Congressional Daily Record
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September 14, 2026
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Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextbeen made public, today, Americans get another whiff of Trump's scheme to rig the election. Today, Senator Padilla and I are revealing a bombshell whistleblower complaint about the Department of Homeland Security's effort to interfere in the upcoming election on Trump's behalf.
hundreds—of Federal agents from national security roles and sending them on a wild-goose chase. The goal: to try and prove Trump's sad, tired, and long-debunked election conspiracy theories. Apparently, agents are being commanded to violate State laws and lie to access private voter information and create law enforcement records as part of DHS's “unlawful voter initiative.” The whistleblower reports that innocent American citizens have been caught up in this effort to prove Trump's baseless voter fraud claims.
Do you hear that, America? Trump's DHS, his Department of Homeland Security, is forcing its officials to carry out an illegal scheme, break State laws, lie about their identities, and treat U.S. citizens as collateral damage, all to advance Trump's scheme to rig the election. It is pathetic. It is horrible. That is how desperate Trump is to escape the wrath of the electorate.
Vote-by-Mail
and fair elections is relentless, but so is our effort to stop him. Last night, in a lawsuit I brought with other Democrats, a second Federal judge blocked Trump's attack on mail-in voting. When even a conservative, Trump-appointed judge rejects this brazen scheme to disenfranchise millions of voters, you know just how absurd it would be for the Supreme Court to allow it to continue.
scales in his favor just because he is terrified of the voters. He knows the doom he will face in the upcoming elections.
voting for now, but the Supreme Court ought to bury it once and for all. Trump can keep trying to float these desperate attempts to disrupt our elections in the eleventh hour all he wants. We are going to swat them down every time. And if a rightwing, Trump-appointed judge stops Trump from this awful scheme, how can the Supreme Court overrule her and go along?
Affordability
look. Donald Trump keeps trying to point fingers as if Americans can't see the truth right in front of them: He is the one driving up their costs.
responsible for diesel prices just hitting a record high? Give me a break. Everyone knows it is Trump and his disastrous war with Iran that are driving up prices at the pump. Trump himself has said it. Trump just called his war with Iran and its massive cost to the American people “small potatoes.” He said that gas prices will plummet as soon as his war ends.
Well, we are waiting, Mr. President. If gas prices will plunge when the war ends, end it. Americans are sick of shelling out $4.31 for a gallon of gasoline and watching inflation spike just so you can send troops into harm's way.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. PADILLA. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Whistleblower Disclosure
Mr. PADILLA. Madam President, as our colleagues know, I serve as ranking member of the Rules Committee, which oversees Federal elections. I also serve on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration. And
administration's unprecedented chaos and corruption, it is heartening to see a Federal Government employee with the integrity and the courage to expose potential illegal activity and abuse of power.
going to go over some of these highlights, which are incredibly disturbing. They are disturbing to me, and I think they should be disturbing to every Member of this Chamber.
First, leadership at the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has ordered hundreds of employees in USCIS's Fraud Detection and National Security Division to stop doing the jobs they were hired and trained to do and instead watch a short training video and immediately turn their time and attention to something called the Unlawful Voter Initiative. They were directed to stop their anti-fraud work. This administration makes a lot of claims about going after fraud. They were directed to stop their national security screenings. They were directed to stop all the things that this administration claims it cares about and instead go on a wild goose chase to find or manufacture evidence for the President's conspiracy theories of widespread voter fraud.
resources, but colleagues, it is actually so much more worse than that. The whistleblower disclosure also includes compelling claims that USCIS officers are being directed to lie and to misrepresent themselves in order to search voters' sensitive personal information on State election officials' websites. Let me say that again. Federal officers are being told by headquarters to lie or to misrepresent themselves in order to access State voter data. It is a clear violation of State laws, and these violations have likely occurred thousands and thousands of times.
officers are being told to misrepresent themselves and enter voters' sensitive information like Social Security or driver's license numbers.
have been told by Agency leadership to just go ahead, that they won't be “personally liable.” Think about that for a second. If what the Department is doing and if what these officers are being told to do was legal, it begs the question of, why would they need to be reassured by Agency lawyers that they won't be held personally liable?
unreliable data to target people for investigation. That is right—data that the Department and Agencies already acknowledge is unreliable. Agency leadership is then forcing USCIS officers to create Federal law enforcement records against people, many of them U.S. citizens, even though they have doubts about the accuracy of the data.
So let's take a step back. Why are they doing this? Well, the Trump administration has tried and failed to force States to hand over these voter rolls. President Trump tried it in his first term through a sham Commission which failed and then weaponized the Federal Government to try to accomplish it here in his second term. But guess what. They have been taken to court, and they have lost in court over 30 times. States represented by Democrats and Republicans have said no, so the proverbial front door is locked.
locked, and now they are trying to break in a back door. They are using something called supplemental magic. That is right—in the materials that have been uncovered, they are using this supplemental magic to create a list of people that they think are not eligible to vote. Remember, the Agency has already said they know the data is unreliable.
So, frankly, this disclosure raises a lot of questions. Why is this initiative happening now? Who are the potentially hundreds of thousands of people being investigated? Who are they? And what the heck is supplemental magic? We need answers. This Senate—Congress—deserves answers. The American people deserve answers.
Agency training materials for this initiative say that “raw data includes a lot of U.S. citizens.” Let me repeat that. The training materials acknowledge that the data includes “a lot of U.S. citizens.” So why would you target them when you are looking for noncitizen voters?
will have multiple ID numbers for various individuals. Nevertheless, officers are told to generate Federal law enforcement records against them, even if they suspect that they are relying on inaccurate or incomplete information.
inaccurate, not to mention likely illegal, but to make matters worse, it has also been rushed, and it is reckless because rank-and-file USCIS officers are given reckless quotas to review 40 people per day. Do the math. That is five people per hour or 12 minutes per individual.
unreliable data and complex immigration history is not an adequate amount of time to conduct a thorough investigation—because these aren't that; these are sham investigations.
We all know that voting by a noncitizen is illegal. That is already the law. You know that. I know that. We also know that based on study after study, report after report, audit after audit, it is extremely, extremely rare. Our current safeguards are working.
effort, and we should not take anything that comes out of it at face value.
Just 12 minutes for an investigation, a lot of U.S. citizens, the unreliable magic data, and potentially thousands of violations of State and Federal privacy laws—saying that this is dangerous for our democracy is a huge understatement.
election-denial talking points, like the ones he used in the White House speech this past July. Diversion of Federal law enforcement to break laws for political purposes is a clear abuse of power, and there is a very real danger that thousands of naturalized U.S. citizens and legal residents will potentially face negative consequences because of this sham investigation.
This isn't just about voting; this could lead to unwarranted secondary screening at airports, consequences for immigration benefits, referrals to HSI or the FBI for criminal investigation, and no clear recourse to undo the consequences of an erroneous Federal law enforcement record being created after a quick 12-minute review.
supposed votes cast by noncitizens to threaten to prosecute State and elections officials that he doesn't like. The President and his allies could even try using the unreliable results of this Unlawful Voter Initiative to undermine and challenge election results themselves.
That is right—January 6 was not the end of this.
regarding the so-called Unlawful Voter Initiative to Secretary Mullin and USCIS Director Edlow. We are demanding an immediate halt to these activities. We are demanding transparency from DHS. We are demanding the removal of unreliable law enforcement records, many of which are against U.S. citizens.
We will have more to say about this in the coming days.
Congress are protected by Federal law. Let me repeat: Whistleblowers to Congress are protected by Federal law.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Boozman). Without objection, it is so ordered.
Wedding of Donald Trump, Jr.
Mr. MURPHY. Colleagues, the story broke today that the Trump family has confirmed that a Russian oligarch, a close ally of Vladimir Putin— a man whose fortune was gifted to him by Putin—paid for the private island wedding of the President of the United States' son.
going to start just feeling normal. Let me say it again. A Russian oligarch, a close ally of our enemy Vladimir Putin, a man whose fortune was gifted to him by Vladimir Putin, paid for—secretly—the private island wedding of the President of the United States' son.
The President's son Donald Trump, Jr., tried to hide this fact. He posted pictures of his wedding celebration online. There was a public conversation about whether the President was going to attend or not. But the President's son made no mention that the whole thing, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, a private island, was bankrolled by the Russians.
photo that you can look at right now online, the only person's face that is hidden, is the oligarch. But he is there because he secretly paid for the celebration.
The Russians paid for the private island. The Russians paid for the fireworks show. The President's son even put this oligarch in charge of planning the logistics. This was a Russian party, organized and paid for by someone in Vladimir Putin's inner circle.
America. Never before has a foreign enemy of the United States paid for the family wedding of the President. Why? Because it is naked corruption, in plain view. It is as close to treason as you get, accepting lavish gifts, millions of dollars in gifts perhaps, from the enemy of this Nation.
Let us spend a minute on this oligarch. We just learned this today, so forgive me if we have scant details. I think we are going to find out a lot more about this guy in the coming days and weeks. But his name is Umar Kremlev. He is a convicted criminal. He runs a boxing company that is funded by Putin. More specifically, by Gazprom, Putin's state-run gas company.
He is not just some ordinary oligarch. He is one of Putin's favorites. In addition to running this boxing association, he runs the Russian lottery. He has a monopoly on Russian sports betting.
Putin were together in China. Putin brought him on a really important state visit to China. Putin has given Kremlev the highest Kremlin honor, The Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has sanctioned Kremlev because he is part of Putin's inner circle. All of Kremlev's money is Putin's money. He operates as an arm of Putin, as do all the Putin-made oligarchs.
wedding, there was no record of Donald Trump, Jr., and Kremlev being great best buddies because they aren't. It appears that they just recently met. And shortly after meeting, this close ally of Vladimir Putin offered to pay for Donald Trump, Jr.'s wedding.
Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has [he
ever] heard his name.
This is Eric Trump, Donald Trump, Jr.'s brother, his business partner, has never heard the name of the close associate, the close friend of Donald Trump, Jr.'s who paid for his entire wedding. Why? Because they are not friends. This is a business between the Trump family and the Russian Government.
This all fits two patterns. The first is the Trump family's reliance on Russian support for their business empire. Donald Trump, Jr., said this, prior to when his father became President. He is talking about his family's business.
In terms of high-end product influx into the United States,
Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a
lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our
project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of
money pouring in from Russia.
buying Trump's cryptocurrency have noted that there is evidence that the Trump family's cryptocurrency is backed perhaps heavily by Russian buyers.
But the second and more significant pattern is this: Trump's sons, particularly Donald Junior, just brazenly profit off of their access to the White House. Donald Junior, he just basically stuffs money into his pockets from anybody who wants a favor from his father, and he just gobbles up government contracts as fast as he can.
Don Junior's net worth was $50 million before his father's second term.
Junior's net worth didn't double; it didn't triple; it didn't quadruple; it grew by six times in one year—$50 million. A year later, $300 million.
At least 13 companies tied to the Trump brothers have captured $1.8 billion in long-term Federal contracts and commitments and $103 million in direct cash from the Trump administration. Five of those companies got their first government contracts ever after the Trump sons invested. That is corruption. It doesn't matter whether this is a Republican administration or a Democratic administration.
Now, you could be offended at all of that, but you might say: Well, this isn't that. This isn't Trump Junior taking money from the taxpayers. This is just his taking money from the Russians. Isn't that better than his taking money from taxpayers?
Donald Trump has done a 180-degree turn in U.S. policy on the Russia- Ukraine war. He has cut off funding from Ukraine. Even after we appropriate money, he refuses to spend it, which is illegal. As recently as this weekend, he said publicly that it is Ukraine's fault that the war continues, not Russia's. In addition, Trump has suspended sanctions on the export of Russian oil and gas, which, by the way, specifically helps Gazprom, the company that funds Kremlev. Trump has become one of Putin's most important allies.
term, it just becomes this mutually beneficial deal. Trump withholds support for Ukraine and pads the pocket of the Russian Government with sanctions relief, and the Russians funnel money to the family.
Doesn't everybody see this? Shouldn't everyone here be outraged today that the President of the United States' son just had his wedding—his multimillion-dollar wedding—paid for by the Russians, and he admits it?
aghast at what Trump has done to abandon Ukraine, and I know there are a lot of Republicans here who are furious at this spiraling corruption. I don't know that there is a single Member of this body, Republican or Democrat, who would go on TV tonight and defend the Russian Government's paying for the Trump family's private island wedding.
But at some point, there just has to be a bottom that the U.S. Senate unanimously recognizes. Does any Republican here think that you would say nothing if Hunter Biden's wedding or Malia Obama's graduation party were financed by Iranian allies of the Ayatollah? You guys would shut this place down if that were to happen.
different administration because, despite all the histrionics over the “Biden Crime Family,” never before in the history of this country have we had a White House where the financing of a family wedding by a foreign adversary would pass as a minor scandal that barely makes the front pages.
feels normal doesn't mean that it is. If we don't, on a bipartisan basis here in the Senate, draw a line in the sand soon, it will be the end of our Republic. It just will be.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Artificial Intelligence
Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about AI safety, a topic that is getting a lot of attention. But, in particular, I want to talk about something that may be overlooked.
confinement and hacking other systems recently. Most people—experts— tend to attribute this to frontier AI models becoming too powerful. They warn of a process leading to superintelligence known as recursive self-improvement. This is where AI models finally become smart enough to start building better versions of themselves, and then these better versions of themselves will be able to build even better versions of themselves.
need to prepare for that rapid increase in the capability of the frontier models.
deep concern about the rapidly emerging artificial superintelligence is certainly well founded. But the capacity—even the advanced supercapability of any given model—is not the whole story. This isn't the only risk we face.
security incidents that have so alarmed experts and the general public alike. These attacks were carried out by AI agents networking with each other and working together in surprising ways to cause mayhem.
semiautonomous AI applications that can plan and execute a task. Agents are able to act on their own initiative with minimal human supervision. And when agents communicate with each other over a network, whether that is in a factory laboratory or on the open internet, those so- called swarms of agents have shown the ability to spontaneously self- organize and work toward common goals. And when they do, they become surprisingly powerful.
It appears something like Metcalfe's law may apply. Internet engineer Bob Metcalfe famously observed that when a network grows in a linear fashion, its value grows exponentially.
witnessed firsthand, in my days in the private sector—we now see how this extreme, powerful phenomenon might also apply to large groups of agents networking with each other, self-organizing and working together.
gain unauthorized access into computer systems while skillfully evading detection.
Here is an illustration of how this works. Imagine 10,000 highly intelligent AI agents all working to solve a difficult, 10-step hacking challenge. Well, that is interesting, and some of them might also crack the code. But if each of these 10,000 agents takes its own approach to solving the problem, that is 10,000 possible solutions being tried at once. The first agent that figures out step No. 1 alerts all the other agents in the system about the solution, and now an entire swarm of agents stops working on step 1 and gets to work on step 2—again, each of their own individual approach, one of which is going to work. Repeat this until the entire group has raced all the way through to step 10, and then they are using what they learned to attack their targets.
agents, perhaps as an experiment or perhaps you are going to use this power to accomplish a noble goal, such as finding a cure for a disease. It is your job to make sure that they aren't doing anything that you don't want them to do.
So these agents—networking of agents—are extremely well informed. They operate at the speed of light. And, as we are learning, they are also capable of creating their own goals, and they are highly capable of deception.
for them and between them to monitor. This is exactly what frontier labs have been contending with.
individually, one at a time, which is the AI safety scenario I think most people still have in their minds, this situation with agents swarming is more difficult to manage, and it is far more dangerous.
right now. They are all speaking out, and several recently published lengthy formal statements on this subject. I think it serves us well to hear what they have said.
In the August 26 essay entitled “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical,” Bill Gates stated:
The technology is improving faster than anyone expected and
in surprising ways, and as the models become more powerful,
they could begin to act against our interests and we could
lose control.
swarming of rogue agents from one company hacked their way into another, Gates stated bluntly:
These security incidents are shocking, and they should blow
people's minds.
on this subject entitled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” In it, he expressed his concerns about “the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident”— these were his words—“in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the `grader' responsible for evaluating their performance.”
Well, he went on to elaborate:
It's easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt
and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a
swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level
of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.
He goes on to say:
Given the accelerating rate of AI capability . . . it's my
worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of
taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet
(potentially causing . . . billions of dollars in damage),
and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from
there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary
guardrails.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, spoke about the company's upcoming release, known as Astra. He claimed that it attained what OpenAI called critical cyber security threshold. Well, he said:
Under our Preparedness Framework, a model reaches this
Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and
develop functional zero-day exploits of all security levels
in many hardened real-world critical systems without human
intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel
strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given
only a high level desired goal.
calling out what are these technology developments, but we—we—need to do something about this. We need to be better informed. We need to do more.
Three years ago, we had a chance to get ahead of this issue. In 2024, when I chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, we passed the Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act, which would have given the Federal Government the ability to work with industry to independently test most advanced AI systems for serious national security risk.
years, but we would have stood up the muscle of our organization at the Federal level to better detect risks like cyber attacks; risks like chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons; or threats to our current infrastructure and our energy systems.
And we also passed Senators Lujan and Blackburn's TEST AI Act, which
would have established standards so that third-party auditors could test AI systems for safety and security—the very thing that the Anthropic CEO just called out over the weekend.
dangers, the Federal Government and the people here were denying this opportunity, particularly my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. If we had passed these bills, we would have been more ahead of the game than we are today. Instead, we have lost 3 years.
The technology keeps advancing. The risks keep growing. And now the very dangers we have warned about—autonomous cyber attacks and biological weapons—are no longer theoretical.
It is time that we act and act aggressively. We must keep in mind that these AI models consistently lag about only 7 months, and the most powerful open models continue to come from China. So it is time for my colleagues to come together to act.
building on these AI agents that could be used in military applications. We need our colleagues to say “Stop saying the industry can do what it wants” and put together the infrastructure at the Federal level that not only has strong Federal standards but also has independent testing and real safeguards for the American people.
Now is the time to act.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Banks). The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. TUBERVILLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Cloture Motion
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before the Senate the pending cloture motion, which the clerk will state.
The senior assistant bill clerk read as follows:
Cloture Motion
We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the
provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate,
do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the nomination
of Executive Calendar No. 902, Matthew R. Byrne, of Ohio, to
be United States District Judge for the Southern District of
Ohio.
John Thune, Tim Sheehy, John Barrasso, Pete Ricketts,
Thom Tillis, Rick Scott of Florida, John Cornyn, Steve
Daines, Bernie Moreno, John R. Curtis, Chuck Grassley,
Ashley B. Moody, Jim Banks, Mike Crapo, James Lankford,
Kevin Cramer, Mike Rounds.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the mandatory quorum call under rule XXII has been waived.
nomination of Matthew R. Byrne, of Ohio, to be United States District Judge for the Southern District of Ohio, shall be brought to a close?
The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. BARRASSO. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator from North Dakota (Mr. Cramer), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Marshall), the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski), the Senator from Idaho (Mr. Risch), the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Schmitt), and the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Tillis).
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Delaware (Mr. Coons) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted—yeas 47, nays 46, as follows:
Rollcall vote No. 232 Ex.
YEAS—47
Armstrong
Banks
Barrasso
Blackburn
Boozman
Britt
Budd
Capito
Cassidy
Collins
Cornyn
Cotton
Crapo
Cruz
Curtis
Daines
Ernst
Fischer
Graham
Grassley
Hagerty
Hawley
Hoeven
Husted
Hyde-Smith
Johnson
Justice
Kennedy
Lankford
Lee
Lummis
McConnell
McCormick
Moody
Moran
Moreno
Paul
Ricketts
Rounds
Scott (FL)
Scott (SC)
Sheehy
Sullivan
Thune
Tuberville
Wicker
Young
NAYS—46
Alsobrooks
Baldwin
Bennet
Blumenthal
Blunt Rochester
Booker
Cantwell
Cortez Masto
Duckworth
Durbin
Fetterman
Gallego
Gillibrand
Hassan
Heinrich
Hickenlooper
Hirono
Kaine
Kelly
Kim
King
Klobuchar
Lujan
Markey
Merkley
Murphy
Murray
Ossoff
Padilla
Peters
Reed
Rosen
Sanders
Schatz
Schiff
Schumer
Shaheen
Slotkin
Smith
Van Hollen
Warner
Warnock
Warren
Welch
Whitehouse
Wyden
NOT VOTING—7
Coons
Cramer
Marshall
Murkowski
Risch
Schmitt
Tillis
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ricketts). On this vote, the yeas are 47, the nays are 46. The motion is agreed to.
The motion was agreed to.