Politics

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17218022

Archive link: https://archive.is/PCpMN

> This is not being reported in the U.S. news media. Maybe you can argue it's because it's July 4th, but if this doesn't come out in a major way tomorrow, I guess the fix is in.

OP note: I couldn't find anything either.

"Trump’s name appears over and over again on Jeffrey Epstein’s message logs in the grand jury docs released this week. It is also undisputed: Trump’s name appears 7 times on Epstein’s private jet flight logs, that Epstein flew on Trump’s jet with a young girl of indeterminate age, girls who Epstein trafficked worked at Mar-A-Lago, a girl Epstein trafficked mentioned visiting Trump’s casino in a recently released deposition transcript.

Trump said Epstein is a great guy who likes girls on the younger side, Trump frequently “partied” with Epstein, Trump wished Ghislaine Maxwell well at her criminal trial, and someone who testified under the pseudonym JANE DOE at the Ghislaine Maxwell criminal trial stated that she was introduced to Trump by Epstein when she was 14 years old," a user posted on X.

For more than a year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has owed the state over $11,000 in fines for filing late campaign finance reports. Now, his office is charged with collecting the money.

The situation presents a clear conflict of interest for enforcement of the state’s campaign finance laws, said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a government watchdog group.

New campaign finance records show that Donald Trump's political action committee paid the legal firm representing the former president's longtime adviser Boris Epshteyn ahead of his pending criminal trial in Arizona.

The leadership PAC, Save America, made two payments of $40,000 and $10,000 on May 14 to the Phoenix-based law firm Tully Bailey LLP. Named partner Michael Bailey, who was the U.S. attorney for Arizona from 2019 to 2021, has represented Epshteyn in the Arizona case since at least May 9, according to court records.

He did not send questions to the White House ahead of time, nor did he get approval for the topics to be discussed during the interview.

Recording began as soon as Biden was miked and sitting in the chair that Friday at 2:50 p.m. Earlier that day, Biden’s press staff had said the president would have only 10 minutes for the interview, instead of the previously agreed upon 20 minutes. We requested that the interview go the full 20 minutes. You can hear during the unedited interview a couple of moments when White House staff interrupted to signal that the interview should come to a close. Biden seemed eager to continue talking.

The agency had first proposed to revoke the regulation in November 2023. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, BVO was banned in the UK in 1970, followed by India in 1990, the EU in 2008 and Japan in 2010.

Another fake which went viral earlier this year was more directly aimed at American politics.

It was published on a website called The Houston Post – one of dozens of sites with American-sounding names which are in reality run from Moscow - and alleged that the FBI illegally wiretapped Donald Trump’s Florida resort.

It played neatly into Trump’s allegations that the legal system is unfairly stacked against him, that there is a conspiracy to thwart his campaign, and that his opponents are using dirty tricks to undermine him. Mr Trump himself has accused the FBI of snooping on his conversations.

Experts say that the operation is just one part of a much larger ongoing effort, led from Moscow, to spread disinformation during the US election campaign.

While no hard evidence has emerged that these particular fake news websites are run by the Russian state, researchers say the scale and sophistication of the operation is broadly similar to previous Kremlin-backed efforts to spread disinformation in the West.

“Russia will be involved in the US 2024 election, as will others,” said Chris Krebs, who as the director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was responsible for ensuring the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.

Giuliani has been disbarred, according to a decision handed down Tuesday by the Appellate Division First Department in New York.

The ruling is a consequence of Giuliani's "demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers, and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump's failed effort at reelection in 2020."

Handing the Biden administration an unexpected win amidst a legal back-and-forth, a court over the weekend agreed to let the Education Department continue implementing the final phases of a student loan repayment plan that will lower people’s monthly bills.

This comes after the department had already begun the process to put 3 million borrowers into a payment pause, a move officials said was necessary to comply with the court’s initial ruling last week to halt the payment cuts. But because of the latest ruling, borrowers enrolled in the SAVE Plan will now go forward with payments at their new rates beginning in July and August, officials said.

The Supreme Court today correctly found that social media platforms, like newspapers, bookstores, and art galleries before them, have First Amendment rights to curate and edit the speech of others they deliver to their users, and the government has a very limited role in dictating what social media platforms must and must not publish. Although users remain understandably frustrated with how the large platforms moderate user speech, the best deal for users is when platforms make these decisions instead of the government.

In a letter filed with the New York court, prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said they would be open to a two-week delay in the July 11 sentencing in order to file a response to Trump’s motions.

“Although we do believe the case to be without merit, we do not oppose his request” to delay the sentencing pending determination of the motion, the prosecutors wrote.

The letter came one day after Trump’s attorney requested the judge delay the sentencing as he weighs the high court’s decision and how it could influence the New York case.

Justice Clarence Thomas used the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity on Monday to again request that the constitutionality of special prosecutors, like Jack Smith, be called into question.

In his opinion, Thomas asked the lower courts to render a ruling on Smith and the legality of the special prosecutor’s office before they proceed with Donald Trump’s pair of federal criminal cases that Smith’s team is prosecuting. No other justice signed onto Thomas’ opinion.

“If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people,” Thomas wrote. “The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the special counsel’s appointment before proceeding.”

A former Goldman Sachs banker turned alt-right media figure, Bannon was seen by Democrats as the brain behind not only Trump's extraordinary political rise but also some of his most divisive policies.

The huge handbook of "Project 2025" is positioned in a place of pride in the room. The 900-page tome put together by the Heritage Foundation - a conservative think tank - contains detailed plans for how a second Trump administration will transform the American government and the power of the executive branch.

It is “impossible”, he told me, for Joe Biden to win the election in November. And, therefore, there is no way he or his "Maga army" will accept the result if the president is reelected.

Organized labor is in the midst of a fierce campaign to make inroads at auto manufacturers in the South, most recently at the Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, where on May 17, 56% of workers voted narrowly against joining the United Auto Workers. But a few months before the unsuccessful vote at Mercedes, workers 100 miles away at an EV bus manufacturing plant in Anniston, Alabama, unionized and won a historic contract. In January 2024, the majority of the around 600 workers at a plant run since 2013 by New Flyer, the largest transit bus manufacturer in North America, signed a union card to join the International Union of Electrical Workers-Communications Workers of America (IUE-CWA). Over the last couple of years, workers at the company’s other plants in Kentucky and New York have unionized, joining two longtime union shops in Minnesota. Together, they now make up the largest union in the public transit bus manufacturing sector in the United States, with over 2,350 members.

The Supreme Court on Monday revived a lawsuit by a North Dakota truck stop that is challenging the fees banks can charge for debit-card transactions in a ruling that could have deeper implications for other government regulations.

The decision was the latest from the Supreme Court this term that would make it easier for industries to challenge what conservative critics describe as the “administrative state.”

“Today’s ruling is especially significant in light of Friday’s decision overruling Chevron, because it means that even old agency rules can be challenged anew so long as they produce any contemporary harm,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, rejected Trump's broad immunity claims and said that Trump only has immunity for his "official" acts as president. The high court did not determine what constitutes an official act in this case, leaving that to the lower court.

The court's liberal justices issued blistering dissents of the majority opinion. In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the ruling "breaks new and dangerous ground."

California’s legislators pass hundreds of new laws each year, most of which take effect in January. But a handful kick in on July 1, the start of the state’s fiscal year.

Signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, the wide-ranging new laws include sweeping protections for California consumers against hidden “junk” fees that add unexpected costs to everything from concert tickets to food delivery. The laws also tackle issues related to housing affordability, the difficulty of fixing your own iPhone and other electronic devices, and screening measures to detect date-rape drugs in alcoholic drinks at bars and nightclubs.

Officials in Nevada have formally certified a proposed amendment that would enshrine abortion access in the state's constitution to appear on the November ballot.

The move was announced late Friday by organizers behind the ballot measure as well as the Nevada secretary of state’s office. It makes Nevada the sixth state to put the issue of abortion rights directly before voters in this year's election.

“The support this initiative has received from Nevadans throughout the signature collection process shows what we’ve known to be true: Nevadans believe that healthcare decisions about abortion are best left to women, their doctors, and those they love and trust — not politicians,” Lindsey Harmon, the president of Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, the group behind the effort, said in statement.

A Sarasota judge has ruled that law enforcement officials violated former Florida Republican Party Chairman Christian Ziegler’s rights during their investigation into an alleged sexual battery and video voyeurism.

In a 46-page order posted early Monday morning, Sarasota County Circuit Court Judge Hunter Carroll declared that search warrants that allowed investigators to comb through Ziegler’s cell phone for documents — including hundreds of thousands of photos, videos and text messages — were “severely overbroad,” and contained communications that had “no connection” to the allegations against Ziegler.

The Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped ruling whether Florida and Texas laws limiting how social media companies regulate content violate the First Amendment, sending the issue back to the lower courts for further review.

Theopinion was authored by Justice Elena Kagan.

The loan was finalized in February after the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, suggested sending pandas to the San Diego zoo as “envoys of friendship” between China and the US.

Officials with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance were on hand in China for a farewell ceremony commemorating the departure of the giant pandas, Yun Chuan and Xin Bao.

The celebration included cultural performances, video salutations from Chinese and American students, and a gift exchange among conservation partners, the zoo said in a statement. After the ceremony, the giant pandas began their trip to southern California.

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outside in public places, ruling along ideological lines that such laws don’t amount to cruel and unusual punishment, even in West Coast areas where shelter space is lacking.

The case is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the U.S. are without a permanent place to live.

In a 6-3 decision, the high court reversed a ruling by a San Francisco-based appeals court that found outdoor sleeping bans violate the Eighth Amendment.

A federal appeals court appears to have cleared the way for top officials in the attorney general's office to testify before a grand jury, signaling the criminal probe into alleged corruption by Ken Paxton lives on well after the Senate killed his impeachment last year.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order last week rejecting an unnamed state agency's attempt to stop federal investigators from calling top officials before a grand jury on Tuesday. The order suggested the agency may be trying to withhold evidence of criminal activity.

The Iowa Supreme Court said Friday the state's strict abortion law is legal, telling a lower court to dissolve a temporary block on the law and allowing Iowa to ban most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy — before many women know they are pregnant.

The 4-3 ruling is a win for Republican lawmakers, and Iowa joins more than a dozen other states with restrictive abortion laws following the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Currently, 14 states have near-total bans at all stages of pregnancy and three ban abortions at about six weeks.

The Texas Supreme Court upheld the state's ban on gender-affirming care for minors, rejecting pleas from parents that it violates their right to seek medical care for their transgender children.

The 8-1 ruling from the all-Republican court, released Friday, leaves in place a law that has been in effect since Sept. 1, 2023. Texas is the largest of at least 25 states that have adopted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.

Most of those states face lawsuits, and the U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear an appeal from the Biden administration attempting to block state bans on gender-affirming care. The case before the high court involves a Tennessee law that restricts puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors, similar to the Texas law.

In a ruling involving a challenge to a fisheries regulation, the court consigned to history a 1984 ruling called Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. That decision had said judges should defer to federal agencies in interpreting the law when the language of a statute is ambiguous, thereby giving regulatory flexibility to bureaucrats.

It is the latest in a series of rulings in which the conservative justices have taken aim at the power of federal agencies, including one on Thursday involving in-house Securities and Exchange Commission adjudications. The ruling was 6-3, with the conservative justices in the majority and liberal justices dissenting.

The justices in a 6-3 vote on nonideological lines handed a win to defendant Joseph Fischer, who is among hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants — including former President Donald Trump — who have been charged with obstructing an official proceeding over the effort to prevent Congress' certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory.

The court concluded that the law, enacted in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act after the Enron accounting scandal, was only intended to apply to more limited circumstances involving forms of evidence tampering, not the much broader array of situations that prosecutors had claimed it covered.

• The Guardian
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Bowing to pressure from conservatives, the superintendent of a Texas school district agreed earlier this month to remove 676 books from its libraries, including seminal texts on the Holocaust and antisemitism, according to a report by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

That superintendent, Carol Perez, is now facing her own removal by a board of trustees that recently voted to initiate a separation process on the grounds that her 10-year contract is illegal, clearly violating a Texas law that limits such contracts to five years.

Though the censorship has not been cited as a cause for removal, the decision by the trustees came just weeks after she provoked backlash by immediately surrendering to a demand from right-wing activists to purge "very sexually explicit" and "filthy and

Exercising a little-known authority called “retention,” the commissioner, Edward Caban, ensured the case would never go to trial.

Instead, Caban reached his own conclusion in private.

He decided that it “would be detrimental to the Police Department’s disciplinary process” to pursue administrative charges against the officer, Gerard Dowling, according to a letter the department sent to the oversight agency. The force that the officer used against Villafane was “reasonable and necessary.” The commissioner ordered no discipline.

Today, Dowling is a deputy chief of the unit that handles protests throughout the city.

The information on payments comes from reports filed by the companies with state regulators and a national association — data that is not released to the public.

Regulators across the country collect troves of data about the performance of companies. It is assembled by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

Companies have claimed some of the data is a trade secret, and the association has resisted efforts at more transparency. Weiss says his company posts the information it purchased from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners on its website for Florida-specific insurers.

“A consumer, before buying a policy from a company, should know right up front what percentage of claims are being denied,” Weiss said. “We’ll be glad to make that number public, but we’d much prefer either the authorities or the company do that job.”

In a scathing dissent Thursday of the Supreme Court’s Idaho abortion decision, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the ruling is “not a victory for pregnant patients” even though it allows emergency abortions for now.

“It is delay,” she wrote, which she read from the bench. “While this Court dawdles and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires.”

Brown said the high court had the opportunity “to bring clarity and certainty to this tragic situation, and we have squandered it.”

The unnamed 23-year-old juror reported that she had received a gift bag filled with cash in the closing days of the federal criminal trial in Minneapolis.

"This is stuff that happens in mob movies," Assistant US Attorney Joseph Thompson said earlier this month after the alleged scheme emerged.

Prosecutors have charged 70 people with stealing $250m from federal food programmes during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Among the five charged with bribery are three who stood trial for providing fake names of non-existent children they were claiming to feed and creating a fraudulent paper trail in order to pocket millions of dollars.

The justices in a 5-4 vote on Thursday rejected arguments by the Biden administration and Democratic-controlled states that the plan was cutting air pollution and saving lives in 11 states where it was being enforced and that the high court’s intervention was unwarranted.

The rule is intended to restrict smokestack emissions from power plants and other industrial sources that burden downwind areas with smog-causing pollution. It will remain on hold while the federal appeals court in Washington considers a challenge to the plan from industry and Republican-led states.

The justices ruled in a 6-3 vote that people accused of fraud by the SEC, which regulates securities markets, have the right to a jury trial in federal court. The in-house proceedings the SEC has used in some civil fraud complaints violate the Constitution, the court said.

The SEC was awarded more than $5 billion in civil penalties in the 2023 government spending year that ended Sept. 30, the agency said in a news release. It was unclear how much of that money came through in-house proceedings or lawsuits in federal court.

A narrowly divided Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision struck down a hard-fought bankruptcy plan for OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma that would have awarded $6 billion to state and local governments to fight opioid addiction and payouts to more than 100,000 victims of opioid overdoses while also extending immunity to Purdue's owners, the Sackler family.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority that included Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the text of the bankruptcy code does not allow discharging a third party -- in this case, the Sacklers -- from any legal liability when they are not themselves declaring bankruptcy.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down part of a federal anti-corruption law that makes it a crime for state and local officials to take gifts valued at more than $5,000 from a donor who had previously been awarded lucrative contracts or other government benefits thanks to the efforts of the official.

By a 6-3 vote, the justices overturned the conviction of a former Indiana mayor who asked for and took a $13,000 payment from the owners of a local truck dealership after he helped them win $1.1 million in city contracts for the purchase of garbage trucks.

In ruling for the former mayor, the justices drew a distinction between bribery, which requires proof of an illegal deal, and a gratuity that can be a gift or a reward for a past favor. They said the officials may be charged and prosecuted for bribery, but not for simply taking money for past favors if there was no proof of an illicit deal.

Supreme Court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe confirmed that a document was “inadvertently and briefly uploaded” to the court website, but added that the ruling “has not been released.”

NBC News has not seen a copy of the document and could not independently verify the document. It is not known if it was a draft decision, the actual decision or neither.