Politics

Georgia RNC members clear way for national party support of Burt Jones

Published

5 months ago

February 10, 2026

Top state Republicans in Georgia have quietly opened the door for the Republican National Committee to support Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in the state’s hotly contested primary for governor.

The RNC normally maintains strict neutrality in party primaries to let voters — not party leaders — choose its nominee. Any move to intervene in Georgia, however, could dramatically reshape a crowded race for an open governor’s seat in a premiere battleground state. It could give Jones, President Donald Trump’s handpicked choice, a boost in a field that includes Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a target of Trump’s ire ever since he refused to echo the president’s falsehoods about the 2020 election in his state.

Georgia’s three RNC members signed letters late last year and early this year waiving the party rule that bars the RNC from intervening in contested primaries, according to three people familiar with the agreement. That move allows the national party to provide financial or operating support to Jones and coordinate with him ahead of the May primary.

It’s unclear whether the RNC will move to support Jones in the crowded primary now that it’s been cleared to do so. But it was the RNC that first reached out to the Georgia party leaders about waiving the rule, according to a person familiar with the process — a sign the national party has at least considered getting off the sidelines. The RNC did not provide a comment.

Josh McKoon, the chair of the Georgia Republican Party, said he signed the letter waiving the RNC’s neutrality rule because Jones has Trump’s endorsement.

“It was a no-brainer for me to sign the letter,” McKoon told Blue Light News.

“From my perspective, I was going to remove any barriers to working with the RNC from a candidate that the president has clearly signaled as the candidate he wants to be the next governor,” he said.

Jones has long been a vocal supporter of Trump. He endorsed him for president in 2015, and as a state senator, was among the 16 Republicans who attempted to serve as electors in 2020 and falsely certify Trump’s loss in Georgia as a win. Jones received Trump’s official endorsement in August, and released a video with Jones last week calling him a “friend” who’s “going to make a great, great governor.”

Limited early public polling shows Jones leading the field, and he maintains a sizable war chest, but the race remains fluid, and a prolonged and expensive primary could complicate Republicans’ general election prospects. RNC support could help Jones fend off rivals and potentially avoid a prolonged primary fight, especially if he can avoid a run-off.

Last week, health care business owner Rick Jackson injected new uncertainty into the race by launching a surprise gubernatorial bid, pledging to spend $50 million of his own money to support his campaign. He has presented himself as a Trump-aligned political outsider, a message that could cut into Jones’ base.

A Cygnal poll released Monday, after Jackson’s surprise campaign launch, found Jones leading with 22 percent support among likely primary voters. Jackson followed at 16 percent, with Raffensperger at 10 percent and Attorney General Chris Carr at 7 percent.

To avoid a June run-off, a candidate must secure an outright majority of the vote in the May 19 primary — a high bar in an increasingly crowded field.

“I can see a path to victory for all four of them right now.” said Jason Shepherd, a former Cobb County GOP chair who is backing Carr. “But Burt Jones’ path to victory just got a lot harder” with Jackson’s entrance.

Under RNC rules, the national party is barred from backing candidates in primaries unless the filing deadline has passed and a candidate is running unopposed. That requirement, known as Rule 11, can be waived if all three of a state’s RNC members sign off. Such Rule 11 agreements have been used sparingly in recent cycles.

State party leaders in North Carolina have green-lit early support for former RNC chair Michael Whatley, another Trump-backed candidate running for the state’s open Senate seat.

Both Georgia and North Carolina are top priorities for the Republican Party in November. In Georgia, Republicans are looking to retain control of the governor’s mansion in a state that Trump flipped in 2024. The steps taken in both states raise questions about whether the RNC could face pressure to take similar moves in other states’ primaries where Trump decides to take sides, such as in Louisiana, where he endorsed Rep. Julia Letlowin her primary challenge against Sen. Bill Cassidy.

“We all look very carefully at when [Trump] decides to weigh in a race, because he doesn’t always do that,” McKoon said. “I certainly didn’t want to be serving as an obstacle to the RNC being able to coordinate with his campaign and provide support.”

Alec Hernández contributed to this report.

Politics

A ‘pride match’ between Iran and Egypt — and Washington state’s gay leaders couldn’t be happier about it

Published

1 hour ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — On Thursday, the Washington state House speaker and its Senate president — likely the country’s first-ever pairing of openly gay state capital legislative leaders — met to strategize with progressive campaigners against a pair of conservative-backed ballot initiatives that would impose new rules on transgender children in schools and sports.

To defeat the measures, the campaign will have to convince voters beyond Seattle’s progressive enclaves to accept their arguments about privacy, liberty and acceptance.

But on Friday, Washington’s LGBTQ+ leaders were thinking about how they might address an even more hard-to-reach constituency: citizens of Egypt and Iran, whose governments criminalize homosexuality but have seen their national teams paired through a scheduling quirk in the World Cup’s only official “Pride Match.”

Members of Seattle’s World Cup organizing committee set out to make the June 26 game a showcase of the city’s inclusivity before a random draw ensured two of the world’s most repressive states toward sexual minorities would take the field. While FIFA has banned critics of the regime in Tehran from flying the country’s pre-revolutionary flag (under rules prohibiting the display of political symbols), soccer’s governing body hassaid it will permit rainbow flags over objections from Iranian and Egyptian soccer officials.

“How many opportunities do you have to get positive messages about happy queer people beamed into Iran and Egypt?” said state Senate President Jamie Pedersen. “I don’t think there’s going to be any way for people who are watching the game and seeing images of the stands to be able to avoid the fact that there’s going to be a huge contingent of rainbow flags waving.”

Pedersen and House Speaker Laurie Jinkins have known each other since the 1990s, when they first worked together on a failed campaign to pass a statewide non-discrimination law. Both were subsequently elected to the legislature — she from Tacoma, he from a Seattle district encompassing Capitol Hill, the traditional seat of gay power — and rose to lead Democratic majorities in their respective chambers. Along the way they became friends, attending each other’s marriages and raising children in parallel.

Now they are collaborating with the No Hate in WA State campaign to defeat two separate initiatives that will appear on the November ballot after the two leaders refused to take them up in their legislative chambers. One,characterized as a parents-rights measure, would allow parents to opt out of classes related to sexual education or gender diversity and compel educators to notify parents if their children request medical attention. Aseparate measure would “prohibit biologically male students from competing with and against female students” in interscholastic sports, and require girls to receive a medical examination confirming their biological sex.

Both Pedersen and Jinkins said they expected to build on the coalition that helped enshrine gay and lesbian rights at the ballot, first bypassing a domestic-partnership regime in 2009 and then three years later by approving a same-sex marriage law that had passed the legislature before facing a citizen’s-veto threat. (Let’s Go Washington, the campaign committee organized to pass the two transgender-related initiatives this year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“What we saw, going back to the 1980s and 1990s, is people didn’t think they knew anyone who was gay or lesbian. Once they started to realize they knew people, that started changing opinions dramatically,” said Jinkins. “It stopped the other side from being able to use stereotypes to characterize us.”

In interviews Friday morning, both of the legislative leaders cast the day’s unusual Pride matchup — and its likelihood for friction with soccer fans in Seattle’s streets — as a healthy development for the state’s LGBTQ+ community.

“That’s one of the best things about the World Cup, some of the exposure that different communities are having to one another,” said Jinkins. “It’s not just Iranian and Egyptian fans learning about Pride, it’s us learning about Iranian and Egyptian culture and thought.”

Neither, however, planned to attend the match itself despite receiving invitations to do so. Jinkins said she would likely visit a “fan zone” watch party being hosted by the Puyallup Tribe of Indians at its administrative headquarters in her Tacoma district. Pedersen, who concedes he is “not a sports fan,” was scheduled to participate in a Trans Pride event in Capitol Hill, the historic heart of gay Seattle where he is deep in an aggressive reelection campaign against a challenger to his left.

“I feel bad when I take up the ticket for something where there is a lot of demand,” Pedersen said. “People who really enjoy it should be having this experience, and probably not me.”

Politics

Judge halts executive order seeking to create federal voter list…

Published

2 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday halted President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to create a federal voter list and limit who can receive a mail ballot.

U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, sided with a coalition of nearly two dozen states that challenged the Republican president’s order in granting a summary judgment. Her ruling applies to this year’s midterm election cycle.

Plaintiffs argued in two lawsuitsboth filed in federal court in Boston, that Trump’s order should be found unconstitutional because the states and Congress, not the president, have the power to set election rules. The judge agreed, saying in her ruling that the provisions of Trump’s order seeking to create a federal list of eligible voters and using the U.S. Postal Service to determine who can receive a mail ballot are “legally void” because they “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.”

It was the second ruling in as many days against executive orders Trump has signed seeking oversight of the nation’s elections. A separate ruling Wednesday prohibited an executive order he had signed last year that would have required people to show documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote.

Order targeted mail voting, administration likely to appeal

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, whose state was among the plaintiffs, celebrated the court’s decision.

“Millions of independents, Republicans and Democrats across Arizona have voted by mail for decades,” she said in a statement, noting that nearly 80% of ballots in the state are cast by that method.

Mayes, a Democrat, singled out military families, voters in the state’s rural expanses and Native Americans who cast ballots from tribal lands.

“Donald Trump’s executive order targeted all of these voters,” she said. “But today, the courts affirmed what the Constitution makes clear: States run their elections, not the President.”

AP AUDIO: Federal judge halts Trump’s election executive order seeking to create a federal voter list

AP Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports President Trump has suffered a legal setback for a second straight day in his bid to get oversight of the nation’s elections.

The White House stood by Trump’s executive order and indicated the administration would appeal the ruling. The order, said spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, “lawfully protects our elections, and we are confident that we will ultimately prevail in its implementation.”

The administration, in its motions to dismiss the lawsuits challenging the order, argued that the motions were premature and that plaintiffs lacked the legal basis to bring their claim based on the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

But in an interim order before Thursday’s ruling, Talwani said the motions pertaining to this year’s election cycle were relevant: “In light of the EO’s specific deadlines over the next three months, and the reality that elections will be occurring throughout this period with the November 3, 2026 midterm occurring in just five months, postponing judicial review is impracticable and may inflict significant hardship on Plaintiffs,” she wrote. That order denied the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the challenges.

Executive order sought to give Postal Service a central role in elections

Trump’s executive order, the second one aimed at elections during his second term, comes as he continues to raise the specter of widespread voting by noncitizens as a reason to change election rules. But states already have detailed processes aimed at keeping their voter rolls accurate, and voting by noncitizens has been shown to be rare. It also is a felony that can be punishable by deportation.

Trump issued his second order in March after a bill he supported to overhaul voting stalled in Congress. The order would have had the federal government — through the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration — create a “state citizenship list” of eligible voters. It then directed the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to those on the list.

Election officials argued that it was ripe for abuse and could cause chaos.

The Postal Service has published a proposed rule required by Trump’s executive order in the Federal Register. Among other things, the rule would not apply to primary elections or overseas ballots.

Postal Service workers have pushed back against the order, saying they are not equipped to determine who is eligible to vote in each state. After Trump issued his order last spring, the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association said forcing its members into such a role “risks politicizing one of the nation’s most trusted public institutions.”

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat whose state was among the plaintiffs, said the executive order illustrated how Trump was attempting to “abuse power in previously unthinkable ways” to interfere in elections.

She said it “strains credulity” to think the U.S. Postal Service could set up a workable system for pre-screening individual voters to determine whether they would be allowed to vote by mail, adding that it would be “a shocking violation of American constitutional rights.”

The Postal Service did not immediately respond Thursday to requests for comment.

Trump’s second election executive order faces multiple legal challenges

The lawsuit seeking summary judgment was filed by Democratic attorneys general representing 22 states and the District of Columbia. Also signing on were attorneys representing Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, which has a Republican attorney general.

The states also told the court that the move imposes a costly burden on election officials to comply and would spread fear about the possibility of prosecution. Stephen Pezzi, a lawyer for the Trump administration, had argued that no one would be prosecuted for violating the order.

The other lawsuit filed in Talwani’s court was by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, which have sought a preliminary injunction against the executive order.

In yet another lawsuit filed against the executive order, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., in May agreed with the Trump administration that it was too early to block the order because it had yet to be implemented. That lawsuit was brought by Democratic and civil rights groups, which have appealed.

Since his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe BidenTrump has groundlessly claimed mail voting is rife with fraud and has launched a federal investigation into that year’s vote, even though repeated audits and investigationsincluding ones run by Republicansfound it was free of widespread fraud. Trump also has said he wants to “take over” election administration in Democratic areas.

___

Barrow reported from Atlanta and Hanna from Topeka, Kansas.

Politics

The drone war over World Cup skies

Published

3 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The federal government wants credit for mounting the World Cup’s best defense.

The Transportation Security Administration this week said its federal air marshals have seized more than 300 drones that broke through Federal Aviation Administration airspace restrictions imposed over World Cup stadiums or at nearby fan events in what the Department of Homeland Security called “the most comprehensive airspace security and drone mitigation effort in U.S. history.”

As part of that effort, local Federal Bureau of Investigation offices across Atlanta, Miami, New York, Dallas and elsewhere have released rolling social-media updates on their counter-drone enforcement activities, including the interception of dozens of unauthorized drones, along with warnings to recreational drone operators to keep their aircraft grounded.

“These incidents reflect the reality that drones are becoming part of the security environment surrounding major public events,” Michael Robbins, president of the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, told Blue Light News.

“The encouraging news is that authorities successfully detected and mitigated these incursions, demonstrating both the professionalism of the teams on the ground and the value of investing in effective counter-unmanned aircraft systems capabilities,” said Robbins, whose group represents drone manufacturers and suppliers.

Beyond countermeasures kits that include portable or wearable detection or jamming tools, law enforcement officials and security personnel are also utilizing enhanced training measures at the FBI’s drone training center in Alabama, which opened last year. FBI director Kash Patel boasted to Congress that “every single agency across the country wants their police officers there.”

As enforcement ramps up, a more fundamental question persists: whether many of the operators behind these incursions are knowingly breaking the rules or simply unaware they are flying where they shouldn’t be.

A former drone industry executive, granted anonymity to candidly discuss how drone policy has evolved in the last few years, said some drone manufacturers have simply put more responsibility on operators to figure out restrictions instead of baking it into the technology.

“Stepped up enforcement has some deterrent effect, but ultimately technology solutions will be most effective at preventing or mitigating incursions,” the executive said.

For now, as large-scale events continue across the U.S. — including the upcoming Olympic games — the next phase of thwarting drones must include “continuing to modernize our counter-UAS framework, expanding the deployment of proven detection and mitigation capabilities, and ensuring federal, state, and local partners have the clear authorities and tools they need to protect the public while preserving the tremendous economic and public safety benefits that drones provide every day,” added Robbins.