[FoxNews] The directive mobilizes Cyber Command, NSA and other military spy agencies against foreign threats ahead of Tuesday's vote
Ever since the 2016 presidential election that first got President Donald Trump elected and the ensuing Russiagate scandal, there has been increased scrutiny on foreign meddling in U.S. elections and threats to the American voting system.
Now, 10 years later, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is directing his entire intelligence and spy forces to ensure foreign adversaries do not interfere in Tuesday's midterms.
The Pentagon chief has ordered America's military intelligence and cyber agencies to mobilize against foreign threats to the 2026 elections by directing his department's sprawling intelligence apparatus to make election security a priority in what he calls a "no-fail mission."
The September directive reaches beyond U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, instructing the entire Defense Intelligence Enterprise — including agencies responsible for military and geospatial intelligence — to "mobilize every authorized asset, capability, and partnership" against foreign election threats.
The order puts some of the military's most sophisticated intelligence capabilities behind a mission that has grown considerably since Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. But with Americans preparing to vote, the extent to which Hegseth's directive has changed the Pentagon's existing election-security operations remains unclear.
The Department of War declined to provide Fox News Digital with additional details about how the order is being implemented. Cyber Command separately declined an interview request about its election-security efforts.
In practice, the directive can mean military intelligence agencies are tasked with identifying foreign hackers or influence operations overseas, warning civilian agencies about threats headed toward U.S. targets and, when authorized, Cyber Command taking action against the foreign actors or infrastructure behind them.
The military's role largely stops at the U.S. border: state and local officials run elections, while agencies such as the FBI and Department of Homeland Security handle the domestic side.
The Pentagon's election security mission is not new. Cyber Command and NSA have spent years tracking and disrupting foreign threats around American elections, including operations targeting Russian actors during previous election cycles.
The effort began taking its current shape ahead of the 2018 midterms, when the agencies formed a "Russia Small Group" focused on foreign interference. It later evolved into a joint Election Security Group, combining NSA's intelligence-gathering capabilities with Cyber Command's ability to conduct operations against foreign cyber threats.
By 2022, then-Cyber Command and NSA chief Gen. Paul Nakasone was describing election security as an "enduring, no-fail mission" — language echoed by Hegseth four years later.
"Rest assured, we were doing operations well before the midterms began, and we were doing operations likely on the day of the midterms," Nakasone said after the 2022 election, describing the military's role as "understanding your foreign adversaries and operating outside the United States."
The agencies again established an Election Security Group for the 2024 presidential election, but whether that structure was recreated for this year's midterms has been less clear.
Gen. Joshua Rudd, the current head of Cyber Command and NSA, told lawmakers in April that foreign interference was "reasonable to expect based on what we've seen in the past" and said his command was "postured and ready to support as required or tasked." He said at the time that he was unsure whether the Election Security Group had been reconvened.o
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Gregor Spitzen
The protesters are organized and led by old-style anarcho-communist syndicalists (Antifa/Black Bloc). The demands of the protests are taken from their usual list, not what the generality might happen to want. So really, why bother examining what they claim to believe? The cause it not the cause, the cause is always revolution.
[Regnum] European youth are demanding that the government reconsider its priorities. Young people across Germany have taken to the streets, demanding increased education funding and protesting against compulsory military service.
Tens of thousands of dissatisfied people gathered in more than 30 cities, including Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Mainz, Erfurt, Magdeburg, Dresden and Leipzig, on October 31.
Was it a nice, sunny day, perfect for spending the day in, turning cholesterol into Vitamin D in the company of like-minded souls?
German youths rightly argue that the austerity program aimed at restarting the military-industrial complex and the desire to make Germany "fit for war" again is working to the detriment of young people, while sparing the richest.
No, they don’t. But one can understand why Russia might want to encourage such thinking.
They feel unfairly treated and that the current problems fall primarily on their shoulders. They ask why they must pay with their labor for the failures of financial, pension, and defense policies.
Their elders get to pay with money and a reduced standard of living, not to mention failing hopes for the comfortable pension they were promised.
Added to this are the challenging labor market and rising costs of living. Previously, students could live more or less comfortably on their scholarships. Now, the fixed price for housing is €380 per month, but a room in a shared apartment in many cities costs double that.
Plus, there's the forced conscription into the Bundeswehr, which is still hidden behind the fig leaf of mandatory completion of a form about readiness to serve.
According to surveys, only 14% of German respondents under 30 said they trust politicians.
Perspicacious. Many of their politicians have deliberately not been trustworthy.
Almost 60% answered negatively to the relevant question. Many believe the government simply makes decisions without consulting anyone, even though they directly affect their interests. This leads to feelings of helplessness and frustration.
On the other hand, the proportion of young adults concerned about generational conflict is only 20%. The situation hasn't worsened significantly yet. However, this is also due to the fact that many have parents who help them when they can't find a job or afford an apartment. This mitigates the problem. Nevertheless, dissatisfaction and psychological stress are rising among people under 30 in Germany.
The youth's anger took many forms. There were peaceful talks, hopeful speakers, posters with ironic slogans directed at Chancellor Friedrich Merz, fireworks, attacks on police with bottles and stones, and barricades set ablaze.
At the same time, the protests were sometimes vague: anger at the federal government and the super-rich was mixed with expressions of solidarity with Palestine.
What Palestine has to do with it is puzzling, except it has been forcibly made into the shibboleth of the age. Hopefully the world will soon move on to something less destructive.
In Munich, the protests proceeded relatively calmly: according to police, fireworks were used only occasionally. Several red flags with the hammer and sickle were seen, as well as banners of the Revolutionary Communist Party with slogans classified by the constitutional protection authorities as left-wing extremist.
The Gen-Z regelt initiative, which is behind the protests, distanced itself from violence. However, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution warned of possible attempts by left-wing radical groups and apolitical looters to infiltrate the activists' ranks.
Fearing looting in the Bavarian capital, some retailers have barricaded their windows with wooden panels, such as on the upscale Maximilianstrasse shopping street.
Stuttgart also saw some high-profile incidents: law enforcement officers were displeased with the fact that some of the demonstrators were wearing masks. Strict measures were taken for the use of pyrotechnics.
In Cologne, police canceled a march at the last minute due to masks and pyrotechnics. The demonstration continued as a rally. A police water cannon was deployed to calm "violent demonstrators."
There were also reports from Frankfurt of firecrackers being thrown at police. In Berlin, some demonstrators threw bottles and eggs.
In Hamburg, police officers were pelted with pyrotechnics and construction barriers. In response, a "direct enforcement" operation was reportedly carried out.
People dressed in black and partially masked tore plastic construction barriers from their moorings, threw them into the street, and then set them on fire. Police dispersed the crowd and used pepper spray against the demonstrators.
Future protests will likely show how vocal young people will be. In a number of cities, they have already been announced for November 20. In Magdeburg, for example, protesters viewed the incidents of late October as the beginning of something bigger.
Some, however, believe that the pan-European rebellious impulse may not fully spread to Germany because activists are not being decisive enough in their demands.
Others—because Germany, unlike France, lacks a distinct postcolonial background.
Do they still say, “Wir sind kein’ Hottentotten hier?” Where do you suppose that came from?
This means that among those taking to the streets are no descendants of former colonies who, for generations, have been unable to find their place in the society and economy of the metropolis.
That’s a different question.
In any case, two conditions appear to be necessary for the protests to gain broad public acceptance: the willingness of young people to distance themselves from random fellow travelers
…not actually random at all, but the professional leadership cadre supplied by Antifa…
who seek primarily provocation and violence against the police, and the willingness of the older generation, politicians, and civil society to take the content of the protests and the issues raised seriously, rather than demonizing them.
[DWUJKA] The protracted political confrontation between the President and Prime Minister of Poland has gone beyond public attacks and has finally escalated into a struggle for control of state institutions. Polish political life seems to be gradually turning into a bad TV series, in which the writers have abandoned a single genre. It blends comedy, political thriller, and even elements of crime drama. As the saying goes, "horses and men are all mixed up..."
The political struggle employs virtually every tool: from social media squabbles and mutual accusations of "working for the Russians" to a war of compromising evidence, scandals involving the airing of dirty laundry from the past, and, finally, a serious institutional crisis.
On opposite sides of the barricade are the Civic Platform party, led by its helmsman, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and the Law and Justice party, which nominated Karol Nawrocki for president. Relations between the two political powers have been strained since the presidential race. However, recently the standoff has noticeably escalated: the two sides have increasingly traded public barbs and attacks, and the media and social media have become a veritable battlefield.
From social media squabbles to a constitutional crisis, the Warsaw "plot," which initially resembled a hilarious comedy in the vein of The Naked Gun, has increasingly evolved into a political thriller with each new episode.
Now, let's take things in order.
On May 26, 2025, just six days before the second round of the presidential election, the Polish publication Onet published a large-scale investigation into Nawrocki's possible involvement in human trafficking (Article 189a of the Polish Criminal Code). The fact is that the future president worked as a security guard at the Grand Hotel in the resort town of Sopot in his youth.
According to his then-colleagues, he assisted local prostitutes and pimps in finding clients among the hotel's guests. Nawrocki categorically denied the accusations and filed a lawsuit. Ultimately, Nawrocki won the election against the candidate of the ruling Civic Coalition party, but his margin of victory was minimal—just over 1.5 percentage points. The difference amounted to only 369,000 votes. It's difficult to say to what extent Onet's publication influenced the election results. However, there is no doubt that from that moment on, relations between the prime minister's party and the president's team became extremely hostile. "The Swan, the Cancer, and the Pike": Who Shapes Poland's Foreign Policy?
Immediately after assuming the presidency, Nawrocki began to forge his own foreign policy: he made strong statements on European integration and Poland's future course within the EU, demonstrated independence in his relations with Washington, and did not coordinate his actions with the government, particularly the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Meanwhile, the Polish Constitution obliges the president to cooperate with the prime minister and the relevant minister. It was precisely over the boundaries of these powers that one of the most heated confrontations unfolded.
For example, Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski refused to support Nawrocki's candidacy for the post of ambassador to Washington—Michal Rachon, a journalist for the state television channel TVP. Rachon had previously conducted several investigative reports on the plane crash near Smolensk on April 10, 2010, which killed Polish President Lech Kaczyński and a significant portion of the country's top military and political leadership.
In his reports, Rachoń promoted conspiracy theories about the events, according to which Donald Tusk allegedly acted in concert with Moscow, was warned in advance by the Russian side of the threat, and deliberately did not fly with the presidential delegation. Naturally, such a candidate could not count on the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when appointed ambassador to the United States.
According to Polish law, ambassadors are appointed and recalled by the president, but he does so on the recommendation of the minister of foreign affairs, approved by the prime minister. Meanwhile, Nawrocki has long been deliberately blocking personnel proposals from the Tusk government. From August 2025 to October 2026, 46 nominations for new ambassadors piled up on his desk. The president has yet to sign a single one. As a result, the Polish Ministry of
Foreign Affairs is forced to send heads of diplomatic missions with a lower status – chargés d'affaires. Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski has also responded. Throughout this standoff, he has repeatedly publicly criticized Karol Nawrocki for his foreign policy and his flirtation with far-right populists from the pro-monarchist Confederation of the Polish Crown party.
Incidentally, the party's leader, Grzegorz Braun, advocates restoring relations with Russia, but his electoral base remains very limited. Moreover, he himself is limiting the potential for expanding his support, including by promoting a fringe anti-Semitic agenda that portrays Jews as enemies of Polish independence and attributes to them secret conspiracies to seize Poland.
The Polish president also received criticism for his ostentatious friendly relations with Donald Trump. In a television broadcast, Sikorski ironically described one of Nawrocki's meetings with the American president as "an exchange of words by the cage during some kind of brawl." He was thus alluding to the two politicians' joint viewing of a mixed martial arts tournament, which took place on October 14, 2025, on the South Lawn of the White House.
THE HOUSING ISSUE RUINED BOTH.
Bulgakov, in his immortal novel, The Master and Margarita, put the famous phrase into the mouth of Woland:
"...well, they're frivolous... well, what can you do... ordinary people... generally speaking, they resemble the old ones... the housing issue only ruined them."
It seems a similar story happened to our heroes: the housing issue also tarnished their political reputations. While Sikorski's case is a moral scandal, Nawrocki's clearly smacks of criminality.
In the spring of 2025, on the eve of the presidential elections, Karol Nawrocki repeatedly claimed during the campaign that he owned only one apartment in Gdańsk. However, investigative journalists from Onet discovered a second apartment—a small one-room apartment in the city's historic center, which he received from an elderly man under a life-long maintenance agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Nawrocki was obligated to care for the previous owner until his death. However, the man ultimately ended up in a nursing home, and the Nawrocki family bought the apartment from the municipality for just 10% of its assessed value.
The story sparked a major scandal, and the Gdańsk prosecutor's office even launched an investigation. However, after Nawrocki's inauguration, the situation acquired a special legal status: the incumbent president enjoys constitutional immunity, so prosecutors cannot prosecute him under the usual procedure. Article 145 of the Polish Constitution provides for a special procedure—through the State Tribunal.
Some time later, Nawrocki's team launched a counter-information attack on Radosław Sikorski, pulling former Polish Defense Minister Romuald Sheremetyev out of his political mothballs. In an interview, Sheremetyev recalled a story from 1992, when Sikorski, then his deputy, took up residence in the Defense Ministry's representative palace, designed to receive foreign delegations, and refused to vacate it even after the ministry's head demanded it. Ultimately, according to Sheremetyev, he was forced to persuade the then-prime minister to dismiss Sikorski.
Meanwhile, the former Defense Minister raised the topic of Sikorski's possible ties to MI6. As an indirect argument, Sheremetyev recalled his past as a British war correspondent in Afghanistan, where he covered the mujahideen's military operations against Soviet troops from 1986 to 1989. Sheremetyev suggested that such trips to hot spots could hardly have been undertaken without the approval of British intelligence agencies.
It's quite possible that Sheremetyev's interview struck a nerve with Sikorski, prompting the Foreign Minister to reopen the media agenda for the scandal surrounding Nawrocki's alleged pimping at the Grand Hotel. On the morning of October 28, 2026, he posted a short, ironic question on the social media site X, clearly alluding to Karol Nawrocki's trial against Onet journalists:
"What is the correct pronunciation: pimp, pimp, or gigolo?"
In response, Marcin Przydacz, head of the Presidential Bureau of International Policy, offered his own version of the verbal classification of Sikorski: "A boor, a rude person, or a primitive?"
THE CRYPTO WALLET OF POLISH POLITICS
It would seem that the writers of the Polish political series had already exhausted their supply of plot twists. But no, viewers were in for a new franchise, this time about the Polish far-right's exploration of the cryptocurrency market. The central role is played by the crypto exchange Zondacrypto and its corrupt ties to Polish political circles.
In late summer 2026, Zondacrypto found itself at the center of a large-scale criminal investigation on suspicion of fraud. In August, an Estonian court declared the company bankrupt. It's noteworthy that as early as 2025, the crypto exchange financed events associated with the PiS party, including Karol Nawrocki's election campaign meetings with voters.
On September 4, 2026, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, speaking in the Sejm, announced that the Polish prosecutor's office had estimated the total damage caused to Polish citizens by the crypto exchange's activities at the equivalent of €83 million. That same day, the Sejm again failed to override President Karol Nawrocki's veto of the bill regulating the cryptocurrency market.
Meanwhile, the most important announcement came next. Donald Tusk stated that, according to information received from intelligence services, the crypto exchange's founder was missing and likely murdered. Furthermore, the company's structure includes funds linked to Russian intelligence services and organized crime groups.
And here, if I were President Nawrocki, I would be seriously concerned. It's one thing to have sex in a hotel during a wild youth or a dubious affair involving an elderly pensioner's apartment. It's quite another when one's own country's intelligence services gather information about the current president and his possible ties to lobbying for foreign criminal interests—Russian or otherwise—and then report it to the prime minister, to whom they directly report.
Of course, Polish intelligence services are legally obligated to inform both the president and the prime minister of information material to national security. The only question is: was this information reported to Karol Nawrocki, and to what extent? Or was it not deemed necessary at all?
AND WHO ARE THE JUDGES?
Against the backdrop of the events described, the conflict over the Constitutional Tribunal can hardly be viewed as an isolated legal dispute. Especially since the opposition, represented by the vice-marshal of the Sejm and one of the leaders of the Confederation, has begun talking about an attempted coup.
To understand the reasons behind Judge Anna Korwin-Petrowska's decision to remove Constitutional Tribunal President Bohdan Święczkowski and his deputy, it's necessary to first examine the background to the conflict within the Tribunal itself.
In 2026, the Sejm elected six new judges to the Constitutional Tribunal. Nawrocki swore in two, while four took their oaths in parliament, as the president had not invited them to the ceremony. The legitimacy of this procedure is still being contested by the president's team, and, on Nawrocki's orders, the Constitutional Tribunal President, in turn, prevented the four elected judges from fully participating in the hearings.
The result is a rather curious setup: parliament elects judges, the president deliberately disrupts their inauguration procedure, and the Court's leadership, on this basis, prevents them from performing their duties. One can't help but recall Griboyedov's dictum, "And who are the judges?"
The current President of the Constitutional Tribunal, Święczkowski, is a longtime associate and close associate of the PiS leadership. In October 2006, he was appointed by Jarosław Kaczyński to head the Internal Security Agency (ABW), leading it until November 2007. This period was marked by high-profile scandals surrounding the use of intelligence agencies to pressure the opposition, discredit political opponents, and spy on journalists. In 2011, a parliamentary investigative commission recommended that Święczkowski be brought before the State Tribunal.
Thus, behind the dispute over the correctness of the oath-taking procedure and the exclusion of four judges, lies a struggle for control of the Tribunal itself.
And here another interesting nuance arises. Nawrocki isn't simply arguing with the parliamentary majority over the procedure for appointing judges. The Constitutional Tribunal itself is empowered to review the constitutionality of laws and resolve disputes over the competence of state bodies. Consequently, its composition and legitimacy are particularly important in the context of the growing political escalation between the president and the government. And there's no doubt that the number of such conflicts and the intensity of the confrontation will only increase.
As a result, the Polish political series has acquired a new plot line: now the dispute is no longer just about who can slander whom more harshly on social media, but also about whose decisions will ultimately be implemented by state institutions.
And if anyone should be more worried in this situation, it's Nawrocki: with such a track record, the matter could very well end up before the State Tribunal. And then the question of the constitutional and legal grounds and procedure for holding the president accountable will come to the fore.
And the main question now is not so much how far the standoff between Tusk and Nawrocki will go, but which side the Polish security forces will take in the event of a final escalation.
SCOTUS Wire on X: "BREAKING: In a 2-1 vote, the Ninth Circuit lifted restrictions on the Trump administration's efforts to have states set aside ballots from suspected noncitizens, allowing it to resume such requests, warn election officials of prosecution, and pursue related investigative steps."
11:52 PM · Nov 2, 2026
#1
That was the en banc panel. The full court will kill it then pigeon hole the case so it doesn't get scheduled for appeal. Typical MO of the liberal circuits.
A federal appeals court briefly lifted a block on the Trump administration’s efforts to investigate alleged voting by noncitizens in California, then reversed course hours later, sending the dispute to the full 11-judge 9th Circuit for rehearing.
Earlier Monday night, a three-judge panel granted the Justice Department’s request to pause a temporary restraining order issued by a San Francisco federal judge. That order had barred the administration from making further requests to set aside ballots under the warning of prosecution of state and local election officials who declined.
The panel said the government was likely to prevail in arguing that its requests and criminal investigations were core executive functions.
Hours later, the full 9th Circuit vacated the ruling and ordered the case reheard by all 11 active judges, according to the court’s order. The move restored the district court’s restrictions while the full court considers the dispute.
"The TRO issued by a San Francisco judge purporting to restrict DOJ investigations into election officials has been appropriately lifted," First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli wrote on X before the temporary restraining order was restored. "Conducting criminal investigations is a core function of the executive branch, not the judiciary."
The case against investigating allege noncitizen voting was brought by labor unions and civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens. They argued that DOJ and Homeland Security letters to election officials, which warned of potential criminal liability over ballots linked to suspected noncitizens, amounted to intimidation.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
SCOTUS Wire on X: "BREAKING: In a 2-1 vote, the Ninth Circuit lifted restrictions on the Trump administration's efforts to have states set aside ballots from suspected noncitizens, allowing it to resume such requests, warn election officials of prosecution, and pursue related investigative steps."
