This is a web version of The Lever ’s daily email newsletter.
🔥 ICYMI in The Lever : Democrats’ name-dropping could cost them the midterms .
👀 Watch : Life imitates art .
👇 Further down in this newsletter:
- These bad bots got a slap on the wrist instead of justice.
- Has Big Tech bought the Dems leading the AI safety charge?
- A metric the Iran War might actually improve.
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STORIES TO GO
In a hurry? These are the top stories in the country today.
🚨 The U.S. House held private equity billionaire Leon Black in contempt of Congress for refusing to respond to an Oversight Committee subpoena related to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein .
📈 The Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, by 0.25 percent, in defiance of the Trump administration.
🙄 The Trump administration spent more than $9 billion paying federal employees on administrative leave in 2025 — a 435 percent annual increase — thanks to DOGE’s deferred resignation program.
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TODAY'S TOPLINES
Bad bot! With AI safety dominating the midterms debate, The Lever is looking back at what the Trump administration has done to hold AI fraudsters accountable. The answer is: Not much. Notably, in December 2025, the Trump administration abandoned a Biden-era consumer protection ruling that forced Rytr, an artificial intelligence writer and editor, to shut down its products for generating business and product reviews. The Federal Trade Commission in 2024 found that these generative AI tools give bad actors the resources for deception and fraud by allowing individuals to generate fake customer testimonials with “no relation to the user’s input” that “almost certainly would be false.” But the Trump administration argued such a determination “unduly burdens [AI] innovation.”
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