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election interference
As AIPAC Spends Millions to Oust Him, Massie Unveils Bill Requiring Pro-Israel Lobby to Register as Foreign Agent
“The lobbying that happens on Capitol Hill should be reported if it’s a foreign country, whether it’s Great Britain, Australia, Turkey, Qatar, or Israel,” said the Kentucky Republican.
May 15, 2026
As the Israel lobby attempts to end his political career, the Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has introduced a bill that would require lobbyists working for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, commonly known as AIPAC, to register as foreign agents.
The bill, known as the Americans Insist on Political Agent Clarity (AIPAC) Act, would amend the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), which requires those working to influence government policy on behalf of a foreign power to register with the US Department of Justice (DOJ).
Most lobbyists and donors for AIPAC are American, leading the DOJ to classify it as a domestic, rather than foreign, lobbying group. But critics have argued that it engages in extensive coordination with the Israeli government and that groups lobbying for the interests of other countries are treated with stricter scrutiny.
“Today, I introduced a bill called the AIPAC Act… which would make AIPAC subject to the Foreign Agents Registration Act," Massie (R-Ky.) announced on Redacted News Thursday. "For some reason, they’re immune right now, and I think not just the money that’s spent in politics, but the lobbying that happens on Capitol Hill should be reported if it’s a foreign country. Whether it's Great Britain, Australia, Turkey, Qatar, or Israel, it needs to be reported."
Massie has established himself as the leading Republican critic of President Donald Trump in Congress, agitating for transparency from the DOJ on the Jeffrey Epstein files and stridently opposing increased military spending and the president's aggressive overseas wars, including in Iran.
He has also distinguished himself as one of the few Republicans willing to publicly criticize Israel and call for the US to "immediately terminate" military aid in response to its killing of tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza.
His debut of the AIPAC Act comes as he's in the fight of his political life in Kentucky, where pro-Israel lobbying groups have unleashed a flood of money to unseat him in next week's Republican primary.
The United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC, has spent about $2.6 million, according to Axios, while the Republican Jewish Coalition has dropped $4 million to support Massie’s opponent, retired Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. The Christian Zionist group Christians United For Israel has dropped six figures on a campaign to blanket “every available billboard," it said, in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district with anti-Massie messaging.
Trump has also thrown his support behind Gallrein, and two of his senior political advisers, Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio, have raised more than $2 million for their MAGA KY PAC from a trio of top pro-Israel billionaires—hedge fund manager Paul Singer, investor John Paulson, and a group linked to casino mogul Miriam Adelson, according to Axios.
In all, the GOP primary in KY-04 has become the most expensive House primary on record in US history, with more than $25 million spent on advertising in total, surpassing the 2024 Democratic primary in New York's 16th district, where AIPAC and its allies unleashed another torrent of cash and successfully felled the progressive Rep. Jamal Bowman (D).
"[The money] didn't come from regular people. It's come from billionaires, and 95% of it... has come from the Israeli lobby," Massie said of the funds spent to oust him during an appearance on Tucker Carlson's podcast last week. "Their position is more war, it's more strife, it's more bombs, it's more foreign aid, and those are the things that I've been voting against."
Right now, the ad blitz—which has portrayed Massie as disloyal to MAGA—has put the incumbent in a position to lose his race. A Quantus Insights poll earlier this week showed him trailing with 43% of likely voters to Gallrein's 48%.
Massie said: "The real reason that this race is a serious race, and I may lose, is because a foreign lobby has fully funded to the extent that they've never done in any Republican race ever before."
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Report Details Trump Effort to Quietly Lay Groundwork to 'Steal Future Elections'
"It seems one of the ways this effort will take shape is, as with DHS's deportation efforts, to racially profile voters and try to invalidate their votes by pretending they're not citizens," said one critic.
Apr 28, 2026
President Donald Trump is using the US Department of Homeland Security to quietly assert federal control over elections in at least eight states, according to an investigation out Monday from Reuters.
Under the US Constitution, elections are run by states, rather than the federal government. But under Trump, who has called on Republicans to "nationalize" voting in Democratic strongholds, DHS—which typically handles issues of counterterrorism, immigration, and national security—along with other executive agencies, has launched what Reuters described as "a wider-than-known federal push into the machinery and conduct of US elections."
"Trump administration officials and investigators have fanned out across the country, seeking confidential records, pressing for access to voting equipment, and reexamining voter-fraud cases that courts and bipartisan reviews have already rejected," the report continued.
Branko Marcetic, a writer for Jacobin, said that the revelations showed that "Trump's push to steal future elections by taking federal control of them is quietly gaining steam."
In Ohio, DHS agents have called local boards of elections in at least six counties, requesting immediate access to data about specific voters, including registration forms, voting histories, and other confidential data, citing unspecified "investigations." Though Ohio leans red, all of the requests were made in counties that either had competitive elections coming up in 2026 or were solidly Democratic.
The Nevada secretary of state received a request from the FBI for voter information as part of an investigation into the 2020 election, which Trump has continued to claim was marred by fraud that cost him a victory despite evidence to the contrary. He never fulfilled the request because those records did not exist.
In Arizona, the state senate complied with a similar subpoena for records related to its report on an audit of the 2020 election, while DHS requested information related to the state attorney general's fraud probe.
In Colorado, Jeff Small, a lobbyist with connections to the White House who claimed to be working on behalf of Stephen Miller, the president's homeland security adviser, called 10 county clerks to request access to Dominion voting machines, which were at the center of Trump's fraud conspiracy theories.
Later, some of those clerks received the same request from a person who identified themselves as a senior official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversees election security. The clerks said they did not comply with these requests, which some said would violate state law.
These efforts follow a high-profile January raid by the FBI on an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize hundreds of boxes of ballots, tabulator tapes, and voter roll information from the 2020 election. Trump has directly influenced the investigation, speaking with FBI agents about it the day after dispatching Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to take part.
According to Reuters, election officials in many other states are bracing for similar investigations and raids into their operations.
“There is an intimidation factor,” said Amy Burgans, the Republican clerk and treasurer of Douglas County, Nevada. “It puts the question in the back of your mind... Who’s going to be next?”
As Republican chances of prevailing in the 2026 midterms appear grim, Trump has suggested on multiple occasions that elections be "canceled," something he has no power to do.
He has thus far failed in his efforts to pass the SAVE America Act through the Senate, which would require every voter to reregister and provide documents proving their citizenship, a measure experts say would likely disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.
But Reuters' investigation has revealed efforts to achieve similar ends by contacting states to compare their voter rolls with federal citizenship databases.
This happened in Missouri, where Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins shared publicly available voter roll data with federal authorities, who handed back lists of potential noncitizens flagged for removal.
Clerks in several of Missouri's counties said that most of the individuals flagged in the federal screenings were US citizens who'd been naturalized.
Clinton Jenkins, the Republican clerk for Miller County, said none of the names of people identified by the review had voted illegally. Rather, he suggested that federal authorities were targeting people who seemed to be of Hispanic and Latino heritage.
"It looks like if you have too many vowels in your name, you show up on a list,” Jenkins said.
"They are doing this through DHS, which it's clear by now this administration views as its own personal police force," Marcetic said.
"It seems one of the ways this effort will take shape is, as with DHS's deportation efforts, to racially profile voters and try to invalidate their votes by pretending they're not citizens," he added.
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'Batshit Authoritarianism': Trump Allies Drafting Order to Give Him 'Extraordinary Power Over Voting'
“This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in our elections," said Sen. Mark Warner.
Feb 26, 2026
A group of right-wing activists is crafting an executive order that would let President Donald Trump unilaterally ban mail-in ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the order being drafted by Trump allies would give him "extraordinary power over voting," even though the US Constitution explicitly gives individual states the powers to run their own elections.
An advocate for the order, Florida attorney Peter Ticktin, acknowledged in an interview with the Post that the Constitution does not give the president any role in shaping elections, but he said Trump needed to act to prevent China from supposedly interfering with American elections.
"Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” Ticktin said. "But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it."
The activists drafting the emergency order said that they are working in coordination with the White House, although the extent of any cooperation isn't clear.
However, the Post pointed to some evidence that the White House really is on board with such a strategy, such as the Trump administration's efforts to investigate his 2020 election loss to former President Joe Biden, which the president has long baselessly claimed was due to foreign interference from a number of nations, including China and Venezuela.
As the Post noted, "a 2021 intelligence review concluded that China considered efforts to influence the election but did not go through with them."
Additionally, Trump has publicly stated numerous times that he wants to completely do away with mail-in ballots and voting machines, both of which he has baselessly claimed are riddled with fraud.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the draft order was simply an attempt by the president's allies to block democratic accountability in future elections.
"We've been raising the alarm for weeks about President Trump’s attacks on our elections and now we’re seeing reports that outline how they may be planning to do it,” Warner told the Post. “This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in our elections."
Government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said that the drafted order was plainly unconstitutional and would fail in court.
"The Constitution gives states power over election law with oversight from Congress," CREW wrote in a social media post. "Notice who's missing? The president. Trump may try to cook up a sham national emergency to try to seize control of elections but it won't stand up to scrutiny."
MS NOW national security contributor Marc Polymeropoulos called the draft order "batshit authoritarianism" and cautioned that "this crazy shit is possible as Trump knows Congress is all but lost at this point in a free election."
"To save himself," Polymeropoulos added, "anything is possible."
Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker pointed to the Post report and warned, "Donald Trump’s plan to steal the 2026 midterm elections is already underway."
Rep. Rosa De Lauro (D-Conn.) accused Trump of "setting the stage to steal the midterm elections and set fire to our democracy," while vowing that Democrats would "fight for our democracy and safeguard the right to vote."
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