Dominion Voting Systems — the voting machine behemoth that President Trump and his allies baselessly attacked after the 2020 election — has been sold to a Missouri-based company run by a former Republican election official, Axios has learned.
Dominion is one of the biggest election equipment providers and was used by 27 statesduring the 2024 election.
Liberty Vote purchased Canada-based Dominion for an undisclosed sum, according to a person familiar with the transaction.
Liberty is a new company owned by Scott Leiendecker, who in 2011 created a software program focused on enabling election workers to verify voters and check them in at polling locations.
According to Leiendecker’s LinkedIn page, his company KNOWiNK has more than 150 employees and $55 million in annual revenue.
The company says its systems are used by election officials in more than a third of U.S. states and describes itself as the “nation’s leading provider of electronic poll books.”
Leiendecker also has deep Republican connections.
Matt Blunt, who was then Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, appointed Leiendecker to a role investigating St. Louis’ elections administration after the 2000 election.
As governor, Blunt later appointed Leiendecker to be St. Louis’ Republican election director.
Ed Martin, a loyal Trump surrogate, was St. Louis’ Board of Elections’ chair when Leiendecker was the city’s election director.
This is not good.
I hate getting too hysterical about the election system.Local officials are still in charge and there’s no reason to suspect right now that they are going to cheat on Republicans’ behalf. My feeling has always been that Trump’s game plan is to contest the election after the fact and try to hold up the process or possibly even have his henchmen refuse to seat Democrats. But you never know. Regardless of anything else, having a right wing partisan owning voting machines is guaranteed to reduce the trust in the system even more than it already is.
Hegseth ordered this latest hit and denies that Colombians were on the boat. But nobody in the administration has provided any intelligence to anyone that would prove any of these boats are filled with drugs, much less who the people in the boats are. Not that it makes a difference. Blowing up civilian boats on the high seas for any reason is called murder. It is illegal according to both U.S. and international law.
These actions shock me as much as the invasion of our cities by violent federal agents who are trying to provoke a reaction so Trump can invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law. I know it sounds hysterical but I won’t be surprised if he tries to postpone elections.
They have no restraint here in the U.S or anywhere in the world.
He’s always rude and he doesn’t listen to briefings so he probably didn’t know about this but still. What an appalling person:
President Donald Trump mocked transgender people in front of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose child identifies as nonbinary, during an Oval Office meeting in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday that was intended to focus on trade relations but instead became a showcase of Trump’s familiar culture war politics.
The meeting, held in the presence of reporters, aimed to emphasize renewed cooperation between the two countries, which remain deeply economically intertwined. But as The Independentreported, it “devolved into a political rally disguised as a routine press availability.” Trump repeatedly veered off topic to attack Democrats, the media, and transgender people, boasting that under his leadership, “We have strong borders. We have no men in women’s sports. We’re not going to take your child away and change the sex of your child.”
He went on to claim that Democrats had left America “a dead country” plagued by “men playing in women’s sports and transgender for everybody and windmills all over the place.”
Carney, sitting beside him, did not respond publicly. The contrast was striking: Trump dominated the moment with bluster and provocation, while Carney, having been elected on the promise that he could handle Trump better than his predecessors, remained silent.
Maybe because if he said something it would blow up the relationship between the two countries. Any father in Carney’s position would be hard pressed not to slap Trump across the face:
Carney and his wife, British-Canadian economist Diana Fox Carney, have four children, one of whom identifies as nonbinary. In 2019, The New Haven Registerprofiled then-Yale student Sasha Carney, who used they/them pronouns and spoke about the relief of being recognized outside the gender binary when the university introduced a nonbinary gender marker.
What else is there to say? Trump 2.0 has declared war on anyone non-MAGA (CNN):
A remarkable scene unfolded in the White House State Dining Room on Wednesday as the Trump administration convened a group of independent journalists and online commentators to share stories of violence at the hands of Antifa, an anti-fascist movement with no leadership or organization.
President Donald Trump and top officials vowed to use the full weight of the federal government to bring down Antifa – comparing it to major gangs and drug cartels who they’ve attacked with the US military. They said they’d go after Antifa’s finances and designate it an “international” terrorist organization as they moved to dismantle it.
This is like Bush II’s “global war on terror,” or GWOT. No nation. No central command. TERROR is not an organization. Neither is the non-organization known as ANTIFA, short for anti-fascist. Antifa is Trump 2.0’s imaginary monster under the bed. Imaginary except that if they choose, you are in it.
But just as it was not an impediment for Bush II’s international anti-terror marauders, Antifa being a non-organization is no impediment to the second Trump administration. Trump 2.0 is reprising the Bush approach to brand anyone non-MAGA a potential target for summary execution by Hellfire missile fired from a drone. Trump’s attorney general suggested as much.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi compared the movement to the administration’s effort to target cartels.
“Fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guy off the streets. It’s breaking down the organization brick by brick, just like we did with cartels. We’re going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa, destroy the entire organization, from top to bottom. We’re going to take them apart,” Bondi said.
Mehdi Hasan noticed, “So he is going to drone strike American citizens?”
Trump’s use of “insurrectionists” above is no accident, Natasha Lennard argues at The Intercept:
… members of Trump’s Cabinet have repeatedly used the term “insurrection” and “insurrectionists” to describe the protesters standing up to U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Gestapo-style operations. And Stephen Miller, the ghoulish architect of Trump’s deportation machine, described the Oregon judge’s ruling as “legal insurrection.”
Like an incantation, they call the notion of insurrection into being to justify the Insurrection Act’s invocation when no such justification exists in material reality.
“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, where Trump’s storm troopers already wreaking havoc in Chicago, said on Monday. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”
It’s coming. The questions I have now are 1) What can we do to stop it? and 2) What do we do if we can’t?
Trump’s pet psychopath “glitches” when he realizes he’s said too much in public about Trump’s plans for martial law. TNR: “The clip has gone viral online, with many social media users speculating that there was no technical malfunction; Miller, they claim, had glitched out of panic, after accidentally revealing the authoritarian designs of the administration.”
The first time Donald John Trump took the presidential oath of office in January 2017, he swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, etc. As I watched I wondered how the career con man would manage to raise his right hand and place his left on a bible with his fingers crossed behind his back.
I kid. He simply lied in front of the entire planet. And did again in January 2025.
A Facebook post yesterday a from a woman with D.C. connections came to my attention. After a career “dedicated to preserving and strengthening democracy,” she is suspending her account. She recommends escaping social media algorithms to build local community as a means of rebuilding trust.
“It’s also how we figure out ways to govern ourselves going forward.”
I read “going forward” to mean (ominously) that she believes we might have to rebuild from scratch. I’ve been itemizing the ways Donald Trump and the MAGA Party are not making America great, but are working overtime to unmake it to the point that we’ll have to start again from scratch, if that’s even possible.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D) of Connecticut gave a speech this week laying out the Trump 2.0 battle plan for unmaking America. Before we get to that, the constitution Trump swore to protect (twice) is being shot through with holes by him and his Project 2025 lieutenants.
Let’s do a battle damage assessment in their Cold Civil War.
Since retaking office, Trump has usurped the constitutionally assigned powers of the Legislative Branch — specifically, “the power of the purse” — without a whimper from his MAGA allies there. The White House sees itself as a law unto itself and, as we saw this week with AG Pam Bondi, views congressional oversight with contempt.
Trump has treated the Judicial Branch alternately as a legal dodge and gnat he can swat away as it pleases him. He has defiedcourt rulings including the unanimous 2024 NRA v. Vullo ruling. That case confirms that the First Amendment “prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech.” Yet Trump 2.0 has made threats against media outlets over content he doesn’t like. He has threatened colleges and universities over what they teach. Through paper-thin criminal cases brought against his perceived enemies “as part of his crusade for retribution,” through a flurry of executive orders targeting law firms, and through harassment lawsuits he brought personally against newspapers and media outlets, Trump has made a mockery of the judiciary.
The convicted felon is stealing freedoms guaranteed to you in the Amendments as well. Trump 2.0 is systematically gutting rights guaranteed under the First Amendment (discussed above).
His immigration secret police now snatch immigrants and citizens off American streets without judicial warrants and without probable cause. They systematically violate people’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Once detained, immigrants and citizens alike are denied their due process rights under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Impacted by these unlawful actions are not only undocumented immigrants summarily deported, but also green card and visa holders who find them revoked without notice or court appeal.
Trump’s federalized deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles, California alleges, violates state sovereignty guaranteed by the 10th Amendment. Illinois and Oregon also find their 10th Amendment protections in Trump’s sights.
His first day in office, Trump issued an executive order claiming the power (that belongs to Congress and state legislatures) to strike the birthright citizenship clause from the Fourteenth Amendment as if by royal decree. To date, that effort has failed.
But his second administration has stepped up efforts to denaturalize U.S. citizens protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Ohio Capitol Journal reports that “a recent Justice Department memo prioritizes national security cases, it directs the department to ‘maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence’ across 10 broad priority categories.”
The ACLU warns, “Under other administrations, those targeted for denaturalization were often Nazis and other war criminals trying to escape prosecution under assumed identities. Now, the administration is attempting to strip citizenship from individuals based upon old removal orders issued when an applicant did not appear, discrepancies in applications, and allegations of crimes that they had not even been charged with at the time of their naturalization.” A mere accusation of being a gang or cartel member can be enough under Trump 2.0.
Finally, through a lengthy menu of voting-related legislative and administrative gambits, Trump’s MAGA party has eaten away at states’ guarantee of a republican form of government under Article 4.
God knows where they’ll turn next in redacting your constitutional rights.
Murphy this week outlined the plans behind Trump’s authoritarian takeover:
We aren't on the verge of an authoritarian takeover. We are in the middle of it.
But I worry people don't see the whole scheme. They just pay attention to each new daily outrage. So I went to the Senate floor to explain Trump's plan.
Step 5 is to rig election rules to concretize his control of government and to destroy your right to a republican form of government under Article 4 of the Constitution.
I know this sounds extreme. It is.
I know I sound overly alarmist. I don't think I am.
Trump is enacting a well thought out plan so he and his allies can rule forever.
But it's not too late to stop them. We can peacefully and forcefully mobilize now. We have the power. pic.twitter.com/0f2nw60FOC
File away for future use. Twice this month I’ve been approached by youthful Trumpers sealioning me about why I oppose their boy king. Shut them down with this.
Robert Reich has a tighter list concluding with this. “Don’t give Trump what he wants.” Remain peaceful.
I’m convinced that there’s an attention economy and virtually nothing matters in politics anymore if nobody hears about it. So you have to become skilled at breaking through the noise, especially the endless cacophony coming from Trump and his minions, in order to make any headway. (I wrote a bit about this earlier.)
To the extent the outcome of a political question or fight is pre-determined, politics and news coverage of it ceases to exist. Or if it doesn’t cease to exist, it loses the vast amount of its electricity and impact. We see this most clearly in 2025 public corruption stories. There are countless public corruption stories out there right now. But do they matter? Are you as a reporter going to really dig deep into one and is your editor going to give you a lot of running room when it is an absolute certainty there will never be an investigation by the Trump DOJ? The Tom Homan story is almost the exception that proves the rule. The Feds already basically caught him totally dead to rights. And yes, this case is so totally bonkers that reporters are kind of razzing Trump and AG Pam Bondi and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about it. But even here, reporting is constrained by the iron reality that Homan won’t lose his job, let alone face any legal consequences.
This dimension of politics applies in legislative and DC politics as well. As long as the outcome is foreordained, the gas just drains out of the politics tank. This is why the Epstein story caught hold like wild fire during the summer. It really wasn’t the inherently shocking and provocative nature of the crimes. It was that people could see that it wasn’t clear the White House could control it. Then politics and media coverage, which to a real degree were in a sort of months-long coma, began to flicker to life.
That’s the same issue here. It’s easy to look all-powerful when you are in fact … well, all-powerful. Blue America and all its commentators and consultants and campaign gurus have never been sufficiently attuned to how Trump’s constant performances of power create this aura of invincibility around him which in turn makes him seem uncrossable. The Kimmel fight — despite being about a late-night talk show — began to pierce some of that bubble. The trillion dollars of health care cuts weren’t popular when they passed this summer either. But as long as the outcome was guaranteed, it was never going to get sufficient attention. No one wastes time watching a rigged prize fight. All political contest and all the news coverage that swirls around it are based on uncertainty and the fact that there’s always the new detail to be known. This is a big part of why this fight, regardless of the outcome, was so important. Democrats don’t just seem to be winning this political fight, at least for the moment. They’re bringing actual politics — contests of power and public opinion about which the outcome is unknown — out of its coma. And that makes everything look very different.
That’s what the fighting is for. We don’t know how it will come out and that’s what gets people’s attention and creates engagement. This is always true to some extent but in the Trump era it is everything. So far, the Democrats have made this shutdown have some real suspense and as a result they’ve created the space to have some success as well.
On October 6th, in the middle of his most difficult period as president, Javier Milei donned a long leather jacket, strode into a packed arena in Buenos Aires and jumped around like a rock star, belting out Argentine rock classics. The idea was to revitalise his party’s campaign for the midterms on October 26th and to remind his supporters, and perhaps himself, that his presidency was once exciting, even fun.
Lately, running Argentina has been quite a slog. On September 22nd Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, promised that America is ready to “do what is needed” to steady Argentina’s currency. That intervention was prompted by the Argentine central bank being forced to sell over $1bn in two days to prop up the peso. Mr Bessent’s promises stopped the slide, but details are scant and even Republicans are questioning the bail-out. The situation is again fraught.
With every social-media post by Mr Bessent, the peso and Argentine bonds lurch (see chart). By some estimates the Argentine treasury has sold more than $1.7bn over the past five days to support the currency. Mr Milei’s economic team is in Washington, trying to hash out the details of the bail-out and buy some calm. Yet even if they can navigate American politics, the Argentine variety may swamp them. A serious loss in the midterms would all but end Mr Milei’s radical economic reform programme.
Trump really is the bail out king isn’t he? We’re bailing out Scott Bessent’s buds overseas now too:
Popular Information revealed that the taxpayer-funded bailout had massive economic benefits for hedge fund billionaire Rob Citrone, a personal friend and former colleague of Bessent. Citrone’s fund, Discovery Capital, had bet heavily on Argentina, purchasing Argentine debt and equity in numerous companies closely tied to the country’s overall economy.
Citrone’s investments reflected his belief that Milei’s right-wing economic program, which emphasizes deregulation and sharply reduced government spending, would revitalize the Argentine economy.
That theory began to unravel as growth slowed, unemployment spiked, and Milei’s popularity tanked. This spring, Citrone reportedly urged Bessent to help Milei secure a separate $20 billion package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF funds began to arrive in April, but proved insufficient to turn the Argentine economy around.
Concerns turned into panic after Milei’s party was routed in the Buenos Aires provincial election in early September, fueling fears that Milei would soon lose control of the economic agenda. Investors began dumping the peso and liquidating other Argentine assets, which spelled major trouble for Citrone’s hedge fund.
It’s very weird in Bizarroworld. The merging of show business and politics and extreme ideology was never on my bingo card although as I look back I suppose we should have seen it coming.
It will be such a relief if we really start to see this unravel. A Milei loss would be a good start.
On Tuesday, Johnson was asked by reporter Pablo Manriquez for his thoughts on the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show.
“I didn’t even know who Bad Bunny was, OK,” Johnson said, “but it sounds like a terrible decision in my view.”
Asked to elaborate further, Johnson suggested that Bad Bunny didn’t appeal to a “broader audience” and that he wasn’t a role model to “impressionable children.”
“Well, it sounds like he’s not someone who appeals to a broader audience,” Johnson continued. “And I think — you know, there’s so many eyes on the Super Bowl, a lot of young impressionable children, and I think, in my view, you would have Lee Greenwood — or role models — doing that, not somebody like this.”
He actually thinks that Lee Greenwood, a one hit wonder, appeals to a broad audience especially the young people. I mean, Willie Nelson, yes. Dolly Parton, for sure. Lee Greenwood????
They’re so upset about this that they’re talking about putting together a Turning Point alternative to the halftime show featuring …. Creed. I’m not kidding.
Bad Bunny has been the most-streamed artist in the world for multiple years. I can guarantee that anyone younger than 35 knows exactly who he is and most of them couldn’t pick Lee Greenwood out of a line-up. Probably not Creed either.
Someone please explain to me why everyone insists on saying that these throwbacks are the Real Americans and the rest of us are out of step with the culture and need to be reined in. It’s laughable.
