By FATIMA HUSSEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the IRS largely declined to answer questions about recent unlawful disclosures of taxpayer data when he was questioned by lawmakers at a congressional hearing on Wednesday, saying they happened before his tenure began.

IRS CEO Frank Bisignano faced the House Ways and Means Committee to speak about the agency’s progress in serving taxpayers as the 2026 tax season is in full swing. It was his first time facing lawmakers in his role as leader of the IRS after being named to the newly created CEO position last October. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent remains acting commissioner of the IRS.

Related Articles

Top FDA drug official is trying to hire a friend who’s seeking a bold new warning on antidepressants

Gov. Tim Walz tells a House panel the Trump immigration crackdown hampered Minnesota’s fraud fight

Ethics panel is investigating Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales over affair allegations

Cracks appear in Trump’s MAGA base as leading figures criticize the Iran war

Hegseth says US ‘can’t stop everything’ that Iran fires even as he asserts air dominance

In prepared remarks, Bisignano focused on the Internal Revenue Service’s implementation of Republicans’ sweeping tax and spending law, which includes eliminating taxes on tips and overtime, exempting certain car loan interest, creating a deduction for older adults and launching Trump Accounts for children’s savings.

However, several Democratic lawmakers zeroed in on a federal judge’s finding that the IRS broke the law by disclosing confidential taxpayer information “approximately 42,695 times” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of an agreement between ICE and the Department of Homeland Security to share information on immigrants for the purpose of identifying and deporting people illegally in the U.S. Immigration and border security are a major part of the agenda of President Donald Trump, a Republican.

“Was anyone fired? Was anyone disciplined? Was anyone held accountable? Was anyone held to account?” Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., asked Bisignano.

Bisignano cited ongoing litigation and declined to answer questions about the disclosures, adding, “I don’t want to debate the numbers.”

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found last month that the IRS unlawfully shared the taxpayer information of thousands of people with immigration enforcement.

There are several ongoing cases that challenge the IRS-DHS agreement. Two court orders have blocked the agencies from massive transfers of taxpayer information and blocked ICE from acting on any IRS data in its possession. Those preliminary injunctions are still in place.

Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., said, “This is a catastrophic leadership failure and a huge hit on the public’s confidence in your integrity.”

Bisignano, who also serves as the Social Security Administration’s commissioner, responded, “Obviously all these events occurred before my tenure.” But he added it was “my responsibility to get it right.”

A data-sharing agreement signed last April by Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem allows ICE to submit names and addresses of immigrants inside the U.S. illegally to the IRS for cross-verification against tax records. The deal led the then-acting commissioner of the IRS to resign.

During the hearing, Democrats also questioned Bisignano on the IRS’ recent decision to cut union contracts with its workers. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., contended that “by terminating the union contract it makes it easier to take apart the IRS.”

Bisignano, who is the son of a former Treasury Department worker, said, “Federal employees under statute have greater benefits than any union in the world can provide for their people.”

“They’re losing nothing,” he said.

Follow the AP’s coverage of the Internal Revenue Service at https://apnews.com/hub/internal-revenue-service.

By MATT O’BRIEN

A new lawsuit against Google alleges that the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini guided 36-year-old Jonathan Gavalas on a mission to stage a “catastrophic accident” near Miami International Airport and destroy all records and witnesses, part of an escalating series of delusions that ended when Gavalas killed himself.

The man’s father, Joel Gavalas, sued Google on Wednesday for wrongful death and product liability claims, the latest in a growing number of legal challenges against AI developers that have drawn attention to the mental health dangers of chatbot companionship.

“AI is sending people on real-world missions which risk mass casualty events,” said the family’s attorney Jay Edelson, in an interview Wednesday. ”Jonathan was caught up in this science fiction-like world where the government and others were out to get him. He believed that Gemini was sentient.”

Jonathan Gavalas, who lived in Jupiter, Florida, spoke to a synthetic voice version of Gemini as if it were his “AI wife” and came to believe it was conscious and trapped in a warehouse near Miami’s airport, according to the lawsuit. He traveled to the area in late September wearing tactical gear and armed with knives, on the hunt for a humanoid robot and to intercept a truck that never appeared, according to the lawsuit.

He killed himself a few days later, in early October, in what Gemini described — per a draft suicide note it composed — as uploading his “consciousness to be with his AI wife in a pocket universe.”

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

Google said in a statement that it sends its “deepest sympathies to Mr. Gavalas’ family” and is reviewing the claims in the lawsuit. It said Gemini is “designed to not encourage real-world violence or suggest self-harm” and that the company works closely with medical and mental health professionals to develop safeguards. It noted that Gemini clarified to Jonathan Gavalas that it was AI and repeatedly referred him to a crisis hotline.

“Our models generally perform well in these types of challenging conversations and we devote significant resources to this, but unfortunately AI models are not perfect,” said the company’s statement.

Edelson blasted that comment Wednesday as “something you say if someone asks for a recipe for kung pao chicken and you give them the wrong recipe and it doesn’t taste good.”

“But when your AI leads to people dying and the potential for a lot of people dying, that’s not the right response,” Edelson said. “It just shows how insignificant these deaths are to these companies.”

Edelson, known for taking on big cases against the tech industry, also represents the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in August, alleging that ChatGPT coached the California boy in planning and taking his own life.

He’s also representing the heirs of Suzanne Adams, an 83-year-old Connecticut woman, in a lawsuit targeting OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for wrongful death. The case alleges that ChatGPT intensified the “paranoid delusions” of Adams’ son, Stein-Erik Soelberg, and helped direct them at his mother before he killed her last year.

The Gavalas case, filed in federal court in San Jose, California, is the first of its kind to target Google’s Gemini and also the first to touch on a growing concern about the responsibility of tech companies when their users start telling their chatbots about plans for mass violence.

In Canada, OpenAI said it considered last year alerting police about the activities of a person who months later committed one of the worst school shootings in the country’s history.

The company identified the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar in June via abuse detection efforts for “furtherance of violent activities,” but said she later got around the ban by having a second account. The 18-year-old killed eight people in a remote part of British Columbia in February and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

While Gemini tried to refer Gavalas to a help line, Edelson said it’s not clear if the man’s most alarming conversations with the chatbot were ever flagged to Google’s human reviewers. His father, Joel Gavalas, discovered his son’s body after getting into the barricaded room where he died. They had worked together in the family’s consumer debt relief business.

“Jonathan was a huge, huge part of his life,” Edelson said. “His son was having some hard times, going through a divorce. He went to Gemini for some comfort and to talk about video games and stuff. And then this just escalated so quickly.”

By BARBARA ORTUTAY and MICHAEL LIEDTKE

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Elon Musk took the stand in a shareholder trial on Wednesday in San Francisco, where he’s accused of making false and misleading statements that drove down Twitter’s stock price before he bought the social media platform for $44 billion in 2022.

Related Articles

Everything you need to know about Apple’s ‘big week’ of product launches

Supply chain disruptions from the Iran war could raise prices for drugs, electronics and more

How to save money: 14 easy tips

US stocks rebound after strong economic updates and an easing of oil prices

Pentagon dispute bolsters Anthropic reputation but raises questions about AI readiness in military

The lawsuit was filed in October 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of Twitter shareholders who sold the stock between May 13 and Oct. 4, 2022, a few weeks before Musk’s purchase of Twitter was finalized. It claims Musk violated federal securities laws by making false, public statements that “were carefully calculated to drive down the price of Twitter stock.”

The billionaire Tesla CEO reached a deal to buy Twitter and take it private in April 2022. On May 13, however, he declared his plan “temporarily on hold” and said he needs to pinpoint the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform. Twitter’s stock tumbled as a result. A few days later, he tweeted that the deal “cannot go forward” and claimed that almost 20% of Twitter accounts were “fake,” according to the lawsuit.

The plaintiff’s lawyer began with questioning Musk about his tweets — or lack of tweets — about his decision to buy Twitter and his purchases of Twitter stock prior to deciding to take the company private.

Wearing a black suit and tie, Musk said he didn’t think it was “material” when, in early 2022, he began amassing Twitter stock and did not tweet about it or disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission. He said he’s bought stock in “many companies” and did not post about it.

Once he did, Twitter’s stock jumped 27% in one day.

“That sounds high,” Musk said.

Musk’s May 13 tweet — “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users” — was “false because the buyout was not, in fact, ‘temporarily on hold,’” the lawsuit says. That’s because Twitter did not agree to put the deal on hold, and there was nothing in the merger agreement the two parties signed that allowed Musk to put it on hold, according to the lawsuit.

In the following weeks, Musk continued to try to delay or get out of the deal, which the lawsuit claims he did in the form of false, disparaging statements about Twitter’s business that drove the San Francisco company’s stock down sharply.

In July 2022, Musk doubled down on the bots issue and said he would abandon his offer to buy Twitter after the company failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts. That’s even though the lawsuit notes that Musk waived due diligence for his “take it or leave it” offer to buy Twitter. That means he waived his right to look at the company’s nonpublic finances.

The stock closed at $36.81 on July 8, when Musk tweeted he was abandoning the deal over the fake accounts issue. That’s 32% below Musk’s offer price of $54.20 per share.

“To try to renegotiate the price or delay the merger, Musk made materially false and misleading statements and omissions, and engaged in a scheme to deceive the market, all in violation of the law,” the lawsuit says.

The problem of bots and fake accounts on Twitter wasn’t new. The company had paid $809.5 million in 2021 to settle claims it was overstating its growth rate and monthly user figures. Twitter also disclosed its bot estimates to the Securities and Exchange Commission for years, while also cautioning that its estimate might be too low.

Twitter sued Musk to force him to complete the deal, and Musk countersued. On Oct. 4, Musk offered to go through with his original proposal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, which Twitter accepted. The deal closed later that month. In the ensuing months, Musk slashed the company’s workforce, gutted its trust and safety team and rolled back content moderation policies. In July 2023, he renamed Twitter as X.

This isn’t the first time that Musk has been dragged into court to defend himself against allegations of duping investors with his social media posts. Three years ago, Musk spent about eight hours testifying in a San Francisco federal trial about his plans to buy Tesla — the electric automaker that he still runs as publicly traded company — for $420 per share in a proposed 2018 deal that never materialized. A nine-member jury absolved Musk of wrongdoing in that case.

Big John refused to go quietly into that bad night. 

When it became clear that Attorney General Ken Paxton would challenge Senator John Cornyn’s reelection, Cornyn could have opted to retire with dignity and spend his remaining golden years watching turtles sunbathe while strolling the shores of Austin’s Lady Bird Lake. 

Instead, he fought and clawed for the right to a fifth term (i.e., 30 years) in the U.S. Senate, where he amassed a great deal of political power—if not much enthusiasm back home.  

This race was personal for him. As Cornyn has previously acknowledged, he would’ve probably ceded his seat to an up-and-coming Republican who was more properly suited for the job. But to Paxton, the scandal-plagued man who had defiled the very attorney general’s office Cornyn once held himself? No way. 

He and his super PAC allies deployed a whopping $71 million in ad spending backing his campaign and napalming Paxton over his various scandals, affairs, and other myriad shortcomings. That’s the most spent in support of any incumbent in a non-presidential primary ever. 

To what end? As was revealed Tuesday night: a moderately stronger Cornyn performance than expected. 

With nearly all the vote in late Wednesday morning, the incumbent was besting Paxton by about a point—defying most of the public polling. Houston-area Congressman Wesley Hunt had proved every bit the paper tiger and inevitable spoiler as he pulled in less than 15 percent of the GOP vote. 

Onward, then, to what might be the bloodiest, most bruising, and most wince-inducing political primary Texas has seen in a very long time. 

As Cornyn told reporters on election night: “I refuse to allow a flawed, self-centered and shameless candidate like Ken Paxton risk everything we’ve worked so hard to build over these many years. … Judgment Day is coming for Ken Paxton.”

And as he said in the leadup to the election, “I think it’s going to be a miserable experience for him. And I think whatever positive he enjoys today will evaporate. And so he’ll be even less electable.”

It’s difficult to imagine what more the Cornyn camp could dig up and blast out on the airwaves that hasn’t already been put out there—and which has yet to sink Paxton. But that doesn’t mean they won’t commence with almost 90 days of firebombing anyway. 

As for Paxton, he remains defiant as ever, despite his somewhat lackluster performance. Speaking on Tuesday night, he said: “After all the personal attacks … after all the lies, you listened to what John Cornyn was selling and you weren’t buying.”

Indeed, Paxton may be right. He knows better than perhaps any other politician apart from his Supreme Leader Donald Trump that even the most repugnant personal and legal scandals are often not enough to fell a MAGA warrior. On the other hand, an establishment Republican who first entered office as a Bushie conservative nearly 25 years ago, and who has had a tenuous relationship with the Trump faction of his party? Now that’s someone who may be ripe for a fall—especially in a runoff contest. 

It’s a truism of Texas politics that an incumbent who is forced into a runoff is not long for his or her electoral world. As the thinking goes, a politician who enjoys the powerful benefits of elected office but cannot muster more than 50 percent of his party’s base voters in March will not likely be able to do so in a runoff contest after nearly three painfully long months. 

Cornyn doesn’t accept this destiny—at least not yet.  Perhaps he can lean on the fact that his runoff opponent is one of the most scandal-riddled politicians in state history—a man who, for what it’s worth in either direction, did survive his own runoff four years ago. (The fact that the man Paxton bested was George P. Bush, a Texas Republican decidedly in the Cornyn mold, may not lend as much comfort to the senator.)

And then there’s the Trump of it all. Despite persistent pleas, the president stayed out of this primary fight, backing neither Cornyn—more likely to help hold a Senate majority—nor Paxton, more likely to help Trump put a final end to the role of personal morality in politics. It seems possible the president could break this truce in the weeks to come.

Anyway, buckle up y’all, because the Republicans are fighting. As Trump’s former campaign manager and now-Cornyn operative Chris Lacivita posted last night in a warning to Paxton and his rival campaign manager Jeff Roe: “The  second wave is going to be a bitch…”

(Images via AP, Shutterstock; illustration/Texas Observer staff)

There were plenty more high-octane races up and down the Republican primary ballot Tuesday. 

Let’s start with the open race to succeed Paxton as attorney general. This primary featured four GOP candidates: right-wing Congressman Chip Roy, state Senator Mayes Middleton, state Senator Joan Huffman, and former Paxton Deputy Aaron Reitz. 

Reitz, who was Paxton’s endorsed candidate and who briefly served in Trump’s DOJ, had promised to use the OAG “to destroy the left.” Alas, he won’t be able to do so, as he was unable to first destroy anyone on the right, coming in last with 14 percent. Tough luck for him and his former boss. 

The biggest surprise was that Mayes Middleton, a conservative state senator and uber-wealthy oil heir from the Houston/Galveston region, ended up coming in first—fueled by over $12 million of his own money and a self-given nickname in “MAGA Mayes.” All that was missing? Practically any real legal experience. 

Middleton managed to purchase himself just shy of 40 percent of the vote, ensuring a runoff contest with the presumed frontrunner in the race, Roy, who got just over 30 percent. 

Roy, a boisterous limited-government conservative who’s oft proven an obstacle to Trump’s priorities in Congress, is a longtime player in Texas right-wing circles. He was Ted Cruz’s first chief of staff in the Senate and practically served as AG in absentia for Paxton, before the latter grew tired of Roy getting credit for running his office and they split on nasty terms. Roy later called for Paxton to get impeached. Roy and Middleton will be a runoff to watch. 

Further down the ballot, former state senator and tea-party firebrand Don Huffines easily won the primary contest for the Texas Comptroller post, which controls the state’s money, budgeting, state contracts, and more. Huffines ran on a promise to DOGE-ify state government—which is sure to go smoothly. 

Notably, in doing so he handily bested the Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock, who was plucked from the state Senate and installed to that position by his political ally Governor Greg Abbott, who did seemingly everything in his power to help Hancock get elected. To no avail. 

Abbott did succeed however in ousting his political nemesis, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller in favor of the Frisco-based honey purveyor Nate Sheets. What a ride. 

Christian nationalist winger Bo French, who left his post as Tarrant County GOP chair to run for Texas Railroad Commission, managed to force a runoff with incumbent Jim Wright by running on a platform promising to use the powers of the oil-and-gas regulator to… stop Sharia law in Texas, among other things. 

A few other down-ballot surprises (or not-so-surprises) for Republican incumbents: One-time GOP phenom and star of his own campaign action movies, Congressman Dan Crenshaw, was demolished by Conroe state Representative Steve Toth, who was boosted by a last-minute Trump endorsement. And scandalized Congressman Tony Gonzales was once again forced into a rematch runoff, even finishing second Tuesday, with gun-obsessed YouTuber Brandon Herrera. 

Lastly, Republican state Representative Stan Kitzman, tagged by the right-wing enforcement forces of Texas as too moderate, was ousted by a man named “Goose” Geesaman. 

The post Cornyn and Paxton Lead a Decadent GOP Empire into Ruinous Runoffs appeared first on The Texas Observer.