Elections and Media

President Donald Trump’s campaign-style rallies have found a receptive audience at Fox News Channel, which unlike the other cable news networks often carries his speeches live and in their entirety. Four times in the past few weeks, Fox has set aside its usual prime-time programming to air the president speaking live to supporters at events in South Carolina, Minnesota, North Dakota and West Virginia. The network also promised live coverage of a Trump rally July 5 in Montana, where Sen Jon Tester (D-MT) faces a tough fight for re-election.

Republican leaders and lawmakers are setting their sights on a new target as they head into a difficult midterm election: an increasingly-powerful tech industry they view as biased against conservatives.

Even as President Donald Trump holds court in large arenas filled with thousands of cheering supporters, he also has been giving rich financiers and business executives up-close access, helping cultivate the kind of big-money outfit he once derided.

During a daylong public hearing, the Federal Election Commission’s four remaining commissioners — two seats are vacant because President Donald Trump hasn’t appointed anyone to fill them — couldn’t find consensus on how to best drag federal political ad regulations into the Internet age. “I don’t think we’ve gotten very far,” FEC Chairwoman Caroline Hunter, a Republican, said two hours into the hearing, which featured testimony from 12 representatives of think tanks, activist groups and legal organizations.

Twitter and Facebook are scrambling to assuage conservative leaders who have sounded alarms — and sought to rile voters — with accusations that the country’s tech giants are censoring right-leaning posts, tweets and news. From secret dinners with conservative media elite to private meetings with the Republican National Committee, the new outreach reflects tech giants’ delicate task: satisfying a party in power while defending online platforms against attacks that threaten to undermine the public’s trust in the Web.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) is showing no signs of de-escalating a conflict with the Justice Department over the Russia investigation, hitting the department with an expansive new request for "any contacts" between FBI intelligence sources and over a dozen Trump campaign associates.

Silicon Valley companies and law enforcement are starting to talk about how to ward off meddling by malicious actors including Russia on social media in the November midterms, an attempt at dialogue and information-sharing that was absent during the 2016 presidential elections.

The Supreme Court largely upheld Texas congressional and legislative maps that a lower court said discriminated against black and Hispanic voters. The lower court was wrong in how it considered the challenges, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the 5 to 4 decision. The majority sided with the challengers over one legislative district. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent that was longer than Justice Alito’s majority decision. She said the decision “does great damage to the right of equal opportunity.

The Supreme Court sent back to a lower court a decision that Republicans in North Carolina had gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts to give their party an unfair advantage. The lower court will need to decide whether the plaintiffs had the proper legal standing to bring the case. The Supreme Court recently considered the question of partisan gerrymandering in cases from Wisconsin and Maryland. The court has never found a map so infected by politics that it violated the constitutional rights of voters. But the justices did not rule on the merits of the issue.