The Final 5: October 28, 2026

Brandon Bird. So yes, the married Eagles fans are now the Birds. Congratulations. Have a good night. Here's the Final Five with our Jim Lokey. Right now in the Final Five, when is Dan Sullivan not Dan Sullivan? We'll take you to Alaska. Plus, a brand new documentary exposes alleged corruption in the White House. And if you want to talk about the documentary or politics in the workplace, might be fraught, but we got you covered. That's your Final Five. Let's do this. Welcome into the Final Five. It is Wednesday night. We are starting here on Fox Local, and we start once again on the campaign trail. We are now six days out from Election Day and another round of dueling rallies in battleground states. Republicans, including President Trump, in Ohio tonight. Meantime, former President Obama and Democrats in Georgia. We will get to all of that in a moment. But first, we're going to start in Alaska in a fight over Dan Sullivan. We've talked about the dueling Dan Sullivan's on this show before. It took a whole new dimension today because the Senate race there features a couple of candidates, including the incumbent senator, Republican Dan Sullivan, there in the middle. Mary Peltola is the Democrat. And wait, on the left, another Dan Sullivan? Yes, there are two Dan Sullivans in the same race. And Republicans are crying foul, especially after a New York Times investigation published today alleges that Peltola and Democrats worked together to recruit that second Dan Sullivan just to confuse voters. Now, President Trump and Republicans, who normally call the New York Times fake news and dishonest, now think they are the paragon of journalistic excellence. It's voter fraud. And when you say you didn't do it, that really makes it bad. So I think it's a race that should be. I think Dan Sullivan, the fake Dan Sullivan and Mary Peltola should be number one. They should be taken off the ballot. And number two, they should be prosecuted. Well, we don't have the time to get into it. This is not unique to Alaska. This has happened before in American elections many times. And maybe if you're good, some might I'll tell you the story about three Bob Casey's in Pennsylvania. But the president's comment echoes a Justice Department lawsuit that aims to stop the results from being certified if and only if the incumbent Dan Sullivan loses. For the record, Peltola and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee deny any wrongdoing. This is just another distraction. It's another diversion. Every day, it's some new, you know, look over here moment. Not Dan Sullivan, registered republican incumbent voted for this war in Iran 14 times nobody at the New York Times cares about affordability in Alaska by the way you heard uh Peltola say the registered republican incumbent it's important to note and we should note that on the ballot that the Dan Sullivan the incumbent dan sullivan is denoted as such the other dan sullivan is not let's move on to ohio president trump back in the buckeye state tonight telling reporters to once again imagine he's on the ballot and that if not for him the country would be in a mess right now implying that he believes everything is going well the president though was interrupted by hecklers a couple of times one of whom gave him the bird while reminding everybody about his ties to jeffrey epstein not a big surprise his supporters were not happy to see them there but they did however welcome his classic hits they have a lion a bear a snake and a camel but no other presidents agreed to take It's a very powerful test, very highly respected test, very well-known test. 30 questions, very hard. Some of them, after you get to 50, oh, after you get to 20, 25, very few people. I'm one of the only persons. I passed it all three times. I aced it. Zero mistakes all three times. But, no, that's the good news. Meantime, in Georgia, former President John Obama campaigning with Senator John Ossoff, taking aim at the president's policy and his priorities. I am not making this up. He is literally doing arts and crafts while we are fighting a war and trying to deal with out-of-control prices. Promise to lower prices on day one. Instead, under the failed President Donald J. Trump, it costs more than ever in American history to fill up your truck, stock your fridge, visit the doctor, or power your home. And while the crook president and his crook family rake in billions from all over the world, you pay more for everything. A new documentary levies some serious accusations against President Trump and his administration in his second term. Corruption Land, streaming now, claims the president and his administration were behind dozens of episodes of alleged corruption and abuses of power. The executive producer is Miles Taylor. He's a former official in the first Trump administration. He now heads up Defiance.org. Back up late with me tonight here on The Final Five. Miles, always good to have you on. Good to see you again. Great to see you, Jim. How do you define corruption? Well, look, in the film, we say that corruption is the use of federal power for wrongdoing, for riches, or for revenge. And with that framing, we identified at least 100 instances of alleged corruption in the second Trump administration that met that definition. And we used that as the basis for this film. So you're looking at things like pardons and contracts and firings and investigations, all of that stuff. you know people will look at this and say where's the line between things that are demonstrably wrong and things that you might or anybody might disagree with yeah well i mean ultimately for us it came down to is this something that defies the law is it something that defies normal uh rules of ethics in Washington DC whether it's Democratic or Republican administrations and to apply that as the filter so for instance i think one of the biggest things that you see in the second Trump administration is the misuse of federal funds, things where Congress said to the executive branch, you must spend money on this. And either the executive branch spent it on something else like a ballroom or refused to disburse funds to Americans in need. So, I mean, one of the things that we dug into is we've seen the Trump administration statistically reluctant to approve emergency FEMA aid for Democratic blue cities and states, Whereas it appears Republican cities and states and localities get almost immediate approval. This is very significant. You've got Americans in places where there are hurricanes and tornadoes and floods. And because they didn't vote for the president, they're not getting the support that they would expect from their federal government. Those sorts of things go up into the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. It's not just the money that the president has said he's made since he was president, which is north of $2 billion. dollars. It's all of the different ways federal funds have been used potentially as means of coercion or intimidation against the American people and certainly ways that the president's lieutenants have potentially tried to profit off of their roles inside the Trump administration. When you mentioned the disaster funding, there's a lot of people in Western Maryland who know what you're talking about very well after we saw some terrible storms move through there a while back. Look, they're in any administration, and you know this having served in a few yourself, they're supposed to be guide rails. You're supposed to have ethics lawyers. You're supposed to have inspectors general law enforcement, the courts. They normally are a bulwark. And I think one would argue in the first Trump term, we saw that happen quite a bit. It's not happening much now. Why is that the case? Well, it's not. And I saw those guardrails up close in the first Trump administration, Jim. And to a certain extent, love or hate Donald Trump, they worked. And in the documentary, we go through these as the five corruption filters in Washington that have existed in Republican and Democratic administrations. And it's everything from the ethics officials and the lawyers at the White House to an independent Justice Department and FBI that can investigate if those lawyers don't tell the president no on something that's illegal to the internal watchdogs like inspectors general, the external watchdogs like the press and then the courts and the Congress. And we looked at each of those filters and said, how well are they functioning right now? And what we found in talking to nonpartisan experts and members of Congress and members of the media is that most of those layers are under severe duress, and some of them very intentionally from the administration, which means a lot more corruption is getting through than would normally happen. And I will say that this film is not a partisan broadside. We spoke to a lot of Republicans for this film, a lot of people who are worried about corruption, and probably the one issue of corruption we heard about the most was around the Epstein investigation. And a lot of Democrats and Republicans and independents see that as the symbol of a corrupt Washington. The fact that you could have fourteen hundred women and girls who are estimated to have been sexually abused and want recourse from their government, want an investigation and do have it shut down by their government. That, I think, has been so galling for people. And you see the impact of those sorts of decisions in the film. And folks can, by the way, they can stream it at corruptionland.org for free, and they can also go see the data for themselves, the data we used for this film. There's a map of these 100 alleged instances of corruption, which sum up, by the way, Jim, to $377 billion. When you look at where things stand now and what you encountered, I know early on in this second administration, you talk about the media. There were a lot of media organizations that were very reticent to investigate or report on alleged malfeasance involving President Trump for various reasons. I think you look at CBS News right now. That's a good example of where you're seeing that reticence play out. Did you feel like there was any resistance to getting this out there? I know you're releasing this on the website. I mean, was there was there difficulty getting this out there, getting people on board with talking with you? Well, I mean, one of the meta moments in this film was during one of our shoot days in Washington, D.C., we went to film at the Washington Monument, which is a location that's managed by the National Park Service, publicly accessible to anyone. We got tickets like anyone else. And you're allowed to film there. You're allowed to take pictures at the Washington Monument. But as we were up there, when we started to talk about the corruption you can see around Washington, D.C., and we wanted to go up there just to get a 360 and point out there's the president's ballroom. There's the golf course he's tearing up. There is the reflecting pool. There's where he wants to build a monument. There's the Kennedy Center he's put his name on. And as we were going around and talking about that, you saw the National Park Service get very nervous. Those officials came up. They asked us to stop filming. We explained to them that we were meeting all of the requirements and obligations. In fact, we were using a camera that the tourists behind us, they were using the same camera. And, Jim, they ultimately kicked us out of the Washington Monument, escorted us out of the building. We decided not to make a scene out of it. And I'll tell you why. I don't blame those park officials. Those people are terrified. You see, and it's one of the things we kept running into, the level of fear inside the federal government is enormous because this administration has systematically fired people, pressured them, coerced them, pushed them out of the federal government. And you could tell that these employees were nervous about us filming a documentary about their bosses, bosses, bosses, alleged corruption. And that moment is captured in the film. You can see it at corruptionland.org. And in a sense, we became a data point on that corruption map that we were trying to document. Miles, appreciate the time. Good to see you again. Thanks, Jim. And we're back after this here on the final five from yet another major election in this nation. And as you know, talking politics can be fraught, especially in the workplace. So let's talk more about what we'll encounter and how we can get around it and how we can coexist in the workplace better. Carolyn Johnson is president of the Sherman Center for Inclusion and Diversity. She's up late with me tonight here on the final five. Hi, Carolyn. Welcome. Good evening. How are you? I'm good. So, look, I know that they say what we were probably both raised to say you never discuss religion and politics at the dinner table. The workplace, especially over the last couple of years, it has certainly changed. It's evolved. And for a lot of people, it can be a very, very fraught situation when people want to discuss politics around you when you're trying to get your job done. This is very true. And I couldn't agree with more and more with the changes that we're seeing from a research perspective in the workplace. specifically as it relates to civility or incivility. So, I agree with you 100%. You, Sherman, put out the Civility Index. And explain what that is and how you go about determining what entails the Civility Index. Sure. So, the Civility Index is a quarterly pulse. And we survey U.S. workers on their experience with how they're treated and what they see happening potentially to others in the workplace. And we started doing this because, you know, going into next week around elections and around politics, the impact on productivity that incivility has is something that we needed to be able to put a number on. And so our research found that due to incivility, your organizations are losing about two point six billion dollars a day. Right. And absenteeism and lost productivity as a result of incivility and incivility defined or ways in which you could look at it are are people being treated differently because of their political beliefs or as you talked about at the top of this around the dinner table, religious beliefs. And then what is management or what are leaders doing to ensure that the workplace is a place where folks can come, feel respected, be respected and get their work done? In terms of respect in the workplace, I think we've had these national conversations that time and time again over over the last several decades. And we look at it, treating people with respect, with dignity, making sure that they're free from harassment of all sorts. But when it comes to politics, you have gauged a number in the survey where people say that they want their workplaces to stay politically neutral. Yep, that's right. So let's talk about two numbers. So just last month, Jim, 74 percent of workers saw or experienced incivility just last month, while 87 percent of them said they want their employers to remain neutral. So this, for the data that we're seeing, is truly a manager gap. And while we're sticking to the numbers, 35% of workers say their managers ignore incivility. And ignoring incivility can be anything like, you know, not having the same consequences for performers just because, you know, they are producing at a different level. It can be silence or it can also be not modeling the behavior that should, quite frankly, be part of your code of conduct. So we're hearing we're seeing one thing happen to folks. We're hearing them say that they're OK having a workplace where politics are not discussed. But that's not what's actually happening. It also comes down to a generational gap, too, between younger and older workers. Yes, it does. And when we talk about the generational differences, for the first time, generational differences was talked about as a bigger issue in the workplace than politics to the tune of 37 percent compared to 32 percent. And some people may say, because I'm big on definitions, Jim. So, like, what are generational differences? It can be the environment. It can be artificial intelligence. It could be communication style. It can be, you know, the way in which you're expected to work, report to the office or remote. And so some of those issues are what we're hearing folks say also create situations where behavior is not civil. And this comes in so many different ways. I mean, it can happen face to face. It can happen just by by the environment that management has set. It can come virtually or digitally. So when we get when we get to Wednesday morning, day after the midterms and, you know, maybe look, not everybody lives and dies by what happens in elections. There are a lot of people who prefer to stay politically agnostic. How do you navigate that the next day? So more than just navigating it the next day, I think we have to continuously prepare managers to address incivility promptly and model constructive disagreement. And so that's going to be something that it's a muscle, if you will, that we have to flex on a regular basis so that it's not a function of what happens next week or what happens after election day. If we want to make sure that our workplaces are healthy and that the culture is one that people can thrive, then we have to make sure that this is something that we do on a regular basis. We model it on a regular basis. We have a conduct, a code of conduct applied to it, and that the consequences, no matter who someone is, are applied equally. If people want more information about what you do at Sherman in the Civility Index, Where's the best place to go? www.shrm.org. That's S-H-R-M dot org. Carolyn Johnson, I can keep talking about this, but we're out of time. I really appreciate you taking some time to talk with us here. Yep, absolutely. And if I can just offer you a closing thought. Let's go. I want folks to remember that civility is how differences become for performance and not problems. Please do remember that if you don't remember anything else I said. Words to live by. Carolyn, thank you. We're back after this. it has been 48 hours since the cheesecake factory entered our political discourse and my friends i regret to inform you it is continued this evening it's the third block and we head back to that democratic rally in georgia tonight former president obama following up on his comments about president trump's design taste over the weekend and if you missed it this is what the former president had to say a ball rose garden put a helicopter pad on the south lawn and and there's gold everywhere what's up with the gold everything more gold he's got the white ass looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory well you know Republicans did not care for that joke everybody from Fox News to Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sounded off calling Obama an out-of-touch elitist for ripping on the Cheesecake Factory the president the current occupant of the office said his predecessor does not understand design but tonight the former president once again on the campaign trail pointing out there was one aspect of his insult that was apparently not disputed did not dispute what i said about them being directly responsible for rising prices they did not argue with that they did not deny tariffs were contributing to higher costs for families they didn't say anything about that the president wasn't even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison that part didn't bother him all right oh cable news is gonna be fun tomorrow folks moving on to Minnesota a state that's received a lot of attention from Republicans because of alleged fraud stemming from social services and elections the GOP should be celebrating tonight because two real cases of election fraud have been prosecuted emphasis on the should in that sentence because the Minnesota Reformer reports right-wing influencers James O'Keefe and Cam Higbee have been charged for unlawfully voting and identity theft. It follows a stunt in the August primary where they tried to unsuccessfully prove that Minnesota's defense against voter fraud is insufficient. The men posted videos where they went to polling places wearing Islamic garb trying to register to vote illegally. Higbee posted on social media within an hour of being charged saying, quote, they want me in prison for exposing election vulnerabilities in their states. Coming up next, the final five will tell you who's sleeping soundly. A news toxic attorney tonight Well, the Michigan Senate race was supposed to be a nail-biter, but with less than a week to go, Democrat Abdul Sayed is showing some momentum, with new polls putting him ahead. As the race tightens, the rhetoric is getting uglier. Tonight, Senator Ted Cruz said there's a, quote, very real risk that Americans will die if El-Sayed wins and ends up on the Senate Intel Committee. El-Sayed denies it. That's especially striking, though, in Michigan, home to one of the largest Muslim and Arab-American communities in the country. They may have different politics and faiths, but they're Americans just the same. Meanwhile, in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu may have beaten the polls, but he hasn't yet beaten the math. His block has gained ground as the votes are counted, but he's still short of the needed seats to govern. That may mean the real election could be starting as Netanyahu looks for new allies, and his opponents may need support from Arab parties that they've been reluctant to embrace. So if Bibi may have survived election night, whether his government does is another question. That's your Final Five. We're back at it again tomorrow at 11.30. Congratulations, the Brewers. Go to bed.