• The dual agent AI system autonomously solved Anderson’s conjecture from 2014
• Rethlas explores problem-solving strategies like a human mathematician would
• Archon transforms potential proofs into projects for the Lean 4 verifier

A research team led by Peking University developed a dual-agent AI system capable of solving advanced mathematical problems while also verifying its own results.

The system resolved a conjecture proposed in 2014 by Dan Anderson, completing the process within 80 hours of runtime.

The underground market for stolen credit card data has long operated as a volatile and highly deceptive ecosystem, where even experienced actors routinely fall victim to scams, exit schemes, and compromised services.

In recent years, this environment has become even more unstable, driven by increased law enforcement pressure, internal distrust among criminals, and the rapid turnover of marketplaces. As a result, threat actors are increasingly forced to adopt more structured approaches to identifying reliable suppliers and minimizing risk within their own illicit operations.

A guide found on an underground forum by Flare analysts sheds light on how threat actors themselves navigate the volatile world of credit card (CC) marketplaces.

The document, titled “The Underground Guide to Legit CC Shops: Cutting Through the Bullshit”—provides a structured look at how actors attempt to reduce risk in an ecosystem plagued by scams, law enforcement infiltration, and short‑lived operations.

Analysis of the guide reveals more than just practical advice. It outlines a methodology for vetting carding shops, operational security practices, and sourcing strategies, effectively documenting how today’s fraud actors think about trust, reliability, and survivability.

While parts of the guide appear to promote specific services, suggesting a possible vested interest from its author, it still offers a valuable glimpse into the inner workings of the carding economy, and the evolving standards actors use to operate within it.

From Opportunistic Fraud to Supplier Vetting Discipline

One of the most striking aspects of the guide is how it reframes carding from opportunistic fraud into a process‑driven discipline. Rather than focusing on how to use stolen cards, the document emphasizes how to evaluate suppliers.

This shift reflects a broader evolution within underground markets, where the primary risk is no longer just operational failure, but being defrauded by other criminals or interacting with compromised infrastructure.

The author repeatedly stresses that legitimacy is not defined by branding or visibility, but by survivability. In other words, a “real” shop is one that continues operating over time despite law enforcement operations, scams, and internal instability.

This aligns with observed trends in underground economies, where the lifespan of marketplaces has become increasingly unpredictable, forcing actors to adopt continuous verification practices.

The guide makes it clear that what separates a “legitimate” shop from the rest isn’t branding or uptime, it’s the quality of the stolen data it delivers. References to “fresh bins” (BIN = Bank Identifiable Number) and low decline rates point directly to the sources behind the data, whether from infostealer infections, phishing campaigns, or point-of-sale breaches. In this ecosystem, reputation isn’t built on promises but on consistently providing cards that actually work.

Shops that fail to maintain reliable data sources are quickly exposed, while those with steady access to fresh compromises rise to the top.

Building Trust in a Trustless Market

Transparency is another recurring theme. The guide highlights the importance of clear pricing models, real‑time inventory, and functional support systems, including ticketing and escrow services. These characteristics closely mirror legitimate e‑commerce platforms, underscoring how leading carding shops have adopted business practices designed to build user confidence and reduce friction.

Equally important is the role of community validation. The guide dismisses on‑site testimonials as unreliable, instead directing users toward discussions in closed or invite‑only forums. This reflects a broader fragmentation of the underground landscape, where trust is increasingly tied to controlled environments and long‑standing reputations.

Actors are encouraged to look for sustained discussion threads and historical presence, rather than isolated positive feedback.

The document also reveals a strong awareness of adversarial pressures. The emphasis on security‑first infrastructure, such as mirror domains, DDoS protection, and the absence of tracking mechanisms, suggests that operators are actively defending against both law enforcement monitoring and competing criminal groups.

In effect, these marketplaces function not only as distribution platforms, but as hardened environments designed to ensure operational continuity.

The Technical Checklist 

Beyond high‑level principles, the guide introduces a step‑by‑step vetting protocol that provides insight into how threat actors conduct due diligence. Technical checks such as domain age, WHOIS privacy, and SSL configuration are presented as baseline requirements.

While these checks are relatively simple, they demonstrate an effort to apply structured analysis to what has historically been a trust‑based decision process.

The guide also highlights the importance of identifying mirror infrastructure and backup access points, noting that established operations rarely rely on a single domain. This reflects a practical understanding of the instability of underground services, where takedowns and disruptions are common. The presence of multiple access points is framed as an indicator of operational maturity and resilience.

Social intelligence gathering plays an equally significant role. Rather than relying on direct interactions with vendors, users are encouraged to analyze forum discussions, track vendor histories, and identify patterns of behavior over time.

Particular attention is given to detecting coordinated endorsement campaigns, such as multiple positive reviews originating from newly created accounts, a tactic frequently associated with scams.

Operational Security 

Another critical component of the guide is its focus on operational security. The recommendations provided, while framed in the context of carding, closely mirror practices observed across a wide range of cybercriminal activities. Users are advised to avoid direct connections, utilize proxy services aligned with target geographies, and compartmentalize their environments through dedicated systems or virtual machines.

The discussion of cryptocurrency usage is particularly notable. The guide strongly discourages direct transactions from regulated platforms, instead advocating for intermediary wallets and privacy‑focused assets such as Monero. This reflects a growing awareness among threat actors of blockchain analysis capabilities and the risks associated with traceable financial flows.

Taken together, these OPSEC recommendations highlight an important shift: actors are no longer relying solely on tools to evade detection, but are adopting layered strategies designed to reduce exposure across the entire operational chain. This level of discipline suggests that even mid‑tier actors are increasingly adopting practices once associated with more advanced threat groups.

Scale vs. Exclusivity

The guide further categorizes carding shops into distinct operational models, including large automated platforms and smaller, curated vendor groups. This segmentation reflects the diversification of the underground economy, where different actors prioritize scale, accessibility, or quality depending on their objectives.

Automated platforms are described as highly efficient environments, often featuring integrated tools and instant purchasing capabilities. These operations resemble legitimate online marketplaces in both structure and functionality, enabling users to quickly acquire and test data at scale.

In contrast, boutique vendor groups emphasize exclusivity, higher quality, and controlled access, often relying on invitation‑based systems and long‑term relationships.

Commercial Interests and Operational Reality

Despite its structured approach, the guide is not without bias. The inclusion of a direct endorsement for a specific platform suggests that the author may have a vested interest in promoting certain services. This is a common pattern in underground communities, where informational content is often used as a vehicle for subtle advertising or affiliate activity.

Such endorsements should be viewed with caution. However, they do not necessarily invalidate the broader insights provided by the guide. Instead, they highlight the complex interplay between information sharing and commercial interests within cybercriminal ecosystems.

From a defensive perspective, the guide offers valuable intelligence into how threat actors assess risk and make operational decisions. The emphasis on verification, community validation, and layered security reflects a level of maturity that complicates traditional disruption efforts. Rather than relying on single points of failure, actors are increasingly building redundancy and adaptability into their workflows.

Ultimately, the document serves as both a playbook and a signal. It demonstrates that the carding ecosystem became more structured, more cautious, and more resilient. For defenders, understanding these dynamics is critical to anticipating how these markets will continue to evolve, and where opportunities for disruption may still exist.

How Flare Can Help

Flare helps organizations stay ahead of fraud by continuously monitoring underground forums and marketplaces, revealing how threat actors source, vet, and use stolen credit card data. This provides early insight into attacker behavior, including how they optimize success rates, build trust, and adapt to defenses.

By turning this intelligence into actionable insights, Flare enables security teams to detect exposures, anticipate fraud campaigns, and disrupt attacker workflows-shifting from reactive response to proactive, intelligence-driven defense.

Learn more by signing up for our free trial.

Sponsored and written by Flare.

London School of Economics’ Viet Nguyen-Tien and University of Birmingham’s Gavin Harper and Robert Elliott examine whether EVs have passed a tipping point for adoption.

A version of this article was originally published by The Conversation (CC BY-ND 4.0)

When the Strait of Hormuz first closed in March and oil hit $120 a barrel, a very old question came back: is this finally the moment electric vehicles (EV) take off for good – or just another false start?

EVs have been here before. They surged after the 1973 oil embargo, collapsed when oil fell, and surged again. Each wave died when the external pressure eased.

We think this time is different. In a new discussion paper, we argue that the economic case for electric vehicles is now improving on its own terms. This is because of what has happened to batteries, not because of the oil price. The same evidence, though, shows the transition creates new problems as serious as the ones it solves.

Why this time is different

Battery costs have fallen 93pc since 2010. That is the number that changes everything. A pack that cost more than $1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 cost $108 by late 2025, driven down by a decade of learning, investment and policy support.

Research on the global battery industry finds that every time cumulative production doubles, costs fall by around 9pc. More buyers, more production, lower costs, more buyers.

Unlike the 1970s, this loop does not need an oil crisis to keep spinning. Electric cars have crossed lifetime cost parity with petrol vehicles across much of Europe; in the used-car market they now have the lowest total cost of ownership. Newer models even match petrol cars in estimated lifespan – something early EVs could not claim.

Global sales surpassed 17m in 2024, one of the fastest technology diffusion processes in the history of transport. Norway is near-fully electrified. And Ethiopia reached around 60pc EV sales share in 2024, powered by cheap hydroelectricity – some way ahead of the US, for instance, which sits at around 8pc.

An economic platform, not just a better engine

The deeper reason this wave will not fade is not technical – it is economic. An EV is a platform. Its value grows as the network around it grows, just as smartphones became indispensable not because of the hardware but because of everything connected to it.

Every charger built makes the next EV more attractive. Every software update raises the value of every car already on the road. Every recycled battery feeds back into the supply chain that makes the next one cheaper. It’s part of the reason some other technologies like hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have struggled to get off the ground in numbers – the tech exists, but all the other elements aren’t quite there.

One study of 8,000 drivers in Shanghai found that range anxiety – the fear of running out of charge – has a real economic cost due to unnecessarily avoided trips. But that cost is falling sharply, not because batteries improved, but because charging networks expanded.

Making real-time charger availability visible could add six to eight percentage points to market share by 2030. And because EV charging is far more flexible than other household electricity demand, drivers can shift away from peak hours remarkably easily when the price is right – turning the car into a grid asset, able to store and release electricity when needed. These are economic network effects, not engineering features.

Swapping one dependency for another

Ending oil dependence does not end geopolitical exposure. It relocates it.

In late 2025, China introduced rules requiring government approval for exports containing more than 0.1pc rare earths. The leverage that once came from control of oil flows now comes from control of processing capacity and component supply chains.

The minerals at stake – lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite and neodymium to name but a handful – carry their own geopolitical risks and, as we have written elsewhere, serious human costs in the communities that mine them. This creates a predictable cycle of social contestation that threatens to stall the transition unless the industry commits to responsible, sustainable innovation.

The metal cobalt traditionally helped EVs travel further on the same charge. And when prices spiked, so did research into making batteries with less or even no cobalt. Today, more than half of all EV batteries sold globally are cobalt free.

Four decades of patent data show the same pattern: higher mineral prices consistently redirect research and development toward mineral-saving technologies.

Recovering lithium and cobalt from used batteries is becoming economically viable too, shifting part of the supply chain away from geopolitically exposed extraction sites. In addition, Norway and other countries are looking to exploit new critical mineral resources to diversify supplies.

The transition is real – but not risk-free

The Hormuz crisis is a reminder of what concentrated energy dependence costs. The EV transition does not need it. The learning curve keeps falling, the platform keeps compounding, the economics keep improving. That is what makes this wave different.

What it does not do is eliminate geopolitical risk. Unlike oil, where leverage comes from energy flows, EV supply chains concentrate power at materials, processing capacity, and technological bottlenecks – supply chains that are highly concentrated and carry their own serious risks. Fuel dependence becomes mineral dependence. That dependence is highly concentrated.

Traditional carmaking regions are already absorbing concentrated job losses, and history shows such disruptions leave persistent scars even if the long-term aggregate effects are positive. Yet electric vehicle assembly is proving more labour-intensive in western countries than expected – requiring more workers on the shopfloor, not fewer, at least in the ramp-up phase. Contrast this with China, where massive automation has led to the creation of ‘dark factories’ where there are so few humans, internal lighting isn’t required.

The same regions facing losses could benefit. But the gains and losses do not fall on the same people. That is where the work remains.

By Dr Viet Nguyen-Tien, Dr Gavin D J Harper and Prof Robert Elliott

Viet Nguyen-Tien is an applied economist at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics (LSE) with an interest in economic and political issues related to technology, energy and the environment.

Gavin Harper is a research fellow at the Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements & Critical Materials in Birmingham Business School at the University of Birmingham focused on issues at the critical materials/energy nexus.

Robert Elliott is an applied economist at the University of Birmingham who works at the intersection of international economics, development economics, environmental and energy economics and international business.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

OpenAI is losing two of the architects of its most ambitious moonshots. Kevin Weil, who led the company’s science research initiative, and Bill Peebles, the researcher behind AI video tool Sora, both announced their departures on Friday. The exits come as OpenAI consolidates around enterprise AI and its forthcoming “superapp.”

The departures follow OpenAI’s decision to cut back on “side quests,” including customer-facing bets like Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora, which was losing an estimated $1 million per day in compute costs, was shut down last month.

OpenAI for Science was the internal research group behind Prism, an AI-powered platform that promised to accelerate scientific discovery. It’s being absorbed into “other research teams,” according to Weil’s social media post announcing the news.

“It’s been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science,” Weil wrote. “Accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI.”

The team had a short and bumpy road after its formal announcement in October 2025. Weil deleted a tweet claiming GPT-5 had solved 10 previously unsolved Erdős mathematical problems, but that claim fell apart immediately when the mathematician who runs the website erdosproblems.com called it out.

Weil’s departure comes a day after his team released GPT-Rosalind, a new model to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery.

In a social media post announcing his departure, Peebles credited Sora with igniting a “huge amount of investment in video across the industry,” and argued that the kind of research that produced the video tool requires space away from the company’s mainline roadmap.

“Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term,” he wrote.

OpenAI is also losing Srinivas Narayanan, its chief technology officer of enterprise applications, Wired reports. Narayanan reportedly announced the news internally that he was leaving to spend more time with family.

This article was updated to include the departure of Srinivas Narayanan.

• The Orion spacecraft uses eight processors running identical instructions simultaneously
• A fail-safe design prevents faulty computers from sending incorrect commands
• Triple redundant memory corrects single-bit errors automatically on access

The NASA Artemis II mission relies on a computing system built to remain operational under extreme conditions and hardware faults.

Unlike the Apollo program, where onboard computers handled limited functions, the Orion spacecraft manages life support, navigation, and communication through integrated flight software.

Gamers seeking victory in any fast-paced game will want every frame they can get. Sony designed the INZONE M10S II with this specific purpose in mind, and they accomplished it by including two different modes. Switching between settings is simple on this 27-inch OLED panel. If you keep the resolution at 1440p, the display will run at a scorching 540 hertz. Drop the resolution to 1080p and you’ll be rewarded with an even faster refresh rate of 720 hertz.

That kind of flexibility is invaluable when you’re playing different games with varying demands on your screen. Some titles are all about the details, while others are simply about obtaining that speed, since every millisecond counts. Fortunately, the tandem OLED build of this display keeps the image quality sharp even while switching between modes. Sony also included a brilliant feature called motion blur reduction, which keeps fast-moving objects clear and prevents the screen from becoming too dim even when you’re in the thick of things.

INNOCN 27″ OLED 2K QHD 2560 x 1440p 500Hz Gaming Monitor, Gaming Console Ready, VRR, G-SYNC Compatible…

• 【Epic QD-OLED 500Hz Monitor】 A new generation of gaming monitor is emerging, this new 27 Inch 1440p 500hz monitor adopts QD – OLED panel and…
• 【Rare 500Hz Refresh Rate & 0.03ms】INNOCN 2780M – Ultra-fast 500Hz OLED display. The faster speed lets you respond quickly to opponents and stay a…
• 【Powerful Connectivity】 2780M 2560 x 1440p 500hz gaming monitor delivers powerful connectivity: 2 x DP, 2 x HDMI, 1 x 3.5MM Audio Jack, wide…

The display itself is also quite forgiving in terms of placement, since the special anti-glare coating does an excellent job at maintaining visibility regardless of the lighting conditions in your room. With that level of control over reflections, your emphasis remains where it should be: on the game. For the competitive crowd, there is an extra tiny tool in the arsenal known as tournament mode. When you turn it on, the display basically shrinks to 24.5 inches, with black bars on the sides, but you still get the desired high refresh rate.

Ergonomically, the setup feels perfectly natural on almost any workstation. The stand can tilt from minus five to thirty-five degrees and adjusts in height by roughly five inches to maintain your screen at the ideal angle. Plus, it swivels left and right, allowing you to have a good perspective regardless of your preferences.

In terms of input, you have two HDMI 2.1 connections and one DisplayPort 2.1 connector to keep up with the latest graphics cards. Variable refresh rate support almost guarantees that you’ll never have to struggle with those annoying screen tearing bugs. As an added bonus, you get two pre-tuned picture settings for shooter games: one that gives you the familiar look of a regular display, and another that really shows off the OLED panel. Sony plans to sell the monitor for $1,099, with a release later this year.
[Source]

A newly discovered live recording from Yusef Lateef arrives via Resonance Records for Record Store Day 2026, capturing the saxophone icon in an intimate club performance that stands out as one of the most compelling archival jazz releases of the year.

Yusef Lateef Alight Upon The Lake: Live at the Jazz Showcase captures the artist backed by a superb swinging quartet featuring Kenny Barron on piano, Bob Cunningham on bass, and Albert “Tootie” Heath on drums.

One of the better sounding of Resonance’ RSD new offerings, as with most of these shows from Chicago’s Jazz Showcase — a venue run by jazz enthusiast Joe Segal — the tapes used for creating this release are recorded in monaural, yet effectively document the sound of the band in the club. 

Pianist Kenny Barron stands out as a featured performer, the band playing two of his compositions including the nearly 30-minute opening track “The Untitled”– almost half of it showcases Barron’s lush, wave-like solo explorations. Likewise, his “Inside Atlantis” stretches for nearly 20 minutes.

Lateef’s playing is, not surprisingly, beautiful and inventive. Yet he also takes time to let loose such as on the lighthearted boogie-woogie show closer “Yusef’s Mood.” This has the feel of a vintage 1940s–50s Jazz at the Philharmonic blowing session, driven by the same raw energy as Illinois Jacquet and Flip Phillips, with flashes of the R&B honk and swagger you’d hear from Joe Houston and Big Jay McNeely.

The vinyl quality is fine on this new RSD release as are the production elements as we’ve come to expect from Resonance. The 3LP set features liner notes by noted Yusef Lateef biographer Herb Boyd, plus interviews with musicians Bennie Maupin and Wayne Segal (son of the club’s found and the frontline person maintaining his father’s sizable tape archive). 

Whether you need to own Alight Upon The Lake: Live at the Jazz Showcase on vinyl is a personal decision versus just getting the CD version. The 3LP version will likely run you upwards of $60 (estimated) on RSD, However, the 3CD set is available for pre-order for just $29.98 at Amazon. 

Either way you go, this will be a fun listen for fans of Mr. Lateef’s music. 

Mark Smotroff is a deep music enthusiast / collector who has also worked in entertainment oriented marketing communications for decades supporting the likes of DTS, Sega and many others. He reviews vinyl for Analog Planet and has written for Audiophile Review, Sound+Vision, Mix, EQ, etc.  You can learn more about him at LinkedIn.

Related Reading:

The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission have safely returned to Earth, but if your Moon fever has yet to break, or you’re curious to get a big picture view of how the second of a planned five Moon missions was pulled off, PBS has a new documentary you’ll want to watch. The hour-long Return to the Moon was produced for PBS’ NOVA and aired on TV on April 15, but you can view the episode in its entirety on YouTube right now.

Return to the Moon covers the history of NASA’s Artemis program, and specifically the planning and preparation that went into Artemis II. Per the documentary’s official description:

Follow the four members of the Artemis II crew as they embark on a perilous 10-day journey to orbit the Moon, venturing beyond Earth orbit for the first time since Apollo and farther into the Solar System than any humans have gone before. And get an inside look at the preparations needed to overcome the extreme engineering challenges of human-crewed spaceflight, all the way from launch to splashdown.

The last Apollo mission was in 1972, so Artemis II getting a group of four astronauts anywhere near the Moon has naturally generated a lot of excitement. The crew flew further away from Earth than anyone has gone so far, captured some stunning photos of both the Moon and our home planet and managed to make everyone feel better about their dislike of Microsoft Outlook. Few Moon missions have been as well-documented or relatable.

The S’porean couple behind Freshio Gelato is proving that age has no limit

At 73 and 77, most people would be slowing down. But Tan Kian Tat (KT) and his wife, Zheng Yazhu, were just getting started again.

Once a “crawfish king” in China, the retired KT and his wife have returned to work life in Singapore—this time scooping out up to 500kg of gelato a month at Freshio Gelato, a homegrown gelato business they built without touching a cent of their retirement savings.

A path that began far from the kitchen

KT’s path began far from any kitchen.

For 15 years, he dominated China’s crawfish export industry, running eight factories across different provinces and shipping US$40 million worth of frozen crawfish to Europe and the US in a single three-month season. 

I was the biggest exporter—they called me the crawfish king in China.

Meanwhile, his wife, Yazhu, wasn’t idle. 

She ran two cafes in Shanghai for four to five years, serving Singaporean food and acting as a distributor for Neapolitan coffee brand Izzo.

When they left China in 2011 to retire after more than 20 years, they simply handed their cafés to trusted workers, who later expanded those locations to five across the city.

The struggle with idle time

Retirement, however, felt suffocating for this couple wired for work.

After leaving the country, the couple travelled the world for three years before settling in Vancouver, where Uncle KT’s family lived. But the slow pace of retirement clashed with his personality.

“I’m a workaholic. I always loved working, moving here and there,” he said. “In Vancouver, it would be like, this week maybe we drive down to the USA, then next week we come back—where to go again? It’s too much of nothing to do and just spending money only.” 

Seeking purpose, the elderly couple then chose to return to Singapore, where they were born, to spend their golden years.

To pass the time, KT drove for Grab while Yazhu worked as a McDonald’s barista, but two years of being pushed around by younger colleagues left her in tears. “They always bully me in McDonald’s,” she told him. “Ask me to throw rubbish, do this, do that.”

Taking a leap into entrepreneurship

In 2019, an HDB café lease opened in Sengkang North. Drawing on Aunty Yazhu’s café experience, they took the leap—this time with gelato.

The choice wasn’t random. KT understood that cooking at their age would be physically demanding and stressful. Gelato offered something different.

“Gelato is a dessert, it has timing—always after lunch or dinner. Before that big hour, you have a quiet period to prepare,” he explained. “You make them all in pans, and put them ready on display. When the order comes, just need to scoop and go.”

Initially, the couple adopted a supplier-based model, buying ready-made gelato to serve at Freshio Gelato. But it soon fell short of expectations.

“If you’re a big shop, they send you very fresh batches, maybe made just yesterday,” KT said. “But if you’re a small shop, sometimes they will send you old gelato that has a layer of ice over it. They don’t even put a date on it, so we don’t know when they were really made.” 

At their first outlet, the business barely covered rent and operations. Worse still, supplier flavour options were limited. As such, in 2021, Yazhu encouraged KT to learn to make gelato from scratch and breathe new life into the business.

Learning how to make gelato from scratch

That same year, with the Sengkang North lease expiring and a tiny 300-square-foot unit available at City Gate, the elderly decided to shift to the latter unit. 

Before opening, KT flew to Thailand’s Dream Cones school for a two-week gelato course. At 66, he became the oldest student.

The master didn’t believe that I myself was actually an enrolled student. He was thinking, “Am I visiting someone?” The other students were all in their 20s.

KT acknowledged that his food processing background and engineering knowledge gave him an edge. At the end of the course, when the instructor conducted a blind taste assessment, his pistachio gelato won hands down.

“[The master] praised me for the textures, the flavour and the smoothness, because I can understand some food science, the quick freezing and chilling, the infusion of the flavour.”

Back in Singapore, their cramped shop with just two tables became proof of concept. Customers immediately noticed the difference between house-made and ready-made gelato.

Word spread. Despite a limited social media presence, customers returned repeatedly, bringing friends.

By 2023, frequent overcrowding pushed them to relocate to a larger space at Sunshine Plaza on Bencoolen Street, strategically positioned near 5,000 to 6,000 students from nearby universities like Singapore Management University, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, and LASELLE College of the Arts. 

Competition eventually arrived, with international brands marketing their “own farms” and “dairy heritage,” drawing long queues. But KT and Yazhu remained unfazed, content serving their S$4.50 gelato in their cosy spot.

The science of flavour and texture

Making gelato in-house is where KT’s past expertise truly shines. As a trained refrigeration engineer, he repairs his own equipment and speaks with technical precision about freezing points.

“You must understand this to make gelato from scratch,” he insisted. “What are the contents of your ingredient, because it changes the textures and freezing point.” 

The display freezer maintains -14 degrees Celsius, yet each of his 35 rotating recipes must remain perfectly scoopable. This is trickier than it sounds, especially with alcohol-based flavours.

Making gelato also demands intense concentration. Blending generates heat, so the mixes have to rest on ice. Timing matters in everything, especially when infusing.

A moment’s distraction once burned a coconut base, but KT turned the mistake into a “roasted coconut” flavour customers loved. “Sometimes a mistake is actually a blessing in disguise,” he said. However, he could never replicate it consistently, so it left the menu.

His 16-flavour display always stocks the classics children demand: pistachio, hazelnut, vanilla, and strawberry. The remaining slots rotate based on customer requests, like the black grape flavour created for a regular whose son loved them.

When his Italian ingredient suppliers visit, KT makes them taste his current gelato first, before it joins the display refrigerator.

Throughout his life of running businesses, he has maintained strict financial discipline. His initial S$50,000 investment came from funds he could afford to lose.

I won’t stress myself out. This is just a very small token to keep myself active and busy. If it goes, it goes. If it doesn’t, let it close—it’s okay.

He cautioned other seniors against using retirement funds to start a business, noting that success is never guaranteed and that having savings to fall back on is essential.

Passing the torch and opening a second location

Today, the Sunshine Plaza outlet is led by KT’s goddaughters Lee Qi and Joey, recent graduates passionate about carrying forward the Freshio Gelato legacy and reviving its social media presence.

His son Alex also contributes with design ideas, new products, and demographic strategy.

But even with the next generation stepping in, the elderly couple are not ready to retire just yet.

In late Mar this year, they opened a new outlet at Kadayanallur Street near Maxwell Food Centre, employing a different strategy while Sunshine Plaza bets on students. The outlet instead targets Chinese and Taiwanese tourists who frequent the hawker centre’s famous chicken rice stall.

The new Freshio Gelato serves durian desserts and newly launched yoghurt and açai bowls on top of their regular gelato flavours, which KT shared that “customers photograph from every angle before eating.” 

With its mobile gelato machine, Freshio Gelato is also able to supply gelato at any location and event. This includes corporate bookings handled through organisers serving both private companies and public sector clients, from Changi Airport to Sentosa hotels.

The business also partners with organisations such as The Foundry charity next door, the Photographic Society on Waterloo Street, and YMCA graduation events, serving hundreds of guests at a time.

In total, the business moves through roughly 500kg of gelato a month. Till this day, KT and Yazhu leave the shop at 2AM, and face peak crowds from 1-3PM and 8-10PM, timings they call the prime time for dessert.

Freshio Gelato has redefined the couple’s retirement

Running Freshio Gelato has redefined retirement for the elderly couple.

“It’s just keeping active and providing another kind of financial income every month,” KT said. But more than money, it means staying relevant through “intergenerational collaboration” with his grandchildren and his younger customers.

“If you TikTok, I can also do TikTok,” he said with a laugh. “I learn from younger people and enjoy working alongside them.” 

His advice to elderly entrepreneurs stands in practicality. Find something that keeps you engaged, risk only what you can afford to lose, and never stop moving. 

For KT, that something turned out to be gelato.

• Learn more about Freshio Gelato here.
• Read more articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Freshio Gelato, Divyanshu Mahajan via Google Reviews

from the a-test-of-democracy dept

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

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

They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dismantling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Team America

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

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

They represented the new type of people running the show.

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

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

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

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

Team America members have echoed or spread such material themselves. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Flags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dismantling the Brain”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: democracy, donald trump, elections, midterms