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Good evening, and happy Halloween! I’m about to head out trick-or-treating with my daughter, so I’ll keep this one quick. I hope you all had a great day.
Trump just lost his Epstein birthday letter lawsuit, and he lost it for good. A federal judge permanently threw out his multibillion-dollar suit against the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch, writing that it was “grasping at straws” and that his claims “lack merit.” His BBC lawsuit could be next. Alaska’s own Republican government is shredding the election lawsuit he ordered. And three days out, his party is panicking, with Ted Cruz warning of a “bloodbath.” Plus, we spoke with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and you won’t want to miss it.
We’re going live all night on Election Night, Tuesday, Nov. 3, from 6 p.m. to midnight Eastern. Right after Election Day, we’re dropping major investigations designed to give Congress a roadmap to investigate Epstein, Trump’s ties to Russia, and more. Trump just learned in court that he can’t sue the press into silence. This reporting is going to ruffle some feathers, and the attacks on our work are only going to get louder.
That’s why I need you with me. Independent reporting like this only survives because readers like you support it, with no billionaire owner or corporate boss deciding what gets covered. If you want accountability to actually happen, please become a paid subscriber today and share this with someone who needs it. Three days. Let’s finish strong, and then let’s get to work.
Here’s the news:
Judge Permanently Tosses Trump’s Epstein Birthday Letter Lawsuit Against the Wall Street Journal as His BBC Suit Faces Collapse
A federal judge has permanently thrown out Trump’s multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over its story on his birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein. U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami dismissed the suit with prejudice on Saturday, which means Trump can never refile it. Gayles ruled that Trump failed to plausibly allege that the Journal, Rupert Murdoch, and the other defendants acted with “actual malice,” the standard a public figure must meet to win a defamation case. It was Trump’s second try: the judge had already dismissed his original complaint, and he refused Trump’s request for discovery before amending it. Gayles wrote that the amended complaint was “grasping at straws” as it tried to “manufacture flaws” in the Journal’s reporting. The judge also said the court “agrees that President Trump’s defamation claims lack merit,” and gave the defendants 30 days to ask Trump to pay their legal fees under anti-SLAPP laws.
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The judge rejected Trump’s core argument that his denial alone should have stopped the Journal from publishing. “In effect, President Trump argues that once he declared the Letter a ‘fake,’ Defendants should have disregarded everything else they learned in their investigation and not published the story,” Gayles wrote. “But that is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment.” If that were the law, he warned, “any time a public figure or his team denies an accusation, journalists would be immediately blocked from publishing negative or contradictory press.” He noted that the article prominently included Trump’s denial and called the Journal’s work “a thoughtful and detailed investigation.” Gayles called Trump’s focus on Ghislaine Maxwell “a red herring.” He also pointed out that the Journal’s later visual breakdown of the letter “contains several examples where President Trump’s actual signature and sketches are similar to those in the Letter.”
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The ruling caps a saga that began when Trump personally asked Murdoch to stop the story. According to the order, Trump told Murdoch directly that he hadn’t signed or sent the letter, and when Murdoch said he would “handle it,” Trump thought the Journal wouldn’t print it. Two days later, in July 2025, the Journal published its story on a sexually suggestive letter bearing Trump’s name, framed by a hand-drawn outline of a naked woman and included in a 2003 album that Maxwell compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday. Trump denied writing it, calling it “a fake thing,” and sued the next day. Weeks later, the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Epstein’s estate and released the birthday book, which includes a page matching the Journal’s description of the letter. Gayles opened his ruling with a quote from the landmark free speech case New York Times v. Sullivan, warning that “fear breeds repression.”
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Trump’s separate $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC could also be thrown out over missing documents. U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjolique Lett warned that the suit could be dismissed unless Trump hands over requested legal documents by Nov. 23, according to the Independent. The Florida court raised serious concerns about how Trump’s legal team collected paperwork, and ordered him to produce a full list of documents withheld under privilege by Nov. 5 or face sanctions that include dismissal. Lett also ordered Trump to sit for a deposition under oath by Dec. 11, after his lawyers canceled an earlier date so he could campaign for the midterms. The case centers on a 2024 BBC Panorama documentary about the Capitol riot, which the BBC admitted had an editing “error of judgment” that gave the impression Trump called for violent action. The BBC is pushing to have the suit thrown out, citing extreme prejudice from Trump’s discovery delays and arguing the Florida court has no jurisdiction over a program that never aired in the state.
Alaska’s GOP-Led Government Shreds Trump’s “Meritless” Election Lawsuit as DOJ Appeals Order Blocking Its Pressure Campaign
Alaska’s Republican-led state government is tearing into the election lawsuit Trump personally directed his Justice Department to file, calling it “meritless” and the plan to segregate ballots “disturbing and impossible.” The lawsuit seeks to block certification of Alaska’s Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses and if votes for a second candidate with a similar name, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., could have changed the outcome. Trump has publicly acknowledged directing the suit, and Democracy Docket reports that he boasted about ordering it personally. In the state’s filing, Alaska’s lawyers called DOJ’s ballot proposal a “half-baked idea” and said the administration has no legal basis to intervene. “A political scandal does not support a federal claim without a viable federal law basis,” Alaska’s election board wrote. The state is asking the court to dismiss the case with prejudice so it can count the votes and certify the election without “unwarranted federal interference.”
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Alaska says DOJ is trying to use a voter registration law to take over a dispute that has nothing to do with voter registration. The Justice Department is relying on the National Voter Registration Act, but the state says the law covers voter registration, not voter fraud, and that DOJ can’t cite a single court case, or even a law review article, supporting its reading. Echoing the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Alaska argued that DOJ can’t explain “how its federal-authority elephant could possibly fit into its NVRA mousehole.” The state also says the ballot plan makes no sense, because separating ballots can’t reveal why someone voted for a candidate, and matching voters to their ballots to question their intentions would violate the secret ballot. It warns that discarding votes or reassigning them differently from how voters marked them would be more likely to violate voters’ constitutional rights than to protect them. “If Congress had intended for a few words from the ‘Findings and Purposes’ section of a 1993 voter registration statute to give the federal executive imperial oversight over all matters of election integrity in the States, how are we all only learning about it now?” the League of Women Voters of Alaska and other pro-voting groups wrote in support of dismissal.
The emergency order Judge Trina Thompson issued Friday night is even broader than first reported, blocking both DOJ and DHS from pressuring election officials in every state. Under the order, neither agency can demand that election officials segregate ballots, purge voters from the rolls, or halt ballot processing, according to CNN. “Although Defendants claim that their actions are designed to halt unlawful voting by noncitizens, their actions are likely to have the effect of interfering with election administration and disenfranchising lawful voters,” Thompson wrote. She also barred threats of criminal prosecution and any other actions that “threaten, intimidate or coerce” officials into changing how they process ballots. Election workers following the law “do not violate federal criminal law even if a particular ballot belongs to a registered voter alleged by Defendants to be ineligible to vote,” she wrote, rejecting threats the administration has made for months. Thompson is also requiring the administration to tell her about any search warrant applications, grand jury subpoenas, or other demands for election materials tied to its lists of supposedly ineligible voters, and the order runs through Nov. 16.
The Justice Department appealed Thompson’s order on Saturday, as its effort to pressure election officials keeps falling apart in court. The case was brought by a coalition of labor unions and civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens, which allege the administration’s conduct violates the Voting Rights Act and unconstitutionally intrudes on state control of elections. At the center of the fight is a DHS data-matching operation comparing state voter lists with federal records, and election officials say the resulting lists of suspected noncitizens are unreliable and include U.S. citizens. Despite the lawsuits, DOJ has sent letters to 29 states and Washington, D.C., threatening investigations and demanding they preserve 2024 records, even though federal law already requires them to keep those records for 22 months. In California, the 9th Circuit has already ruled that the administration has no right to intervene in how states verify citizenship. As CNN puts it, the administration’s aggressive efforts have “increasingly run aground in the courts.”
Republicans Panic in the Final Days: Paxton Cancels Stops, Cruz Warns of a “Bloodbath,” Salazar Fights for Her Life, and Graham’s Seat Slips
Ken Paxton, Trump’s hand-picked Texas Senate candidate, has canceled three stops on his final bus tour as his rallies draw small crowds. The cancellations on his “Come and Take It” tour include a rally in El Paso, a meet-and-greet in Texarkana, and an appearance in Tyler, according to the Daily Beast, as reported by the Mirror. The Daily Beast also reported that Paxton’s campaign was caught busing attendees into an Amarillo rally on Oct. 26, and the crowd was still small. Two days later, at a stop in Odessa, Paxton paused after a single audience member clapped and said, “Thank you. Thank you for that one clap.” At a Beaumont event, a speaker went viral begging the crowd not to leave while Paxton ran late, saying, “I don’t want the media to turn it into saying ‘people don’t like Ken Paxton.’” Paxton has two days left to make his case against Democrat James Talarico, and his final stop on Monday is still expected to go ahead.
Sen. Ted Cruz is warning that if the election were held today, Republicans would suffer a “bloodbath.” “Overall, I am deeply, deeply worried,” Cruz said in an interview, though the Mirror notes it’s unclear which outlet it was with. “What we’re seeing across the country is massive Democrat turnout,” he said, adding that Democrats are showing up “energized” because “they hate, hate, hate Donald Trump.” “If the election were over today, if just the early votes that have been cast so far were counted, Republicans would lose massively,” Cruz said. “It would not be close. We would lose both the House and Senate.” It’s a stunning admission from one of Trump’s closest allies, coming from a senator whose own state’s Senate race is in trouble.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar, once the most popular Republican in Miami, is now fighting for her political life over Trump’s mass deportations. Salazar won more votes than Trump in her Miami district in 2024, but the administration’s crackdown has upended the city’s immigrant communities, and Miami registered the highest number of ICE arrests of any field office in 2025, according to POLITICO Magazine. Salazar says she privately called Trump political director James Blair and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles to warn them that the party is at risk of losing Latino voters. In a viral September ad filmed in front of the White House, she told Trump that “some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far” and that Hispanics who backed him “feel betrayed today,” and Trump later shared Truth Social posts calling for her to be replaced. A new FIU poll found that 76% of Cuban respondents disapprove of the crackdown on Cuban nationals, though 68% still plan to vote Republican. “They’re not switching parties, and they’re just simply not going to show up,” FIU’s Eduardo Gamarra said of many Latino Republicans.
Republicans are panicking over South Carolina’s Senate race, which a New York Times/Siena poll shows tied between Sen. Darline Graham and Democrat Annie Andrews at 48%. “It’s a f***ing train wreck,” Republican Rep. Nancy Mace told MS NOW. “If MAGA doesn’t show up to vote on Tuesday, she loses.” The poll found just 80% of Republicans backing Graham, compared with 97% of Democrats backing Andrews, and the poll was taken after Trump had already rallied in the state twice. Graham was appointed to finish her late brother Lindsey Graham’s term at Trump’s urging, and Mace said voters “don’t believe in nepotism,” while Rep. Ralph Norman, who lost the primary to Graham, refused to say her name three times and asked, “What position does she have other than she likes Donald Trump?” South Carolina hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1998. As Norman put it when asked whether Graham is in trouble: “Do you think he’d be coming down here for the second time to South Carolina if she wasn’t?”
Even in deep-red Kansas, Trump loyalist Sen. Roger Marshall is fighting to save a Senate seat Republicans have held for more than a century, as recent polling shows him in a statistical dead heat with Democrat Adam Hamilton. When a Topeka business owner told Marshall that Trump’s tariffs were hurting his family’s company and his employees, the senator replied that “most of them are expanding and business is great,” and at another stop he said, “There are things more important than money to Kansans,” according to the New York Times. Marshall is also facing a Times investigation that found he sued more than 700 former patients over unpaid medical bills, with some arrested after failing to appear in court, which he calls a “hit job,” along with an ethics complaint alleging he used taxpayer funds for campaign staff and trips. Hamilton, a Methodist pastor who founded one of the country’s largest congregations, has been endorsed by two former Republican governors, while the Kansas Livestock Association’s PAC, which backed Marshall in 2020, declined to endorse him this time over tariffs. Trump rallied for Marshall in Wichita and openly tied a policy Kansas farmers care about to his survival: “With Roger Marshall in the Senate, we will make year-round E15 permanent. But if Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it.” Trump carried Kansas by about 16 points in 2024, but privately, many Republicans believe Marshall assumed his seat was safe and waited too long to take the challenge seriously.
Other news:
The Ebola outbreak in Congo has now killed more than 5,000 people, making it the second deadliest in history. Congolese Health Ministry data released Saturday shows the disease has killed 5,026 of the 10,351 people infected, a fatality rate of nearly 50%, according to the Associated Press. The outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, which has no known vaccine or treatment, and only the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak, which killed 11,000 people, was deadlier. About 80% of new cases are coming from outside the chains of contacts health officials are tracking, according to the Africa CDC, and a third of deaths happen before victims are ever tested. Armed conflict in eastern Congo, attacks on health workers, and strikes over months of unpaid wages have all hampered the response. Kenya and Nigeria confirmed cases this month, making this the most geographically widespread Ebola outbreak in the continent’s history.
Evacuees from Russian-occupied Oleshky were reunited with their families in Ukraine on Saturday, under the most significant truce since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Evacuees wrapped in Ukrainian flags stepped off buses at the Ukrainian-Belarusian border after traveling through Russia and Belarus, as residents of nearby villages lined the highway with flags and torches. “It was very difficult. There were a lot of drones,” said 48-year-old Ivan Yevhenovych, who said landmines or drone strikes were killing residents every day and that staple food had run out since spring. The White House said First Lady Melania Trump helped broker the localized ceasefire in the Kherson region, and she posted that the convoy could safely evacuate more than 750 people. Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said evacuees ranged in age from just over one to 94 and brought pets including dogs, cats, a parrot, and a raccoon. Even as the evacuation went on, Zelenskyy said Russian drone attacks overnight left 280,000 households in the Dnipro and Kyiv regions without power.
Virginia and Washington, D.C., have sued to stop Trump’s 250-foot memorial arch as the administration prepares to begin construction as soon as next week. The arch would rise on a patch of grass by the bridge connecting the city to Arlington National Cemetery, making it 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. Attorneys general Brian Schwalb of D.C. and Jay Jones of Virginia argue the three-year construction project would “snarl traffic,” pollute the Potomac, and “interfere with emergency services.” It’s now the third lawsuit against the project, and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is already weighing whether to halt it while an earlier suit by three Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian plays out. The administration says it will seek final approval at Thursday’s Capital National Planning Commission meeting and could break ground that same day. Its 106-page plan calls for a giant winged bronze Lady Liberty with an eternal flame, an observation deck, offices, and a “fire command center.”
The Trump administration has propped up nearly half of America’s coal plants with taxpayer money and “free passes to pollute,” according to a new analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund. The analysis found that 90 of the 184 grid-connected coal plants received help through “cash handouts, free passes to pollute, and requirements to stay online past their retirement dates.” The administration handed $950 million in taxpayer dollars to 24 plants and gave 70 plants exemptions from Clean Air Act limits on toxic pollution, the Guardian reports. One exempted plant, WA Parish outside Houston, was found in a 2018 Rice University study to cause as many as 177 premature deaths a year. “It’s like Americans are getting hit twice,” said EDF’s Surbhi Sarang, pointing to both higher electricity costs and more pollution. The White House says Trump has “saved more than 100 coal plants” and praised “beautiful, clean coal.”
Riot police clashed with masked protesters across France and Germany on Saturday as a third wave of cost-of-living protests swept Europe. About 320,000 people marched across France, down from an estimated 410,000 last weekend, including 70,000 in Paris, many in Halloween costumes, according to the interior ministry. In Paris, “a hardcore of several hundred rioters” pried up paving stones and hurled projectiles including a Molotov cocktail at police, who responded with tear gas and baton charges. “We’re being run by a group of incompetents who juggle billions while families are struggling with a few cents,” one Paris protester said. In Germany, police fired water cannons in Cologne and protesters set barricades ablaze in Hamburg after youth-led marches organized by a group called “Gen Z regelt!” Students in France have vowed new school blockades this week ahead of a major union demonstration on Nov. 5.
British defense officials privately said police should “absolutely” not have handed the case of a U.S. fighter pilot who strangled a British woman over to the American military, according to documents obtained by the Guardian. Cambridgeshire police let U.S. military police take over the investigation of Capt. Jacob Wulfson, who was accused of sexually assaulting Sarah Steele in his Cambridge flat in December 2023 while he was off duty. Under a long-standing U.S.-U.K. agreement, British police have the primary right to investigate such crimes, and Ministry of Defence officials called that agreement “pretty unambiguous.” Instead, Wulfson was tried at a court-martial on a U.S. airbase by an all-male jury of his fellow officers, where Steele faced what the Guardian describes as invasive and aggressive questioning. He was convicted of strangling an intimate partner but acquitted of sexual assault, and he served six months in a military jail. The U.K. government has now launched a high-level inquiry into why police keep handing serious cases involving off-duty American personnel to the U.S. military.
The task force searching for Nancy Guthrie, the mother of “TODAY” co-host Savannah Guthrie, traveled to Florida to meet with DNA scientists as the case nears nine months. The 84-year-old vanished from her Tucson, Arizona, home in February, in what federal authorities have described as a kidnapping-for-ransom case. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department said the task force met with lab scientists “to see what more could be done to advance the case,” and that “a number of ideas were discussed.” Updates have been rare, and in July officials said hair found during the investigation wasn’t linked to any potential suspects. “There is a hole inside us that can never be filled,” Savannah Guthrie wrote in August, vowing to find out what happened “so that we can give her the dignity of a proper goodbye.” Authorities say “no tip is too small” and ask anyone with information to call 88-CRIME or 1-800-CALL-FBI.
Newly released police records show multiple other women came forward with allegations against Packers running back Josh Jacobs after his May arrest. Jacobs pleaded no contest in September to misdemeanor battery and criminal damage to property after a woman said he threw her to the ground, and the new records add that she said he pinned her on a bed and covered her mouth and nose so she felt she couldn’t breathe. One woman told police that in 2022, Jacobs slapped her, threw her phone into a pool, pinned her down, and said, “I should kill you right now.” Another said he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, and that she didn’t report it because she wasn’t a U.S. citizen at the time and he told her she could be deported. Jacobs’s lawyers called the allegations “uncorroborated, old, and previously unreported,” noting that prosecutors had them for months and still pursued only two misdemeanors. The NFL said it will review the allegations as part of its ongoing investigation.
A federal judge ruled that McDonald’s must face a lawsuit claiming the McRib misleads customers into thinking it contains actual rib meat. The proposed class action accuses McDonald’s of shaping the patties with ridges to look like pork ribs while actually using lower-grade pork products, which the plaintiffs claim include shoulder, heart, tripe, or stomach. U.S. District Judge April Perry in Chicago dismissed some claims but rejected the company’s argument that no reasonable consumer could expect a McRib to contain rib meat. “Plaintiffs’ proffered understanding of ‘McRib’ is not unreasonable or fanciful,” Perry wrote, adding that customers need not do research before buying a $7 fast-food sandwich. McDonald’s says it doesn’t use hearts, tripe, or stomach in the McRib and called the lawsuit “meritless.” The chain has sold the McRib on and off since 1981.
Mexico is coming alive for its annual Day of the Dead celebrations, though overtourism is creating new tensions in some places. Streets, markets, and homes are filled with orange marigolds, which are believed to light the way for the souls of the dead returning to reunite with their families on Nov. 1 and 2. Families build altars with food, mezcal, and photos of loved ones, and gather at cemeteries across the country on the night of Nov. 1. Mexico City even set a Guinness World Record this week for the world’s largest “Catrina,” the elegant skeleton figure that has become a symbol of the holiday. But on the island of Janitzio in Michoacán, authorities closed the cemetery to tourists for the first time after crowds caused tombs, crosses, and part of a wall to collapse. In Mexico City, many locals remain skeptical of the city’s big catrina parade, which was invented for the 2015 James Bond film “Spectre.”
See you soon.
— Aaron
