Two trends that I’m very interested in are about to collide and it’s going to be a mess.

By now, some of you will be tired of my calling for a more nuanced discussion about the use of AI and machine learning tools in the video game industry. I get it, but I’m also not going to pretend like I don’t still hold that very same view. AI tools are just that: tools. If the tools are good and used at the behest of the artists in the industry to make better games, that’s a good thing. If they upend artistic intent or simply suck, that’s a bad thing. And on the matter of jobs within the industry, if there is a net reduction in jobs, that’s bad! If AI lowers the barriers of entry for otherwise creative people and the result is even more jobs within the industry spread over more studios and, importantly, more cultural output in the form of games, that’s good!

Except when it’s not. And even if the AI evangelists are right, or those of us who see the possibility that AI use will ultimately result in more people in the industry and more games released to the public are right, that can still present very real problems within the industry. And I think there could be a serious one looming for storefronts like Steam.

This concern calcified in my head somewhat when I came across indie publisher Mike Rose, known for producing Yes, Your Grace, talking about just what all of this output could mean on Steam specifically.

“From a publisher perspective specifically, it’s mega annoying,” Rose tells GamesRadar+ in an interview, echoing other publishers like Hooded Horse. “If we thought the number of games being launched on Steam was crazy before, now it’s just impossible. During the last Next Fest, it seemed like around 1/3 of the demos had either AI generated key art, and/or AI-generated content. So now we have that to compete with too. Hurray!” Publishing lead John Buckley of Palworld developer Pocketpair called out the same AI trend in the latest Steam Next Fest.

Steam, as a focal point for the more open PC gaming market, is the clearest barometer for the rising quantity of games, with over 20,000 releases fighting for space every year. Even with Valve sticking to AI content disclosures for games listed on Steam, the rise of AI tools will only contribute to the torrent of content flooding the platform as games – or at least AI-made things game-shaped enough to be sold – become easier to produce.

Claims that there are too many games being released on Steam certainly isn’t new, nor has it historically been tied to anything to do with artificial intelligence. There have been complaints about this, as well as Valve’s apparent lack of interest in playing any real curation role, going back to 2023. Wait, make that 2020. Oh, wait, it actually goes back to 2015.

But while Steam hasn’t yet collapsed under the weight of its own volume of releases on the platform to date, the through line to all of that criticism has been Valve’s stoic apathy towards keeping up with the volume when it comes to helping its customers navigate the flood.

And that could be a very real problem for the platform. Steam’s value to the consumer, besides being the most recognizable outlet for PC gaming, is in its curation capabilities. To date, other than providing some search filters and a few tools to personalize the recommendations it makes for new titles to you, Steam has mostly left curation up to the customer themselves, or third-party list-makers. Meanwhile, the process for listing a game on Steam has not changed appreciably in the past several years. It’s still the same $100 entry fee to get your title listed. You still have to jump through all the registration steps with Steamworks, generate an app ID, build the store page, upload your assets. Then you wait for Valve to do its own review before you can publish your game, but that mostly amounts to ensuring that you’re compliant with Steam policies, that the game can launch successfully, and that’s about it.

With a potential flood of PC games coming, that sure doesn’t feel like enough to keep the platform from becoming an unnavigable wasteland where you can’t tell the gems from the slop. And, barring any new rules limiting to what degree AI can be used in game creation, that tidal wave is coming.

On this point, Rose focuses on “the elephant in the room” here: “It’s probably never going away again.”

“People can now make stuff by telling a bot to make it for them, and you know, the thing is that humans are mega lazy,” he reasons. “I don’t even mean that as an insult! We just are. So for a lot of people, if there’s a choice between ‘spend a bunch of time and money making a cool thing,’ vs ‘type some prompts into a program and the thing is made for me very quickly’ – the average person is going to pick the latter.

And that’s the thing really: Our feelings on it don’t matter. It doesn’t matter that a bunch of us don’t like genAI. It’s gonna get used now, and it’ll get used more and more. As the kids say: Video games are cooked.”

I don’t think that video games are cooked, but his point that AI will be in use in the industry is the one I’ve been making for months now. We have to be talking about how it will be used, not if. That ship has sailed.

And if Steam is still going to be of any value at all to the consumer, Valve better be thinking right damned now how it’s going to get more involved in the curation of what shows up on its platform.

Back in January, we covered Trump’s audacious lawsuit demanding $10 billion from his own IRS over the 2019-2020 leak of his tax returns by IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn (who is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for the leak, meaning the system that Trump claims failed him actually worked just fine). It’s also worth remembering that every major party presidential nominee since Nixon had voluntarily released their tax returns — Trump was the exception, not the rule, and the “harm” he suffered was exposure to the same transparency his predecessors embraced without incident.

The original piece laid out why the whole thing was a scam: Trump is the plaintiff, the IRS and Treasury are the defendants, and the DOJ defending those defendants is stocked with Trump’s former personal attorneys who have made clear they still consider themselves his personal attorneys — a problem that has only gotten worse with Todd Blanche now serving as acting AG. The fix was obviously in. The only real question was how brazenly the parties would go about it.

We now have an answer, and it turns out the answer is: extremely brazenly, and in writing, on the public docket.

Earlier today, the parties filed a consent motion for a 90-day extension explaining why they needed the Court to hit pause on the litigation:

Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation. This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.

[…]

The Parties are engaging in discussions and need time to work through how to ensure those discussions can take place productively to avoid protracted litigation. This brief period will allow the Parties to initiate and structure those discussions in a manner that best serves the interests of all Parties and the Court.

Read that the normal way you’d read any consent motion, and it’s mundane. Two adversarial parties are exploring settlement. Courts love this. Judicial economy! Everyone wins.

Now read it again with the actual parties in mind.

The plaintiff is the sitting President of the United States. The defendants are two agencies of the executive branch that the plaintiff (again, the President of the United States) runs. The lawyers representing those defendants report, through a chain of command, to Trump’s former personal lawyers. “The Parties are engaging in discussions” means Trump’s lawyers are negotiating with Trump’s other lawyers over how much of your money Trump gets to take home. The “interests of all Parties” reduces, functionally, to the interests of one guy. The phrase “avoid protracted litigation” means “skip the part where a judge or a jury or any actual adversarial process might interfere with the predetermined outcome.”

Real negotiations require two sides with opposing interests. This is just a man haggling with his own wallet over how much of your money to take.

The filing notes that there hasn’t even been an attempt at a defense from the government yet:

None of the Parties will suffer prejudice: the case is newly filed, no scheduling order has issued, and the Government has not yet answered or otherwise responded on the merits. An extension will conserve judicial and party resources and avoid piecemeal litigation that could arise if the Parties are forced to proceed without first exploring these discussions.

The consent motion even includes, with a straight face, the boilerplate certification that plaintiff’s counsel ‘conferred in good faith’ with the very people he effectively works for:

Pursuant to Southern District of Florida Local Rule 7.1(a)(3), Daniel Epstein, co-counsel for Plaintiffs, certifies that he conferred in good faith with counsel for Defendants on April 15, 2026 by telephone regarding the relief sought in this motion. Defendants consent to the requested extension.

The only party with an actual adverse interest here — the American public — has no seat at the table and no lawyer in the room.

The structure of the scam is clear. Step one, filed back in January: sue your own government that you control for $10 billion over something that wasn’t its fault, using a complaint so flimsy it quotes the leaker himself saying Trump suffered “little harm” — and demanding damages for being exposed to information that every other modern presidential candidate simply released voluntarily. Step two, filed this week: get the defendant you control to agree with you that litigation should pause so you can work out a deal. Step three, coming soon to a docket near you: announce a “settlement” in which the taxpayers cut a check to the president for some eye-watering sum, with the DOJ loudly proclaiming that this was the responsible outcome that avoided wasteful litigation.

At each step, the paperwork will look perfectly normal, indistinguishable from thousands of other consent motions on other dockets. The corruption lives entirely in the gap between what the documents say and who is actually on each side of them.

This is worth naming plainly: what’s happening here is exactly the kind of self-dealing abuse of public office that the impeachment clause was written to address. Hamilton, in Federalist 65, defined impeachable offenses as those:

A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.

If a sitting president negotiating a multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded payout to himself — through agencies he controls and lawyers loyal to him personally, over damages he demonstrably did not suffer (he is richer than he has ever been and won re-election after the leak) — does not qualify as an abuse of public trust, then the phrase has no meaning.

But none of that matters, because the political machinery that would be required to act on any of this has been thoroughly captured or cowed. Congress has largely abdicated. The Supreme Court, as noted in January, has made it clear there’s not much the courts can do about presidential self-dealing. The DOJ is, for these purposes, Trump’s law firm. And so the scheme proceeds on schedule, in plain sight, with everyone involved politely pretending that “the Parties are engaging in discussions” describes something other than what it is.

We’ll almost certainly be back for part three when the inevitable settlement drops. You already know roughly what it will look like. The only real variables are the size of the number and how straight a face whoever is serving as Attorney General at that point manages to keep while announcing it.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.

They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden. 

With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat. 

Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?

ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.

The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.

Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job. 

At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House. 

What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.

Then Barr offered his resignation letter, which Trump accepted. Barr left believing he’d done his part to preserve democratic norms. 

“I was saddened,” Barr wrote of Trump in his memoir. “If he actually believed this stuff he had become significantly detached from reality.”

Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified after Barr was gone. Although rioters inspired by Trump managed to delay the certification of his defeat by storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, ultimately the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — barely.

But if faced with the same tests today, the guardrails and people that held the line would largely be missing, an examination by ProPublica found. 

ProPublica scrutinized what happened the last time Trump lost a national election. Some of that happened in plain sight: After a cascade of defeats in court, Trump began pressuring state and local officials to overturn the results. But more happened behind the scenes, like the meeting that helped persuade Barr to hold the line.

Our reporting uncovered previously undisclosed aspects of a federal effort to safeguard the results of the 2020 vote, which involved at least 75 people across several agencies. Today, nearly all of those people are gone, having resigned, been fired or been reassigned, particularly in the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. That included the cybersecurity specialists who had established that the Antrim County allegations were false and reported their findings to Barr. 

The people we identified as resisting attempts to overturn the 2020 results have been replaced by roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement. Experts warn that shows the movement has merged with the federal government.

These new officials could influence how Trump reacts to the upcoming midterms as polling shows Republicans are approaching what could be a significant electoral loss, with the president’s approval rating nearing record lows, and public concern growing about the weak economy, the administration’s mass deportation effort and the war on Iran. Seemingly in preparation to head off such a blow, Trump has stepped up his efforts to “nationalize” the 2026 elections, saying that Republicans need “to take over” the midterms. Democrats who monitored Trump’s attempts to block his 2020 loss have begun to question whether he will allow a “blue wave,” particularly if it flips control of a House of Representatives that impeached him twice in his first term.

ProPublica’s examination reveals new details on how the president has unleashed his loyalists to transform elections. This includes the background of this year’s FBI raid in Georgia to seize 2020 election materials and how they are using federal resources to search for noncitizens voting. Ultimately, ProPublica’s reporting shows how thoroughly and expansively the Trump administration has overhauled the federal government into what some fear is a vehicle for making sure elections go his way.

ProPublica’s reporting is based on interviews with roughly 30 current or former executive branch officials familiar with the work of Trump loyalists installed in election roles. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, including those knowledgeable about the December 2020 Barr meeting. 

The Trump administration maintains its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure — and keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from doing so.

“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”

Spokespeople for the DOJ and DHS emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair, and that they are working closely with the states to achieve those goals. Contentions to the contrary, they say, are false.

A few guardrails have endured, preventing Trump from fully realizing his agenda for elections. Judges have blocked key parts of a March 2025 executive order in which Trump attempted to exert greater federal control over aspects of voting, and some Republican state officials have fought back against Justice Department lawsuits demanding state voter rolls. 

Late last month, Trump issued another executive order on elections that attempts to exert unparalleled federal control over mail-in voting and voter eligibility, which Democrats and voting rights groups are challenging in court.

Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.   

“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, “but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”

The Dismantling

Barr has said that in the high-stakes days following the 2020 election, he felt like he was playing Whac-A-Mole with Trump’s “avalanche” of false election claims.

The investigators at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency supplied intelligence that disproved many of them, not just those involving Antrim County.

CISA was created by Trump in his first term to counter cyber threats in the aftermath of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 vote. It soon came to provide crucial expertise and support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks. 

After the 2020 election, it also played a crucial part in puncturing fallacies spread by Trump supporters, producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them. And it partnered with state officials and technology vendors to release a statement calling the election “the most secure in American history.” Trump swiftly fired Chris Krebs, whom he had appointed to lead CISA, but Krebs’ defense of the election’s soundness reverberated widely in the media and on Capitol Hill.

Among Trump’s first actions upon returning to the Oval Office was eviscerating CISA. 

Starting in February 2025, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. The leadership also froze the agency’s other election security work, which included assessing local election offices for physical and cybersecurity risks, and disseminating sensitive intelligence information on threats. Eventually, all three dozen or so CISA employees specializing in elections were fired or transferred to work in other areas. 

“It took years of dedicated, bipartisan, cross-sector partnership to build the security infrastructure we’ve had, and dismantling CISA leaves a gaping hole,” said Kathy Boockvar, an elections security expert who served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state from 2019 to 2021. “We are making the job of securing our democracy exponentially harder.”

A DHS spokesperson told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.” The spokesperson said that CISA’s mission is still to coordinate protection of critical infrastructure, including by supporting local partners against cyber threats.

It isn’t just CISA that’s been gutted. 

The Trump administration has discarded or diminished other federal initiatives with roles in protecting election integrity or blocking foreign interference. While many of these actions have been reported, together they reveal the full sweep of the changes. 

First, the administration got rid of the National Security Council’s election security group, which convened departmental leaders to coordinate federal actions related to voting. Then in August, the administration dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center, a branch of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had stymied efforts by Russia, China and Iran to interfere in the 2024 election. 

A spokesperson for ODNI said the center was redundant and that its functions were folded into other parts of the office’s intelligence apparatus in ways that “arguably makes our ability to monitor and address threats from foreign adversaries stronger, more efficient and more effective.”

However, former national security officials, including one who had worked at the center, told ProPublica that its functions had largely ceased. Caitlin Durkovich, who led the NSC’s election security work during the Biden administration, said that under Trump the federal government has “abandoned” its traditional role in preserving election integrity and security.

“Nearly every program and capability to stop bad actors and support election administrators has been dismantled,” she said. “Heading into the midterms, this leaves states and localities exposed, without the intelligence support or federal coordination they need to detect and respond to threats in real time — precisely when the stakes are highest.”

The early months of the second Trump administration also brought seismic changes to three parts of federal law enforcement with central roles in elections.

Kash Patel, the FBI’s new director, dismantled the public corruption team, which had been deployed in previous administrations to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded. (An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)

Furthermore, the Justice Department substantially reduced the role of its Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for making sure the department’s inquiries weren’t improperly influenced by politics. 

After the 2020 election, senior lawyers in the section warned against having the FBI investigate fraud claims raised by Trump allies, saying that the agency’s involvement could damage its reputation and appear motivated by partisanship. In this instance, they were overruled by Barr and his deputies, but former officials said this was a rare case in which their guidance was ignored. The need to directly overrule the unit, they said, made it a roadblock — one that no longer exists.

A month after Trump returned to the Oval Office, the unit’s top staff resigned when agency leaders directed them to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. More resigned later or were transferred. The 36-person section was reduced to two. The administration no longer mandates that it review politically sensitive cases, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Another key DOJ office, the Civil Rights Division’s voting section, had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination. In December 2020, the assistant attorney general overseeing the Civil Rights Division was one of the many department leaders who said they would resign if Trump promoted Jeffrey Clark, a leader who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, to head the department after Barr’s resignation. This mass threat of resignation ultimately led Trump to not promote Clark.

But now, nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. This largely started last spring after Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, put out a memo saying their mission would shift from ensuring voting rights to enforcing Trump’s executive order on elections.

The Trump administration then filled the section with conservative lawyers who are now litigating against the lawyers they replaced. At least four of those newly appointed lawyers participated in challenging the 2020 vote or have worked with people who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

“It’s just a shocking and depressing reversal of the federal government’s role in making real the promise of nondiscrimination in voting and racial equality,” said Anna Baldwin, an appellate attorney for the Civil Rights Division who resigned last year and is now one of those litigating against the Justice Department in a new role at Campaign Legal Center.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to specific questions about the dismantling of the Public Integrity Section or the change in mission for the Civil Rights Division.

In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, DOJ and other departments have left or been fired, ProPublica found.

Team America

Late last summer, after the Trump administration had forced out most of the career specialists, a small group of political appointees began convening at the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters. 

The group — which once called itself “Team America,” according to sources familiar with the matter — looked for federal levers it could pull to make Trump’s March executive order about elections a reality, an effort that has not been previously reported. 

They represented the new type of people running the show.

Its core members included David Harvilicz, a DHS assistant secretary tasked with overseeing the security of election infrastructure, including voting machines, and three of his top staffers. As ProPublica has reported, Harvilicz had co-founded an AI company with an architect of Trump’s claims about Antrim County.

Despite the setbacks the executive order had met with in court, there “was not a whole lot of discussion or disagreement” about acting on the directive from Harvilicz or one of his deputies, said a former federal official who interacted with group members. “It was just us saluting to do it.” 

This small group was part of a wider team at DHS, DOJ and the White House seeking to push forward the president’s agenda. Some of Trump’s new guard are well known: After the 2020 election, Patel pressured military officials to help investigate a conspiracy theory about voting machines, according to a former Justice Department official. (Patel did not respond to a request for comment but claimed in congressional testimony that he did not recall the event.) Others, like Harvilicz, are more obscure but still wield consequential powers.

These newcomers are seeking to carry out Trump’s executive orders and are unlikely to push back against his false claims that American elections are rife with fraud. 

Team America members have echoed or spread such material themselves. 

Heather Honey, who serves under Harvilicz in a newly created position focused on elections, falsely asserted that there were more ballots cast in Pennsylvania than voters in the 2020 presidential election. Trump cited this claim, which has been traced back to her, while exhorting his followers to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

At least 11 administration appointees, including Honey, have ties to the Election Integrity Network, a conservative grassroots organization seeking to transform American elections. It is led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Gineen Bresso, who holds a top job in the White House counsel’s office, coordinated with the network’s leadership in 2024 as the Republican National Committee’s election integrity chair, ProPublica has reported. Since moving into government, Honey has maintained close ties to Mitchell’s organization, and she and at least two other federal officials have given its members private briefings. 

Experts say these former activists who helped forge a movement built on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump are seeking to make sure that does not happen again.

“The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government, and they are working together toward a shared goal of reshaping elections” in ways that undermine the freedom to vote, said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy legal organization. “It’s not just last-minute slapdash attempts to overturn the results” as in 2020, “but more systematic efforts to influence how elections are run months ahead of time.”

In response to questions sent to DHS, Harvilicz and Honey, a DHS spokesperson disputed that they were seeking to use the department’s powers to advantage Trump, writing that its employees “are focused on keeping our elections safe, secure, and free” and working to “implement the President’s policies.” In response to questions about their ties to the election denial movement, the spokesperson wrote, “To meet the diverse and evolving challenges the Department faces, we hire experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”

Mitchell did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica. The White House answered questions sent to Bresso about her connection to Mitchell’s network by reiterating its commitment to making American elections secure. 

Through the fall and winter, as the Justice Department demanded that states turn over confidential voter roll information, Team America worked to solve problems hindering the use of digital tools to comb the lists for noncitizens who had illegally registered to vote. Honey and others ironed out the technical details of merging information from different agencies and crafted data-sharing contracts. When Honey or others hit roadblocks, they’d go to the White House or senior DHS leaders who “would come in hot” to clear her path, said officials who interacted with them. 

Initially, the plan was to run voter information obtained by DOJ through a Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. 

More recently, according to two people familiar with the matter, Team America has worked to harness a more powerful tool used by another branch of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations, to increase its ability to search for noncitizen voters and bring criminal charges against them. 

While DHS told ProPublica that SAVE has identified more than 21,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls in the past year, officials who have checked those results in detail have found vast inaccuracies, as ProPublica has reported. Most states — including those with millions of voters — have eventually marked only a few to a few hundred potential noncitizens as registered to vote, and far less have ever voted. The DHS spokesperson also called SAVE “secure and reliable.”

As the election approaches, current and former officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Harvilicz and Honey, who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about elections, are in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness. 

It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.”

Red Flags

Perhaps nothing better reflects the breakdown of the guardrails that thwarted Trump’s rashest impulses in 2020 than his creation last fall of a special White House post reinvestigating his loss to Biden. 

In December 2020, just days after Barr rebuffed Trump’s Antrim County claims, lawyers in the White House counsel’s office helped prevent the president from heeding activists’ call to essentially declare martial law to seize voting machines. This multihour shouting and cussing match has been called the craziest meeting of the first Trump administration.

But the lawyer whom Trump hired in 2025 as his director of election security and integrity, Kurt Olsen, had worked to overturn Trump’s loss in court in 2020 and was later sanctioned by judges, including for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections.

Olsen’s work in the second Trump administration has breached the firewall between the White House and DOJ officials, established after Watergate to prevent law enforcement officers from making decisions based on political pressure, said Gary Restaino, a former U.S. attorney in Arizona.

“This is not a constitutional or even a statutory requirement,” Restaino said, “but it’s a democracy requirement to make sure that citizens throughout America understand that decisions about life and liberty are being made in an objective and consistent manner.”

In a previously unreported series of events, around the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Olsen wanted the FBI to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, and gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown and his team emphasized to Olsen that any investigation his team did would be independent and fair. 

When Brown and his team examined the report, they found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether, and concluding that others came down to human error, not criminal wrongdoing. The report had been assembled by a longtime ally of Olsen’s and participant in the Election Integrity Network who had a history of discredited claims, ProPublica has reported.

Based on their own investigation, Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors at DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted.

Soon after, Brown was offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office, people with knowledge of the exchange told ProPublica. 

Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”

Brown’s ouster after refusing to carry out the seizure of 2020 election materials has been reported, but Olsen’s involvement and the details of their interactions leading to Brown’s retirement have not been previously disclosed. 

With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement. 

Trump administration officials also took another step to keep control of the investigation. 

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi chose Thomas Albus, whom Trump had appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to prosecute the case even though it fell far outside his usual regional jurisdiction. Albus had been meeting with Olsen since around the time the White House lawyer was hired, ProPublica has reported. (Albus declined a request for comment.)

In late January, the FBI carried out an unprecedented raid in Fulton County — and the agency’s affidavit, put together by Albus and Brown’s replacement, cited a version of the report Olsen gave to Brown as evidence supporting the seizure. ProPublica was part of a news coalition that sued to unseal the affidavit.

An FBI spokesperson said that its agents “followed all procedure to ensure everything was in proper order, and FBI evidence team had the necessary court-authorized search warrant before they arrived on site.” 

Ryan Crosswell, who worked in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section for around half a decade, handling a number of election cases, called Brown’s replacement and Albus’ involvement a “red flag” because of the unusual circumstances of their appointments. 

“They’re just moving through people until they find someone who’s willing to do exactly what they want,” Crosswell said.

The Justice Department did not respond to a question about Crosswell’s comment.  

The extraordinary raid was also enabled in a previously unreported way by the destruction of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section.

Multiple former lawyers for the section said they likely would have tried to block the Fulton County investigation because it lacked strong evidence, had a clear political slant and went against department directives that actions should not be taken “for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.” 

Crosswell said, “Based on everything we know, if PIN was still there, we’d say no.”

John Keller was principal deputy chief of the Public Integrity Section from 2020 to 2025 and was acting chief when he resigned in early 2025. He worries that allegations of irregularities in the upcoming election will be handled on a partisan basis.  

“Without that review and without apolitical, objective, honest brokers involved in the process, there is a much greater risk for intentional manipulation or inadvertent interference,” Keller said.

“Dismantling the Brain”

The week the FBI seized Fulton County’s ballots, about half of the nation’s secretaries of state converged on Washington, D.C., for their winter conference. 

They had urgent questions about elections for Bondi, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other luminaries who had promised to appear at the event. But none of the headline names showed, leaving conference attendees staring at an empty podium, until the session was abruptly canceled.

The breakdown was emblematic of a widening chasm between state officials and the parts of the federal government that had, until recently, worked with them to secure American elections.

Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview that the trust between the Trump administration and states is “absolutely demolished.” 

This loss of trust reflects that election deniers have assumed so many top roles at federal agencies. Honey sometimes represents DHS on cross-departmental conference calls with state election chiefs, an unsettling reality for those who spent years countering the false claims she made from outside the government. 

On a February call, state officials expressed confusion about whether the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would still assess their election systems for physical and cyber vulnerabilities. Honey said it would, but Bellows said she’d been told it wouldn’t. 

Two DHS officials told ProPublica CISA’s remaining staff avoids election work, afraid they could lose their jobs if they engage with state and local officials. “In CISA, elections are a toxic poison,” one said. 

A DHS spokesperson said state and federal officials are still working together “every single day” to protect elections and that “The claim that DHS has a broken partnership with states and made our elections less secure is simply false.”

The cuts to career election specialists and their divisions have eliminated information channels that spotlighted threats as voting took place, including Election Day command posts run by the Justice Department and FBI. Another information channel, which DHS used to fund, will still operate but will be available only to state and local election offices, not the federal government.

Jessica Cadigan, a former FBI intelligence analyst who investigated Election Day threats, said FBI headquarters’ command post was critical to her cases.

“That is dismantling the brain, if you will,” she said. “They are the ones that piece the whole thing together.”

An FBI spokesperson said the agency will still have capabilities to monitor the situation on the ground through designated election crimes coordinator experts in all its field offices.

Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, has come to see the federal government as adversarial to elections and election administration, rather than a partner. 

Colorado is one of around 30 states the Justice Department has sued for confidential voter roll information. At least four courts that have fully considered those cases so far have dismissed them, although the Justice Department has appealed most of the decisions. (The others are pending.) Griswold told ProPublica she has added another lawyer to her staff to fight whatever comes next from the Trump administration.

“Donald Trump,” she said, “has made American elections less safe.”

We’ve been covering Brendan Carr’s censorial ambitions for a long time now. When Trump first picked him to chair the FCC, we warned people that the “free speech warrior” branding was a total sham. We later dug into the letter from a massive coalition of 80+ legal scholars, former FCC officials, and civil liberties groups detailing how Carr’s threats fly in the face of the First Amendment. Hell, just this morning Karl wrote about how Carr is still plotting to punish Jimmy Kimmel for mocking President Trump. Meanwhile, Carr has responded to the criticism with smirking emojis and culture-war memes on X, treating the whole thing as performative trolling for an audience of one.

But now, First Amendment lawyer Bob Corn-Revere has published an open letter to Carr that is, frankly, one of the most devastating things I’ve read in years. And you really should go read the whole thing.

While Carr has mostly laughed off or ignored criticism of his many First Amendment violations, a letter from Corn-Revere (beyond the incredible prose of the letter) may hit a bit different given his stature within the First Amendment world. He has famously spent decades fighting in the trenches of the hardest, most politically uncomfortable First Amendment cases in the country. He represented Larry Flynt’s Hustler Magazine in the landmark Hustler v. Falwell case. He defended 2 Live Crew in the obscenity prosecution over As Nasty As They Wanna Be. He was counsel in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, the Supreme Court case that effectively ended the FCC’s broadcast indecency regime. There are many more famous cases on his resume as well. This is someone who has spent his entire career defending speech, including in cases where it was genuinely offensive, deeply unpopular, and legally novel — because that’s what actual First Amendment commitment requires.

Oh, and he served as Chief Counsel to former FCC Chairman James Quello, so he knows how the FCC works from the inside.

So when this person tells Brendan Carr that he has betrayed his professed values, it carries a weight that Carr’s thumbs-down emojis can’t dismiss. The letter opens by pointing to the cautionary tale of Pam Bondi’s sudden firing as Attorney General:

Pam Bondi’s sudden and ignominious end as Attorney General is an important cautionary lesson about what happens to officials in this administration who over-promise in order to curry favor with the man they see as their boss, but who under-perform because of the limits of their authority.

Bondi promised the President she would prosecute his political enemies and failed miserably. The President rewarded her misplaced loyalty by denying her the graceful exit she sought, and instead fired her during a cross-town limo ride to watch a Supreme Court argument.

You have recently threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who air what you call “fake news,” which apparently includes any skeptical reporting about the war in Iran—something you know you cannot do legally.

My advice? Don’t get into a car with the president anytime soon.

That line sets the tone for everything that follows — a pointed warning from someone who’s been inside the institution and watched Carr’s transformation up close, not someone lecturing from a safe distance.

From there, Corn-Revere walks through exactly how Carr has become the precise opposite of the person he used to claim to be, quoting Carr’s own prior statements back at him:

As you may recall, shortly after you were named to head the Federal Communications Commission, I offered you some unsolicited advice in the form of an open letter entitled “A Plea for Institutional Modesty.” I suggested you should be circumspect in your assertions of power over broadcasters because “you don’t have as much power as you may think,” and flexing your regulatory muscles would conflict with both the Communications Act and the Constitution.

But as was clear from your initial acts as chairman and statements you made while campaigning for the job, your quest for political advancement overrode any previous commitment to First Amendment values. Gone were the days when, as a commissioner, you said things like “a newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them,” or that “inject[ing] partisan politics into our licensing process” is “a deeply troubling transgression of free speech and the FCC’s status as an independent agency.”

I never expected you would heed my gratuitous advice, but had no idea how thoroughly you would betray your former (professed) values. Instead, you emerged as a Bizarro World caricature of yourself, threatening owners of broadcast networks with summer stock Don Corleone impressions and devoting much of your social media activity to jawboning. It is as if you set out to prove that the real mental health crisis in America isn’t about teens on Instagram, but public officials on X.

If someone of BCR’s stature said any of that about me, I might log off the internet forever.

The letter is full of these moments where Corn-Revere combines deep legal knowledge with rhetorical skill matched by very few. Take his description of Carr’s reliance on the long-dormant “news distortion” policy — a regulatory zombie that only exists because the FCC never formally killed it off after eliminating the Fairness Doctrine decades ago:

The news distortion policy is like a phantom limb after the FCC amputated the fairness doctrine—it is not really there in substance, but you still seem to feel you can walk on it.

Your smug social media posts about how broadcasters will be held to their public interest obligations “on your watch” ignores this history, but your claim that “the opposition to holding broadcasters accountable to the public interest comes increasingly from those unfamiliar with longstanding FCC precedent” is even worse, because you know it is a bald-faced lie.

The letter also hammers home a point we’ve made repeatedly: the actual, messy consequences of Carr’s performative bullying, and shows how spectacularly it has backfired over and over again. After Carr strong-armed Disney into suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live:

Protesters picketed outside the gates of the Magic Kingdom, and an estimated 7.1 million people cancelled subscriptions to Disney-owned streaming services Disney+ and Hulu over the controversy—at about twice the usual churn rate.

ABC affiliate group owners Sinclair Broadcasting and Nexstar Media Group, who had business before the Commission, and who dutifully followed your demand, also lost money. It turns out that advertisers will not pay as much for spots during reruns of Celebrity Family Feud as during Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Sinclair revenue dropped a reported 16 percent for the quarter. Nexstar also suffered losses, although the amounts were not disclosed.

The result? The suspension ended a little more than a week after it began and Kimmel triumphantly returned to the air to his highest viewership in over a decade. Kimmel’s comeback garnered 6.3 million broadcast viewers and roughly 20 – 26 million views on social media within 24 hours.

His attempt to manipulate equal opportunity rules to silence Stephen Colbert went even worse:

In January, you caused the FCC staff to reinterpret whether candidate interviews on certain talk shows were exempt from the equal opportunities rule, reversing decades of precedent.

You apparently were miffed that candidate interviews on certain TV shows did not trigger “equal time” requirements for their opponents under exemptions to the rule Congress adopted in 1959. Yet mysteriously, you said there was no need to apply your reinterpretation to conservative talk radio interviews.

But your main target of this move, Stephen Colbert, outsmarted you. He ridiculed your reinterpretation of the equal opportunities rule on air, and gleefully transmitted his interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on The Late Show’s YouTube channel, which is beyond the FCC’s jurisdiction. The interview got over seven million views overnight (more than three times the on-air viewership), Talarico immediately received $2.5 million in campaign contributions, and won his primary.

Carr’s tactics are unconstitutional and tactically stupid. He keeps creating the very outcomes he’s supposedly trying to prevent — even as some less strong-willed news orgs buckle under his threats or pre-censor themselves to avoid his performative wrath.

But the part of the letter that really sticks with me is the section on Carr’s legal knowledge — specifically, the massive gap between what Carr actually knows and what he pretends to believe. Corn-Revere lays out the full chain of Supreme Court precedent cutting back on the FCC’s assumed authority over broadcast content — and then lands this:

But you know all this. Just as you know the FCC eliminated the fairness doctrine four decades ago, which is the regulatory progenitor of the “news distortion policy” you now love to cite (but only against broadcasts you perceive as critical of this administration).

This matters because it removes the escape hatch of ignorance. When politicians misstate the law, you can at least entertain the possibility they just don’t know better. Carr has been an FCC commissioner for nearly a decade. He practiced communications law. He knows what he’s doing is legally indefensible, and he knows his smug social media posts about “the law is clear” are, as Corn-Revere puts it, “a bald-faced lie.”

The letter ends by looking at what all of this does to Carr’s legacy, and it lands with a quiet brutality that no amount of trolling can deflect:

Your recent appearance before the Conservative Political Action Conference is a prime example, where you explained the president is “winning” against the media by listing several media personalities who have left their jobs, including (as you put it) “sleepy eyed Chuck Todd.” I should not have to remind you of this, but it is a poor and pathetic leader who measures “winning” by what he thinks he has destroyed rather than by what he has managed to build.

And:

As I wrote in my first open letter, selling out your (professed) values represents short-term thinking. I noted that “officials who have tried to muzzle the press for short-term political gain have not been treated well by history,” and “if I were your adviser, this is not how I would want history to remember you.” Now, to the extent you will be remembered at all, it will most likely be mainly as a South Park character.

I wish you had listened.

Carr will likely ignore this, much like he brushed off the coalition letter, his own past statements, and basically every legal guardrail he’s encountered since taking the chair. That’s his whole game — the threats, the memes, the emojis, the audition tape for whatever comes next.

Still, the record is there now, written by someone whose First Amendment track record makes Carr’s look like a cheap Halloween costume. And unlike Carr’s social media posts, this letter will age well.

There’s a lot more in the letter. Go read the whole thing. You won’t regret it, even if Brendan Carr would likely wish to censor it like he wishes to censor Jimmy Kimmel.

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Just to be clear, when I refer to “Trump” in terms of his administration, I’m referring to the collective hive mind of dangerous enablers he employs. Trump, by himself, is incapable of closing an umbrella. It’s the people around him that are dangerous, since they’re able to convert his rants and brain stem impulses into action.

While it’s understandable that an aspiring autocrat like Trump would feel threatened by a movement dedicated to opposing fascists, it’s only now that he’s returned to office that he can do anything about it. Deliberately ignoring the fact that the most dangerous domestic terrorists are located on the far right of the political spectrum (including the hundreds of people he pardoned for assaulting police officers and raiding a federal building following his 2020 election loss), Trump’s administration is once again attempting to turn protected First Amendment activity into terroristic acts worthy of lengthy minimum federal sentences.

The United States was as concerned as always about Islamist terrorism, said the official, Monica A. Jacobsen, according to a copy of her prepared remarks reviewed by The New York Times and three officials briefed on the meeting. But, she told her counterparts from Europe, Canada and Australia, the Trump administration also wanted more attention on what it believed was an insidious, underestimated threat: the far left.

Western governments must combat “antifa and far-left terrorism,” Ms. Jacobsen’s prepared remarks asserted, casting the effort as an evolution in counterterrorism following the “global war on terror.” Her prepared speech defined far-left terrorism to include threats from communists, Marxists, anarchists, anticapitalists and those with “eco-extremist” and “other self-identified antifascist ideologies.”

“As always” is a nice touch. It’s always a good idea to keep an “Islamist” scapegoat in the yard, especially when you’re busy losing a war with Iran. Not only does it generate steady work for bored FBI agents, but it also allows Trump to continue pretending the mass deportation of hardworking, tax-paying non-whites is somehow contributing to the effort to root out an alleged “1,700 Iran sleeper cells” in the United States. (No “sleeper cell” has been broken up or deported despite Trump claiming the government already knows who these “sleepers” are and where they’re located.)

As evidence of the dangerousness of “far left” terrorists, Jacobsen pointed to a single protest in Milan, Italy, in which police and protesters “clashed” — the favorite euphemism deployed by people who wish readers to believe protesters were just as violent as law enforcement officers.

Meanwhile, the administration can’t actually find any hard evidence to back up its assertions about the supposed violent threat posed by far left activists.

In November, the State Department took the first major step in the strategy by designating four leftist groups in Europe — two in Greece, one in Germany and another in Italy — as terrorist organizations. None of the groups has been known to have plotted attacks on Americans in the past decade, which is usually a criterion for such a designation.

All it can do — as it did late last year when Trump unilaterally declared “antifa” a terrorist organization — is disappear any evidence to the contrary — something it did less than 48 hours after Charlie Kirk was killed by gunman during a campus appearance.

Even if you were to decide that what’s being claimed about “far left terrorism” in Europe by this administration is somehow true, you can’t ignore the facts on the ground here in the United States:

Over the past decade, right-wing extremists have killed 112 people across 152 terrorist attacks in the United States, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan research institution. Over the same period, left-wing extremists killed 13 people over 35 attacks, according to the analysis, while jihadist attacks left 82 dead.

Even if Trump hadn’t spent his entire term so far routinely insulting and berating our European allies, it’s still unlikely he would have been able to convince them to ignore the reality of the situation for the sole purpose of future abuses of civil liberties and rights.

Trump has been pounding this table since late last year, but now he’s finding fewer world leaders willing to indulge his fantasies or nod politely as Trump’s emissaries literally make shit up about left-wing activist groups.

The State Department wants to bring foreign law enforcement officials from at least 17 countries to The Hague in May for a workshop on how to fight far-left groups like antifa.

[…]

Formal invitations had not been sent as of last week, in part because Congress had to approve funding. U.S. officials told The Times that foreign governments had expressed less interest in the events than the State Department had hoped.

Once again, let’s pause to reflect on these claims. “Antifa” simply stands for “anti-fascist.” You barely have to move left at all to oppose fascism. All you would have to do is move to the left just far enough to align with… I don’t know… Ronald Reagan? And yet this administration is so stupid and thuggish that it actually thinks it can portray people opposed to fascism as more dangerous than US citizens who actively support it.

Everything else on Trump’s list of “domestic threats” is just a lazy rip-off of McCarthyism. “Far left” supposedly covers Communists, Marxists, “anti-capitalists” (yet another tell), and “eco-extremists.” In other words, people who disagree with this particular president and his policies. Free speech is what it is. But Trump and his enablers want people to go away for decades by turning dissent into terrorism.

Meanwhile, the true terrorist threat that is the extremely foreseeable result of the war in Iran is being back-burnered in favor of locking up people who just want to see this country remain a democratic republic. Fortunately for us, the rest of the world is no longer interested (Israel, Hungary, and Russia aside) in pretending Trump poses less of a threat than the people he wants to punish.

As the boss of the country’s media and telecom regulators, there’s plenty of corporate malfeasance and corrupt shenanigans Brendan Carr could be targeting on any given day at the country’s biggest media and telecom companies. But because Carr’s never been all that interested in the public interest, he’s once again spending his time trying to hurt a comedian who made fun of our unpopular president.

After an embarrassing failure at his attempt to censor Jimmy Kimmel for criticizing Donald Trump last year, Policyband notes that Carr is cooking up a new inquiry to ensnare Kimmel. This time, Carr is pretending he cares about financial conflict of interests, and is looking to “revisit” long‑standing conflict‑of‑interest rules for broadcasters (and Kimmel):

“A lot of people don’t know this, but there’s conflict‑of‑interest rules that apply to broadcasters, both personal financial, but also personal political,” he said. Carr — who had a blow up with Kimmel last September over the comic’s comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination — did not mention Kimmel by name. But he really did not need to because of the existence of a conflict of interest complaint pending against the host of Jimmy Kimmel Live! (via an ABC station) at the FCC.”

It’s been abundantly clear that the Trump administration is one giant, lumbering financial conflict of interest, though obviously Carr’s not actually interested in any equal application of financial conflict of interest rules. Instead, he’s leveraging FCC rules to single out Kimmel and a $23,000 payment Kimmel made to Democrat Adam Schiff’s campaign a year before Schiff appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Trump’s friend Larry Ellison has already taken out one late night TV host, Stephen Colbert, who was abruptly fired by CBS. Now Trump continues to try and leverage his lapdog at the FCC to find new and creative ways to make life difficult for any remaining late night hosts, tramping the First Amendment at every and any opportunity.

Carr is the same guy who recently (and illegally) ignored any remaining media consolidation limits to help his friends at right wing TV broadcasters merge, something only scuttled after court intervention. Whether it’s a conflict of interest inquiry, a free speech complaint, or cybersecurity “reforms,” absolutely nothing Carr does is in good faith; something our press struggles to make evident.

The exception has been outlets like Wired, which recently reported that a right wing activism group, the Center for American Rights (CAR), had direct access to Carr, bypassing all standard staff interactions. CAR was integral in helping Carr shape some of his hollow complaints against Kimmel and ABC in relation to his abuse of the antiquated FCC “equal time” rule.

With that bogus censorship effort thwarted, Carr has moved on to creatively crapping all over the First Amendment in equally creative, but likely equally fruitless ways.

Several years ago, Rockstar Games suffered an intrusion into its corporate network. During that intrusion, a trove of data, files, and information about the in-development and unfinished Grand Theft Auto 6 game was exfiltrated. Under monetary threat of that data leaking, Rockstar completely lost its mind and went on a DMCA takedown campaign to try to remove any leaked content or footage that was being teased by the hacker in circulation. Readers here will already know that this kind of DMCA whac-a-mole never works and instead served only to Streisand the whole story into wider consciousness, working directly against Rockstar’s purposes in the first place.

Today, Rockstar is under threat of a similar leak. The company has acknowledged that hacking group ShinyHunters gained access to Rockstar information through a third-party data breach, namely that of Anodot, and has threatened to leak all that data if it isn’t paid by Rockstar.

ShinyHunters claim to have breached Rockstar’s outsourced Snowflake cloud storage system by way of a third-party analytics tool, Anodot, which reportedly suffered its own breach recently. With authentication tokens from Anodot, ShinyHunters would not have needed to crack Snowflake’s security directly⁠. They would have just been recognized as an authorized party and let in through the front door, like Agent 47 in a security guard outfit. ShinyHunters claims to have had access to Rockstar’s database for a significant amount of time before it was realized anything was amiss.

“Your Snowflake instances were compromised thanks to Anodot.com. Pay or leak,” ShinyHunters wrote in a post on their site. “This is a final warning to reach out by 14 Apr 2026 before we leak along with several annoying (digital) problems that’ll come your way. Make the right decision, don’t be the next headline.”

Unlike the previous hack and threat of a leak, however, Rockstar appears to be taking a completely different tactic. In addition to once again refusing to pay any ransom, which is absolutely the correct course of action, the company has also basically shrugged its shoulders over this entire situation.

Rockstar quickly responded to Kotaku saying that while “a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed,” the incursion would have “no impact on our organization or our players.”

There’s still no clear idea of what data has been taken, but Rockstar is certainly playing it very cool. ShinyHunters, should it go through with plans to publish the information, will likely post it to its dark web pages from which it’ll eventually filter to the wider public.

Now, I want to be careful to not give Rockstar any undue credit here. As discussed below, the type of data that was gained in this particular breach is far more banal than the previous one, which included actual unfinished game footage, and perhaps it’s that which explains this change in stance.

But I would argue that this is mostly the right course even if that weren’t the case. You can’t bottle up the genie once the leak is out there, so you might as well put your PR hat on and engage with the public in a way that puts the company and the product in the best light, while also acknowledging the thirst for more information on the unreleased game.

This is something we’ve advocated for for years now. It’s a simple as putting out a statement roughly like:

Hey, everyone! We know there might be a leak about our company and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto title coming out soon and we know you’re interested in anything you can get your hands on about the game. We are too! We want you to see the game, but we do prefer you see it in its finished state. But if you can’t wait that long, we understand. Please just also understand that we are something of a victim in all of this. It kind of hurts and is frustrating to have our plans for this release get derailed by this kind of criminal activity, but all we ultimately care about is making sure you know just how awesome the next GTA is going to be!

Good will would abound, the hackers wouldn’t get the payout that wished for, and the company could appear awesome, and, more importantly, human. I very much hope that this response from Rockstar thus far is an indication that that’s where the company is headed with all of this.

In this case, ShinyHunters did eventually release the leaked info, and you can see why Rockstar didn’t care:

Looking at the structure of the data, it does appear to come from automated exports generated by analytics pipelines. The files are compressed CSV outputs, commonly used for batch reporting in cloud data platforms like Snowflake. This supports earlier reporting that the access point was not Rockstar’s core network but a third-party analytics integration, believed to involve Anodot.

Some of the files also reference internal monitoring and testing. For example, dataset names linked to cheat detection models and platform-level revenue mismatches suggest the data includes operational insights used by Rockstar teams to manage gameplay balance and detect abuse. There are also references to Zendesk ticket metrics and customer support reporting, indicating visibility into service operations rather than individual player accounts.

What is not present in the leaked material is just as important. There are no player credentials, account data, or unreleased game assets such as GTA VI content. That aligns with Rockstar’s earlier statement that the breach involved limited company information and did not impact players.

So perhaps Rockstar’s reaction is more explained by the lack of any really problematic content in the leak. But, still, it is a reminder that you don’t have to completely freak out over every leak.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• The Darkest Web (BBC)
• Federal agencies skirt Trump’s Anthropic ban to test its advanced AI model (Politico)
• Anthropic Opposes the Extreme AI Liability Bill That OpenAI Backed (Wired)
• Europe should regulate Big Tech instead of banning kids from social media, Estonia says (Politico EU)
• Statement by President von der Leyen with Executive Vice-President Virkkunen on the digital age verification app (European Commission)
• Apple threatened to remove Grok from the App Store over sexualized deepfakes, letter says (NBC News)
• A fake Ledger app on the Apple App Store drained $9.5 million in crypto (Coindesk)
• India’s Decentralized System of Internet Censorship (Tech Policy Press)
• As Social Media Tears Society Apart, a New Crop of Scary Movies Focuses on the Horror of Content Moderation (Variety)

We’re still yet to find a Ctrl-Alt-Speech 2026 Bingo Card winner — could this week be your lucky day? Play along!