Alaska Asks 3,000 Voters: Wait, Who Are You Again?

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(Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images)

Something strange happened in Juneau this summer. More than 3,000 Alaskans got a letter from the state asking a simple, almost old-fashioned question: are you a citizen? Normally that letter goes out to about 200 people a year — a quiet bit of housekeeping as Alaska checks its voter rolls against DMV records. This year the number jumped fifteen-fold. Carol Beecher, who runs the state’s Division of Elections, told lawmakers this week that “old data” got swept up somehow in the comparison. Nobody’s yet said exactly how a filing cabinet’s worth of outdated records ended up flagging thousands of real,

Trump Ties Saudi Nuclear Deal to Israel Normalization

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(Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

President Trump threw a wrench into his own nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia this week — and he did it on purpose. On Wednesday, the Energy Department announced with some fanfare that Washington and Riyadh had finalized an agreement to share American nuclear know-how with the Saudis for civilian use. Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed it alongside his Saudi counterpart, Prince Abdulaziz, and the statements coming out of the department made it sound like a done deal, full steam ahead, nothing left to see here. Then Thursday, Trump got on Truth Social and added a catch nobody in Washington saw

6,600 Noncitizens. 400 Ballots. DOJ Wants Answers.

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(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

New Jersey says it was a computer glitch. Harmeet Dhillon says: prove it. That’s the standoff now playing out between the Justice Department and Governor Mikie Sherrill, and it isn’t going away quietly. Dhillon, the DOJ’s top civil rights official, has given Sherrill five business days to hand over detailed records on some 6,600 people who ended up on New Jersey’s voter rolls after telling the state, in plain terms, that they weren’t citizens. She renewed the demand this week, right after Sherrill’s office let slip a number that’s hard to shrug off: fewer than 400 of those people went

What It Means When Van Jones, of All People, Draws the Line

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(Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Anti-Defamation League)

This weekend, Van Jones — CNN commentator, longtime Democrat, nobody’s idea of a conservative plant — told his own party’s radical wing to knock it off. He didn’t hedge it. Democrats, he said, don’t need “party poopers.” So stop, he told them, pooping in the punch bowl — and then telling everybody the turds are ice cubes. They aren’t. And we’re smart enough to know the difference. It’s a blunt line. It was meant to be. Here’s why it matters. Van Jones isn’t some backbench crank. He worked in the Obama White House. He’s spent two decades as one of

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