> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://capital-to-capitol.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # A federal judge ordered Trump to stop running taxpayer-funded campaign ads on Sunday night. The administration ran two more into early morning anyway. - URL: https://capital-to-capitol.ghost.io/a-federal-judge-ordered-trump-to-stop-running-taxpayer-funded-campaign-ads-on-sunday-night-the-administration-ran-two-more-into-early-morning-anyway/ - Published: 2026-10-13T03:06:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-16T01:01:20.000Z - Description: A judge found Trump's taxpayer-funded campaign ads misappropriate government funds. The administration ran two more past the court deadline. Russia struck a Ukrainian power plant within hours of Trump declaring a ceasefire. Monday opened the week with a lot going on. - Author: Saanjali Ganesh - Tags: Law, Democracy, War, History, Economics, Security A federal judge ordered the taxpayer-funded Trump campaign ads stopped Sunday night. The administration ran two more into Monday morning anyway. Russia struck a Ukrainian power plant within hours of Trump declaring a ceasefire. Monday opened the week. Here is Monday. --- **A federal judge found the taxpayer-funded Trump ads misappropriate government funds and ordered them stopped. The administration kept running them past the deadline anyway.** [A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order Sunday blocking the Trump administration from airing taxpayer-funded campaign-style television ads](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/10/12/judge-blocks-trump-administration-airing-taxpayer-funded-campaign-style-ads/), finding they were “likely unlawful” and that the government had “misappropriated government funds.” US District Judge Jennifer Rochon of New York ordered the immediate cancellation of any remaining ad slots. [The administration blew past the Sunday evening deadline and ran two more ads into the early hours of Monday](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/10/12/judge-blocks-trump-administration-airing-taxpayer-funded-campaign-style-ads/). [Nearly $22 million in taxpayer funds has been spent on the ad campaign](https://www.npr.org/sections/news), with nearly half spent after Trump promised to fund future ads through his super PAC. DHS said the ads were paid from its border agency’s budget earmarked for “commemorating efforts and events related to border security.” Trump has not committed to reimbursing the government. This brief first covered the taxpayer-funded NFL ads on September 28\. It covered Trump reversing course and pledging PAC funding on October 6\. It covered the Trump directive to budget chief Russell Vought to use more taxpayer money for ads on October 5\. The timeline from September 28 to today produced: a September 28 brief noting the ads, an October 5 brief noting a Vought directive, an October 6 reversal promising PAC funding, and a Sunday night court order that the administration violated into Monday morning. Judge Rochon found five confirmed ads and noted up to eight others may be part of the campaign. The court has now said the ads misappropriate government funds. The administration has now run the ads past the court order. Both of those things are Monday morning facts. --- **The DOJ opened an antitrust investigation into five TV networks for suspending White House press pool coverage. The theory is that competing companies coordinating a boycott violates competition law.** [The Justice Department said it is investigating ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News](https://www.justsecurity.org/160381/early-edition-october-12-2026/) over whether their decision to suspend White House press pool coverage of President Trump broke federal competition laws. The DOJ asked all five networks to hand over communications related to the pool suspension and said the boycott could violate the Sherman Act, the foundational US antitrust law passed in 1890 that bars companies from conspiring to restrain trade or form monopolies. The press pool is a small rotating group of journalists designated to cover the president when space or access is limited, with their reporting shared across all news organizations. The networks suspended pool coverage as a protest against restrictions the White House placed on which journalists could participate. The DOJ’s Sherman Act theory is specific: if competing media companies coordinated their decision to suspend coverage, that coordination among competitors on a business practice could be treated as an antitrust violation. The legal theory has not been tested in a media context. Its application here produces a specific scenario: the same Justice Department that is seeking to charge the January 6 whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson is simultaneously investigating whether news networks broke competition law by collectively declining to cover the president. Both of those are uses of the DOJ’s legal authority. Both arrived in the same week. --- **Trump declared an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine on Monday morning. Russia struck a Ukrainian power plant in Kharkiv with glide bombs and drones within hours.** [Russia attacked a major power plant in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, with glide bombs and drones](https://www.golocalprov.com/news/big-news-stories-overnight-monday-october-12-2026/) just hours after President Trump announced on Truth Social that he had brokered an energy ceasefire in which both Russia and Ukraine agreed not to attack each other’s energy infrastructure. Trump posted: “Do not break it!” Russia’s state media mocked the ceasefire within hours. Ukrainian President Zelensky confirmed the strike on Kharkiv and criticized the Trump administration for pursuing economic ties with Russia while claiming to broker peace. An announcement of a ceasefire followed within hours by a strike on the type of infrastructure the ceasefire specifically covered describes a specific kind of diplomatic failure: either Russia did not agree to what Trump said it agreed to, or Russia agreed and immediately violated the agreement, or the announcement was made without the parties having reached an enforceable understanding. Any of those three explanations is consequential. Trump announced this ceasefire two days after announcing the Russian diesel deal that Ukraine’s president also criticized. The pattern the week is producing is a president making announcements about Russia and Ukraine that Russia immediately contradicts with its military. Kharkiv’s power grid serves millions of civilians heading into winter. --- **India’s government purged voter rolls and arrested thousands of protesters. Three opposition leaders were stopped before they could board a plane to join a demonstration.** [Protests against the right-wing government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi rocked Delhi over the weekend](https://havanatimes.org/news/international-news-briefs-for-monday-october-12-2026/), as opposition parties said revisions to the list of eligible voters favor Modi’s party. Police detained thousands of people on Saturday. [The three leaders of the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party, Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das, and Ashutosh Ranka, were arrested as authorities intercepted their flight from Mumbai to New Delhi](https://havanatimes.org/news/international-news-briefs-for-monday-october-12-2026/) to prevent them from reaching the demonstration. The Cockroach Janta Party, Janta meaning “people” in Hindi, is the political party formed from the Cockroach Movement this brief covered October 5 when the movement launched new protests demanding the Chief Election Commissioner’s resignation. The movement has since grown into a formal political party whose three founders were arrested at the airport on Saturday, their flight intercepted before they could exercise the most basic act of democratic participation: traveling to a place where other citizens had gathered to express a political view. The voter roll purges the opposition is challenging are not a minor procedural dispute. In a country of 1.4 billion voters, changes to the voter eligibility database determine who has the legal right to cast a ballot. The Cockroach Movement named itself after the insect that survives everything. Three of its leaders were arrested at an airport. The movement continues. --- **A mass shooting in Erie, Pennsylvania on Friday killed nine people. Two children, a pregnant woman, and seven family members were among the dead. The investigation continued Monday.** [A 45-year-old man killed eight people in Erie, Pennsylvania on Friday evening](https://www.newstribune.com/news/2026/oct/12/erie-pennsylvania-shooter-killed-8-people-then-himself-police-say/), including two children and a pregnant woman, seven of whom were family members, before dying of a self-inflicted wound as police arrived. Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah said: “I have not seen anything like this in my 28-plus years.” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro offered the state’s full support to Erie Mayor Daria Devlin. Federal and state investigators launched a full investigation Monday. Motive had not been established. Erie is a city of approximately 95,000 people in northwestern Pennsylvania about 120 miles north of Pittsburgh. The shooting brings the total of mass shootings in the United States in 2026 to more than 400, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are shot excluding the shooter. Two children dead, a pregnant woman dead, seven family members dead, one person not related to the family dead: the shooter killed almost everyone in his immediate world before turning the gun on himself. There is no policy resolution to type at the end of this paragraph. There are nine people who were alive on Friday morning who were dead by Friday evening in Erie. The investigation looking for a motive will not produce a reason adequate to that fact. --- **China is importing gold at record levels. Central banks worldwide are accumulating physical bullion. The dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency is being quietly contested.** [Global central banks, including China’s, are importing gold at record levels](https://drydenwire.com/news/morning-headlines-monday-oct-12-2026/) in a sustained effort to diversify their foreign reserves away from dependence on a single currency, with monthly purchases of physical bullion running at historically high rates. The dollar’s status as the world’s primary reserve currency, the currency most central banks hold and most international trade is conducted in, gives the United States a specific and significant economic privilege: it can run trade deficits indefinitely, borrow cheaply, and impose sanctions effectively because so many countries need dollars to participate in global trade. Central banks moving to gold at record pace are making a specific institutional bet that the dollar’s dominance is less reliable than it has been, and that physical gold, which no government controls and no sanction can freeze, is a more trustworthy store of value. China’s record gold imports arrive in the same week that the Trump administration relaxed Russia sanctions to obtain diesel, a federal judge found government ads misappropriate funds, and the DOJ investigated news networks for coordinating a boycott. The dollar is not in crisis. But the record level of global gold buying is the international financial system’s running comment on American institutional stability, filed in bullion. --- **Taiwan’s president gave a National Day speech rejecting Chinese sovereignty over the island. China announced live-fire military drills along its coast the next day.** [Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te delivered a National Day address Saturday](https://www.justsecurity.org/160381/early-edition-october-12-2026/) saying Taiwan cherishes peace but will not give up its freedom, and that Taiwan’s people have a fundamental right to exist. China denounced the speech and said it “distorts the truth.” [Taiwan’s Defense Minister Wellington Koo announced Monday that Taiwan’s military is monitoring a series of Chinese live-fire drills, exercises using real weapons systems, taking place along China’s coast this week](https://www.justsecurity.org/160381/early-edition-october-12-2026/). The specific sequence, a Taiwanese president asserting sovereignty in a National Day speech, China denouncing it, and China then beginning live-fire military drills along its coast the next morning, is a pattern Taiwan has experienced before. It is the same sequence that followed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022, which produced the largest Chinese military exercises around Taiwan in decades. The drills Monday are not that scale. They are a calibrated response, demonstrating that China has the military capacity to do more than denounce a speech. The same week that Trump asked Xi if China wanted to buy American weapons, announced a deal with Russia, and declared a ceasefire that lasted until Russia’s next missile, the Taiwan Strait is running its own separate and older tension in parallel. Taiwan’s defense minister said Monday the military is watching. It always is. --- **It is Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Leonard Peltier has been in federal prison for nearly 50 years for a crime his supporters say he did not commit.** [Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the federal and state holiday that replaces Columbus Day in many jurisdictions to honor Native American peoples and their histories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous%5FPeoples%27%5FDay%5F%28United%5FStates%29). Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement, spoke with Democracy Now about his nearly 50 years in prison and a new documentary film about his case. Leonard Peltier was convicted in 1977 for the murders of two FBI agents during a 1975 confrontation at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, when federal agents and Native American activists clashed in a period of intense violence at the reservation. Human rights organizations including Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee have contested the legal process that produced his conviction for decades, citing withheld evidence, coerced witnesses, and procedural irregularities. He has been denied clemency and parole repeatedly. He is 82 years old. A new documentary film is bringing his case to a new generation that may not know it. Indigenous Peoples’ Day is observed every October 12, the same date as Columbus Day, specifically because October 12, 1492 is the date Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas. The holiday does not resolve anything. It names something. Today it names that Leonard Peltier is still in a federal prison at 82, and that the country observing the holiday and the country keeping him there are the same country. --- **The thread underneath Monday** A federal judge found Trump’s taxpayer-funded campaign ads misappropriate government funds and ordered them immediately stopped, the administration ran two more ads past the Sunday deadline into Monday morning, nearly $22 million spent total with DHS billing the cost to a border security commemoration fund. The DOJ opened an antitrust investigation into ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News for coordinating the suspension of White House press pool coverage, asking for their communications and citing possible Sherman Act violations. Trump declared an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine Monday morning on Truth Social; Russia struck a Ukrainian power plant in Kharkiv with glide bombs and drones within hours; Russia mocked the ceasefire as Zelensky criticized Trump for pursuing economic ties with Moscow. India’s government purged voter rolls, arrested thousands of protesters on Saturday, and intercepted the flight of three Cockroach Janta Party leaders to prevent them reaching a Delhi demonstration. A mass shooting in Erie, Pennsylvania on Friday killed nine people including two children and a pregnant woman, seven of whom were family members, the fourth-deadliest domestic mass shooting of the year. China and global central banks are buying gold at record pace, diversifying away from dollar dependence in a sustained institutional bet on American instability. Taiwan’s president rejected Chinese sovereignty in a National Day speech; China announced live-fire coastal drills the next morning. Leonard Peltier, 82, spoke on Indigenous Peoples’ Day from federal prison where he has been for nearly 50 years. The Brewers beat the Dodgers 2-1 in NLCS Game 1\. Ilhan Omar’s home was raided by DHS agents over immigration paperwork her late father filed when she was a child. A wildfire near Santa Clarita forced evacuations north of Los Angeles. Elon Musk has spent $366 million to help Republicans in the midterms. Eight sections, 36 days until the midterms. The ceasefire lasted until Russia’s next missile. See you tomorrow. **What to watch tomorrow:** Watch whether the Trump administration formally complies with Judge Rochon’s order to cancel all remaining ad slots or challenges it in a higher court, because running ads past the deadline Sunday night means the compliance question is still unresolved Monday. Watch whether any of the five networks hand over communications to the DOJ’s Sherman Act investigation, because a news organization turning over editorial communications to the government in an antitrust case produces immediate First Amendment questions that courts will have to resolve quickly given election proximity. Watch the Chinese live-fire drills along the coast for any escalation in scope or proximity to Taiwan, because the baseline calibration of the drills determines whether this is a routine political signal or a precursor to something larger. And watch whether Russia strikes another energy target in Ukraine this week, because a ceasefire that lasted until Russia’s next missile is now either dead or has to be renegotiated, and which of those the administration pursues publicly will define the week. See you tomorrow. --- *Capital to Capitol publishes every evening, five days a week. Subscribe free below and today’s brief lands in your inbox by 11 PM.*