1. United States
2. Ariz.
3. Letter

Scott Dworkin has discovered something you should be aware of. Let me show you what we dug up this week that the headlines left out. Over the weekend, you saw national headlines that the top spending group for Senate Republicans pulled out of North Carolina, abandoning Trump’s handpicked Senate candidate. The New York Times got its “more than $30 million” figure from “one of the people familiar with the decision.” The Associated Press got “about $32 million” already spent from an ad-tracking firm, and the decision itself from four anonymous sources. Neither one had the record itself. We tracked down the Senate Leadership Fund’s 48-hour spending notice filed with the FEC (FEC-2016104). Line SE.6 shows $1,923,364.08 for ads against the Democrat, paid on September 28. I haven’t seen that payment in any news story. The running total on that line isn’t an estimate. It’s $30,404,583.65. That check went out three days after Michael Whatley promised “We will get the support we need.” Four days later the fund quit on him, and now it’s paying to protect Kansas. We turned up the same thing in West Texas. The headlines said a federal judge paused wall construction in Big Bend. We went and got Judge Kathleen Cardone’s order in Friends of the Ruidosa Church v. Mullin. She didn’t only park the bulldozers. She wrote that the effect of the regime’s Big Bend waivers “is STAYED.” Those waivers are how the regime switched off dozens of laws to build its wall, including the Endangered Species Act and the law that protects national parks. And we found this in the court file: according to one expert, this whole stretch of border accounts for about 1% of the migrants apprehended this century. They sent bulldozers into one of the most beautiful places in America to wall off a stretch almost nobody crosses. A judge just switched the law back on. That’s what investigating gets you: a $1.9 million check that didn’t make the headlines and one word that put the law back in force. Nobody leaked either one to us. We went and dug them out.