Welcome back to the Morning Brief——brought to you by one of America’s largest independent newspapers—The Epoch Times. 

It’s Thursday October 15th, and I’m Keegan Billings.

Let’s jump right in.

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Here are today’s top stories.

• Election integrity, birth tourism, and tackling transnational repression and government weaponization are among the priorities of the DOJ, Attorney General Todd Blanche told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview.

• Nine of the largest U.S. banks maintained policies that disadvantaged some customers because of their political or religious views or their affiliation with lawful but “disfavored” industries, according to a sweeping review by a federal banking regulator.

• Health officials poring over death records and other data have recently found that 189,000 people were improperly enrolled in subsidized Affordable Care Act coverage despite also being enrolled in a government insurance coverage program or being dead.

• a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told The Epoch Times Senate Republicans are training their own election observers to send to battleground states ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms,

• At least 600,000 people in Ukraine are without power following a Russian overnight aerial attack on energy infrastructure in Kyiv, the Kyiv region, and Kharkiv, according to the Ukrainian president Zelenskyy.

NOW, BACK TO OUR TOP STORY:

‘Back to the Basics:’ AG Blanche Outlines Top DOJ Priorities

Attorney General Todd Blanche is charging ahead to reshape an agency he said was weaponized under the previous administration. 

In a wide-ranging interview, Blanche opened up about some of the department’s ongoing work and how he wants to steer the agency “back to the basics.”

With consequential midterm elections kicking off in the coming weeks, the attorney general was asked what he felt the current and biggest vulnerabilities were.

Blanche said.

“I think it’s obvious. It’s making sure that the only people voting are eligible to vote, and that we have assurance that that’s happening,” “That’s our biggest objective.”

The attorney general also shared the latest steps his agency is taking against the threats facing the United States—from both within and beyond its borders.

President Donald Trump’s administration has ramped up efforts against illegal noncitizen voting.

Blanche said.

“This isn’t an isolated issue in a particular state. It’s something that’s happening, I think, unfortunately, in a lot of states,” 

On Oct. 5, the DOJ announced 16 individuals face charges including voting by aliens in federal elections, false claims of U.S. citizenship to register or vote, and false statements on citizenship applications.

A grand jury indicted 10 foreign nationals who allegedly registered and voted illegally in Minnesota in the 2022, 2024, and 2026 elections, the Justice Department said on Sept. 30.

Blanche said To date, the DOJ has charged nearly 100 foreign nationals over illegal voting, 

“What do you hear from the critics about that? ‘Well, it’s not that many. We’ve only charged 96 people.’ What does that matter?” Blanche said. “For months and months, it was, ‘There’s no proof there’s anybody voting illegally,’ and then it was, ‘Well, OK, there’s a little bit of proof,’ and then we keep on coming up with more and more examples of it happening.” (More)

He said The DOJ currently has “hundreds and hundreds” of ongoing cases,

He expressed frustration at Congress for not passing the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of American citizenship before voting in federal elections.

The House of Representatives advanced it earlier this year, but it has since stalled in the Senate.

Return to the basics: This is the message former Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Blanche himself, and other DOJ officials have instilled in department employees.

“Getting the drugs off our streets, going after cartels, stopping the fraud, stopping the illegal immigration, stopping the violent crime,” he said. “If prosecutors and agents are working on those types of crimes, they don’t have time to meddle in places they shouldn’t be meddling.”

Blanche said that to get “back to the basics,” his agency must acknowledge and act on past conduct he characterized as weaponization.

The DOJ released a report on Oct. 5 revealing a Biden-era plan to label parents who protested at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists” and prosecute them under federal law.

Blanche classified Chinese Communist Party (CCP) espionage and transnational repression cases as a “big priority” for his DOJ.

Over the past year, the agency has charged several individuals with attempting to silence dissidents from the CCP, using physical violence in some cases, he said.

The DOJ launched a Birth Tourism Prevention Task Force in August after the Supreme Court on June 30 rejected Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship that would have prevented children of illegal immigrants and legal temporary visitors from obtaining U.S. citizenship at birth.

Blanche said. “[The Supreme Court] didn’t give us what we wanted in that case,” 

But the justices also “made it clear that there were certain safeguards that [the DOJ] could put in place,” he said, to prevent individuals from coming to the United States solely to have a child.

NOW, OVER TO POLITICS:

• Nine of the largest U.S. banks maintained policies that disadvantaged some customers because of their political or religious views or their affiliation with lawful but “disfavored” industries,

This is  according to a report by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or (OCC), it said it examined nearly 100,000 such complaints that occurred between 2020 and September 2025.

The banks named in the report are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank, and BMO Bank.

 Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said in a statement.

“Today’s report provides irrefutable evidence that the nation’s largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses,”

At the center of the report are banks’ policies for managing “reputation risk,” or the possibility that serving a particular customer could damage a bank’s public image or business relationships.

In one example, PNC declined to provide a line of credit in late 2021 to a media company that its relationship manager described as growing and performing well financially.

According to the report, PNC employees raised concerns that one owner was “a conservative political commentator,” while another owner’s foundation had financed Christian conservative organizations, some of which had been designated as “hate groups” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

One employee wrote that it was difficult to justify working with a company whose owners had expressed opinions “very contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values.”

The OCC also detailed several decisions involving WePay, a now-discontinued payment operation owned by JPMorgan Chase.

In February 2021, WePay closed the account of a merchant selling merchandise supporting President Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again movement after determining that the products promoted “hate, violence, or racial intolerance.”

According to the report, politically sensitive policies did not exclusively affect conservatives.

In 2023, Capital One declined a potential primary banking relationship with an organization that supported access to abortion. An employee evaluating the organization noted that about 95 percent of its political contributions went to Democrats.

The bank separately declined to serve another pro-abortion group, as well as a public-education organization whose political arm endorsed Democratic candidate

Banks also adopted policies limiting their exposure to industries that were legal but deemed politically or socially controversial, the report found.

Those restrictions affected businesses involved in firearms and ammunition, Arctic oil and gas drilling, coal mining and coal-fired power generation, detention facilities, tobacco, e-cigarettes, and digital assets.

In one case, Citibank refused to help a firearms company pursue an initial public offering because the company’s sales practices did not comply with the bank’s own “responsible firearms” standards, including restrictions on so-called “high-capacity” magazines and sales to customers under 21.

• Health officials poring over death records and other data have recently found that 189,000 people were improperly enrolled in subsidized Affordable Care Act coverage despite also being enrolled in a government insurance coverage program or being dead.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials said the Department of Health and Human Services and its Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) division reviewed data and identified the duplicative enrollments, as well as dead people being insured, 

officials said Insurance companies, brokers, and agents profit from the double-enrollments, not the people themselves. Individuals in many instances do not know they are double-enrolled.

People identified as being double enrolled are  given 30 days to provide evidence to resolve the allegations. And the estates of people who come up as deceased are also given 30 days to respond.

After the resolution process, officials this year removed from Obamacare 58,000 people who already have Medicare, CMS Deputy Administrator Peter Nelson said. Another 11,000 subsidized plans were ended for dead people.

Nelson projected the removal of an additional 3,500 deceased individuals by the end of October.

The removals will prevent an estimated $738 million in improper subsidy payments this year, and $1.5 billion each year moving forward.

AND MORE ON POLITICS:

•  a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told The Epoch Times Senate Republicans are training their own election observers to send to battleground states ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms,

Senate Democrats also announced on Oct. 14 that more than 100 Democratic Senate staffers had been recruited and trained as observers.

While declining to say how many observers Senate Republicans have recruited so far, the spokesperson said they fully expect their election efforts to be equivalent to the Democrats’ efforts.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on a press call that the Democratic observers are preparing to deploy to key polling sites and postelection vote-counting centers in states with close Senate races. Their role, he told reporters, is “to observe, to document, and report the facts.”

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who leads the program with Schumer, said Democrats plan to send observers to nine states with contested Senate races—including Ohio, Georgia, and Michigan, where polls show some of the tightest contests, and that it could change before Election Day.

Padilla said on the call that he knew that Republicans “have a similar effort on their side of the aisle.” He said both parties’ efforts are paid for with official Senate funds.

Padilla said Democrats hope to send observers out in bipartisan pairs where Republican staff are available. The Senate spokesperson for Thune told The Epoch Times that the office had no comment on any bipartisan pair effort at this time.

Schumer said Democrats launched the program because they believe that PresidentTrump wants to undermine the elections.

He pointed to Trump’s push to limit mail-in voting, his executive orders on elections, and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act—which Senate Democrats have repeatedly blocked.

• The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party made public more than 700 pages of previously nonpublic federal investigative records, they detail researchers at American university undisclosed affiliations, financial arrangements, and research ties with Chinese institutions.

The investigations uncovered cases involving Chinese state-backed talent recruitment programs, undisclosed foreign compensation, and failures to report outside research support.

Committee Chairman John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) urged Congress to pass the Securing Innovation and Research from Adversaries (SIRA) Act, which would restrict federally funded research collaborations involving entities on specified U.S. government lists.

Among the records is a 2020 National Science Foundation  investigation involving Enrique Lavernia, a Cuba-born materials scientist who served as executive vice chancellor and provost of the University of California—Irvine until March of that year.

Investigators documented his undisclosed affiliations with Wuhan University of Technology and other Chinese institutions, including participation in Beijing’s Thousand Talents recruitment program.

Wuhan University of Technology publicly identified Lavernia as a strategic scientist and reported that he received the Chinese Government Friendship Award in September 2017.

A Chinese Academy of Engineering document obtained by investigators credited Lavernia’s work with helping China develop advanced materials and manufacturing technologies for defense weapons and equipment.

The records also contain an unsigned Chinese employment contract offering $50,000 per month, research-team funding, laboratory support, and other benefits. The document does not establish that every proposed payment was received.

Investigators found that Lavernia repeatedly omitted Chinese affiliations and compensation from federal research disclosures and a Department of Energy Top Secret security-clearance reinvestigation.

The investigation identified approximately $5.2 million in federal research awards associated with him since fiscal year 2012.

• The  DOJ announced Wednesday the first nationwide “tax fraud surge” that led to the prosecution of 76 defendants in 45 days whose alleged crimes totaled an intended loss of over $490 million.

U.S. Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald  said the federal investigators were not looking for people “who clicked the wrong button on an online filing form.” He said the government was looking for people who lied on purpose to take money that they knew did not belong to them.

One case discussed during Wednesday’s press conference involved Martin Navarrete, 66, of Glenn Dale, Maryland. He was charged in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland with failure to collect, account, and pay over taxes and willful failure to file tax returns.

The term “pay over tax” means that a person or business has to turn over to the federal government taxes that it is legally required to collect or withhold from someone else.

Navarrete is accused of failing to account for and pay over trust fund taxes on behalf of Navarrete’s employees at Navarrete Brothers Construction from September 2020 through December 2025.

Another case involved Marty Linville, 58, of De Queen, Arkansas. Linville, who owned a trucking business, was accused of not filing the W-2 forms to the Social Security Administration and did not submit withheld employment taxes to the IRS. He pleaded guilty to two counts of willful failure to account for and pay over trust fund taxes. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison and ordered to pay restitution of more than $3.8 million.

• Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway has sued Chinese online retailer Temu, alleging the company illegally collects personal data and deceives consumers.

Hanaway’s office  alleged that Temu’s “aggressive and misleading data collection practices” could leave consumers’ personal data “at the mercy of the Chinese communist regime.”

Hanaway said in a statement.

“My advice to all Missourians is to delete this app. Temu lied to you, stole your data, packaged it up, and potentially delivered it to the Chinese Communist Party,”

Missouri is the latest state to pursue legal action against Temu, following similar lawsuits in Arkansas, Nebraska, Kentucky, Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma.

Temu’s platform, which began in the United States in September 2022, is owned by Chinese e-commerce giant PDD Holdings, which also operates the Chinese e-commerce platform Pinduoduo.

In January 2024, research firm Marketplace Pulse estimated that more than 100,000 China-based sellers were operating on Temu.

According to the complaint, Missouri hired forensic investigators to examine the Temu app, who found that it “is designed to collect sensitive user data without the user’s knowledge or consent and is purposely designed to evade detection of this type of data collection by third-party security researchers.”

Specifically, Temu was found to collect “an alarming amount of sensitive user data and personally identifiable information”—including users’ precise location, installed apps, and associated accounts, as well as cellular and WiFi network data—well beyond what a typical online shopping app would need.

NOW MOVING ONTO WORLD NEWS:

•  according to the Ukrainian president Zelenskyy At least 600,000 people in Ukraine are without power following a Russian overnight aerial attack on energy infrastructure in Kyiv, the Kyiv region, and Kharkiv, 

Russian forces fired 39 ballistic missiles and 120 attack drones against energy and critical infrastructure, with there being “significant damage” to facilities, including 26 power facilities and four in the oil and gas sector, he said.

he noted that it was the very infrastructure covered by the ceasefire announced by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Trump said on Oct. 11 that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire,” in which both sides would refrain from striking each other’s energy facilities. 

Russia, at the time, did not issue a statement confirming the agreement. Ukraine stated that it would continue its long-range strikes against Russia if Moscow did not accept an energy truce.

The Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that Russian Armed Forces struck communications and energy infrastructure in Kyiv, the Kyiv region, and the Kharkiv region in Ukraine. According to Russian state-run news agency TASS, the ministry stated that the facilities were targeted because they supported Ukraine’s military industry and armed forces.

There have been fatalities and injuries, Zelenskyy said on X, and he asked international allies to “respond forcefully,” including with strong sanctions on Russia.

• SpaceX CEO Elon Musk denied reports that the company curbed its military-oriented Starshield satellite internet service in Ukraine.

Musk wrote on X on Oct. 14.

“Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government,”“Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

Ukrainian officials on Oct. 14 began raising the alarm that their military’s Starshield services were stymied overnight, leaving gaps in their defenses as they contended with a significant Russian missile and drone barrage.

a military adviser to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, said Starshield services were restricted on connected devices moving more than 100 mph. he said the speed limits came into effect without any prior warning to Ukrainian military users, upending military missions.

In an interview with Piers Morgan on Oct. 14, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces have used Starshield-enabled systems to intercept jet-powered Russian attack drones. Zelenskyy said the abrupt implementation of new limits on Starshield service meant those interceptor systems didn’t work during the latest overnight attacks.

• Ukraine’s bid to join the European Union moved a step forward as Kyiv opened negotiations with Brussels on internal market and competitiveness standards

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed the move, calling it “yet another important step on [Ukraine’s] path toward EU admission

The reopening of discussions between the EU and Ukraine was allowed to proceed after Hungary dropped its objections to Kyiv moving forward with membership negotiations.

Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who had maintained closer ties with Russia than most other EU states and frequently stymied moves to support Kyiv.

The Hungarian government, now under Prime Minister Peter Magyar, has softened its position on Oct. 12, after Ukraine’s parliament passed legislation expanding the rights of Hungarian speakers and other minorities to receive education in their native language.

• A Chinese state-media correspondent accused of gathering intelligence for Beijing went on trial in Prague on Wednesday, becoming the first person to be prosecuted under a Czech law targeting 

unauthorized activities on behalf of a foreign power.

Yang Yiming, a Prague correspondent for Guangming Daily, a newspaper operated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee, denied the charges through his attorney at Prague Municipal Court.

Prosecutors allege that Yang used his position as an accredited journalist to collect political and economic intelligence, cultivate influential contacts, and transfer information to China.

According to Czech courtroom reporting, prosecutor Martin Bily said Yang arrived in the Czech Republic in 2022 as a member of a Chinese intelligence service and obtained foreign-journalist accreditation from the Czech Foreign Ministry.

The indictment alleges that Yang produced at least 38 documents containing information he had collected, supplemented by his own assessments, risk evaluations, and recommendations. He allegedly stored the documents electronically and delivered the material to another person at predetermined times and locations.

Prosecutors said Yang cultivated relationships with people who could provide useful information, sometimes inviting them to dinners, offering small gifts, or inviting them to conferences in China.

The prosecution alleges that his collection and transfer of information threatened the Czech Republic’s sovereignty and constitutional order.

And before we leave, here are some words of wisdom to start the day…Today’s quote is from Leo Tolstoy’s, “War and Peace” 

It reads,

“Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.” 

—Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace”