That is not a characterization. That is what the documents say.

Subscribe now

American Muckrakers has reviewed the text messages Rep. Chuck Edwards produced to the U.S. House Committee on Ethics. His own words, spanning two years and two 20-something female staffers:

The House Ethics Committee has now found Edwards violated the House Code of Official Conduct and recommended the full House CENSURE him. We publish the screenshots, the full timeline, and the case for why censure is not enough. Chuck Edwards must resign.

I’ve spent years chasing accountability in Congress. Boebert. Cawthorn before her. This morning it landed in my own backyard.

Chuck Edwards is my congressman. NC-11, Western North Carolina, the mountains I live in. Today the House Ethics Committee, chaired by a Republican, recommended the full House censure him over his conduct toward two young female staffers. One was 19 when she started working for him. Censure means standing in the well of the House while the Speaker reads your shame out loud. Only expulsion is worse.

And here’s the part most outlets will skip: Edwards filed a 14-page counterattack written by Stanley Brand, one of the most experienced ethics lawyers in Washington. It doesn’t deny the gifts or the trips or the letters. It says the Committee broke its own rules to get him.

We’re hosting every page at Muckrakers.Today. Don’t take my word for anything. Read it yourself:

Full report: https://muckrakers.today/docs/edwards-ethics-committee-report.pdf

The exhibits: https://muckrakers.today/docs/edwards-ethics-appendix-a.pdf

His lawyers’ response: https://muckrakers.today/docs/edwards-ethics-appendix-b.pdf

Press release: https://muckrakers.today/docs/edwards-ethics-press-release.pdf

THE STUFF YOU WON’T BELIEVE

Sixteen witnesses. Nearly 1,500 pages. I’m quoting the documents, not speculating.

Over $1,000 in jewelry. Designer purses. Guns, plural. A paid New York trip with Hamilton tickets after one staffer’s breakup. Comments about their weight. Dinners he told staff to keep off his official calendar. Texts after midnight.

He skipped House votes, actual votes he was sent to Washington to cast, to decorate a staffer’s Christmas tree.

He hired a singer for a staffer’s birthday to perform an Ed Sheeran love song. “Darling, we could fall in love ‘neath the hills of Aberfeldy.” She told a friend she was “scared lowkey.” Her words, in the record.

One day a staffer looked sad, so he had about 30 tubs of ice cream delivered to her house. When she said that seemed like a bit much, he wrote back: “My heart was breaking seeing you like that.”

And my personal favorite. A staffer texted him thanks after a casino night. He printed the text out. On paper. Drew a heart next to it. Then wrote, in his own hand, “Perhaps my proudest personal moment!” The photo is in the exhibits.

November 2025, he flew a former staffer to Vegas. Bellagio, Sphere show, flights, all on him. When shutdown votes yanked him back to DC, she offered to change his flight herself so his scheduler wouldn’t “ask why you’re in Vegas.”

THE DELETED TEXTS

When the Committee asked for his messages, more than 400 texts with one staffer were missing, plus a nine-month hole covering at least 400 more. And the gaps weren’t random. His replies vanished in a pattern that made the young women look like the ones doing the chasing.

The problem with deleting texts is that the other person still has them. Investigators got the receipts anyway. Among the recovered messages: “I’m burning with jealousy because I wanted to be the person to introduce you to it.” A handwritten letter signed “With my lifetime of appreciation and devotion, Chuck.”

The Committee wrote that deleting those particular messages “indicates he was aware that their content was cause for concern.”

NOW, HIS SIDE. AND YOU SHOULD ACTUALLY READ IT.

I’m an accountability journalist, not a prosecutor, so here’s what Appendix B argues, straight up.

First, the Committee found no violation of the actual sexual misconduct rules. No sexual activity, no proposition, no quid pro quo, no federal harassment violation. The censure rests entirely on the catch-all rules about behaving “creditably” and honoring the “spirit” of the House.

Second, nobody ever filed a complaint. The investigation started from a Committee press statement and media reports. His lawyers say a censure recommendation requires an Investigative Subcommittee, formal charges, and a hearing where every count gets proved by clear and convincing evidence. None of that happened. Their word for it: “ultra vires.” Beyond the Committee’s power.

Third, they produced a voicemail Staffer 2 left Edwards in October 2025, weeks before Vegas: “I’m still so excited for Vegas. It’s going to be so much fun.” His lawyers say the Committee had that recording and ignored it.

They also point out House gift rules exempt gifts based on personal friendship, that Edwards gave gifts to plenty of other staffers including a handgun to a male staffer, and that the affair rumors trace back to a staffer he fired. He closes with “sincere regret” if anyone felt uncomfortable. While admitting nothing.

Is some of that lawyer smoke? Sure. The procedural argument is real, though, and if the House censures him on this record, every member of both parties should understand the precedent being set.

But here’s what sticks with me. When investigators asked Edwards directly whether he should have acted differently toward the young women who worked for him, he had a three-word answer.

“I’m going to say no.”

Two women walked away from careers in Congress. He’d change nothing. The Committee called it “a lack of self-awareness and accountability.” I call it exactly what Western North Carolina doesn’t need in Washington.

And while we’re on the subject of ethics: American Muckrakers has two ethics complaints pending against Lauren Boebert right now. The Edwards report proves the process can work when the evidence is there. We intend to make sure it works twice more. She’s also got court dates in Garfield County on August 13 and Weld County on September 4, and we’ll be watching those too.

The House votes on censure next. Then in November, NC-11 votes. I’ll be covering both here and at Muckrakers.Today. Subscribe, share this, and send it to somebody in the 11th District.

Sunlight. Always sunlight.

Big D

NOTE: All quotations come from the House Committee on Ethics report, Appendix B, and exhibits linked above. Representative Edwards has denied wrongdoing, and he is entitled to a presumption of innocence with respect to any matter not adjudicated. OK, Chuck.

Subscribe now

About the Author

David B. Wheeler is the president and co-founder of American Muckrakers, the Western North Carolina accountability organization best known for helping end Madison Cawthorn’s congressional career in 2022, the rare instance in modern politics of a sitting incumbent losing his own primary because somebody bothered to do the homework. Since then, American Muckrakers has turned its attention to Lauren Boebert, Ken Paxton, and a growing roster of politicians who confuse public office with a personal ATM. He publishes accountability journalism at Muckrakers.Today.

Wheeler co-hosts the MUCK YOU! podcast with Col. Moe Davis, the retired Air Force colonel and former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay. He is the author of Color the Crooks, Case File #001: Lauren Boebert, the coloring book James Carville endorsed with the words “She earned every damn page. Buy it.” *He is also the founder of VoteROI.com, a political data company built on 86.9 million FEC records that helps donors figure out where their money actually goes, which, as this essay makes clear, is a question more people should be asking.

Before all that, Wheeler spent three decades in politics, elections, and event production in more than 50 countries on all seven continents. Along the way he lowered the Mississippi River, produced the first professional sports event ever held in Moscow, and produced the first marathon ever run on Antarctica. His political education started early: Page for the Iowa House of Representatives, intern in the United States Senate, and National Committeeman for Iowa on the Young Democrats of America national committee. David was the lead advance guy for then Senator Obama in Iowa City, Iowa, in October of 2006, and then again during his presidential announcement in Waterloo, Iowa, in February 2007. And, he has some good stories from both experiences.

An Iowa native and proud Hawkeye, Wheeler is a father of three and lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina, in the district Chuck Edwards is currently failing. He believes sunlight is the best disinfectant, filings don’t lie, and the loudest guy in the room is usually the one with the most to hide.

And, Beetlejuice Boebert claimed she was going to sue him. She never did, so David sued her in Federal Court in Denver and partially won.

Paid for by American Muckrakers PAC II (americanmuckrakers.com). Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Donations made to American Muckrakers, Inc. are not deductible for federal or state tax purposes.

This publication is First Amendment protected speech and commentary on matters of public concern. All individuals referenced are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. No portion of this publication may be used for commercial purposes without the written consent of American Muckrakers PAC, Inc. and David B. Wheeler.

Share

I don’t need to look far for proof. I see it right from my front porch.

Exhibit A: North Carolina’s 11th District

Subscribe now

Meet Chuck. I live in NC-11, tucked in the mountains west of Asheville. Our congressman is Chuck Edwards. Edwards is currently under investigation following allegations he was sleeping with, or trying to sleep with, his own staff. Beyond that, he presided over a Hurricane Helene disaster recovery that left his constituents stranded without debris removal, housing funds, or basic answers while he cut ribbons and posed for photo ops. And yes, Chuck has the single worst comb-over in the United States Congress. That’d be funny if it weren’t such a precise metaphor for the guy: an awful lot of effort to cover up what everyone can plainly see.

Meet Jamie. This district ought to be a knife fight, and credit where it’s due, our nominee is fighting one. Jamie Ager, a fourth-generation local farmer, has out-raised Edwards roughly 3 to 1. That’s around $3 million compared to Chuck’s $940,000, holding more than four times his cash on hand according to the latest FEC filings. Polling shows Edwards in deep trouble.

Now, here’s the catch. NC-11 is an anomaly, and everybody in politics knows it.

Ager is what happens when a top-tier local candidate, a severely wounded incumbent, and serious money happen to collide in the exact same place at the exact same time. Go ahead, name a second district where all three conditions are true right now. I’ll wait.

Across the rest of the country, great challengers are starved for cash. National money arrives in late October, if it shows up at all, and wounded incumbents cruise to victory simply because nobody built the infrastructure to knock them off. One bright spot in the mountains isn’t a nationwide wave; it’s a mirage letting everyone else off the hook.

Even here, the race isn’t won. It comes down to whether that war chest actually transforms into door knocks in Mitchell, Madison, and Haywood counties. Money that stays in a bank account is just a digit on a quarterly report.

NC-11 is the exception. Here’s the rule with six warning signs we’re ignoring at our own peril.

1. Confusing Pure Anger With Actual Organization

Anger is free. Organization costs real money, time, and shoe leather. Western North Carolina is furious over the Helene recovery, but raw fury doesn’t knock doors, cure flawed ballots, or pull low-propensity voters to the polls in precincts decided by 900 votes. Rallies in Asheville feel great, but they don’t move Mitchell, Madison, or Haywood counties an inch. If your county party’s field operations fit on a paper napkin, you aren’t ready. Right now, way too many of ours aren’t.

2. Money Going to the Wrong Places (Still)

I run a PAC. I read filings. Most people would want a shower after looking at them. A shameful chunk of small-dollar cash raised in the name of “saving democracy” gets incinerated on consultant fees, list rentals, and out-of-state vendors who’ve never won a single race in the state they’re billing. I’ve documented campaigns where over 40% of the money left state lines before a single voter was ever contacted. That isn’t a political campaign; it’s a car wash for political consultants.

Donors: Do your homework. Look up candidates on VoteROI.com1 and direct your money to the races that desperately need cash today.

3. National Cash Arrives Late or Not at All

October money is funeral money. The DCCC and major national funders love parachuting into races in late September, long after the die is cast, and then blaming the candidate when they lose. Battles are won with early capital: building staff, field networks, and name recognition in the spring, not a frantic TV ad buy ten days before the election. Writing off winnable districts with damaged incumbents isn’t high strategy, it’s malpractice, and people ought to lose their jobs over it every single cycle. (Spoiler: nobody ever does.)

4. The Map and the System Aren’t Neutral

While folks argued on Twitter, the other side redrew the maps. North Carolina’s lines were explicitly drawn to safeguard incumbents like Chuck Edwards, and that exact playbook played out state after state. Throw in voter roll purges, closed polling sites, and local election offices staffed by people who still insist 2020 was stolen. None of this is secret; it’s public record enacted in broad daylight. Every hour spent in social media flame wars is an hour nobody spent recruiting poll watchers or funding election protection lawyers for post-election courtrooms.

5. Complacency Disguised as Confidence

“Midterms always swing against the party in power.” Maybe. But historical trends aren’t a field strategy, and hope isn’t a ground game. Chuck Edwards’s main achievements are an active federal investigation, a disastrous recovery response, and a hairstyle held together by Aqua Net, and he’s still standing. Guys like Chuck don’t lose to general vibes; they lose to relentless organization. The “inevitable wave” has a funny way of evaporating, leaving the same pundits to write post-mortems on why the failure was bound to happen.

6. The Circular Firing Squad Is Loaded

Last night, I got an email that illustrates our whole problem. A donor gave us $10 two years ago, then wrote in to unsubscribe over our billboard campaign targeting Lauren Boebert. She stated she strongly opposes Boebert’s views and held no objection to holding her accountable, but our billboards offended her manners, so she was pulling out.

Subscribe now

The kicker? She lives in Colorado, but not even in Boebert’s district.

Is that email an isolated incident? Sure. Most of our inbox consists of snark, encouragement, and useful tips. But pause and digest what that email represents: Lauren Boebert votes against disaster relief, veterans, and her own constituents, yet this donor’s response is to lecture the one group that nearly stripped Boebert of her seat and take her ten bucks home.

I offered to refund her $10. Hell, I’d drive it to her house. If you spend your energy policing the folks fighting in the trenches and hitting us harder than you hit Boebert, you aren’t an ally.

The other side doesn’t do this. Their donors don’t cut and run over rough language or sharp edges. They know they’re in a knife fight, and they back the people holding knives. Our side keeps expecting a war won with thank-you notes and pristine etiquette, then acts stunned when the Boeberts and Edwardses of the world keep winning. Politics is a contact sport. If you don’t treat this like a battle for the country’s direction, you aren’t paying attention.

Our Own Books, Open on the Table

Sunlight applies to everybody, including me.

American Muckrakers has raised $13,865 across 541 contributions this year, along with roughly $14,000 from subscribers to this Substack. Split that across six months, and it’s about $4,500 a month for a 61-year-old man and his three teenage kids to live on. That is the entire war chest of the outfit that helped derail Madison Cawthorn’s political career, operating on an average gift of $25 while grift shops with slick email systems and zero wins collect millions.

Small-dollar donors are exhausted. They’ve been burned by years of urgent “DONATE NOW OR DEMOCRACY DIES” inbox spam, leaving the people doing the real work to pay the price.

That number terrifies me, more than any polling data. Not because I’m scraping by, but because I know how hard we work, what we’re capable of flipping, and how pitiful our fundraising numbers are relative to the stake.

So here is a direct ask, with total transparency on where every cent goes: Lauren Boebert is expected in Colorado courtrooms this August and September regarding her son’s criminal cases. We are raising funds right now to place cameras in those courtrooms and put her testimony directly in front of her constituents, in her own words, on the record.

No consultants. No email list rentals. Just live coverage on social media and a pooled feed for news outlets. If you want hard-hitting accountability journalism over another panic-email about democracy, help us make it happen: donate here.

Want something tangible for your money? Pick up my book. James Carville already told you to. All proceeds go directly to American Muckrakers.

So What Do We Actually Do?

I’m a muckraker, not a doomsayer. Every single one of these problems has a practical fix, but it requires unsexy work nobody posts on social media:

• Give smart: Use VoteROI.com to donate directly to candidates like Jamie Ager and local grassroots groups conducting real voter contact, not email lists that spend your $25 renting other email lists. Got $10 for us? It goes straight to courtroom cameras in Colorado this August and September.

• Do the unglamorous jobs: Data entry, ballot curing, voter transit, poll monitoring. If you hold a law license, sign up for election protection now—not three days before the election. Got a laptop and a platform? Focus locally, where a few hundred votes alter the outcome.

• Hold our own side accountable: Sunlight isn’t reserved exclusively for Republicans. When our campaigns burn donor money or national committees write off winnable seats, call them out. A party unable to police itself has no business asking voters for power.

Disaster isn’t inevitable, but it is sitting right in front of us, in NC-11 and in my inbox, waiting for us to remain complacent, disorganized, and preoccupied with grading each other’s manners.

Ninety-six days. Get off your ass, get to work, and give.

— DBW

About the Author

David B. Wheeler is the president and co-founder of American Muckrakers, the Western North Carolina accountability group best known for helping end Madison Cawthorn’s congressional career in 2022, a rare instance of a sitting incumbent losing his own primary because someone took the time to do the research. Since then, American Muckrakers has focused its lens on Lauren Boebert, Ken Paxton, and a growing list of politicians treating public office like a personal bank account. He publishes accountability journalism at Muckrakers.Today.

Wheeler co-hosts the MUCK YOU! podcast alongside Col. Moe Davis, retired Air Force colonel and former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay. He authored Color the Crooks, Case File #001: Lauren Boebert, the coloring book endorsed by James Carville with the words: “She earned every damn page. Buy it.”

He is also the founder of VoteROI.com, a political data platform built on 86.9 million FEC records to help donors trace where their money actually goes.

Before founding Muckrakers, Wheeler spent three decades in politics, elections, and event production across 50+ countries on all seven continents. Along the way, he lowered the Mississippi River, produced the first professional sports event ever held in Moscow, and staged the first marathon ever run in Antarctica. His political background spans decades: Page for the Iowa House of Representatives, U.S. Senate intern, and Iowa National Committeeman for the Young Democrats of America. David served as lead advance for then-Senator Barack Obama in Iowa City in October 2006, and again during his presidential announcement in Waterloo in February 2007.

An Iowa native and Hawkeye, Wheeler is a father of three living in Western North Carolina’s 11th District. He believes sunlight is the ultimate disinfectant, filings don’t lie, and the loudest person in the room usually has the most to hide.

(And yes—Lauren Boebert threatened to sue him, never did, so David sued her in Federal Court in Denver and won a partial victory.)

Paid for by American Muckrakers PAC II (americanmuckrakers.com). Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. Contributions to American Muckrakers, Inc. are not tax-deductible for federal or state purposes.

This publication constitutes First Amendment-protected commentary on matters of public concern. All individuals mentioned are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law. Content may not be republished for commercial purposes without explicit written consent from American Muckrakers PAC, Inc. and David B. Wheeler.

Share

So here’s the bill. April 23, 2026, Lauren Boebert puts her name on the Surveillance Accountability Act as the lone cosponsor behind Thomas Massie. And it asks the government to do the almost insultingly obvious: get a warrant. From a judge. On probable cause. Before it goes digging through your life. Shut the loophole that lets the feds just buy from a data broker what the Constitution says they can’t take. Kill the warrantless face scans. Choke the license plate readers quietly clocking everywhere you drive.

Subscribe now

It’s actually a pretty good bill. I’ll say it twice so nobody misquotes me: good bill. The data-broker dodge is a real, deliberate, years-running scam on the Fourth Amendment, and Congress has spent every one of those years looking anywhere else.

But chew on one word. Notice.

Last time these people brawled over warrantless spying, back in 2024, some of the drafts floating around did something you should never be allowed to forget. They wrote in special protection for members of Congress. One rulebook for the 435 people writing the law. A cheaper, flimsier one for the 330 million of us stuck living under it. Tim Burchett caught it and said the quiet part out loud on his way to voting no: “If the bill is good enough for the American people, it should be good enough for us.”

There it is. That’s the whole game in one sentence. The same crowd building the surveillance state kept trying to bolt a panic room onto the inside of it, for themselves. Rules for thee. Warrantless searches for thee. A carve-out for me.

And now one of the protected class has wandered out of the panic room, into the open where the rest of us have been standing this whole time, and, shocked, shocked, discovered the machine doesn’t check for a congressional pin before it eats you. Suddenly the building’s on fire.

Here’s the match. Late April, Chuck Grassley dumps whistleblower files on Operation Rampart Twelve, a preliminary FBI probe cracked open by the Washington Field Office on January 22, 2021, aimed at Boebert and three other Republicans, Gosar, Biggs, Brooks. The pitch: they’d supposedly run recon tours of the Capitol before January 6. The pitch was garbage, and the prosecutors clocked it almost immediately, one looked at the video of the crowd behind Boebert and saw a family with kids, weird, sure, but not suspicious. Case ordered shut in January 2022. No charges. As far as the record shows, not even an interview.

But somewhere in that dead-end fishing trip, the agents pulled her phone records anyway. No warrant. No notice. And she didn’t find out for five years, and when she finally did, it wasn’t the FBI coming clean or the DOJ owning up. It was a leak. Of course it was a leak. It’s always a leak.

Her rage is real and it’s earned. It’s also five years late and pitched at a volume that tracks, to the decimal, exactly how close the surveillance finally got to her personally. “To have all this just exposed to me five years later by a whistleblower, not even by the DOJ or the FBI, is very concerning,” she tells CBS Colorado. “If it is going to happen to a sitting member of Congress, it can happen to any one of your viewers.” Yeah. No kidding. That’s the entire lesson, and it’s the same one privacy people have been screaming into a hurricane for twenty years, except they screamed it without a congressional office, without a friendly chairman to unseal their file for the cameras, without a camera in the first place.

Subscribe now

And credit where it’s due, because I’m not going to lie to you to score a point, her answer beats most of the building. On FISA 702, the law that lets the government hoover up Americans’ messages warrant-free the second you talk to a foreigner, she’s been “warrants or bust” for real. She was one of nineteen Republicans who torched their own party’s reauthorization in 2024 over the missing warrant rule. In 2026, when Trump flipped from “KILL FISA” to “give me a clean renewal,” she held out against her own president. On that vote, she’s stood exactly where her shiny new bill says she stands.

So no, this isn’t hypocrisy. And frankly, calling it hypocrisy would let her off easy, because hypocrisy is cheap and everybody’s numb to it. This is worse. This is proximity. This is a principle that sat in a drawer, real but resting, until the day it got personal.

Because the warrant fight is old and it kept losing, over and over, most obscenely in 2024 when the amendment cratered on a 212-to-212 tie. One vote. A coin landing wrong. And the entire grinding apparatus this bill would finally take a wrench to got built and rubber-stamped in broad daylight, session after session, while the bodies it ran over were mostly broke, mostly nameless, mostly people who couldn’t have conjured a Senate hearing if their lives depended on it. Which, sometimes, they did.

What Boebert’s got that they never will: a whistleblower, a chairman, a mic.

So pass the damn bill. I mean it. Close the loophole, force the warrant, every word of the principle is right and the country would breathe easier for it. A good idea doesn’t go rotten just because a latecomer’s name lands on the letterhead.

But keep your eyes open about what you’re actually watching here. The machine didn’t become intolerable the day it caught Lauren Boebert. It was intolerable when it caught the first nobody, and the next, and every one since, the ones with no whistleblower, no hearing, no bill number, no prayer of ever finding out it happened at all. She had the principle the whole time. She just kept it folded in her back pocket until the day it was her phone in the government’s fist. And the only test that counts, the one nobody in that building ever passes, isn’t this bill, filed with impeccable timing the same month her own file spilled into the daylight. It’s whether she’s still this loud a year from now, when the poor bastard on the wrong end of a warrantless search is a nobody, and the last person left willing to raise hell is the exact one the Fourth Amendment was written to cover in the first place.

Don’t hold your breath, especially when Boebert attaches her name to something. Remember her cafe, Shitters?

Subscribe now

About the author

David B. Wheeler is an accountability journalist, the founder of American Muckrakers, and host of the MUCK YOU! podcast. He writes on political corruption, government surveillance, and public accountability from Spruce Pine, North Carolina.

© 2026 David B. Wheeler. All rights reserved. This work is protected opinion and commentary on matters of public concern, published under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It draws on public records and public reporting, cited herein. No portion may be reproduced for commercial use without the written consent of David B. Wheeler. The named individual is presumed innocent of any wrongdoing not established by a court of law.

Subscribe now

The numbers came in this week, and they are worse than anything in four years.

The United Nations confirmed on July 14 that June 2026 was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since April 2022. At least 293 civilians killed. Another 1,990 injured. May had already set a four-year record. June broke it.

Since Putin launched his full-scale invasion in February 2022, the UN has verified at least 16,431 civilian deaths in Ukraine, including 803 children, with more than 48,000 injured. The UN says the real number is far higher, because it cannot count the dead in places Russia occupies, like Mariupol, where thousands are believed buried under rubble no investigator can reach.

And July is not letting up. In the first seven days of this month alone, 93 civilians were killed. On July 6, Russian missiles and drones hit Kyiv overnight and killed at least 14 people in their apartment buildings. That strike came four days after another attack on the capital killed at least 30.

Why now? Two reasons, and neither is complicated.

First, Ukraine is running low on air defense missiles, and Russia knows it. With interceptor stocks depleted, Russian long-range missiles and drones are reaching dense urban neighborhoods they could not touch a year ago. Civilian casualties from long-range weapons are up 60 percent over the same period last year.

Second, Putin is not trying to win on the battlefield. He is trying to break a population. When your strategy is hitting apartment blocks in Kyiv, Dnipro, and Kharkiv, the dead 3-year-olds are not accidents. They are the point.

The fear is running in both directions

Here is the part the Kremlin does not want you to notice: while Putin terrorizes Ukrainian cities, he is also terrorizing his own people, because he is afraid of them.

Just today, Russian police arrested Ilya Remeslo, a blogger who spent years as a loyal Kremlin attack dog and helped run campaigns against Alexei Navalny. In March, Remeslo published a manifesto titled “Five reasons why I stopped supporting Vladimir Putin,” calling him a war criminal. First they put him in a psychiatric hospital for a month, a Soviet-era classic. Now he faces up to 10 years in prison for “spreading false information about the military.”

The same day, a Russian court convicted Boris Nadezhdin, the politician who tried to run against Putin in 2024 on an anti-war platform, of displaying “extremist symbols.” The conviction and his new “foreign agent” label keep him off the ballot in September’s parliamentary elections.

A regime that is winning does not jail its own former loyalists. A regime that is winning does not need to rig a parliamentary election it already controls. Fear flows downhill from the top, and right now the man at the top is afraid.

What we’re doing at Muckrakers.Today

We built Putin Watch because pressure only works if someone is keeping score in public.

Every day, we track the Putin Watch Index, a 0 to 100 read on the stress facing the Kremlin, scored by a human editor from seven inputs: elite purges, economic strain, battlefield losses, diplomatic isolation, domestic dissent, succession signals, and what ordinary Russians are searching for. Every score comes with dated, linked sources. Today’s arrest of Remeslo goes straight into the Domestic Dissent column.

We maintain a running Body Count of Putin’s war, updated daily and deliberately conservative, so no one can accuse us of inflating it. We track how many days it has been since Putin was last verified in public. We publish weekly briefings on the men around him and who might come after him.

None of it is a prediction. All of it is a record. When this ends, and it will end, the record will matter.

See it all at targets.muckrakers.today/putin/watch.

If this matters to you

Independent accountability journalism does not fund itself, and we do not answer to advertisers or a corporate parent.

Subscribe free. Get Muckrakers Daily, our morning accountability brief, one email a day, at muckrakers.today or on Substack.

Support the work. If you can chip in, donate at voteroi.com/support. Every dollar goes to keeping the lights on and the record public.

The dead of Kyiv and Dnipro cannot keep score. We can.

Sources: UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, July 14, 2026 update; UN News, July 6, 2026; OHCHR verified casualty data through June 30, 2026; Reuters, Bloomberg, and The Moscow Times reporting on the Remeslo arrest and Nadezhdin conviction, July 17, 2026.

About the author

David B. Wheeler is an accountability journalist and the founder and editor of Muckrakers.Today. He has spent four years documenting the powerful, from Vladimir Putin to Lauren Boebert, who sued him and lost when a federal magistrate found she had defamed him five times. He hosts the MUCK YOU! podcast with Col. Moe Davis. Before journalism, he produced events in more than 75 countries and on all seven continents, including the first marathon in Antarctica. He lives in the North Carolina mountains with his three children.

Muckrakers.Today is an independent editorial project of Parallax Advisory LLC. This essay is First Amendment protected speech and commentary on matters of public concern. It reflects the reporting and opinions of the author, is based on cited public sources, and is not affiliated with, authorized by, or produced on behalf of any political candidate or committee. All individuals referenced are entitled to a presumption of innocence with respect to any alleged unlawful conduct unless and until proven otherwise. Corrections: editorial@parallaxadvisory.llc

.

She wants the law enforced against immigrants, teachers, librarians, prosecutors, political opponents, and anyone else who irritated her before breakfast.

But when the law requires Lauren Boebert to explain her own family’s money, “law and order” begins to look less like a principle and more like a bumper sticker.

Nearly $1 million in consulting income appeared on one financial disclosure.

Then the exact amounts disappeared.

The name of the company changed.

Another LLC, personally formed by Lauren Boebert, appeared in the corporate chain.

Official county records continued placing her husband directly inside active drilling operations.

The congressional guardrails responded with the institutional equivalent of staring at their shoes.

This is not a minor bookkeeping dispute.

This is a story about money, political power, oil and gas, federal disclosure requirements, and a member of Congress who appears to believe transparency is something other people should practice.

The $938,987 That Appeared Once

Nearly half a million dollars a year

Lauren Boebert’s first congressional financial disclosure reported that her husband, Jayson Boebert, received:

$478,386 in 2020

$460,601 in 2019

That totals $938,987 in two years for what the filing described as “consulting services.”

The reported source was Terra Energy Productions.

The same disclosure identified Lauren Boebert’s 100 percent interest in Shooters Grill LLC and listed her position as proprietor and member of that company.

That is not side-hustle money.

That is not somebody earning a few dollars advising a neighbor about where to put a septic tank.

That is almost half a million dollars a year.

Most Americans would be delighted to have a consulting business that generated that kind of money without ever having to explain what the consultant actually did.

Which Terra company was it?

The federal disclosure names Terra Energy Productions.

But the operational records we reviewed repeatedly use different names:

• Terra Energy Partners

• TEP Rocky Mountain LLC

• Boebert Consulting LLC

A recorded corporate document identifies Terra Energy Partners LLC as the sole member of TEP Rocky Mountain LLC. Garfield County records identify TEP Rocky Mountain as the drilling operator.

The precise company named on Boebert’s federal filing does not match the entities appearing throughout the drilling documents.

Perhaps “Terra Energy Productions” was a mistake.

Perhaps it was an informal name.

Perhaps someone preparing a federal financial disclosure involving almost $1 million simply shrugged and typed whatever sounded close enough.

That is not an acceptable explanation.

Boebert certified that the statements in her report were true, complete, and correct to the best of her knowledge and belief.

When the amount is nearly $1 million, “close enough” is not an accounting standard.

It is a warning sign.

Then the Numbers Disappeared

Welcome to the land of N/A

Boebert’s next annual disclosure no longer identified a Terra company as the source.

Instead, it listed:

Boebert Consulting LLC
Spouse, Consulting Services
Amount: N/A

The filing continued to list Boebert’s position with Shooters Grill LLC. It listed no position with Boebert Consulting LLC and no position with JLB903 LLC.

Her 2022 report repeated the pattern:

Boebert Consulting LLC
Spouse Salary
Amount: N/A

That report again disclosed her position with Shooters Grill and nothing involving JLB903 or Boebert Consulting.

Her 2023 report once again listed Boebert Consulting as the source of her husband’s salary, again showed the amount as N/A, and listed no outside positions at all.

Apparently, in Boebert accounting, N/A stands for Not Answering.

The amount may not have been required, but the retreat matters

Federal law generally requires disclosure of the source of a spouse’s earned income above the applicable threshold. The statute permits more limited reporting of a spouse’s income from personal services or self-employment in certain circumstances. (US Code)

So the use of N/A does not, standing alone, prove a violation.

But it tells us something important about Boebert’s approach to transparency.

When she first filed, the public received exact dollar figures.

Once those figures generated scrutiny, the public received the minimum.

The money went from $938,987 to N/A.

The disclosure did not become clearer.

It became foggier.

The Drilling Work Did Not Disappear

Official records kept naming Jayson Boebert

While Boebert’s congressional reports became less informative, Garfield County records remained surprisingly helpful.

A 2018 application for temporary employee housing at a TEP Rocky Mountain operation listed Jayson Boebert as a 24-hour emergency contact.

A December 2020 application at another TEP Rocky Mountain site again listed him as a 24-hour emergency contact.

A September 2021 application did the same.

The accompanying site plan identified him plainly:

Jayson Boebert: Drilling

The same emergency-contact list separately identified a drilling and completions manager, another drilling contact, a safety contact, and a spill-response contact.

Jayson was not listed as “former consultant,” “family friend,” or “guy who happened to answer the phone.”

He was listed under Drilling.

A September 24, 2021, rig-move notification stated that TEP Rocky Mountain had commenced drilling operations expected to continue for approximately 54 days. Jayson Boebert was copied alongside TEP personnel involved in drilling, engineering, safety, and operations.

Then, in January 2023, another Garfield County application named Jayson as a 24-hour emergency contact for a TEP Rocky Mountain project expected to remain active for 127 days.

The work remained visible. The compensation became invisible.

These county records do not tell us how much Jayson was paid after 2020.

That is precisely the problem.

The records continued to place him inside Terra-linked drilling operations.

The congressional reports continued identifying Boebert Consulting as the source of his income.

But the public was no longer told how much money was coming in.

The work remained visible.

The compensation disappeared behind N/A.

It is an impressive trick.

David Copperfield usually requires lighting, smoke, and a very expensive theater.

Congress apparently requires a PDF.

Subscribe now

Now Meet JLB903 LLC

Lauren Boebert personally formed it

Colorado records show that Lauren Boebert personally formed JLB903 LLC on January 29, 2018.

The articles of organization identify:

• JLB903 LLC at the Boebert family address

• Lauren O. Boebert as its initial registered agent

• Lauren O. Boebert as the person forming the company

• Lauren O. Boebert as the person causing the document to be filed

The filing states that management was vested in one or more managers and that the company had at least one member.

It does not identify the manager.

It does not identify the member.

But Lauren Boebert is the only individual named throughout the formation filing.

That is considerably more involvement than accidentally walking past an LLC at the grocery store.

JLB903 then appears inside Boebert Consulting’s structure

The Colorado business record for Boebert Consulting identifies JLB903 LLC as its registered agent.

It uses the same Panoramic Drive address connected to the Boeberts.

That creates a direct documentary chain:

Lauren Boebert formed JLB903 LLC.

Lauren Boebert served as its initial registered agent.

JLB903 became the registered agent for Boebert Consulting LLC.

Boebert Consulting became the disclosed source of Jayson Boebert’s income.

Colorado’s Secretary of State explains that a registered agent receives official documents and service of process for a company. The state’s filing instructions also make clear that a registered agent is not necessarily an owner or director. (Colorado Secretary of State)

Registered-agent status alone does not settle the ownership question.

It raises it.

Who owned JLB903?

Who managed it?

Why did Lauren form it?

Why did it become the registered agent for the company listed as the source of her husband’s income?

This is an LLC inside the orbit of another LLC, connected to income originally attributed to a differently named energy company.

It is less a corporate structure than a Russian nesting doll designed by an accountant with trust issues.

She Knew How to Disclose an LLC

Shooters Grill made the form. JLB903 did not.

Boebert’s original disclosure identified her 100 percent ownership of Shooters Grill.

It listed the company as an asset.

It listed its estimated value.

It listed its losses.

It identified her as a proprietor and member of the LLC.

She clearly understood that LLC ownership and LLC positions could belong on a congressional financial disclosure.

But JLB903 did not appear.

Boebert Consulting did not appear as a position she held.

Her role in forming JLB903 was not explained.

JLB903’s relationship with Boebert Consulting was not explained.

The relationship among Boebert Consulting, Terra Energy Partners, and TEP Rocky Mountain was not explained.

The source named “Terra Energy Productions” was not reconciled with the companies appearing in the operational records.

The form had room for her husband’s retirement accounts, Robinhood activity, cryptocurrency trades, and restaurant interests.

It apparently ran out of space just before reaching the LLC Lauren personally created.

What unfortunate timing.

What Boebert Will Say

Let us save everyone some time

Lauren Boebert and her lawyers will probably say this is all perfectly innocent.

They may say registered-agent status does not prove ownership.

Correct.

They may say Lauren merely formed JLB903 as an administrative convenience, had no financial interest in it, never managed it, and received no benefit from it.

Possible.

They may say “Terra Energy Productions” was simply a clerical error and everyone understood that the disclosure referred to a Terra-related company.

Also possible.

They may say House rules did not require disclosure of the exact amount of her husband’s later ordinary earned income.

That may explain N/A.

They may say Boebert Consulting belonged solely to Jayson and that Lauren had no ownership, management authority, signing authority, or entitlement to distributions.

Fine.

They may say the House Ethics Committee reviewed her reports and did not object.

That would not prove the filings were complete. It would prove the congressional ethics system did not publicly pursue the questions now visible in the documents.

Then there is the traditional political defense:

This is a partisan witch hunt.

Naturally.

When documents raise questions about a politician’s money, the documents apparently register to vote.

She can clear it up immediately

None of these defenses requires months of investigation.

Lauren Boebert could resolve the central questions today.

She does not need another press release.

She does not need a fundraising email about the radical left.

She does not need to pose with a firearm next to a copy of the Constitution.

She needs to release the documents:

• The operating agreements for JLB903 and Boebert Consulting

• The complete ownership histories of both companies

• Documents identifying their members and managers

• Amendments, transfers, resignations, or changes in control

• Contracts involving Jayson Boebert, Boebert Consulting, Terra Energy Partners, TEP Rocky Mountain, or affiliated entities

• Invoices and payment records supporting the consulting income

• K-1s or other records identifying company income and distributions

• Bank-signature records showing who controlled the accounts

• Any explanation submitted to House Ethics concerning “Terra Energy Productions”

• Any amendment correcting or clarifying the identity of the payer

The missing documents are the ones that would reveal ownership, control, payment flow, and whether Lauren had a reportable position or interest.

Come on MUCK YOU!

Lauren Boebert is formally invited to appear on MUCK YOU!

Live or recorded.

She may bring a lawyer, an accountant, a spokesperson, or all three.

She can bring every document she believes proves our conclusions wrong.

She can explain:

• What services Jayson performed for nearly $1 million

• Which company actually paid the money

• Why the federal disclosure named “Terra Energy Productions”

• Why later filings named Boebert Consulting

• Who owned and managed Boebert Consulting

• Who owned and managed JLB903

• Why Lauren created JLB903

• Why JLB903 became Boebert Consulting’s registered agent

• Whether Lauren had signing authority or received a financial benefit

• Why neither company appeared among her disclosed positions

• Whether she has amended, or intends to amend, any report

No ambush.

No edited clips designed to change her answers.

No campaign-rally audience.

Just the documents, the questions, and her explanation.

Come on MUCK YOU!, Congresswoman.

Defend the filings.

Explain the companies.

Show us the ownership records.

Follow the money with us.

Subscribe now

Silence is also an answer

Boebert does not have to accept the invitation.

She does not have to release the operating agreements, contracts, invoices, ownership schedules, or bank-control records voluntarily.

She can continue calling every investigation political.

She can continue pretending that N/A resolves nearly $1 million in unanswered questions.

But she cannot credibly claim that the truth is complicated while refusing to release the documents that would make it simple.

If she had no ownership interest, show us.

If she was never a manager, show us.

If JLB903 had no financial connection beyond serving as registered agent, show us.

If “Terra Energy Productions” was an innocent mistake, identify the actual payer and release the contract.

If every disclosure was complete and accurate, come explain it under questioning.

The fastest way to end a supposed witch hunt is to produce the records proving there was no witch.

Until then, the questions remain.

So does our invitation.

AN OPEN INVITATION TO LAUREN BOEBERT

Appear on MUCK YOU! and explain the disclosures, the companies, the ownership structure, and the payment trail.

Bring counsel.

Bring an accountant.

Bring the documents.

No slogans. No fundraising appeal. Just answers.

What the Law Requires

These are legal filings, not campaign biographies

The Ethics in Government Act requires annual financial disclosures to include a “full and complete statement” of the information specified by law. The required categories include reportable income, certain property interests, liabilities, transactions, and positions held with outside businesses. (US Code)

The House Ethics Committee’s current Financial Disclosure Instruction Guide explains the detailed reporting obligations for members and other House filers. (House Committee on Ethics)

That makes the unanswered questions about JLB903 central to this story.

Was Lauren Boebert a member?

If she owned a membership interest, was it reportable as an asset or outside position?

Was she a manager?

If she functioned as a manager, was that a reportable position?

Did JLB903 own or control any interest in Boebert Consulting?

If so, did Lauren have a direct or indirect financial interest?

Did she have account authority or receive a benefit?

Who signed checks?

Who controlled the accounts?

Who received distributions?

Who reported the income for tax purposes?

These questions cannot be answered by another cable-news interview.

They require operating agreements, ownership schedules, tax documents, contracts, invoices, bank records, and payment records.

In other words, documents.

Lauren Boebert’s natural predator.

The Laws We Are Examining

5 U.S.C. § 13104

This is the core federal financial-disclosure statute.

It requires a full and complete statement covering the categories specified by Congress, including reportable income and certain outside positions and interests. (US Code)

The central question is whether Boebert had any reportable position, ownership interest, financial interest, or functional role in JLB903 or Boebert Consulting that was omitted.

5 U.S.C. § 13106

Federal law authorizes civil action against an individual who knowingly and willfully falsifies, fails to file, or fails to report information required under the financial-disclosure law.

The statute also contains criminal provisions for knowing and willful falsification or failure to report required information. It directs a supervising ethics office to refer a matter to the attorney general when it has reasonable cause to believe a willful violation occurred. (US Code)

Not “may consider.”

Not “might discuss after the next recess.”

The statute uses mandatory language.

Congress occasionally writes strong verbs into laws.

The challenge is locating someone willing to read them.

18 U.S.C. § 1001

Depending on the evidence and the filing involved, the federal false-statements statute may also warrant examination.

It prohibits knowing and willful concealment of a material fact, materially false statements, and the use of materially false documents in covered federal matters.

For legislative-branch matters, its reach includes certain documents required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to Congress or a legislative-branch office, as well as authorized congressional investigations and reviews. (US Code)

Whether that statute applies here depends on evidence of intent, materiality, and the precise nature of any omission or false statement.

That is why we need the records.

House Rules XXIII and XXVI

The current Rules of the House contain the Code of Official Conduct in Rule XXIII and financial-disclosure provisions in Rule XXVI. (Rules Committee)

The spirit of disclosure is not difficult to understand:

Tell the public what you own.

Tell the public which businesses you manage.

Tell the public where your money comes from.

Do not turn a federal disclosure into a scavenger hunt involving county drilling permits, family LLCs, and several variations of the word Terra.

Where Were the Guardrails?

Congress policing Congress

The House Committee on Ethics may review allegations that a current member violated the Code of Official Conduct or other applicable laws, rules, or regulations. (House Committee on Ethics)

So where was it?

Did the committee ask why nearly $1 million was attributed to “Terra Energy Productions” when the operational records identify Terra Energy Partners and TEP Rocky Mountain?

Did it ask why the source later changed to Boebert Consulting?

Did it ask who owned Boebert Consulting?

Did it identify JLB903?

Did it obtain JLB903’s operating agreement?

Did it determine whether Lauren was a member or manager?

Did it compare the federal disclosures with Garfield County drilling records?

Did anyone follow the money?

The public has no reason to believe these basic questions were meaningfully answered.

Congress created an ethics system in which members file their own reports, their colleagues oversee compliance, and much of the process happens outside public view.

That is not a guardrail.

That is an honor system for people who hire consultants to explain why the honor system technically does not apply to them.

We Are Exploring Every Avenue for Accountability

House Committee on Ethics

American Muckrakers is reviewing the evidence for potential submission to the House Committee on Ethics.

The committee accepts information alleging that a current House member, officer, or employee violated the Code of Official Conduct or another applicable rule, law, or regulation. (House Committee on Ethics)

Any submission should ask the committee to determine:

1. Whether Lauren Boebert held an ownership interest in JLB903.

2. Whether she served as a manager, member, officer, or proprietor of JLB903.

3. Whether she held any direct or indirect interest in Boebert Consulting.

4. Whether JLB903 owned, controlled, or received payments from Boebert Consulting.

5. Whether “Terra Energy Productions” accurately identified the source of the reported income.

6. Whether required positions, assets, or income sources were omitted.

7. Whether any omission or misstatement was knowing, willful, and material.

Office of Congressional Ethics

We are also examining submission to the Office of Congressional Ethics.

OCE describes itself as an independent, nonpartisan entity that reviews allegations involving House members, officers, and staff and may refer appropriate matters to the House Committee on Ethics. (Office of Congressional Conduct)

Department of Justice

If the evidence supports a knowing and willful violation, federal law provides for potential referral to the attorney general.

The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section oversees investigations and prosecutions involving federal crimes affecting government integrity, including sensitive cases involving elected and appointed officials. (Department of Justice)

The records we intend to pursue

We are examining lawful methods of obtaining or confirming:

• Operating agreements

• Membership and ownership records

• Manager designations

• Consulting contracts

• Invoices

• Payment records

• K-1 forms and other tax records

• Bank-signature and account-control documents

• Communications concerning preparation of the disclosures

• Any amendments or explanations submitted to House Ethics

We will follow the records wherever they lead.

Even if they lead through enough LLCs to qualify for a frequent-filer discount at the Colorado Secretary of State’s office.

The Law of the Land Is Not a Campaign Prop

Lauren Boebert has spent years demanding accountability from everyone else.

She lectures Americans about personal responsibility.

She calls for investigations of political opponents.

She treats allegations against others as established fact before the first document has been read.

But when the questions involve her own household income, her own federal disclosures, her own LLC formation, and her own connection to a business tied to her husband’s consulting income, the public is expected to accept ambiguity.

The company names do not match.

The dollar amounts vanish.

The family-linked LLC is not explained.

The drilling records continue.

The ethics system sleeps.

That is what a two-tiered system looks like.

For ordinary Americans, incorrect paperwork can mean penalties, liens, audits, lost benefits, court hearings, or worse.

For members of Congress, it can apparently mean correcting the form later, assuming anyone bothers to ask.

Lauren Boebert says nobody is above the law.

Good.

We agree.

Now we are going to test that proposition on her.

What Comes Next

We are continuing to obtain documents, map the corporate relationships, identify the payment chain, and evaluate formal accountability actions.

This story is not finished.

It has barely cleared the well pad.

The law is not a slogan.

The Constitution is not a costume.

Financial disclosure is not optional.

And N/A is not an answer.

Oh, final word: Boebert never sued us. We sued her and partially won that federal lawsuit thanks to Dan Ernst, an expert in 1st Amendment law and an attorney in Denver.

Subscribe now

About the Author

David B. Wheeler is the President and Co-Founder of American Muckrakers, a rabid watchdog organization focused on accountability, ethics, and rule-of-law enforcement. He is also the host of the MUCK YOU! podcast, which features candid conversations with public figures. Wheeler cut his teeth on campaigns in Iowa, was elected to the Young Democrats National Committee in 1776, produced the first marathon on Antarctica, lowered the level of the Mississippi River once for Burlington, Iowa Mayor Elaine Baxter, and began fatherhood of three kids at age 45. He has run for public office in a deep-red county in Western North Carolina. He is clearly a glutton for pain. But, he lost 50 pounds in a year too.

Disclaimer

First Amendment-protected commentary. This article is not a pleading or affidavit and is not intended to influence any pending proceeding. All rights reserved. Paid for by American Muckrakers PAC II. Contributions are not tax-deductible.

Sources and Primary Documents

Congressional Financial Disclosures

Lauren Boebert New Filer Report, Filing Year 2020

Filing ID #10043518, filed August 17, 2021

This report identifies “Terra Energy Productions” as the source of Jayson Boebert’s consulting income and reports $478,386 for 2020 and $460,601 for 2019.

It also discloses Lauren Boebert’s 100 percent interest in Shooters Grill LLC, identifies her as a proprietor and member, and contains her certification that the filing was true, complete, and correct to the best of her knowledge and belief.

Lauren Boebert Annual Report, Filing Year 2021

Filing ID #10050195, filed August 13, 2022

This report changes the listed source of Jayson Boebert’s income to Boebert Consulting LLC, describes the income as spousal consulting services, and reports the amount as N/A.

It lists Shooters Grill as Lauren Boebert’s outside LLC position but does not list JLB903 or Boebert Consulting.

Lauren Boebert Annual Report, Filing Year 2022

Filing ID #10053834, filed May 11, 2023

This report lists Boebert Consulting LLC, Spouse Salary, N/A.

It continues to identify Shooters Grill as Boebert’s outside LLC position and does not list JLB903 or Boebert Consulting as positions held by her.

Lauren Boebert Annual Report, Filing Year 2023

Filing ID #10061648, filed August 13, 2024

This report again lists Boebert Consulting LLC, Spouse Salary, N/A.

Schedule E reports no outside positions.

Colorado Corporate Records

JLB903 LLC Articles of Organization

Colorado entity ID #20181087585, filed January 29, 2018

The filing identifies Lauren O. Boebert as the initial registered agent, the person forming the LLC, and the individual causing the filing to be delivered.

It uses the Panoramic Drive address, states that management is vested in one or more managers, and confirms that the company had at least one member.

The filing does not identify the manager or member.

Boebert Consulting LLC

Colorado entity ID #20121008968

The state business record identifies JLB903 LLC as Boebert Consulting’s registered agent, uses the Panoramic Drive address, reports a formation date of January 4, 2012, and lists the company as delinquent beginning January 1, 2024.

Colorado’s official business database allows searches by company name, entity identification number, and document number. (Colorado Secretary of State)

Colorado Registered-Agent Guidance

The Colorado Secretary of State describes a registered agent as the official point of contact for receiving service of process and state documents.

State filing instructions specify that a registered agent is not necessarily an owner or director. (Colorado Secretary of State)

Garfield County and TEP Operational Records

2018 Temporary Employee Housing Application

The application identifies TEP Rocky Mountain LLC as the operator and lists Jayson Boebert as a 24-hour emergency contact.

2020 Temporary Employee Housing Application

The application identifies TEP Rocky Mountain as the operator’s compliance officer and lists Jayson Boebert as a 24-hour emergency contact.

GR 12-29 Drilling and Employee-Housing Records, September 2021

The site plan identifies TEP Rocky Mountain LLC as the applicant and lists:

Jayson Boebert: Drilling

It separately identifies a drilling and completions manager, another drilling contact, safety personnel, and a spill-response contact.

The September 24, 2021, rig-move notification states that TEP Rocky Mountain had begun drilling operations expected to continue for approximately 54 days. Jayson Boebert was included among the recipients copied on the notice.

Honea 19-05 Drilling Records, January 2023

The application identifies TEP Rocky Mountain LLC and lists Jayson Boebert as a 24-hour emergency contact for a project expected to remain at the location for 127 days.

Terra Energy Partners and TEP Rocky Mountain

A recorded document contained in the Garfield County records identifies Terra Energy Partners LLC as the sole member of TEP Rocky Mountain LLC.

Federal Financial-Disclosure Law

5 U.S.C. § 13104

This statute governs the contents of federal financial-disclosure reports and requires annual filings to include a full and complete statement covering the information specified by Congress. (US Code)

5 U.S.C. § 13106

This statute addresses knowingly and willfully false financial disclosures and knowing and willful failures to report required information.

It authorizes civil enforcement, contains potential criminal consequences, and provides for referral to the attorney general when the statutory standard is met. (US Code)

18 U.S.C. § 1001

This statute prohibits knowing and willful concealment of material facts, materially false statements, and the use of materially false documents in covered federal matters.

Its legislative-branch provisions include certain documents required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to Congress or a legislative-branch office. (US Code)

House Disclosure and Ethics Rules

House Committee on Ethics Financial Disclosure Overview

The House Ethics Committee states that the Ethics in Government Act requires members, officers, specified employees, and candidates to file financial-disclosure reports with the Clerk of the House. (House Committee on Ethics)

House Financial Disclosure Instruction Guide

The committee publishes the official instructions governing what must be reported and how the schedules should be completed. (House Committee on Ethics)

Rules of the House of Representatives, 119th Congress

Rule XXIII contains the Code of Official Conduct.

Rule XXVI addresses financial disclosure. (Rules Committee)

House Committee on Ethics Complaint Process

The committee may review allegations that a current House member, officer, or employee violated the Code of Official Conduct or another applicable rule, law, or regulation. (House Committee on Ethics)

Additional Accountability Authorities

Office of Congressional Ethics

OCE is an independent, nonpartisan entity charged with reviewing allegations involving House members, officers, and staff and referring appropriate matters to the House Committee on Ethics. (Office of Congressional Conduct)

Department of Justice Public Integrity Section

The Public Integrity Section oversees federal investigations and prosecutions involving crimes affecting government integrity, including sensitive public-corruption matters involving elected and appointed officials. (Department of Justice)

Source Note

The congressional disclosures, Colorado corporate filings, and Garfield County documents cited in this report are public records.

Screenshots and document excerpts should be captioned with the filing number, date, issuing agency, and page number whenever possible.

Federal statutes and current House guidance were checked against official government sources in July 2026.

She wants the law enforced against immigrants, teachers, librarians, prosecutors, political opponents, and anyone else who irritated her before breakfast.

But when the law requires Lauren Boebert to explain her own family’s money, “law and order” begins to look less like a principle and more like a bumper sticker.

Nearly $1 million in consulting income appeared on one financial disclosure.

Then the exact amounts disappeared.

The name of the company changed.

Another LLC, personally formed by Lauren Boebert, appeared in the corporate chain.

Official county records continued placing her husband directly inside active drilling operations.

The congressional guardrails responded with the institutional equivalent of staring at their shoes.

This is not a minor bookkeeping dispute.

This is a story about money, political power, oil and gas, federal disclosure requirements, and a member of Congress who appears to believe transparency is something other people should practice.

Read more

I never want money to keep anyone from being part of this community. If a paid Substack subscription is not within reach right now, please contact me. I will gladly provide a free lifetime subscription.

Share

No questions asked. No judgment. No explanation needed.

You belong here. Hit me up via email or chat here on SS anytime.

And, if you afford a subscription, I’d appreciate your support today. Our donations are down so far I’m contemplating joining OnlyFans for the elderly.

DBW

Subscribe now

Then comes this Facebook Marketplace listing from Jayson Boebert: an entire black reclining living-room set, including a couch, loveseat, recliner and end tables—offered for $200, reduced from $750. Can you imagine what that furniture smells like and has seen! Maybe JD would like the couch?

But taken together, they produce a distinctly Boebert-era tableau: unpaid taxes in the public record, deeply discounted furniture on Facebook and a once-loud political brand quietly ending up on the virtual curb.

The listing is now marked “Out of Stock.”

Apparently, somebody finally found a bargain in the Boebert economy.

If you like our "hard hitting” work, please drop a dime or two in the piggy bank! We could use your support now and will put it to good use in our quest to rid DC of Boebert. Donate $50 or more and I’ll autograph and send you my book, “Color the Crooks: File 001-Lauren Boebert”.

Support American Muckrakers - Donate

PUBLIC RECORDS • FIRST AMENDMENT • FLORIDA BULLSHIT

STORY UPDATED ON JULY 14, 2026, WITH STATEMENTS FROM THE O’GARAS & the OFFICE OF CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER BLAISE INGOGLIA.

Mr. James O’Gara mailed a postcard to Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia. It contained three words: “You lack values.”

That was not a threat. It was not even ambiguous. It was criticism, the kind of blunt, unpleasant, constitutionally protected criticism public officials receive every day.

Florida responded by sending two armed investigators from the Department of Financial Services’ Criminal Investigations Division to the home James shares with his wife, Cathy. The agents questioned him and then interviewed two neighbors. The encounter was entered into the department’s ACISS case system as Case No. 25-3226.

The public-records file and the recorded interview do not prove that Ingoglia personally ordered the visit. But, he has a reputation as a control freak and desperatly wants to keep his office. But they do show senior officials inside the department transforming a harmless postcard into a formal “threat assessment,” routing it down a law-enforcement chain of command and dispatching investigators who themselves repeatedly acknowledged that O’Gara had done nothing wrong. (Review the full public documents below.)

And they show something else: the sheer, absurd scale of the government effort to make this a big fucking deal. The state that brags about hunting waste burned a full work week of public payroll on three words from a retired Army veteran.

The numbers

I requested the records. Getting them took a fight of its own. I requested and paid for these records in October 2025, while the story was still fresh. The Department of Financial Services did not produce them until July 2026, roughly nine months later. I had to pester them. Florida's public-records law contemplates production within a reasonable time; nine months for a batch of emails is not that. It is long enough for a news cycle to die, an election cycle to turn, and the officials involved to hope everyone forgot. Add whatever it cost to slow-walk one records request to the tab below.

Here is what production 4638-2025 shows, by the numbers:

• 2,323 pages produced in response to a single public-records request, totaling roughly 295,000 words

• At least 38 distinct emails about the postcard, appearing more than 50 times across the production once you count the copies bouncing between inboxes

• 22 or more separate people on those emails: state law-enforcement brass, executive staff, communications aides, city police commanders and reporters

• Roughly 7,800 words of postcard-related correspondence spread across 50 pages of the production

• Two armed investigators at the O’Garas’ door, with two more agents in unmarked black Broncos staged down the street, according to Cathy O’Gara’s written account, plus two neighbors interviewed

• One recorded interview, just under eight minutes, logged as ACISS Case No. 25-3226

• Zero threats found. Their words, not mine.

• Zero apologies. Anywhere in 2,323 pages. To anyone.

The order was explicit

On September 15, 2025, then-Criminal Investigations Division Director Simon Blank wrote: “The attached was mailed to the CFO. Can you have someone look into the name and do a threat assessment?”

Two weeks later, the request was moving through the chain of command. A senior official asked staff to verify the sender’s identity and “evaluate any potential threat level.” A chief assigned personnel, ordered an attempt to make contact by the next morning and directed that the encounter be documented as a case in ACISS.

Subscribe now

The bureaucratic language is revealing. The agency described the proposed interview as a meeting to discuss “potential avenues for assistance.” But the task was assigned as a threat assessment, handled by criminal investigators and entered into a criminal case system.

The agents said the quiet part out loud

The interview audio is more embarrassing than any editorial flourish could be. One investigator told O’Gara: “Yeah, look, you didn’t do anything wrong.” Later, an investigator repeated: “I looked at your postcard and was like, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

O’Gara answered with the obvious question: Why were armed investigators at his house if he had done nothing wrong? He told them, “I have a right to voice my opinion,” and said the visit would make him exercise that right even more. Asked whether the postcard carried some hidden meaning, he answered: “His values suck. That’s all I said.”

O’Gara, a two-tour Army veteran who re-enlisted after September 11, told the agents he has mailed roughly 200 similar postcards to elected officials at the state and federal level, up to and including President Trump. Only one office responded by sending armed men to his home. On tape, he made his position plain: he was pissed that they were sent, the visit was totally inappropriate, and it was not the agents’ fault.

The investigators were courteous. This is not primarily a story about two field agents doing an assignment they were handed. It is a story about the officials who handed them the assignment, and the institutional judgment that turned criticism into a police matter.

Listen to the audio from the actual interview here:

The department’s own report found no threat

The follow-up report says O’Gara had sent similar postcards to roughly 200 political figures, including President Donald Trump. It records that he had “no intention on escalating to actual threats” and would continue writing to the CFO as an exercise of his First Amendment rights.

That should have ended the matter before investigators ever reached his front door. Instead, the state created a law-enforcement record after the fact documenting that the citizen was not a threat.

Meanwhile, an 11-year-old hid inside

While the agents stood at the door, Cathy O’Gara’s 11-year-old granddaughter was inside the house, frightened. The men wore vests marked POLICE, presented no identification and gave no names. When Mrs. O’Gara left to drive her granddaughter to school, she passed two unmarked black Broncos with two more agents down the street.

She did what any sensible person would do: she emailed the Largo police chief to ask whether the visit was even legitimate.

“This morning 2 men dressed in brown clothes, no insignias knocked on our door... My granddaughter, 11, was inside and very afraid... Are we, as a city, going to allow intimidation tactics by law enforcement of any kind? Please protect us. Our children are actually afraid.”

That email triggered its own mini-investigation. A Largo Police Department major and a lieutenant traced the mystery agents, looped in the Department of Financial Services and confirmed to the family that yes, the men who would not identify themselves were state officers. Add a city police department’s time to the tab.

Then came the public-relations dodge

When reporters began asking questions, Ingoglia’s communications director repeatedly issued the same statement: the CFO did not see the postcard, did not direct the assessment and the decision was made “solely by law enforcement personnel.” The statement then praised the CFO as a conservative believer in free speech.

The records support the narrow statement that they do not show Ingoglia personally ordering the investigation. But the broader response is evasive. The “law enforcement personnel” were senior officials within the Department of Financial Services, the department led by the CFO. The internal email did not describe a specific threatening word, act or circumstance. It said the item had been mailed to the CFO and asked for a name check and threat assessment.

Subscribe now

The production also contains a two-line email that complicates the tidy “arm’s length” story. On October 1, hours after the doorstep visit, Deputy CFO Julie Jones, who oversees the department’s law-enforcement division, wrote under the subject “Talked to Simon”:

“Postcard came from Sydney. Can I see it?”

Sydney Booker is the communications director. Per the department’s own top law-enforcement executive, the postcard routed through the CFO’s communications shop, and she herself had not seen it after her agents had already been to the man’s door.

The Orlando Sentinel’s Jeff Schweers put the hard questions to the office directly: Is telling Ingoglia he “lacks values” a valid threat? Why was the Fire, Arson and Explosives unit, whose stated mission is investigating arson and explosives crimes, running threat assessments on postcards? And if Blaise did not know about the postcard, who decided to send his law-enforcement officers out? The production contains no substantive answer to any of them.

The Sentinel’s editorial board later summed it up in a headline the CFO’s own staff dutifully forwarded around the office: Ingoglia says he hates waste, then sends gun-toting officers to investigate a postcard.

The bill

Let’s total this up. These are my estimates, built from the documents, and I have kept them deliberately conservative.

Call it a full work week and then some, spread across two agencies and a criminal case system, spent on three words mailed by a veteran. That total does not include the CFO’s DOGE teams, whose government-waste road show was the reason for the postcard in the first place. The man auditing counties for excessive spending ran up this tab over a piece of mail.

No apology

Here is the part that should bother you most. In 2,323 pages, there is not one apology. Not to Mr. O’Gara, whose protected speech earned him armed visitors. Not to Mrs. O’Gara, who had to email a police chief to find out who had been at her door. Not to an 11-year-old who watched men in POLICE vests come to her grandparents’ home and was, in her grandmother’s words, “very afraid.” No apology has been made since, either.

Instead, the office’s official position blames the weather: the visit was “a direct result of an increasingly hostile political environment.” The hostile environment, in this telling, was created by the retiree with the postcard, not by the office that sent armed agents to his house.

CFO Says The O’Garas Deserved A Visit From Law Enforcement Due to Assassination of Charlie Kirk

“This postcard was received within days of the brutal and tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, during a period of heightened vigilance for law enforcement agencies responsible for assessing potential threats to public officials. The Department of Financial Services and the CFO have always respected Floridians’ First Amendment rights, and the Department has continued to receive postcards from the O’Garas and other constituents on a regular basis. The Department has also updated its threat assessment processes within the Criminal Investigations Division.”

Sydney Booker, Communications Director, Office of Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia

Subscribe now

What is embarrassing, and what may be legally serious

The embarrassing part is established by the records. A statewide elected official’s department deployed criminal investigators over three words of political criticism. Investigators who saw no threat were required to check anyway. Neighbors were questioned. The contact was memorialized in the department’s ACISS case system. Then the office defended the process by claiming to protect the very First Amendment rights the process predictably chilled.

Calling the conduct criminal, however, would go beyond the evidence currently available. The documents do not establish corrupt intent, and they do not show Ingoglia personally initiating the assessment. The strongest legal concerns are constitutional and administrative, not a proven criminal offense.

1. A possible First Amendment retaliation or chilling-effect claim. Criticism of an elected official sits at the core of protected political speech. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that government officials generally may not subject a person to retaliatory action because of protected speech. A viable lawsuit would still require proof of adverse action, retaliatory motive and causation. The public records raise those questions; they do not resolve every element.

2. No apparent statutory threat. Florida’s written-threat statute concerns threats to kill, cause bodily injury, conduct a mass shooting or commit terrorism. “You lack values” contains none of those things. The records released so far do not identify another statement by O’Gara that would fit that definition.

3. A serious mission and jurisdiction problem. The Criminal Investigations Division publicly describes its work as fraud, arson, explosives, public-assistance fraud and theft or misuse of state funds. Ordinary criticism of the CFO is not listed. The department may have protective responsibilities not fully described on that page, but it should be required to identify the legal authority, written policy and objective criteria used here.

4. A possible misuse-of-office issue, but the current proof is incomplete. Florida ethics law prohibits a public officer or employee from corruptly using a public position or public resources to secure a special privilege or benefit. Retaliating against a critic with state resources could raise that issue. Yet “corruptly” is an important element, and the existing production does not prove it. An ethics accusation should be based on additional evidence about motive, authorization and comparable cases, not assumption.

The questions Florida still owes the public

What exactly was attached to the September 15 email that triggered the assessment, and why was it omitted from the production?

Who first decided the postcard should be routed to the Criminal Investigations Division?

What written policy defined this as a potential threat?

Why were two neighbors interviewed after agents concluded the postcard was not threatening?

Was ACISS Case No. 25-3226 closed, retained, disseminated or expunged?

How many similar political messages have produced home visits, and were the senders’ political viewpoints recorded?

How much staff time and public money did this episode consume? My conservative estimate above is 49 hours and counting. The department should produce its own accounting.

What, precisely, did the department change when it later said it had updated its threat-assessment processes?

Will anyone apologize to James and Cathy O’Gara?

Send the CFO a lawful postcard

The proper answer to an attempt, intentional or not, to chill political criticism is more political criticism. Send one peaceful postcard to the public office of Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia. Do not threaten anyone. Do not contact a private residence. Do not target staff members. Use the public office address and say exactly what you mean:

“You have no values. Leave James and Cathy O’Gara alone, you political hack.”

MAIL TO:

Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia

Florida Department of Financial Services

200 East Gaines Street

Tallahassee, Florida 32399

One postcard per person is enough. Sign your name if you choose, the way Jim did. Keep it nonviolent, lawful and unmistakably political. Public officials are not entitled to insulation from criticism, and state law-enforcement resources are not a customer-service department for bruised political egos.

James O’Gara’s first postcard said, “You lack values.” The records do not rebut him. They make his point. And if the CFO’s office wants to run threat assessments on a few thousand more postcards, we already know what one costs.

Hear it from the O’Garas themselves

Jim and Cathy O’Gara joined me and my co-host, Colonel Moe Davis, on the MUCK YOU! podcast to tell the whole story in their own words: the knock at the door, the unmarked Broncos, the badge Jim could not read because the agent kept it turned away, and what it did to their grandchildren. They are funny, unbowed, and exactly the kind of citizens this country is supposed to produce. Listen to the full episode here: Florida Veteran’s Message to Official Unleashes Unprecedented Police Response.

Share

Source notes

The Florida Department of Financial Services was offered the opportunity to respond to our story but we never heard anything prior to publication. The FL DFS was also offered the opportunity to appear on MUCK YOU! podcast to refute our reporting.

The FL DFS/CFO public-records production 4638-2025 (2,323 pages, approximately 295,000 words), especially pp. 13, 105, 107, 135, 136, 458 and 595. Email, word and participant counts computed from the full production; staff-hour figures are the author’s conservative estimates from the documents.

Audio: James O’Gara interview, October 1, 2025, ACISS Case No. 25-3226. Exact short quotations in this draft were cross-checked against the transcript published by Reason on July 6, 2026.

Florida Statutes § 836.10 (written or electronic threats).

Nieves v. Bartlett, 587 U.S. 391 (2019) (First Amendment retaliation principles).

Florida Statutes § 112.313(6) (misuse of public position).

Florida Department of Financial Services, Criminal Investigations Division, “About the Division.”

Full public documents produced by FL CFO office.

37.6MB ∙ PDF file

Download

We requested these documents in October 2025. They arrived in July, 2026.

Download

About the Author

David B. Wheeler is a journalist, political strategist, and the founder of American Muckrakers and Parallax Advisory LLC. He hosts the MUCK YOU! podcast and publishes accountability journalism at Muckrakers.Today. He has produced events in more than 75 countries and on all seven continents, including the first marathon in Antarctica. He lives in Western North Carolina and is a proud father of three and Iowa Hawkeye.

Disclaimer

This essay is opinion journalism based on public records obtained under Chapter 119, Florida Statutes, and on a law-enforcement audio recording released by the State of Florida. Document images are excerpted from Florida Department of Financial Services public-records production 4638-2025. Nothing in this essay alleges that any person committed a crime, and all individuals are presumed innocent of any wrongdoing. Staff-hour figures are the author’s estimates and are labeled as such. This publication and its call to action constitute political speech protected by the First Amendment. Readers who choose to write to public officials should do so lawfully, peacefully, and only at official public office addresses. Corrections: corrections@americanmuckrakers.com

PUBLIC RECORDS • FIRST AMENDMENT • FLORIDA BULLSHIT

Mr. James O’Gara mailed a postcard to Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia. It contained three words: “You lack values.”

That was not a threat. It was not even ambiguous. It was criticism, the kind of blunt, unpleasant, constitutionally protected criticism public officials receive every day.

Florida responded by sending two armed investigators from the Department of Financial Services’ Criminal Investigations Division to the home James shares with his wife, Cathy. The agents questioned him and then interviewed two neighbors. The encounter was entered into the department’s ACISS case system as Case No. 25-3226.

The public-records file and the recorded interview do not prove that Ingoglia personally ordered the visit. But, he has a reputation as a control freak and desperately wants to keep his office. But they do show senior officials inside the department transforming a harmless postcard into a formal “threat assessment,” routing it down a law-enforcement chain of command and dispatching investigators who themselves repeatedly acknowledged that O’Gara had done nothing wrong. (Review the full public documents below.)

And they show something else: the sheer, absurd scale of the government effort to make this a big fucking deal. The state that brags about hunting waste burned a full work week of public payroll on three words from a retired Army veteran.

Read more

After months of rewriting, correcting, rebuilding, and occasionally wondering whether Lauren Boebert’s glasses could get any larger, Color the Crooks™: Case File #001 — Lauren Boebert is officially available on Amazon.

This is not your average coloring book.

It is a 90-page adult political satire built in the tradition of old editorial cartoons, MAD Magazine, and the kind of sharp-edged political humor that powerful people rarely appreciate—but frequently deserve.

Every page turns a documented controversy, public statement, or political absurdity into something you can color while contemplating the unsettling fact that some of these people actually hold public office.

Lauren Boebert is merely Case File #001.

The larger goal behind Color the Crooks is to use humor, research, and satire to hold public officials accountable. Political corruption thrives when people become exhausted, overwhelmed, or afraid to laugh at those in power. Satire strips away the stage lighting and reminds everyone that politicians are public servants—not royalty.

Subscribe now

Buy the Book

You can order Color the Crooks: Case File #001 — Lauren Boebert directly from Amazon:

Order Color the Crooks on Amazon

Buy one for yourself. Buy one for a politically frustrated friend. Leave it on a coffee table where your most conservative relative is guaranteed to find it.

Support the Work and Receive a Copy

American Muckrakers continues to investigate public officials, publish accountability reporting, develop new projects, and create work that challenges the people who believe power places them beyond scrutiny.

None of that happens without financial support.

Please consider making a donation. Anyone who contributes more than $50 will receive a complimentary copy of the book.

You can also help without spending a dime by sharing the Amazon listing, posting about the book, leaving a review after reading it, or forwarding this essay to someone who still believes political satire serves a useful public purpose.

This book is funny, intentionally outrageous, and sometimes uncomfortable.

So are the people it documents.

Color the Crooks is now on Amazon. Case File #001 is open.

Donate >$50 & Get the Book!

The TRUMP token was launched on Solana on January 17, 2025, three days before Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term. Within 36 hours it printed a peak price of about $73. Within 12 months it was trading at $1.79, a fall of more than 97 percent from peak. In between, roughly 4.6 million trades moved through 990,000+ wallets. American Muckrakers pulled the on-chain record and reconciled realized profit and loss, wallet by wallet.

The headline finding is simple. About 1,700 wallets, roughly 0.17 percent of everyone who touched the token, captured $3.25 billion in realized gains. 751 of those wallets cleared more than a million dollars each. The single biggest winner, a wallet tagged naseem.sol, cleared $53.4 million on just 25 trades. On top of the on-chain winnings, Donald Trump’s 2025 personal financial disclosure listed a $636 million windfall attributable to the coin and related entities. That number is his, not ours; it comes from the disclosure his own filers signed.

Subscribe now

On the other side of the same trade, 988,905 wallets are underwater. Combined losses: $3.81 billion. Average loss per underwater wallet: $3,853. These are not paper marks; they are realized losses booked against actual buys, plus mark-to-market on wallets that are still holding a token that has lost 97 percent of its value and shows no sign of recovering it.

The mechanic is not complicated. At launch, roughly 80 percent of the token supply was held by Trump-affiliated entities under a vesting schedule. The remaining float was made available to the market at the peak. Retail buyers, most of them in the United States, absorbed the sell-side as insider allocations unlocked and were distributed. The chart of price against holder count shows the pattern with the clarity of a physics experiment: price falling from $73 toward $2, holder count climbing from a few thousand into the high hundreds of thousands, most of them buying above $10.

The people on the losing side are not, generally, sophisticated traders. Our intake so far, running for six weeks at muckrakers.today/trumpcoinripoff, is dominated by first-time crypto buyers who bought because the President of the United States was promoting the coin on his own social platform. A meaningful fraction are retirees. A meaningful fraction bought on borrowed money. The average loss is nearly $4,000. For the household budgets we are hearing about, that is not recoverable.

Subscribe now

There are two accountability questions worth asking now. The first is a securities question. The Trump organization’s posture has been that the token is a collectible, not a security, and therefore not subject to registration or disclosure. The SEC under the current administration is not going to test that theory. A private plaintiff, or a state attorney general, might. The second is a political question. The President of the United States personally promoted an asset that transferred at least $3.81 billion from ordinary Americans into a small circle of wallets, several of which are connected to his own family and business partners. Congress has the authority to investigate that. It has, so far, chosen not to.

If you bought the TRUMP token and lost money, we want your story. The intake form is at muckrakers.today/trumpcoinripoff. It takes about two minutes. Your account, with your permission, will be used to inform the ongoing reporting and, if you consent, to support any legal accountability that follows. We do not sell your data, we do not share your wallet address without your written permission, and every field except your name and email is optional.

Share

Share your story

If you bought the TRUMP token and lost money, we want to hear from you. The intake form is at muckrakers.today/trumpcoinripoff. Takes about two minutes. Your name and email are the only required fields.

Sources

1. On-chain aggregation of every TRUMP token trade on Solana, January 17, 2025 through July 4, 2026. Realized and unrealized PnL computed wallet-by-wallet across 4.6 million trades. Data pipeline: github.com/Parallax-Advisory/trump-coin-tracker.

2. Donald J. Trump, Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Report (OGE Form 278e), filed 2025. Section listing income and asset value attributable to the TRUMP token and related entities.

3. American Muckrakers reader intake, muckrakers.today/trumpcoinripoff, ongoing.

Originally appeared on Muckrakers.today, July 5, 2026.

Subscribe now

Nobody trusts the polls anymore, and they have earned that distrust.

A modern poll is built from the shrinking slice of people who still answer unknown numbers, agree to talk to a stranger, and say what they are willing to say out loud. Even when a poll is close, it is still just a snapshot, frozen on one day and stale by the time most people read it.

So we built something different.

Read more

Happy Fourth of July! And to our friends north of the border, a very Happy Canada Day. This is a weekend for fireworks, family, and a little well-earned rest.

Subscribe now

So take it. Fire up the grill, watch the sky light up, and soak in the freedom this weekend celebrates. Because come fall, we have real work to do. The midterms are coming, and American Muckrakers will be in the fight, digging where others won’t and holding the powerful accountable.

That work runs on you. I’ll be candid: funds are low right now. Every dollar you give goes straight into reporting, investigations, and impact. Nothing wasted, all of it used well.

Here’s a special thank you. Anyone who donates more than fifty dollars before July 8th gets a copy of my upcoming book (cover below). It’s a limited offer, donors only, and a future collector’s item you won’t find anywhere else.

Read more

Happy Fourth of July! And to our friends north of the border, a very Happy Canada Day (CORRECTION: July 1st). This is a weekend for fireworks, family, and a little well-earned rest.

Subscribe now

So take it. Fire up the grill, watch the sky light up, and soak in the freedom this weekend celebrates. Because come fall, we have real work to do. The midterms are coming, and American Muckrakers will be in the fight, digging where others won’t and holding the powerful accountable.

That work runs on you. I’ll be candid: funds are low right now. Every dollar you give goes straight into reporting, investigations, and impact. Nothing wasted, all of it used well.

Here’s a special thank you. Anyone who donates more than fifty dollars before July 8th gets a copy of my upcoming book (cover below). It’s a limited offer, donors only, and a future collector’s item you won’t find anywhere else.

Read more

Happy Fourth of July! And to our friends north of the border, a very Happy Canada Day. This is a weekend for fireworks, family, and a little well-earned rest.

Subscribe now

So take it. Fire up the grill, watch the sky light up, and soak in the freedom this weekend celebrates. Because come fall, we have real work to do. The midterms are coming, and American Muckrakers will be in the fight, digging where others won’t and holding the powerful accountable.

That work runs on you. I’ll be candid: funds are low right now. Every dollar you give goes straight into reporting, investigations, and impact. Nothing wasted, all of it used well.

Here’s a special thank you. Anyone who donates more than fifty dollars before July 8th gets a copy of my upcoming book (cover below). It’s a limited offer, donors only, and a future collector’s item you won’t find anywhere else.

Read more

American Muckrakers today called on Democratic South Dakota US Senate candidate Julian Beaudion to suspend his campaign and withdraw, citing his financial history and serious questions about how his campaign is spending donor money.

Subscribe now

“I’ve done a deep dive on Mr. Beaudion’s history in Louisiana and South Dakota, and I can say with certainty, and on the record, Julian Beaudion is using his donor’s funds to pay his personal expenses and hire his friends and family,” said David B. Wheeler, President and Co-Founder of American Muckrakers.

South Dakota court records show a pattern of debt-collection and loan-servicing lawsuits and multiple bench warrants for failure to appear. American Muckrakers is also asking whether Beaudion’s candidacy was engineered to split the opposition vote in this three-candidate race and protect the incumbent, Sen. Thomas Pischke (R-SD), who was recently indicted.

“Did the current US Senator recruit Mr. Beaudion to run, to ensure his gravy train in DC doesn’t end? T…

Read more

It started with a website and one sentence. In May of 2022, we put up fireboebert.com, and the message on it was not complicated: we helped fire Madison Cawthorn, and now it was Boebert’s turn. [SOURCE: HuffPost, May 2022: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/madison-cawthorn-lauren-boebert-muckrakers-back-firing-campaign_n_62883dc4e4b05cfc268c57d2] The logo, fittingly, was a dumpster on fire. [SOURCE: Smoky Mountain News profile: https://smokymountainnews.com/archives/item/35461] I had just come off the Cawthorn campaign with my co-founder, Colonel Moe Davis, and I will be honest with you about what I thought at the time. I thought I had seen this movie before. I looked at Boebert and I saw Cawthorn’s twin sister. Same act. Same righteousness. Same certainty that the rules were written for other people. [SOURCE: Smoky Mountain News, same URL]

Read more

Subscribe now

And here is the thing: Brian Bengs can win.

South Dakota voters are independent-minded. They know when Washington is broken. They know when the two-party food fight is not solving the cost of living, rural healthcare, veterans’ issues, corruption, or the basic problem of politicians answering to party bosses instead of real people. …

Read more