Justin here. Chloe has a good breakdown of the latest on the Iranian conflict today. Bottom line: Trump is trying to post and/or brand his way out of a mess that he caused. Plus, he and Republicans continue to push false election fraud claims to sow doubt in the November midterms. On another note, my book is out and you can order it here, wherever books are sold, or by asking your local bookstore to order a copy. I hope you’ll read it. As always, the best way to support the fact-based, adversarial journalism we perform here at Doom is through a paid subscription or by throwing a few dollars into our Coffee Fund. Now, on to the news… -jg

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The fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran has been upended with a series of attacks between the two countries and their proxies in the region. None of these developments should be surprising to those who have been paying attention to the general absence of U.S. leadership under President Donald Trump.

Trump is now firmly a lame duck president with historically low approval ratings, and Iran and Israel both know this, as well as the fact that Trump can’t be counted on to put together a coherent thought.

Israel and Iran say they’ve now halted strikes after waves of firefights between the two nations. Israeli warplanes struck the southern suburbs of Beirut in retaliation to alleged Iranian attacks, according to NBC.

Amidst this fighting, two U.S. Army aviators had to be rescued by a Navy sea drone near the strait of Hormuz after their helicopter was struck down by Iranian forces. President Trump took to Truth Social on Tuesday, saying that “the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack.”

As of Wednesday night (Thursday morning Tehran time), the U.S. has resumed airstrikes in Iran. A peace deal, for now, appears all but dead.

The situation is just the latest escalation in the constant, will-they-won’t-they of Trump’s largely failed attempts at a peace agreement. With previous ceasefires and discussions of mutual cooperation falling through repeatedly, Iran and Israel are doing whatever they deem to be justified in the absence competent U.S. leadership. Because the Trump administration is effectively an authoritarian government, nothing as big as a peace deal with Iran can get done without Trump’s approval — and he simply doesn’t care anymore.

As the war eclipses the 100-day mark, it appears no closer to ending — with both sides seemingly unwilling to back down.

Public Notice

Trump's cognitive impairment endangers us all

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6 days ago · 914 likes · 47 comments · Justin Glawe

The Times of Israel reported that just four days before the Iranian missile strikes on Sunday, Trump admitted to calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “fucking crazy.” On Sunday, June 7, Iran launched multiple waves of ballistic missile strikes that were intercepted by Israeli defenses. Israel returned fire, and Iran subsequently launched a sixth wave of strikes.

In other actions taken against Israel, Houthis in Yemen announced missile strikes on the country and declared a ban on Israeli shipments coming through the Red Sea.

Prior to this, talks of mutual ceasefire between Hezbollah, Iran’s terror-proxy, and the U.S. were beginning to take place. On June 1, Lebanon confirmed that Hezbollah had agreed to the U.S. proposal for a mutual ceasefire with Israel, according to Daily Beirut.

While Trump has been golfing, posting on social media, falling asleep in the Oval Office and attending the NBA Finals, the situation in the region deteriorated rapidly. After alleged Hezbollah attacks that led to Israeli intervention in Beirut, the Iranian Foreign Ministry defended the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ right to defend itself after citing multiple Israeli ceasefire violations.

Israel has also continued to act against Hezbollah outside Iran, complicating the existing ceasefires. Israel continued to carry out daily strikes in southern Lebanon over alleged Hezbollah attacks in northern Israel, despite those attacks being halted by negotiations in Washington.

Iran warned that attacks on the Lebanese capital would trigger a broader response across the Middle East once more.

In response to the devolving situation, Trump has continued his efforts to post his way to peace, making breathless demands on Truth Social. From almost the first day of the conflict, Trump has repeatedly claimed that a peace deal is just around the corner.

Trump repeated the claim again in recent days, saying that the U.S. and Iran are “very close to making a deal” in an interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. Trump has repeatedly teased such deals that have yet to happen — a throwback to his deal-making background as a businessman. But unlike an ice-skating rink in Central Park, Trump’s branding bravado isn’t working with Iran.

In the interview, Trump expressed his disdain for “endless wars” — a campaign promise that Welker pointed out he has now threatened with his “excursion” into Iran — and repeatedly boasted of a forthcoming peace deal. Trump also suggested the U.S. would “work with Iran to retrieve and destroy its highly enriched uranium” if they are unable to reach a deal. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

“If we make a deal that now we’re friendly, we’ll all go together. It’ll be our equipment. We’ll take it out and destroy it, whether it’s on-site or whether we take it off-site,” Trump told Welker.

“And we will go with them, or without them. But we won’t have people shooting at us, OK?” Trump went on. “Now, if we don’t make a deal, then we’re going to take them out militarily very harshly. And we’ll wait till we do that before we go, in which case we’ll have safety either way.”

Trump also said, bluntly and strangely, that Iran and Israel have “both had their fun” but that he does not want this to “blow up” a final deal with Iran — ignoring the U.S. role in the conflict.

All of this is why it’s so dangerous to continue to allow Trump to serve as president. He started a war that he’s realizing he can’t end simply by posting, risking regional catastrophe.

In the same interview, Trump walked out on Welker after making various false claims about his “landslide election victory” in 2020, the unfairness of the press, and rigged elections, calling Welker, NBC, CBS and CNN “crooked.”

Notably, Trump’s blowup came after Welker pressed him on false claims of election fraud in 2020, which came as Trump made similarly unfounded claims of elections in California.

The wait for results of elections in California that will decide the next mayor of Los Angeles have created a vacuum into which Trump and Republicans have firmly stepped, claiming that the normal vote-counting procedures in the state are evidence of fraud. These claims are part of broader efforts to sow doubt in November’s midterms.

Meantime, the bombs are again falling in a war that few asked for.

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For as long as the internet has been around, there have been people willing to say terrible things online. It used to be that many who expressed racist beliefs and other markers of societal regression did so anonymously, and that’s certainly still the case. But take a scroll through the Facebook feed of just about anything these days — including, most certainly, your local TV news station — and you’ll see members of your own community openly espousing racism and hate.

Many of our friends, neighbors and co-workers no longer feel pressured to keep these beliefs under wraps. They are open with it, and clearly feel there are no consequences. Increasingly, they’re right.

As I’ve gone about talking to people about my book, which has now been published, people have asked me variations of a question: what’s different about America now compared to when I began my career as a newspaper reporter more than a decade ago? If I had to pick a single word to describe a driving factor of the widespread decline the book covers, it would be shamelessness.

Many of our friends, neighbors and co-workers have been emboldened over the last two decades to openly espouse beliefs that many of us grew up believing were in the past. They do not feel shame in displaying their ignorance and racism. I don’t know about you, but I grew up in an era where things like the Civil Rights movement were generally viewed as good things. The people who believed otherwise, I was led to believe, were on the margins of our society. I don’t know if I can say that anymore.

Savannah Mayor Van Johnson does an admirable job combatting the hate and racism that fills the comment sections of his Facebook posts on any given day. Like a lot of us, he might be better off ignoring those comments more often, but I understand why he feels the need to confront them head-on.

His feed — plus that of hundreds of local news outlets across the country — is inundated every single day with people saying things that should result in getting them ousted from polite society. But they’re not doing so anonymously — they’re doing it under their own names, often proudly linking themselves and their racist comments back to their employers.

Maybe some of these folks get a talking-to by their boss at the local car dealership where they work. Maybe some of them even get fired for saying obviously racist shit on the Facebook page of their town’s mayor, where their profile lists them as being employed at businesses whose bottom lines rely on, you know, not being openly racist. But many more of them face no consequences. And why should they? Over the last 10 years, we’ve watched as some of the most powerful and influential people in American life have expressed racist beliefs on a daily basis.

In this type of society, why should anyone be fearful that such comments will have consequences in their own lives? Many of the things that many of us were led to believe would result in dire consequences no longer apparently do so, especially for those at the top, like Donald Trump. Wanton corruption, open racism, abject ignorance — all of these things have led to more success and power for Trump and his vast network of Americans who support these degrading behaviors or are profiting from them.

How do you turn around a society where such behavior is rewarded? That’s the underlying question that will be answered by November’s elections.

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With all of the major news related to the Trump administration, we cover a variety of topics here at American Doom to keep readers like you up to date on the various updates and changes that come each day, big or small. To support our work, you can subscribe for $6 a month or throw a few dollars in our Coffee Fund.

To celebrate the 250th birthday of the U.S., Flag Day, and Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, UFC is hosting a fight on the South Lawn of the White House on June 14th. As of May 25, construction has begun at the White House for UFC Freedom 250. The event will have seating for 5,000 and 85,000 tickets free to the public for viewing.

The event is happening at a time when Trump is at his most unpopular, his disapproval rating is up to 59%, according to the New York Times latest averages of different polls.

The president and CEO of UFC, Dana White, has said in an interview with Rolling Stone “I bet he probably wishes this wasn’t happening, but it is happening.” White, a longtime friend of Trump, said that “there’s always bad things going on” like the war in Iran, and things have to keep going when running a global business, or in Trump’s case, a country. Joe Rogan, another longtime supporter of Trump doesn’t approve of the event amidst the rising tensions in the Middle East.

This project is just one of the many controversial ones that Trump has attempted to complete over the course of his second term. One of the first and most notorious projects is the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to build a 90,000 sq. ft. ballroom that would be able to host around 1,000 guests. Along with many technical critiques, including the unsymmetrical design and staircases that led to nowhere, the design is so large it undermines the fact that the White House was intentionally built to be “restrained in size and expression.” Architect Jorge Salgado disapproves of the large design beside the original buildings, which are 35,000 sq. ft. smaller than the ballroom.

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Although the East Wing has already been demolished, there have been several hindrances in the process of actually building. On March 31, it was reported by NPR that a U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled that construction on the ballroom must be halted until congress approves it to be completed. Congress is still keeping any building from happening, but Trump is protesting this in light of the most recent assassination attempt on himself

Trump is also currently working on another project, painting the reflection pool in Washington D.C. “American flag blue.” The project was first projected to cost $2 million or $3 million, but now Trump claims there is more work to do on the exterior and his new estimate is $20 million.

There is also a nonprofit organization in D.C. who has sued the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum over their support in the decision to paint the bottom of the pool blue. The Cultural Landscape Foundation filed the lawsuit and asked for the project to be stopped and reviewed federally. However, Trump’s goal is to have the project done by July 4, 2026.

This lawsuit to lawsuit and others made in protest to these projects brings up the questionable morality and motivations for these projects. When the White House was built, it was deliberately modest, the founding fathers wanted to leave behind the grand palaces the monarchs built before them. They wanted the White House to symbolize democracy. So, the question is — do these new renovations reflect those values? Sarah Boardman, an interior designer, said to the Huff Post that “everything about the materials, scale and design are all about his ego, not the people.” While it is good to have spaces to gather, many spaces like this already exist within the White House and many people believe they don’t need to be changed, but simply just upkept.

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You’ll read lots of pieces today about last night’s election results but this is the only publication where you’ll learn about the following. To support our work, you can subscribe for $6 a month or throw a few dollars in our Coffee Fund.

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Georgia’s election denial network of public officials, unhinged online personalities and average citizens spent yesterday ricocheting between joy and despair — and it had nothing to do with the results that began to roll in last night.

Led by Trump allies on the State Election Board (SEB) and a handful of far-right state lawmakers and political candidates, election denial forces here have spent weeks fear mongering and successfully placing clips in right-wing media over the Secretary of State’s election night operation center that the election deniers have deemed a “secret bunker.”

In fact, the “Election Night Reporting Center,” as the Secretary of State’s Office calls it, is not, and never has been, a secret. Nor are any votes actually counted there, as SEB members and a pair of Republican candidates who filed a lawsuit to gain access to the “bunker” have alluded. Votes are counted at county offices of elections, which then send those totals to the Secretary of State. There, the totals are put online for the public to see.

But Georgia’s election denial wing of the Republican party does not trust Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as part of their demands that all elections be administered and all votes be counted by those who pass a litmus test that includes abject support for Donald Trump and a fervent belief in lies and conspiracies about widespread election fraud. That wing includes the MAGA majority on the SEB and figures like Greg Dolezal, a state senator, and Christopher Mora, a candidate for one of Georgia’s U.S. House seats.

Dolezal and Mora filed a lawsuit this week demanding that the SEB and Republican poll watchers be granted access to the reporting center at the Secretary of State’s Office. On Tuesday, a judge briefly ordered that that access should be granted before rescinding the order on a technicality, thus prompting the back-and-forth emotions on display by Georgia’s vast network of election denial officials and activists.

While much of the coverage of these developments has covered the lawsuit, opposing judicial orders and the reporting center under the both sides framework, key context has been absent: the SEB (and its MAGA “pitbulls,” as Trump has called them), Dolezal and Mora have had months — years, really — to make their claim that poll watchers and other observers should be legally allowed to oversee election night proceedings at the Secretary of State’s reporting center. The simple and obvious reason that they did not file their lawsuit until this week is that it would not have benefitted them from a political and media-savvy standpoint to do so.

By filing the lawsuit this week, Georgia’s election deniers took advantage of public interest in Tuesday’s primaries to gin up further distrust in elections. Raffensperger has a secret bunker where he could manipulate votes! He’s running in the very election that his office is charged with overseeing! He won’t let us into the bunker to ensure he isn’t stealing the election for himself and other people who are bad!

In the last 48 hours, these have been the stupefyingly insincere arguments that Dolezal, Mora, the SEB and others have made. Maybe many of them actually believe their own nonsense, but just as many understand that the best way to secure elections for MAGA candidates is to sow as much doubt as possible in all elections. By doing so, election deniers think they can convince the public that they, and only they, should be allowed to administer elections, make rules about voting and polling locations, and effectively control all levers of government in order to ensure that real Americans are in charge.

You see this mindset reflected in statements from Trump administration officials and Republican members of Congress every single day when they say things like how they want to pass the SAVE Act to ensure that “the right people” are voting. It’s part of a playbook that includes the aggressive redistricting of the South to dilute Black — and in turn mostly Democratic — voting power. From this week’s nonsense over the “secret bunker,” to efforts across the country to purge voters based on false and misleading claims about undocumented immigrants voting in elections — every policy and talking point about voting and elections pushed by the vast majority of Republicans is aimed at a singular goal: using the levers of power to ensure that they maintain their grip on it, regardless of what American voters say at the ballot box.

Other election night takeaways:

Massie vs. whoever

Rep. Thomas Massie lost to a man whose name most voters probably did not even know until they arrived at their polling locations in Kentucky yesterday. That’s because the majority of those voters were simply doing what Trump told them to do — get Massie out of office by voting for the other guy. Why was Trump so adamant that Massie had to go? Because Massie had the gall to be one of the only elected Republicans in the country to ask serious questions about the president’s ties to Jeffery Epstein. Just a few years ago, nailing politicians and powerful figures with Epstein ties was a huge deal for Republican voters! But what they actually meant was that they wanted to imprison people like Bill Clinton, not Donald Trump. It’s sort of like all the MAGA folks you see with the Gadsden flag. They don’t really mean Don’t tread on me; what they really mean is Tread on them. But don’t believe the hype Massie’s loss — it was a primary in a very Trumpy state. Considering Trump’s dismal approval ratings, this is like winning a preseason football game.

Jones (Trump) vs. Jackson (cash)

Lt. Gov. Burt Jones will head to a runoff with billionaire Rick Jackson to become the state’s next governor. If you’re not in Georgia, this race may not seem important but here’s why it matters: Jones has been instrumental in not just spreading Trump’s lies about election fraud but propagating rules and systems that have allowed the MAGA wing of his party more control over elections here. Considering Georgia’s role as something close to a swing state, Jones becoming governor stands to have an important effect on how elections and voting are run here — and how those rules will help and hurt Republicans and Democrats.

Jones was responsible for appointing Salleigh Grubbs to the SEB, where she has quickly become the most forceful and unhinged voice of Georgia’s election denial movement who has any position of power (albeit very little). You might remember Grubbs as the woman who chased a garbage truck in 2020 because she thought it contained shredded ballots. As this week’s madness over the “secret bunker” played out, Grubbs was out front on the issue, appearing on Mike Lindell’s “news” channel.

Jones is also one of Trump’s fake electors who was never fully punished for, you know, fraudulently trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Rick Jackson is just another loaded guy who thinks his billions entitles him to run things. Not great choices! One of the two will face former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in the general.

Who will lose to Jon Ossoff?

A pair of MAGA backbenchers — Rep. Mike Collins and Derek Dooley — are headed to a runoff for the honor of probably losing to Sen. Jon Ossoff. Collins is most famous for his work on the Laken Riley Act, a classically regressive piece of legislation built, more than anything, to give him an “I hate immigrants more than most” talking point on the campaign trail. Dooley was once the head football coach for the University of Tennessee, so is therefore obviously qualified to join the United States Senate.

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In just the last few days, Republican threats to democracy have exploded.

Using legal, quasi-legal and legislative means, Republicans from Washington D.C. on down to state legislatures have enacted widespread measures to secure what they hope will be a permanent majority of American power, voters be damned. That’s because the goal of the election denial movement — which forms a major part of the Republican base of voters — has never been to “secure elections.” It’s always been about ensuring that only Republicans can win elections, as I explained on the Signal Fire podcast today. You can watch our conversation here.

With Republicans asking the Supreme Court to purge voters very close to the November midterms under the guise that scores of undocumented immigrants populate voter rolls (they do not), this plan to not just sow distrust in an election Republicans are set to lose, but to ensure that the rules prohibit anyone else from winning it, has become more clear. Not satisfied with these efforts — and helpfully backed by a Supreme Court decision two weeks ago — Republicans throughout the South have begun to legislate Black lawmakers out of their elected positions.

Quite literally, Republicans are using the tools of democracy to undo it. Already, several elections have been outright cancelled as Republicans draw new maps that will solidify their political power. Again, not satisfied with this historic power grab, Republicans in Tennessee have gone a step further, stripping Black lawmakers of legislative roles that allow them a say in how their state is run.

Helping Republican politicians along are their foot soldiers in the election denial movement, who continue to file voter roll challenges and harass election offices with lawsuits, demands for public records based on their conspiracies about election fraud and, in the case of someone here in the South this week, threaten election officials who refuse to tow President Donald Trump’s line on non-existent widespread election fraud.

Someone mailed a four-page manifesto threatening Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to a sheriff’s office in Mississippi, bizarrely. The letter preceded a bomb scare at a campaign event in Georgia on Monday, where Raffensperger was speaking to voters about his bid to become the state’s next governor. Raffensperger famously refused to help Trump overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, and as a result has been the target of constant harassment from his fellow Republicans.

Meanwhile, Trump is again floating the idea of sending the military to voting locations in November, just as he did in 2020 when he considered having the National Guard seize voting machines. (In December, Trump said he regretted not doing that.) Trump saying something random to a reporter is one thing, but there’s more than that: multiple federal agencies are involved with efforts to “secure” the midterms.

You might remember the inexplicable presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI raid of a Fulton County elections warehouse in January. Recent reporting makes clear that her presence there was part of an administration-wide effort to stay on top of false election fraud claims in order to exploit them for maximum benefit in November.

Department of Homeland Security officials have been reaching out to state- and county-level election officials throughout the country. The DHS officials have demanded, among other things, voter history and registration information from these officials, Reuters reported.

Keep in mind that counties are the frontlines of U.S. elections. It’s there that results are initially certified before being approved by state officials, which is why, as I reported on significantly back in 2024, Republicans tried to use their power at the county level to refuse to certify election results that showed Democrats winning.

To my knowledge, no state has reformed its certification rules in the wake of those attempts, and there is no indication that efforts by election denial officials in counties across the country aren’t just as robust as they were two years ago.

Meanwhile, those same county and state officials have fewer resources from the federal government to help them manage election threats and chaos this time around. That’s because the Trump administration has gutted agencies that provide help to state and local officials battling online threats, hacking attempts and other scenarios that states and counties might not have the tools to fight.

“Nearly every program and capability to stop bad actors and support election administrators has been dismantled,” a former Biden administration official at the National Security Council who worked on threats to elections told ProPublica last month.

Whatever agencies and programs haven’t been purposefully destroyed by the Trump administration have had their missions completely perverted with the hiring of election conspiracy theorists to lead them. Already, this has (partly) resulted in things like the seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico and, of course, the FBI elections raid here in Georgia.

Seven months out from the midterms, the threats to Americans’ ability to actually elect who they prefer continues to rise. You hear a lot of hyperbole these days — and around the time of any election, really — but I don’t think it’s too alarmist to say that if Republicans succeed in their efforts to effectively gerrymander and rule-make their way into legislative majorities both in the states and the U.S. Congress, that’s power they’re never going to give up.

Trump has said as much, urging states to gerrymander their way into power and chastising them when they don’t. He’s doing this because he’s terrified of being impeached when Democrats take the House and, possibly, the Senate after November. Even in his current state of severe cognitive decline, even Trump knows that Republican chances in the midterms are bad. He’s certainly not helping by driving up costs with a clueless war in Iran, spending tons of money we don’t have on vanity construction projects and a missile defense system we don’t need, and just generally not giving a shit what everyday Americans are going through as daily life becomes more and more expensive.

There have always been two paths to power. The democratic one has always been more difficult. The authoritarian one is easier, if sometimes bloodier.

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You might have seen that American Doom beat the Justice Department in federal court last week. Trump’s DOJ will now have to officially reveal the names of some of the witnesses in an affidavit that led to an FBI raid on an Atlanta elections office. Doom was the only publication in the country to motion the court to release the names. To support our work, please choose a paid subscription or drop a few dollars into our Coffee Fund.

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I do not think this summer will be as hot as the last one, but what do I know? I’ve been wrong before. For whatever reason, it seems that many Americans have come to accept the daily drumbeat of chaos and corruption that emanates from Washington, as well as the more recent authoritarian machinations being heaped upon us by Trumpian legislatures throughout the country. Well, maybe accept isn’t the right word. Maybe people are just exhausted.

And when I say us, I guess not all of us. Because lots of people are very happy about the abject power grab that has occurred in recent days following the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Republican-led states to effectively rig the map so that only Republicans can win.

Last summer saw fairly widespread protests over the Trump administration’s mass deportation regime as masked agents stormed American streets. The song of the summer this year seems to be a slightly less obvious one of rising authoritarianism: the quiet, plodding work of Republicans who are using the tools of democracy to undo it. There are many ways to create an authoritarian state. One of those ways includes the masked police that sparked outrage and protests last year. Another involves what we’re seeing now: duly-elected officials ensuring that no one else can come to power by using the very levers of government and elections that are supposed to ensure equal representation under the law.

Simultaneously, Republicans are working to, once again, convince millions of Americans that any election that doesn’t result in a Republican victory is fraudulent. (This is the thesis statement of the election denial movement, whether they explicitly state it or not.) All of this — the war in Iran, Trump administration corruption coupled with a complete disregard for the economic concerns of Americans, attacks on voting rights, sowing distrust in elections — feels like the inevitable, if not openly-violent, end state of decades-long period of turmoil that I’ve reported on in one form or another my entire career.

Today at Luke O’Neil’s Hell World, you can read about some of that chaos in an excerpt from my forthcoming book, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened – The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. The book will be published in June by the University of Georgia Press and you can pre-order it here. (Use the code 08TERRIBLE to receive 30 percent off.)

Some folks have been asking me why I wrote this book, which also deals with my descent into and recovery from alcoholism, and the short answer is: I had to. Not only did I have to get all this shit off my chest, but I felt I had to put these events down so that other people who were watching the chaos and violence of American life — and who were wondering if it all was really as bad as it can sometimes seem — were not alone. First, you are not alone. Secondly, it certainly all has been very bad. Third, it’s going to get better. The pendulum never stops at the top, as my dad would say.

All of this pressure and pain will go away if Americans stick to the principles of light, love, justice and progress. It can be hard in dark days to remember that those principles can win, but by remembering that they can defeat darkness we get closer to willing the darkness away.

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A federal judge in Georgia has sided with American Doom and ordered the Justice Department to officially reveal the identities of three witnesses whose allegations led to the FBI raid of a Fulton County elections warehouse in January.

I say “officially,” because the identities of the witnesses were more or less known immediately thanks to information provided in the affidavit about their positions as public officials — two are appointed members of the State Election Board (SEB) and the third is an elected member of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners.

But the officials — Dr. Janice Johnston and Janelle King of the SEB and Fulton County Commissioner Bridget Thorne — objected to American Doom’s motions to have their names un-redacted from the affidavit. Johnston, King and Thorne did not respond to a request for comment.

What’s never been clear is why the three officials objected to the public release of their names. All three are clearly identified in the affidavit by their positions on the SEB and Fulton County commission, and all three are outspoken election skeptics who, for years, have amplified falsehoods and questionable claims about widespread voter fraud.

For her part, Johnston was so enamored with the FBI raid in January that she made an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast from her SUV in the parking lot where, nearby, FBI agents were still pulling materials from the elections warehouse. Since at least late last year, King has publicly bragged about her solicitation of help from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to investigate specious claims of election fraud in Fulton County during the 2020 election, as I reported for the Guardian in November. Thorne has openly discussed her inclusion in the affidavit with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee ordered the Justice Department to provide an un-redacted version of the FBI affidavit that led to the January raid. That document will now officially name Johnston, King and Thorne as witnesses.

Boulee explained his order:

“In balancing the right of access versus Respondent’s interest in keeping the names of the witnesses confidential, the Court notes that many of the above factors weigh in favor of the right of access. For instance, it does not appear that Glawe is seeking the records for an illegitimate purpose or to promote public scandal. Moreover, it is undeniable that the 2020 election and the seizure of the election records are historically significant matters and that granting full access to the affidavits is likely to promote public understanding of these events,” Boulee wrote in his order. “The Court also cannot ignore that the redacted information concerns both public officials and a matter of public concern. Indeed, each of the witnesses currently holds a public office related to elections in Georgia and the underlying search at issue in this case involves a Georgia election.”

The Justice Department had argued that the identifies of Johnston, King and Thorne must remain under seal due to “concerns over privacy, retaliation, and/or harassment associated with official confirmation of their providing evidence in a criminal investigation.” Boulee noted that the identities of the three are already widely known, and that “maintaining the seal in this case does little to protect the privacy of these witnesses.”

Keep in mind that the information provided by Johnston, King and Thorne was already widely known as well. Their claims of “election fraud” are based on technical errors that occurred during the 2020 election — errors that have been the subject of much scrutiny and hand-wringing by the election denial movement in the ensuing six years.

The case against Fulton County is largely viewed as specious by election experts, former judges and reputable lawyers, but that hasn’t stopped the Justice Department from pursuing criminal charges against the county for the technical errors that occurred in 2020 — and had no effect on the outcome of the election. Trump lost; Biden won. It’s as simple as that. But with the Justice Department acting as Trump’s personal law firm, election denialists within the agency have been aggressively pursuing debunked claims of widespread election fraud for two reasons: to curry favor with Trump, who simply cannot accept that he lost the 2020 election, and to lay the groundwork for forthcoming claims that the November mid-terms were beset with widespread fraud.

Trump and Republicans need to create this narrative going into November because they’re likely to lose in significant fashion. The FBI raid in Atlanta, the subpoenaing of election records in Arizona and the personal information of election workers in Fulton County, the seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico, and a recent demand that the Supreme Court allow Republicans to purge voters in Arizona under dubious claims that many undocumented immigrants are registered to vote — all of it is part of the narrative-building that Republicans and the Trump administration are performing in order to claim that an election they are set to lose was somehow stolen from them.

Millions of Americans are being primed to believe this, and they’re being led by people like Johnston, King and Thorne, who now must officially take credit for their role in the affidavit — and their positions as leaders of a movement in Georgia aimed at convincing voters of fraud that simply doesn’t exist.

***

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Had a brief flashback last night to 2017, when I woke up to the news of the Vegas massacre, then hopped on a plane to go there and find the unsung hero. At the time, that event seemed unthinkable. What happened the other night in D.C…. well, I don’t know about you but I sort of knew before I knew, if that makes sense. Here are some thoughts on that as well as an excerpt from my forthcoming book that deals with the Vegas massacre.

The book — If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened — just received a starred review at Publishers Weekly, which I’m told is a big deal. You can pre-order it here. Use the discount code “08TERRIBLE,” (that’s a ZERO at the front) to get 30 percent off. If you choose to become a founding member of American Doom, I’ll send a free signed copy of the book.

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We have some exclusive reporting coming on a few fronts, including more on ICE deaths and efforts to interfere in the midterms. So, as always, I ask for your paid support or contributions to our Coffee Fund to help pay for our journalism here.

Driving through the salt marshes lit by the moon we laughed and talked about the gig. The band had played well and the crowd was good. People enjoyed it and tipped us accordingly: each of us made $75 from the tip jar. A successful night. She told me about some of the people who had talked to her about the music, including the bartender at another place on the island I’ve always wanted to play who said he wanted to book us there. Then, she asked, “Do you want to hear the other development?”

Sure, I said, knowing what it was before she even said it: someone had tried to kill him again. Maybe that’s my finely-tuned intuition after having spent the better part of the last two decades reporting on the violence and upheaval of this country. Or, it’s just a reflection of our collective understanding and acceptance of the violence and upheaval of the Trump era.

The first thing I read about the attempted assassination was someone’s post saying they believed it was real, that it was not staged — another grim hallmark of times in which a faked presidential assassination attempt seems even remotely plausible. A quick scan told me everything else I needed to know. They caught the guy, he was nuts, and he had some guns.

The circumstances of this attempt are a bit different than the last two — or three, depending on how willing you are to trust the U.S. intelligence apparatus under Trump — but some of the results will be relatively the same: some in the legacy media put out a story about a changed, reflective and humbled Trump. He’ll surely blow a hole in that narrative in the coming hours and days as he blames half of the country for the actions of a single person before using the attempt on his life to enact further crackdowns on immigrants, or civil liberties, or decides to expand the surveillance state.

Meanwhile, men and women caught up in the ever-growing network of immigration detention centers continue to die at a record pace; alleged drug traffickers and at least some innocent fishermen continue to die in extrajudicial drone killings carried out by our military in international waters; the war in Iran drags on with no clear end or objective as we send more assets to the region, making us vulnerable to attacks elsewhere as our stockpile of munitions is depleted by the endless bombing.

And to add a bit of Trumpian absurdity to the growing catastrophe, Republicans in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life have taken up talking points about the construction of a White House ballroom that is now apparently a matter of national security.

Combined with several other major renovations and construction projects at the White House, Americans would be justified in wondering why the president is spending so much time, money (ours) and effort revamping a building that he is required by law to vacate in less than three years. Many Republicans have already been coalescing around the idea that he is not required to leave office at the end of his second term, or that they should change the rules to allow him to remain in power.

Simmering underneath all of this are efforts to upend what is currently the only threat to Trump’s power — the November midterm elections. Across the country, Republican state legislators have introduced more than 1,000 bills, according to an American Doom review of legislation in several states, that seek to enact some of the anti-democratic measures for voting and elections that Trump and the election denial movement insist must take place. Some of these bills include state-level changes to who is allowed to call themselves a U.S. citizen for the purposes of voting.

Urged on by developments like the latest attempt on Trump’s life, Republicans nationwide continue to operate under the belief that they are both victims targeted by an ascendant and violent left, but are also always the victors. This seemingly contradictory narrative is fleshed out a bit by Jeff Sharlet and a colleague, who described it succinctly as “Victory over victimhood.”

They will ride this narrative into November, when they will try — through legal, quasi-legal, and probably other means — to hold on to the power that allows them to brutalize the people they blame for not being more rich and powerful than they already are.

***

DALLAS, LAS VEGAS — I finished up work one day and punched in a single word into Google Maps: “bar.” Five minutes away was a place — no reviews, no website, no photos, just a neon “OPEN” sign shining and a hand painted ship on the side of the building: Tradewinds - The Original Social Club. I opened the door and took off my sunglasses to adjust from the blinding Texas afternoon sun to the utter darkness inside, where the only light came from the glow of TVs and Christmas lights. “I called earlier. Cool to bring in my dog?” Sure, the bartender said, and in ran Hendrix, a wildhearted Wheaten Terrier mutt who never met a person he didn’t like or a set of woods he didn’t want to disappear into. Before I could introduce myself, Henny was behind the bar, jumping up on the bartender’s leg and getting pets on the head.

Thus began my three-year residency at Tradewinds, the last real neighborhood bar in an area of Dallas that was either becoming trendy or being ignored by developers because it was too Mexican. Tradewinds was right in the middle of those two worlds. Henny and I took our barstools — back then, Henny was still spry enough to jump up on one — and I introduced myself. “I’m Justin, too,” said the bartender, “and that’s Justin down there.” Just three Justins sitting in a dark bar drinking Lone Stars on a warm spring Texas afternoon. I texted Sarah the address and told her to meet me there after work. I was elated. After leaving Chicago and moving to Texas, I figured my days of neighborhood bars were gone. Finding Tradewinds was like finding a piece of home right down the street from our house. She was, shall we say, less than pleased to walk in and find Hendrix and I sitting on a barstool at five o’clock in the afternoon after a few hours of drinking. But she made the best of it, and put up with my affection for Tradewinds and its cast of rough-and-tumble regulars as I acclimated to Texas. She put up with a lot of things I wish she wouldn’t have.

We rented a small home in Oak Cliff, which we filled with art and records and tchotchkes from our lives of travel. Things began to slow down. I bought a lawn mower and a grill and began reporting on immigration. At night I sat outside on our patio and listened to the neighbors blaring Tejano music as I slowly got drunk on Tecates. One bright morning I awoke with my usual sudsy hangover and saw Sarah looking at her phone. Fuck, she said, 50 dead? I opened my own phone to an email from the Washington Post asking if I was available to chase down some addresses in Dallas tied to the shooter who opened fire in Las Vegas overnight. Then came the rush — shower, clothes, laptop, notepad, phone charger, car, highway. By 11 am I had found a few of the homes and talked to some neighbors. Nothing doing. No one really remembered the guy. He was just another nobody. By noon I was on the phone with my editor in New York at the Beast. A call to Sarah — “Gotta go, love you” — then back to our house in Oak Cliff, and then the rush again — suitcase, car, highway, airport, security, airport bar, seat, Bloody Mary. By 10 pm., Sin City for the first time in my life.

My experience with hotels up to that point was that my car was usually sitting just on the other side of a dirty door in a parking lot no more than 15 feet from my bed, so dropping my bags in a room 20 stories off the Vegas strip was nice. It was 11 o’clock local, a little more than 24 hours after a madman had picked off 55 people with a machine gun from his turret in a highrise hotel room at Mandalay Bay. The time meant there probably wouldn’t be much for me to do, not that I thought there was much to do on this story regardless of the time of day or night. From the moment I woke up the day before in Dallas and hit the ground running to try to unravel the mystery of the shooter, Stephen Paddock, I knew it was a fool’s errand. I couldn’t say why; I just knew. The answer would come to me in bits and pieces over the days, months and years that followed.

I took the elevator down to the lobby and emerged to eternal daylight. New York is a city that occasionally sleeps —Vegas never does. I walked outside onto the sidewalk and into the freakshow diaspora that is the strip on any given night. People watched the worst of the other drugged out or drunk people laugh, cry or argue under the false sense of security that they weren’t like that, that they would keep it together. In Las Vegas, no one keeps it together for long. Your time crying in the pit is always just a few more hours away. The sidewalk was filled with these freaks, people from all over the country and the world unchained from their daily selves, laughing or crying and puking their way toward midnight. I walked through them and toward the Mandalay Bay. A TV news van was parked on a street corner just on the public side of yellow crime scene tape. A woman stood in front of it, posing for a photo her boyfriend took. There was no sense in something like the worst mass murder in US history ruining their vacation.

I went to a casino and sat at a bar and drank Jack and Cokes, smoking cigarettes and taking in the scene around me. The incessant chiming of slot machines provided a comforting white noise as an hour or so wore on. I talked to no one and went to bed. The next day I woke up to the sun streaming bright orange desert light across the carpet and got to work. I had heard that Paddock had tried to shoot up another music festival a week before and headed to the hotel that was across the street from where that event was held, where I found a manager and asked whether they’d seen Paddock when he stayed at the hotel and whether anything seemed amiss. The manager didn’t want to talk, and it was hard to tell, as it always is, whether that was because he had been trained not to talk or knew something he’d been told not to tell a reporter. Across town, the police were holding a press conference and argued my way inside. I didn’t have press credentials. For some reason I almost never had them over the years. Maybe I always thought I was faking it. I convinced a cop that I was actually a reporter and snuck in just in front of a group of reporters in line who weren’t allowed in because the room was at capacity, and wound up jammed underneath the TV cameras streaming the press conference out to the world. The reporters in the front row asked dumb questions like, Why did the shooter do this? As if the cops would know then or ever. I thought they should have been asking more obvious questions like, Didn’t anyone see this guy checking into a hotel room with a giant bag full of machine guns? Or, Why the fuck did it take you guys so long to find this guy and take him down? One of the officers leading the press conference talked about law enforcement’s response to the shooting and offhandedly mentioned that it was a security guard at Mandalay Bay who first found Paddock as he carried out his rampage. I wondered who that person was and why he wasn’t getting the attention he deserved for being the hero that finally drew the violent carnage to a close. I went back to my hotel and called the Mandalay Bay and asked to speak to the head of security. Someone there said I would have to speak to the union for security officers. A man told me a guard had been called to the 32nd floor, where Paddock’s room was located, for a hallway door that had been left ajar. When he walked past the room, Paddock saw him through cameras he had set up outside the door to his room and shot him in the leg. The guard alerted police who took a few excruciating minutes to reach the hallway. Meanwhile, Paddock shot out a window and began firing on the crowd below. The security guard was a hero but no one knew it. That was about to change. I told the union official that the security guard deserved credit for his heroic actions and after an hour of cajoling convinced him to let me tell the world his name: Jesus Campos. I wrote up my story in an adrenaline fueled rush so powerful that my hands shook as I typed.

I had my big story and watched it blow up online and on cable news as word spread of Campos’ heroism. Then I got drunk because that’s what I did when a big story went out, because the combination of adrenaline and alcohol was the best feeling in the world to me. I knew when I went to Vegas that I wasn’t going to leave there with the why of Paddock’s massacre, but it felt good to have figured out a little bit of the what the hell actually happened here? Now that the what was out of the way with, there wasn’t much left to do than some victim cleanup. That is, tell a few stories of victims’ families so the world would know what it felt like to lose a loved one in what people like to call senseless violence. I had done this hundreds of times over the years but wasn’t much in the mood for it in Vegas. It depressed me and I didn’t like feeling depressed. I was in this line of work for the adventure and the chase, not the sadness.

Over the years, I had ignored the traditional requirement of objectivity in journalism to advocate for people and causes I thought had gotten a raw deal. I used the concept of objectivity to justify my purposeful lack of emotions for those who had experienced the worst things imaginable. Drinking just made that easier. I drank away that which frightened or disturbed me and dismissed those feelings with forced callousness under the guise of journalistic objectivity or good, old fashioned gallows humor. If a murder victim’s mother broke down in front of me I carefully described the scene in order to not feel the emotions it brought. I relayed the facts of grim realities like the psychological breakdown of a grieving mother to an editor as if I was collecting meaningless bits of construction material to build a house I would soon abandon. In Gary I described the physical dismantling of the murdered women in excruciating detail in order to make them less human to me and more mechanical, soulless structures that were taken apart. In Piketon I wrote about the minor crimes of two young men who had been brutally murdered in some obsessive and heartless quest for a complicated and meaningless truth. As far back as Peoria and throughout my travels I often othered the Black community by reporting on it like it was a foreign warzone instead of a neighborhood across town where my fellow Americans lived. I deluded myself with the internal narrative that I was a righteous truth-seeker. I wasn’t like the politicians on the evening news and the Stephen Paddocks of the world who degraded and destroyed human life through their quest for power and control. I convinced myself that even if I fed on whatever soul had just passed, at least I did so in pursuit of the truth. The reality was, sometimes I was just a parasite.

By that evening I was back on my patio in Texas listening to the neighbors play Tejano music and sipping a beer. I was tired, so I did something I hadn’t done for a very long time: I turned my phone off and just listened. I heard the birds chirping, then a mother screaming over her dead son in Peoria. I heard the Tejano music, then gunshots in Chicago. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the orange film that the sunlight created through my eyelids, then I saw the man bleeding from a gunshot wound to his stomach in the back of a car in Ferguson. I opened my eyes and looked up into the trees, then saw tear-gas canisters with smoke spiraling from them flying through the air in Baltimore. Things began to feel bright, sharp and loud. I knew that it was the beginning of a panic attack. But I couldn’t understand why. How can I have anxiety because of the things I have seen? I didn’t lose my son to murder in Peoria. I wasn’t shot in Ferguson. I wasn’t at a country music festival in Las Vegas where a madman fired on innocent people with a weapon of war. I didn’t experience any of these things myself. I had just learned about all of these events and written about them in intimate and excruciating detail before moving on to the next one. I simply compiled terror and pain for a collection of stories that comprised the body of work that was my career. I was just a normal guy, I thought, whose line of work caused him to have random thoughts like wondering whether the chef’s knife I used to chop cilantro was the size of the blade Tino Bagola used to murder his two cousins on that remote Indian reservation in North Dakota. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the orange film and the Tejano music, then I saw Bagola’s eyes, staring back at me through a haze of dilated pupils and psychotropic drugs from a jail cell in Fargo, where I met him just before he was shipped off to prison for the rest of his life.

Three weeks after returning from Las Vegas, a young man shot up a church in Sutherland Spring, Texas. That day, I had had my phone off for hours. Things were slowing down in my life — a bit. Sarah and I were settling into our new home and I’d was enjoying spending time discovering Texas with her. I turned my phone on and learned of the shooting, then waited for the emails and calls to come in with the assignments. They didn’t. I had to sit this one out. And for the first time in a while, I wanted to.

***

This article is the result of months of digging into ICE deaths. The previous article in this series is viewable here. This reporting has taken much time and resources — and hundreds of dollars in fees to obtain autopsy reports. To support this work, please choose a paid subscription to American Doom or contribute to our Coffee Fund.

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Two coroners in Missouri who have publicly expressed anti-immigrant sentiment have overseen the autopsy of an ICE detainee who died in a local jail, American Doom has found. Now, under a questionable interpretation of Missouri law, the two coroners are refusing to release the autopsy report for Brayan Garzon-Rayo, a 27-year-old Colombian man who allegedly took his own life while being held on an ICE detainer in the Phelps County Jail just a little more than a year ago, on April 8.

The refusal of the two coroners — Darren Dake and Ernie Coverdell — to release Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report highlights transparency issues regarding the record number of deaths in U.S. immigration custody under the Trump administration.

At least 44 people have died in the custody of ICE, other immigration agencies, or in local jails as a result of the Trump administration’s historic crackdown on undocumented immigrants. That’s the highest number of deaths in a 14-month period since the government began publishing detainee death data in 2018 — and possibly since the Department of Homeland Security and ICE were formed in the wake of 9/11.

With about 70,000 immigrants in immigration custody each day, and plans to convert warehouses across the country into detention centers to hold even more, immigrant advocates worry that the number of deaths will continue to rise. As more immigrants are held in facilities that are already at or over capacity, conditions within the facilities will worsen, advocates have warned, leading to delayed responses to medical emergencies and routine ailments.

“These recent tragedies underscore what we’ve known to be true for many years, which is that nobody is safe for any period of time inside ICE detention,” said Laura Hernández, executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, a nonprofit organization devoted to ending immigration detention. “The detention system is infamous for its long-standing record of brutal medical abuse, violence, and premature deaths.”

While poor conditions inside ICE facilities have been well-documented, less known are the exact circumstances that have led to the record number of immigrant deaths during the Trump administration. But records collected by American Doom show that delayed or insufficient staff responses to medical issues played a role in some of those deaths.

In September, a Chinese man experiencing seizures and heart issues was left unattended by medical staff at a facility in California, according to an autopsy report provided to American Doom by authorities. Huabing Xie later died of a heart attack after being left alone for 36 minutes during a crucial window of time, the autopsy showed.

Another autopsy report showed that a Mexican man held at another California facility complained of severe rectal pain for weeks and was given only Tylenol. By the time the man was finally taken to the hospital, staff there recommended emergency surgery. The man, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, died of a heart attack before the surgery could take place. At the time of his death, Ayala-Uribe rated his pain at a level of 10 out of 10.

In Missouri, two men have allegedly taken their own lives while being held in local jails on ICE detainers. They are among at least seven people who have died of what ICE and local authorities have said are suicide. In the case of Garzon-Rayo, he denied having a history of depression or suicidal thoughts, according to a detainee death report released by ICE. Several days later, after testing positive for COVID and tuberculosis, Garzon-Rayo allegedly committed suicide.

But authorities have yet to release key records that could shed light on the exact circumstances of Garzon-Rayo’s death, which his family has questioned. Those records include Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report, which Dake and Coverdell have refused to release. The two coroners have claimed an exemption in Missouri state law that prevents them from publicly releasing the report, but civil rights attorneys and public records experts who spoke to American Doom say the law is not prohibitive, and that it’s up to individual coroners in Missouri to release autopsy reports.

This fact is backed up by the cooperation of another coroner in Missouri, who has agreed to release the autopsy report for Luis Cruz-Silva, who allegedly took his own life while in custody at the Ste. Genevieve County Jail.

Dake and Coverdell have offered various explanations for their refusal to release Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report. Initially, Coverdell told American Doom he couldn’t release the report because “it’s an ICE report,” without providing further information. Later, he joined Dake in citing state law regarding autopsy reports that the two men say prevent them from releasing the document publicly. But that’s simply not the case.

The Missouri Attorney General as well as local prosecutors did not respond to requests for clarification on whether Dake and Coverdell were allowed by law to release Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy report, but the public records experts who spoke to American Doom confirmed that the law is not prohibitive — both men could release the report if they wished. Additionally, the Missouri State Highway Patrol, which investigated the deaths of Garzon-Rayo and Cruz-Silva, have not yet provided records related to the two men’s deaths as requested under the state’s public records law by American Doom.

The lack of transparency over Garzon-Rayo’s death is a reflection of the byzantine network of immigration detention facilities, multiple federal agencies, local law enforcement, and medical examiners and coroners across the country that must be navigated in order to understand exactly how the 44 people who have died in ICE custody under Trump met their deaths.

In many cases, local authorities like medical examiners and coroners have helpfully released key records like autopsy reports. In others, local authorities and ICE have put up roadblocks to obtaining information about deaths in custody, or have provided incomplete and sometimes misleading information about those cases.

For Garzon-Rayo, the situation is clear: Dake and Coverdell could release his autopsy report, but have refused to do so. Coverdell has said he has viewed video from inside the Phelps County Jail that confirmed Garzon-Rayo took his own life, but declined to answer questions about exactly what that footage showed. The Missouri State Highway Patrol investigated the deaths of Garzon-Rayo and Cruz-Silva, but would only say that no charges are forthcoming.

***

After Garzon-Rayo died, Coverdell took custody of his body. Unable to conduct the autopsy himself — Coverdell is an elected coroner but not a licensed medical pathologist — Coverdell paid Dake, the coroner in nearby Crawford County, $2,600 to conduct the autopsy, he told American Doom.

Coverdell and Dake have a history of making public comments in support of Trump’s immigration policies, among other disparaging remarks about Democrats, liberals and Americans who don’t support Donald Trump, according to an American Doom review of their Facebook posts going back to 2018.

“CLOSE THE BORDER,” read a post shared in 2023 by Coverdell.

In 2018, Coverdell shared a photo of a migrant caravan with a caption that read, in part, “wake up before we are truly overun (sic) you liberal fools.” Coverdell has shared posts that said “toilet dwelling” Democrats propagate a “culture of hate.”

Among his many posts on his personal Facebook page, which has no privacy restrictions, Coverdell has also shared an AI-generated photo that showed an encampment of tents in a trash-strewn field under the banner, “Kamala’s America;” another AI-generated photo that showed the Statue of Liberty constructing a wall at the U.S. southern border; and a Dec. 23, 2023 post that encouraged his Facebook audience: “Everyone post: CLOSE THE BORDER!”

Dake has shared posts that support Trump’s “remain in Mexico” asylum policy and decried “leftists” who “hate border walls and gun rights,” among other pro-Trump posts.

Dake said he found nothing wrong with his posts, adding that he was “looking forward to the publicity.”

“Every time you left-leaning ‘journalists’ write a spin piece about me my support and popularity increases,” Dake told American Doom.

Dake did not answer specific questions about Garzon-Rayo’s autopsy, pointing to Coverdell in Phelps County. Coverdell told American Doom that he had seen video from inside Garzon-Rayo’s cell, but did not elaborate.

“It doesn’t matter what race, religion, ethnic background,” someone is, Coverdell told the American Doom, “if it’s a person that feels it’s better to die than face life for one reason or another.”

Coverdell said he did not intend to “disparage immigrants,” and said that he “in no way believes it is good when someone dies, especially by suicide.”

In August, Phelps County Sheriff Michael Kirn, whose agency oversees the jail, addressed members of the county commission about the county’s agreement with ICE to hold detainees like Garzon-Rayo.

Kirn told commissioners that “having the ICE inmates has incurred costs in food, medical, staffing and transport” that the county was having difficulty affording, according to meeting minutes reviewed by American Doom, adding that there was “not enough revenue coming in to offset” those costs. Under an agreement with ICE, the county had been receiving funding from the agency to hold detainees like Garzon-Rayo. Kirn did not respond to questions from American Doom.

At the August commission meeting, Phelps County’s elected officials agreed that the agreement with ICE was no longer worth the county’s resources. Phelps County stopped housing ICE detainees on September 1.

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Today’s edition of American Doom has information about the fight over 2020 ballots in Georgia that you won’t find anywhere else. Please choose a paid subscription or contribute to our Coffee Fund to help fuel more of the fact-based, adversarial journalism you see below.

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As Fulton County and the Justice Department continue to argue in court filings over the thousands of 2020 ballots and other material seized during an FBI raid in January, witnesses who Trump’s DOJ has relied upon for its supposed evidence of fraud in that year’s election have officially — and strangely — attempted to distance themselves from the case.

Of the 11 witnesses named in the FBI affidavit that led to the raid, all but four have agreed with American Doom’s motion to have their identities un-redacted. This means they’ve agreed to have their identities officially made public. Of the four who have asked that the court continue to withhold their identities, three are public officials. Two are current members of the Georgia State Election Board.

“Wit. 2 is the Republican-appointed member of the Georgia State Election Board,” the affidavit states, abbreviating “witness.” Any ambiguity about which “Republican-appointed member” this witness is — there are four Republican-appointed members on the SEB — is obliterated by the next sentence. “Wit. 2 was an obstetrician prior to serving on the State Election Board.”

For anyone with a passing knowledge of Georgia election matters, this is quite obviously SEB member Dr. Janice Johnston, who frequently discusses her time in private practice as an OBGYN, including at SEB meetings.

“Wit. 3, the current House-appointed State Election Board member, confirmed there were missing ballot images,” the affidavit goes on, referencing an oft-referenced claim about missing ballot images in Fulton County in 2020 that reflects the election denial movement’s misunderstanding of the rules and mechanisms for storing such records.

This is Janelle King, who is the only Republican member of the SEB who has been appointed by the Georgia House of Representatives. The remaining Republican SEB members — John Fervier and Salleigh Grubbs — were appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp and Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, respectively.

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“Current Fulton County Commissioner, Wit. 11, was a poll worker during the 2020 election,” the affidavit says of Bridget Thorne, who is one of only two Republicans on the commission, and the only Republican who has been outspoken in her belief about election fraud.

The SEB’s Johnston and King are fighting American Doom’s motion to have the court make their identities public. Joining them is Thorne, a Fulton County commissioner who has spread lies and conspiracies about election fraud. American Doom is not naming the fourth individual who has asked that their identity remain redacted in court documents because they’re a target of what is broadly considered to be a politically-motivated prosecution by Trump’s Justice Department that is primarily based on “evidence” presented by biased, pro-Trump election skeptics like Johnston, King and Thorne.

The evidence cited in the affidavit — which led to a magistrate judge issuing a search warrant that the FBI executed during its Jan. 28 raid of the Fulton County elections warehouse — is mostly recycled claims of technical errors and mistakes like double-counted ballots. That evidence is widely viewed to be not a predicate for criminal charges, which is what DOJ lawyers have argued is the basis for the raid, but for the Trump administration’s efforts to sow doubt in November’s election results.

Combined with similar seizures of 2020-related election materials in Arizona, California and Michigan, the Fulton County raid appears to be part of a coordinated effort to resurface fraud claims ahead of an election that Republicans across the country are slated to lose — and lose big — as the president carries out an unpopular war in Iran, gas prices spike, and inflation continues to make life less affordable for most Americans.

The Fulton County case is going nowhere but deep into the obscure lore of MAGA election denial conspiracy. Any criminal charges that result from the affidavit that Johnston, King and Thorne are now weakly distancing themselves from will likely be tossed by reputable judges. Perhaps this is the reason for their quiet recusal from being officially named as a result of American Doom’s motion.

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Johnston, King and Thorne’s attempts to keep their identities weakly sealed in the affidavit are at odds with much of their public behavior. As we reported in November, King and others have openly bragged about their coordination with the DOJ on election fraud claims in Georgia for months.

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If there were any remaining questions about the MAGA-dominated SEB’s role in the Fulton County raid, Johnston herself put them to rest at the last meeting of the board.

“A request was made to the DOJ” by the SEB, Johnston said at the board’s Feb. 19 meeting, “and took notice (sic) to the Fulton County election irregularities that have been alleged, but had never been investigated.”

So, why are Johnston and King asking the court to allow their names to continue to be redacted? That’s a good question, and one that I put to Johnston, King and Thorne. As of this writing, none have responded.

One would think that, after years of claiming that the 2020 election was beset with widespread fraud by Democrats and poll workers in Fulton County, this trio of hardcore election skeptics would want to shout from the mountaintops that their “evidence” is the backbone of what Trump’s lawyers at the DOJ are now claiming is a criminal investigation. (No one has been charged yet.) Instead, Johnston, King and Thorne are quietly arguing behind-the-scenes to have their identities remain redacted in the affidavit — a laughable objection, considering how obvious the affidavit makes their identities to be.

If nothing else, having their identities so obviously obtainable in the affidavit itself begs the question of why Johnston, King and Thorne are now fighting their official release. Maybe they’re fighting just because they feel like it, who knows, or to stick it to the “fake news,” as they like to say. It doesn’t really matter because everyone knows who they are.

What does matter is that Fulton County is pressing the DOJ hard on the “evidence” that Johnston, King and Thorne presented to the FBI that led to the raid. That evidence is questionable at best. At worst, it’s the result of “research” from the same small but vocal network of election deniers who have tried to have their way with Georgia elections since 2020. This network has used their influence to pressure state lawmakers to institute changes to election administration and voting — like the ban on QR codes that are used to count votes in a more reliable way than the hand counts that election deniers would like to impose — on millions of Georgia voters.

The election denial movement’s success in Georgia has caused a fracturing within the state Republican party. That divide is at the heart of the races for governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general, all of which will be up for grabs in November.

If the MAGA, election denial wing of the Georgia GOP wins out, you can expect to see the state implement even more anti-democratic measures aimed at cracking down on voting rights and fair elections. Because none of this is actually about election fraud; it’s always been about ensuring that Republicans win, no matter what.

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Watching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth give another bombastic press conference that seemed like an act of absurdist theater this morning as the chyron reminded us of the ridiculous name of our war in Iran — Operation Epic Fury — I had one of those moments where I’m reminded just how staggeringly dumb much of modern American life is. It inspired me t…

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Good morning from Savannah, where spring is about to pop if the hint of salt smell coming off the marsh this morning is any indication.

Meanwhile in Atlanta, lawmakers are no closer after two months in session to agreeing on a replacement ballot and tabulation system as a July 1 deadline approaches. That deadline requires that the ballots Georgians will vote on in November cannot have QR codes that are scanned in order to tabulate votes. Why? Because the election denial movement believes — with no proof — that QR codes can be used to manipulate, even change, votes.

The QR code ban shouldn’t have happened in the first place — there is no evidence that a single vote has ever been flipped simply because election equipment in Georgia utilize QR codes to tabulate votes. But the cat’s already out of the bag thanks to the passage of a 2024 bill, SB 189, that sets the July 1 deadline and accompanying prohibition on QR codes.

So, it’s up to the Georgia legislature to come up with a replacement system for how the state will count votes in the November midterms. So far this legislative session, which ends in early April, lawmakers have failed to introduce bills that solely address how those votes will be counted. Instead, the Republican-dominated legislature has introduced far more sweeping legislation that would require various forms of hand counts and hand-marked paper ballots for millions of Georgians to vote.

If Republicans get their way and Georgians will have to vote on hand-marked paper ballots, instead of the touchscreens the state has used for years, and those votes will then have to be counted by hand, we can expect chaos and turmoil.

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This is a developing and fast-moving story that American Doom has been fighting in court over for weeks. Please check back later for updates. This tedious and time-consuming work is not possible without your support. Please choose a paid subscription or consider a one-time contribution to support American Doom’s aggressive, fact-based journalism. - jg

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A …

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American Doom has been at the forefront of reporting on elections in Georgia. We were the first to file a motion to unseal the DOJ affidavit that led to the raid in Fulton Co…

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In a filing this afternoon in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, I’m seeking the release of the affidavit that led to the FBI raid in Fulton County that netted the Trump administration hundreds of thousands of ballots and other material from the 2020 election.

While the search warrant for that raid has been made public, the Justice…

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I’ve got some exclusive information about the FBI raid carried out on Wednesday at a Fulton County elections warehouse. Read on below or catch my full report at Zeteo. Stay tuned for much more on this developing story, as well as lots of forthcoming reporting on Homeland Security, ICE and our rapidly-expanding immigration detention system. If subscribing isn’t your thing, you can do a one-time contribution here. Now, on to the news…

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The raid at a Fulton County warehouse containing records from the 2020 election appears to have been a haphazard and incomplete one. A source familiar with the operation tells me that the agents there did not confiscate all the materials inside — even though some of the boxes left behind could very well have contained records pertinent to the investigation.

Not that it matters all that much — Democrats, voting rights advocates, and election officials from both parties contend that the investigation being carried out by the Trump administration is both unnecessary and doomed to fail. That’s because there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Still, President Donald Trump has never given up on his hopes of proving widespread fraud in 2020. To that end, his Justice Department has been coordinating with election deniers for months, as I reported in November at Zeteo.

Wednesday’s raid is part of an investigation that exists simply to propagate a narrative, Democrats say. That narrative will be used in November to call into question the results of midterm elections that Republicans in many polls look to be fairing poorly in. The narrative of election fraud will be weaponized, according to Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), to directly interfere in November’s election.

“This is not idle speculation — earlier this week AG Pam Bondi offered to withdraw ICE agents from Minnesota if the state turned over its voter rolls,” Goldman told me in a statement. “Just two weeks ago, Trump admitted that he ‘regretted’ not seizing voting machines after the 2020 election, and now, six years later, his administration is doing just that by raiding Fulton County’s board of elections.”

Goldman is among a handful of congressional Democrats who are warning that Trump could use the military or federal law enforcement to interfere in the midterms.

“It is clear that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are using their militarized immigration agents as part of this scheme,” Goldman continued. “By sending masked, violent agents into our cities to inflame tension and incite violence, they are trying to create a sham pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act, seize more voting information, and even potentially cancel the election.”

But even if that doesn’t occur, Wednesday’s raid offers another path toward MAGA election interference, Democratic officials here tell me. It involves the MAGA-dominated State Election Board taking over election administration in Fulton County, home to Georgia’s largest and most important voting bloc — a largely Black, largely Democratic group of voters who will be crucial to determining the balance of power in Congress through Sen. Jon Ossoff’s re-election campaign.

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I’m out with a big exclusive today at Zeteo that’s the result of a week of digging into immigrant deaths at ICE facilities across the country. Your paid support funds my journalism, and keeps American Doom free for everyone else. To support my work, please choose a paid subscription or drop a few dollars in the Doom Coffee Fund. Also, pre-order my book so I can hopefully write another one some day. Now, on to the news… - jg

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The killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis is just the latest development in a year’s worth of outrage over the Trump administration’s aggressive push on immigration enforcement. The apparently unjustified killing of Pretti — and before him, Renee Nicole Good — might push Senate Democrats to refuse to pass a funding bill that would give ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the money they need to continue their operations across the country.

A vote on that bill is expected Tuesday. Pretti’s killing also comes as there are growing questions about deaths inside immigration facilities. Today at Zeteo, I have some troubling news on that front.

Since October, ICE has not released a single detainee death report for any of the dozen-plus immigrants who have died in immigration custody since that time. ICE is required by federal law to release this information — in the form of what are called “detainee death reports” — within 90 days of an immigrant’s death. But the most recent detainee death report listed on ICE’s website is from Sept. 22.

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You can watch my breakdown above about how Good was perceived as such a non-threat that she waived through ICE agents who drove past without incident just before she was killed. None of this adds up and it’s all very bad.

Speaking of bad things that have been happening for some time, I’ve written a book that details the last decade of chaos and carnage, as well as the early years of my career and my battle with — and recovery from — alcoholism. It’s called If I am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened - The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. I’m told the book even contains a bit of a love story.

So what, you say — you already knew about this stupid book? Well, now you can pre-order the book on Amazon before it’s published by the University of Georgia Press in June. I sure would appreciate that. It’s nice to be reminded every once in a while that there are folks who are actually on the other side of these words and that I’m not just pumping out sentences into the ether.

If you want a taste of what’s inside Something Terrible, you can read an excerpt I published here at Doom in September. You should read that, pre-order my book, and share it far and wide. That way I can continue doing what I love — as dark as this job often is.

Speaking of that, I also need you to pay for the journalism I produce here. Less than 300 of Doom’s 13,000 subscribers are paid supporters of my work. That doesn’t seem like a great ratio! I get it. I don’t want to pay for subscriptions either. And I damn sure don’t want to be reminded or guilted into paying for things like subscriptions to things I use. But I think my journalism is worth it — especially considering my exclusive reporting on threats to democracy as we head into the most important election of our lifetimes (for real this time, and again). Remember this from last year, which all the other reporters and publications in the country didn’t find, but I did all on my own?

Yeah, that’s pretty good stuff. And there’s more of it coming. So, if you aren’t already, please consider throwing a few dollars my way with a paid subscription to Doom. For the next few days, you can get a discount of 20 percent off those subscriptions.

OK, enough of the money-grubbing. Watch the clip above and check out the Public Notice piece, plus that excerpt. That should keep you pretty busy for a while. And remember, they can’t break all of us at once.

-jg