The Federal Election Commission’s electronic filing system went offline after a hacker or hackers attempted to breach the agency’s systems, disrupting mandatory campaign finance disclosures one week before the November 3 midterm elections.
In an email obtained by Reuters, an FEC electronic filings officer wrote to campaign compliance firms on Monday night that “We have a bad actor attempting to breach FEC systems. As a result, we’ve had to temporarily shut down our web-facing services.”
The agency confirmed in a public statement that its electronic filing system was offline and that IT staff were actively working to restore service, while noting that users could still search the website for previously filed reports.
“I’ve never seen this in 26 years,” Steven Mele, president and CEO at political finance compliance firm MBA Consulting Group, told Reuters.
A status message said the system had been down since around 10 p.m. EST on Monday, and a later update said the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented.
The outage blocks political organizations from filing the FEC’s required 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports, which disclose last-minute expenditures by campaigns, super PACs, and other groups on specific races.
These filings are especially significant in the final days of an election cycle when outside spending is high.
The FEC tracks and enforces federal campaign finance rules but does not administer elections or handle voter registration.
Officials emphasized that the disruption should not affect voters’ ability to cast ballots.
The timing has drawn attention because the midterms will determine control of Congress for the remainder of President Donald Trump’s term, with record spending by outside groups in the closing week.
Reuters reports:
The midterms are now the most expensive US election in history with roughly $11.21 billion spent on advertising and future reservations so far, according to political ad tracker AdImpact. They have surpassed the previous record set in the 2024 elections when $11.2 billion was spent on all races, including $3.2 billion on the presidential race between Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris, AdImpact said.
Much of the spending is being driven by super PACs, which can accept unlimited amounts of money from wealthy individuals and corporations, opens new tab and spend as much as they want on campaigns with few restrictions.
The sums being spent in recent weeks are staggering as Democrats gain ground in several Republican strongholds.
Super PACs and dark money groups have spent an average of over $50 million per day over the last week, said Brendan Glavin, research director at nonpartisan campaign watchdog group OpenSecrets. More than $250 million in spending was reported on October 20 alone, he added.
President Trump said on Wednesday that he approves of conservative Brazilian presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of persecuted former President Jair Bolsonaro, fleeing to the US after his election was stolen and the regime targeted him.
Bolsonaro was the clear frontrunner, but the fix was in on election day.
Voting hours were extended by two hours on election day in an unprecedented move while Bolsonaro was leading. Lula da Silva pulled off a win after the extension was ordered by his personal attorney and Brazilian Justice Christiano Zanin.
Trump previously responded to the rigged election, highlighting the “very strange” extension.
“It looked terrible to me. I thought it was terrible-looking. I didn’t take sides, but it looked like another rigged election, frankly,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I didn’t take sides, but it was a terrible look for the world.”
Trump continued, “You know, elections have to be indisputable, and it looked very bad to me. I didn’t take sides. I didn’t endorse anybody or anything. But I watched the election, and it looked so, so corrupt, so terrible.”
Since the election, Bolsonaro has been ordered by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to hand over his passport after challenging the corrupt results.
Now, he has reportedly arrived in the United States, fleeing persecution from the Communist regime.
Overnight, upon returning to Washington, DC, from midterm rallies in Texas, Trump told reporters he “would certainly approve” of Bolsonaro coming to the US, but said that he had “heard he was in Argentina,” not America.
“The election was very strange, and I thought it was terrible,” Trump said. “Would I approve of it? Yeah, I would approve. It would be okay with me.”
“I didn’t take sides. Lula, I know. I know Flavio a little bit. I know the father very well. The father was treated really badly, I thought, but I wasn’t involved. That’s Brazil; it’s a different country,” he added. “I thought I’d stay out of that one. I thought the end result, you know, it’s fine the end result. But the way they got to the end result was terrible.”
President Trump tells reporters how he beat Obama and the Clintons and why they are still mad at him.
President Trump spoke to reporters from Florida before traveling to Georgia for a rally on Saturday night.
The President and First Lady spoke with reporters after casting an early in-person vote in the Florida elections.
Jordan Conradson reported on his conversation with reporters outside the polling station.
The President highlighted recent findings by the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles that “more than 20,000 people who are likely aliens are registered to vote in California.”
“In Los Angeles, as you know, they have 20,000 votes, and it could be as high as a million votes,” Trump said.
President Trump also was asked about Barack Obama and Bill Clinton out campaigning against him and Republicans today.
His response was EPIC Trump!
Reporter: “Mr. President, President Obama and President Clinton are out there being a little critical of you today. Do you want to respond to that?”
You know, when I started, we had a very much weaker Republican Party, a smaller, weaker Republican Party. And then I ran and I won in 2016 and I won in 2022 (2020). But it didn’t work out that way. It was a rigged election. But I won by millions of votes. And I figured because I did, I’ll do it again. And I did it again and I made it too big to rig, even better than 2020 or 2016. And they’re out there fighting and I guess I’d be fighting about with them too.
But Obama was a lousy president. Clinton was not bad, but he got caught up in a lot of scandals. Outside of the scandals, he would have been a good president.”
We never deserved this wonderful man as president!
Soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army’s Northern Theater Command prepare for the Vostok-2018 military exercise in Russia’s Trans-Baikal region on Friday. Photo by Pan Mengqi/China Daily.
Russia is training Chinese soldiers in drone warfare and urban combat and has agreed to equip and train a battalion of Chinese paratroopers, while China supplies 90 percent of the sanctioned technology entering Russia.
“For decades, Russia armed China. Today the technology and the leverage flow the other way,” China Economic and Security Review Commission Vice Chair Mike Kuiken said. “Ukraine’s battlefields have become a classroom for the People’s Liberation Army,” he added, saying “the lessons are being studied with Taiwan in mind.”
From the 1990s into the early 2020s, Russia provided 77 percent of China’s arms imports while withholding its most advanced systems. The commission now cites reports of cooperation on China’s next-generation Type 096 ballistic missile submarine and on a missile defense system that would surpass Russia’s S-500. “If accurate, this cooperation directly affects U.S. naval posture and anti-submarine warfare planning in the Pacific,” the commission wrote.
That classroom moved to Russia’s Chelyabinsk region from Sept. 28 to Oct. 3 for Tsentr-2026, a strategic exercise involving more than 47,000 personnel. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov said Russia built its preparations on its “unique experience” in Ukraine. Chinese troops from the Central Theater Command and its 82nd Group Army took part, and China Central Television reported that drone “swarms” fed target information to ground combat groups.
Chinese military commentator Song Zhongping argued that drones and precision-guided weapons now pose a greater threat to tanks than large armored clashes, and that studying armored losses can help the PLA counter such threats.
The paratrooper deal points directly at Taiwan. Contracts leaked by the hacktivist group Black Moon show Russia agreed in 2023 to supply equipment for a Chinese airborne battalion, including 37 BMD-4M amphibious assault vehicles, along with operator training and technology transfer.
The arrangement provides the PLA with experience directly applicable to a future campaign against Taiwan. The PLA also wants data on U.S. systems Taiwan fields, including HIMARS rocket launchers, and Russia may be passing along performance data on Western weapons.
Leaked material from a November 2023 China-Russia military-technical forum in Guangzhou shows how the two sides intend to pool what they know. Li Rong of the PLA Academy of Military Sciences noted that China has 160 types of loitering munitions but has barely tested them in combat, and proposed that Russia contribute frontline experience while China provides artificial intelligence and mass production to develop autonomous swarm munitions.
Researchers from China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation presented a three-tier plan to neutralize Starlink through regulatory pressure, electronic warfare, cyberattacks and the destruction of satellites in orbit.
Beijing has its own reasons to keep Russia fighting. In July 2025, Foreign Minister Wang Yi reportedly told European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas that China did not want Russia to lose the war because the United States would then focus entirely on China.
Since 2022, China has shipped $10.3 billion in high-priority export-controlled goods to Russia, including semiconductors, drone parts and machine tools. The commission also cited reports that China secretly trained Russian personnel on drone operations and provided satellite imagery to track Ukrainian targets and guide missile strikes.
The partnership reaches into the Pacific and the Arctic. In July, the two navies conducted joint operations and patrols featuring submarine, anti-submarine and drone operations. In 2024, Chinese bombers on a joint patrol with Russia entered the Alaskan air defense identification zone for the first time. Chinese state-owned companies hold a combined 20 percent stake in Russia’s sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project, and the two countries are developing year-round commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route.
Russia continues to test those methods in Ukraine. Its forces struck more than 200 petrol stations in June and July, and in early October its drones hit Kyiv’s Southern and Northern bridges over the Dnipro. Chinese industry supports that campaign. In October 2024, the Treasury Department found that Xiamen Limbach Aircraft Engine Co. produced the L550E engine for Russia’s Garpiya attack drones.
Washington has gone after the industrial side of the relationship. The Garpiya action marked the Treasury Department’s first sanctions on Chinese entities “directly developing and producing complete weapons systems.” Treasury has sanctioned nearly 300 Chinese and Hong Kong individuals and entities, and the Commerce Department has placed more than 158 on its Entity List, the commission said. Chinese state-owned firms suspended purchases of Russian seaborne oil in October 2025, yet China’s crude imports from Russia ended the year down only about 8 percent.
On Sept. 18, Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. Section 113 directs duties of up to 100 percent on goods from the five largest importers of Russian crude oil or natural gas that keep buying, as well as from the top five countries facilitating evasion of Russian oil sanctions. The measure is expected to fall hardest on China and India, Al Jazeera reported. Trump and Xi discussed the war at the White House on Sept. 24, but China’s Foreign Ministry said only that they “exchanged views,” and neither side released details.
On Sept. 30, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced plans for an Autonomous Warfare Command to expand U.S. drone and robotic capabilities. In Taiwan, American Institute in Taiwan director Raymond Greene told a July drone industry forum that “nothing will deter conflict more effectively than turning Taiwan into a hornet’s nest of air, surface, and subsurface drones.” Both Beijing and Washington are drawing on the same war, one to prepare for an attack on Taiwan and the other to prevent it.
