Headlines for Thursday, May 4, 2023
🗽A well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson
🗽A well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson
Pro Publica: Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Private School. Harlan Crow Paid the Tuition: In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.” Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow. The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.
POLITICO: Black Caucus presses Senate Dems to blow up tradition on judges: Tensions are escalating between Senate Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus over the arcane tradition that gives a single senator veto power over President Joe Biden’s judicial picks. The Black Caucus quietly met with Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) last week to lobby against the decades-old Senate practice that Republicans have recently used to block one district court nominee and stall another — slowing Biden’s efforts to stock the federal bench. Both House and Senate Democrats are worried that the GOP will ramp up its roadblocks of Biden judicial picks through the tradition known as “blue slips,” named for the color of the forms that senators return to approve of home-state judicial nominees.
Washington Post: Tucker Carlson floats plan to host alternative GOP debate in post-Fox future: Lesser-known cable channels are itching to build a new brand around him. Industry experts think he could make a mint in podcasting. But Tucker Carlson — who was fired by Fox News last week at the height of his popularity and influence in right-wing punditry — has aspirations of moving into a larger role that doesn’t limit him to a single medium, according to people familiar with his thinking. And he is willing to walk away from some of the millions that Fox is contractually obligated to pay him, if that would give him the flexibility to have a prominent voice in the 2024 election cycle. Most ambitiously, Carlson wants to moderate his own GOP candidate forum, outside of the usual strictures of the Republican National Committee debate system. The idea, which he has discussed with Donald Trump, the front-runner for the party nomination, would test his vaunted sway over conservative politics. And it would take a jab at his former employer — Fox is hosting the first official primary debate, which Trump has threatened not to attend — if he can manage to make his grandest plan happen.
New York Times: Four Proud Boys Convicted of Sedition in Key Jan. 6 Case: Four members of the Proud Boys, including their former leader Enrique Tarrio, were convicted on Thursday of seditious conspiracy for plotting to keep President Donald J. Trump in power after his election defeat by leading a violent mob in attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The jurors in the case failed to reach a decision on the sedition charge for one of the defendants, Dominic Pezzola, although he was convicted of other serious felonies. The verdicts, coming after seven days of deliberations in Federal District Court in Washington, were a major blow against one of the country’s most notorious far-right groups and another milestone in the Justice Department’s vast investigation of the Capitol attack.
Washington Post: Behind Trump’s musical tribute to some of the most violent Jan. 6 rioters: Most nights at 9 p.m., defendants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol flicker the lights in their D.C. jail cells to signal to supporters outside that it’s time to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” together. The recital has become a sacred ritual for a subset of Donald Trump’s movement devoted to heroizing the accused rioters. The former president is now embracing their cause, lending his voice to a recording of the “J6 Prison Choir” and playing it to start the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign. The song, “Justice for All,” features Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance mixed with a rendition of the national anthem. “Our people love those people,” Trump went on to say at the rally, speaking of those who were jailed. “What’s happening in that prison, it’s a hellhole. ... These are people that shouldn’t have been there.”
CNN: Trump’s lawyers say they will seek to move New York criminal case to federal court: Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys said Thursday they plan to try to move the criminal case against him to federal court. Trump attorney Todd Blanche told New York Judge Juan Merchan during the tail end of a procedural hearing Thursday that Trump’s legal team would file a motion later in the day to seek to move the case to federal court. The attempt to move the case into federal court appears to be a long-shot bid to try to undercut Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump, who pleaded not guilty last month to charges of falsifying business records with the intent to conceal illegal conduct connected to his 2016 presidential campaign.
Semafor: Donald Trump’s dig at Ron DeSantis over Disney wasn’t a random attack: Last month, Trump took to Truth Social to levy a new (and for many, unexpected) attack against Ron DeSantis: His war with Disney was a disaster. The Trump campaign is hoping they can reframe DeSantis’ Disney fight as a failure on its own terms, rather than litigate the company’s underlying behavior. The “main precursor” to Trump’s focus on the Disney fight, one person close to Trump said, came back in March, when Disney used a legal maneuver to retain influence over the area around the park that the state hoped to reassign to their own board. In that moment, his team began to see a clear path take shape to go after DeSantis.
“This isn’t about defending Disney,” a person close to Trump said. “This is about DeSantis’s lack of strength in preventing Disney from doing this.” Some members of Trump’s team have also pointed to DeSantis’s recent half-joking proposal to put up a prison next door to the theme park as evidence that the Florida governor’s fight has gotten out of hand, and raised questions on how DeSantis’ escalations could affect everyday taxpayers and other Florida businesses, something Trump himself has brought up.
The Hill: Chevron case: Supreme Court could take sledgehammer to agency power: The justices this week agreed to take up a case that asks them to overrule a 39-year-old precedent that gives federal agencies deference in rulemaking that Congress hasn’t clearly authorized. That decision could have wide-ranging impacts that scale back the executive branch’s authority to implement certain environment, employment, drug and other regulations when the justices decide whether to overrule the court’s 1984 decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, known as the Chevron deference. The test has become a bedrock of administrative law, and judges have cited it in more than 10,000 subsequent decisions, according to research by Columbia Law School professor Thomas Merrill. Legal experts noted Chevron has been cited by Democratic and Republican administrations in implementing regulations across the board, ranging from overtime pay to pollution to visa programs.
The Guardian: Donald Trump goes on attack against rape case while on Irish trip: The former president said on Thursday he would probably attend the trial in New York but called it a political attack built on false claims by the accuser, the writer E Jean Carroll. “I have to go back for a woman that made a false accusation about me and I have a judge who’s extremely hostile,” he told reporters while playing golf at a resort he owns in Doonbeg, County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland. However, Trump’s lawyer in court, Joe Tacopina, said he is still not expected to attend the trial or testify. Trump repeated previous assertions that Carroll was a Democrat who invented the story to sell a memoir. “I have no idea who she is,” he claimed. “It’s ridiculous. She made a claim, she wrote a book, she made a claim.”
Reuters: North Carolina House passes 12-week abortion ban: North Carolina's Republican-dominated House on Wednesday passed and sent to the state Senate a controversial bill limiting most abortions to the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, a sharp drop from the state's current limit of 20 weeks' gestation. The bill passed 71-46 along party lines, with one Republican and two Democratic lawmakers not voting. If the state Senate passes the bill on Thursday as expected, Democratic Governor Roy Cooper will almost certainly veto it. But Republicans have a supermajority in the House, thanks to a formerly Democratic lawmaker who switched parties in April, and can override Cooper's veto if the lone Republican who abstained from Wednesday's vote supports it.
Forbes: Trumps Fail To Turn Over Documents In Fraud Case, New York Attorney General Claims: Donald Trump, his three eldest children and the Trump Organization failed to turn over emails and other communications in a fraud lawsuit, the New York attorney general’s office claimed in a letter submitted in court last week. The office singled out “an unexplained drop-off in emails for Ivanka Trump” as one of the more significant issues. The refusal to provide material goes back to the investigation into the Trumps’ business practices that preceded the lawsuit, the letter notes. In May 2022, the former president paid a $110,000 fine after Judge Arthur Engoron found Trump in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena from the attorney general’s office. “For years, Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization have tried to thwart our lawful investigation, but today’s decision makes clear that no one can evade accountability,” Attorney General Letitia James said when a judge ordered Trump ordered to pay the fine last year. The attorney general’s office is now saying the Trumps’ evasiveness has continued into the discovery process of the $250 million lawsuit, which alleges Donald Trump, his children, the Trump Organization and some of its top executives inflated property values to obtain economic benefits, such as securing cheaper loans. The defendants have denied the charges.
POLITICO: Jury in rape trial hears from Trump — but not in person: Donald Trump has not attended the civil trial in which E. Jean Carroll is accusing him of rape, but jurors watched the former president defend himself Thursday. In a videotaped deposition played in Manhattan federal court, he justified statements he made in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, lobbed personal attacks at a lawyer questioning him and described rape as “the worst thing you can do, the worst charge.” The video showed the former president growing agitated, at times crossing his arms over his chest, under questioning by Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, who says Trump raped her in a dressing room at the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s. Carroll is suing Trump for battery and defamation. He has denied the alleged attack, saying it “never happened.” In the deposition, conducted at Mar-a-Lago in October, Kaplan asked Trump about the “Access Hollywood” tape, a recording from 2005 in which Trump can be heard saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” adding: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
NBC News: Texas Senate passes bill to allow secretary of state to overturn Harris County elections: The Texas Legislature is advancing a bill that would allow the secretary of state to redo elections in Harris County, where a number of Democratic candidates posted strong midterm election results and which has been dogged by GOP claims of election mismanagement. The Republican-controlled Senate passed the bill Tuesday and sent it to the state House. If it is enacted, it would allow the secretary of state to toss out election results in the state's largest county and call a new vote if there is "good cause" to believe that at least 2% of polling places ran out of usable ballots during voting hours. The bill would apply only to counties with populations greater than 2.7 million, effectively singling out Harris County, which is home to Houston and has by far the largest population in the state, at nearly 5 million. In recent decades, Harris County has become more Democratic.
CNN: New documents show how Sandra Day O’Connor helped George W. Bush win the 2000 election
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor provided the early framework that steered the outcome in the dispute over the 2000 presidential election and ensured George W. Bush would win the White House over Al Gore, Supreme Court documents released on Tuesday show. Memos found in the newly opened files of the late Justice John Paul Stevens offer a first-ever view of the behind-the-scenes negotiations on Bush v. Gore at the court. They also demonstrate the tension among the nine justices being asked to decide a presidential election on short deadlines.
Washington Post: US Elections Are More Democratic Now. Thank the Money.
Colin Allred, a former NFL player now in his third term in the US House, plans to give up a safe Texas seat to take on Ted Cruz for the US Senate in 2024. He is probably Democrats’ best hope to challenge the Republican incumbent. While his bid, announced Wednesday, is a long shot, Allred’s candidacy is proof that the torrent of money involved in political campaigns, and specifically the huge number of small-scale donations, has been a boon for American democracy.
CNN: Exclusive: Special counsel probing Trump Organization’s handling of Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage
Prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith have been asking questions in recent weeks about the handling of surveillance footage from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort after the Trump Organization received a subpoena last summer for the footage, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation.The handling of the footage, and how employees within the Trump Organization responded to the Justice Department’s demand for it, have prompted a new round of grand jury subpoenas to top Trump employees in the last few weeks, the sources told CNN.
Washington Post: Judge throws out Trump lawsuit against New York Times
Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the New York Times was tossed out by a New York Supreme Court judge on Wednesday, with the former president being ordered to pay all attorney’s fees, other legal expenses and associated costs. Trump, who is facing a number of legal battles, filed the $100 million lawsuit in 2021, alleging that the Times and his niece, Mary Trump, had worked together on “an insidious plot” to secure his tax records for a story on his tax issues, which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. The lawsuit claimed that interactions between three Times reporters and his niece led to a “breach of contract” of a 2001 family confidentiality agreement.
ABC News: Trump should not be subject to 'muzzle' regarding indictment, his attorneys say
Former President Donald Trump should have no "muzzle" on him while he defends himself against a criminal indictment in Manhattan, his attorneys plan to argue during a hearing Thursday. Trump, who pleaded not guilty last month to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, is fighting the imposition of a protective order as sought by the Manhattan district attorney's office. "The People have proposed what would be an unprecedented and extraordinarily broad muzzle on a leading contender for the presidency of the United States," defense attorneys Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles wrote in an opposition memo submitted ahead of Thursday's hearing.
Daily Beast: How Trump’s Legal Jeopardy Will Test American Democracy
Donald Trump's 2024 campaign for the White House is about to collide with an 1892 Supreme Court decision and a federal criminal trial rule, setting up a spectacular legal clash that the Framers of our Constitution could never have imagined. As the subject of two federal grand jury investigations, Trump faces the prospect of running his presidential campaign—whether as the Republican Party nominee or an independent—from the defense table in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C.
Reuters: Trump says he will probably attend civil rape trial
Donald Trump said on Thursday he will "probably" attend an ongoing civil trial in New York where he is accused of rape and defamation, repeating his denials of the allegations during a visit to his Irish golf resort. Writer E. Jean Carroll, 79, says Trump, 76, raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the mid-1990s, and then tarred her reputation and career by lying about it online. "I will probably attend (the trial) and I think it's a disgrace that it's allowed to happen, false accusations against a rich guy, or in my case against a famous, rich and political person," the former U.S. president told reporters while he played golf at the Doonbeg resort in southwest Ireland.
Politico: Opinion: Trump’s Election Denialism Is Already Winning
Presidents of the United States who have lost elections generally don’t go on to dominate their parties and win the office again. Donald Trump has found a work-around, by denying he was defeated in 2020. This effort has been overwhelmingly successful among its target audience of Republican voters and has tilted the playing field of the 2024 nomination battle in his favor. Trump has made himself the incumbent in exile, the sitting president in the hearts and minds of his supporters, the martyr of shadowy forces (so shadowy, in fact, that they can’t be readily identified) and the true heir chiseled out of his rightful throne by an unscrupulous pretender. This creates a terrible dilemma for Trump’s opponents: How do you run against a defeated president without noting the highly relevant fact that he was, ahem, defeated?
Wall Street Journal: Will Trump Prove to Be Another Romney?
President Biden’s team hopes the 2024 race will mirror the last one. It won’t, if Republicans are smart. This time, there’s no pandemic to excuse Mr. Biden’s campaigning from his basement. His mental decline will be obvious, as will his turn to the left. He won’t be able to portray himself convincingly as a moderate unifier, as he did in 2020. No wonder Mr. Biden is losing independents—only 14% said in the April 17 Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center poll that they’d like him to run for re-election.
The Hill: Democrats eye funding cuts as leverage against Supreme Court
Senate Democrats are looking at their power of the purse as the next pressure point to use in their escalating battle with the Supreme Court, which so far has resisted calls by lawmakers to adopt a judicial code of conduct. Some Democrats want to add language to the annual appropriations bill funding the Supreme Court to direct its justices to adopt more stringent and transparent ethics rules and procedures for enforcing those rules. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the chairman of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees the court’s budget, says he is looking “at all the options.”
Fox News: Opinion (by Senators King and Murkowski): Americans don't trust the Supreme Court, but this helps the justices help themselves
A healthy democracy requires trust: trust in leaders, trust in public institutions, and trust in systems. As our founders warned in the Federalist Papers, preserving America’s historically-rare democracy starts with citizens having faith in their government. But this trust is waning, and our fragile system is facing a crisis of confidence. Unfortunately, this erosion of faith over the years includes public views of the Supreme Court, resulting in all-time low confidence levels in this vital institution. It is for this reason that we have come together across party lines to introduce the Supreme Court Code of Conduct Act. The bill is very straightforward—just three pages in length—and simply charges our highest justices with establishing and making public their own code of conduct and oversight structure. The bill is designed to help the court re-establish its reputation and the respect that it should have from all Americans, regardless of party affiliation or personal beliefs.
MSNBC: Congress has power to reform Supreme Court ethics, conservative judge says
On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republicans tried to frame the push for Supreme Court ethics reform as a Democratic ploy. Complicating that already desperate narrative is J. Michael Luttig, the vaunted former judge who’s pushing the justices to abide by the highest ethical standards possible. Luttig’s role is remarkable not only because he’s a respected conservative legal figure generally, but also because he helped Justice Clarence Thomas during his contentious confirmation in the early 1990s. Thomas, of course, is the impetus for the latest wave of ethical scrutiny, following ProPublica’s reporting on years of his undisclosed lavish gifts from GOP billionaire Harlan Crow.
Roll Call: Sacrificing democracy to belong to a shrinking ‘club’
It was a scene both disturbing and expected: former President Donald Trump embracing one of the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, with the intention of overthrowing the results of the 2020 election. Micki Larson-Olson was found guilty of a misdemeanor charge of resisting police as they tried to clear the grounds that day. Yet, apparently, there are no hard feelings against Trump. In fact, quite the opposite. After driving from Texas to the New Hampshire campaign stop of the current candidate and former president, Larson-Olson got emotional over the recognition, the photographic record of her meeting with him, and his autograph on her backpack.
CNN: Brazilian police raid former President Bolsonaro’s home, arrest former aide: CNN Brasil
Brazilian Federal Police arrested one of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s closest aides and two others, in connection to the investigation of a gang that allegedly falsified data on Covid-19 vaccination cards, according to CNN affiliate CNN Brasil. Sixteen search and seizure warrants and six arrest warrants were also served, police said in a statement. Lieutenant-Colonel Mauro Cid’s defense told CNN Brasil that he has not yet obtained access to the inquiry, “which is considerable and confidential.” The defense added, “We will declare as soon as we obtain a copy of the records.”
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