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Trump spent hours consulting an AI chatbot before ordering the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Senator Thom Tillis told off Trump in an explosive leaked text message chain. ICE agreements with local police departments have increased by 950% since Trump took office. And Susan Collins is still taking dark money from a defense contractor at the center of an FBI bribery probe.
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Trump Used an AI Chatbot to Decide Whether to Invade Venezuela
Siri, invade Venezuela.
An insider in the Trump administration told TIME magazine the president spent hours in an Oval Office meeting with Elon Musk last December, asking Musk’s Grok chatbot questions about his presidency and his legacy. When Trump asked the chatbot how Venezuelans might respond to the capture of President Nicolas Maduro, it predicted many would welcome the removal.
Trump then ordered Maduro’s capture in January. The experience reportedly left him thinking Grok was an ingenious tool, which contributed to his decision to wage a war with Iran.
Most recently, Trump signed an executive order renaming artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.” He announced the rebrand at his U.N. General Assembly speech last week, where he told the audience his name sounds “much better” and is “much more accurate.”
Trump also released the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” Tuesday, personally drafted by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and signed by executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and others. Neither the order nor the accord contain any new regulations or enforcement provisions for AI.
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GOP Senator Ripped Into Trump in Explosive Text Messages
Retiring senators discover their spines the way most retirees discover pickleball.
Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina sent Trump two private text messages this summer that were obtained by Politico and published on Friday. The messages followed Trump attacking Tillis on Truth Social, calling him weak and ineffective and accusing him of spending his remaining months in office working against the Republican Party.
Tillis wrote in a May 22 message: “I still want to help but I don’t take this bullsh*t from anyone, including you Mr. President. Save that sh*t for the cowards who don’t care if you fail. I care if you fail and right now we are failing.”
Trump later posted that Tillis dropped his reelection bid after he learned Trump would not endorse him. In a text back on June 6, Tillis said Trump never explicitly threatened to primary him, and the president was confusing him with the many other Republicans he’s threatened.
“As I have said before, you NEVER threatened me with a primary challenge,” Tillis wrote. “I get that you may have me confused with so many Republicans that you have threatened in the past, but NEVER me. If you had ever threatened me directly with a primary, I would have immediately told you to f*ck yourself, and I would have announced my retirement immediately. Save those threats and head games for cowards and fools.”
Since then, Tillis has split with the White House on a number of issues, including opposing Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh and condemning the Justice Department’s $1.776 billion slush fund. Never before announcing his retirement though.
ICE Agreements With Local Police Departments Have Surged 950%
If a lottery investigator asks for your papers, you are legally allowed to be confused.
Immigration and Customs Agreements New analysis of ICE data shows involvement with local law enforcement agencies has increased by 950% during Trump’s second term. The administration has revived a 1996 law, known as 287(g), which allows local police officers to be deputized by ICE to arrest people they suspect of being undocumented.
Under Biden, about 150 agencies took part. That figure has increased to nearly 1,100 under Trump.
The program has drawn almost 16,000 local officers from 40 states, including police, county sheriffs, state troopers, university law enforcement and even lottery investigators. The administration has said it is seeking at least 3,000 arrests per day.
In August alone, ICE arrested about 50,000 people, an average of almost 1,600 a day. More than 800 non-criminals were arrested each day on average during that period.
Susan Collins Is Still Taking Dark Money at Center of FBI Probe
He is serving time for the donations she is still spending.
Sen. Susan Collins is still getting dark money from sources tied to a defense contractor whose CEO went to prison for illegally funneling campaign contributions to her through a shell company. A ProPublica investigation revealed that the FBI opened a bribery probe into Collins in 2024, but the teams assigned to the case were gutted after Trump returned to office.
The contractor’s CEO, who pleaded guilty to money laundering in 2022, funneled more than $150,000 to a super PAC supporting Collins through a shell company created to hide the transactions. He worked with the FBI for years, describing his dealings with Collins and other lawmakers.
Collins is the only Republican up for re-election in a state that voted for Kamala Harris over Trump in 2024, and her Democratic challenger Troy Jackson has made the FBI probe a central point of his campaign. Collins called the contractor’s CEO “a liar” and dismissed the reporting as the work of Democratic operatives.
Jackson’s campaign said in a statement that he “is refusing corporate PAC money in his campaign for U.S. Senate, unlike Susan Collins who has taken millions from corporate PACs and was eyed by the FBI for steering millions in taxpayer dollars to her major donor until President Trump dismantled the team investigating it.”
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Republican Super PAC Abandons North Carolina Senate Race, Shifts Funds to Kansas. The Senate Leadership Fund, the top super PAC supporting Senate Republicans, said Friday it is canceling all remaining ad reservations in North Carolina, pulling tens of millions of dollars out of the state. The group originally planned to spend $71 million in the state, and has already spent more than $30 million, with $18 million still set aside for the final month on broadcast and cable alone. Senator Thom Tillis is giving up North Carolina’s seat, and Democrats recruited Roy Cooper, a popular former two-term governor, to challenge Republican Michael Whatley, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Federal Judge Rules Law Criminalizing Noncitizen Voting Is Unconstitutional. A federal judge has ruled the 1996 ‘Voting by Aliens’ statute that makes it a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in elections is unconstitutional. The defendants in the case argued that states, not the federal government, have the right under the Constitution to determine voter qualifications. Noncitizen voting is also extremely rare, with only 129 people charged in the law’s 30-year history. Under previous administrations, most defendants took plea deals and were fined around $150, but Trump’s Justice Department has aggressively pursued the cases as part of its larger campaign against voter integrity.
Appeals Court Rules That Training AI on Copyrighted Editorial Work Is Not Fair Use. A federal appeals court has found that an AI company violated copyright law by using a legal publisher’s editorial work to train a competing product. Ross Intelligence, the company, used the summaries written by Westlaw editors to construct an AI-powered legal research tool that did the same thing as Westlaw itself. Ross argued that using the material for training, rather than republishing it, should qualify as fair use, but the court disagreed, finding that the end goal was still a competing commercial product. The ruling does not establish a blanket rule for all AI training, but it does put publishers in a stronger position to fight back.
New York Releases 10-Year Plan to Protect the State’s Most Vulnerable Wildlife. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has released a draft of its updated State Wildlife Action Plan, a 10-year strategy to protect species and habitats before populations decline beyond the point of recovery. The plan, which stretches from 2025 to 2035, includes species like the fox squirrel, which was once common throughout the state but has been displaced by habitat loss and competition from gray squirrels. Conservation groups have urged the DEC to list wolves, cougars, and Canada lynx as protected species, arguing the Adirondack Park could sustain viable populations of all three.