In a court filing from the lawsuit Kao’s old company brought against him, we found a March 2020 plan to send Collins’s staff a private note saying to use their scholarship story “in any way that can help the Senator in her re-election campaign.” That’s what reading the whole file gets you, and it’s why this work stays reader-funded. If you want to do more, upgrade to a Founding Member, or give a gift subscription to someone who deserves our daily reports. Trump’s FBI Let The Susan Collins Probe Die. The Paper Trail Didn’t. Also: Trump tells the UN he’s keeping Venezuela’s oil, bans three newsrooms and loses in court, and Republicans can feel November coming. Scott Dworkin Sep 24 Thanks so much for joining me today. With all of Trump’s chaos, I’m glad to have some great news for you, along with more of our investigations. This edition focuses on how the regime keeps trying to shut doors, and people like us keep standing in their way. Before you read on, would you tap the ❤️ like button and restack this? The White House launched its own TV feed this week so you’d only hear their version. Your restack puts ours in front of someone who absolutely needs it. And if you haven’t yet, join us as a paid subscriber today. We are proud as hell to be independent. Help us keep it that way: The Bribery Probe Kash Patel’ FBI Buried In August 2019, GOP Senator from Maine Susan Collins stood beside Martin Kao, the CEO of a Hawaii defense contractor, and took credit for an $8 million Navy contract for his company. ProPublica uncovered that his company’s research never produced anything the military wanted to buy. American taxpayers footed the bill anyway. Four months later, Kao illegally moved $150,000 of company money into a political group backing Collins’s reelection. He did it through a front dressed up as a scholarship charity. We pulled the federal election file. The group told regulators it had no reason to suspect a thing. Its lawyer was Cleta Mitchell, who later helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election. Kao ended up going to prison. This week ProPublica revealed he’d handed the FBI a 50-page roadmap naming members of Congress he said helped him trade campaign cash for government contracts. He told agents Collins once said to him, “You’ve seen me deliver.” Her office denies it, and the FBI says an earlier look found nothing on her. By late 2024, agents wanted a full bribery probe. Then Trump came back to the White House, and Kash Patel’s FBI purged the anti-corruption squad. Michelle Ball, who helped take Kao’s confession, was fired over her work investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The probe died in that same purge. Ball is now suing. Fire the investigators and corruption walks, but this time it didn’t stay hidden. Collins’s Democratic opponent Troy Jackson calls it “corruption of the highest order.” Maine gets the final word in 40 days. At The UN, Trump Said It Out Loud At the UN on Tuesday, Trump bragged to leaders from nearly 130 countries about the oil deal he got after US forces seized Venezuela’s president in January. “It was a war,” he said. Then: “To the victor belong the spoils.” The Trump regime says the deal gives the Pentagon a 35% stake in a company that holds 100-year drilling rights to around 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. American troops did the fighting, and the Pentagon got a piece of the oil company. The regime also promised that this deal would help deliver lower gas prices. This week, the national average for gas sat just shy of $4.50, pushed higher by Trump’s war with Iran. Plenty of people at the UN weren’t buying it. Brazil’s president, speaking just before him, said Venezuelans should decide their own future. In his final General Assembly address, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the superpowers their power “isn’t so super.” When Trump went after Cuba, Cuba’s diplomats stood up and walked out. Americans aren’t buying it either. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll out this week, only 17% approve of how Trump’s handling the cost of living. He went to the UN to look strong and failed miserably. Trump Banned Three Newsrooms. Even Fox  Said No. Last Friday, Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO from the White House grounds. He didn’t name a single false story, of course. He just didn’t like their coverage of him. The next morning, Secret Service officers took press passes away from reporters at the gate, following through on the kind of media crackdown we’ve always expected. Trump now warns that “other Fake News Media Outlets” will follow. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News agreed to fight back for once—refusing to run all shared TV cameras at his events until further notice. The New York Times and The Washington Post piled on, holding back their photos of Trump’s events for a day. It backfired further on Monday, when the White House streamed its own helipad ribbon-cutting. You couldn’t hear Trump over the helicopter. It was wonderful. Early Thursday, Judge Timothy Kelly—the same Trump appointee who gave former CNN reporter Jim Acosta his pass back in 2018—ordered the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” their passes. The regime claimed their reporting threatened national security, but Kelly noted most of the reporters behind the stories it flagged didn’t even hold one. If Trump gets to pick who covers him, he gets to pick what you hear. The networks paid him millions to drop his lawsuits and bowed to him for a decade. His own judge needed one night. Republicans Can See November Coming Fox News’s latest polling has Democrats ahead by 7 in the race for Congress. NBC found more voters calling their ballot a rebuke of the sitting President than at any point in its midterm polling since 1998. And this week Fox’s political analyst pointed to polls suggesting a “blue wave,” then shifted 17 House races toward Democrats. Republicans see it too. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana says he never would’ve believed he’d be spending his time helping candidates in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home weeks early in an act of desperation, which also pushed a vote on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth past Election Day. Then there’s the Iran war. In March, a House vote to end it failed. It kept coming back. On September 15, Dem Rep. Seth Moulton’s resolution to end it passed the House 220-204, the third time this year the House has passed one. This time, Iowa Republicans Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks voted yes, with farmers back home paying more for diesel and fertilizer—among everything else. Miller-Meeks’s Democratic opponent, Christina Bohannan, wasn’t fooled. Miller-Meeks “voted 5 times for the Iran War,” she said, and only noticed how angry her own voters are “weeks before an election.” Two Republican candidates distanced themselves from the war this week, one calling for a quick end. And Florida’s GOP nominee for Governor, a longtime Trump loyalist, scrubbed most mentions of Trump from his website. That isn’t a change of heart. It’s fear. They’re right to be afraid. There are only 40 days until the midterms. Every second is a chance for us to make sure we win. I can speak freely because there is no corporate influence here. No advertiser who can threaten to pull ads unless we take it easy on Trump. No billionaire who can pull funding. No press pass to dangle to make us beg for access. Something we have never done—not once—over the past decade. That same independence is what allows us to run one of the biggest pressure campaigns on Congress ever. More than 863,000 letters on the desks of senators and House members since November 2024, millions since 2016. That’s on top of our social media Watchdog Coalition, where we take on Trump’s propaganda generating billions of impressions every month. So we are never just preaching to the choir. For the next 40 days we want to do everything we can to turn Trump into a lame duck. But we can’t do it without you. Thanks to those who have become paid subscribers, we are able to dig further, work harder, and spend more time organizing. If you haven’t joined us yet, please help fuel our movement by becoming a paid subscriber today. Let’s win this: Before you go, tap the ❤️ like button and restack this. Somebody you know only heard the regime’s propaganda this week. Let’s make sure our truth is louder than their lies. Onward! Scott A donor told the FBI he traded campaign cash for help in Congress, and the probe died anyway. Should Susan Collins have to answer questions under oath? Forty days out, what’s one thing you’re doing between now and Election Day? Thanks for your support! Another way to help us out is by gifting subscriptions to friends and family! You can get yours by clicking the link. For all contact Congress links, or to volunteer, you can go here: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/sign-up-for-the-watchdog-coalition Scott Dworkin 8h They are running. Johnson shut down the House for 7 weeks to protect Hegseth, and a judge just threatened Blanche with contempt for hiding Epstein files. Flood Congress on all 7: Roberts: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-impeach-supreme-court-chief-justice-john-roberts/ Hegseth: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-impeach-pete-hegseth/ Yosemite: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trumps-yosemite-giveaway AI Ban: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-pass-the-ban-on-ai-we-cant-control/ 45M Acres: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trump-from-destroying-45-million-acres-of-our-national-forests/ USFS: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trumps-illegal-plan-to-destroy-the-us-forest-service/ Epstein: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-demand-acting-ag-blanche-release-all-of-the-epstein-files-now/ JUST A FEW OF MANY WELL INFORMED COMMENTS:  I’m from a state that pretends this stuff is too complicated for regular people. It isn’t. A contractor cut a $150,000 check, a senator posed for the contract photo, and the investigators who had the file got fired. That’s the whole story. The White House built its own TV feed so you’d only hear their version. Then they banned three newsrooms and a judge they appointed said no by Thursday. Share this before the feed swallows it. Forty days. If you’ve been waiting for a sign that they’re scared, Miller-Meeks voting to end the war “weeks before an election” is the sign. If they can fire the investigator and call it closed, they can do it to anybody. That’s why Maine doesn’t get to shrug this off. I don’t need a new poll to tell me they’re scared. I can hear it when they start taking his name off the website. Forty days is not a lot of time. It’s enough if nobody lets up the gas. Yes. Susan Collins should testify under oath. It’s sad that we can’t even trust our elected officials to honestly represent us. I voted on the FIRST day of early voting here in MN. I am focusing my efforts on encouraging everyone else to do the same. Stand up and be counted, people. It felt SO GOOD to cast my vote this time. Go vote! Will do, Connie! Yes to register and Yes to vote! United we stand, divided we fall - that old adage remains vital to preserving American Democracy. On behalf of the League of Women Voters (we ARE now classified as a terrorist organization by the current regime) I have personally canvassed over 200 of my fellow citizens in my little village, and every single one of them is registered and will vote. In Minnesota. Susan Collins can be concerned as a private citizen. She is only concerned that her gig is up. And clutch her pearls. 🙄 ONE THING? Between now and Election Day? Writing some post cards urging people to vote for a Democrat candidate. Attending a weekly rally for Peace & Democracy and against Trmmp. Sharing THE DAILY DWORKIN and other Substack essays on Facebook. Making a VOTE EARLY splash on October 17. Brushing up on the Propositions. Voting as soon as I get my ballot in my hot little hands. Dropping it off instead of chancing it with the USPS. Susan Collins does need to answer for this in a debate for everyone. Imagine if Patel’s FBI quashed the investigation thats why she eventually voted for all the tRump nominees then she plays dumb. PLEASE MAINE: Elect Troy Jackson & let him win by high margins….thank you Scott. ONWARD!!!!!💙💙💙 Susan Colins talks a big game, but votes for Trump and the regime most of the time. She should absolutely swear under oath for corruption. Go Troy Jackson! i give monthly to the Democratic National Committee and I support Democrat's running in Washington state. Only Communist Countries, run by dictators, form their own network. HMMM! I love all the local media here in Maine that refer to her as a "moderate." She certainly hasn't been a moderate since Trump's been in office and now we know at least part of the answer why. I'm looking forward to the debates (or her justifications for squirming out of them). Diane’s Newsletter5h I donate only to candidates. I will not donate to organizations because I don’t know how or where my donation is spent. The DNC is a Centrist organization that does not acknowledge the left wing of the party. They have not even congratulated the young successful candidates! Thank you! When they blackballed anyone campaigning to unseat an INCUMBENT, that was it for us!  They went out of their way to re-elect CORRUPT HENRY CUELLAR and then he genuflects to tRump!  Donald Trump pardons Henry Cuellar, claims Joe Biden targeted him Dec 3, 2025President Trump said Wednesday he was granting a full and unconditional pardon to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) and his wife, Imelda, who last year were indicted on charges related to allegedly acce… https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5631645-trump-pardon-cuellar-texas-biden/ Same here. I keep getting texts from the DNC begging for donations. I delete them and donate directly to candidates of my choice. The Democratic leadership needs to get its head out quickly. There are too many candidates that VOTERS supported that the DNC ignored or fought.  Like MAMDAANI who has done an impressive turnaround and also helped empower NYC residents - telling them that it's THEIR GOVERNMENT!  Also AABDUL EL-SAYED is impressive - defeated both the DNC and AIPAC=ANTI-DEMOCRACY.  TOO MUCH MONEY and POWER with the WEALTHY!  ROBERT KRAFT defined his bigotry and willingness to support GENOCIDE and WAR CRIMES and the NFL joined.  Old Man with a Dog7h There is certainly a time for asking questions of Collins. I keep thinking of when Perry Mason was asking questions on TV. “Never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.” The answer to the next question is: I will probably be rage posting as more and more dark money comes out against future senator Talarico! We really MUST get rid of the Citizens United court ruling. A donor told the FBI he traded campaign cash for help in Congress, and the probe died anyway. Should Susan Collins have to answer questions under oath? Absolutely AND I hope Maine voters NEVER vote for her again!!! Forty days out, what’s one thing you’re doing between now and Election Day? I'll be attending our 1st Saturday demonstration and NO KINGS day events. There should absolutely be a congressional probe into Susan Collins actions we can see how “Concerned” she really is? We are having another protest sign waving near the main highway. There are more of us each time. $22,000,000 for a $150,000 campaign donation. Not a bad deal if you’re willing to go to prison. One might conclude that Collins is toast but in a NYT article today she’s getting much support from the middle class. People sometimes just baffle me with what they are willing to accept as ok!🤬 Posts like this won’t go through, update https://apple.news/AjDvLaOtYQTiDlOO0rAuAtQ I’m waiting for someone to make a movie in which a foreign power takes over the White House, removes its current denizens, and establishes a logical, caring administration. It will be called “For Their Own Good,” subtitled “and for the rest of the world.” Are at Protests, writing postcards ( mailing 300 to Michigan on Oct 14 ) and asking people to vote ( one at a gas station to a young man who was asked by my husband if he was going to Vote ) he said no, he hates Politics . My husband’s answer was “ you HAVE TO Vote! “ before my husband left he asked again, “ are you going to vote?” And he said he would. Making people think, one person at a time. It's All Relative8h GO Troy Jackson in Maine! Ask Susan Collins what she knows about why Martin Kao went to prison? Just have to say we have been paying $6.00+ for gas all through this past summer here on the Olympic Peninsula of WA state. Trump is so messed up! Does he not see how crazy it is to have caused a fuel crisis for most of the world (including here in the good old US of A) while he goes blathering on about 'his' Venezuelan oil!?!? Shesh! I kind of wish that Judge Timothy Kelly would have left Trump to stew in his own juices without any media coverage! The man cannot live without constantly seeing his face everywhere. But we will see what his next fiasco will be soon enough. Yea....and where is the money for the Venezuela Oil scummy stole?????? couple of comments: Today, the secret service still refused to let Pro Publica, CNN and MSNOW, even pulled their press passes. Yet, chinese media was allowed in. This is in defiance of the judge's ruling Wednesday night. So, question will be, what happens next. Sure hope there are some arrests and sanctions. As for Susan Collins, I hope Troy Jackson goes to every one of the towns that voted for her and play this for all to hear. Gloves off, she will never face criminal prosecution but she has to be removed from congress. what am I doing between now and the election? I am taking training to be a person to help check mail-in ballots for errors, and I am learning how to become a person that will give rides to people that vote early in person or on election day, and make sure they get to actually get to vote. I am also going to be calling local police stations to ask that they respond to any malfeasance with ICE or FBI or any militia group that wants to interfere. Gloves are off people, and I am no longer just voting, but also participating in all of the voting structure to help rid corrupt congress people not willing to honor their oaths. DIRTY ENERGY KOCH has been lusting after VENEZUELA OIL for decades that I recall....as I recall, they had a refinery on the GULF OF MEXICO (not to be confused with the GULF OF AMERICA) capable of refining heavy oil.  In one of my college chem courses, we did DISTILLATION EXPERIMENTS that revealed the energy input required - the differential was significant.  FROM GREG PALAST:  The Koch Brothers, Hugo Chavez And The XL Pipeline by Greg Palastfor Vice Magazine and The Other 98%February 7, 2013 https://www.gregpalast.com/the-koch-brothers-hugo-chavez-and-the-xl-pipeline/ Koch Industries and Venezuelan Oil https://www.juche.org/briefings/koch-venezuelan-oil Where is the oil money Trump stole from Venezuela’s people? Nobody in Trump regime will say where Venezuela’s oil money is, who controls it or even who’s collecting its accrued interest by Thom Hartmann September 19, 2026 excerpt:  At any other time in American history, it would end the career of somebody like Scott Bessent, our limited-intelligence Treasury Secretary. It came out yesterday when Illinois Congressman Sean Casten was questioning him about the “billions of dollars” that Trump keeps claiming America is “getting” from selling Venezuelan oil. https://asiatimes.com/2026/09/where-is-the-oil-money-trump-stole-from-venezuelas-people/ Trump Says He Took Venezuela's Oil. Here's What Actually Happened. Trump put Venezuelan revenues in a secretive bank account overseen by the U.S. government. It's a display of the Treasury's unaccountable power. Matthew Petti Updated Fri, August 7, 2026 at 11:13 AM EDT https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-says-took-venezuelas-oil-151304112.html Where are the Venezuelan oil fields Republican oil barons want Trump to grab? Check this map. https://thedemlabs.org/2025/12/22/venezuela-oil-trump-maduro-koch-oil-lobby/