Congress
Max Miller threatens legal action over Democratic challenger’s ‘defamatory’ ad
Rep. Max Miller is threatening legal action to block a television ad created by his Democratic challenger Brian Poindexter that includes allegations of domestic abuse.
A lawyer for Miller is demanding Cleveland-area television station WKYC stop publishing “false, malicious, and defamatory statements” in a cease-and-desist letter sent Thursday and shared with Blue Light News by the Poindexter campaign. Miller has previously denied the abuse accusations.
The ad and ensuing legal threat mark a major escalation in the race between Miller and Poindexter. For much of his campaign, Poindexter avoided directly attacking Miller’s legal troubles, highlighting instead his working-class background and affordability.
With the ad, the two candidates are litigating the accusations in the public eye and placing Miller’s family drama at the heart of the race.
Miller’s lawyer Alejandro Brito — who has repeatedly represented President Donald Trump — said WKYC’s failure to comply with the cease and desist “will leave Congressman Miller with no choice but to pursue any and all legal rights and remedies available to recover damages for the overwhelming financial and reputational harm that Defendant will cause him to suffer.”
Miller is facing allegations of abuse from his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, the daughter of Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno. They include accusations he poured hot water on Emily Moreno, held a gun to her head and broke his two-year-old daughter’s collarbone.
The 30-second Poindexter ad depicts a local sheriff listing some of those allegations, and saying, “34 years in law enforcement tells me: Max Miller does not belong in power.”
A spokesperson for Miller declined to comment. WKYC also did not return a request for comment.
In a video response shared with Blue Light News — which the campaign will use to fundraise — Poindexter rips up the letter.
“He’s threatening to sue because he doesn’t want people to hear the facts. Here are the facts,” Poindexter said. “Max Miller has been accused of abuse by three women… Max Miller used his money and fancy lawyers to get himself out of his trouble his whole life. Not this time.”
Miller is not on the House Republican campaign arm’s “Patriots” list which features the most vulnerable members who typically get the bulk of its spending. However, recent polling suggests a tight race between Miller and Poindexter, and national campaign brass has taken notice.
The Congressional Leadership Fund, a top Republican super PAC, placed a staggering $4.85 million ad buy for Miller to air Sept. 30 to Nov. 3. The NRCC also dropped $450,000 on a three week ad-buy supporting Miller that started Sept. 7.
Jensen Huang’s clout as the leader of the world’s largest company is about to be tested on Capitol Hill as debates around artificial intelligence safety intensify.
The Nvidia boss and his army of lobbyists want Congress to lay off restricting exports, particularly to China, of high-end computer chips — the building blocks necessary to power AI development. Lawmakers could include these guardrails as part of the annual defense policy bill set for negotiations this fall.
But despite Huang’s team having had some success over the past year in convincing lawmakers to peel back regulations that would hamper exports, the swift shift in the AI political landscape has led the company to start sounding out of touch — at least to some lawmakers’ ears.
One Senate Democratic aide, granted anonymity to describe private meetings, said Huang’s recent visits to congressional offices have “repeatedly been seen as tone deaf, as he’s openly dismissed or downplayed the risks of AI, including denying any likely workforce disruptions from the technology.”
“Jensen makes an argument — I’m not sure I fully buy it — that as long as the world is relying on Nvidia chips, that’s a good thing,” the Senate Intelligence panel’s top Democrat, Mark Warner, said in an interview. He’s among those who fear giving a top U.S. competitor more tools to advance AI technology, which other industry executives have recently warned could have catastrophic consequences for humanity if left unchecked.
Huang last week echoed President Donald Trump’s sentiment that no new AI laws or regulations are necessary. But even Trump this weekend seemed to concede there are some dangers to the emerging technology. In a Truth Social post, he announced an “AI Force” and an AI czar to lead it — though he offered few details about what powers it would have or whether its creation would need congressional approval.
Meanwhile, a trio of GOP senators is trying to convince their leaders to do something — anything — on AI safety, an issue they believe could tilt the midterms and 2028 elections.
Sens. John Curtis, Josh Hawley and John Kennedy aren’t coordinating their efforts, but each is making a push from the back benches to jolt more senior senators to take action, with Curtis and Hawley teaming up with Democrats on various efforts.
Curtis said in an interview lawmakers need to “show that we’re adults in the room, that we can talk about this, that we can find solutions.”
Hawley is also convening a hearing this week in the Judiciary subcommittee he chairs on AI-powered Flock cameras, and using another subcommittee gavel to investigate OpenAI over the runaway model that led to rogue AI agents escaping testing.
But any hopes of passing legislation are facing skepticism among Senate Republicans that they will ever be able to overcome Trump’s opposition to AI regulations and House GOP leaders who side with the administration, according to three people granted anonymity to describe private conversations.
Kennedy said in an interview he hadn’t heard “anything” about movement in the Senate to address AI and that lawmakers who ignore the growing voter uproar around the issue were courting peril.
“We really need to send a memo around explaining we’ve got midterm elections coming,” he said. “I may send that out.”
Meanwhile, a deep dive in POLITICO’s magazine digs into the Trump administration’s complicated relationship with Anthropic and how officials’ perspective has shifted on AI this year as they discover the fearsome computing power being assembled by private companies on their watch.
What else we’re watching:
— DEMS EYE ONE MORE IRAN VOTE — Senate Democrats are hoping to rebuke Trump and the Iran war in one last war powers vote this week before the midterms. Sen. Thom Tillis is expected to flip his vote after saying he would support efforts to curtail the war if the administration hadn’t sought an authorization from Congress to continue it by mid-September. Senate Dems have attempted 14 similar votes in the past seven months with only two advancing due to GOP absences, but are now hoping increased dissatisfaction with the war will drive more defectors.
— CASSIDY SETS TEST FOR FDA PICK — Trump’s pick to lead the FDA must acknowledge the president’s claim that the measles vaccine is lethal is “absurd,” Sen. Bill Cassidy said Sunday. Senate HELP, which Cassidy chairs, is set to consider Dr. Heidi Overton’s nomination to lead the FDA on Thursday. “I need to hear that she understands that calling the measles vaccine lethal is absurd, and we need radical honesty,” Cassidy said on CBS when asked what he needs to be persuaded during the hearing.
Kelsey Brugger, Ari Hawkins, Jordain Carney, Sophia Cai, Cheyenne Haslett, Leo Shane III, Connor O’Brien and Jalen Beckford contributed to this report.
House Republicans have left Washington till November. President Donald Trump is decrying concerns about the issue as a “HOAX.” But a few Senate Republicans are trying to nudge their party into doing something — anything — about artificial intelligence.
There isn’t much binding them together aside from the “R” next to their names, but Sens. John Curtis, Josh Hawley and John Kennedy have each been closely attuned as voters suddenly grow alarmed — not only about the data centers powering the AI industry, but the recent insider warnings about potentially catastrophic consequences for humanity.
Curtis is a Utah moderate who has been among the few in his party to take seriously scientists’ warnings about climate change. Hawley is a populist Missouri conservative who has long been skeptical of Silicon Valley business titans. And Kennedy’s simple-Louisiana-country-lawyer persona belies a relatively sophisticated understanding of frontier AI developments.
The trio is not coordinating efforts, but their individual actions were part of a clear push from the GOP’s back benches over the past week to get party leaders to wake up and address an issue they believe could tilt the upcoming midterms and certainly the presidential and congressional races in 2028.
“We might want to be on the side of voters — just a thought,” Hawley said, noting that while he has his own “views” on how Washington should respond, party leaders have offered members no guidance on how to approach the topic.
Hawley is taking matters in his own hands this week by convening a hearing in the Judiciary subcommittee he chairs on AI-powered Flock cameras. He’s also using another subcommittee gavel to investigate OpenAI over the runaway model that saw hundreds of rogue agents escape testing and hack another tech company.
Both Curtis and Hawley have teamed up with Democrats, who have generally been more aggressive in calling for AI safety measures — particularly since a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee went public saying advanced models could “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Hawley and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) — who both sit on the Judiciary and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee — pushed congressional leaders last week to hold a vote on their “risk evaluation” legislation, arguing that “frontier AI demands frontier legislation.”
Curtis, meanwhile, joined with a fellow Commerce Committee member, Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), to call for “immediate public hearings” to “work through solutions that maintain America’s competitive edge in development while ensuring that these technologies serve human interests and remain fully under human control.”
Curtis said in an interview lawmakers need to “show that we’re adults in the room, that we can talk about this, that we can find solutions.”
“I don’t want to say we’re making it too hard, but I think we’re making it too hard,” Curtis said. “And what I mean by that is, there’s a lot of false narratives out there — we need to just jump on this immediately and clamp it down, or we need to not touch it, and all of that only I think causes anxiety back home.”
Both efforts could be seen as attempts to jolt more senior senators who are in positions to advance AI-related legislation. So far they are treading carefully amid skepticism among Senate Republicans that they will ever be able to overcome Trump’s opposition on AI regulations and recalcitrance among House GOP leaders, according to three people granted anonymity to describe private conversations.
They include Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who indicated in an interview that he had no plans to hold hearings or take other action related to AI.
“I think that I’d be getting into the jurisdiction of the Commerce Committee,” Grassley said, directing further questions to Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
Cruz has been more deeply engaged than Grassley in AI matters, but his plans for action remain uncertain. He said last week he is still hoping to hold a committee vote on AI safety legislation this month before the Senate leaves for the final stretch of pre-midterm campaigning.
Cruz is engaged in negotiating a revised version of an AI safety bill that Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) first introduced in 2023. But multiple Commerce Committee Republicans said they have so far heard zilch behind the scenes about what the committee could do, and some doubt they will be able to get an agreement in time to act before the Senate leaves — possibly as soon as the end of this week.
While Thune himself has been the most engaged on AI issues among top GOP leaders, he still advocated for a “light touch” on industry regulation last week while acknowledging the “considerable amount of interest” among lawmakers in taking action.
Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said — as Hawley suggested — that he isn’t giving members guidance on how to talk about AI.
“People have opinions and they’re going to make their opinions known and talk to their voters,” he said.
And then there’s Kennedy, who recently said the industry is run by “high-IQ stupid people” and was the rare Republican who attended a briefing put together by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) last week to meet with AI experts to talk about potential safeguards for the technology.
He took his AI concerns straight to the Senate floor Wednesday, seeking to pass legislation this week that would require companies to install so-called “kill switches” for their AI models. In a speech before seeking unanimous consent to pass the bill, he delivered a homespun but technically detailed summation of the OpenAI swarm attack and the risks posed by “recursive self-improvement.”
His bill was blocked by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who instead proposed creating a panel to make recommendations about potential guardrails.
Kennedy said appointing a committee would be “the weenie way out” after warning his colleagues from the Senate floor that Americans were growing “very skeptical” of AI and the tech titans behind it.
“They’ve seen this vampire movie before,” he said.
In a separate interview, Kennedy said he hadn’t heard “anything” about action in the Senate to address AI and that lawmakers who ignore the growing voter uproar around the issue were courting peril.
“We really need to send a memo around explaining we’ve got midterm elections coming,” he said. “I may send that out.”
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang has been a powerful force pushing back on Congress’ recent efforts to restrict high-end computer chips. The all-consuming artificial intelligence safety debate is about to test that clout.
In the past year, Huang and his army of lobbyists have had some success convincing lawmakers to peel back regulations that would hamper the multi-trillion dollar company’s ability to sell its advanced chips to the world, particularly China.
But the political landscape has shifted in a matter of days, and the company’s stated mission of “solving humanity’s greatest challenges” via AI has started to sound out of touch — at least to some lawmakers’ ears — after the CEOs of three leading tech companies said AI was moving so fast it soon risked spiraling beyond human control.
One Senate Democratic aide, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe private meetings, said Huang’s recent visits to congressional offices have “repeatedly been seen as tone deaf, as he’s openly dismissed or downplayed the risks of AI, including denying any likely workforce disruptions from the technology.”
Nvidia and other chipmakers are now pressing lawmakers to strip provisions from the chamber’s draft of the annual defense policy package that would restrict China’s access to Nvidia’s most advanced chips as well as chip-making equipment — the building blocks necessary to power its AI ambitions. Affiliated groups have sent multiple letters pressing the issue in recent months.
“What Jensen argues is that the threat of China is greater if they have to develop their own chips, and that’s not a frivolous argument,” said Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in an interview. “At multiple hearings, [we] have questioned witnesses about, ‘how do you respond to this argument that Jensen’s laid out?’ And there’s some force to it.”
A spokesperson for Nvidia did not return a request for comment.
But this has become a much taller ask of Congress amid rising fears on Capitol Hill that the sales of Nvidia’s advanced AI chips could give China not just a competitive edge but accelerate the threat of human extinction. Whether Nvidia is now able to secure its legislative priorities in the coming months will be an indication of its staying power in a political environment overtaken by the fight over what role the government should play in regulating AI.
Nvidia in a recent earnings call said that less than 1 percent of its data center revenue came from certain high-end chips shipped to customers in China, but that data point isn’t reassuring critics. That includes China hawks who have said they don’t want the U.S. to slow down AI innovation so as not to cede the race to China, but fear that allowing Nvidia to sell advanced semiconductors to China could give Beijing a dangerous advantage.
“Jensen makes an argument — I’m not sure I fully buy it — that as long as the world is relying on Nvidia chips, that’s a good thing,” the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, Mark Warner of Virginia, said in an interview, adding that he spoke with Huang at length at a conference earlier this month and described him as “very smart.”
Asked about Jensen’s influence on Capitol Hill, however, Warner said he thought “the place where Nvidia is gaining the most influence is obviously in the White House.”
He was referring to Huang’s recent viral moment, when he put the president on speaker phone while onstage at a major AI and tech conference. Trump, on the phone, declared that the “robots will not be taking over” — and the federal government would not be putting the brakes on the industry.
“I’m with you all the way,” Trump said through the phone to Huang, who is now expected to be a guest at an upcoming State Dinner to be held in honor of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Some close observers think this relationship will have its limits when it comes to whether Huang can leverage his ties to Trump to prod Republicans into taking a pro-Nvidia position in negotiations over the National Defense Authorization Act.
The Senate version of the bill — which has not yet passed the chamber and is likely to go straight to negotiations with the House after the midterms — is expected to require tracking of exported chips, allow Congress to block exports of advanced AI chips to China and other foreign adversaries and impose new controls on chipmaking equipment, in coordination with allies.
“Jensen Huang has a close relationship with the president, yes, but the NDAA is much bigger than that. It’s not a bill he can veto,” said Chris MacKenzie, vice president of communications for the Al safety group ARI, of the legislation that must be enacted at the end of this year.
He added that the “all-out campaign” Nvidia successfully waged against the inclusion of similar restrictions in last year’s defense bill “doesn’t seem to have manifested in the same way” this time around.
Over the past week especially, lawmakers of both parties have been taking stock of Nvidia’s arguments in light of conversations about what role Congress should play in regulating the AI industry, if at all. That includes evaluating both the costs and benefits of the White House’s support for the company and indications it could be planning to clear the way for the sale of high-end chips to China — and whether Congress should seek to use the defense bill to rein in those ambitions.
“There’s four things we need to win in the race to AI dominance: energy, data sets, talent, chip design,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) in an interview. “China is our peer competitor or exceeding us … It is really dangerous to be advocating for exporting the most sophisticated chips and chip-making technology to China. So I haven’t heard from Nvidia or Jensen, but I’m a pretty strong believer in the importance of continuing export controls.”
The debate on export controls legislation is also coming to a head as China hawks in Congress grow increasingly frustrated with the Trump administration’s lack of executive action on tech restrictions — especially in light of this week’s summit with Xi, where the president is under pressure to pursue diplomacy in hopes of deescalating a trade dispute with the world’s second largest economy.
One Senate GOP aide, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the administration’s slow pace on export controls is putting Republican senators “under pressure to do something and fill the vacuum” in the defense package.
Republican Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan — chair of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and a vocal proponent of more restrictions on Chinese tech — said Nvidia is “under the belief that if we sell China more chips, they’ll become more addicted to our technology and that will create a dependency. And my belief is, we should have a rolling technical threshold where we allow people to sell into the Chinese market but not help improve their capabilities exponentially — maybe incrementally, but not exponentially.”
Moolenar said last week that lawmakers “do have a responsibility for public safety” while asserting it’s also important to “beat China when it comes to the AI race.”
Cruz, who said he discussed this issue when he met with Huang in July, is also treading carefully.
In a recent interview with Blue Light News about the AI safety panic spreading throughout the country, Cruz underscored the need for the U.S. to stay ahead in the AI race, quipping: “If there are going to be killer robots, I would rather they be American killer robots, rather than Chinese killer robots.”
Asked in a separate, later interview about whether he thought Nvidia would come under greater scrutiny in the robust AI safety discussion, he said he’s still weighing the merits of Huang’s case.
“Nvidia has certainly been pushing against enhanced export controls, and Jensen in particular has been quite vocal making that argument,” said Cruz. “He argues we want to see American chips adopted globally. There are two sides to that argument, and I think I and other policymakers are evaluating both sides. I think we need to have meaningful export controls, but where the line should be is a complicated judgment call.”
John Sakellariadis and Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.
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