Secret Service furious at Kash Patel for rushing to announce arrests in UFC plot

To prove the point, the appeal resurfaced one of Trump's own social media broadsides against him, in which the president raged that Vindman knew his 2019 call to Ukraine's president was "perfect" and accused him of staying silent about the whistleblower report. The campaign cast a strong fundraising quarter as payback. "A huge FEC report will be seen as a great rebuke to Donald Trump," it told donors. "Imagine … Alex Vindman as Donald Trump's Senator."

The needling draws on a long history. Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, was a key witness in Trump's first impeachment, testifying about the call in which Trump pressured Ukraine's president, and was pushed out of his National Security Council post after the trial. He is now running as a Democrat to unseat Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, the former state attorney general appointed to fill Marco Rubio's seat after Rubio became secretary of state.

The "Trump's senator" framing is potent for donors, but the underlying race remains an uphill climb. While Vindman's campaign has cited polls showing the contest within the margin of error, independent surveys have given Moody healthier leads, and Florida has trended firmly Republican, with no Democrat winning a Senate race there since 2012. The Cook Political Report rates the seat "Solid R." Vindman also has to clear an Aug. 18 Democratic primary first.

Still, the appeal underscores how thoroughly Vindman's campaign is built on nationalizing the race and turning his personal feud with Trump into small-dollar fuel, betting that the fantasy of representing Trump's adopted home state is worth a few dollars to Democrats itching to land a blow.

Barbra Streisand, the EGOT-winning singer and actress and a longtime Democratic megastar, is also supporting Vindman.

The case centered on Bryan Rafael Gomez, a migrant whom DuBose ordered released from ICE custody after a Justice Department attorney, Kevin Bolan, withheld information about a years-old homicide arrest warrant from the Dominican Republic.

A special counsel McConnell appointed to investigate the matter found that Bolan had committed a serious ethical violation by failing to be honest and transparent with the court — though the counsel recommended against formal disciplinary proceedings.

Without knowledge of the warrant, McConnell said, DuBose's decision to release Gomez was entirely appropriate, and the judge said ICE's press release suggested otherwise.

"ICE falsely suggested, contrary to the true record, that when Judge DuBose released the petitioner, she knew he was sought in connection with a homicide," McConnell wrote. "This false public statement by ICE put her in personal danger and undermined public faith in the federal courts."

Bolan, who said he withheld the information based on ICE guidance and was unaware it had already been publicly disclosed, apologized to DuBose and has otherwise handled his cases responsibly, McConnell said. But the chief judge warned him plainly: "Any future finding of misconduct will be severely sanctioned."

Gomez has not yet been located by authorities for re-detention. The ICE press release remains on its website despite DuBose's request that it be taken down.

The episode is one of many involving Justice Department attorney conduct that has drawn judicial scrutiny amid the Trump administration's aggressive immigration enforcement push.

" Trump is, above all, a showman," Eggers wrote. "While he’s plainly slowing with age, he has certainly not lost his ability to deliver near-daily shocks with his attacks on good government, ethics, and taste. But the nature of those shocks has been changing lately. More and more, they’ve seemed calibrated to obscure a harsh truth: Not yet two years into Trump 2.0, the administration’s momentum has ground to a halt."

The new reporting on those alarming efforts at the highest level of government serves as a graphic illustration of that, he argued.

"Reading this report was a shocking experience for two reasons," Eggers wrote. "First, obviously, are the merits — it’s insane that any White House would contemplate such measures in peacetime at all. But the piece also yanks the reader back to a time last year when pretty much everything was like this."

This time last year, Eggers wrote, Trump was running roughshod over a government battered and bruised by DOGE, migrants were being disappeared into foreign torture prisons, the National Guard was marching on cities, law firms and universities were fighting administration lawsuits, and the president was threatening to invade Greenland and the Panama Canal.

"This period of Trump’s furious maximalism seemed to die in Minneapolis early this year," he argued. "It has stayed dead since. Instead, Trump has spent the first half of 2026 mostly just fighting to keep stuff from sliding away from him."

Courts have blocked man of his plans, and even compliant Republicans are gumming up the works for some of his legislative priorities, and the president has instead focused on slapping his name and coats of paint on buildings around Washington, D.C., or concoct new ways to raid the treasury.

"All this could change, of course," Egger wrote. "It’s far from impossible that Trump — his war concluded, his ICE re-funded, his White House UFC fights all brought to a satisfying conclusion — could seriously reapply himself to recapturing his god-emperor domestic-policy mojo. It’s safe to say that he intends to do this in at least one seriously chilling way: by monkeying with the upcoming 2026 and 2028 elections."

"It’s not fun, exactly, to see him and his people squee and gibber while a bloodsport fighter hoots that 'MICHELLE OBAMA IS A MAN!' from a fight cage erected preposterously on the White House lawn," he added. "But these circuses aren’t just intended to trigger the libs and titillate his base — they’re designed to distract both camps from how little the president is actually getting done these days. Compared to where we were last year, it’s a damn good start."