In 2026, the Democratic Party has a Senate candidate in Maine, Graham Platner, who wore a tattoo replicating the Totenkopf — the insignia of the SS branch that ran the death camps; he says he didn't know its meaning and has covered it, and Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed him. It has a House nominee in New Jersey, Adam Hamawy — an Army veteran never charged with any crime — with a documented association with Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh" convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspiracy; the Congressional Progressive Caucus endorsed him by name. And in Florida, Lev Parnas — convicted of funneling foreign money into U.S. elections, a participant in the 2019 operation that also ran through Treasury-designated Russian agent Andrii Derkach — is running for Congress as an anti-corruption Democrat.

Two years earlier, the same party ended a four-term legislator's career over a single photograph. A party has every right to decide who runs under its label — so the question isn't the power, it's the standard. Each of these records, on its own, exceeds the one that disqualified Sarah Unsicker. So what is the standard actually tracking?

Eric Garland is an intelligence analyst personally sanctioned by the Russian Federation in May 2022 for his work on Russian intelligence operations. He is the author of the 2016 "Game Theory" thread, named by The New York Times as one of the 25 most important tweets in history.
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SOURCES

U.S. Department of the Treasury, OFAC — designation of Andrii Derkach as an active Russian agent, September 10, 2020
United States v. Parnas, S.D.N.Y. — conviction October 2021; sentenced June 2022
TIME — profile of Adam Hamawy, June 3, 2026
Reporting on Graham Platner and the Totenkopf tattoo, 2026