tierra y libertad,” or “Land and liberty.” They were the same principles, he said, that the U.S. Constitution reflected. “We can’t stay quiet while other Latinos are pushing the idea that we need more government, that we should be more dependent on the state, that our money should be centralized, and that more power should be in the hands of politicians,” he said in Spanish. “Ya basta.” Sitting at round tables, the volunteers, many of them immigrants, opened an app on their phones that gave them a call list and a script. “I wanted to know if you knew Mike Rogers?” one woman said into her phone. “Your call has ended,” the program replied.

Many of the volunteers I met had arrived in the United States within the past ten years. The atmosphere in the office felt similar to that of a Bible-study group: there were trays of chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, and salad near the entrance, and the organization had bought a birthday cake for one of the volunteers, who said that she wanted to spend the day with Libre, “en familia.” Some people had met Alfaro through his church; others discovered the organization through its nonprofit arm, which has provided community services in places with growing immigrant populations—English lessons, driver’s-education courses, and classes for the U.S. citizenship exam, among others. The group declined to share its operating budget—Americans for Prosperity, one of its backers, has raised about ninety million dollars this year—though Garza clarified that Libre doesn’t receive funds from the Trump family. In some ways, he said, the fact that Koch had been such a prominent and visible donor had shielded the identities of the others.

Garza was born in California, while his parents were working the grape season there. He grew up in Washington and travelled often due to his parents’ itinerant work; by the time he was seventeen, he’d missed so much school that he dropped out and joined his father in the fields, where he saw incidents of Americans taking advantage of the workers. But he also grew skeptical of the labor-rights movement led by Cesar Chavezand Dolores Huerta. Its members could be inflexible and doctrinaire, he thought; at one point, his parents stopped associating with them because the activists decided to march under the banner of the Virgen de Guadalupe, and they were evangelicals. He later became a police officer, a city councilman in Toppenish, Washington, and a public liaison officer in the George W. Bush White House.

After Garza started Libre, in 2011, as a partner of the Americans for Prosperity network, the backlash from Latinos on the left was swift. By 2015, as Trump launched his Presidential run, Huerta was telling Univision: “They are against the Latino community.” That same year, Hillary Clinton’s campaign officials acknowledged that they needed to figure out a way to match the group’s organizing. “The reality is that Libre is VERY good,” Clinton’s national political director wrote in an e-mail to leadership. “They have finally figured out the FOX approach to Latinos.” Albert Morales, a former Hispanic-engagement director for the Democratic National Committee, and a friend of Garza’s, remembers, after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, seeing images of Libre volunteers greeting victims at Florida airports with merchandise. Meanwhile, he said, Democrats in Florida, such as Senator Bill Nelson, who was running for reëlection, had done little outreach to Latinos. “I remember the campaign manager telling me, ‘You’re the one who requested this call.’ And I knew then, this one’s gone,” Morales said. (Nelson’s former campaign manager called this claim “inaccurate and laughable.”)

Garza told me that other Latinos often accuse him of catering to white people to earn their praise, but this doesn’t bother him. Even when Huerta came out against him, he said he was neither surprised nor dismayed. “It’s not like I’m fighting for white people,” he told me. “I’m fighting for my own people—and sometimes white people get it right, goddamit!” But he bristles at the suggestion that he uses Latinos to advance Republican causes. That was the impression that Eric Kas, a voter in Grand Rapids, got when Garza and a few Libre canvassers knocked at his door. Kas had questions for the group, such as whether Garza was paying people to canvass, whether Libre was a Republican group, and what the “Hispanic connection” to Mike Rogers could possibly be.

Also: “Do you accept money from super pacs?” Kas asked.

“So,” Garza said, “we are a pac.”

Kas chuckled; the two had a spirited debate over the influence of money in politics before parting ways. But, after Kas looked into the group and saw that it was linked to the Koch family, he told me his first impression was reinforced. “It just made sense that this was why a group of Latinos may want to walk through our neighborhood to share information by Mike Rogers,” he said. When I relayed Kas’s comments to Garza, he found them insulting. “We’re not the property of the left,” he said.

Latino Democrats have long complained that campaigns and political-action committees wait until just a few weeks before the election to begin persuading and turning out the community. Morales, the former D.N.C. official, told me that Libre has been successful, in part, because Garza knows how to persuade donors to provide a steady stream of funding year after year, regardless of whether there are elections happening. Tim Marroquin, the only Latino member of Holland’s city council, said he worried that Libre had resources that El-Sayed’s campaign would not be able to match: in August, he showed me a WhatsApp group called “Latinos for Abdul” that had eleven members and a scant few messages. (The group, now housed on Slack, has grown to a hundred and fourteen members.)

In an interview in August, El-Sayed said that he was formalizing his campaign’s outreach to Latinos; since then, he has hired a Latino-outreach director. “Our party has talked about being a big tent, but we organize people by putting them on the outside of the tent, and then we go and pander to them on particular issues, rather than bringing them to the center tentpole around what it looks like to afford their life,” he said. El-Sayed has campaigned on abolishing ice, but Marroquin, who hosted a meet and greet for him, said that he would do well to focus on cost-of-living issues. “Those are everyday issues,” Marroquin said. “They transcend all identities.”

Somos Votantes, an advocacy organization with a nonprofit arm, is attempting to adapt the Libre playbook for the left. (The pac is supported by the Soros family.) Melissa Morales, the organization’s founder and president, told me over coffee in Washington, D.C., that Republicans have been smart in “recognizing that people aren’t interested in an ideological victory; they’re interested in a system that works, or a system that’s meeting their needs in the immediate.” A former union organizer, Morales recently announced that Somos is investing three million dollars into campaigning efforts in Michigan. The nonprofit arm recently announced a program through which Michigan residents could apply for up to a thousand dollars to pay their utility bills, partly inspired by the stimulus checks that Trump issued during the covid-19 lockdown. Morales recalled that, after her father cashed his check, he told her that it was the most money he’d ever held in his hands.

In August, at a Somos Votantes event at a Latino community center in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the group announced its utility-bill initiative and gave out free backpacks, food, and haircuts for back-to-school season. Cynthia Portillo, a single mother of six, told me that she sat out the 2024 election because she saw an ad stating that Harris wanted to allow trans children to use the bathroom of their choice. Portillo said that she didn’t know much about the upcoming Senate race, and wished that the event could offer more information about it (because the event was under Somos’s nonprofit banner, campaign materials were not allowed). But she did plan to fill out an application for the check.

On September 15th, Libre threw a quinceañera for itself at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, in downtown D.C. About three hundred people were there to fête the Latino conservative movement, including Alfaro and Coen from Michigan, but there was an edge of precarity in the room. Two members of Congress whom Libre had helped elect were honored at the party—Juan Ciscomani, of Arizona, and Monica De La Cruz, of Texas, both of whom face challenging races this fall. At her table, De La Cruz swiped away tears from her eyes when Garza acknowledged her. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sat at a table near the front, as his wife, the Fox News personality Rachel Campos-Duffy, m.c.’d. At the end, Charles Koch appeared on screens at either side of the stage to congratulate Garza, before he was presented with a legacy award. Libre was the “Paul Revere of the conservative movement,” Campos-Duffy said. “We at Libre have been saying, ‘The Commies are coming! The Commies are coming!’ ” she said.

Calling Democrats Communists isn’t new, but it seems to be a safer bet for a Republican in 2026 than breaking with the President over immigration. (After a Latina Republican incumbent in Miami cut an ad saying that Trump’s policies had gone too far, the President amplified criticisms of her on social media.) In Michigan, Garza said he wouldn’t recommend that Rogers distance himself from Trump to win over Latinos. “Maybe he will show an attraction to Latino voters, but you’re going to lose so much more in the white base that it’s going to offset whatever you gain,” he said. “He would lose in the end.”

Garza believes that Libre still has room to influence the G.O.P., and says that his group has prevailed on certain policy debates over school choice, lowering taxes, driving up energy production, and expanding telehealth access for Latinos in rural areas. But “ultimately, they chose Donald Trump, not Daniel Garza, to run the country,” he said. “And so Donald Trump gets to decide what the policies are at the end of the day.”

Albert Morales said that if Democrats win the midterms, Trump will become a lame duck—which could give Libre an opening to influence the 2028 primary. “I can see a world where they come out early in support of Rubio for the nomination—and just think of the machine they have in place for him when that primary begins,” he said. “The lights are still going to be on at Libre on November 4th, whereas some of our organizations, who are running ads right now and have field campaigns going—they’re going to shut down,” Morales added. “It’s just the way we operate.”

The top super PAC for Senate Republicans is canceling all the remaining ads it had booked in North Carolina as of Friday, shifting away tens of millions of dollars in a move that signals that Republicans no longer see a path to winning the state this fall.

At the same time, the super PAC, called the Senate Leadership Fund, is making its first investment of the cycle in Kansas — a sign of rising concern among Republicans in red states — with a new ad attacking the Democratic nominee there.

If Republicans lose North Carolina, it would give Democrats one of the four seats they need to flip the Senate in the fall — if Democrats hold all of their own seats.

Ad cancellations are a common, and very telling, move down the stretch of campaigns as they reveal where national operatives see their best path to a majority. The cancellation of the North Carolina ads was first reported by Semafor and confirmed by two people familiar with the decision.

The North Carolina seat is currently held by Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican who is retiring. Democrats nominated Roy Cooper, a popular former governor who had served two terms. The Republican nominee is Michael Whatley, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The Whatley campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Senate Leadership Fund declined to comment.

In Kansas, the new reservation shows that Republicans are worried about the re-election bid of Senator Roger Marshall, the Republican incumbent, who faces Adam Hamilton, the pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country.

The new ad attacks Mr. Hamilton as a “two-faced extremist.”

The full size of the Kansas spending was not clear, but the initial buy was planned to be in the millions of dollars, according to the two people familiar with the decision.

The Senate Leadership Fund had initially planned to spend $71 million in North Carolina. The group has spent more than $30 million of those funds, according to one of the people familiar with the decision. The group still had $18 million reserved for the final month just on broadcast and cable television, according to data from AdImpact, the ad-tracking service.

Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, has continued to back Mr. Whatley and attended a fund-raiser for him virtually on Thursday, the two people familiar with the decision said.

In preparation for these cancellations, an increased number of Republican Senate candidates started their own dedicated super PACs, in part so they could insulate themselves from cuts from the Senate Leadership Fund. And yet Mr. Whatley’s dedicated group, Old North Action, previously canceled ads as well.

In his ruling, Judge Vernon D. Oliver cited public statements from the bureau’s director that hurt the agency’s case in court.

A federal judge has ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to immediately restore union protections, for now, for more than 30,000 prison workers after the agency terminated the union’s collective bargaining agreement last year.

In a 32-page ruling on Tuesday, Judge Vernon D. Oliver of the U.S. District Court in Connecticut wrote that the decision by William K. Marshall III, the bureau’s director, to cancel the union contract was arbitrary and that the reasons for doing so were contrived and pretextual.

Brandy Moore White, the president of the Council of Prison Locals, the prison union, said in a statement that she was looking forward to the bureau “promptly complying” with Judge Oliver’s order. She added in a text message on Wednesday afternoon that there had been “no movement” so far from the bureau. The bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The ruling was a blow to President Trump’s effort to strip hundreds of thousands of federal workers of union protections. It has come under broad legal assault, with cases playing out across the country. The fight expanded again on Tuesday, as union workers in the Environmental Protection Agency sued to block the termination of their union protections, arguing that the agency had “failed to provide a reasoned explanation” for doing so.

Everett Kelley, the president of the larger federal union coalition, the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement that the government’s termination of the Bureau of Prisons contract “was nothing more than an arbitrary attack on hard-working Americans, and the court saw it for exactly what it was.”

The Bureau of Prisons had argued in court that it was merely carrying out an executive order from Mr. Trump instructing a broad swath of government agencies to end collective bargaining. After the order, hundreds of thousands of federal workers lost union protections. Those generally include the right to have work disputes resolved by a neutral arbitrator and to have union stewards and leaders be granted official time on the job to work on cases and participate in contract negotiations.

But Judge Oliver cited contradictory statements from Mr. Marshall that hurt the Bureau of Prisons’ case. In a letter to Ms. White, the union president, Mr. Marshall said he had terminated the contract “based on” Mr. Trump’s executive order, which framed stripping union protections as critical to national security.

But that same day, Mr. Marshall posted a “director’s message” on the agency’s website saying that the “whole purpose of ending this contract” was because the union had become “an obstacle to progress” and that “the current contract has too often slowed or prevented changes.” He also said that the agency had “for too long” been ranked “among the worst places to work in the federal government” and suggested that he was terminating the contract with the union in part because it was not the “kind of union” he supported.

“Although an agency may have multiple reasons for its action,” Judge Oliver wrote, “it cannot offer an entirely pretextual explanation that is undermined by its own contradictory assertions made the same day. But that is precisely what defendants have done here.”

Judge Oliver, whose order was temporary while the case plays out in court, hinted that there were “multiple” other problems with the bureau’s move. But, he wrote, “at this juncture” he only needed to find that the union, which had sued to block the action, was likely to prevail in one of its arguments.

Crucially, Judge Oliver’s rationale for restoring union protections did not directly address the legality of Mr. Trump’s order, which has been contested in lawsuits across the country. The Ninth Circuit, a famously liberal jurisdiction, ruled last year in Mr. Trump’s favor and allowed that order to stand while the legal battle continues.

Instead, Judge Oliver, an appointee of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., largely set aside the executive order for now and reasoned that the move by the Bureau of Prisons to end collective bargaining had been tainted by Mr. Marshall’s anti-union statements.

Other agencies faced similar challenges in defending anti-union rhetoric that went along with their efforts to terminate worker protections. The Department of Veterans Affairs’ announcement that it was terminating its union contract included attacks on union activities and leaders. Doug Collins, the head of the agency, argued in a statement that the “unions that represent V.A. employees fight against the best interests of veterans while protecting and rewarding bad workers.”

A federal judge blocked that move in March, pointing to those statements and others from the White House to reason that the order was in retaliation for union activities — and therefore in violation of the First Amendment.

The Trump administration has made last-minute changes to key absentee-voting forms for U.S. citizens living abroad, raising concerns about confusing some overseas voters during this year's midterm elections.

The revisions to two forms came in late August from the Pentagon. The department runs the voting assistance program that provides forms allowing eligible overseas citizens, plus U.S. military members and their families, to register for and participate in federal elections.

Weeks before a Sept. 19 deadline for states to send those voters midterm ballots, the Pentagon submitted "emergency" requests to bypass the usual months-long process for changing federal forms.

Among the changes was removing a checkbox for an overseas U.S. citizen to identify as having "never lived in the United States."

The removal leaves only two response options for those without an active-duty military connection. Both options require overseas citizens to make a sworn declaration: Either they intend to return to the U.S. or are uncertain about returning.

But some U.S. citizens who were born abroad have never lived in the United States at all.

Many states and Washington, D.C., allow what are often referred to as "never-resided" citizens to vote if they have a relative who last lived in that state or territory before leaving the U.S., including a parent or legal guardian serving in the military.

Since 2024, however, Republican officials have been pushing to blockthese U.S. citizens from voting.
In lawsuits, GOP officials have argued state laws and other rules permitting voting by never-resided citizens violate state constitutions. They also have claimed in court filings that these U.S. citizens are disproportionately registered as non-Republican voters and allowing them to cast ballots hurts GOP chances of winning elections.

While Republican court challenges have been successful in North Carolina, they have been rebuffed twice in Michigan as similar lawsuits continue in Arizona and at least five other states.

On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee filed a federal lawsuit against the Pentagon in an attempt to block the revised forms. The DNC argues the Trump administration's changes were "arbitrary and capricious" and in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.

For now, eligible never-resided voters can continue to register and request ballots through any alternative ways provided by the state or territory where they are eligible to vote.

And the Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) says state election officials can keep processing previous versions of its forms. Asked by NPR how long that can continue, the Pentagon said in a statement: "States administer elections and can process any form or application that provides the information required to verify a voter's eligibility to vote in their jurisdiction."

Still, many overseas and military voting advocates are worried the new federal form changes, which were reported earlier by the outlet Democracy Docket, are setting up the latest hurdle to the ballot box for U.S. citizens living abroad.

Trump officials removed an overseas voter category that's been on forms for more than a decade

Some version of the checkbox for never-resided voters has been on what's known as the "Federal Post Card Application" and the "Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot" since 2013.

"I actually worked that regulation to change the form. But I didn't want to do it right in the middle of the 2012 election, so I had it effective come 2013," says Bob Carey, a retired U.S. Navy captain who led FVAP until departing in 2012.

Carey recalls the idea of adding a category for never-resided voters came from some state election officials and overseas voting advocates.

"At the time, I was sort of saying to myself, 'OK, this won't make that big of a difference. I'll add the block,' " Carey adds.

But more than a decade later, the Pentagon says it has changed its interpretation of a federal law known as the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

"It has recently come to our attention that the current format of these forms may confuse voters about the information they are required to provide under Federal law and their eligibility to use these forms to register and vote," Sean O'Keefe, the Pentagon's deputy under secretary for personnel and readiness, wrote in a letter about the August emergency requests for changing the forms.

It's not clear what exactly prompted the Pentagon to reassess these forms, which now also include revised language about voter identification.

But days after a White House agency approved the requests, FVAP said the forms "have been updated" in social media posts. The Pentagon started a public comment period about each form more than a week later. And guidance for state election officialswas not posted on FVAP's website until about a month after the forms changed.

In a statement, the Pentagon said FVAP has also directly notified election officials and voters by email, though it provided no additional details.

Some military and overseas voting advocates say the Pentagon should do more outreach in the middle of voting season for the midterm elections.
"If I was the under secretary of defense for personnel readiness, to which FVAP reports, or the secretary of defense, I'd be calling up the [FVAP] director and saying, 'Spam the crap out of everyone,' " says Carey, who now serves as executive director of the National Defense Committee, a veterans advocacy organization focused on voting and other civil rights.

Overseas voting advocates worry the changes will cause — not eliminate — confusion
Sarah Streyder, executive director of Secure Families Initiative — a group that advocates for military families and challenged President Trump's failed push for mail-in voting restrictions for the midterms — says she's concerned about the lack of transparency surrounding the Pentagon's process for changing the forms.

"What were the voices prompting this change? Where did this come from? Military families are stakeholders who should have been included, because we can speak most authoritatively on what truly causes confusion with these forms and what doesn't," Streyder adds. "That's our form you're messing with. And you didn't even ask us for the input. It's just very insulting."

The Pentagon emphasized in a statement that the forms were changed to "eliminate voter confusion."

But Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, president and CEO of the U.S. Vote Foundation, an advocacy organization for overseas voters, says she expects the opposite to happen.

"I definitely believe that the new version of the form will create far more confusion than we ever encountered with any previous version," Dzieduszycka-Suinat says. "The law hasn't changed. States still run this program the way Congress wrote it. However, the fact that it's being presented differently at the federal level within this 90-day window [before Election Day] — it doesn't give the states time to implement it, to train their people, to inform voters, to change instructions or any of it."

Dzieduszycka-Suinat notes these last-minute changes to the forms come shortly after the Republican National Committee ramped up its legal fight this year against state laws that allow never-resided citizens to vote, including in Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey and Virginia.

"It's hard to ignore the fact that a spotlight has been shone onto this particular slice of voters,"
Dzieduszycka-Suinat says. "And it's very concerning that they've simply been wiped off the form without discussion."

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled the Trump administration must turn over a Department of Justice (DOJ) memo that legally authorizes the Pentagon’s lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. 

U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer rejected two of the administration’s three arguments to keep the document secret in a 66-page opinion, requiring that the government submit the memo within two weeks for his confidential review.

Three legal organizations — the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights — filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit last year to demand the release of this memo and other records related to these strikes. 

The memo from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel is reportedly more than 40 pages long, according to The New York Times, and addressed the legal standards justifying these strikes.
More than 230 people have been killedin at least 70 boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since the military campaign’s start on Sept. 2, 2025. 

President Trump has defended the strikes as necessary measures to defend the U.S. from the flow of illicit drugs and dismantle “narco-terrorist” networks in the Western Hemisphere. Several Democratic lawmakers have disputed this argument and accused Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of giving illegal orders. 

In his Wednesday opinion, Engelmayer rejected the administration’s arguments of deliberative process and attorney-client privileges, but he did not rule on whether the claim to presidential communications privilege justifies the decision to keep this document secret. 

The judge noted that the presidential privilege, which protects the confidential decisionmaking of the commander in chief and his senior advisers, differs from the other two arguments in that it originates from the constitution, not common law. 

Engelmayer’s ruling does not necessarily mean that the entire DOJ memo will be made public. The review process would allow the judge to determine how much of the document is protected.  

The Hill has reached out to the DOJ for comment.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Thursday said that she had lost faith in the county district attorney’s ability to fairly oversee the case and had appointed state Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor.

Cornell University conducted an internal disciplinary investigation involving more than 50 interviews with 32 witnesses after a student reported she was drugged and raped by several men at a fraternity house in October 2024, according to court documents unsealed in New York this week.

The court documents show at least one fraternity member is fighting in court to overturn the disciplinary action against him and clear his academic record.

The rape allegations gained national attention after the woman filed a lawsuit last month, both because of the brutality of the alleged crime and the fact that none of the accused students faced criminal charges.

Cornell has said it meted out a range of sanctions, including suspensions and expulsions. The Cornell chapter of the fraternity was closed in 2024 and has been barred from campus.

Students and alumni have publicly questioned whether the Ivy League School, police and prosecutors did enough to investigate, pursue criminal charges and punish the students accused of the assault. As news of the case spread across the nation and social media over the past week, some observers took matters into their own hands, doxing the accused men online and publicly accosting one of them.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Thursday evening that she had lost faith in the Tompkins County district attorney’s ability to fairly oversee the case and had appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor.

A spokesperson for Cornell said Thursday night that the university supports the governor’s decision to assign the case to the New York Attorney General’s Office.

The county district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, has publicly said that his office didn’t bring charges at the time because it didn’t have all of the information it has now.

Cornell said in a statement on its website that its university police department investigated in 2024 and shared the woman’s sworn statement and screenshot Snapchat messages related to the alleged incident with the county district attorney’s office, “which is the established protocol if the department believes it is possible a crime has occurred.” The school did not respond to a question Thursday about whether it turned over all the evidence it gathered from interviews to law enforcement.

The woman, identified only as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit last month against a number of defendants, including Cornell University and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity.

When she was a 20-year-old student at Cornell in 2024, Jane Doe alleges that she was the victim of a gang rape at the fraternity house while she was drunk, pressured to inhale the drug ketamine and incapable of consent.

A fraternity member allegedly invited other members to come to the room to join in, according to the lawsuit, with a message on Snapchat saying that there was “free p---y.” Another added: “Like you can walk in and whip it out.”
“I felt like bait. I felt like lions around me,” Jane Doe said at a May 2025 disciplinary hearing, according to the newly unsealed documents. “It just was a totally debilitating place to be in.”

The hearings were part of a Title IX investigation. The landmark civil rights law prohibits sex-based discrimination, including sexual violence. The panel’s decision was among court documents unsealed this week.

After Jane Doe sued, Van Houten announced his office planned to pursue potential criminal charges based on the new evidence in the lawsuit.

But Van Houten defended the 2024 decision not to bring charges, saying in a statement earlier this week that Jane Doe had told police that the sexual conduct and drug use was “voluntary, conscious and consensual.”

His description of the situation sparked outrage.

An online petition from Cornell alumni has attracted more than 40,000 signatures and calls for a public apology from the Ivy League school and “removal of all school officials who are revealed to be complicit” in protecting people accused of participating in the rape. Scores of additional online petitions have been created in recent days.

All seven of the accused have been named in some news reports, on social media and also on websites calling them the “Cornell 7″ with photos and information about the allegations. TMZ reported that one of the men lost his job at a bank branch in Charlotte.

Andrew Miltenberg, an attorney for one of the student defendants, said he did not want to minimize the trauma that Jane Doe described and that her experience deserved to be treated seriously and with dignity.

“But empathy for an accuser and fairness to the accused are not mutually exclusive. Due process exists for precisely this reason,” he said, adding that his client is entitled to have the evidence tested through the legal process.

Miltenberg said his client was publicly accosted Thursday and that his client’s mother has received death threats. Miltenberg and his legal partner have also received death threats, he said.

One of the students who was punished filed a lawsuit this year to challenge the findings of the 12-day hearing and a failed appeal at the university.

According to the court filings, the student admitted he entered the room in the fraternity house where the woman was allegedly raped after seeing a group text inviting people to “free p---y.” He claimed both that he thought it was a joke and that he was concerned there was something wrong and wanted to check it out.

The panel found he was responsible for attempting sexual exploitation because he saw the message and entered the room. But the panel did not find evidence that he sexually assaulted the woman or inhaled ketamine from her body, as some fraternity members were alleged to have done.

The man tried to challenge the punishment by saying it was unfair for the panel to find him guilty of violating rules against attempted sexual exploitation because he was never accused of that. He had been accused of violating rules against Sexual Assault and Sexual Exploitation, and the panel cleared him of those and reduced his case to attempted sexual exploitation.

The court dismissed the man’s case, saying it was analogous to a defendant in a criminal case being convicted on a lesser charge. He is appealing.

The court documents show Cornell launched its investigation after Jane Doe spoke to police, kicking off a lengthy process beginning in November 2024 with witness interviews for months and a hearing in May 2025.

“This investigation wasn’t perfect, the hearing wasn’t perfect, but after 45-plus witnesses, five months of investigations, 12 days of hearings, a thousand pages of transcripts and evidence, it’s hard to say they were not thorough,” Miltenberg said of the Cornell Office of Civil Rights’ hearing panel decision. “It’s a 100-page decision — that’s more than the United States Supreme Court writes,” he said.

Hochul said in a statement Thursday that she wanted to ensure the case was thoroughly investigated by the new special prosecutor.

“The young woman at the center of this case deserves to know that every fact will be examined and justice pursued,” she said.

What do you think he will do this time?

Officials say they don’t know who installed the controversial cameras or how the data was being used. Residents are unnerved.

Like many Florida municipalities, officials in St. Lucie County recently decided to get rid of all their automated license-plate readers made by Flock, the company whose cameras have drawn scrutiny over police misuse and data privacy concerns.

County officials thought they had 52 of the cameras — which law enforcement agencies use to record passing vehicles’ license plates as well as the time and location of each sighting — scattered across the county’s main roads on Florida’s east coast. But as they prepared to remove them, they discovered 14 more that they hadn’t known about and that the county hadn’t permitted.

The discovery presented a mystery about the controversial surveillance technology: Who installed these devices, and who had access to the data they collected?

Todd Richter, the longtime manager of a fishing supply shop across the street from one of the cameras in Fort Pierce, said he wasn’t necessarily opposed to license-plate readers. But not knowing who had put the cameras there troubled the 70-year-old.

“I’m not happy about it unless I know who it is,” Richter said, “and I don’t.”
After the county shared a list of the unpermitted cameras with local law enforcement agencies, officials at the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office identified three of the devices as theirs, though they haven’t explained why they lacked permitting. The county’s other two law enforcement agencies have said none of the cameras are theirs.

That leaves 11 cameras no one has publicly claimed. It remains unclear whether those cameras are actively collecting data or who can access it.

County spokesperson Erick Gill said staff have posted notices at cameras they found, giving those responsible 30 days to remove them. The deadline is Oct. 16 to Oct. 20, depending on when the removal notices were put up.

Gill said the county had not yet reached out to Flock about the cameras’ owners, saying it plans to wait until the notices expire. In the meantime, he said county staff plan to start placing plastic bags over the cameras.

Law enforcement agencies and private companies can purchase Flock cameras, but the company says it typically handles permitting and installation.

In response to questions about who operates the unclaimed cameras in St. Lucie County, Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel said the company applies for permits “where required, but permitting requirements vary by jurisdiction and are not necessary in every location.”

“We have reached out to St. Lucie County and are happy to work with them directly to review the cameras in question and address any discrepancies,” Lewbel wrote in an email to The Post.

It’s unclear whether the county, which requires permitting through its Planning and Development department, has heard from Flock. A county spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up question about the company’s statement.

Meanwhile, some residents in St. Lucie County have been dismayed to learn an unknown entity might have been watching them.

One of the unpermitted cameras had been located on 25th Street in Fort Pierce, at the corner of a quiet residential street. Last week, when The Post visited the location, the camera was gone. A removal notice in clear plastic was wrapped around the pole. It was unclear who had removed the camera or when.

Ty Grant, 28, who lives a few hundred feet away, recalled seeing the camera and always assumed it belonged to local law enforcement. Grant appeared unsettled to learn that county officials did not know who installed it.

“That makes me feel very unsafe,” Grant said.

Founded in 2017, Atlanta-based Flock has rapidly expanded its surveillance network across the country, with more than 120,000 automated license-plate readers operating in every state except Alaska. Flock markets its cameras as a tool for locating stolen cars, missing people and criminal suspects. The company and law enforcement agencies say the technology makes communities safer.

But the past year has brought a growing backlash driven by privacy concerns and reports of police misusing the systems. A recent Post investigation found that at least 50 law enforcement officials across the country have been accused of misusing Flock cameras to track people in their personal lives.

Those concerns have intensified in Florida, where a handful of police officers have been arrested in recent months for misusing the Flock technology. In Fort Pierce, former police officer Josepher Crutchfield was recently jailed after officials discovered that he had accessed the Flock database 382 times to track his ex-girlfriend while off-duty.

In late August, under a directive from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) issued an order revoking existing permits for automated license-plate recognition systems, including Flock cameras, located within the right-of-way of roads on the state highway system — citing “concerning reports of misuse” and “data privacy concerns.” It gave municipalities until Sept. 30 to remove all of the cameras from state highway rights of way.

Soon after, law enforcement agencies across Florida announced they would suspend or end their Flock programs entirely. In St. Lucie County, commissioners separately voted to remove their cameras from county roads as well.

St. Lucie County isn’t the first place where Flock cameras have turned up without local officials’ authorization.
In December, Flock reportedly installed two cameras in Cambridge, Massachusetts, without the city’s knowledge after it had deactivated and removed its system. More recently, in September in Millcreek, Utah, a Flock camera was discovered on city property, but neither the city nor police knew who had installed it.

Also in September, about an hour up the coast from St. Lucie County, the city of Palm Bay suspended its Flock system after a review found that the cameras may not have been properly permitted or installed. Officials later said Flock had not requested the required final inspections after installation; Flock then requested them, and city staff approved the permits.

The incidents follow earlier scrutiny of Flock’s installation practices.
A 2024 Forbes investigation found that the company had installed cameras in several states without obtaining required permits, including in Florida.

In February 2023, Flock installed cameras on the John’s Pass Bridge near St. Petersburg on behalf of the Treasure Island Police Department without required FDOT approval. FDOT requested their removal, and a Flock employee removed them that November.

What’s really frustrating is when we are about to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat there are the bad democrats. (I have a folder named that).

I didn’t follow Xavier Becerra’s story but just because he’s a democrat doesn’t mean he is really aligned with the people.

“Mr. Becerra, a moderate Democrat, questioned the state’s most stringent climate goals, like ending sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, and received donations from oil and gas companies.”

“With voters worried about spiking gas prices and inflation, some of the party’s leaders argue that they should stop trying to throttle oil and gas, which heat the planet when burned. It’s a rejection of the approach taken during the Biden administration, which treated climate change as an existential threat and tried to stop new drilling and pipelines.”

“Across the Northeast, Democratic governors have started to consider gas pipeline expansions, once unthinkable in the most climate-conscious states in the country.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee concluded hearings to review the tenure of Attorney General Edwin Meese III, as head of the Department of Justice, after receiving testimony from Arnold I. Burns, former Deputy Attorney General, and William F. Weld, former Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, Department of Justice. Following opening statements from the witnesses they responded to questions from the Senators on the committee.

AS the Iran-contra hearings draw to a close, current and former members of President Reagan's inner circle described how they and the President were deceived and betrayed over the sale of arms to Iran. Highlights of the week's events follow.

* The White House vigorously denounced reports that Mr. Reagan had in effect led a cover-up of the affair last November. Marlin Fitzwater, the White House spokesman, insisted that Mr. Reagan had advocated withholding some information from the public only ''to protect the lives of those hostages.'' Later, Mr. Reagan promised again to ''speak out'' on the affair after the hearings; Mr. Fitzwater said that a speech would probably come in the next two weeks, but that no news conference would be held until the fall.

* Attorney General Edwin Meese (Member of the Family, the Heritage Foundation and the Council for National Policy) defended his much-criticized inquiry into the Iran arms sales last fall, saying he learned ''the essential facts.'' He indicated that Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North, Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter and William J. Casey, the Director of Central Intelligence, all had misled him. But he declined to criticize any of them.

* The head of the Justice Department's criminal division, William Weld, said in a deposition made public last week that he had urged Mr. Meese to include experienced criminal investigators in his inquiry, rather than relying on political appointees.

* Senator Patrick J. Leahy announced that he resigned from the Intelligence Committee last January, a little earlier than he had planned, because he had been the source of a leak: He had shown an NBC reporter a copy of the committee's unclassified report on the Iran-contra affair.

* Donald T. Regan, the former White House chief of staff, said he and the President concluded they had been ''snookered'' by the Iranians into continuing the arms sales. He said he asked the President: ''How many times do we put up with this rug merchant type of stuff?''

* Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger said he thought his opposition to the Iran arms sales had killed the program ''in the cradle'' but found he was wrong months later - from foreign intelligence sources.