Two days after a historic midterm election, the questions were piling up fast. Then , a true Silicon Valley OG, reached out and invited , the “Democracy Bitch,” and me to join him live. Anne is a skilled attorney and law professor whose legal commentary cuts straight to what matters. We both said yes on the spot, and this morning the three of us hit the “go live” button.

We covered almost everything political in the book about what happens now that the election is behind us.

Guy picked up where his Wednesday conversation with Rep Ro Khanna left off and pushed the follow-up questions you’ve been asking. Anne brought the sharp legal analysis she’s been sharing here and on social, and she didn’t soften a single word of it.

Your job as a citizen starts the morning after the votes are counted.

We also worked through the issues I laid out in my free 6,000-word Tuesday night post, “Democrats Took Back Congress. Here’s What Happens Next.” If you haven’t read it yet, read it today. Then watch the replay with that post open beside you. You’ll understand the stakes at a level most people never reach.

Here’s the truth about the weeks ahead. The noise will get louder. The headlines will get scarier. Your best defense is knowing exactly what comes next and why.

Calm comes from understanding what happens next. Spoiler alert: I think America is in very good shape moving forward.

I mentioned several posts during the show. Here they are so you can dig in:

Democrats Took Back Congress. Here’s What Happens Next

Donald Trump Will Resign in 2027. The First Domino Falls This November.

Nine People. Decades of Power. One Fix for the Supreme Court Most Americans Already Want.

Pick one link, read it tonight, and share the replay with one person who needs the clarity as much as you do.

The people who stay informed after the election are the people who shape what happens next.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

It Took Less Than a Day

Within hours of Tuesday night’s blue wave, JD Vance stepped in front of the cameras and told the country that Republicans lost Congress for one reason, the Iran War. Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican leadership, Don Jr. included, fell in behind him so fast it looked like every one of them got the same text message of talking points before breakfast.

Because they did.

I want to tell you exactly what is happening here, because I have watched this same party take a violent attack on our Capitol, a day the whole country saw with its own eyes, and slowly sand it down into a feel-good story about patriots and free speech until millions of people stopped believing what they saw. They are doing it again regarding why they lost the midterm elections.

They will gaslight the facts and they will minimize the harm, and this time the Iran War is the tool they picked up to do it.

They Already Ran This Play Once

January 6th was an attack on the Capitol that Donald Trump and others incited in the weeks leading up to that day. On the morning of the assault, Trump and his allies took the stage at a rally they called “Save America,” held at the Ellipse, a large public park directly south of the White House in Washington, D.C., and they threw more gasoline on a fire that was already burning. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, called for “trial by combat.” John Eastman, a constitutional law professor and Trump legal adviser, urged Vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the electoral votes. Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama told the crowd to fight politically and carry their message to Capitol Hill.

Donald Trump Jr. stood up for his father and challenged Republicans who were unwilling to contest the election, and Eric Trump did the same, going after Republicans who refused to back the election challenge. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a Trump campaign fundraiser and Don Jr.’s partner at the time, fired up the thousands of supporters packed into that park with an enthusiastic speech, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton pushed claims attacking the election results from a separate rally that day. We all saw what happened next. We saw the violence, the anger, the hate, and the destruction, outside the building and deep inside it.1

[Continue to read for free]

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Grab your calendar right now and block off Thursday at 11 am PST.

You’ve had a full day to breathe and decompress. Now the questions are piling up, and you deserve real answers. Clarity is the best medicine for your nerves after an election.

This Thursday, I’m joining two people you need to hear from. Guy Kawasaki is a top thought leader and true Silicon Valley OG. Anne P. Mitchell, Esq., aka the “Democracy Bitch” is an attorney, law professor, and legal commentator. Together we’re going to tell you what to expect next.

No pulled punches. No hype. Just answers.

We’ll also cover some of the answers to questions Guy dived into with Rep Ro Khanna, on Tuesday, and what Anne’s been sharing here and on social. We’ll also dig into many of the issues I laid out in my free 6,000-word case file Tuesday night post, “Democrats Took Back Congress. Here’s What Happens Next.” Read it before we go live and you’ll walk in ready.

Set your reminder now and bring your toughest questions. We’ll see you tomorrow (Thursday) at 11 am PST.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Executive Summary

Tonight, Democrats took back the House and the Senate. On January 3, 2027, every committee gavel, subpoena, spending bill, and confirmation vote moves to a majority that answers to the voters who showed up.

This article walks you through major fights and issues that change on day one: health insurance premiums and Medicaid cuts, the undeclared war with Iran, ICE detention deaths, the Minneapolis shootings, the Insurrection Act, the EPA endangerment finding, impoundment, the Trump family’s crypto money, your grocery bill, and sworn accountability for officials who spent two years stonewalling Congress. It covers the limits honestly too, including the presidential veto and a Justice Department run by the president’s former personal lawyer.

You also get a plain-language guide to how impeachment works if the evidence gets there, along with my prediction that Donald Trump resigns in 2027 with a Vance pardon waiting for him.

Congress holds the tools now. Your job starts Wednesday morning.

The Night the Gavels Changed Hands

Tonight Democrats took back the House and the Senate in a historic election, and with that vote the American people saved democracy. Donald Trump goes to bed tonight a lame duck, and he stays one for every remaining day of his second term.

I have spent nearly forty years in courtrooms, and I know the moment a case turns. The witness stops making eye contact, and the lawyer at the other table starts shuffling papers that need no shuffling. That is Washington tonight.

On January 3, 2027, a new Congress gets sworn in, and from that morning forward every committee gavel, every subpoena, every spending bill, and every confirmation vote for a Trump nominee runs through a Democratic majority that answers to the people who showed up tonight. That changes everything.

For two years, a Republican Congress treated its constitutional duties like optional homework. It looked away from the war in Iran, the crypto money, the deaths in ICE custody, and the price of your groceries. Congress is supposed to be your lawyer, and tonight you finally hired one that shows up to court. Here is what happens next, issue by issue, and why none of it happened before tonight.

What a Majority Buys You

Let me explain congressional power the way I would explain it to a jury.

Start with the subpoena. In a lawsuit, discovery is the stage where each side has to turn over documents and evidence. A congressional subpoena works the same way. When a committee chair issues one, the person who receives it has to comply. It comes with a deadline to show up or hand over records, and anyone who refuses gets that refusal written into the public record permanently.

Next comes the hearing calendar, which works like a deposition, where a witness answers questions under oath. This spring, House Oversight Democrats said Republicans had replaced formal hearings with roundtables, informal sessions where nobody gets sworn in and nobody faces a contempt vote for refusing to cooperate.

The third tool is the purse, and that’s where the real pressure lives. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution says no money can leave the Treasury unless Congress passes a law approving it. By long tradition, the House writes those spending bills first.

The Senate holds a fourth tool: confirmation. The president’s top nominees need Senate approval to take office. A Democratic Senate ends the era of 50 to 49 rubber-stamp votes, like the one in August that made Trump’s former defense lawyer the Attorney General.

Donald Trump keeps his veto pen, and overriding it takes two thirds of both chambers, a number nobody won tonight. Senate rules still demand 60 votes for most legislation, and contempt referrals still travel through a Justice Department run by Todd Blancher, his former personal lawyer. I want you to know all of that going in, because an honest case wins in front of any jury.

Money decides how this plays out. Government funding runs out on December 11, and Congress has to pass a defense bill every year. That means a president who wants one more dollar for his war or his deportation machine has to negotiate with Democrats, the same party whose progressive wing he spent the summer calling communists.

History shows how this works. The 93rd Congress served in 1973 and 1974. In those two years, it ran the Watergate investigation. It also passed the War Powers Resolution, overriding a presidential veto to do it, and passed the Impoundment Control Act. That law stops a president from sitting on money Congress has already approved, because he has to ask Congress for permission to cancel it, and if Congress says nothing within 45 days, the money has to go out.

One warning before the list. Republicans stay in charge of Congress until January 3, and before they leave, they will try to lock in a full year of government spending on their own terms. The weeks between the election and the new Congress are called the lame duck session. During that time, Senate Democrats still have the filibuster, a Senate rule that lets the minority block most bills unless 60 senators vote to move forward. Democrats should use it to delay the spending fight until January, when they hold the majority.

Ten Things That Change Starting January 3

Every item below comes straight out of the fights of the last two years, and every one of them now sits on the other side of a gavel. [keep reading for free]

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If anything goes wrong at your polling place today, you do not have to figure it out alone. Pick up your phone and call the nonpartisan Election Protection Hotline. Trained volunteers are ready right now to answer your questions and walk you through your rights. Make the call. Then go cast your ballot.

English: 1-866-OUR-VOTE / 1-866-687-8683

Spanish: 1-888-VE-Y-VOTA / 1-888-839-8682

Arabic: 1-844-YALLA-US / 1-844-925-5287

For Bengali, Cantonese, Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Mandarin, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and more: 1-888-API-VOTE / 1-888-274-8683

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The Election Protection Hotline, the voter help service run by Election Protection, is the country’s largest nonpartisan voter protection coalition, more than 100 partner organizations led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

What it does: trained legal and grassroots volunteers staff the lines live during voting hours on election days and help any voter, free, regardless of party, work through problems on the spot. Typical calls:

• Confirming registration status and finding your correct polling place

• Voter ID questions and what to do if you are turned away

• Mail ballot and absentee problems, including ballots that never arrived

• Voting machine failures, long lines, ballot shortages, polling place closures

• Reports of voter intimidation, discrimination, or misinformation, which get logged and can be escalated to lawyers on the ground

Each language line is run by a different coalition partner. The English line is the Lawyers’ Committee itself. The Spanish line is the NALEO Educational Fund. The Asian languages line is APIAVote and Asian Americans Advancing Justice. The Arabic line is the Arab American Institute.

Beyond the phones, the coalition puts trained monitors at polling places and collects what voters report, using those records to push election administration fixes and, when needed, litigation.

Since today is Election Day, the lines are staffed live all day while polls are open.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Related: Know Your Rights If Federal Agents Show Up Where You Vote

Sunday Afternoon Before the Vote

It’s Sunday afternoon, and in two days you walk into a voting booth. I believe Democrats take back the House on Tuesday, and I believe the Senate goes with them. Enough Americans will do the right thing. I feel that in my bones.

My chest, on this quiet Sunday, sits heavy anyway.

After two impeachments, a felony conviction, the Epstein files, an Iran war Congress never approved, gas and grocery prices climbing because of that war, a Justice Department that treats court orders like suggestions, and a daily flood of lies told straight to your face, tens of millions of Americans still stand behind Donald Trump. And that breaks my heart.

I know his name sits nowhere on Tuesday’s ballot. His supporters fill it, Republican candidates who doubled down on his rhetoric, his views, his policies, and his hatred for your neighbors, and every one of them is asking you to keep his foundation standing. That’s why I’m writing to you today. The fact that Tuesday is even a close question tells you this problem runs deeper than one election, and I honestly thought we were a better country than this.

Look at Who They Defend

He has no ethics and no honesty. He does not know how to tell the truth, and he cares nothing about you or the people standing right next to him.

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The Bolsonaro Pass

Donald Trump campaigns on a closed border and on criminals pouring into this country. He then gave Flávio Bolsonaro a pass and said so himself.

The New York Times reported that a White House official arranged the private jet that carried Bolsonaro to Miami. Trump adviser Jason Miller arranged that flight. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recommended admission and Trump approved it.

Officials at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security granted Bolsonaro and his wife Fernanda and their two daughters humanitarian parole. Argentine President Javier Milei helped him cross Argentina on the way out. Bolsonaro presented a canceled Brazilian diplomatic passport on arrival in Florida, and American officials expect a green card application to follow.

The Facts

You should know exactly who got that pass. Bolsonaro is a far right senator from Brazil. He had just lost the presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes had ordered him to surrender his passport. Federal police are investigating him in two alleged money laundering schemes, one tied to disgraced banker Daniel Vorcaro and one tied to lawyer Willer Tomaz and the betting business.

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What the government asked this court to do

The Justice Department sued California on October 15 and asked Judge David Carter for a temporary restraining order, an emergency order that changes how an election runs before a full trial. The government wanted county workers to pull ballots from its federal list of more than 20,000 registered voters aside and leave them uncounted in the November 3 midterms.

He denied it.

A vote set aside on suspicion alone is a vote taken from a citizen with no trial and no appeal. His opening sentence deserves your highlighter: "Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch."1

Standing, and why the government started the case already losing

Standing means the legal right to bring a case into court in the first place. Standing comes first. Carter found the Justice Department likely lacks standing and likely lacks a cause of action, the legal claim a judge needs before a court reaches a remedy, and he found the federal criminal law against noncitizen voting hands prosecutors a tool for charging a person and hands that law zero authority over California ballot processing rules.

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The House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a new 52 page staff report claiming Donald Trump took an active part in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women in the mid to late 1990s, and that his own Justice Department is working to keep you in the dark.

I read all 53 pages of this report so you don’t have to, and here is what you need to know. If you want to do your own deep dive, the link is here.1

Where It Started

Starting in 1991, Trump hosted Elite’s Look of the Year contest for models ages 14 to 19 with his business partner John Casablancas, and contestants later said they were made to dance for the men on a yacht and that Trump kept finding reasons to come backstage as they changed. Paolo Zampolli, a Trump envoy until his recent firing, now faces a lawsuit claiming he drugged and raped a young model in 2023. Zampolli says he introduced Donald and Melania. An FBI file from a former Epstein assistant says Epstein did.

Eleven Women

The report describes eleven women who link the two men, and five accuse Trump of rape or sexual assault in Epstein’s company or presence. Beatrice Keul, a Swiss model, told committee staff that at Trump’s 1993 Plaza Hotel pageant, Trump and Epstein promised to take care of her, with Trump offering a visa and a spot at NYU. Later that day a Trump representative led her to a suite where, she says, Trump forcibly raped her, a full account she gives for the first time here. Stacey Williams says Trump groped her at Trump Tower as he and Epstein kept talking, “smiling and grinning.”

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I read the complaint and the House Ethics report2 that backs much of it, and in this video I’ll show you exactly what they say happened behind closed doors, who paid for it, and why Washington is hoping you never hear about it.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Subscribe for free to get every breakdown straight from the record, and if this work matters to you, a paid subscription keeps it independent and keeps it coming. Thank you.

I Appreciate Your Support

I’m tired of Donald Trump and his administration.

I’m tired of Trump and his people praising dictators instead of holding them accountable. Last week, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff told Vladimir Putin, “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.” Putin invaded Ukraine and faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for deporting Ukrainian children.

I’m tired about how Trump and his administration are destroying our environment by waiving clean-air rules for industrial facilities that spew cancer-causing gases while his appointees work to gut regulations altogether.

I’m tired of Jared Kushner running around the world making deals after career White House security staff recommended denying his top secret clearance over foreign influence concerns and omissions on his background forms. He isn’t a government employee, so he dodges the rules and congressional oversight. Now reporting alleges Dutch intelligence watched him log into a UAE account holding hundreds of millions of dollars.

I’m tired of a President whose words and policies have given racists permission to crawl out of the woodwork and say the quiet part out loud. They’re drawing voting maps to dilute the power of Black and brown voters and standing up at public hearings and rallies saying things no one in modern America would have dared say in public before this presidency, and they do it because they know the man at the top has their back.

I’m tired of watching his enablers nod along to everything he says and does, from the people in his administration to the MAGA Republicans running Congress, because loyalty to him pays better than loyalty to you. They trade their oath to the Constitution for more power and more money, and every time they look the other way, you’re the one who pays for it.

I’m tired of a president who promised to release the Epstein files, then stalled once he took office, even with his name appearing in at least 4,500 of those documents.

I’m tired of Trump lying to his audiences that schools are secretly sending their kids off for gender-affirming surgery behind their backs. No school, no child, and no surgery has ever been found behind that claim, and a school nurse cannot even hand a child a Tylenol without a parent’s permission.

I’m tired of crowds cheering when Trump tells them he can say the stupidest things and still get applause, and when he promises them a healthcare plan that is always two weeks away for the last 10 years. He told them to stop complaining about high gas and grocery prices, and they clapped for that too.

I’m tired of an administration that treats a federal judge’s order like a suggestion. Judge Reyes required court approval before cutting more than 10 trees at the East Potomac golf links course, and the government cut down at least 430 mature trees that weekend.

I’m tired of conduct by the Trump administration and the Department of Justice lawyers resulting in a federal judge, on the record, saying the government has lost all credibility with her court and that it did its absolute worst, not its best.

I’m tired of one man, Elon Musk, being allowed to spend $366 million dollars to shape this year’s midterms, including $158 million dollars to a single Senate super PAC in one summer. One man’s checkbook should not count more than your vote.

I’m tired of his Justice Department trying to stop California from counting about 20,000 mail ballots three weeks before Election Day, based on a list it will not explain. Federal judges have already thrown out 26 of these voter-roll cases, and in Nevada every one of the 185 people the government flagged turned out to be a lawful american citizen.

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Picture an intelligence analyst in The Hague, coffee going cold beside the keyboard, capturing one screenshot after another as the man married to the President’s daughter logs into a bank account in Dubai holding hundreds of millions of dollars sent from a bank in Azerbaijan. According to Matthew Cole’s excerpt from his forthcoming book Princes and Thieves, published by Vanity Fair on October 22, 2026, Dutch intelligence allegedly captured screenshots of Jared Kushner’s iPhone that revealed his access to foreign bank accounts, claims Kushner’s counsel denies. Every voter who cares about who our leaders answer to should read what follows.

The Man Handed the Middle East

Jared Kushner married Ivanka Trump in 2009. In 2017, Donald Trump named him Senior Advisor to the President. Before that, Kushner ran his family’s real estate company. He had no government experience. Then he received the Middle East portfolio, one of the hardest jobs in American foreign policy, with no Senate confirmation and no hearing, and the man at the top of his chain of command was his wife’s father, the President himself.

In 2018, intelligence officials and the White House’s top lawyer raised concerns about giving Kushner a top secret clearance, and as The New York Times reported in 2019, the President overruled them and ordered his chief of staff, John Kelly, to grant it, an order Kelly documented in writing. Trump denied playing any role, and Kushner’s lawyer said the clearance went through the regular process with no pressure from anyone. That same year, The Washington Post reported that officials in at least four countries privately talked about ways to manipulate Kushner by exploiting his tangled business deals and his thin foreign policy experience.

Give an untested man the keys to the Middle East with nobody watching, and foreign rulers will line up to test him.

Kushner left the White House in January 2021. He returned to Middle East diplomacy during Trump’s second term as an informal envoy, helped broker the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire, and now carries the President’s title of envoy of peace, a role the White House calls unofficial volunteer work.

How the Money Moved, According to the Investigation

Here is the story Cole’s reporting tells. In late 2017, Dutch military intelligence learned that a Russian GRU hacker was heading to England, and the British agreed to help catch him. The Dutch gave him a choice between working for them and going to a British prison. He chose to switch sides. He then gave the Dutch access to a GRU server in Rostov, Russia, where they found screenshots of Kushner’s iPhone X.

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SUMMARY: Since February, Russia has been handing Iran the locations of American troops and bases, and U.S. officials concluded that intelligence put Iranian missiles on target at Prince Sultan Air Base, where 12 Americans were wounded. Trump’s answer has been sanctions relief for Moscow and a story about Russia’s role that keeps shrinking every time he opens his mouth. On October 16, two days before the deadline in the sanctions law he signed, he waived its core penalties and shielded the buyers of Russian oil and gas from tariffs of up to 100 percent. That keeps Putin’s oil money flowing straight into the war machine pounding Ukraine, and it hands Moscow more leverage at the peace table with every barrel sold. Every one of those choices puts Russia’s interests ahead of American troops, ahead of Ukraine, and ahead of every ally counting on the United States to stand up to Putin. If Trump keeps protecting the country that’s helping Iran aim at our troops, and keeps siding with Putin over Ukraine every time the bill comes due, whose side is he on?

In March, Iranian missiles slammed into Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, wounding twelve American troops and damaging an E-3 AWACS radar plane, the flying radar station our commanders count on to track every aircraft and missile moving through the skies around them. Two days before that strike, fourteen Russian spy satellites passed over the base. U.S. officials later concluded that Moscow’s information made the precision attack possible.

As a lawyer I know what a case looks like when the evidence lines up and the defendant keeps changing his story, and this is one of those cases. Russia is helping Iran find and hit American forces and Trump keeps looking the other way.

Let me lay it out for you the way I would lay it out for a jury.

The Two Charges

The first charge is that since the war began on February 28, 2026, Russia has fed Iran the locations of American troops, warships, aircraft, and radar sites, mostly through satellite photos that Iran uses before a strike to choose its targets and after a strike to grade how much damage it did.

The second charge is that Trump knows about it and doesn’t do anything about it. To make matters worse, he keeps easing the economic pressure on Russia, most recently by waiving the heart of the Russia sanctions law that Congress passed and he signed in September.

Both charges stick.

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What Happened

Late on October 13, Ukrainian soldiers sent their interceptor drones up to hunt Russian attack drones racing toward their cities, and somewhere far above them the rules changed without a word of warning. Any Starshield terminal moving faster than about 100 miles per hour lost its satellite link, and some units lost signal at speeds as low as 45 miles per hour.

Nobody warned them. Ukraine’s military learned of the cap, of all places, from SpaceX customer support after filing a complaint.

Given everything Trump has handed Russia lately, I don’t believe for one second this was a coincidence.

Start here

You need the basics first. Starlink is the commercial satellite internet service owned by Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX. Starshield is the military version sold to governments, riding the same satellites with tougher encryption. Ukraine’s army runs on both.

An earlier deal through US European Command put 500 Ukrainian terminals on Starshield, and an August 2024 Pentagon contract added 2,500 more. Poland has said it pays about 50 million dollars a year toward Ukraine’s Starlink service, and Germany says it pays for some of the equipment too. Soldiers use these links to fly drones, move supplies, spot targets and talk to headquarters. Russia’s newest attack drones run on jet engines and fly fast. Ukraine’s interceptors have to fly faster to catch them.1

Connections under the cap started coming back on the evening of October 14, and on Saturday President Zelensky said the satellites still were not tracking antennas on anything moving faster than 161 kilometers per hour, which is about 100 miles per hour and far slower than the jet drones his pilots chase.

Everyone Points Somewhere Else

I’m a trial lawyer, and I have watched plenty of defendants point at each other. This case has the whole cast doing it.

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What The Heck is Going On?

Everyone is talking about Russian oil right now, and much of what you hear comes wrapped in spin. I’m a trial lawyer. Energy policy and international sanctions sit outside my area of expertise, so I put my team to work digging through the laws and the deals behind the headlines, with one goal in mind: hand you a plain English breakdown of what is happening and why it should worry every American who fills a gas tank or cares about a stable Ukraine, a stable Europe and a safer world.

Each major section closes with a short summary in plain language, so we all walk away holding the same facts. Read it, then share it with the people you talk to about this.

Oil Pays for Russia’s War

Russia leans hard on oil money. Oil and gas supplied about 30 percent of Moscow’s federal budget in 2024 and close to a quarter in 2025, making energy sales the Kremlin’s single biggest source of cash for missiles, drones, tanks and soldiers aimed at Ukraine, a country Russia first carved up in 2014 when it seized Crimea and then invaded outright on February 24, 2022, starting the largest war in Europe since World War II. America answered with two weapons. We armed Ukraine, and we went after Putin’s wallet.

In plain terms: Russia pays for its war in Ukraine largely by selling oil and gas, so America chose to fight back by arming Ukraine and shrinking Putin’s oil paycheck, and every decision that loosens that squeeze puts money back into Russia’s war machine.

How America Squeezed Moscow

In March 2022 the United States banned Russian energy imports outright. Europe stopped buying Russian crude by ship and then Russian diesel. The G7 nations set a price cap of $60 a barrel, so Western shippers and insurers would only touch Russian oil sold below that line, and Europe and Britain later pushed the cap down to $44.10.

Allies sanctioned hundreds of aging shadow fleet tankers Russia used to cheat. In August 2025 Trump himself slapped a 25 percent penalty tariff on India for buying Russian oil, and in October 2025 he sanctioned Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two biggest oil companies. India’s Russian oil purchases fell to about 1.1 million barrels a day by January 2026, the lowest since late 2022. In the end, every dollar we let Putin earn on oil helps pay for the bombs falling on Ukrainian apartment buildings.

In plain terms: America and its allies spent four years shrinking Russia’s oil income through bans, a price cap and sanctions on ships and companies, Trump added his own penalties in 2025, and the numbers show the pressure was working.

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Donald Trump stood in front of a crowd this week and lied again to the country that schools are secretly shipping children off for gender-affirming surgery behind their parents’ backs.

It doesn’t happen.

He say’s “it’s sick.”

You know what’s sick? The President of the United States lying to the people he took an oath to protect over and over again.

But his lies are nothing new. It’s what this guy does.

Fact-checkers documented more than 30,000 false or misleading claims in his first term alone, and the number has increased daily during of his second term.1

With respect to his unauthorized gender-affirming surgeries story, he’s been pushing this story over and over on the 2024 campaign trail, and now because his numbers are at a historic low before the midterms, he’s pushing it again this week. Every single time fact-checkers look into it they rate it false, because there is no child, no school, and no surgery anywhere behind the claim. He knows it. He says it anyway.

Zero Evidence From Anyone

Reporters asked the Trump campaign for proof. When his prior press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was asked in September to back up her boss, she had nothing to give. Independent investigators went looking on their own and came back with the same nothing. Snopes found no evidence of any child receive a sex-change operation or gender-affirming surgery at school. CNN fact-checkers went further and contacted several conservative parental rights groups, organizations with every motive in the world to find a case, and those groups failed to name a single school anywhere in America that ever arranged surgery for a student. The file is empty.

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The Law Slams This Door Shut

Completely unrelated to schools, even in states where gender-affirming surgery is legal for people under 18, a parent has to sign consent before a minor goes anywhere near an operating room. The president of the National Association of School Nurses said school nurses need explicit permission from a physician and a parent before handing a child an Advil or a Tylenol. Surgery takes a hospital and a surgeon, anesthesia and signed insurance approval, along with consent forms a parent has to put their name on, and a child who vanished from class for three days and woke up in a recovery room would set off missing-child reports and a police investigation within hours. The lawsuits would leave a paper trail a mile long. None exists.

Look, if we want to have a conversation about gender-affirming care for minors, or anyone else for that matter, we deserve responsible people, including the president, to bring accurate facts to that conversation. Trump brings fiction. He fans the flames and walks off the stage, and real families end up breathing the smoke.

Your Move

This snake oil bullshit is pathetic to watch, and it is dangerous. You deserve honest facts from the person who is supposed to be working for you and who holds the most powerful job on earth, so demand them out loud every time this lie gets repeated.

And while we’re both here talking about kids and school, I personally wish he would spend one ounce of the energy we see in his propaganda speeches protecting children from gun violence that follows them into their classrooms. This week another gunman walked into an elementary school, killed three kids and a teacher, and wounded two more people. That is a real danger with real bodies, and it deserves real solutions from the man who has the power to push for them.

Our kids need leaders who fight the threats that are killing them, and they deserve far better than a fake crisis peddled to a cheering crowd by a man with no dignity left to lose.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

If you’re done letting lies set the agenda and you want facts you can stand on and the courage to say them out loud, subscribe to Uncensored Objection right now, because the truth needs you in its corner today.

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The Week in Review

You told me something this week, and I heard you. In the replies, you said the week moved fast and you missed some of what I published. I get it. There’s a lot of breaking news and I put out a lot of content. You have a life to run.

So my Friday morning post is for you. I’m going to walk you through the most important things I wrote and talked about on Uncensored Objection this week. We’ll start with the oldest piece and move forward from there. For every story, I’ll give you the point in plain English.

Grab your coffee. You can get caught up in a few minutes, and then you can get on with your weekend.

Last Saturday opened with “Trump Just Fueled Putin’s War Machine. Ukraine Will Pay the Price.” Three weeks after signing the law that locked Russia’s sanctions into place, the 34-time convicted felon and civilly adjudicated sexual abuser in the Oval Office let Putin sell diesel to America again, and Congress never saw the deal. As usual, the law said one thing and the White House did another. Ukraine pays for the difference and Russia profits.

Sunday I shared “The Day It Happens.” Everybody has a plan for the day “it happens” and mine is getting out on the water at sunrise. No headlines. No news apps buzzing at two in the morning when he post something stupid on his social network.

I also share a few new notes this week you can quickly scroll through using this link. One of my favorites is the following:

One day, you’ll hear cell phones going off.

Then shouting and cheering.

In the distance, car horns will start honking.

A stranger will buy everyone a round at the bar where you’re sitting.

And without a word spoken, you’ll know.

Monday brought “$366 Million Says Elon Musk’s Vote Counts More Than Yours.” One man has spent three hundred sixty-six million dollars to shape this year’s midterms, and I walked through the checkbook, the law that allows it, and the change that ends it. One man’s checkbook should never outweigh millions of American votes. Monday also brought the podcast version with Jim and Jill, “One man has spent three hundred sixty-six million dollars to shape this year’s midterms,” plus the episode version of the diesel story, “Trump Just Fueled Putin’s War Machine: The Diesel Deal That Broke the Law.”

Monday closed with “Masked Men With Guns and No Badges: The Shooting That Should Terrify Every American.” A father pulled into a parking spot with his five year old in the back seat. What happened next is the story every American needs to hear, since a country where armed men carry no badges is a country where nobody can tell the law from the threat.

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Tuesday brought “Her Tenure Will Be Measured in Scaramuccis, and I Doubt She Makes It Past One.” White House press secretary Katie Zacharia claims to be a lawyer, and the reporting says no bar license stands behind the claim. I walked through the law she faces under Business and Professions Code sections 6125 and 6126(a), and I covered Rule of Court 9.46 and the registration path it closes to her. My line stands in the piece: the over-under on her tenure is one Scaramucci, and I am taking the under.

Tuesday also brought Jim and Jill took the midterms apart in “The Midterms Will Change Everything. Here’s What To Expect On January Third.” A small number of seats decides who holds the gavel, who issues the subpoenas, who runs the investigations, and who controls the impeachment math when the new Congress opens on January 3, 2027. The episode walks through exactly what changes with each outcome, so you can watch election night knowing what each number means for your family and your rights.

Wednesday I published “The Judge Required Permission. The Government Brought a Chainsaw.” A federal judge gave the Trump administration one rule for East Potomac Golf Links: get court approval before cutting down more than 10 trees. The government filed its notice minutes before 5 p.m. on a Friday, and by the end of Saturday at least 430 mature trees were on the ground. Judge Ana Reyes told the government it had lost all credibility with her court and warned that a violation by two seconds brings contempt proceedings. A court order is a command, and this administration keeps treating commands as suggestions. She said it on the record, in open court, for every American to hear.

Wednesday also brought “The Price is Zero.” Times are tough, rent is up, and margins are thin, so I put 40 years of courtroom and mediation lessons into one negotiation field guide and gave it to this community for free. One better lease or one better job offer pays you back thousands. The guide costs you nothing.

Thursday morning brought “They Clapped When He Called Them Stupid in Tennessee.” In Clarksville, Tennessee, the President bragged that his stupidest lines still draw applause, and the crowd proved his point on cue before the circus rolled into Bullhead City and did it again. I wrote about the danger hiding inside that applause, since a public trained to believe anything ends up accepting anything, and I closed with the answer: check your registration today and bring friends with you to the polls.

Thursday closed the publication week with “BREAKING: 0 for 26, Trump’s DOJ Files Another Frivolous Suit to Block 20,000 California Voters’ Ballots.” The Justice Department sued California to block the counting of mail ballots from about 20,000 voters the Department of Homeland Security labeled likely noncitizens, based on a list the government refuses to explain. The Department has run this play in court 26 times and lost every decided case, most of them before Republican appointed judges. Nevada checked a similar federal list name by name and found every single person was a citizen. Your ballot belongs to you, and no unexplained list from Washington gets to take it away. Under the Constitution, states run elections, and California runs this one.

Read the pieces you missed, share the one that matters most with somebody in your circle, and bring that same energy with you to the ballot box on November 3, since this democracy holds only as long as the people who love it keep showing up for it.

Mitch Jackson, Esq. | recommendations

You’re support via a free subscription and sharing, or your paid subscription and supporting, means the world to me. Thank you!

The Short Version

The Trump administration wants a court to temporarily block California from counting the mail ballots of voters the federal government claims are noncitizens. Today, it filed its’ related lawsuit.1

To all my fellow Californians, that is your vote on the line.

Here is the part every voter in my state, and across America, need to hold onto before the spin starts: under the United States Constitution, state and local authorities run and supervise our elections. The federal government has no business walking in three weeks before Election Day to decide whose ballot gets counted and whose ballot gets set aside.

The Department of Justice Keeps Losing in Court

The Justice Department has run this play before. It sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., to force them to hand over complete, unredacted voter registration files. Federal judges threw out 26 of those cases. Most of those judges were appointed by Republican presidents, including Donald Trump himself. The only appeals court to rule upheld the dismissal.

Then on October 9, a federal judge in Washington struck down the entire program nationwide, including in the at least 18 states that had cooperated voluntarily. That record speaks loudly. Picture a neighbor who sues 30 homeowners on your street over the same property line. He loses 26 of those cases. He appeals and loses again. Then a judge throws out his claim for every house on the block, including the 18 neighbors who went along with him to keep the peace. His next move is to sue one more house over the same line. That house is California.

About The Alleged Fraud

It does not matter what Trump, MAGA Republicans, Todd Blanche, or anyone else at his Department says about voter fraud. The widespread fraud they keep describing does not exist. It is a made up excuse Trump and his enablers use to try to keep your vote from counting.

Trump invented this excuse after he lost the 2020 election. When he won in 2024, the fraud talk went silent. Not one word. Now his approval ratings sit at an all time low and Republicans face a real chance of losing the House, with the Senate in play too, so Trump has gone right back to the same old trick. Here’s what you need to know.

Audits in Georgia and Utah found that noncitizens make up a tiny fraction of registered voters. In Nevada, the Department of Homeland Security claimed nearly 16,000 noncitizen voters, a number that shrank to 185 once people checked the names by hand in a manual review, and the state’s own records then indicated that every one of those 185 people was a citizen. Right of center groups agree. The Heritage Foundation’s database counts about 1,500 proven fraud cases nationwide, and the libertarian Cato Institute told lawmakers that audits consistently find noncitizen voting far too rare to decide a major race.2

What Happened in Los Angeles

On Thursday, the Trump administration sued California and a Los Angeles County official. It asked a court to block the state from counting mail ballots from about 20,000 voters that DHS labeled “likely noncitizens” until their citizenship gets confirmed. This lawsuit follows 18 months of failed federal lawsuits over state voter rolls. Days earlier, federal officials sent Los Angeles County a thumb drive loaded with the names and gave the county 48 hours to act.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said California refused to set aside the suspect ballots, and he accused the state of helping noncitizens vote. County election officials never opened the drive. Smart move, that. They called it an insecure device that would violate their data privacy protocols, and anyone who has sat through a single workplace cybersecurity training knows you do not plug a mystery thumb drive into a computer system that holds millions of voter records. Secretary of State Shirley Weber wrote that the federal data lacked the detail to support any investigation and that the government never explained why it suspected these voters in the first place.

Sacramento’s Answer

California officials vowed to fight the suit in court. Gov. Gavin Newsom called it a desperate attempt to suppress voters three weeks before Election Day. Attorney General Rob Bonta called it part of a campaign built on voter fraud conspiracy theories.

Election expert David Becker said the case faces serious legal problems and questioned why it landed now, pointing out that every time federal officials have pushed noncitizen voting claims in other states, those claims have turned out badly inflated and full of errors. Nevada gives you a recent example, where state officials reviewed the DHS list of 185 alleged noncitizen voters and concluded that all of them were citizens.

That math matters. The Justice Department has taken this fight to court 26 times and lost every case a judge has decided, and most of those rulings came from judges appointed by Republican presidents. This new suit asks a court to freeze ballots based on a list the government still refuses to explain, three weeks before Election Day.

I’ve spent four decades in courtrooms, and everything I’ve seen tells me this case will meet the same fate as the other 26. Your vote counts, and the evidence stands with you. Send this post to every voter in your circle who needs to hear that today.

Mitch Jackson, Esq. | recommendations

You already know the truth about voter fraud, and now you have the receipts, so subscribe to Uncensored Objection and become a free or paid member today, because you deserve a community that arms you with facts every single week. Between now and the midterms, you are the difference, so stop waiting for someone else to set the record straight, confirm your voter registration right now, and send this post to one person who needs to hear it from you.

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Yesterday I watched a crowd of grown adults pack into another Trump event in Bullhead City. Most were wearing red hats and outfits that looked like they came straight off a clown supply rack, cheering as the man on stage promised, for what feels like the hundredth time, that their healthcare plan is two weeks away. They cheered when he told them we are living in a golden age and when he ordered them to stop complaining about high gas and grocery prices, they clapped for it.

Just a few days earlier in Clarksville, Tennessee, he told supporters he could “say the stupidest things” and still get applause, and the crowd laughed and clapped.

These moments say plenty about where we are as a country. We have normalized being uninformed. We have let conspiracy theories and the flat out ridiculous slide into everyday conversation like the weather report, and most folks shrug and scroll on.

Who They Cheer For

Look hard at the man that crowd stands behind. He ridicules people with lies. He is a documented liar, crypto grifter and convicted felon. A civil jury found him liable for sexual abuse.1

He calls your neighbor, the retired teacher who waves at your kids every morning, a communist and your enemy. Every voter in this country has watched all of it play out on the evening news, in the courtroom, and on their own phone, over and over, for the better part of ten years. Backing him after all of that takes a level of misinformation and gullibility I struggle to understand and explain to anyone.

Sad and embarrassing are the parts I can live with. The danger is what keeps me up at night, because a public willing to believe anything will eventually accept anything, including the slow dismantling of the checks that protect your paycheck, your vote, your healthcare and your family’s future.

November Is the Moment

This midterm gives us a shot at common sense and a shot at saving our democracy. Win back majority control of Congress and you restore the power of oversight, the power of the purse and real separation of powers. The three tools the founders built so no single person ever gets to run this country like a private club where the members pay the dues and the owner keeps the money. That matters to me.

What Ten Years Taught Us

These past ten years taught me more about people than forty years of jury selection ever did. I’m guessing you feel the same way.

Pressure reveals character, and ten years of it showed us exactly who people are once the truth turns inconvenient.

The part that stings most comes from the friends and neighbors who sit at our Thanksgiving tables and wave from their driveways every morning, living their lives with no idea their rights are slipping away a little more each week. Worse still are the ones who see every bit of it and look the other way anyway, for their own misguided and self-serving reasons. A democracy dies quietest in the homes where nobody bothers to look or cares.

Check your registration today, bring two friends to the polls with you, and vote like your rights depend on it, because they do.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Paying attention is the price of keeping power honest, and Uncensored Objection exists to make sure you never stop. Subscribe today and upgrade to paid so this community keeps showing up with the facts, the verdicts and the receipts every single week until November and well beyond.

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Five months ago, a federal judge in Washington gave the Trump administration one simple rule for East Potomac Golf Links, the historic public course Trump wants to rebuild into a championship layout. Get court approval before cutting down more than 10 trees.

Then came Friday. Minutes before 5 p.m., government officials notified the court that they planned to remove “up to 529 trees” in phases starting Saturday, and by the end of that Saturday at least 430 mature trees were lying on the ground of a public park that belongs to you and every other taxpayer in this country.

The Spirit of an Order Matters

You don’t ask a judge for permission at 4:55 on a Friday and start the saws Saturday unless you never wanted an answer.

I’ve stood in front of judges for 40 years, and every new lawyer learns this rule fast. A court order means what the judge intended it to mean. The whole point of the rule was to give Judge Ana Reyes time to look at the plan and decide before anything happened. A last minute filing dropped late on a Friday gives a judge zero time to do any of that. The trees came down before anyone in the courthouse had a fair shot at reading the paperwork. That move honors the letter of nothing and the spirit of less. Lawyers have a name for it. We call it gamesmanship, and judges see through it every time.

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