The Latest: Michigan judge dismisses charges against fake electors for Trump

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A Michigan judge dismissed criminal charges Tuesday against 15 Republicans accused of trying to falsely certify President Donald Trump as the winner of the 2020 election, saying that because they seriously believed him, there was no intent to commit fraud.

District Court Judge Kristen D. Simmons' dismissal is a major blow to prosecutors as similar cases in four other states have been muddied with setbacks. Each of the defendants, including a few high profile members of the Republican Party in Michigan, faced eight charges of forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery, the top charge punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

The effort to secure fake electors was central to the federal indictment against Trump that was abandoned shortly before his second term.

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The White House says it’d like to have handwriting experts review Trump’s signature to see if it is consistent with the one on a years-old card to Jeffrey Epstein.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “we would support that.”

She added: “The president did not write the letter. He did not sign this letter.”

Leavitt said Trump’s legal team plans to continue a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, which previously published the letter Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein.

The White House had claimed the letter didn’t exist, but it was released to Congress this week.

Leavitt said that the president’s legal team would continue “aggressively pursuing litigation against the Wall Street Journal.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the U.S. received prior notice about the pending attack from Israel.

In response, diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff passed along a warning to the Qataris.

President Donald Trump spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the attack, Leavitt said, and “made his thoughts and concerns very clear.”

She said Trump believes the attack was an “unfortunate incident” that didn’t advance peace in the region.

The Democratic governor is calling out President Trump for a “relentless, unhinged obsession with California” in a pre-recorded letter Tuesday. Newsom opted to send the letter to the state Legislature instead of delivering it publicly.

Newsom didn’t mention Trump by name.

“We are facing a federal administration built on incompetence and malicious ignorance, one that seeks the death of independent thinking,” Newsom said in the letter.

California has been a battleground for the Trump administration over a number of policies including those on immigration, climate changes and transgender athletes, among other things. The state has sued the administration 41 times since January.

On Tuesday, the White House released a video of Trump in the Oval Office addressing the case of Zarutska and accusing Democrats for adopting policies that release offenders too easily.

“In Charlotte, North Carolina, we saw the results of these policies when a 23-year-old woman who came here from Ukraine met her bloody end on a public train,” he said. “She was slaughtered by a deranged monster who is roaming free after 14 prior arrests.”

He said authorities must respond with “force and strength” and said Chicago and other cities need help.

“We have to be vicious just like they are. It’s the only thing they understand,” he said about criminals.

Vice President JD Vance and his wife, second lady Usha Vance, will travel to New York to attend the 24th anniversary commemoration of the worst terrorist attack on the United States.

The White House has not announced Trump’s plans as yet.

The U.S. military did not participate in the Israeli strikes that took place in Doha, according to a U.S. official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Pentagon has directed questions to the White House, where officials didn’t immediately respond.

-By Konstantin Toropin

“It’s not hard to see why middle-class Americans are frustrated,” said Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union. “The frozen job market, tariffs and Medicaid cuts are going to put even more of a squeeze in 2025 on middle and lower-income households.”

For richest 10% of households, incomes rose 4.2% to $251,000, while for the poorest one-tenth saw a 2.2% rise to $19,900. A household is defined by Census as a family unit or an individual living alone or living with people who aren’t relatives.

Earnings for women barely rose, while male earnings increased, widening the gender wage gap for the second straight year after two decades of narrowing. Women on average now earn 80.9% of what men earn, down from 82.7% in 2023.

The income for the typical U.S. household barely rose last year and essentially matched its 2019 peak, the Census Bureau said Tuesday, as stubbornly high inflation offset wage gains. Highest-earning households received healthy inflation-adjusted income increases, while middle- and lower-income households saw little gain.

The Median household income, adjusted for inflation, rose 1.3% in 2024 to $83,730, the Census Bureau said. This illustrates why many Americans have been dissatisfied with the economy since the pandemic, even as unemployment has been historically low: Median household incomes are essentially unchanged from five years earlier, the report showed. It’s a sharp contrast from the preceding five-year period, 2014 to 2019, when median household income rose nearly 21%.

▶ Read more details from the Census report on U.S. incomes

And now the Trump White House is saying it inherited a far worse economy than initially believed.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued benchmark revisions that found there were 911,000 fewer jobs than first reported for the year ended in March 2025. The Census Bureau said that median household income rose just 1.3% last year to $83,730.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt seized on the data to say that “Biden’s economy was a disaster and the BLS is broken.”

Trump fired the head of the BLS last month after downward revisions to the monthly jobs report showed a far weaker economy than what Trump had been claiming.

Students at four universities in the nation’s capital are staging walkouts to protest Trump’s military policing surge. Roughly 100 demonstrators crowded a plaza at Georgetown University on Tuesday with chants to “free D.C.” and keep federal immigration officers away from the private campus.

Speakers called on Congress to end the deployment of National Guard troops in the city and urged university leaders not to cooperate with federal law enforcement. Speakers included Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass. He said the city is “under assault” and called Trump’s crackdown political theater.

Students at Howard University staged a similar demonstration, and others were scheduled at George Washington University and American University.

Talarico, a state representative with a rising national profile, joined the widening race to unseat Sen. John Cornyn. The Republican primary includes Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was impeached in 2023 on articles including bribery and abuse of public trust. Other Democrats running include former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, who unsuccessfully challenged Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

Talarico, a 36-year-old divinity student with degrees from the University of Texas and Harvard University, has gained popularity through viral social media posts challenging Republican-led policies such as private school vouchers and requiring the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

“There is a deep hunger across the political spectrum for a fundamentally different kind of politics,” Talarico said in an interview. “It’s been 10 years now of Trumpian politics, politics as a blood sport ... and there is a hunger 10 years later for a return to more timeless values of sincerity and honesty and compassion and respect.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel called the the judge’s ruling Tuesday “disappointing” and a “very wrong decision.”

The defendants have maintained their actions did not constitute a crime. And the judge said their efforts to declare Trump the winner despite election results showing a majority of Michigan voters chose Biden were constitutional because rightly or wrongly, they believed there were problems with the election.

But Nessel said the defendants knew their actions were not the proper election procedure and specifically sought to circumvent the rules. “They knew they were not electors,” Nessel said.

The U.S. military did not participate in the Israeli strikes that took place in Doha, according to a U.S. official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Pentagon has directed questions to the White House, where officials didn’t immediately respond.

— Konstantin Toropin

That’s according to an Israeli official and another person familiar with the matter, who were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Pentagon officials referred questions about coordination to the White House. And the White House officials did not respond to request for comment.

It was not clear how much warning was provided or whether the U.S. expressed approval for the strike.

Congressional leaders appeared caught off guard by Israel’s strike.

— Aamer Madhani, Joseph Krauss

▶ Read more about the Israeli strike against Hamas in Qatar

An AP-NORC poll on Aug. 25 found a partisan split on this issue, with 82% of Republicans and 30% of Democrats approving of using the U.S. military and National Guard to help police, and less support — 51% of Republicans, 15% of Democrats — supporting the military taking control of local police departments.

▶ Read more about the AP-NORC survey results on crime and military intervention

House Speaker Mike Johnson is advocating forcefully for the use of the National Guard in the nation’s capital and other major U.S. cities, saying it can make a big difference in the quality of life for residents.

He said he could not understand why any Democrats would think it’s a good political message to oppose the deployments.

“Yield man. Let the troops come into your city and show how crime can be reduced. It’s a morale boost for the county and it’s safe and right for everybody involved,” Johnson said.

The president told NBC News Tuesday morning that a lewd depiction of a woman purportedly drawn by him for disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is a “dead issue.”

“I don’t comment on something that’s a dead issue,” Trump told NBC in a phone call Tuesday, according to the network. “I gave all comments to the staff. It’s a dead issue.”

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released the drawing, as well as a slew of other Epstein-related documents, on Monday. The drawing includes a signature that appears to be Trump’s; the White House and the president’s allies have denied that it is his signature.

Investigators said the group met at the Michigan GOP headquarters in December of 2020 and signed a document falsely stating they were the state’s “duly elected and qualified electors,” even though President-elect Joe Biden won Michigan by nearly 155,000 votes, a result confirmed by a GOP-led state Senate investigation in 2021.

Prominent Michigan MAGA activist and former Michigan Republican Party Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock was one of the accused. Her attorney, Nicholas Somberg, told reporters after the hearing that the state attorney general’s office had engaged in a “malicious prosecution.”

“There needs to be major consequences for the people who brought this,” he said.

For now, Chicagoans are describing confusion and anxiety over threats of federal intervention in the nation’s third-largest city. President Donald Trump said Monday that he intends to send in National Guard members from other states as well.

The Supreme Court's emergency docket ruling Monday lifting a restraining order against stopping people based on indiscriminate factors like race, language, job or location is boosting Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Attorney General Pam Bondi applauded the decision, posting on social media: “Now, ICE can continue carrying out roving patrols" without "judicial micromanagement.”

Voto Latino co-founder Maria Teresa Kumar called it a “direct attack on Latino and other communities of color — with nearly 130 million of nonwhite Americans now potentially being subject to the Trump Administration’s racially motivated policing.“

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Judge Simmons said she saw no intent to commit fraud: Whether they were “right, wrong or indifferent,” they “seriously believed” there were problems with the election, the judge said. “I believe they were executing their constitutional right to seek redress.”

Prosecutors in Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona have also filed criminal charges related to the fake electors scheme. None have neared the trial stage amid procedural and appellate delays. Technically, Trump is still a defendant in the Georgia case, but as the sitting president, it is highly unlikely that any prosecution against him could proceed while he’s in office.

The effort to secure fake electors was central to the federal indictment against Trump that was abandoned shortly before he began his second term.

District Court Judge Kristen D. Simmons said in a court hearing that the 15 Republicans will not face trial. They were accused of attempting to falsely certify Trump as the winner of the 2020 election in the battleground state. Tuesday’s dismissal is a major blow to prosecutors as similar cases in four other states have been muddied with setbacks. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, announced the charges over two years ago.

Each member of the group, which included a few high profile members of the Republican Party in Michigan, faced eight charges of forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery. The top felony charges carried a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.

A federal appeals court heard oral arguments Tuesday in the case of a U.S. military contractor ordered to pay $42 million for contributing to the torture and mistreatment of three detainees at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison decades ago. The Reston, Virginia-based CACI says the lower court lacked jurisdiction.

Suhail Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili and Asa’ad Al-Zubae testified at last year’s trial that they were subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, forced nudity and other cruel treatment at the prison during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. A jury awarded each $3 million in compensatory damages and $11 million in punitive damages.

The three did not allege that CACI’s interrogators explicitly inflicted the abuse themselves, but argued CACI was complicit because its interrogators conspired with military police to “soften up” detainees for questioning with harsh treatment. CACI has denied any wrongdoing. Photos of the abuse released in 2004 shocked the world.