May. 22, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

In a surprising turn of events, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin on Thursday released an unfinished, error-laden draft of the 2024 election autopsy report he had commissioned last year but then refused to release in December on the grounds that it would be a “distraction.”

Martin wrote a peculiar note announcing the unexpected release of the 192-page reportwhich read, in part:

I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it. But transparency is paramount. So, today I am releasing the report as I received it – in its entirety, unedited and unabridged – with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.

But if this report doesn’t represent the DNC’s views, then why release it at all? And why the sudden epiphany about “transparency” some five months after publicly spiking the postmortem?

Perhaps the most likely explanation is that Martin was trying to get ahead of an imminent CNN report on the document that was published Thursday — and scramble to control the narrative ahead of yet another round of withering criticism.

The DNC report itself is at once both boring and a mess. And the drama surrounding its release distills how utterly disastrous Martin’s handling of the autopsy has been from start to finish. It’s all marked by an irony: If he had followed through on his original promise, this report wouldn’t be shrouded in a fraction of the controversy it is now.

Martin doesn’t name the author of the report, but according to a DNC official familiar with it, the author is Paul Rivera, a longtime New York Democratic strategist who is friends with Martin.

Martin’s argument in his announcement message is that the reason he didn’t release the report is because Rivera’s work was subpar. “It wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close,” he wrote. “And because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning — every conversation, every interview, every data set.” Martin apparently eventually decided it wasn’t worth the effort to fix it.

If Martin thinks that statement is exculpatory for him, it isn’t. When he was elected chair in February 2025, he promised a report investigating what went wrong for the party in 2024. It was initially supposed to come out in spring 2025, but then he delayed and delayed until he ultimately said he refused to release it at all. He had ample time to either clearly lay out expectations for the report’s quality or work to fix what was submitted. And when he torpedoed the report, he did not explain why other than to say the party ought to look forward. The result is a failure on his part: He made a pledge, and he did not fulfill it.

Reading the report is a strange experience. At the very top of the document there’s a “disclaimer” that reads: “This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.” Again, this would seem to be a reason to not release the document at all.

The draft report contains awkward language, grammatical errors, factual errors and is missing entire sections, including an executive summary and a conclusion. The document is also marked up with many notes calling for sourcing backing up claims.

The analysis of what went wrong is narrow in scope and tracks with what one might expect from a moderate, risk-averse member of the Democratic establishment. For example, there’s an assessment that then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign did not make a sufficient “affirmative case” for the presidency, and that she was successfully hit by attack ads pointing out her past support for surgery for transgender inmates.

The report is also striking for what it doesn’t include. BLN’s review found that the report omits discussion of “Biden’s decision to run again, Harris taking over as the nominee without a nominating process or how the ticket’s positions on the war in Gaza affected Democrats in key states like Michigan.”

Skipping over those issues is political malpractice, and suggests this wasn’t a serious autopsy or wanted to avoid certain debates. But, again, one is left wondering whether the final report would’ve mentioned those issues because this one is incomplete. One can’t help but wonder, too, if Martin has preemptively derided the report as so bad it needed to be shelved because he sought a way to avoid tussling with activists who would’ve assailed the report’s assessment of issues like Gaza.

The DNC has managed to achieve the worst of all worlds. If it had released a report similar to this when it initially was expected to, it would likely have caused a few days of debate between moderate and progressive Democrats, and then most people who have forgotten about it. But Martin’s process of delaying it, quashing it and then releasing a sloppy, incomplete report has attracted far more scrutiny than it would’ve gotten otherwise, and made the party look cowardly and incompetent in the process.

At a time when the party is suffering from an extreme trust deficit with its voters, this is the last thing it needed.

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.

May. 22, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Spencer Pratt doesn’t approve of all the Trump comparisons.

The former reality TV star gets them a lot these days. He’s a celebrity — best known for his breakout role on MTV’s “The Hills” two decades ago — who is now running for mayor of Los Angeles. He doesn’t have much experience in politics or city government, but he comes with an A-list Rolodex and a built-in fanbase that includes more than five million followers across X, Meta and TikTok. He’s bombastic, confident and has a habit of rambling his way through speeches that veer into conspiracy theory. And, by his own admission, he has harbored an absurd, borderline toxic obsession with money since he was a teen.

Pratt, 42, is a registered Republican, but rejects the notion that he is aligned with MAGA or following in Trump’s footsteps. In February, while gathering signatures at an early campaign event on Ventura Boulevard in Encino, he joined the livestream of celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton to give his elevator pitch to be mayor. When Hilton asked about claims he’s a MAGA candidate, Pratt pushed back.

“I’m not a political person — I’m somebody with basic expectations of our tax money and our quality of living,” he told Hilton.

Pratt’s primary motivation for the career pivot, he said, stemmed from the Palisades fire that ravaged his neighborhood last January, destroying his family home and killing a dozen of his neighbors. He blames Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom for the devastation, which he believes was preventable were it not for the “corruption” in city government.

Talking about the fires on Hilton’s show, Pratt began to ramble, meandering through allegations of deceit and misconduct at the hands of a mysterious “they” who he said were misappropriating fire recovery funds and purposefully “increasing homelessness” in LA to defraud taxpayers.

This election, Pratt said, is a matter of good versus “evil,” and he’s waging “spiritual warfare” on behalf of his future constituents, who, in Pratt’s telling, have fairly simple requests.

“They just want to go on TikTok, have their Wi-Fi working, and be able to not step in human poop or a fentanyl needle on the walk to get their matcha. That’s who I represent,” he said.

As a Republican in a deep-blue city, Pratt was a longshot candidate on day one of his campaign. He’s also a career entertainer with no experience running for office, let alone running a city of 3.8 million people. And he has earned support from MAGA loyalists, establishment Republicans and even Trump himself, making him a tough sell in a city and state the president casts as a leftist “trash heap.” Pratt, too, seems to prioritize sparring with his political opponents and railing against quality-of-life issues on social media over laying out detailed policy plans for voters.

But Trump’s formula for politicking, while radical, has been successful for him. And whether Pratt is intentionally following that formula or not, his celebrity and social media savvy are giving him real momentum in the race. Several polls have him in second place behind Bass; an Emerson College poll from May 13 put him at 22%, a 12-point surge from March that leaves him eight points behind the incumbent.

And this week, his growing success drew the attention of the president.

“I’d like to see him do well,” Trump told reporters. “I heard he’s a big MAGA person.”

Pratt is a bellwether of sorts for the national Trump-era GOP. His success or failure on June 2 — or, if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, in a November runoff — will test the effectiveness of running a Trump-like populist candidate in a deep-blue jurisdiction where Democratic voters are wavering on the party establishment. Democrats face a litmus test as well, with Democratic Socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman running to the left of Bass, her former mentor. Pratt seeks to position himself between them as a moderate alternative to both.

To Pratt’s supporters, he’s a “breath of fresh air” who could shake the city from the Democrats’ grip, as Roxanne Hoge, chair of the LA County GOP, put it.

“We’ve been under one-party rule,” Hoge told MS NOW. “And it has destroyed what should be paradise.”

To critics, Pratt’s mayoral campaign is more evidence of MAGA’s ineptitude. The movement’s backing of Pratt “means that they are not a serious governing party, and it means that there’s no desire to even attempt to be,” said Mike Madrid, a California-based Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

But to Pratt, all the MAGA talk is a distraction campaign mounted by his opponents.

“They say I’m MAGA to try to stop me,” Pratt told Hilton, “because my message exposes their corruption.”

Pratt’s team declined multiple interview requests from MS NOW, and did not respond to specific allegations mentioned in this story.

***

Pratt’s early daysleading up to and during his time on “The Hills,” were marked by a relentless fixation with money — amassing it however he could, and then throwing it away as soon as it arrived.

In his book, “The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain,” published in January, Pratt details the lying and hustling that brought him celebrity and wealth, and the lavish spending that followed.

Pratt grew up in the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy residential enclave of about 20,000 people sandwiched between Santa Monica and Malibu. As a teenager going to school alongside celebrities, Pratt said he stole photos of his friend with Mary-Kate Olsen and sold them to Us Weekly for $50,000. (The magazine’s then-photo editor, Peter Grossman, whom Pratt said he sold the photos to, did not respond to MS NOW’s multiple requests for comment.)

Pratt’s obsession with get-rich-quick schemes only grew after he joined the cast of “The Hills” in 2007. The MTV show, which premiered the year before, chronicled the personal dramas of a group of 20-somethings trying to build careers in fashion and entertainment in LA.

Pratt quickly assumed the role of the show’s villainover his propensity to bully other cast members, particularly women. That version of Pratt was a persona, he maintains, handcrafted by producers. The volatility of his on-camera relationship with fellow cast member — and now wife — Heidi Montag was also fake, he writes. Pratt was Montag’s bad boyfriend on the show, who fought with her family, isolated her from her friends and famously kicked her out of his car when she refused to move in with him — a scene he said producers forced them to film a dozen times, and one that he writes “still haunts me to this day.” (Several of the show’s former producers, including executive producer Adam DiVello, did not respond to MS NOW’s requests for comment.)

Fighting and breaking up proved lucrative for the couple, as did reuniting. Pratt said in 2008, he and Montag eloped to Mexico on the promise of a $400,000 paycheck from Us Weekly, all behind the backs of the show’s producers — a move they believed would make them too relevant to be fired. They staged another on-camera church wedding in LA the following year. Pratt said he considered leaving Montag at the altar if producers would offer them an extra $1 million.

The plot kept working, so they kept staging fake storylines to secure magazine deals. The whole time, Pratt writes, “the public saw chaos, betrayal, and divorce papers. But behind the scenes? Heidi and I were still thick as thieves, scheming side by side, laughing at how easy it was to keep the world guessing and the checks coming in.”

And once the money started rolling in, they blew right through it.

They amassed, in Pratt’s telling, more than $1 million worth of crystals; $500,000 worth of Hermes Birkin bags for Montag; designer suits for Pratt worth “about the same”; and $300,000 worth of guns and ammunition, purchased as they became increasingly paranoid about their safety. At one point, during the penultimate season of “The Hills,” the couple’s finances were in such dire straits that they had to move back in with his parents.

“Ever since I’d met Heidi, every dollar that came in, we’d spent right away,” Pratt writes. “That’s just how we rolled. No savings account, no backup plan, just direct deposit and vibes. Because what’s money, really? Just energy moving in and out of your life.”

Pratt’s laissez-faire approach to spending doesn’t seem to raise red flags with his local political supporters. Ariana Assenmacher, vice president of political engagement for the LA County Young Republicans, told MS NOW she sees Pratt’s admissions as proof he is “willing to admit his mistakes, and hopefully learn from them.”

She added that she has faith the city government’s “checks and balances” — including a Democrat-run city council — would help control his spending.

But some Angelenos who were on the fence about voting for Pratt told MS NOW that his financial admissions didn’t inspire confidence in his ability to manage the city’s $14 billion budget.

“Would that make me apprehensive to vote for him? Absolutely,” said Rob Jernigan, a Palisades resident and fire recovery activist, in March after hearing passages from the book read by MS NOW.

By May, though, Jernigan said he was resigned to voting for Pratt. He believed his preferred pick in a crowded field of more than a dozen candidates, tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, didn’t stand a chance.

“He’s not great,” Jernigan said of Pratt. But “compared to Karen Bass and Nithya Raman,” he added, “are you kidding me?”

***

The Palisades fire destroyed more than 6,800 structures, including both Pratt’s and his parents’ homes, and killed a dozen people in the neighborhood, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Pratt was grief-stricken in the weeks and months that followed. On social media, he posted videos of himself sifting through the rubble of his former home, where he and Montag were raising their two sons, pulling out crystals that survived the blaze.

He directed his anger at Bass and other city officials for what he described as a series of failures to prepare for and respond to the blazes. Bass was in Ghana at the time of the fires, and city officials kept a reservoir near the Palisades dry for y ears, despite the fact that it was intended to help mitigate a deadly fire — a fact that Newsom later called “deeply troubling.”

But Pratt has focused the majority of his attention and ire on a disproven theory surrounding the disbursement of $100 million in recovery funds raised through a pair of concerts in LA last year, organized by the Annenberg Foundation, a private family organization. In July, Pratt platformed allegations by a local blogger, who claimed the funds were being misspent by FireAid, the entity charged with disbursing them, by going to nonprofits rather than individual victims. Within days, Trump posted about it on Truth Social, alleging FireAid “LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER DEMOCRAT INSPIRED SCAM,” and Rep. Kevin Kiley, I-Calif., called for a federal investigation on the House floor. Within weeks, Pratt was in DC, having meetings at the Justice Department.

Pratt’s claims were soon undermined. Separate investigations by the Los Angeles Times and a law firm commissioned by FireAid found that while some of the money did go to nonprofits, none of the funds were misappropriated. Instead, some grants provided direct assistance to victims through cash vouchers and gift card for groceries, while others supported more long-term recovery.

But conspiracy theories have a way of outlasting the facts. Pratt has continued repeating the unsubstantiated claim that the FireAid relief effort was a “scam,” including in his book and during an interview with Joe Rogan last month, which has more than one million views. The fantastical theory left Pratt feeling, he told Rogan, like public funding “doesn’t go to solving anything or fixing it. It goes to scams.”

This isn’t the first time Pratt has dipped his toe in the conspiratorial waters, as he admits in his book.

“I come from a long line of so-called conspiracy theorists who turned out to be dead-on accurate because it’s only a conspiracy theory until it becomes breaking news,” Pratt writes. “Then, suddenly, everyone’s acting like they saw it coming all along…”

In 2009, he and Montag appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ now-moribund podcast to discuss their “recent awakening” after watching Jones’ new film, “The Obama Deception,” which claimed without evidence that former President Barack Obama had been installed as a puppet president by shadowy actors to facilitate a totalitarian regime.

“I really do feel like we took the blue pill or whatever in Matrix,” Pratt told Jones at the time. “And I feel like you really did pull that little mechanical thing out of the back of my brain.”

Pratt kept taking the Matrix pills. Among the beliefs he shared with Jones were that 9/11 was “100%” an inside job; that global warming isn’t real (“We’ve all seen footage of the polar bears swimming to new pieces of ice,” Pratt said); and that fluoridated water is a government poison (“Do you know how hard it is for me to go to the market and even find a drinking water bottle that says ‘fluoride free’?” Pratt asked).

Eight years later, the couple again joined Jones and revealed that they had gone deeper down the conspiratorial rabbit hole. They said that their belief in the “New World Order” — a sprawling Cold War-era theory alleging that global elites are behind pandemics, terrorist attacks and other crises — had tanked their Hollywood careers.

***

Pratt may be coy about his party affiliation and ties to the Trump-era GOP, but Republicans are nevertheless claiming him as one of their own.

Fox News host and former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called him a “phenomenal model” for the party’s midterm candidates on air earlier this month.

“Wake up, congressional Republicans. Become Spencer Pratt,” McEnany said the day after Pratt’s first mayoral debate.

Assenmacher, from the LA County Young Republicans, sees Pratt as “the future.”

“We want imperfect people to step up and lead us in the right direction,” she told MS NOW.

Pratt is a flawed candidate. In addition to his track record of poor money management and belief in conspiracy theories, Pratt has been caught stretching the truth during his campaign. Pratt said he lived in an Airstream trailer on his burned-out lot in the Palisades, while reports said he was actually staying at the Hotel Bel-Air, where rooms go for at least $1,500 a night. (Pratt later told TMZ“I don’t live anywhere” — despite a viral campaign video in which he claimed to live in the trailer — and said his security team would not let him sleep in his Airstream due to death threats.)

MS NOW’s review of Pratt’s campaign finance records turned up other discrepancies. Despite Pratt’s recent claims to CBS News and in a fundraising email that he campaigns “from my heart” and without consultants or backing from billionaires, since launching his campaign in January, Pratt has spent at least $48,000 on consultants, including TAG Strategies, whose clients have included Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and the Arizona Republican Party. (Between January and mid-April, Bass spent at least $167,000 on consultants, while Raman spent at least $27,800, their most recent filings show.)

Pratt also secured donations from billionaires, including sports executive Jeanie BussNew York hedge fund manager Dan Loeb and the Winklevoss twinsknown for their ties to Facebook. Pratt out-raised both Bass and Raman between January and mid-April, taking in more than $538,000 — just over $7,000 more than Raman raised in the same period, and about $40,000 more than Bass.

Republican voters may be willing to overlook Pratt’s imperfections on the hope of gaining a substantial foothold in city government. But whether a majority of Angelenos can accept Pratt’s shortcomings is another question — especially as the city gears up to host the World Cup this July and the Olympics in 2028, all while confronting housing and homelessness crises and a crumbling entertainment industry.

Some of the city’s electorate may be starting to sour on Bass — a UCLA poll released last month shows that 40% of the electorate is undecided in the race — but some Republican strategists are skeptical those voters’ frustrations will be enough to make them pick Pratt over Raman. In the city’s last mayoral election, Bass beat her closest challenger, billionaire Rick Caruso, a Republican turned centrist Democrat, by nearly 10 points. Pratt, meanwhile, is contending with comparisons to Trump at a time when the president’s approval rating sits at a historic low.

“This is a much more difficult partisan environment than four years ago,” Madrid, the California strategist, said.

Angelenos, Madrid added, “want a change agent who’s not part of the typical Democratic Party — it doesn’t mean [they’re] going to go vote for a Republican.”

Raman and Bass seem to be hoping the same. Both highlighted Trump’s comments supporting Pratt this week, in apparent efforts to boost their own campaigns.

But just as Trump dismisses his own critics with claims that he alone can make America great again, Pratt promises he’s the only candidate who can restore LA to its “golden age.”If he doesn’t win, Pratt told CNN this week“LA is cooked, cooked — like, done. Burnt cooked.”

Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.

May. 22, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Five years ago, a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and assaulted police officers in an attempt to stop the peaceful certification of the 2020 presidential election. Today, some of those individuals are among those most likely to profit from the Trump administration’s new $1.8 billion settlement fundaimed at compensating the victims of a “weaponized” government in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack.

The president and some 1,500 rioters he pardoned upon his return to the White House in 2025 are claiming the same grievance: that they were politically persecuted at the hands of former President Joe Biden’s Justice Department.

The creation of the “anti-weaponization” fund enables those rioters, along with a host of Trump allies, to apply for taxpayer-funded payouts as compensation for their time in the criminal justice system.

And they are eager to get in line.

“This just changed EVERYTHING for January 6 defendants,” Tommy Tatum, who was arrested on felony charges for interfering with a police officer while storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, wrote in a post on X.

Trump’s Department of Justice established the fund as part of a settlement that resolved the president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. The fund, every penny of which comes from taxpayer dollars, establishes a “lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization” to “seek redress,” according to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Although the details of the application process, including who is eligible to apply and the amount of money they may receive, remain vague, Jan. 6 rioters and their lawyers are already celebrating.

Enrique Tarrio, the pardoned Proud Boys leader who was originally convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in planning and orchestrating the Capitol attack, said he would seek a payout shortly after the fund was announced.

Tarrio has long said he was wrongfully prosecuted because he was not present at the Capitol building on Jan. 6, but was found guilty over his role in orchestrating the movements of hundreds of Proud Boys who led the Capitol riots that day.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and experts in political extremism have sounded alarm bells over the potential the fund holds to legitimize claims like Tarrio’s.

But Trump, who has long maintained that the rioters were wrongfully convicted for the insurrection — a day he refers to as one of “peace” and “love”— has downplayed his role in creating the fund but said he supports it all the same.

“I wasn’t involved in the whole creation of it and the negotiation, but this is reimbursing people that were horribly treated,” Trump told reporters Monday. The president has floated the idea of a compensation fund for those prosecuted in connection to Jan. 6 in the past, saying in a 2025 interview with Newsmax that “a lot of the people in government” were considering the idea because they “really like that group of people.”

Many of the Jan. 6 defendants Trump pardoned on the first day of his second term have gone on to be charged or convicted of new crimes. Andrew Paul Johnson, a Florida man who was part of the mass pardons, was sentenced to life in prison months later for the sexual abuse of two preteen girls.

Johnson, according to court documents, attempted to prevent the girls from coming forward with the abuse by bribing them with the millions of dollars of redress he expected to receive from the Trump administration in connection to his Jan. 6 charges.

“Andrew Paul Johnson, a Jan. 6 rioter pardoned by President Trump, molested two children… then tried to pay them off, saying he expected compensation from Trump,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, wrote in a post on X. “Is this what this new $1.8 billion slush fund is going to go towards?”

It is not just Jan. 6 rioters who can apply for the fund. Other Trump allies, including his former political adviser Steve Bannon and former White House trade adviser Peter Navarrowho have both faced prosecution for refusing congressional subpoenas, have indicated they may seek restitution.

In announcing the fund, Blanche made no acknowledgement of the argument that the Justice Department he leads is actively pursuing cases against Trump’s perceived political enemies.

Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter covering national politics and policy for MS NOW. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at SydneyCarruth.46 or follow her work on X and Bluesky.