The “Total Patsy” Theory Died This Week. His Boyfriend Killed It on the Stand.
Plus: McConnell's been hospitalized a month and nobody will say why. And Trump fired the election commission a day after his DOJ threatened to jail election officials.
It's Friday!
I don’t know about you, but I am ready for the weekend! My plan is recovery. Last weekend was Independence Day weekend, and I have yet to catch up on regular life tasks this week. So an exciting weekend of laundry and cleaning ahead, and I am actually cool with that.
In today’s Read:
Robinson’s own boyfriend read the confession into the record. Candace Owens keeps moving the goalposts. Get off her train.
McConnell’s been hospitalized since June 14, and his party will only say “he’s improving.” A Democratic governor is the one asking questions.
Trump emptied the election commission the day after his DOJ threatened election officials with prison. Same campaign, two moves.
Quick Rundown: Spencer Pratt’s fraud video, Carroll’s $5.8 million, another strike on Iran, the ICE-obstruction judge walks, Platner quits, Trump’s Arlington arch, and the Smithsonian report.
The “Total Patsy” Theory Died This Week. His Boyfriend Killed It on the Stand.
The Story.
Tyler Robinson, 23, is charged with aggravated murder in the September 10 assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Since the last edition, the preliminary hearing ran several more days in Provo and the evidence got a lot heavier.
Prosecutors played a recorded interview with Lance Twiggs, Robinson’s romantic partner, who told investigators Robinson confessed in several ways: face to face, by text, and in a handwritten note. One message read, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I took it.” Twiggs said Robinson asked to borrow a Dremel tool about a month earlier to engrave bullets “for a hunting trip,” and forensics matched that exact Dremel to the engravings on casings found in the rifle and in Robinson’s home.
The engravings included “hey fascist, catch” and “bella ciao.” The court also, by accident, put Robinson’s handwritten confession note on the screen. Utah’s highest court declined to hear the defense’s appeal of Judge Tony Graf’s rulings on cameras and hearsay. Graf decides at the close of the hearing whether the case goes to trial.
The Left read. A careful evidence build. PBS, CNN, and the wires cover the confession texts, the Dremel match, the DNA, the boyfriend on the stand, with the defense’s DNA objection noted and moved past. Straight true-crime procedural.
The Right’s read. Fox and the smaller sites lead with the confession and the “hey fascist, catch” casings. What went missing this round is louder than what got said: the “Tyler Robinson never set foot on that campus, he’s a patsy” faction that ran hot in June has mostly gone silent as the confession texts landed, except Candace of course.
What both sides are skipping. The defense’s live fight isn’t the confession. It’s the DNA. Lawyer Michael Burt is hammering the analyst on whether the sample can be pinned to Robinson at all, and that’s the only real challenge going down right now. But it is also the defense's job.
I am not about to be polite. For almost a year Owens has run a "just asking questions" operation on this murder, and the questions keep changing because the last batch got demolished. "Total patsy." "Tyler Robinson was never even on campus." Then the state put his Dodge Challenger on UVU's cameras four times on September 10, the footage flatly contradicting her, and this week his own boyfriend read the confession texts into the record. So watch the pivot happen in real time. On her feed this week it's not "never on campus" anymore.
Now it’s the phone screen was doctored, the ballistics don’t add up, Twiggs testified Tyler “wasn’t political,” and my personal favorite, the whole hearing is a “Zionist PR” operation against her personally. “He wasn’t there” collapses and the answer isn’t “I was wrong.” It’s a fresh theory by dinner.
Notice what she is not doing. She isn’t sitting down for the obvious move, the hours-long livestream taking the hearing apart exhibit by exhibit, in real time, the way you would if you actually had the goods and could dismantle the state’s case on camera. That would mean holding a year of contradictory claims still long enough for people to line them up next to each other. So instead you get one-liners and quote-tweets of anonymous accounts about phone glass. The drip lets her keep moving. A livestream would pin her.
Here’s the tell inside the tell. Candace offered to help Robinson’s defense. They never called. And the defense hasn’t floated a single one of her theories as grounds for reasonable doubt. Not the “never on campus” line, not the doctored phone screen. None of it. Their actual argument is a narrow, technical fight over whether the DNA analyst can pin the sample to Robinson, and nothing more than that. So run her logic all the way to the end. You can’t say the defense is in on some plot to hang Robinson out as a patsy, because then why would Candace, his loudest booster, offer to work with them? But when they pass on her help, the pass itself gets spun into proof of something. Heads she’s right, tails she’s still right. Goalpost moved, again.
Then the part I won’t dress up. This week Owens called the hearing a “show trial,” took a swipe at Erika Kirk’s tears, and posted that “science has no place in a discussion about men made of steel and grieving widows. In fact, it’s demonic.”
A widow buried her husband. Candace turned it into content and a subscriber drive.
So let me say it plainly. I don’t file Candace Owens under “the right” anymore. She’s in it for Candace. Her numbers are climbing because a chunk of the left now cheers her for kicking TPUSA and the president, and grief-farming Erika Kirk pays the bills. If you’re still on her train after this week, after the footage, after the confession, after the goalposts sprinted down the field one more time, get off. This isn’t questioning a case. It’s selling a story she can’t keep straight to an audience that stopped checking.
Watch whether Graf binds the case over (he will). Watch whether Owens ever does the real-time, evidence-by-evidence livestream, or just keeps drip-posting theories with a 24-hour shelf life. And watch her follower count, because it tells you exactly who she’s performing for now.
She keeps moving the goalposts. The hearing keeps not caring.
Mitch McConnell Has Been in a Hospital for a Month. Republican Won’t Tell You Why.
The Story.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, 84, has been hospitalized since June 14 and hasn’t appeared in public or said a word in nearly a month. His office offers one sentence on repeat: he “continues to improve” and is “working closely with his staff.” No diagnosis. No prognosis. Emergency dispatch recordings reported by multiple outlets say responders were sent to his Washington home for an unconscious person in cardiac arrest, with CPR in progress. He chairs the Senate Rules Committee and a defense appropriations panel, and the Senate is back to a full calendar. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, published a letter asking McConnell for a real update, writing that “allowing speculation to continue in the media is not fair to the Senator or to Kentuckians.”
The Left’s read. A transparency failure and a governance problem. Beshear presses, former Sen. Barbara Boxer says she’s “stunned” at the silence, and The Hill runs the broader “what does a lawmaker owe voters” debate.
The Right’s read. Split, and the split is the story. GOP leaders rolled out near-identical statements that they’ve “spoken with” McConnell, and he’s recovering. And a big piece of the right isn’t buying the choreography: conservatives who spent years demanding transparency are calling the coordinated messaging its own cover-up. CNN’s own conservative commentator flagged the matching talking points as “weird.”
What both sides are skipping. The vacancy math, which is the part that actually decides things. In 2024 Kentucky’s Republican legislature passed a law, over Beshear’s veto, that strips the governor of the power to appoint a replacement senator. So a McConnell exit doesn’t hand a Democratic governor a pick. It triggers a special election on a tight clock. And the cardiac-arrest detail sits in the “rumor” pile only because the office won’t confirm or deny it, which is exactly how a silence turns into a conspiracy generator.
Quick context, because this is the part that changes the stakes. Everybody assumes a senator leaving mid-term means the governor picks the next one. Not here. Kentucky’s own GOP wrote that power out of Beshear’s hands in 2024. If the seat opens, Beshear issues a proclamation, and the state runs a special election it has never actually run before, with a practical September 1 deadline to line it up with November’s vote. So the “what happens next” isn’t a backroom appointment. It’s an untested law and a calendar nobody’s tested against a real vacancy.
Look, I don’t wish the man ill, and I’m not going to pretend a health event at 84 is a scandal by itself. Both parties do this, and they all do it badly. Dianne Feinstein’s staff ran her Senate office while she was visibly gone. Fetterman’s early weeks were a fog nobody would describe. This is a bipartisan bad habit, and it’s insulting every single time.
The line we are being fed, “He’s improving,” is not reassuring and, coming from his press aide, does not meet the threshold for informing the public. A sitting United States senator has been in a hospital for four weeks, reportedly went into cardiac arrest, and his party’s answer is a group text of identical reassurances. We can’t keep doing this. The people asking for real answers are a Democratic governor and a chunk of the online right, and the people running interference are McConnell’s own leadership team reading from the same script. When the reassurance is that coordinated, start asking what it’s hiding.
Watch whether the office ever puts a diagnosis on paper. Watch whether Beshear moves toward a proclamation, because that’s the moment this stops being gossip and becomes a Senate seat in play. And watch that September 1 date, because Kentucky’s untested vacancy law is about to get a live trial nobody planned for.
A month is a long time to say nothing. Somebody owes Kentucky a straight sentence.
Trump Fired the Whole Election Commission. The Day Before, His DOJ Threatened to Jail Election Officials.
The Story.
On Thursday, July 9, the White House removed all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the only federal agency built solely for election administration. The two Democrats, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were fired by email. The lone Republican, Christy McCormick, was allowed to resign. All three were Senate-confirmed. With zero commissioners, the agency has no quorum, so it can’t act. It can’t certify voting systems or update the federal voter-registration form, four months before the November midterms. Many states require that federal certification before they’ll buy or use voting machines. The firing leans on the Supreme Court’s Slaughter ruling expanding a president’s power to remove independent officials.
Now rewind one day. On July 7 and 8, Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent letters to all 50 states warning that any election officer who “knowingly retains noncitizens” on the rolls “could be subject to criminal liability,” and gave states five days to explain their compliance. Michigan’s Secretary of State was named directly. Here’s the piece that recasts the whole thing: the DOJ has been suing states for voter data and losing, 11 times in district court, with the Sixth Circuit becoming the first appeals court to affirm one of those losses, siding with Michigan. The criminal-threat letters showed up after the courtroom strategy collapsed.
The Left’s read. Seizing the machinery. Schumer calls the EAC firing “a brazen attempt to seize control of our elections before a single vote is cast,” and the Brennan Center ties it to a pattern of election interference. The Dhillon letters get filed as an intimidation campaign against blue-state officials.
The Right’s read. Lawful housekeeping. Townhall and the pro-administration read frame the firing as a president using the removal power the Court just handed him and staffing a commission with people “aligned” on election security. Noncitizens shouldn’t be on the rolls, the argument goes, and officials who won’t clean them off can answer for it.
What both sides are skipping. The EAC doesn’t run elections; states do. So “seizing election control” oversells what one gutted commission can do. The durable move is quieter: strip the agency of a quorum and it can’t be captured by anyone, but it also can’t do its normal certification job at the exact moment states need it. And nobody’s connecting the dots the administration is drawing in plain sight. The Slaughter removal ruling, the Dhillon prosecution letters, the mail-voting executive order, and now the EAC firing aren’t four separate “Trump fires people” stories. They’re one campaign aimed at the election machinery, and the press keeps covering the pieces one at a time. One more thing both sides skip: the Dhillon letters threaten the officials personally, not any actual illegal votes, and they came after eleven courtroom losses. As election-law expert David Becker put it, if the DOJ believed officials had committed crimes, it would indict them, not issue warnings by mail.
This one isn’t cut and dry, and I won’t pretend it is.
Start with what’s real, because my side is right about the underlying worry. There might not be proof of noncitizens voting in numbers that swing an election. But “we haven’t caught it” is not the same as “the door is locked,” and in a lot of states the door is propped wide open. California and plenty of blue states run elections loose enough that there’s no real check on a ballot before it hits the processing center to be counted. Ballot harvesting is legal. Signature rules are a formality in places, a mark that’s supposed to have a witness, except the witness never has to give their name. You don’t have to film someone casting a fraudulent vote to see the hole. You don’t leave a loophole open just because nobody’s proven it’s being climbed through, and anyone who’s ever locked a door they weren’t sure would get tried understands that instinct fine.
And here’s the part both parties talk around. The doubt itself is the damage. When a big chunk of the country isn’t sure the count is clean, that’s a real injury to the system whether or not one illegal ballot exists, and restoring that confidence takes actual changes, not a press release. So on the goal, tighten the rules, close the gaps, make people trust the number again, I’m here for it.
Now the execution, because this is where I get dicey. The DOJ has gone 0-for-11 in district court trying to force states to hand over their full voter files, and just lost its first appeal when the Sixth Circuit sided with Michigan. Before you write that off as liberal judges covering for a scam, look closer. Some of the reddest states in the country, Utah and Idaho among them, refused the exact same demand, on the grounds that handing Washington unredacted rolls full of Social Security and driver’s license numbers breaks their own state privacy laws. Only two states signed the full agreement. When Idaho and a federal appeals court end up in the same spot, “activist courts” doesn’t cover it.
So let’s run the test. If a Democratic administration emptied the entire election commission and had its DOJ threaten red-state clerks with prison four months before a midterm, the right would lose its mind, and it would be right to. The only reason Democrats aren’t running this exact play is that the current setup already tilts their way, so they don’t have to. That’s not a moral high ground. It’s just whose turn it is.
Does Trump get to act surprised anyone’s upset? No. He ran on election integrity, this is the brand, and the base wanted teeth. Do I think emptying the EAC and mailing prosecution threats after eleven straight courtroom losses is his smartest move? Also no. The optics are bad, and the legal record is worse. And the precedent is the part that bites, because the removal power he’s using and the “fire the referees” move he’s modeling don’t retire when he does. They are there for the next president, and someday that’s the one you didn’t vote for.
Watch which states actually get their rolls cleaned versus just threatened. Watch whether the EAC gets restaffed before November or stays frozen through the vote. And watch whether one Republican cheering today remembers this the first time a Democrat reaches for the same tool.
Fix the locks. Just don’t hand the next guy a key to the whole building.
Graham Platner quit the Maine Senate race. The Democratic nominee suspended his campaign July 8 after Jenny Racicot told CNN and Politico that he raped her nearly five years ago, which he denies. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ro Khanna pulled their endorsements, and Maine Democrats have until July 27 to name a replacement to run against Susan Collins.
Spencer Pratt says the LA mayor’s race was stolen, and Elon Musk ran with it. The former mayoral candidate posted a roughly 10-minute video July 9 alleging fraud cost him a runoff spot: homeless residents paid to vote, NGOs “hoarding ballots,” dead and out-of-state names on the rolls, and harvesters filling in mail-in ballots. Pratt led Nithya Raman on election night before finishing third behind Mayor Karen Bass and Raman. Musk amplified it as “legalized election fraud,” and U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli says his office has fraud investigations open with the FBI.
E. Jean Carroll can finally collect her $5.8 million. A federal judge ordered the jury award, grown from $5 million to $5.8 million with interest, released to Carroll from escrow after the Supreme Court declined to hear Trump’s underlying appeal in the sexual-abuse and defamation case. Trump’s lawyers appealed the release order within the hour.
The U.S. bombed Iran again. American forces struck southern Iran early July 9, a second night of strikes as the June ceasefire falls apart and days after Trump declared the deal “over” from the NATO summit in Turkey.
The judge who helped a migrant dodge ICE got a $5,000 fine and no jail. Former Milwaukee County judge Hannah Dugan was fined $5,000 and spared prison this week after a federal jury convicted her of felony obstruction for steering an undocumented man out a back door while ICE agents waited. She faced up to five years, and prosecutors had asked for 15 to 21 months. Judge Lynn Adelman called her “an otherwise good person” who “made a bad decision in the moment.”
A federal commission advanced Trump’s 250-foot arch near Arlington. The National Capital Planning Commission gave preliminary approval July 9 to the “Triumphal Arch,” after nearly three hours of public opposition, including a Gold Star mother who said it would block the sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The structure violates a 1910 height law, and a final vote could come in September. Washington Post
The White House graded the Smithsonian and flunked it. A 162-page report titled “Saving America’s Story” accuses the National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism” and of trying to “divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens,” with complaints running from a slavery placard to a monarch-butterfly sculpture symbolizing DREAMers. It follows Trump’s executive order to strip “improper, divisive, or anti-American” ideology from the Smithsonian. Washington Post
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