Musk Pours $276 Million Into the Midterms, and Federal Agents Raid Home of Rep. Ilhan Omar

For the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, October 13th, here's what we're covering. Last year on the heels of spending nearly $300 million to help President Trump return to power, Elon Musk, the world's richest man, said he was done. I think in terms of political spending, I'm going to do a lot less in the future. The biggest donor of the 2024 election seemed like he was going to be pulling back from Washington, where he'd made a splash as one of Trump's closest advisors. I think I've done enough. Instead, the Times has learned Musk has now spent even more on the upcoming midterms than he did back in candidates in 2024. According to political spending figures from Musk's team, the tech giant has spent at least $366 million in a rescue mission to try and save Republicans' majority in Congress. As for what that is funding, a lot of it has backed a major Republican turnout operation through a Super PAC Musk founded, which is active in seven Senate battlegrounds, and nearly three dozen house races. The group says it's knocked on millions of doors in a sprawling canvassing operation. Musk actually ramped up that effort after a request from Trump's political advisors this spring, according to a person familiar with the discussion. One place a lot of his money is going is Texas, where, for example, door knockers from a group funded by Musk are leaving flyers warning about the danger of, quote, "radical Democrat socialists." In all, about a third of the spending by Musk's Super PAC has targeted the Senate race in Texas, where polls show a Democrat could win for the first time since the 1980s. Overall, one way that Musk's push to influence the midterms differs from 2024 is that he's talked about it much less. No more big campaign stops where he's jumping around on stage or holding giant million-dollar checks aimed at registering voters. Instead, he's just been quietly making some of the largest donations in American political history. And notably, the big 300 million-plus total only includes donations that are public. According to one person with knowledge of the matter, Musk has also made some seven figure donations to support mid-term candidates through groups that are not required to disclose their donors. And now, two updates on the Trump administration. First, the Times has learned that yesterday, federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security searched the DC area home of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. A person familiar with the matter told the Times that the court-approved search warrant lists a series of potential immigration crimes under investigation, including false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork. The timing of the search itself is notable. There's been a long-standing Justice Department policy not to take any overt, unnecessary investigative steps involving a candidate within 60 days of an election. The midterms are in less than a month, and Omar is on the ballot. My colleague, Devlin Barrett, who covers the Justice Department, says the raid comes after DHS officials have been saying for months that they are investigating the Minnesota Congresswoman, who is a vocal critic of President Trump, and who Trump has attacked repeatedly, focusing on her Somali heritage. President Trump has publicly demanded that certain people he dislikes be investigated or arrested. He has said that about Ilhan Omar in the past. And so all of the investigative action really sort of raises the question of how much is the Justice Department acting because it believes there is evidence of a crime here and how much is the Justice Department acting because President Trump has demanded it. Omar has long said suggestions that her family committed immigration fraud are false and offensive, and in a statement she called the raid an attempt to "target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement." And President Trump's agreement to lift sanctions on Russian diesel to try and lower gas prices ahead of the midterms is causing a diplomatic crisis in Europe. There, leaders are stunned that the President would sign off on a deal that essentially sends billions of dollars to the Russian economy. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky called the deal a gift for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the Prime Minister of Poland urged countries to increase their sanctions on Moscow, not back away from them. In addition to the diesel deal, the U.S. also asked Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries, which has been key most effective way to inflict economic pain on Russia. Zelensky said he was open to that if Russia agreed to do the same, but Putin has not done that. Instead, Russia has been ramping up its attacks on Ukraine, both its energy grid and its cities. Last week, Russian strikes killed more than 20 people, including three infants in a block of apartments, as well as 30 people riding on a commuter bus. In Lebanon, back in April, a ceasefire stopped the worst of the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, but the Times has been looking at how the truce did not stop Israel's destruction of southern Lebanon. When we look at the satellite imagery, what we see is an area that used to be very green villages that had schools, a lot of houses, and all of that has basically turned gray. Scrolling through, you see that roads that once existed are now gone, buildings are gone, farmland, olive trees that used to be there. It's just incredibly widespread devastation across the South. Christina Goldbaum is the Times' bureau chief in Beirut. She says, "In all, the Times found that since the ceasefire, most of the roughly 60 villages and towns in the area of Lebanon occupied by Israel have been leveled," which Israel said it did to remove threats posed by Hezbollah. The villages were almost entirely home to Shiite Muslims. The sect Hezbollah draws most of its support from. The mayor of one town described going back to see that the mosque was gone, the water tanks were gone, even the cemetery was so destroyed he couldn't find his relative's graves. Some of this destruction has raised questions about whether what the Israeli military is doing could constitute a war crime. Since the ceasefire went into effect, the Israeli military's actions in the occupied zone are governed by international laws of occupation. In an occupied area, a military has to have a specific and immediate military goal in order to lawfully destroy property. The many legal experts that we consulted said that it's very unlikely that what the Israeli military is doing meets that threshold. In response to questions from the Times, the Israeli military said it was operating in accordance with international law. And finally, in 2021, NASA's rover Perseverance landed on Mars. It had the ambitious mission to study whether there was ever life out there on the red planet. It's been roaming in and around the Jezero crater ever since and it just passed a major milestone. The rover, which is about the size of a car, has now clocked more mileage on Mars than any rover before it, a whopping 28.1 miles, not counting the some 290 million miles it took to get there in the first place. And before anyone downplays this achievement, which is roughly the distance from Dallas to Fort Worth, consider that NASA's first ever Mars rover in 1997 went 341 feet. For Perseverance, the mission team said the rover was on the edge of cracking the 28 mile record weeks ago. But then it came upon some super intriguing light-colored rocks and, ooh, pretty, we got a stop. Like we've all been on a road trip with that person. No, but really, documenting intriguing rocks is a big part of what the rover is up there to do, looking for clues about the early days of the solar system and sending footage back to Earth. NASA, thanks Perseverance, could possibly go another 30-ish plus miles, give or take, depending on how many more fascinating rocks it stops to look at. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a mathematician on how artificial intelligence is solving some of the biggest problems in math, and what that means for the humans crunching numbers. You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford, we'll be back tomorrow. (upbeat music)