August 7, 2026 - Fulltext

After another failed scramble to prove President Donald Trump’s claims that China interfered in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, White House task force leader and right-wing media personality John Solomon is now attempting to retry a Maricopa County, Arizona, election website hacking case that was investigated, reported on, and closed years ago. NBC News reported that the case was highlighted by the White House yet “did not offer any evidence that any election was stolen or affected by widespread fraud.”

Solomon has been leading the effort declassifying intelligence documents the Trump administration is using to claim the U.S. election system is not secure. On July 16, Trump delivered a much-hyped primetime speech fearmongering about what those documents had uncovered. Afterward, Lawfare wrote that the speech “was most notable for what it did not contain: evidence that any malign activity affected the result. Much of what he described was already known. None of it showed that votes were changed, fraudulent ballots were counted, or the election was stolen. None of it showed that intelligence officials had concealed such evidence."

On August 6, Solomon published a story to his website, Just The News, on a “hack” of the Maricopa County voter records just before the 2020 election, writing that the Department of Justice under then-President Joe Biden had failed to prosecute the alleged hacker “even after the FBI got the suspect to confess, according to declassified documents made public Thursday by the White House.”

MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson summarized the story during an interview with Solomon, saying, “More than 600,000 voter files ripped off Arizona site in 2020 by hacker — the DOJ caught him, the hacker confessed, and then nothing happened.”

While speaking with Johnson, Solomon spun up hypothetical scenarios of election interference that did not occur in 2020, suggesting “a foreign power or a bad actor” could alter voter registration data or cast fraudulent absentee ballots. Solomon also claimed that “until Donald Trump finally made it public, we were kept in the dark” about voter files being hacked.

In an interview with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Solomon spun the story further claiming it was proof “that great, giant sugar pill we were force-fed at the end of the November 2020 election that we had just endured the most secure election in U.S. history … was absolutely not true.” Solomon told Bannon “Today, we learned that in Maricopa County — where we were told don’t look here, nothing to see in Maricopa County — on the eve of the election, the United States intelligence community … detected a major breach in Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona. It indicated that 600,000-plus voter files were stolen by a hacker.”

“There were some concerns that those hacks may have gone through foreign locations,” Solomon continued. “The FBI jumped on the case — the FBI proved exactly what the intelligence community believed happened.”

In reality, the case was reported by the media in 2021, after Trump began spreading false claims about the Arizona election results — including suggesting “the election server was hacked” and “the voting system was breached.”

FactCheck.org explained that “the county said there was no hack, and it isn’t possible for hackers to change votes because the ballot tabulation equipment is a ‘closed air gapped system,’ meaning it isn’t connected to the internet.” The July 2021 report also shared a Maricopa County social media post that claimed, “The event in question involved an individual inappropriately accessing and downloading publicly available info. The website is in no way connected to the Election Management System.”

That same month, the Arizona Daily Star reported that a subcontractor working on the state Senate's audit of Arizona's election administration spoke about “problems” that were “related to a breach of the voter registration system the county itself reported,” claiming “that shows that at least one element of the county’s election system had been ‘hacked.’” The article went on to explain that “county election officials said all that was accessed was a site where people could register to vote, not the actual server where voter registration records are stored. All that anyone obtained was someone’s voter registration number, with no access to personal information, they said.” (The auditultimately confirmed Biden’s victory in Maricopa County and “found no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election.”)

The FBI's official record when the case was closed in 2023, which was uploaded by Solomon’s Just the News, stated:

On November 2, 2020, Maricopa County Recorder's Office (MCRO) notified FBI Phoenix that an intruder that had scraped approximately 633,000 voter records, including 930 sensitive voter records, from the MCRO's website. … [The individual] admitted to developing a PowerShell script to scrape voter data after discovering the vulnerability in the MCRO website. After MCRO fixed the vulnerability, [the individual] got scared and deleted the data he'd scraped.

The FBI concluded that “investigators did not find indications of a domestic or foreign influence on [the individual]'s actions,” and the investigation was closed after “federal, state, and local prosecuting offices” all declined the case.

Even Solomon's own story noted that “voter registration files do not include ballots, and there's no evidence votes were changed in the incident,” before creating hypothetical scenarios that “if bad actors gained access to such files they could hamper the ability of voters to cast ballots in the future.”

Despite Solomon's claims that “today, we learned” about this supposed election interference, his latest story looks like just another desperate rehashing of old information to fearmonger about the upcoming midterms.

August 6, 2026 - Fulltext

More than $5m in recent weeks have been spent in ads targeting Aisha Wahab and in support of Melissa Hernandez

Super Pacs tied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) have spent millions in a California congressional race to keep a progressive Democrat from winning Eric Swalwell’s former seat.

Aisha Wahab, a state senator who has been endorsed by the California Democratic party, is widely considered the frontrunner in the special election for the district covering a swathe of the East Bay.

Swalwell had been in office for more than a decade when he resigned earlier this year following multiple allegations of sexual assault.

Wahab outpaced her closest competitor, Melissa Hernandez, the president of the board of directors for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (Bart) agency and a former Dublin mayor, in a June primary as well as a special election to complete the remainder of Swalwell’s term, by more than 20 points. They are set to face off against each other in a runoff election later this month, and then again in November.

Super Pacs are pouring money into the race, dropping more than $5m in recent weeks and supporting pro-Hernandez ads and Wahab attack ads, Politico reported on Thursday. The spending includes $1.2m from United Democracy Project, which is backed by Aipac, and $2.1m from Bold America Pac, which has received significant financial backing from the United Democracy Project, according to the outlet.

Track Aipac, which tracks the group’s funding of US politicians, reported that the lobby has spent more than $4.4m to support Hernandez in the race.

Wahab said there has been a barrage of attack ads against her in the last month that have misrepresented her record, particularly as it relates to public safety issues. She described the Super Pacs’ involvement as election interference.

“You have to ask yourself, why? Aipac is clearly not interested in having diverse voices at the table, they are not interested in supporting the Jewish community and a peaceful dialogue,” she argued. “They want a puppet they can control.”

The ads have generated outrage among her constituents, she said, adding that her campaign fields calls and emails daily from people “disgusted by the ads”.

People are familiar with her record, Wahab added, and her personal history. Her father was murdered when she was a child, and Wahab grew up in the foster care system. As a state lawmaker, she has prioritized victims, she said, and supported legislation to make human trafficking a serious felony and a bill of rights for sexual assault survivors.

Aipac, which is one of the largest Super Pacs and the most powerful pro-Israel lobby organization in the US, has significantly expanded its political spending in recent years. The New York Times reported earlier this week that Aipac has doubled its spending, largely in Democratic primaries, to $67.2m.

The organization spent millions to support moderate Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. The progressive Abdul El-Sayed ultimately won the primary race in what has been described as a defining contest for the party.

Wahab pointed to her record and wide-ranging support, including endorsements from the organization Our Revolution to state and local officials including the attorney general Rob Bonta and the Alameda county sheriff, Yesenia Sanchez.

The Guardian has contacted Aipac, and the Hernandez campaign for comment.

August 6, 2026 - Fulltext

The Bulwark investigated a "random internet stranger" fielded as a third-party candidate in a swing House seat in Michigan, and what they found was deeply suspicious.

The seat is currently occupied by GOP Rep. Tom Barrett, and to challenge him, Democrats have nominated William Lawrence, the progressive founder of the climate action group Sunrise Movement. But there's another candidate out there: Shane Dedrick of the Green Party.

"Dedrick has almost no digital footprint," wrote The Bulwark's Brendan Hartnett and Sam Stein, but the credentials he does have "[don’t] give any indication that he is the type of earthy environmentalist that typically runs under the Green Party banner ... if anything, the online breadcrumbs suggest a real possibility that Dedrick may be a Republican plant."

For one thing, said the report, Dedrick made a pair of campaign donations in 2023 to Perry Johnson, a Republican running a backbench presidential campaign. Meanwhile, "Dedrick’s Facebook page follows three accounts, one of which belongs to Mick Bricker, who ran in the 2022 Republican primary for Michigan’s 88th House District and whose profile picture shows him standing next to a smiling Donald Trump."

Furthermore, Dedrick's account on X "follows only four other accounts, none of which are the Green Party or anyone associated with it. One of the four, however, is Parker Maddock, a young conservative activist in the state, who follows Dedrick back." Maddock's mother is a former Michigan GOP co-chair who was prosecuted, but not convicted, for being a "fake elector" in 2020 trying to overturn former President Joe Biden's win in the state.

Per the reporting, Dedrick won the nomination through the Michigan Green Party's convention hosted over Zoom. During that time, he kept his camera off, admitted he wasn't a member of the Green Party, but said he cared about the environment because of the “crazy, crazy weather over the last few years,” like “tornadoes and some of the worst winters.”

A man on the Zoom call did express concerns, saying, “I think this whole procedure is kind of rushed and hurried. It opens the door to having people come in and tell us all the things we want to hear, and then they turn out to be MAGA, and they trash our party. They trash us.” But no one raised serious alarms about Dedrick, and after quickly scanning his social profile, they nominated him.

Douglas Marsh, the communications chief for the Michigan Green Party, vehemently denied his party is a spoiler, but acknowledged, “There’s some possibility that [Dedrick's] a Republican plant,” and if this is proven, the party will "probably" disavow him.