On This Day: April 29, 1861 — Maryland’s state legislature voted against secession, keeping the critical border state in the Union and preserving Washington, D.C., from being surrounded by Confederate territory. It was not a foregone conclusion. Baltimore had already erupted in riots when Union troops marched through. Southern sympathizers were plentiful. And Abraham Lincoln, understanding that losing Maryland might mean losing the war before it began, had moved swiftly — suspending habeas corpus and authorizing arrests of key secessionists to prevent the vote from going the wrong way.
It was one of the most consequential votes in American history, taken by a legislature under extraordinary pressure, with the fate of the republic hanging on the outcome. Lincoln did what he had to do to hold the Union together — and historians still debate whether he went too far.
That tension — between the measures a free government is justified in taking to preserve itself, and the liberties it must never sacrifice even in crisis — is not a relic of 1861. It is the central question of every age. This week, it shows up in courtrooms, in indictments, and in a border city that Americans can no longer safely visit.
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🦠 Fauci’s Right-Hand Man Indicted — DOJ Says He Hid COVID Origins Evidence From the American People
The Justice Department unsealed an indictment Tuesday against Dr. David Morens, 78, longtime senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — charging him with conspiracy against the United States, destruction and falsification of federal records, and aiding and abetting — for allegedly routing COVID-related communications through his private Gmail account to evade FOIA requests, boasting in emails that he knew how to “delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times,” and accepting wine and offers of expensive restaurant meals as gifts from a collaborator he later helped by publishing papers supporting the natural-origin COVID theory, according to PBS NewsHour/AP.
Acting AG Todd Blanche called it “a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most,” while Sen. Rand Paul — who referred Morens to DOJ for prosecution in 2024 — said “accountability is coming.” Fauci himself cannot be charged due to Biden’s sweeping pardon issued on his way out the door. Critics note that Morens once bragged that “FOIA never turns up anything useful” — a quote that now reads rather differently in light of the indictment, The Federalist reported.
The Founders who wrote the First Amendment’s freedom of the press and the republic’s commitment to open government understood that an informed citizenry is not a nice-to-have — it is the operating system of self-governance. A bureaucrat who deliberately hides public health information from the public during a pandemic has not just broken federal law. He has broken faith with the entire premise of a free republic.
⚖️ Comey Indicted Again — This Time for “86 47” Instagram Post That Officials Say Threatened Trump
Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted Tuesday for the second time by the Trump Justice Department — this time on charges stemming from a May 2025 Instagram photo he posted showing seashells arranged on a beach to form the numbers “86 47,” which administration officials said constituted a veiled threat against President Trump, with “86” being slang for eliminating or getting rid of something and “47” referring to Trump’s presidency, according to CBS News and Fox News.
Comey deleted the post the same day, claiming he had seen the shells on a North Carolina beach and “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.” Trump told Fox News he wasn’t buying it: “A child knows what that meant. If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination.” Legal experts told CNN the free speech hurdles for prosecutors are significant — and the case is Comey’s second indictment, after his first on charges of lying to Congress was dismissed when a federal judge found the appointing prosecutor had been improperly named, CNBC reported.
The Founders who wrote the First Amendment knew that protecting speech — even hostile, pointed, and deliberately provocative speech — is the price of a free republic. But they also built a republic in which the president’s life is not a political prop, and in which a former FBI director who built his career on the rule of law should understand better than anyone where the line is.
🇲🇽 State Department: Don’t Go to Reynosa — A City of 700,000 Just Across the Texas Border
The U.S. Embassy in Mexico issued an emergency security alert this week ordering all American government personnel to avoid Reynosa, Tamaulipas — a city of roughly 700,000 people directly across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, connected by the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge — citing active reports of “violent criminal activity including roadblocks” by heavily armed cartel members who “often patrol the state, especially along the border region,” according to Fox News and The Hill.
Tamaulipas carries the State Department’s highest travel designation — Level 4: Do Not Travel — due to “terrorism, crime and kidnapping,” making it one of the most dangerous places for Americans in the Western Hemisphere. The alert comes weeks after two CIA officers were killed in Chihuahua during a joint counter-narcotics operation, and as cartel violence in border states has intensified following the February killing of Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader El Mencho in a U.S.-backed Mexican military operation, State Department and AP reported.
The Founders who gave the federal government its core responsibility to “provide for the common defense” and “insure domestic tranquility” understood that a border is not merely a geographic line — it is the edge of the sovereign authority a free people have delegated to their government to protect them. A city of 700,000 people that American government employees are ordered to avoid sits nine miles from a Texas airport. That is not a foreign policy problem. That is a domestic security failure.
A Surprise: 🎉 A Little Something for the Man Behind Original Intent
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Yesterday was also our Editor-in-Chief Joe’s birthday—and we’d love to surprise him with something worthy of the mission he leads every day.
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📊 Betting Markets Snapshot: What Gamblers Think Will Happen
- Senate Control 2026 (ElectionBettingOdds.com avg):
Democrats 51.9% | Republicans 48.1% — too close to call, essentially a coin flip (ElectionBettingOdds) - Texas Senate General Election Winner (Polymarket, $26M+ traded):
Republicans 54.5% | Democrats 45.5% — Talarico leading in polls but money still favors the GOP (Polymarket) - Florida GOP Governor Primary (Polymarket, $1.4M traded):
Byron Donalds 84% | James Fishback 10% | Field 6% (Polymarket)
💀 NC Finds 34,000 Dead People on Voter Rolls — And They Were Actively Cross-Checking
The North Carolina State Board of Elections announced it has identified approximately 34,000 deceased individuals on the state’s voter rolls — a number its own executive director called “higher than we anticipated” — after conducting a comprehensive cross-check against the federal SAVE database as part of an ongoing effort to verify the citizenship status of registered voters, with the board now working county by county to remove the names, according to ABC11/WTVD.
Officials stressed the discovery does not mean 34,000 fraudulent votes were cast — the dead do not always get removed promptly from rolls, and someone has to actually use those registrations to commit fraud — but the revelation comes as Congress debates the SAVE Act requiring proof of citizenship to register, and as Republicans point to the finding as evidence that the routine maintenance of voter rolls requires systematic federal database cross-checking that most states have historically resisted.
The Founders who designed the republic’s elections understood that the legitimacy of a free government depends entirely on the integrity of the process that installs it. A voter roll with 34,000 dead people is not evidence of a stolen election — but it is evidence of a system that has not been maintained with the seriousness the stakes demand. Clean rolls are not voter suppression. They are the minimum standard a self-governing republic owes to its citizens.
🤝 Musk Pledged to Back Massie — Then Never Did. Massie Says No Hard Feelings.
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky — the most consistently principled fiscal conservative in the House, the man who has voted against every bloated spending bill regardless of which party authored it — confirmed Tuesday that Elon Musk, who publicly pledged on X last July to donate to his re-election campaign, never actually followed through with any contribution, as Massie faces a well-funded primary challenge from Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, who has Trump’s explicit endorsement, according to Fox Business.
Massie was characteristically gracious about it: “Elon’s done more for America than any other entrepreneur-inventor this century. I think he found it’s easier to land rockets backwards, provide internet to every inch of the planet, and get cars to drive themselves than it is to fix a broken Washington, D.C., and I don’t blame him a bit for stepping away from this mess.” Gallrein, who appeared with Trump at a Kentucky event in March, is running as a MAGA-aligned candidate in what has become a proxy war between the populist wing of the GOP and its libertarian-leaning fiscal hawks, Fox News reported.
The Founders who warned against factions understood that even within a party that nominally shares principles, the competition for power produces alliances that are more about loyalty than about the ideas that are supposed to matter. Massie has never wavered on the principle that Washington spends too much. The question Kentucky voters face is whether that kind of principled consistency is worth more than the president’s endorsement — and what it says about the GOP if the answer is no.
🌐 Texas Senate: Paxton Leads GOP Runoff 60-41, But Talarico Still Favored in General Head-to-Heads
With the Texas Republican Senate runoff on May 26, prediction markets on Polymarket now show Ken Paxton leading John Cornyn 60% to 41% — backed by $15.8 million in trading volume — as April polling shows Paxton leading the internal GOP race 48%-40%, while the general election picture remains competitive with Democrat James Talarico leading both GOP contenders by 3-5 points in head-to-head surveys, with betting markets still favoring the Republican nominee to win in November at 54.5%, according to Polymarket.
Strategists note that a Paxton nomination could either energize the Trump base or accelerate suburban defection — with Talarico raising $27 million to a combined GOP field of less than half that — as Cornyn’s backers argue that Paxton’s legal baggage makes him a weaker general election candidate in a state that is genuinely competitive for the first time since 1993.
Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic senator in over thirty years. But it has also never faced a cycle where Democrats out-raised Republicans by this margin, where suburban voters have drifted this far from the party, and where the Republican nominee could be a man currently under federal securities fraud indictment. The Founders who designed the Senate to be the chamber of sober second thought would recognize exactly what is at stake: the difference between a candidate who can win a primary and a senator who can win a state.
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🔍 The Cover-Up Is Always Worse — And Now We Have the Proof
For five years, a significant portion of the American public suspected that the people managing the COVID pandemic were not being straight with them. They were called conspiracy theorists. They were deplatformed. They were told to trust the science, trust the experts, trust the institutions.
Now one of those experts has been indicted for allegedly hiding the very evidence the public was asking to see.
Dr. David Morens didn’t just use a private email account. He bragged about it. He coached colleagues on how to avoid FOIA requests. He wrote that he would “delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.” He accepted wine and restaurant meals from a collaborator whose grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was under scrutiny — and then helped that collaborator publish papers supporting the natural-origin theory of COVID’s emergence.
This is not a partisan accusation. It is a federal indictment, signed by prosecutors and presented to a grand jury that agreed there was probable cause. And it confirms, with the weight of federal law behind it, what millions of Americans have believed since 2020: that the official story of COVID’s origins was being actively shaped and protected by the people who were supposed to be telling us the truth.
Anthony Fauci himself is protected by Joe Biden’s sweeping pre-emptive pardon. He will not face charges. He will continue to hold his “distinguished professor” title at Georgetown — where, by all reports, he hasn’t actually taught a single class. He will give paid speeches. He will write his memoir. He will be celebrated in the circles that celebrated him throughout the pandemic. The system that was supposed to protect Americans from exactly this kind of institutional corruption instead protected the men running it.
The James Comey indictment tells a different version of the same story. Comey built his entire public identity on being the straight-arrow lawman who stood up to political pressure. He fired himself up as the guardian of FBI independence and the rule of law. And then he posted a photograph that a reasonable person could read as a call to violence against the sitting president — and claimed, with a straight face, that he just stumbled on those shells on a beach and had no idea what they meant.
Whether the Comey prosecution succeeds is an open legal question. Whether these indictments represent the proper use of DOJ power or the weaponization of justice is a debate worth having. But here is the thing that is not debatable: the institutions these men led — the NIH, the FBI — lost the trust of a large portion of the American public. And they did not lose it because of disinformation or political attacks from the outside. They lost it because of what the people running them actually did.
As Numbers 32:23 puts it plainly: “Be sure your sin will find you out.” Not eventually, as a metaphor. As a matter of moral and practical certainty. The emails exist. The FOIA requests documented what was hidden. The shells were photographed. In an age when everything is recorded, the cover-up is not just worse than the crime — it is, increasingly, impossible to maintain.
The republic the Founders built depends on institutions that can be trusted. Not blindly — the Founders were famously skeptical of concentrated power — but trusted in the sense that the people running them are actually trying to serve the public rather than protect themselves. When that trust breaks down, and is then shown by a federal grand jury to have been broken down deliberately, the damage is not just to the institutions involved. It is to the entire premise of expert-driven governance that has accumulated over the past century.
As Proverbs 12:17 says: “An honest witness tells the truth, but a false witness tells lies.” The American people were not wrong to want honest witnesses. They were right. And they deserve a system — rebuilt, reformed, or replaced — that gives them one.
“Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Government, the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.”
— James Madison, letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1788
The Farmers Outside Boston
Question: On April 29, 1861, Maryland’s legislature voted against secession — a decision that kept Washington, D.C. from being surrounded by Confederate territory and may have saved the Union. President Lincoln took dramatic steps to prevent Maryland from seceding, including suspending the writ of habeas corpus and arresting key secessionists without trial. Which Founder wrote the foundational document that defined habeas corpus protections in American law?
A. Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence
B. The Framers collectively, in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution
C. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 84
D. James Madison, in the Bill of Rights