Congress
Sherrod Brown says Facebook ‘glitch’ cost campaign money, votes
Ohio Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown said Sunday that a “technical glitch” with Facebook’s advertising platform caused around half of his campaign ads on the site to suddenly “go dark with no notice.”
“For the past 48 hours, half of our ads have been unable to reach grassroots supporters and voters,” Brown said in a post to his Substack that both detailed the snafu and served as a fundraising appeal. Brown estimated the issue was costing his campaign “thousands and thousands of dollars — and potentially thousands of votes.”
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Facebook parent Meta, confirmed in a statement that “an error over the weekend impacted the delivery of ads for several advertisers, including the Brown campaign.”
“All of the Brown campaign’s ads have since been restored,” Stone said. “We apologize for the error.”
Neither Brown nor Stone immediately responded to followup questions about whether the Brown campaign would receive a reimbursement for the glitch.
A tally of Meta advertising data for Brown’s political account shows he has spent over a half-million dollars with the company across multiple campaigns. Brown, a former senator, is mounting a comeback against Republican Sen. Jon Husted.
Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz blocked an effort from Sen. Marsha Blackburn to pass her bill on the chamber floor Wednesday afternoon that would allow people to sue over artificial intelligence “deepfakes” — the latest episode in a long-running public rift between the two Republicans over AI legislation.
Blackburn of Tennessee argued the measure, the NO FAKES Act, would guarantee protections against the “proliferation harmful AI-created deepfakes” while ensuring artists and creative work are not impeded.
“Our bill would establish clear guardrails that protect our creators in Tennessee and across the entire country, in addition to establishing a federal intellectual property right in every American’s voice and visual likeness,” she said in a floor speech.
Blackburn sought to advance the bill by unanimous consent, a process that does not require a roll call vote but does permit any single senator to show up in person to object. That person Wednesday was Cruz, who argued the bill was not ready for primetime.
The Texas lawmaker said he had free speech concerns about the legislation as currently written — for example, would the AI-generated photos and videos like the ones frequently promoted on President Donald Trump’s social media accounts be deemed out of compliance? The same could end up being true for news parody websites like The Onion, Cruz added.
Blackburn said that free speech would not be jeopardized by her proposal, and that the bill instead targets online scamming activities that would certainly be illegal if conducted offline. Cruz was not convinced.
“I am happy to work with you,” Cruz ultimately told Blackburn. “But at least as of now, I object.”
Cruz and Blackburn have been at odds on the issue for some time, dating back to when a five-year deal to block states from enacting their own AI rules and regulations collapsed during One Big Beautiful Bill Act negotiations in 2025.
While Cruz voted for the NO FAKES Act in the Senate Judiciary Committee over the summer, he was unable to help broker a larger agreement with Blackburn and the White House to include it as part of a package of bills addressing preemption of state AI regulations and kids online safety issues.
Cruz also undercut Blackburn’s efforts during an Oval Office meeting over the summer, where he told Trump the package had no chance of moving in the Senate. The president ultimately held off on an endorsement.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a NO FAKES co-sponsor, emphasized the broad support from the creative industry that lawmakers have worked to build.
“This is the most baked, ready-to-go AI-related bill there is,” Coons said as he walked onto the Senate floor Wednesday. “We’ve done hearings, we’ve done technical assistance, we’ve done markups. It’s broadly bipartisan.”
Cruz, who objected Tuesday to an attempt to pass an AI safety bill by unanimous consent, countered that his bill making it a crime to knowingly publish sexually explicit images on the internet without the subjects’ consent — real or AI-generated — is the only major AI bill to become law in the 119th Congress.
GOP Sen. Jim Justice said Wednesday that he’ll decide whether to run for West Virginia governor before the end of the year but likely not until after the midterms.
“The timeline is short, because I don’t want to jerk you around,” Justice said. “I don’t want to jerk people around.”
Justice said he initially wanted to make a decision before the Nov. 3 elections, “but, you know, what’s happened is, we’ve been so busy, time just gets away, and now, you know. it may very well be best to wait and go after.”
Blue Light News first reported earlier this month that Justice was considering another governor bid and was viewed as likely to run.
Justice added he was hearing from Republican Party leaders in the state “in only one way, and that’s, please run for governor.”
Justice said he hasn’t spoken to President Donald Trump about whether or not he should run or stay in the Senate. He said he also hasn’t spoken to the sitting Republican governor, Patrick Morrisey.
A close Capitol Hill ally of President Donald Trump is suing the Justice Department and former special counsel Jack Smith for obtaining her phone logs in the course of his investigation into Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) filed suit a day after Smith testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee — on which Blackburn sits — and defended his office’s investigation, including its effort to obtain the records of Blackburn and dozens of other GOP lawmakers who spoke with Trump and his advisers during a four-day period in January 2021.
Blackburn argues that Smith committed a “gross abuse of power” and violated constitutional protections for members of Congress when he subpoenaed her phone logs from Verizon and secured a court order to prevent the company from alerting her. She’s asking a federal judge to declare Smith’s entire probe, as well as his effort to obtain her phone records, was illegal. She’s also asking that the judge order Smith and the Justice Department destroy or return any of her materials.
Smith contended that he sought the phone logs — which don’t include the content of calls or text messages — as part of his probe into Trump’s bid to overturn the election results, even as a mob of his supporters were ransacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump and his aides continued to work the phones that night and encourage lawmakers to derail the transfer of power to Joe Biden.
Smith insisted that his effort to obtain lawmakers’ phone records was cleared by the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section and complied with all department regulations.
But senators said his effort to obtain those call records ran afoul of the Constitution’s speech or debate clause, which provides blanket immunity for lawmakers from being scrutinized by prosecutors for their official business.
Stan Brand, former counsel to the House of Representatives under former Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.), said Blackburn may have a worthy case to test whether members of Congress can win legal relief for violations of the speech or debate clause. That issue is more commonly litigated during criminal cases and before investigators can access members’ records. But in this case, Brand said, the purported violation had already occurred without her knowledge.
“How do you remedy that after the fact?” Brand said. “I think it’s worthy of consideration.”
Blackburn’s lawsuit could put the Justice Department in a bind. Though Trump himself has attacked Smith’s investigation as unconstitutional — and U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon concluded Smith’s appointment was illegal — the Justice Department has never conceded that point. And DOJ has long defended its practice of obtaining secrecy orders from federal courts to prevent telecom companies from disclosing subpoenas to their subscribers.
In 2023, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for Smith’s team to access a subset of records it seized from Rep. Scott Perry’s (R-Pa.) phone, though it ruled that courts had to conduct a “fact-specific” inquiry to determine whether some records were “legislative” in nature and therefore off-limits to investigators.
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