It’s been a big 24 hours for Donald Trump. Yesterday, he sued the Treasury Department and IRS for $10 billion over an employee’s leak of his tax returns. Then, late last night, the Justice Department, clearly fulfilling Trump’s wishes, arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon on charges that he violated federal law when he live streamed a protest at a church in St. Paul. Then, this morning, the president announced his nominee for chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, in what’s seen as the next step in his efforts to influence the ostensibly independent body.

So, there you have it. Our institutions are crumbling. Our First Amendment rights are going wobbly. We’ve brought charges against a journalist covering the protests in Minneapolis while we still don’t know the names of the officers who killed Alex Pretti. And the president is sucking up all the taxpayer money he can. Happy Friday.

It’s the Elections, Stupid

by William Kristol

As I write this morning, there are two processes whose outcomes are unknown: We don’t know how the Senate funding deal is going to play out in the coming weeks, and we don’t know how Donald Trump’s efforts to manipulate and corrupt the 2026 elections are going to play out in the coming months. The two may seem distinct, but they are in fact closely related.

On Wednesday, Kash Patel’s FBI seized 2020 voting records from the elections and operations hub in Fulton County, Georgia. This operation was allegedly justified by a law requiring election records to be retained for a certain amount of time. But Fulton County was already retaining those records under a state court–ordered seal. A hearing in less than two weeks’ time was scheduled in state court to arrange for the transfer of records to parties in a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election. So the preservation-of-records rationale for the FBI operation was entirely pretextual.

The other statute cited by Patel’s FBI to justify the operation is a prohibition on intimidating voters or producing false votes or false voter registrations. These statutes have criminal penalties.

The purpose of the FBI’s action in Georgia was to