Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno Says His Former Son-in-Law, Rep. Max Miller, Abused His Daughter. Miller Won't Quit, and After Wednesday His Party Is Stuck With Him.
Plus: Wisconsin’s socialist frontrunner never deleted the abolish-the-police posts, and the press never went looking.
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In today’s Read:
A GOP congressman is fighting abuse allegations from his ex-wife, a senator’s daughter. No conviction, plenty of smoke, and the Ohio GOP has until Wednesday to swap him off the ballot.
Wisconsin’s Democratic frontrunner for governor called to “abolish the police” and “abolish ICE,” and never deleted the posts. Guess which outlets went looking.
Sixty thousand people crossed into Spain’s Ceuta enclave in days and 67 died. Did Morocco open the gate on purpose?
Quick Rundown: armed bystanders end an Idaho shooting, a court dents mandatory detention, Trump stalls his own AG, MAGA exiles plot a party in Maine, the Russia clock runs out, and Trump calls off a strike on Iran.
His Own Party Has Until Wednesday to Take Max Miller Off the Ballot. He Says He’s Staying.
The Story.
Ohio Republican Rep. Max Miller went live on X on Sunday to deny abusing his ex-wife and their young daughter, and to announce he is not dropping out of his re-election race.
The allegations come out of a bitter divorce and custody fight. Miller and Emily Moreno married at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and divorced in late 2025. In divorce and custody filings, she has alleged he threw scalding water on her, held a gun to her head, shoved her into a wall, and fractured their 2-year-old daughter's collarbone. Mother Jones, which obtained roughly 2,000 pages of court filings and police reports, adds claims of drug use, verbal abuse, and a pattern of allegations involving other women, including a 2021 Politico report that he shoved a young woman down a flight of stairs, which three witnesses corroborated and Miller denied. Stephanie Grisham, Trump's former White House press secretary, has separately described her own abusive relationship with Miller in a 2021 Washington Post op-ed, a dispute the two later settled. Here's the other half: no criminal charges have been filed, a Cuyahoga County child-welfare investigation into the daughter came back unsubstantiated, and family court has kept joint custody in place, which Miller's team says would be impossible if the claims held up. The man leading the charge against him is his former father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno, who calls Miller "a danger" who "should not serve".
Let’s talk about the politics. Ohio's 7th District is red, but not safely: Trump carried it by about 11 points in 2024, while Miller himself won with roughly 51%. Under Ohio law, the window to withdraw and let the party name a replacement closes on August 5, this Wednesday, with a party committee able to certify a new candidate by about August 10. Miller has clearly stated he has no plans to withdraw. His Democratic opponent is Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker and Brook Park city councilman.
The Left’s read. A documented pattern the GOP is covering for. Mother Jones, the New York Times, and ABC lead with the police reports, the photographs of injuries, the second accuser in Grisham, and Democratic demands for a House Ethics investigation and Miller’s resignation. Poindexter’s line is that if the allegations are true, Miller “should be in jail.”
The Right’s read. Mostly silence, with a denial run straight. Fox airs Miller’s “I have nothing to hide” and leans on the unsubstantiated finding and the absence of charges. Outside of Bernie Moreno, almost no elected Republican will say anything on the record, and the loudest GOP chatter is speculation about who could replace him, not a defense of the man himself.
What both sides are skipping. Two things. First, Miller’s own release cuts against his flat denial. In audio he put out to clear himself, he references the water incident, saying he “never thought that that hurt you” and that it was “never done to hurt you with intent.” That is not a denial that it happened. It’s a denial that he meant it, on his own recording, and handwritten apology notes have been referenced too. Second, the clock. The party is treating this as Miller’s decision to make, when the replacement window is a decision the Ohio GOP still controls for three more days. After Wednesday, his name is locked on the ballot no matter what surfaces in October.
Currently, this is a classic he-said/she-said, with a nasty divorce and custody battle wrapped around it. Bitter exes exist. False accusations exist. No court has substantiated a thing; the child-welfare finding came back unsubstantiated, and joint custody is still in place. That is Miller’s strongest card.
But look at what those two facts actually prove, because his team is walking them a lot farther than they go. “Unsubstantiated” does not mean innocent. In child-welfare terms, it means investigators couldn’t get the evidence over the bar, not that they decided it never happened, and the file stays open on the shelf either way. Joint custody proves even less about Emily. Family court is answering one question: whether he’s a risk to the child, not whether he hurt his wife. A judge can decide a kid is safe with her father and leave shared custody in place without ever ruling on what happened between the two adults. Different question, different standard. “I kept my custody” answers the one about the daughter. It says nothing about the one about the mother.
Still, no prosecutor has charged him over Emily, and no court has found her claims true. But the custody order doesn’t clear him, which is exactly the argument he’s trying to make.
Because “he said / she said” is not the same as “nothing here.”
Clearly, there is smoke. Police reports with her account. Photographs of injuries in the filings. A second woman, Stephanie Grisham, describing the same kind of relationship years earlier and settling over it. And Miller’s own audio, where he doesn’t deny the water happened, only that he meant to hurt her. When your defense tape concedes the event and argues about intent, that’s not an exoneration; it’s an admission.
That would be a problem for any man. It’s a bigger problem for a United States Representative, who votes on the laws the rest of us live under. And it’s a real political problem for a party that has until Wednesday to do something about it.
Republicans have a problem. Ohio’s 7th is winnable, and it’s winnable with almost anyone whose name isn’t currently attached to a scalding-water audio clip. Trump took the district by eleven. Miller scraped in at fifty-one. Bernie Moreno, a Republican senator with every incentive to keep his party’s seat, looked at his former son-in-law and said “danger.” It’s to be expected that a father would choose his child over the party, but he’s not wrong either.
Here’s the choice. The Republicans can swap him by Wednesday and keep a red seat clean. Or they can let the clock run, keep a scandal-wrapped incumbent on the ballot, and hand Brian Poindexter the one thing an ironworker in a Cleveland suburb could never buy himself: a reason for soft-R women to leave the top of the ticket blank. But Miller has to withdraw first, and all signs point to him staying put.
Honestly, the guy should withdraw and get his life and house in order. The question is, will the Republicans apply the pressure to make him withdraw, or just watch the clock run? The challenge is money. Ohio should be a safe bet and not require a great deal of financial investment, but with Ramaswamy underperforming at the top of the ticket (a race Cook moved from “Lean R” to “Toss-up” in July) and the choice down-ballot coming down to Miller or a new candidate they’d have to elevate, the Republicans are in a bind, having to spend money to defend a seat that should have been locked in. That’s a real problem with a House margin this narrow.
Watch three things this week. Watch whether any Ohio Republican with a title publicly calls on Miller to step aside before Wednesday. Watch whether the House Ethics Committee confirms it opened anything, or whether it waits for the calendar to make the question moot. And watch the audio, not the GoFundMe of grievances he’s posting around it: does anyone with a microphone ask him to explain, on the record, why the tape has him apologizing for something he says never happened?
Wisconsin’s Socialist Frontrunner Wanted to Abolish the Police. She Never Deleted the Posts, and the Press goes “meh.”
The Story.
Francesca Hong, a 37-year-old chef, bartender, and state lawmaker who has been a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America since 2020, leads the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin, out front of a scattered field in a late-July Marquette Law School poll. She got there on her own steam and on a run of luck. Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez dropped out on July 25 after her campaign discovered it had hundreds of thousands of dollars less on hand than it had reported, and she fired her manager. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley had dropped out and endorsed Rodriguez, then un-dropped-out on July 18 when her campaign cratered. Hong’s own record is the part the establishment would rather skip past.
A 2020 CNN KFile review documents her posting “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” calling to abolish ICE and the Senate, and writing that “police exist to uphold white supremacy.” She has not deleted any of it. She now says a governor could not defund the police and that she would not. She’s been backed by Reps. Ilhan Omar and Ro Khanna, and appeared on Hasan Piker’s stream to confirm parts of her platform. The likely Republican nominee is Rep. Tom Tiffany.
The Left’s read. Generational energy in a battleground. WPR and CNN’s newer coverage frame Hong as a prove-it moment for the DSA and treat the radical posts as years-old comments she has since clarified, taking the walk-back at face value.
The Right’s read. A socialist who wants to abolish the police, ICE, and the Senate is leading in a swing state, and the press is running cover. Fox, Breitbart, and Twitchy hammer the undeleted posts, the Piker appearance, and the pattern of national desks discovering her “energy” but not her archive.
What both sides are skipping. The left underplays that Hong never renounced or deleted a word of it. She says the job wouldn’t let her do it, which is a logistics answer, not a change of heart. The right mostly skips why she’s actually winning, which has less to do with socialism catching fire than with the two establishment alternatives imploding, one on a finance-reporting scandal and one on cold feet. Hong didn’t clear the field. The field cleared itself, and she was the last one standing.
She didn’t say “I was wrong to write that police exist to uphold white supremacy.” She said a governor can’t defund the police. That is a dodge. Which is why she left the posts up. Why she goes on the Hasan Piker stream. Because she is exactly who she has said she is since 2020.
Which is more than I can say for the coverage.
Here’s my actual beef, and it isn’t with Hong. A candidate is allowed to be a socialist. Wisconsin is allowed to nominate one, unfortunately. What I want to know is why it took the KFile and a handful of right-leaning outlets to tell you that the frontrunner for governor of a premier swing state wrote “abolish ICE” and “abolish the Senate” and never walked it back, while the national desks found the words “chef,” “bartender,” and “generational” but never quite made it to “abolish the police.” When every Democratic mayor in the country reversed course on defund after 2020 and quietly deleted their old posts, that was a story. When a gubernatorial frontrunner keeps hers up and runs on the softened version out loud, that’s “energy.”
I mean she is not wrong. A governor genuinely can’t unilaterally defund a municipal police department, so “I won’t” is technically true. Fine. Then ask the follow-up the profiles won’t: do you still believe the thing you wrote, that the police exist to uphold white supremacy, or do you just concede you lack the power to act on it? Those are different answers, also who will this influence her policy? What will she do with executive orders? These questions matter, and no one seems to be asking them.
So watch a few things as this primary closes. Watch whether a single national outlet asks Hong to affirm or retract the “white supremacy” line, in those words, instead of accepting “I won’t defund” as if it settled the belief. Watch whether her lead survives contact now that the posts are traveling on the right, or whether Wisconsin Democrats decide a swing state isn’t the place to test the theory. And watch whether the same reporters who spent 2021 writing “Democrats have moved on from defund” tell you that one of them plainly hasn’t.
60,000 People Crossed Into a Spanish City in Days and 67 Died. The Coverage Keeps Dodging the Obvious Question: Did Morocco Open the Gate?
The Story.
Roughly 60,000 people crossed into Ceuta, Spain’s small enclave on the North African coast, over a matter of days, a number larger than half the city’s population. Many swam around the border fence rather than climbing it. At least 67 people died, drowned or crushed in a stampede at a breakwater. Since then, more than 53,000 have been returned to Morocco under a fast repatriation deal between Madrid and Rabat, which leaves several thousand still in the enclave and reception centers still strained. Spain says the situation is back under control and is installing a 500-meter containment barrier along the sea border. The trigger that moved this many people at once: smugglers told them a June 29 Spanish Supreme Court ruling meant anyone arriving by sea couldn’t be deported. The ruling doesn’t say that. It says sea arrivals get due process because they didn’t cross the physical border infrastructure. And running underneath all of it is the reporting that Morocco encouraged and facilitated the surge to test Pedro Sánchez’s weak left-wing government and its liberal migration posture.
The Left’s read. A humanitarian catastrophe and a due-process story. CNN and Al Jazeera center the 67 dead and the danger of summary “hot returns,” scrutinizing Spain’s mass expulsions to Morocco far more closely than they scrutinize how 60,000 people came to move at the same moment.
The Right’s read. An engineered invasion. The Washington Times and European populist outlets frame it as Morocco deliberately opening the valve to pressure Madrid, using human beings as a bargaining chip the way Rabat has before, over money, fishing rights, and Western Sahara.
What both sides are skipping. The left won't say the quiet part, which is that a border does not move 60,000 people in a few days by accident, and Rabat has a documented history of opening and shutting this exact valve when it wants something from Spain. The right glides past the ending, but not in the way you'd think. The crowd didn't empty out because Spain mounted some heroic removal. Most of those 50,000 walked back to Morocco on their own once they found no food, no shelter, and shuttered shops waiting for them. That cuts against the "unstoppable invasion" panic, and it points at the real magnet nobody wants to name: in April, Spain announced a mass regularization of migrants living there illegally, 1.2 million applied, and 22 EU governments have since told Brussels that promise was the pull.
A border does not move sixty thousand people by accident. Morocco controls this tap. It has yanked it open and shut before to squeeze Madrid for money and concessions, and the reporting that Rabat opened it this time to probe a shaky left-wing government is the likeliest read, not a conspiracy theory. Sixty thousand people, most of them fighting-age men, moved on the same rumor in the same few days. And it wasn’t all desperate swimming. Buses reportedly brought people from across Morocco to the border at Fnideq, and Spanish intelligence had warned days earlier that Rabat was likely to ease the frontier as a Throne Day “gesture of magnanimity,” reading the surge as a deliberate test. Morocco denies facilitating anything. The buses were there anyway. That is a decision by a state that knew exactly what a “you can’t be deported” rumor would do to a desperate crowd. In the end, 67 of them died.
At almost any other point in history, when tens of thousands of fighting-age men pushed across a national border in a weekend, no one would have hunted for a softer word than invasion. The left reaches for a softer word because of who’s doing the pushing and who’s doing the pointing.
Within days, more than 50,000 of them turned around and went back on their own. They walked back because Ceuta had nothing for them. No food, no shelter, the shops shut, a city that couldn’t absorb a second population overnight. This wasn’t the kind of mass military removal the invasion coverage implies. The crowd thinned itself the moment they realized there was nothing to stay for.
Watch the dodge the press reached for while this played out, too. Not the Spanish mainland. Not even the European continent. As if Ceuta stops being Spain because it sits on the African coast. Tell that to the people who live there, who spent the week watching migrants break into shops by the hundreds, then bolted their own doors and went into the street with sticks because the Guardia Civil was overwhelmed. “It’s technically not Europe” is a copout. It’s a permission slip to look away from tens of thousands of Spanish citizens the government left to fend for themselves.
And I’m not going to hedge this, because the cause isn’t a mystery. Ceuta got tested because Pedro Sánchez is soft on exactly this, and Morocco knows it. This is a prime minister who just handed amnesty to more than a million people in the country illegally, and who answers a border breach with sermons about tolerance while branding the people alarmed by it xenophobes. He has argued out loud that Spain needs the newcomers to prop up its pensions and its shrinking population. Rabat looked at all of that and saw a door it could lean on, so it leaned. And Ceuta is not the last handle on that door. Melilla, the other big enclave, and the smaller Spanish holdings off the Moroccan coast, the Peñón de Vélez, the Alhucemas and Chafarinas islands, are all sitting right there for the next test. Every one of them is a piece of the EU’s external border. A weak hand in Madrid is a security problem for the whole bloc.
And Sánchez can’t hide behind surprise. Spanish intelligence reportedly flagged the surge days before it hit, and the Spanish outlet The Objective says those warnings existed. His government denied having them. Warned in advance, it looked away. That isn’t bad luck. It’s a choice.
So watch three things. Watch whether Sánchez names Morocco’s role out loud or keeps blaming the “selfish” EU and the smugglers, because who he refuses to name tells you who he’s protecting. Watch whether the same American outlets that call our own southern border a manufactured panic keep using the word “breach” now that it’s happening to Spain. And watch that returned-versus-remaining number, because the several thousand still inside are the real test of whether “back under control” means anything or just sounded good on Friday.
Sánchez sells the amnesty as a spreadsheet fix: more workers paying in, a younger population to carry the pensions. Set aside whether importing a million people you can’t vet strengthens a welfare state or just grows the bill. The part he never says out loud is the cultural one. You do not move people across civilizations at this scale, this fast, and expect the country on the receiving end to stay itself. Spain, of all places, should remember how it happens. The Moors held most of the peninsula for nearly 800 years before the Reconquista won it back. To me this reads like the slow, 21st-century rerun of that same story, a reconquest by demography and policy instead of armies, beginning at the exact point on the map where the first one landed. Call it alarmist if that’s easier. History has a way of not caring what we call it.
Two armed bystanders ended an In-N-Out shooting in Idaho before it got worse. A gunman killed three people, including a restaurant employee, and injured seven outside a newly opened In-N-Out in Twin Falls on Saturday before an off-duty Idaho State Police trooper and an armed citizen returned fire on him. The shooter, 24-year-old Chad Williams, died of a self-inflicted wound, and the county sheriff called both men heroes who “saved many lives.” No motive has been released.
Scope Report@ScopeReport_BREAKING: Active shooter reported near the In-N-Out Burger at Canyon Rim in Twin Falls, Idaho; according to police.9:35 PM · Aug 1, 2026 · 1.52M Views61 Replies · 136 Reposts · 741 LikesA federal appeals court punched a hole in mandatory immigration detention. The 7th Circuit ruled 2-1 on Thursday that the Trump administration’s no-bond detention policy is unconstitutional in some cases, which could let hundreds of detainees in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin request bond hearings. The fight is over the 2025 Laken Riley Act’s detention mandate for offenses ranging from shoplifting to assault. Appeals courts have now split, and the Supreme Court hears the question in October.
Trump’s answer to two Republicans blocking his attorney general: wait them out. After the Senate Judiciary Committee postponed Todd Blanche’s confirmation vote because John Cornyn and Thom Tillis wouldn’t commit, Trump floated pulling the nomination until 2027, when both senators leave office, and re-nominating Blanche then. The two are holding out for a written guarantee that a DOJ settlement giving Trump audit immunity on prior tax returns is dead.
MAGA exiles met at Tucker Carlson’s Maine home to talk up a new party. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Carlson, outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie, and former counterterrorism official Joe Kent announced a “movement,” with Greene posting “He betrayed us all” over Trump’s Iran turn and the unreleased Epstein files. Trump’s reply was to back a primary challenge against her and call her “Wacky Marjorie.”
Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸@FmrRepMTGWe said no more foreign wars and we meant it and supported Donald Trump because he made that promise. But he’s betrayed us all. Our commitment is America First for all Americans, right, left, and center. The movement has begun.
3:02 PM · Aug 1, 2026 · 9.33M Views14K Replies · 12.1K Reposts · 79.4K LikesTrump’s Russia deadline runs out this week. His shortened ultimatum for Moscow to move toward a ceasefire expires around August 7 to 11, and envoy Steve Witkoff, who arrived in Israel on August 1, is headed to Moscow for what’s being billed as last-chance talks. Trump said flatly on July 31 that the U.S. will “put sanctions” on Russian oil.
Trump says he called off the biggest strike since World War II, and Iran has until Monday to make it worth it. On Saturday the president said he cancelled a planned attack on Iran, which he called the largest U.S. military operation since WWII, after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iran pushed for diplomacy. He tied the pause to rapidly reaching a deal that forces the “Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT” and ends Iran’s nuclear threat. Talks begin Monday, and he added that the U.S. is “ready to go” whenever he wants.
Minnesota’s AI deepfake law is now live, with a $500,000 price tag. As of August 1, victims of non-consensual AI-generated explicit media can sue creators and distributors in Minnesota for up to $500,000 per violation, after a federal court declined to block the law. It’s the first real test of whether a state statute can put a number on synthetic abuse.
That’s The Read.
See you Wednesday.
If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.
Here’s a question, Massie is running around X claiming some bill in the house gave money to Morocco and essentially authorized the invasion into Spain. I don’t think he’s being honest, but of course people blindly follow him. Curious if you saw his claim.