The Gateway Pundit, a far-right website, published a note from its editor on Saturday acknowledging that two election workers in Georgia did not engage in ballot fraud in 2020, days after the publication settled a lawsuit brought against it for falsely reporting that they had tampered with election results.

Earlier this week, the site settled with Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two former Georgia election workers. The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed.

“Georgia officials concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020. The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night,” said the note published to the website Saturday morning by the publication’s founder and editor, Jim Hoft. “A legal matter with this news organization and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement.”

The Gateway Pundit wrote a series of articles about the 2020 presidential election amplifying spurious claims that Freeman, Moss and former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer helped rig the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.

The Gateway Pundit had denied wrongdoing and previously said it was seeking bankruptcy protection.

In 2022, Freeman and Moss settled a similar claim with One America News. Terms were not disclosed. OAN later broadcast a statement saying that a Georgia investigation by the state’s officials had shown that the women “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night.”

In July, a federal judge in Florida threw out a bankruptcy case filed by the Gateway Pundit, ruling that the site sought bankruptcy protection in “bad faith” to avoid having to pay potential damages in defamation suits related to the site’s reporting on the 2020 election. The ruling allowed the defamation cases to proceed.

Moss and Freeman were drawn into the controversy after Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s top campaign lawyer, alleged publicly in December 2020 that the mother-daughter pair had rigged the outcome in their state. Giuliani’s claims have not held up, and Georgia election officials have said that the allegations were false. But none of the explanations kept the two from receiving a barrage of harassment, threats and racist attacks.

Last year, amid a defamation suit filed against him by Freeman and Moss that he eventually lost, Giuliani declared in a court filing that he was no longer contesting their claims that his statements were false.

He has so far avoided paying out the $148 million awarded by the court. The two women sued him in August in an attempt to seize his assets, including his condos in New York and Florida, and also his New York Yankees World Series rings — among the items he listed as assets when he filed for bankruptcy during the defamation case. A status conference scheduled for Oct. 17 in federal court in the Southern District of New York will hear arguments related to that case.

The Gateway Pundit still faces a separate defamation suit from Coomer.

Sarah Ellison and Amy Gardner contributed reporting.

A political organization helping prepare for the potential presidential transition of Donald Trump recently experienced a cyberattack by what federal authorities believe are Chinese hackers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Materials were taken from online accounts belonging to the America First Policy Institute, which has put together policy proposals for a second term and recommendations for jobs and agencies, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the investigation.

The group was founded by an array of former top Trump administration officials and the chairwoman of its board, Linda McMahon, is a leader of the transition planning. Its president, Brooke Rollins, was a top official in the Trump White House.

“As the leading policy group in the America First movement, it is not surprising that hostile foreign actors would attempt to infiltrate our IT,” said Marc Lotter, a spokesman for the group. “The tactics, techniques, and procedures of the threat actor are similar to that of nation-state sponsored activities we have seen, allowing us to remediate and respond quickly. Like the America First movement itself, AFPI will not creep at the speed of government but act at the speed of business with the world’s leading cyber experts to even further enhance our already robust security.”

The Justice Department and FBI declined to comment.

The news of the hack itself — but not the suspected Chinese involvement based on the preliminary investigation — was first reported Friday by Politico.

Trump gave AFPI a prominent role in the transition in part to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation, which is also stacked with alumni from his administration and is responsible for Project 2025, the right-wing plan written by his allies that has become a central attack line by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.

Trump gave AFPI a prominent role in the transition in part to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation, which is also stacked with alumni from his administration and is responsible for Project 2025, the right-wing plan written by his allies that has become a central attack line by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.

Besides McMahon, the group includes more than a dozen former Trump administration advisers. Trump has spoken at the group’s events.

The Trump campaign has been repeatedly targeted by Iran, which successfully infiltrated the campaign’s email account and has sought to disseminate some campaign documents publicly, according to a federal indictment unsealed last month

New majorities in Congress, particularly when the incoming party has a new leader, offer the rare chance for the institution to take a breath and consider what can be done to make the place function better.

The Senate seems poised for just that outcome, as Republicans get closer to locking up at least 51 seats for next year and with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) stepping aside after 18 years atop the GOP conference.

Any major overhaul to the customs of the very tradition-bound Senate, where permanent rules changes are supposed to happen with a least a two-thirds majority vote, are not likely. For now at least, a majority of Senate Republicans have vowed to not do anything radical such as a party-line move to eliminate the 60-vote filibuster hurdle.

Neither of the top contenders to replace McConnell, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and John Thune (R-S.D.), have publicly embraced any vast reform-minded ideas, although Cornyn has voiced support for his party imposing a term limit for its Senate leader, as is imposed on other leadership positions.

Those two front-runners, along with a long-shot contender, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), are doing most of their talking about how they would operate differently than McConnell did during one-on-one huddles with other senators, according to GOP aides familiar with the talks.

But Senate experts believe that if there’s ever a time to truly consider some changes, this would be it. A survey of a half-dozen former senior Senate Republican aides — including advisers to party leaders, top staff for legislative committees and chiefs of staff to rank-and-file senators — produced several ideas that could shift the chamber’s behavior.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer any idea without potential blowback on their former or current employers, these veteran Senate staffers came up with a bounty of suggestions: some very worthy, some more aspirational, some probably impossible to enforce.

One former aide wants to see changes that would make it easier for legislation to be brought to the Senate floor for consideration, especially if there is demonstrated bipartisan support. This aide said amendments that are ruled germane to the debate should also get special protections.

Another wants to end the seniority system that results in Senate committee chairs being selected by whoever is next in line in terms of tenure on the panel, hoping to create more dynamic energy in the once powerful hearing rooms across the street from the Capitol.

Some would like to see a cultural shift back to the days when newcomers served quietly, instituting a rule forbidding them from speaking on the Senate floor in their first year. That might limit the increasing practice of new senators grandstanding to catch the attention of prime time cable news hosts.

One tantalizing idea is almost certain to go nowhere in the modern, TV-driven Congress: banning cameras from the Senate floor so that debate would be between the senators looking across the chamber at others, rather than the current practice of staring straight into the camera as if they are speaking to America.

Cornyn tried to reignite the debate over shaking up the Senate when he announced his bid to succeed McConnell as GOP leader. “I believe the Senate is broken — that is not news to anyone,” he wrote almost eight months ago.

The reality is almost everyone who has served around the chamber over the last 10 years agrees with Cornyn’s assessment.

Senate Democrats quibble with his statement, noting that the House is also broken, possibly worse so given the GOP’s inability to do some of the most basic functions across the Capitol.

This 118th Congress is on track for a record low level of production, with just 106 public laws approved in the first 22 months of its two-year session. That’s on track to be the fewest laws approved by one Congress in more than 100 years.

To put it in perspective, the 116th Congress (2019-2020) also had a partisan split, with Democrats running the House and Republicans holding the Senate, but it produced 344 laws. The 113th Congress had the same partisan makeup as today — a Democratic president, a Republican House and a Democratic Senate — and that combo produced 296 public laws.

Later this month, we will explore a separate column on the possible rules changes that could come with Democrats winning the House — part of a potential historic “double flip” in which the two chambers swap majorities.

But let’s start with the Senate, which has always fashioned itself with such a grand superiority complex that its self-anointed nicknames are the “upper chamber” and “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

The Merriam-Webster definition of “deliberation” is “a discussion and consideration by a group” for and against something. In Senate parlance, that means a debate.

The mere act of debating has collapsed over the last decade, according to records monitored by C-SPAN’s Congress page. From early January 2023 through this month, the Senate has held 272 hours of debate, just 18 percent of the time it was in session.

That’s almost 175 fewer hours of debate than the Senate held through the same time frame of 2021-2022. It’s a small fraction compared to the more than 1,200 hours of Senate debate that came in this timespan of the 115th Congress (2015-2016), when the deliberating accounted for almost 60 percent of all the time in session.

The current Senate has spent twice as much time (551 hours) holding roll call votes than senators spent debating actual legislation.

But almost two-thirds of those votes have come on presidential confirmations, either a procedural vote or the actual confirmation vote, to fill the federal judiciary or executive agencies. Just 16 years ago nomination votes accounted for less than 10 percent of Senate roll calls.

Most of the confirmation votes have been for relatively low-level posts that most senators did not know existed when they first ran for office. Those include the Sept. 19 vote to advance a judicial nominee for the U.S. Tax Court or the Sept. 23 vote to formally confirm that tax judge to a 15-year term.

That first vote was the last of the week, “flyout day,” as it’s known, so nine senators did not bother to show up. The second vote came on a Monday evening, “fly-in day,” and 14 senators skipped that vote.

That confirmation took eight months to process, from President Joe Biden’s formal nomination on Feb. 1, to the June committee vote and late September final approval.

The Senate’s sharp shift into “personnel business” — as McConnell has called confirmation votes — began during his six years as majority leader. And it has continued under Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

One of the smartest ideas from former senior Republican aides would dramatically reduce the number of positions requiring the full Senate’s approval, especially those in key posts like U.S. attorneys who serve as the Justice Department’s regional prosecutors and nonpartisan ambassadors.

Take Biden’s Jan. 11 nominations of two career Foreign Service officers, with decades of experience, speaking a combined six foreign languages, to be ambassadors to Cambodia and Albania.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved their nominations more than six months ago, and today they still await a full confirmation vote.

Freeing the Senate from the endless wheel of confirmation votes would open up the chamber for more legislative debate.

Combine this with the idea, from another former Republican aide, that legislation with bipartisan support in the committee process would receive special fast-track privileges.

Current rules require a majority leader to follow a three- or four-day process to clear the procedural hurdles just to begin debate on legislation. If a bill is bipartisan, just eliminate all those hurdles and allow it to be easily considered for debate — at which point, it would still have to clear one 60-vote hurdle to get passed.

Forcing committee chairs to win their posts through a real internal vote, rather than the current seniority-driven, next-senator-up process, could also energize those roles. They would derive power from across their entire caucus, not just the party leader and Father Time.

These ideas might never come to see the light of day, regardless of who serves as majority leader next year. Each time there’s a new majority leader, pledges flow to improve the institution.

“The good news is that it can be fixed,” Cornyn wrote to his colleagues.

Most senators hope that will happen.

COACHELLA, Calif. — Former president Donald Trump suggested that a heckler would later get “the hell knocked out of her” during an insult-laced speech here Saturday that portrayed a dark image of the country and demonized undocumented immigrants.

As Trump called the Nov. 5 election a “chance to send a message,” he stopped his remarks and turned to the crowd.

“Back home to mommy, she goes back home to mommy,” Trump said, resuming his speech and appearing to address a heckler. “‘Was that you darling?’ And she gets the hell knocked out of her. Her mother’s a big fan of ours, you know that right? Her father, her mother. You always have that.”

It was not the first time Trump has used violent language to attack hecklers who interrupt his rallies. In 2016, after a heckler interrupted a Las Vegas rally, Trump told the crowd: “Here’s a guy throwing punches, nasty as hell, screaming at everybody else,” before adding: “I’d like to punch him in the face.” In Iowa during the same campaign, he also encouraged supporters to “knock the crap” out of potential hecklers.

During his Saturday speech in Coachella, Trump repeated falsehoods about migrants and sought to portray the country in apocalyptic terms. He described the elections on Nov. 5 as “liberation day,” comparing the United States to an “occupied country.”

“We are known all throughout the world now as an occupied country,” Trump said. “We’re like an occupied country. We got people taking over parts of Colorado, we have people taking over other states, a lot of states don’t want to talk about it, because they’re embarrassed … But it’s no different really than if we lost a war.”

Trump used similar language on Friday, when he visited Aurora, Colo. Trump has promised to launch a deportation program called “Operation Aurora” to dismantle “illegal migrant criminal networks” operating in the United States, under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The law was last invoked during World War II to intern immigrants of Japanese, German and Italian descent.

Trump vowed to remove members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan gang. Aurora officials, including the Republican mayor, say authorities there have arrested eight people linked to Tren de Aragua but dispute the gang has “taken over” apartment buildings, as Trump repeatedly claimed.

In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump has leaned into an anti-immigrant message. Earlier this week, he suggested that undocumented immigrants who commit crimes have “bad genes.” While speaking here Saturday, Trump described the border as the top issue and continued to portray undocumented immigrants as criminals, even as federal data shows that the vast majority of people arrested at the southern border do not have criminal convictions. There’s little evidence that undocumented immigrants commit more crime than U.S. citizens.

The California rally capped off a controversial week for the former president during which he said he had been to Gaza when he hadn’t; suggested CBS News should lose its broadcasting license; continued to spread misinformation about the Biden administration’s hurricane relief efforts; described “The View” co-host’s Sunny Hostin as a “dummy”; and insulted the city of Detroit while giving a speech there.

The Washington Post polling average has Vice President Kamala Harris leading in four of the seven battleground states. Every state is within a normal-sized polling error of 3.5 points and could swing either way.

The unusual decision to hold a rally in California, a deep blue state, followed a similar decision to hold an event in another Democratic stronghold, Colorado, and a plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden later this month in New York. The decisions are part of a general pattern in which, unlike the Harris campaign, Trump and his allies are leaning into the idea that they are winning.

Trump’s remarks in California carried the same themes that he has featured in swing states. He repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s first name. He warned about being “very close to World War III.” He described Democrats as “professional thieves.”

And he continued to insult both Harris and other opponents. He referred to California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) as Gavin “New-scum.” He jabbed at former GOP primary rival Chris Christie’s weight. And he called Adam Schiff, the Democratic nominee for an open Senate seat in California, unattractive and repeated his frequent criticisms of the size of Schiff’s neck.

“Pencil neck!” A woman in the crowd yelled as others cackled.

“Tampon Tim!” a man shouted as Trump spoke, referring to the nickname MAGA supporters have given to Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. Trump has used the phrase, too.

“She’s a ho!” others yelled as Trump moved on to Harris, using a term for a sexually promiscuous woman.

The audience grew especially animated when Trump pointed out the “fake news” watching from the press pen, jumping up on their seats to boo and give thumbs down in what has become a Trump rally tradition.

Later, there were more shouts from the crowd after a video montage about Harris. “Ka-MAL-a sucks!” a man yelled, mispronouncing Harris’s name. Another man stood up from his seat to yell that Harris was dumber than a rock, prompting yet another man to shout that they shouldn’t be unfair to rocks.

A minute later, someone yelled again: “She’s a ho!”

Trump has repeatedly spoke disparagingly about the state of California, where Harris served as a district attorney, an attorney general and a senator. During his speech Saturday, he said California “stood as the beacon of what our country aspired to become … It had everything, it had the weather, it had the water.” But he then proceeded to say “all that was eradicated by decades of the very policies that Kamala Harris wants to now force upon America.”

During his speech, Trump once again threatened that, if he became president, he would withhold funds for California wildfires if Newsom didn’t change his water policies. The remark came at the same time that Trump has been criticizing the Biden administration for its allegedly slow response to hurricanes in the Southeast.

“We’ll say, Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving you any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the forest fires that you have,” Trump said.

LeVine reported from Washington.