May. 28, 2026, 7:34 PM EDT

Arizona congressional candidate Mark Lamb is embroiled in a new controversy involving allegations about his online activity.

Lamb, a former county sheriffis running for outgoing Rep. Andy Biggs’ seat in Arizona’s conservative 5th District and has received President Donald Trump’s endorsement.

The Arizona Republic published a report last week on women who said Lamb had messaged them through his campaign’s official social media accounts, citing messages provided by one of his former campaign workers. One of the women alleged that he threatened her with prosecution if she shared his sexual images and messages.

According to the Republic, messages and photos allegedly sent by Lamb — who has made his Mormon faith central to his political biography — were previously shared with leaders at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

After the Republic requested comment from Lamb, who has previously denied claims of sexual impropriety, the newspaper said it was told by his campaign staff that he wasn’t available for comment. Lawyers for his campaign told the paper that many of the claims were “baseless and harmful” but did not elaborate.

The Republic published another report on Lamb on Wednesday, this time focusing on alleged Facebook exchanges with a right-wing anti-immigrant extremist. The outlet said Lamb did not respond to its interview requests.

The new messages, which the Republic said were shared by a former staffer who worked on Lamb’s first campaign, include alleged exchanges in 2016 with a man named Nick Steele, whom the newspaper identified as a member of the extremist vigilante group Border Narcotics Intelligence.

One of the messages appears to show Steele telling Lamb that he and other vigilante members supported Lamb’s campaign and that “BNI guys work like [N-words],” using the racist slur for Black people. The alleged reply from Lamb: “Hahahaha, so you don’t do anything?”

The former staffer, who handled Lamb’s social media accounts at the time and is Black, told the Republic that Lamb apologized to him for the responses.

The Republic also included screenshots showing Lamb responding with amusement after Steele allegedly made homophobic remarks about former Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, who was enmeshed in a 2012 scandal involving his romantic relationship with a Mexican man.

Another screenshot depicts Lamb expressing amusement after Steele referred to a woman as a “stupid b—-” and praising Steele for a social media post directed at her: “Hahahaha! You shut her up!”

It truly is no surprise to me that Trump — a man known for blatant racismhomophobic behaviormisogyny and sexual abuse — endorsed this candidate. That said, Lamb is arguably a prime example of the trend my colleague Hayes Brown recently wrote aboutin which the president aligns himself with far-right primary candidates who could pose a headache for him and Republicans in a general election. Perhaps that’s why there have been unconfirmed whispers in conservative media about Trump potentially pulling his endorsement in Arizona.

If Lamb wins his primary in July, his prospects for victory in the general election are aided by the fact he’s running in a solidly conservative district. But with public sentiment broadly against Trump’s agenda — including among voters the GOP typically relies on — almost nothing feels like a sure thing these days.

And these reports about Lamb certainly doesn’t help his cause.

Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.

May. 28, 2026, 5:50 PM EDT

Amid growing concerns about the cost of living as the war with Iran continues, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday defended the Trump administration’s efforts to put President Donald Trump on a specially issued $250 bill.

“I don’t think that there’s anything untoward about having the president of the United States, the person who is president of the United States, on the 250th anniversary bill,” Bessent said during a White House press briefing as he stood in for press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who is on maternity leave.

Bessent acknowledged The Washington Post’s earlier reporting that two Treasury Department appointees are pressuring the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to create a prototype of the note.

Federal law “prohibits the portrait or likeness of any living person on currency notes, bonds, or securities,” but some lawmakers are searching for a workaround. Bessent said the proposed new Trump note is ultimately up to Congress.

Reps. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.; Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn.; Ralph Norman, R-S.C.; and Darrell Issa, R-Calif., co-sponsored a bill in February of last year to create an exemption. Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, sponsored a similar bill one month later for a $100 Trump note.

“This achievement is deserving of currency recognition, which is why I am grateful to introduce this legislation. The most valuable bill for the most valuable President!” Wilson said in a statement announcing his bill.

But the effort to memorialize Trump on money does not stop at his face. The Treasury announced in March that Trump’s and Bessent’s signatures will appear on future U.S. paper currencymarking the first time in history for a sitting president.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was among the critics who derided the proposed $250 note on social media, saying, “By the end of Trump’s term, it’ll be just enough to buy one gallon of gas and a carton of eggs.”

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.

May. 28, 2026, 5:35 PM EDT

Just more than three years ago this month, writer E. Jean Carroll won the first of two jury trials against President Donald Trump for defamation and sexual abuse, trials through which she was ultimately awarded more than $88 million in damages. Now, as first reported by CNN and confirmed by MS NOWshe is under investigation by Trump’s Justice Department.

According to BLN, the DOJ is looking into whether Carroll lied under oath when she testified, at an October 2022 deposition, that her lawyers were handling her case on contingency and that no one else was paying her legal fees, “though it was later revealed that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some legal fees and expenses.”

The Washington Post has since reported — and as two people familiar with the situation have told MS NOW — that Hoffman and his nonprofit, American Future Republic, are the investigation’s real targets while acknowledging that prosecutors are “expected to look” at Carroll’s statements.

Whether Carroll is the focus of that investigation or collateral damage remains in dispute. But either way, a closer examination of the underlying facts and events illustrates how difficult it would be for the DOJ to show that Carroll committed perjury, which requires proof — beyond a reasonable doubt — that the defendant both knowingly made a false statement and that the statement was material, meaning it was capable of influencing the jury’s decision-making.

Specifically, it was not just “revealed” that Hoffman paid some of Carroll’s legal fees and expenses, but rather disclosed by Carroll’s counsel in a letter sent to Trump’s legal team in April 2023 on the eve of the first trial.

“During the course of preparing for her testimony at trial, Ms. Carroll has recollected additional information,” they wrote. “While Ms. Carroll stands by that testimony about this case being a contingency case, she now recalls that at some point her counsel secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to offset certain expenses and legal fees.”

Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, provided additional details the next day in a failed attempt to quell the Trump team’s concerns. Kaplan explained that months after filing Carroll’s initial lawsuit, she and the other lawyers representing Carroll obtained the nonprofit’s financial support but that Carroll herself “has never met and has never been party to any communications (written or oral) with anyone associated with that nonprofit or its financial supporters.”

Trump’s team, however, insisted that they needed new discovery and even requested a month more to prepare for trial. Ultimately, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York allowed Trump’s team to depose Carroll for one additional hour but eventually concluded her testimony was not relevant to either her credibility or any issue relevant to her claims.

After Carroll won on her defamation and sexual abuse claims at that first trial, the same judge presided over a second defamation-only trial months later. The second trial concerned statements Trump made about Carroll in 2019, when he was still president. There, because the jury in the first trial concluded that virtually identical statements were defamatory, the second trial considered only whether Carroll was damaged by Trump’s 2019 statement and how she should be compensated.

In the meantime, Trump appealed the first verdict on numerous grounds, including the exclusion of evidence relating to the litigation funding secured by Carroll’s counsel. Trump claimed the excluded evidence hurt Carroll’s credibility and exposed her bias and motive. Yet a panel of three appeals court judges affirmed Carroll’s victory, instead finding Carroll believable when she said she forgot about the funding and that the evidence showed Carroll “simply was not involved” in who or what was funding her lawyers’ costs.

After his first appellate loss, Trump struck out again when 8 of the 10 active judges on that appeals court denied his request for a rehearing.

Trump has fared no better in his appeal of the second, much larger Carroll verdict, in which he also raised the litigation funding issue, albeit unsuccessfully. There, too, a unanimous panel of three judges upheld the jury’s verdict, and a lopsided majority of the active judges denied his petition for rehearing last month.

To date, no federal court has ever sided with Trump on either the alleged, knowing falsity of Carroll’s testimony or its relevance.

Now, the only place left for Trump to go is the Supreme Court. In the first of the cases tried, Trump has already petitioned for their review, but the justices have not decided whether they should even hear the case. In fact, although the justices were first supposed to discuss the first-tried Carroll case in February, that discussion has now been “rescheduled” 12 times, including this past Wednesday, the same day the DOJ’s investigation of Carroll was first reported.

In other words, Trump is facing down the increasingly real possibility of paying Carroll more than $88 million, before interest, with only the Supreme Court to potentially rescue him.

But in the meantime, multiple federal judges have already concluded that it was both more likely than not that E. Jean Carroll genuinely forgot about the litigation funding when she was deposed in October 2022, and that the funding itself and her testimony about it were, in any event, irrelevant to questions of her credibility, bias and motive as well as the underlying elements of her defamation claims.

By contrast, in any criminal case, the DOJ would have to establish that her statement was knowingly false and would have been material to the jurors.

Whatever this investigation is, it hardly seems like the beginning of a successful prosecution.

Lisa Rubin is MS NOW’s senior legal reporter and a former litigator.