She Rails Against the Rich. Her Hotel Bills Don’t.

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(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Politicians have to sleep somewhere. That’s only fair to say at the start. A campaign on the road needs beds, a staff, and someone to drive. Nobody expects a member of Congress to stump through Memphis and then check into a motel off the interstate. That isn’t the story. The story is the pattern, and the distance between the pattern and the message. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s re-election campaign has spent about $47,000 on hotels since April. That’s 45 separate charges, according to Federal Election Commission filings first reported by The New York Post. All 45 were at properties the industry

Politico Finally Found the Facts. It Took a Lawyer.

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Politico got a letter on Monday. By Wednesday night, it had a new headline. On Oct. 16, the outlet reported that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles helped set up then-press secretary Katie Zacharia’s Fox News interview with Sean Hannity. The headline said it plainly: “Susie Wiles helped set up Fox interview ahead of press secretary’s exit.” That headline is gone. A correction now sits on top of the story: “An earlier version of this report, including its headline, mischaracterized the role White House chief of staff Susie Wiles played in then-press secretary Katie Zacharia’s interview with Sean Hannity

The Numbers Were Invented. The Trust Was Real.

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The pollster confessed before anyone in the newsroom caught on. On Tuesday night, Wedgewood Polls, a young firm whose numbers had made their way into The New York Times’ poll tracker and onto the pages of Newsweek, admitted it had invented them. The firm said it had “no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases.” It said it was testing how easily a fake operation could be taken seriously. Its answer: “The short answer: Far too easy.” Consider what that means. Nobody hacked a database or forged a document. Someone made up percentages, put

A Warning Shot at the Class ’27 — and an Ethics Complaint.

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(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Picture the kid. Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. Political science degree, some debt, one good suit bought on sale. He’s been refreshing USAJobs at midnight. He wants to be in the building where the country gets run, even if all he does is collate binders for a deputy assistant secretary nobody’s heard of. Now picture a United States senator telling him, more or less: Go ahead. See what happens. That’s the gist of what Michigan Democrat Elissa Slotkin told a University of Chicago audience last week. She wants graduates to look at a job in the Trump administration and see trouble, not

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