Monday, July 27, 2026
Pentagon reports more than 600 Iran war casualties in quiet database update
Pentagon reports more than 600 Iran war casualties in quiet database update
“The article describes the Pentagon's update to its official war casualty database, which includes more than 140 wounded service members. The update also introduces a new casualty category for personnel killed and wounded in the renewed fighting since July 7. The article also highlights the controversy surrounding the Trump administration's interpretation of the War Powers Act and its application to the Iran war.
Figures are source of dispute as US defense department days ago reduced record of troops killed and wounded
The Pentagon updated its official war casualty database over the weekend, adding more than 140 wounded service members. The Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) also introduced a new casualty category labeled “Overseas Operations” for personnel killed and wounded “starting July 7”.
According to the updated database, the official toll for the earlier phase of the US-Iran war, known as Operation Epic Fury, now stands at 14 service members killed and more than 400 wounded in action.
These figures have been the point of contention after the Pentagon previously reduced the totals from 18 deaths and 482 wounded that had been recorded just days earlier.
The dispute comes after the collapse of the ceasefire with Iran and the resumption of near-daily airstrikes beginning on 6 July. Analysts and officials have questioned whether casualties from the renewed fighting should be counted separately from Operation Epic Fury, a move that would be unprecedented.
The Trump administration is seeking to classify the renewed military campaign as separate from Operation Epic Fury, the US military’s official name for the Iran conflict.
The change is tied to the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires the president to end military operations within 60 days unless Congress authorizes an extension. The Trump administration has argued that the April ceasefire with Iran paused the clock on 1 May for the conflict’s initial period. The separate casualty count beginning on 7 July follows that interpretation.
The shift became apparent earlier this week when the Pentagon’s official online list of service members killed in the ongoing Iran war did not includethe four soldiers who died during renewed fighting over the weekend. Their names, however, were included in a Pentagon press release announcing the formal transfer of their remains back to the US on Wednesday.
Combined with the updated Operation Epic Fury totals, the new Pentagon figures show that 18 US troops have been killed and 624 wounded since the US launched its war against Iran on 28 February.
Lawmakers from both parties have challenged the administration’s interpretation of the War Powers Act timeline.
Thomas Massie, a Republican House member from Kentucky, responded to the updated numbers in an X post, writing: “Let me explain this absurd ruse: The Pentagon is pretending there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief cease-fire.
“The reality: By going more than 90 days without congressional authorization,” the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, “IS BREAKING THE LAW and must be held accountable”.
Blanche-led DoJ likely to derail Epstein survivors’ pursuit of justice, experts say
Blanche-led DoJ likely to derail Epstein survivors’ pursuit of justice, experts say
“Jeffrey Epstein survivors are concerned that Todd Blanche’s confirmation as Attorney General will hinder their pursuit of justice. They cite Blanche’s handling of the Epstein case, including the disclosure of survivors’ information and the lack of charges against other accused individuals. Despite these concerns, survivors and advocates remain determined to continue their fight for accountability.
Lawyers predict ‘more suppression and no active investigations’ but victims’ groups determined to continue fight
As Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer Todd Blanche appears poised for confirmation as attorney general, numerous Jeffrey Epstein survivors have sounded the alarm that a US justice department helmed by him would derail their pursuit of justice.
In a letter urging Republican senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn to reject his nomination, these survivors said that Blanche’s handling of the Epstein case as acting attorney general was characterized by misstep after misstep.
Blanche, who reportedly led the disclosure of documents as required by the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act, allowed the disclosure of survivors’ names, photos and identifying information – but omitted the names of accused abusers and enablers, they said.
While more than 1,000 teenage girls and women were abused, not a single person other than Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell faced charges, they noted. And in a recent sit-down with survivors at Tillis’s urging, survivors “received an hour of deflection, interruption and gaslighting”, they said.
These survivors’ concerns about Blanche by no means exist in a vacuum, and have only fanned the flames of a controversy that has dogged Trump since he again took office. While campaigning, Trump promised to release all Epstein files – playing into his supporters’ belief that there was a global sex-trafficking cabal involving high-profile business and political figures.
But Trump’s justice department only released dribs and drabs of information until Congress forced its hand following a series of embarrassing disclosures that renewed attention on Trump’s former friendship with Epstein. Trump has denied all wrongdoing including in relation to Epstein.
Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell in prison last summer, which was followed by her transfer to a lower-security facility, further heightened outrage over the DoJ’s underwhelming disclosures. The constellation of circumstances has raised the question: what would a Blanche-directed justice department mean for Epstein survivors’ search for justice?
Legal veterans told the Guardian that a Blanche-led DoJ would likely derail survivors’ efforts for accountability. Several survivors’ advocates said that all hope was not lost, noting that roadblocks likely under Blanche did not portend a permanent impediment to justice.
Bryan Sullivan, a partner with Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae, said that based on what he has read and seen in Blanche’s testimony before the judiciary committee, he thinks a confirmation would mean “more suppression and no active investigations” into Epstein’s sex-trafficking.
“I think it’s because that’s what Trump wants. He wants this to go away,” Sullivan said. “And that’s one of the reasons he fired [former attorney general Pam] Bondi, because she didn’t make it go away, in my opinion.”
Ron Kuby, a renowned defense lawyer with a focus on civil rights, voiced similar sentiments about a Blanche confirmation.
“It means that no other perpetrators will be held criminally liable for their misconduct,” he said. “That’s no different from the way it’s been throughout the Trump administration and the Biden administration.”
“All the millionaires and billionaires and hangers-on and others in Epstein’s orbit who, you know, enabled him have not been brought to justice,” Kuby said. “And they’re not going to be.”
Carl Tobias, the Williams chair in law at the University of Richmond School of Law, said that even if Blanche were not confirmed, he could serve as acting attorney general for the rest of Trump’s term, meaning he would have continued control over the Epstein case.
“He’ll have more power, of course, if he’s formally confirmed by the Senate … but he’ll have plenty of power even if he’s not,” Tobias said. “So I can’t be very optimistic about what he might do – if anything – about the Epstein files, or to give much comfort to the survivors.”
While there are some legal avenues for survivors to seek justice outside an allegedly recalcitrant DoJ, attorneys cautioned that success would be an uphill battle.
“You could bombard them with [public records] requests, and then file a lawsuit for them not providing responses to the Foia [Freedom of Information Act] requests, but that alone is a long process,” Sullivan said. “Bluntly, the problem with all of this is [that] all of it takes time.”
“Courts are grossly underfunded [and] understaffed,” he said. “It will take quite a while to go through that sort of legal process.”
There has been litigation against federal authorities over their handling of the Epstein investigation, alleging that their failure to act years ago enabled more abuse. Those kinds of cases “are exceptionally difficult to win”, Kuby said.
“It’s always true that had the government done something differently, a different outcome would have ensued,” Kuby explained of the legal intricacies. “There’s no generalized duty to protect specific individuals outside of a special relationship with the victims.”
“I’m certainly sympathetic to those claims, but the government historically is not.”
Tobias similarly described the possibility of winning litigation against the DoJ as “difficult”.
Neither reps for Tillis or Cornyn responded to requests for comment.
Asked for comment on survivors’ concerns, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said: “Todd Blanche has done an excellent job as acting attorney general and will continue doing so as attorney general.”
A justice department spokesperson said in a statement that Blanche, senior DoJ officials, FBI agents and victims services representatives “met with Epstein victims last week and had a productive, initial discussion”.
The spokesperson said Blanche “answered questions and walked through what is needed for investigations to proceed”.
“While some victims said that they had not reached out to the FBI under this administration, he encouraged victims to meet with FBI investigators as the next step, and attendees spoke with agents after the meeting about scheduling interviews. The justice department is determined to bring justice for all victims of human trafficking and sex crimes.”
Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky, who filed sexual harassment lawsuits against former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and co-launched the non-profit survivors advocacy organization Lift Our Voices, expressed hope that survivors could still find justice one day even if faced with more setbacks.
Carlson said she was disappointed in Republicans poised to let Blanche’s nomination go through, noting that Trump went on the attack against Cornyn and Tillis.
“They have the ability not to allow this,” Carlson said, explaining that not everything should be on their shoulders, as “everyone should have questions about Todd Blanche being attorney general, just about the Epstein issues”.
That said, there is a midterm election coming up. “I’ve learned, in all the work I’ve done on the Hill in trying to get bills passed, that you never know who you might get, first of all, to be on your side,” Carlson said. “So you never judge it before you actually try.”
“I feel the same way about this,” she said. “We don’t know who’s going to potentially step up to the plate and say, ‘You know what, I’m going to take over the work that [Republican congressman] Tom Massie was doing on this.
“We can’t do this work with any kind of a negative lens. And although it feels like we’re in a little bit of a setback if Todd Blanche is confirmed, I think there’s always a way to find victory.”
Roginsky expressed similar views. While a possible Blanche confirmation represented a “slap in the face to anybody who’s ever fought … a system that is already rigged very much against survivors”, she advised survivors and advocates to keep pushing for justice.
“If you think about how far our movement has come just in the last decade, we’ve seen tremendous advances,” Roginsky said of Lift Our Voices’ successful advocacy for federal legislation against non-disclosure agreements and forced arbitration related to workplace sexual misconduct.
“We’ve seen some setbacks, but ultimately the advances will always outweigh the setbacks.”
Sunday, July 26, 2026
How Trump could undermine the midterms | US midterm elections 2026 | The Guardian
How Trump could undermine the midterms
"When Donald Trump commandeered primetime US television last Friday, he delivered a familiar, but still extraordinary, message. The president argued once again that the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, were illegitimate.
US elections are “vulnerable to being rigged and stolen”, Trump alleged, claiming that “the trust of the American people was lost” when he was defeated.
Historically, incumbent parties underperform in midterm elections and with the president’s popularity sagging – he has an approval rating of just 37% – Republicansappear on course to lose seats in the US Senate and House of Representatives, as well as in state and local elections, in November.
Trump’s latest intervention, in which he accused China of interfering with the 2020 election, is viewed by US voting rights activists as just the latest escalation of a bid by the White House to influence, and potentially alter, the results of the 2026 midterm elections.
“The number one threat facing American elections is the continued lies coming out of the White House,” said the Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, the official responsible for overseeing the state’s elections.
The president is fighting to persuade Congress to approve legislation, the Save Act, that would allow the US federal government greater control over elections. Trump has also called for the federal government to take direct control of elections in some states, falsely claiming that his defeats there in 2020 were illegitimate.
There’s just one snag. “We have an election system that is not run by the federal government,” said Ben Berwick, who leads Protect Democracy’s election law and litigation team. “It’s run by states and local jurisdictions.”
The president, he added, “really has no power over elections”. So what can Trump actually do?
Republicans in a handful of states have already scrambled, at Trump’s urging, to redraw their congressional maps in the wake of a landmark decision by the US supreme court – controlled by a conservative supermajority – that effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
Louisiana led the way, tearing up its old map of four Republican and two Democratic districts in favor of a new one, which will probably give Republicans five of the state’s six congressional seats. Such efforts are designed to shift the outcome of future elections.
And with threats to mail-in voting, sowing fears about voting machines, as well as a steady stream of unfounded allegations of election fraud, many fear Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to challenge results that don’t go his way in November.
The memory of the deadly 6 January attack on the US Capitol in 2021, fueled by Trump’s denial of his election defeat, looms large.
“It’s reckless that the president will continue to do what he’s doing, and that the folks around him will continue to let him do what he’s doing, and potentially trigger that sort of behavior that could cost lives,” added Fontes. “This is a powder keg out there, and there’s a lot of folks who just just want to get on with their lives, who just want to get on to solving their own problems.”
Mail-in ballots
Trump has repeatedly tried to restrict voting by mail, and likened it to cheating, despite doing so himself. It is a key focus of his administration’s efforts. In November, the administration could use the US Postal Service (USPS) to “control the flow of mail-in ballots, and potentially not send ballots to certain voters”, Berwick said.
Democratic voters are deemed more likely to cast their ballots by mail than Republicans: about one in four registered Democrats did so in 2024, according to the States United Democracy Center, alongside 1 in 5 registered Republicans.
Eight states and the District of Columbia rely almost exclusively on postal ballots. The USPS, at Trump’s direction, proposed a rule that would require states to turn over their voter roll information to the federal government, which would then tell states which voters were ineligible.
That proposal, enforced by an executive order in March, faces a wall of legal challenges and was ruled unconstitutional by a judge. Cases pursued by the civil rights group NAACP in Washington DC and the League of Women’s Voters in Massachusetts have challenged the plan in court.
Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, said the organization intervened to ensure the bid to restrict mail-in voting was “shut down” in time for state primary elections, taking place in the months ahead of November’s general election. “And so I think that was really important for us,” she said, “just to make sure that voters knew how that was going to work, and make sure that they understood what their rights were, and how they could execute their ballot effectively”.
Voting machines
At polling stations, Trump is also pointing to electronic voting machines, which he suggested in his 16 July TV address could be compromised by foreign actors. “China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files,” he said.
Declassified files from US investigators show that China downloaded publicly-available election data in 2022. Those same investigators concluded that China did not interfere in the election.
Voting rights advocates believe Trump may have been telegraphing his intent to try to block the use of some voting machines in a late-day election gambit, invoking national security as a rationale.
“The thing that maybe worries me the most is what we saw in Fulton county and elsewhere,” Berwick said, referring to an FBI raid in January that resulted in the seizure of 2020 ballots and election material in Georgia. The administration “may try to do something similar in the immediate post-election period under the sort of pretext of investigating ineligible voting, or votes cast by ineligible voters”, he suggested, “in a way that, if done in the immediate post-election period, would be designed to disrupt the ability of states to count votes and certify elections”.
In the meantime, the White House has actively undermined safeguards to the election system. The Election Assistance Commission, a US federal agency designed to help states overcome technical challenges in election administration, which currently has nocommissioners. Trump fired the Democrat members, and allowed the Republicans to resign. More than a third of the staff of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was meanwhile cut by Trump’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”, the cost-cutting drive fleetingly led by Elon Musk, including the entire team looking at cybersecurity threats in elections.
“One cannot help but notice the irony of the administration’s purported interest in securing our election systems, and yet gutting the very agency responsible for that,” said Hannah Fried, co-founder and CEO of All Voting is Local.
Save Act
The Save Act, which is stalled in Congress, would require voters to present their passport or birth certificate to register to vote, and then to provide photo ID from a narrow list of valid identifications to vote in person. Campaigners argue such restrictions would disproportionately impact Black, Native, elderly and student voters.
The legislation would also sharply constrain voting by mail, too. And it would require states to turn over their voter rolls to the federal government.
Absent that legislation – which is constitutionally questionable – federal agencies under Trump may still try to pressure states to purge voter rolls using unreliable or unverified federal data sets. Courts have consistently blocked attempts by the federal government to force unvetted voter purges.
Some states – led by Republican officials – have already turned over voter rolls, when requested by the federal government.
Berwick highlighted the prospect of federal agencies like the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security seeking voter lists from states, “presumably to then send to states lists of voters they believe are ineligible, which are very likely to be inaccurate”.
While far-right figures like Steve Bannon, an ally and former adviser of Trump, have called for the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents or federal law enforcement at voting sites, and the president himself has explicitly raised the prospect, it is considered remote because federal law plainly outlaws the presence of troops or federal agents at polling places.
Voter intimidation has already manifested at early voting sites and drop boxes, said Stewart, of the League of Women Voters, who cited an incident in Arizona where armed contractors confronted voters. “The president in particular is pushing for increased ICE funding,” she said. “So you have to ask: for what?”
Stewart highlighted how her organization successfully sued to stop armed drop-box intimidation in 2022, securing a court order within 24 hours. The incident was a demonstration of “how quickly things like that can happen” she said, “but equally as quickly … how we can shut that down”.
Pins and needles
Trump’s increasingly inflammatory rhetoric is itself a threat to the integrity of the 2026 election, said Georgia state senator Saira Draper, a leading voting administration expert, who warned that narrative attacks are designed to undermine outcomes, regardless of who wins.
“By sowing distrust in elections, no matter what the outcome is, he continues on the division, whether his party wins or not into the next term,” said Draper, who suggested that such constant rhetoric turns followers into “foot soldiers for the cause”.
Some of those foot soldiers sit on county boards of elections, which are required to certify elections. And some are running for office, successfully winning the Republican nomination, like Alex Kolodin, who helped lead failed legal efforts to overturn Arizona’s 2020 and 2022 election results, who is now the Republican candidate for Arizonan secretary of state: its top elections official.
After the 2020 election, some Republican elections board members refused to certify fair elections, threatening to disrupt the process. A mass refusal could cast doubt on the results in conservative states that have taken a Democratic turn in a swing year.
“This federal interference led by the president isn’t helping anybody,” said Fontes. “It’s not good for, in my view, any circumstance across the country, and it’s got everybody on pins and needles for no really good reason.
“I mean, what’s the really good reason why folks are afraid, that there’s something wrong with our elections? The only explanation is that Donald Trump can’t get over getting his butt kicked in 2020.”
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