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US Monthly Headline News May 2023 - Page 1
Beware of false prophets

Opinion by Matthew Chapman

Far-right Christians are turning their backs on Biblical teachings, instead embracing near-totally areligious figures like Tucker Carlson in their war for political supremacy, New York Times columnist David French wrote Monday.

"On April 25, the far-right network Newsmax hosted a fascinating and revealing conversation about Tucker Carlson with Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, one of America’s leading Christian conservative advocacy organizations," wrote French.

Perkins, whose organization is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, lamented the firing of Carlson and Bill O'Reilly by Fox News as a betrayal of conservatives.

But "what was missing from the conversation? Any mention of the profound moral failings that cost O’Reilly his job, including at least six settlements — five for sexual harassment and one for verbal abuse — totaling approximately $45 million. Or any mention of Carlson’s own serious problems, including his serial dishonesty, his vile racism and his gross personal insult directed against a senior Fox executive."
Story by kbalevic@insider.com (Katie Balevic)

A committee within the Texas legislature has recommended a lawmaker be expelled for his inappropriate sexual conduct with a teenage intern. The House General Investigative Committee unanimously recommended Republican Rep. Bryan Slaton, 45, be expelled after his sexual contact with a 19-year-old intern came to light, The Associated Press reported.

Slaton and his attorney did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on Sunday, but his attorneys previously called the claims "outrageous" and "false," the AP reported. An investigation into the lawmaker's conduct began after two 19-year-old legislative aides and one 21-year-old intern filed complaints last month.
Story by Andrew Stanton

Republican mayors rejected progressive criminal justice reforms embraced by their Democratic counterparts, but factors such as inequality and guns are still driving crime in larger conservative cities, experts told Newsweek.

The GOP has seized on Democrats' support for criminal justice reform in recent election cycles, arguing these policies lead to higher crime rates in large cities. Instead, Republicans have offered "tough on crime" and pro-police positions that have proved salient, helping them secure control of Congress during the 2022 midterm elections.

However, a city's partisan lean generally does not necessarily correlate with its crime rate, according to data compiled by Newsweek. While cities like Chicago and Philadelphia indeed have higher crime rates than other cities, places like New York City or Los Angeles, frequently cast as crime-ridden by Republicans, have crime rates on par or lower than many cities led by Republicans.

New York City has particularly faced scrutiny following former President Donald Trump's indictment in April. Republicans have sought to accuse Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of ignoring crime in the city while engaging in a politically motivated prosecution. However, conservative cities like Jacksonville, Florida; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Miami all reported higher crime rates in 2021.
Story by rhogg@insider.com (Ryan Hogg)

A hedge fund billionaire has been awarded $203 million after a New York court ruled he was defamed by his former Bahamas neighbor Peter Nygard following a decade-long feud ignited by a shared driveway. Nygard, a disgraced fashion mogul facing several sex trafficking charges, was ordered by a New York court-appointed judge to pay the biggest defamation settlement in the state's history to Moore Capital Management founder Louis Bacon after peddling several wild allegations.

Arguments between Bacon and Nygard began when the two were neighbours in the gated Lyford Cay community on Clifton Bay in the Bahamas. Bacon complained that Nygard, who used a driveway owned by Bacon, held several disruptive parties at his residence, while Nygard accused Bacon of scuppering his redevelopment plans after a fire, per the Financial Times. This gradually escalated into increasingly vicious attacks by Canadian fashion mogul Nygard, with Bacon's lawyers saying he personally spent $15 million on a smear campaign against Bacon.
Story by Joe DePaolo

Tucker Carlson is reportedly “preparing for war” against Fox News in an effort to pry himself loose from his contract with the network prior to its January 2025 end date.

According to Axios, Carlson is ready to escalate his battle with the network. A person described as a “close Carlson friend” told Axios that, up until now, the fired host has been telling friends “I want to get this done quiet and clean.” But now, according to the friend, Carlson is about to change tactics.

“We’re going from peacetime to Defcon 1,” Carlson’s friend told the outlet. “His team is preparing for war. He wants his freedom.” A Carlson source told Axios that the fired host “knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and is ready to start drawing a map.”
Story by Tom Boggioni

Appearing on MSNBC the day after yet another mass shooting claimed eight lives in Allen, Texas, a former gun industry executive who walked away torched Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for paving the way for high-powered weapons to be readily available to almost anyone who wants one.

Speaking with fill-in host Michael Steele, Ryan Busse said what happened at the mall late Saturday is another example of the insanity that has gripped the country and then singled out the Texas Republican for his part in kowtowing to gun rights extremists.

"Here we are again," the author of 'Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America' began. "This terror that we're living in our country is really a byproduct of as Jim, our ATF friend mentioned. It's a byproduct of an all-or-nothing authoritarian NRA governance that has been adopted by the GOP."
Story by Ken Meyer

Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) groaned over the release of footage showing him working with Ron DeSantis (R) years ago while the governor-to-be was contemplating how to deal with Donald Trump.

On Sunday, ABC News’ aired newly-obtained videos from 2018 when DeSantis was still running for governor. Gaetz was an adviser for DeSantis back then, so the footage showed the two of them standing next to each other for a mock debate in which Gaetz asked DeSantis “Is there any issue upon which you disagree with President Trump?”

The clip was one of several where DeSantis was shown pondering how to address certain issues and stay in the good graces of the ex-president’s supporters. In response to the re-emerged videos, Gaetz got on Twitter to denounce the leak and condemn the release as “disloyal hackery.” He also rejected the idea that it casts DeSantis in an unflattering political light.
Story by Marissa Matozzo

In a letter submitted in court last week, the New York attorney general’s office claimed that Donald Trump, his three eldest children (Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric) and the Trump Organization failed to turn over emails and other important documents in a fraud lawsuit. The office also noted that there was “an unexplained drop-off in emails for Ivanka Trump.”
Story by Tom Boggioni

Avery emotional Joe Scarborough dropped the hammer on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) over comments he made following yet another mass shooting in Texas where he ducked saying anything about dealing with his state's gun problem.

Monday's "Morning Joe" kicked off with a clip of a survivor -- a former police officer \-- of the Allen shooting that took eight lives claiming the problem is not mental health, it's too many guns.

After showing Abbott's response on Fox News, the MSNBC host went on an extensive attack on the Texas governor for his continual boosting of putting more guns on the streets.
Story by Amanda Marcotte

Late last month, a bill that would have banned nearly all abortion (and likely would have been used to restrict hormonal birth control as well) was defeated in the South Carolina state senate, despite it being one of the most conservative legislatures in the country. The defeat drew national headines in no small part because of how it went down: The only five women in the Senate, three of whom are Republicans, filibustered the bill into oblivion. At times, the Republican women sounded downright, well, feminist. "Once a woman became pregnant for any reason, she would now become the property of the state of South Carolina," state senator Katrina Shealy declared angrily during debate.  

South Carolina is not some outlier state where the rare bird of the pro-choice Republican flourishes, to be clear. In the same speech denouncing abortion bans, Shealy insisted she is still "pro-life." It's just that these women are learning a hard lesson, as are many other Republican women, both leaders and voters. It was easy enough to be "pro-life" when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. That meant you could sit in judgment of other women, without ever worrying that you or your loved ones would lose access. Indeed, it was easy enough to pass restrictions that made it harder for poor women or young women to get abortions, so long as Republican women could be assured their privilege would smooth the way for their abortions.
Story by Sarah K. Burris

Fox News is reporting more information about the man who opened fire at the mall in Allen, Texas on Saturday. According to the report, the police were searching the home of the shooter, which he shared with his two parents. The 33-year-old Mauricio Martinez Garcia lived in Dallas.

"Neighbors said Garcia had lived in the home with his parents for years," said Fox, "and they had never seen him in possession of a weapon. They told WFAA that he could often be seen going to and from the house in an outfit that suggested he worked in a security role. Despite the regular sightings, neighbors added that both the man and his gray Dodge Charger had frequently been missing in recent weeks." Eight people were killed and seven injured.
Opinion by Luke Wachob

Critics of Justice Clarence Thomas are working overtime to cancel him. That’s no surprise. A longtime thorn in the side of liberal causes, Thomas has evoked a particular hatred from the proponents of cancel culture since he put them on notice over a decade ago.

Thomas not only blasted their unseemly tactics, but he tried to do something about them. In a concurring opinion in the 2010 case Citizens United v. FEC, Thomas called for stronger privacy protections to fight this toxic trend.

Attorneys for an IRS whistleblower who allege there is political interference at the Justice Department in the Hunter Biden criminal investigation met with congressional investigators to lay the groundwork for what their client hopes to share with Congress, according to sources familiar with the matter. CNN reporter Alayna Treene has more.
Story by ALANNA DURKIN RICHER

The Justice Department is seeking 25 years in prison for Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder convicted of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors described as a violent plot to keep President Biden out of the White House, prosecutors said in court papers filed Friday.

A Washington, D.C., jury convicted Rhodes in November in one of the most consequential cases brought in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when a mob of then-President Trump's supporters assaulted police officers, smashed windows and temporarily halted Congress’ certification of Biden’s victory.

Prosecutors described the Oath Keepers' actions as “terrorism," and told the judge that a harsh sentence is critical to deter future political violence. They wrote that Rhodes believes he has done nothing wrong and “still presents a threat to American democracy and lives."
By FOX 4 Staff

ALLEN, Texas - Authorities have responded to the Allen Premium Outlets to investigate a shooting Saturday afternoon. A North Texas congressman said a shooter is "down," and there "multiple casualties" from the shooting.

Few details have been released at this time, but the Collin County Sheriff's Office confirmed there was a shooting.

A spokesperson for the sheriff's office said there are "some" victims at the mall, but their status is not known at this time.

Representative Keith Self, whose 3rd Congressional District includes Allen, tweeted that a shooter is "down," and there are "multiple casualties."
Another story another lie from Fox News.

Story by Tommy Christopher

Fox Biz host Gerry Baker claimed President Joe Biden doesn’t “like Britain” because he didn’t attend the coronation of King Charles III — an event American presidents customarily do not attend. All three cable news networks carried the coronation live Saturday morning, and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden represented the United States by attending.

On Saturday morning’s edition of Fox Business Network’s WSJ At Large, Baker expressed disdain for the ceremony, but also criticized Biden. When a guest called it “odd” that Biden didn’t attend, Baker said “Biden doesn’t seem to like Britain. Is that fair?”

Another panelist replied “I wouldn’t say that” but suggested there is tension between the countries over trade. When it was announced in April that President Biden would not attend, he drew criticism from conservatives and questions from the press on the heels of the announcement that Biden would not be going. At that briefing, the White House was emphatic that this was not a “snub”:
Story by Tommy Christopher

CNN’s Chris Wallace stuck to his guns after GOP Senator Bill Cassidy bristled at his description of the “Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.”

This week’s episodes of Wallace’s HBO Max/CNN series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace featured an interview with country superstar Miranda Lambert and a new format for the show: a dual interview with Republican Senator Bill Cassidy and Democratic Senator Ben Cardin pegged to the roiling debt limit snafu.

At one point in the joint interview, Cassidy objected to Wallace’s citation of the Trump tax cuts, and Wallace gave an immediate rejoinder:
Story by Virginia Chamlee

Republican Mark Robinson, a current candidate for governor, once called school shooting survivors "spoiled little b-----ds" in a Facebook post and justified the shooting of protestors on a podcast.

North Carolina Republican Mark Robinson — the state's lieutenant governor and a contender for governor in 2024 — once called school shooting survivors "spoiled little b-----ds" and justified the shooting of protestors, according to old social media posts and a 2018 podcast unearthed by CNN’s KFile.

Following the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Robinson took to Facebook to lambast the teenaged survivors who were advocating for stricter gun control policies, calling them "spoiled, angry, know it all CHILDREN,” “spoiled little b-----ds,” and “media prosti-tots," CNN reports.
Story by Meaghan Ellis

One senator recently explained all of the possible violations U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas could face over payments made to him and his wife, Ginni Thomas.

On Friday, May 5, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) appeared on MSNBC's "All In with Chris Hayes" where he weighed in with his take on the questionable payments. According to Whitehouse, the payments may ultimately lead to potential tax violations and even fraud.

“Do you think the notion that Roberts and the chief justice of the court should police itself over this is sufficient?” Hayes asked. “No,” Whitehouse stated as he noted that there have been ethical concerns within the high court although no actions have been implemented to increase accountability.
Story by Kaila Philo

As Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) readies his impending presidential run, he’s built a brand largely off of former president Donald Trump’s: appearing “tough on crime” and making noise about election security.

Florida’s Office of Election Crimes and Security (OECS) is at the nexus of those issues. Launched last year, DeSantis has said the new police force will investigate fraud allegations throughout the state in order to find violations of election law. But state Democrats and activists alike see it as a political stunt designed to be “splattered across front pages,” as DeSantis tries to court Trump supporters and Big Lie believers ahead of his expected 2024 run.
Story by Matthew Chapman

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is effectively able to "launder money" through his wife, argued Gabe Roth of the watchdog group Fix the Court on MSNBC Friday.

This comes amid new reporting that right-wing judicial activist Leonard Leo and eventual Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway arranged a secret payment to Virginia "Ginni" Thomas through an organization that successfully lobbied the Supreme Court to undermine the Voting Rights Act in a landmark 2013 decision — and further reporting on the gifts Thomas himself received from billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow.

"What appears to be happening in this great careful document sourced reporting in The Washington Post and the ProPublica reporting is that every document reveals that Clarence Thomas isn't abiding by the court's own disclosure laws," said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "Is that a fair assessment of where we are?"
Story by Tom Boggioni

Reacting to new reporting that Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was getting money from a conservative activist secretly funneled to her by former Trump White House official Kellyanne Conway, CNN's Supreme Court correspondent Joan Biskupic predicted the latest scandal will be hard for the court to ignore.

On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Ginni Thomas, already under a cloud for her attempts to help aides to Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election results, was on the receiving end of payments from activist Leonard Leo, according to documents the newspaper had seen.

The Post report stated, "Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conwaythat he wanted her to 'give' Ginni Thomas 'another $25K,' the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have 'No mention of Ginni, of course,'" before adding, "Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as 'Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,' the documents show."
Story by Kevin C. Neece

In early April, an LGBTQ rights organization in Canada began the process of petitioning the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) to ban Fox News on the basis of inflammatory misinformation spread by then-host Tucker Carlson about transgender people. The organization, known as Egal, cited specific commentary from the incendiary TV personality as dangerous and potentially inciting of violence toward the already threatened transgender community. Like sexual minorities such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, trans people are especially vulnerable to violence, sexual assault, and hate crimes, in no small part because of media spreading falsehoods and supporting legislation that harms their community.

Fox News is being exposed with increasing clarity as a regular source of false and misleading reports that help fuel such animosity, with a recent settlement granted to Dominion Voting Systems of $787 million in its defamation lawsuit against the network. As Canada’s National Post reports, the Egal petition was started before that landmark case concluded and before Fox’s subsequent firing of Carlson. The inciting incident for the motion from Egal was a March broadcast of Tucker Carlson Tonight.

More damning texts from Fox News anchors revealed in a report from The Daily Beast. It shows Tucker Carlson texting with Brett Baier, who touts “straight news” coordinating misleading election calls with Carlson. It puts a new Fox host in middle of the networks “big lie” scandal after settling the largest defamation case of all time. MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber reports.
Story by Milla

The override of Governor Laura Kelly’s veto of a transgender student-athlete ban led to more burning questions. Kansas lawmakers, led by Kansas House Speaker Daniel Hawkins, are accused of passing more than an anti-LGBTQ bill. The viral response The bill bans transgender girls from participating in women’s sports from kindergarten through college. Even more disturbingly, ...
Story by Zoe Tillman

(Bloomberg) -- More than a decade ago, a member of the US court system’s leadership body raised red flags about its handling of public allegations of wrongdoing against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Those concerns spurred internal process changes, but no additional probe of the justice’s conduct. Now, under renewed pressure following reports about the justice’s relationship with a GOP megadonor, the judiciary’s governance arm is again being asked to investigate one of its most powerful colleagues.

US District Judge Mark Wolf’s 2012 protest, which hasn’t been previously reported, sheds new light on long-running concerns that the federal judiciary’s process for enforcing financial reporting rules is inadequate. This system, designed to serve as a check on corruption, is under a microscope amid a barrage of new information about Thomas’s undisclosed financial ties to Texas billionaire Harlan Crow.
Story by Michael Luciano

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis boasted during an interview that The Walt Disney Company has stopped publicly opposing policies he supports since he began waging war against it last year.

DeSantis targeted Disney after company executives spoke out against the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill he signed into law last year. The legislation banned discussion of sexuality in classrooms from kindergarten through third grade, and it has since been extended through the twelfth grade.

The governor sought – and got – the revocation of Disney’s special self-governing status last year. On Friday, he signed a bill allowing a governing board to void development agreements the company had approved. Disney is suing Florida over what it says is  a “targeted campaign of government retaliation.”
Story by MICHAEL KUNZELMAN

AKentucky man with a long criminal record was sentenced Friday to more than 14 years in prison for attacking police officers with pepper spray and a chair as he stormed the U.S. Capitol with his wife.

Peter Schwartz’s prison sentence is the longest so far among hundreds of Capitol riot cases. The judge who sentenced Schwartz also handed down the previous longest sentence — 10 years — to a retired New York Police Department officer who assaulted a police officer outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of 24 years and six months for Schwartz, a welder.
Story by Dominick Mastrangelo

Lawyers for Fox News are asking officials at Dominion Voting Systems to conduct an internal investigation after media reports have surfaced pertaining to leaked text messages from Tucker Carlson, a former top host at the network.

In a letter dated Friday, Fox lawyers said the company had learned documents Fox produced as part of its recent litigation against the voting systems provider “were disclosed to media organizations and published for mass consumption.”

The letter urges officials at Dominion to “investigate and confirm that you are not the source of these improper disclosures.”

Leakage of court documents and redacted exhibits, the network’s lawyers said, would violate “the text and spirit of the parties agreement.”
Story by Stephanie Whiteside

(NewsNation) — The Drug Enforcement Agency on Friday announced the results of an operation targeting fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking driven by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels. Operation Last Mile was a yearlong operation targeting cartel-driven drug trafficking within the U.S.

“The results of this operation – over 3,000 arrests and the seizure of almost 44 million fentanyl pills – demonstrate the Justice Department’s unrelenting commitment to working with our state and local partners to keep fentanyl out of our communities and save American lives,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
Story by Gideon Rubin

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ performative ongoing feud with Disney reflects the breach of an “uneasy truce” between politicians and corporations that served a purpose, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle contends.

“Sure, if politicians threatened a firm’s bottom line, the business would fight back. But there were limits: Companies tended to conduct these battles politely, for fear of offending regulators who held a great deal of power over them, or customers who might disagree with them,” McArdle writes.

“And they did not pick fights on matters that didn’t directly affect their profits.”

The truce started crumbling around a decade ago, McCardle writes, noting Florida's dispute with Disney over culture issues follows a corporate boycott of Indiana over a religious freedom law that LGBTQ+ advocates argued was discriminatory, and Delta’s withdrawal of group discounts to the NRA and CEO’s signing open letters in protest of new laws imperiling reproductive rights, among other disagreements between business and political leaders.
Story by By ED WHITE, Associated Press

DETROIT (AP) — Nine lawyers who were found to have abused the court system by filing a lawsuit that challenged Michigan's 2020 election results in favor of President Joe Biden committed misconduct and should be disciplined, a watchdog agency said.

The state Attorney Grievance Commission filed a complaint this week against Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and seven other lawyers who were allied with then-President Donald Trump. The complaint now goes to the Michigan Attorney Discipline Board for further consideration.
Story by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement

Mississippi’s Republican Governor Tate Reeves, who has the highest firearm mortality rate in the entire country, this week launched his re-election campaign with a video depicting him as Clint Eastwood shooting people of color. Although the video (below) was released Tuesday, few seemed to notice until a Talking Points Memo article was published Friday afternoon.

“Reeves’ face is superimposed on Eastwood’s in clips from the classic Dollars trilogy movies. He’s seen cosplaying the white anti-hero, the Man with No Name, shooting at Mexican bandits with a Colt revolver and puffing on a cigarillo,” TPM’s Emine Yücel writes.

In addition to the inherent racism and violence in the video, there is no policy discussed, and not even any bragging about Reeves’ record. There may be a reason for that. Governor Reeves almost from the start of the coronavirus pandemic – due to policy choices he made – has one of the absolute worst records on COVID in the country.
Story by Kelly McClure

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) solidified a theme of targeting people of other ethnic backgrounds beyond Wonder Bread white when he dedicated the month of April to the celebration of Confederate heritage in 2020.

To announce that he'll be seeking a second term, Reeves is furthering that theme with a troubling campaign video featuring his face superimposed over Clint Eastwood, gunning down people of color with a Colt revolver.

Mississippi governor takes break from pandemic to declare "Confederate Heritage Month" Response to the video, which Tate shared to Twitter on Tuesday, ranges from "Vile" and "Who thought this was a good idea?" to "You can put a poncho on a potato, but it's still a potato."
Story by Harrison Kass

ProPublica, who broke the Clarence Thomas - Harlan Crow relationship, has a new scoop in the unfolding ethics scandal. Apparently, Harlan Crow covered the tuition for Justice Thomas’s grandnephew (Mark Martin, who Thomas was raising “as a son”) to attend Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in northern Georgia.

“Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month,” ProPublica reported. “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.”
Story by Amy Gardner, Holly Bailey

At least eight of the 16 Georgia Republicans who convened in December 2020 to declare Donald Trump the winner of the presidential contest despite his loss in the state have accepted immunity deals from Atlanta-area prosecutors investigating alleged election interference, according to a lawyer for the electors.

Prosecutors with the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) told the eight that they will not be charged with crimes if they testify truthfully in her sprawling investigation into efforts by Trump, his campaign and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia, according to a brief filed Friday in Fulton County Superior Court by defense attorney Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow.
Story by Adam Nichols

Clarence Thomas’ billionaire friend could be hit with hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes for the gifts he bestowed on the Supreme Court Justice, anew report stated Friday.

Harlan Crow reportedly took Thomas on pricey vacations and helped pay for the judge’s grandnephew’s boarding school tuition – all without Thomas declaring it, ProPublica reported.

One of those trip was a yacht jaunt around the Indonesian archipelago that ProPublic valued at $500,000.

And now the Daily Beast reported that, on top of the ethics scandal Thomas is embroiled in, Crow could find himself landed with hefty “gift taxes.”
By Clare Hymes, Graham Kates

Attorneys for the writer E. Jean Carroll released about 48 minutes of deposition video shown at the trial in which former President Donald Trump was pressed about Carroll's claim that he raped her in the 1990s.

The video was released after media organizations, including CBS News, asked the judge in the case to make it public.

During the October deposition, Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan showed Trump a late-1980s photo of him with his then-wife Ivana, Carroll and her then-husband John Johnson. Referring to Carroll, Trump said, "It's Marla," referring to his second wife, Marla Maples.

"That's Marla, yeah. That's my wife," he said, before being corrected, and told it was Carroll. The writer sued Trump for defamation and battery after he said she "made up" allegations that he raped her in a New York City department store in the mid-1990s. Trump has adamantly denied the allegations and claimed Carroll "is not my type."
by Julia Shapero

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo urged that there be “no mention of Ginni” Thomas in an arranged payment to the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

Leo told Kellyanne Conway, a GOP pollster who would later serve as an aide to former President Trump, to “give” Virginia Thomas “another $25K” in January 2012 but emphasized that there be “no mention of Ginni, of course” in the paperwork, according to documents viewed by the Post.

That day, Conway’s Polling Company sent the nonprofit, then known as the Judicial Education Project, a bill for $25,000 for “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting.”

Later that year, the Judicial Education Project submitted an amicus brief in a case before the Supreme Court that would ultimately overturn portions of the Voting Rights Act.
Story by Gideon Rubin

Two days after hurling incendiary allegations at President Joe Biden, Sen. Chuck Grassley admitted his assertion may have been false.

The Iowa Republican on Wednesday issued a joint statement with Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) alleging Biden was involved in a “criminal scheme” when he served as vice president that involved a foreign national. The two Republican lawmakers called on the Justice Department to release a 2020 document them claim alleges Biden’s involvement in the scheme.

“We believe the FBI possesses an unclassified internal document that includes very serious and detailed allegations implicating the current President of the United States," Grassley said in a statement.

"The FBI’s recent history of botching politically charged investigations demands close congressional oversight.”
Opinion by James Downie

The proverbial faucet of ethics scandals around Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas continues to drip. The Washington Post reported Thursday that conservative activist Leonard Leo, a key architect of the right’s takeover of the court, arranged in 2012 for Thomas’ wife, Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work. And he specifically requested that the billing paperwork have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”
Story by Adam Woodard

The United States Department of Justice is ramping up its investigation into how former President Donald Trump has handled classified documents since his time in office ended. But what does that have to do with golf?

According to a New York Times report, amid the larger investigation the DOJ has subpoenaed the Trump Organization for records regarding LIV Golf and President Trump’s ties to the upstart circuit financially backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

In LIV Golf’s inaugural season last year, Trump National Bedminster and Trump National Doral both hosted events. The pair of properties will do so again in 2023, as will his resort in Potomac Falls, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C.
Story by Colby Hall

Joe Scarborough didn’t quite equate past congressional grift scandals to recent reports of Justice Clarence Thomas and his superwealthy benefactor Harlan Crow, but he came close. At issue is a new Washington Post report that details $80,000 in consulting fees paid to Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo who used Kellyanne Conway’s polling company to funnel the money to the wife of the Supreme Court Justice, according to documents review by the reporters.

The Post reported that Leo instructed Conway, a pollster who later became an adviser to former President Donald Trump and now a Fox News contributor, to pay Ginni Thomas but added, “No mention of Ginni.” This comes a day after it was revealed that Crow paid for the private school tuition of Thomas’s grand nephew and previous reporting of numerous luxury vacations Thomas enjoyed at the generosity of his friend.

“We’re going to hear B.S. from the usual defenders of Clarence Thomas,” Scarborough said before adding his preemptive mimicry. “‘Oh, they’re just picking on him because he’s a conservative and they hate black conservatives, this challenge is the…you know blah, blah, blah,’ all of this other nonsense.”
Story by LGBTQNation

Ablistering speech by Dan Andrews, the senior government representative of the Australian state of Victoria, condemned anti-LGBTQ+ protestors and neo-Nazis who used intimidation and death threats to shut down an upcoming drag queen library event in the city of Monash.

“This Americanization of our politics has no place here,” Andrew said in a Thursday afternoon speech on the state’s parliament floor. “My message to those people is very clear: If you want to behave like the worst elements of the Floridian Republican Party, get to Florida. Head over there, where your hateful views might be worth something. They’re worth nothing here.”
By Joseph Ax and Brad Brooks

(Reuters) - Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday signed a bill into law that gives a new board he controls the power to void development agreements its predecessor body signed with Disney - the latest episode in a feud between the conservative governor and the entertainment giant.

Under the bill, which passed the Republican-controlled legislature largely along party lines, the Central Tourism Oversight District Board - whose members are appointed by DeSantis - can cancel any deals signed up to three months before the board's creation.

The legislature formed the board in February to replace the Disney-controlled Reedy Creek Improvement District to oversee development in the 25,000 acres (10,120 hectares) surrounding Walt Disney World, effectively wresting control from the company and handing it to DeSantis.
Story by John Wagner, Matthew Brown

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) is poised to sign legislation as early as Friday that would create a commission with the power to remove local prosecutors from office, a move Democrats in the state have decried as a power grab that usurps the will of local voters.

Atlanta-area prosecutor Fani Willis, who is considering bringing charges against former president Donald Trump and his allies over 2020 election interference, has been one of the most outspoken opponents of the legislation, suggesting she is among those being targeted by its Republican sponsors.
Story by Jessica Washington

The tangled web of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ relationship with Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow keeps getting messier. It was bad enough when ProPublica revealed that Crow had lavished the Supreme Court Justice with fancy vacations, but things have taken a much more bizarre turn.

Now, ProPublica is reporting that Crow also paid for a relative of Thomas’ to go to private school. And not just any relative; Thomas told C-Span back in 2007 that he was raising him “as a son.” Based on everything else we know about this evolving scandal, it probably won’t shock you to learn that Thomas allegedly didn’t report the tuition payments.

According to ProPublica’s reporting, bank statements from the school show that Crow paid the $6,000 a month private school tuition for Thomas’ relative. A former school administrator, Christopher Grimwood, also confirmed to the news outlet that Crow was paying the tuition. “Harlan picked up the tab,” Grimwood told ProPublica.

The reporting from ProPublica takes the scandal to all new heights. It’s one thing for a Republican mega-donor with a thing for Nazi memorabilia to take you on a trip. It’s a whole other story when he’s reportedly paying for your son’s private school tuition.

Dr. Walensky has saved lives with her steadfast and unwavering focus on the health of every American. As Director of the CDC, she led a complex organization on the frontlines of a once-in-a-generation pandemic with honesty and integrity. She marshalled our finest scientists and public health experts to turn the tide on the urgent crises we’ve faced. Dr. Walensky leaves CDC a stronger institution, better positioned to confront health threats and protect Americans.  We have all benefited from her service and dedication to public health, and I wish her the best in her next chapter.
Story by James Bickerton

Arow has broken out in Florida over proposed legislation that would ban Chinese citizens from owning land or property in the state, unless they are also a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. The priority bill has the backing of Governor Ron DeSantis, along with Republican and some Democratic legislators, who argue it is needed to ensure national security. However critics argue it is discriminatory, and could violate the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Polling indicates DeSantis is Republican voters' second most popular choice to be the party's 2024 presidential nominee, following former President Donald Trump, though he has yet to officially enter the race. Thus any dispute involving DeSantis could have national political implications, either undermining the Florida Republican or strengthening his "anti-woke" credentials.

The legislation, titled "SB 264: Interests of Foreign Countries," was approved by the Florida House this week by 95-17 and will now head back to the Senate, which voted for a previous version unanimously. It also prohibits citizens of Russia, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and Syria from buying land within a mile of a military base or piece of critical infrastructure, though only Chinese nationals face a statewide ban.
AP News

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Republican megadonor paid two years of private school tuition for a child raised by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who did not disclose the payments, a lawyer who has represented Thomas and his wife acknowledged Thursday.

The revelation of tuition payments made by Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow is the latest example of Crow’s generosity to Thomas and his family that has raised questions about Thomas’ ethics and disclosure requirements more generally. The payments, along with the earlier examples of Crow’s financial ties to Thomas, were first reported by the nonprofit investigative journalism site ProPublica.
Story by mhall@businessinsider.com (Madison Hall)

Two Supreme Court justices did not recuse themselves from cases that arose before the court involving their book publisher, Penguin Random House, according to a recent CNN report.

There have been two cases that came before the Supreme Court involving publishing conglomerate Penguin Random House. In both situations, the Supreme Court declined to take on the copyright infringement cases, allowing the publisher to win at a lower court level.

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was confirmed in 2009, was on the high court during both cases, which occurred in 2013 and 2019-2020. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch was confirmed in 2017 and was also a member of the Supreme Court during the second case.
MSNBC

Clarence Thomas ethics scandal grows with new bombshell revelations. A new report from ProRepublica revealing billionaire Harlan Crow paid $6,000 monthly for private school tuition for a relative of Thomas. It comes after revelations that Crow paid for Thomas to take private jets to exclusive vacations on yachts around the world. MSNBC Chief Legal Correspondent Ari Melber on the bombshell revelations.
Story by Ed Mazza

Some of the biggest names on Fox News have downplayed the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol or even tried to rewrite that history altogether.

“They were peaceful. They were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists,” said Tucker Carlson in a special that aired before he parted ways with the right-wing network. “They were sightseers.”

Now a new CNN video points out one common line of defense used by Fox News hosts ― one that has since turned out to be completely wrong.
Story by Claude Wooten

In slamming the Supreme Court’s alleged ethics problems, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse laid out a deliberate series of accusations that one Twitter user called “one of the most on point performances I’ve seen by a Senator.”

Notably, Whitehouse’s skewering came even before the latest SCOTUS bombshell revealed that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also allowed his grand-nephew’s tuition to be paid for by his generous benefactor, billionaire Harlan Crow.

Background: Thomas has been given a lot of things by his good friend Crow, a fact which is not in dispute. Thomas’s mother lives in a house Crow owns (and purchased from Thomas) and Crow has spent lavishly over decades providing for Thomas family vacations. Justice Thomas doesn’t deny these things.

Thomas’s defense — as mounted for him by others, like Sen. Ted Cruz — is that 1) these gifts don’t violate his ethical obligations and 2) everybody does it.
Story by John Bowden

The attorney general of the state of New York has accused Ivanka Trump of refusing to turn over documents in a timely fashion as the deadline for producing evidence as required by the discovery phase of the Trump Organization’s civil fraud lawsuit nears.

Letitia James’ team made the accusation in a court filing dated 25 April, first reported by Forbes, in the latest development in the Trump family’s battle with the state of New York to occur since the former first daughter dropped her old legal team, including attorneys who jointly representer her and her brothers.

According to the AG’s office, Ms Trump’s team has all but ceased turning over documents to state authorities. Directed to turn over email communications sent by their client between 2014-2017, Ms Trump’s attorneys reportedly turned over thousands of emails covering the first nine months of 2014 — only for that number to drop to a few hundred per month by the end of that year, and a few dozen per month by the end of 2016.
Story by Sarah K. Burris

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) has been accused of "illegally spending $60,000 on campaign calls and texts in the run-up to November's midterm election," according to a new report from Newsweek.

A complaint has been filed by End Citizens United against Boebert with the Federal Elections Commission, which is tasked with regulating spending on political campaigns.

The group alleges that Boebert spent tens of thousands of dollars on so-called "get out the vote" contact calls and texts.

The voter outreach efforts are considered in-kind independent expenditures, but that wasn't how she reported them, the group said.
Story by Tommy Christopher

CNN anchor John King roasted a new “stunning” claim Republicans are making about President Joe Biden and a “bribery scheme” — saying it’s “more stunning the Republicans making this claim admit they have no evidence, just an unverified tip.”

At issue is a new demand by Republicans in Congress for an alleged FBI document involving President Biden and his family. In letters and press releases, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. James Comer (R-KY) demanded a document they say they “believe the FBI possesses” in which an unidentified informant alleges to FBI agents that Biden “engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national.”

The subpoena, issued by Comer’s House Oversight Committee, demands all FBI interview documents containing the word “Biden” as well as “all accompanying attachments and documents.”

On Thursday afternoon’s edition of CNN’s Inside Politics, King teased a segment on the issue by saying “A stunning allegation: Joe Biden taking foreign money to shape U.S. policy. Also stunning, I would argue more stunning: The Republicans making this claim admit they have no evidence, just an unverified tip.”
Story by Gideon Rubin

Failed Georgia Republican senate candidate Herschel Walker’s improper solicitation of a billionaire donor revealed in emails obtained by The Daily Beast have shocked campaign finance experts, the outlet reports.

Walker in communication with donor Dennis Washington sought hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal business, The Daily Beast reports.

Washington complied with Walker's request for the funds, thinking the contributions were political, the report said.
By Robert Legare

Washington — The one-time president of the far-right Proud Boys group Enrique Tarrio and three subordinates were convicted of numerous felonies including seditious conspiracy for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

A federal jury in Washington, D.C. found Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl and Joseph Biggs guilty of conspiring to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and using force and prior planning to hinder the 2020 presidential election certification.

There was no verdict for Dominic Pezzola on the most serious charge, seditious conspiracy, and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. After the reading of the partial verdict, Judge Timothy Kelly sent the jury back to deliberate on these charges and several other felonies that they did not come to verdict on.

All five were found guilty of several other felonies, including obstructing an official proceeding; obstructing Congress; conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging duties; obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder and aiding and abetting and destruction of government property. But Tarrio, who arrested on Jan. 4, 2021, and not at the Capitol, was found not guilty of assaulting officers. Only Pezzola was found guilty of that charge. They now likely face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Story by Tom Boggioni

According to a Forbes report on the $250 million tax fraud investigation of the Trump Organization investigation being conducted by New York Attorney General Letitia James, questions are being raised about Ivanka Trump's email habits.

On Wednesday, Forbes reported that the Trump Org is not being forthcoming with internal documents that were supposed to be turned over to investigators, which has led to the attorney general’s office asking Judge Arthur Engoron to step in and set a deadline to comply.

Of note, Forbes' Zach Everson wrote,was the startling lack of Ivanka Trump emails that have been turned over.

According to the report, "The [AG's] letter notes a significant decline in emails turned over from Ivanka Trump, dropping from an average of 1,200 emails per month in the first nine months of 2014 to just 37 emails a month in 2016. The attorney general’s office asked Ivanka’s lawyers about the issue and was unimpressed by their response."
Story by jshamsian@insider.com (Jacob Shamsian)

Tucker Carlson extracted concessions from Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California that cinched the votes he needed from far-right members to Congress to become Speaker of the House of Representatives, the former Fox News host said in text messages obtained by Insider.

The text messages demonstrate how Carlson shaped the direction of the Republican party behind the scenes, using his powerful primetime perch at Fox News before his firing last month to make one of the most powerful elected Republicans in America do his bidding.
Story by Ella Lee, USA TODAY

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and three lieutenants on Thursday were found guilty of entering a seditious conspiracy against the U.S. government which culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack.

Prosecutors painted Tarrio as the leader of the plot, despite not physically being in D.C. that day. Tarrio's Jan. 4, 2021 arrest and the stabbing of several Proud Boys at a December 2020 protest turned members of the group against D.C. law enforcement and served as motivators to stop the election certification, the government claimed.

But Tarrio's attorneys argued that the Miami Proud Boy is the government's scapegoat for the Capitol attack. The true culprit of Jan. 6, they said, was former President Donald Trump.
MSN

Francisco Oropeza, the man accused of gunning down five people in an "execution-style" mass shooting in Cleveland, Texas, was taken into custody Tuesday evening after a multiday manhunt, officials said. Oropeza, 38, faces five counts of first-degree murder and his bond was set at $7.5 million -- $1.5 million for each count, San Jacinto County District Attorney Todd Dillon told reporters Wednesday.

Oropeza was apprehended at a relative's house in Montgomery County, about 20 miles from Cleveland, uninjured and without incident, authorities said. He was "caught hiding in a closet underneath some laundry," San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said at a news conference. "I believe he thought he was in a safe spot," Chief Deputy Sheriff Tim Kean said.
Story by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement

U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has revealed the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia also accepted and did not disclose dozens of trips paid for by special interest advocates, in a similar fashion to the decades-worth of undisclosed luxury travel, vacations, and trips Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took. In video that has gone viral on social media – over 1.6 million views in less than 24 hours – Senator Whitehouse says Scalia took “more than seven dozen” of these undisclosed vacations.

“The personal hospitality problems I’ve been pursuing began with Justice Scalia, who took more than seven dozen undisclosed hunting vacations. Most people know of two, the one where he was on the Air Force Two manifest with Dick Cheney and the one where he died,” Sen. Whitehouse said in his remarks during Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing on Supreme Court ethics.

Scalia, a hard-core conservative, died in February of 2016 during a quail hunting vacation, reportedly “at an $800-per-night Texas hunting lodge among still-unknown companions,” a lodge owned by the chairman and CEO of a multi-billion dollar manufacturing company.
Story by David Edwards

El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser confronted Fox News host Brian Kilmeade for broadcasting a false narrative about President Joe Biden's visit to his city Wednesday. During an interview on Fox & Friends, Kilmeade argued that El Paso had removed migrants from the city for Biden's visit earlier this year.

"And the crazy thing is, when the president came, you guys cleaned up the streets," Kilmeade opined. "So he saw a sanitized El Paso, not the one that you have to deal with every day."

"Well, let me explain something," Leeser replied. "That was a very incorrect statement." "When the president came, the numbers had gone down, and you were able to see they had gone down," the mayor noted. "Mr. Mayor, you cleaned up the streets for the president," Kilmeade argued. "That was not a candid look of El Paso."
Story by Steve Benen

It was nearly four years ago when The New York Times published one of the most devastating reports I’ve ever seen. In the first real breakthrough on understanding Donald Trump’s controversial finances, the newspaper exposed evidence of “dubious tax schemes” and “outright fraud” that the Republican exploited to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from his father.

The findings painted a picture in which the then-president, far from the self-made man he pretends to be, relied heavily on legally dubious family handouts. As regular readers may recall, it was the first of three brutal reports on Trump’s financial history, leaving little doubt that he’d spent much of his adult life meandering between failures and fraudulent endeavors.

Eventually, he responded to the reporting by filing a $100 million lawsuit against the newspaper and its source — his niece, Mary Trump — who helped expose him as a fraud. She responded to the litigation at the time by saying, “I think he is a f------- loser.”
By Intelligencer Staff

In April, just as Dominion Voting Systems’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News was going to trial, Fox settled the case with a $787.5 million payment. Days later, in shocking news that may or may not be directly related to revelations the Dominion lawsuit uncovered, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, its biggest star.

Dominion had accused Fox personalities of repeatedly airing debunked election-fraud theories involving Dominion’s voting machine used in the 2020 election. Dominion would have had to prove that Fox News hosts knowingly disseminated falsehoods to their viewers. To that end, the company subpoenaed extensive internal text messages and emails from and between prominent names in the Fox News infrastructure, including Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Rupert Murdoch himself.

In the messages, all from the weeks after the election, the hosts discuss Donald Trump, their often-critical thoughts on Fox management, and their opinions on 2020 election fraud — opinions that often conflict with Fox’s public-facing coverage.
By Oliver Darcy, CNN Business

New York CNN — Tucker Carlson sent a racist text message that “set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox” and ultimately led to his firing, The New York Times reported Tuesday. But the abhorrent racism Carlson put on display should not have surprised anyone at Fox.

After all, Carlson openly employed white nationalist rhetoric on his Fox News program for years. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League, GLAAD and Black Lives Matter repeatedly warned Fox executives and pleaded with the network to take action, all to no avail.

In the January 2021 text message first reported by The Times and later confirmed by CNN, Carlson wrote to a producer about an online video of a group of Trump supporters “pounding the living s**t” out of a protester. The text, which was redacted in court filings, was just one of several private conversations collected in the massive defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News.

“It was three against one, at least,” Carlson wrote to the unidentified producer. “Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it.” Soon after, “an alarm went off” in his brain, Carlson added, telling his producer he realized he was “becoming something” he didn’t “want to be.”
Story by Sky Palma

Donald Trump launched a new campaign ad this week purporting to show that the United States is doing worse under President Biden than it did during his time in the White House, but as Forbes points out, the two most prominent photos in the ad are from Trump’s own presidency.

One of the photos showing a burning cop car was taken in Chicago on May 30, 2020. Another image shows migrants wading through knee-deep water with the caption, “Central American migrants cross the Suchiate River from Mexico to Guatemala, near Tecun Uman, Guatemala, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020" -- meaning that the people weren't traveling north to the U.S.

Both photos were taken during Trump's watch.

"The U.S. presidential election is still a year and a half away, but both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are already running ads," writes Forbes' Matt Novak. "The GOP is even running ads made completely with artificial intelligence. And if Trump’s current tactics are any indication, he’s going to keep lying as we get closer to election day."
Story by Charlie Nash

Jenna Ellis, the former senior legal adviser to 45th President Donald Trump, accused her former employer of staffing his 2024 presidential campaign with “chronically unemployable losers” from the Republican “swamp” in a series of Twitter posts on Wednesday.

“I respect President Trump, but I’m tired of his campaign hypocritically accusing Ron DeSantis of doing things THEY do,” wrote Ellis after conservative strategist Alex Bruesewitz claimed certain polls which showed Trump “struggling” were funded by “a shady polling company made up of Bush, Romney, Rove, Ryan, and Even Soros-Linked Operatives.”

“Since they insist on lying about DeSantis, I have created a running list of Team Trump’s ties to Jeb [Bush], The Swamp, and Woke corporations,” Ellis declared, before posting a list of screenshots which claimed to show Trump’s staffers’ ties to “woke corporations” and the Republican establishment.
Opinion by Sarah Rumpf

Fox News paid dearly for their decision to broadcast former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election: an enormous $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems that came after months of embarrassing headlines about private communications between Fox’s on-air personalities and top executives admitting Trump lost, all culminating in the defenestration of its top-rated host Tucker Carlson. Plus, there’s the Smartmatic $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit still looming menacingly.

The ex-president has repaid that loyalty with a metaphorical punch in the face. Trump will participate in a town hall next week in the critically-important early primary state of New Hampshire, taking questions from undecided GOP primary voters, a highly publicized, nationally televised event that is very likely to deliver solid ratings for the network hosting it – and that network will not be Fox News, but instead its competitor CNN.
Story by Sarah K. Burris

Forbes reported on Wednesday that Donald Trump and his three eldest children who worked at the Trump Organization have failed to turn over emails and other communications requested in the fraud suit from New York Attorney General Letitia James.

A letter submitted to the court last week revealed “an unexplained drop-off in emails for Ivanka Trump” as another one of the issues for the investigators. The request comes from the fraud investigation into the Trump Organization's business practices. Already, Trump has been forced to pay $110,000 in fines because Judge Arthur Engoron found the former president in contempt because he wouldn't comply with a subpoena.

It's unclear if Trump and his family members could be forced to fork over more cash due to the inability to comply with other subpoenas. But thus far, the AG's office is requesting a timeline for the document delivery.
Story by Caitlin Dickson

NEW YORK CITY — During Wednesday’s testimony in the civil trial of former President Donald Trump, author and journalist Natasha Stoynoff became the third woman to testify under oath that Trump sexually assaulted her years earlier.

Called as a witness by lawyers representing writer E. Jean Carroll, who is suing Trump, Stoynoff took the witness stand at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan. She told the jury about an incident in 2005 during which, she said, Trump forcefully kissed her while she was interviewing him at his Mar-a-Lago estate for an article for People magazine.
Story by Ted Johnson

Ron DeSantis is expected to sign a bill that would void Walt Disney World’s development agreement with a special district overseeing the theme parks and resorts, the latest move in a bitter battle between the company and the governor.

The state House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a land use bill, in a 75-34 vote, that would essentially invalidate Disney’s agreement with the Reedy Creek Improvement District in February, when the special district was still under the company’s control. The bill will have a final Senate before going to DeSantis for his signature.

A fight at an electric vehicle charging station in suburban Denver escalated into a fatal shooting that killed a Tesla driver and put another man in custody, authorities said Wednesday.
Story by Maya Boddie

Florida GOP lawmakers have officially passed legislation that will restrict voter registration groups from assisting voters, CNN reports.

Per CNN, the 96-page proposal mostly centers around prohibiting "third-party voter registration groups" from doing their jobs, which will disproportionately impact voters of color.

Earlier this month, Miami Herald reported the proposed legislation package would include:

・Preventing people who are not U.S. citizens from collecting or handling voter-registration applications for the third-party registration groups. Also barred would be people who have been convicted of certain felonies, such as violations of the state elections code.

・Shortening a time frame from 14 days to 10 days for voter-registration groups to deliver registration applications to supervisors of elections. Also, the bill would increase fines for missing the deadline or not turning in applications.

・Requiring that voter-registration groups provide receipts when they collect applications from people. Requiring voter-registration groups to re-register with the state after every general election.
Story by Kevin Harrish

This week, former United States President Donald Trump is visiting the golf courses he owns in Scotland. And while the appearance is jarring enough given that it comes amid his ongoing civil trial for rape as well as federal fraud charges, it’s also a reminder of just how much money he made from his international business while he was president. According to an analysis of his tax returns by CREW, Donald Trump made up to $160 million from international business dealings while he was serving as president of the United States.

“Throughout his time in office, President Trump, his family and his Republican allies repeatedly assured the public that his refusal to divest from his businesses wouldn’t lead to any conflicts of interest. Americans were promised that Trump would donate his salary, which he did, until maybe he didn’t—all while siphoning millions from taxpayers that more than offset his presidential pay. When it came to foreign conflicts of interest, Trump and his company pledged to pause foreign business. They did not,” Rebecca Jacobs and Robert Maguire wrote for CREW.
Story by Leigh Ann Caldwell, Theodoric Meyer, Tobi Raji

In 2008, Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew, Mark Martin, who lived with him and his wife in the Washington suburbs, to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school where tuition ran more than $6,000 a month. “A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows that Crow’s company paid the July bill.”

“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.”

“’Harlan picked up the tab,’ said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.” “Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. ‘Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,’ Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.”
By Charly Edsitty and Chaz Miller, Daniela Hurtado KTRK logo

COLDSPRING, Texas (KTRK) -- Several arrests were made when the San Jacinto County mass murder suspect was taken into custody on Tuesday, including that of his domestic partner, District Attorney Todd Dillon said in an update on Wednesday.

Francisco Oropeza was captured at about 6:15 p.m. in Cut and Shoot, Texas, a city in Montgomery County, about 11 miles from the crime scene. According to officials, he was found inside a home, hiding in a closet underneath a pile of laundry.
Story by Jon Jackson

Jackson Mahomes, a social media influencer and the younger brother of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, was arrested and charged with aggravated sexual battery on Wednesday.

Police in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, told Newsweek that Mahomes, 22, was arrested at around 7 a.m. local time. Court records show he was charged with three felony counts of aggravated sexual battery and a fourth misdemeanor count of battery.

He was booked into the Johnson County Detention Center on a $100,000 bond, local CBS-affiliated station KCTV said. His arraignment is scheduled for Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. at the Johnson County Courthouse.
Carroll alleges that Trump defamed her when he denied her rape claim.
By Aaron Katersky

A businesswoman testified Tuesday in E. Jean Carroll's civil defamation and battery case against former President Donald Trump that Trump had groped her during a flight to New York in 1979, in what Carroll's attorneys said showed a pattern of behavior on Trump's part.

Jessica Leeds is one of two women who the court has ruled are allowed to testify about prior alleged assaults by Trump, who is accused by Carroll of defaming the former Elle magazine columnist in a 2022 Truth Social post by calling her allegations "a Hoax and a lie" and saying "This woman is not my type!" when he denied her claim that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the 1990s.

She added a charge of battery under a recently adopted New York law that allows adult survivors of sexual abuse to sue their alleged attacker regardless of the statute of limitations. Trump has denied all allegations that he raped Carroll or defamed her.
Story by By KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Democrats promised Tuesday to pursue stronger ethics rules for the Supreme Court in the wake of reports that Justice Clarence Thomas participated in luxury vacations and a real estate deal with a top GOP donor. Republicans made clear they strongly oppose the effort.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said lax ethical standards have created a lack of public confidence in the nation's highest court.

“The Supreme Court could step up and fix this themselves,” Durbin said as he opened the hearing. “For years, they have refused, and because the court will not act, Congress must.”

Republicans, however, criticized the hearing as an effort to destroy the reputation of Thomas, one of the staunchest conservative voices on the court. Their comments showed how unlikely it is that Congress will pass legislation on the matter, with the parties worlds apart when it comes to the credibility of the Supreme Court, particularly after the seismic decision last June that overturned abortion rights.
ABC News

Kelly Shannon was excited when she found out she was pregnant. With a daughter under the age of 2, Shannon and her husband had been actively trying for a second child. The Alabama couple's happiness quickly turned to heartbreak when testing revealed just three days before Christmas there was an 87% chance the baby had Down syndrome. Shannon had asked for genetic testing because the couple wanted to tell family the baby's gender at Christmas. She was pregnant with a girl.

"I spent the next few weeks trying not to get too attached, but it's hard not to love a baby you have prayed for," Shannon told ABC News. At an appointment with a maternal fetal medicine specialist in January, Shannon was counseled on resources available for parents of children with the disorder. However, more scans and test results showed there was evidence of swelling in the baby's head and body wall, a heart defect and a tumor on the baby's abdomen that was about one-third the size of the baby and growing.
Story by David Edwards

President Joe Biden trolled House Republicans on Tuesday after they passed a debt ceiling bill that could cut benefits for veterans.

Republicans have accused Democrats of "shamelessly lying" about cuts to veterans' benefits. But the bill "does not explicitly exempt the Department of Veterans Affairs from federal spending caps," according to The Huffington Post.
By Donald Judd, CNN

CNN — The United States Secret Service on Monday said it turned away the Muslim mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, ahead of the Eid reception at the White House. Mayor Mohamed T. Khairullah was not permitted to attend Monday’s Eid reception despite an invitation to the East Room ceremony after his clearance for entry was not approved by Secret Service, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ New Jersey chapter told CNN in a statement.

“While we regret any inconvenience this may have caused, the mayor was not allowed to enter the White House complex this evening,” USSS chief of communications told reporters in a statement later Monday evening. “Unfortunately we are not able to comment further on the specific protective means and methods used to conduct our security operations at the White House.” The White House referred all questions on the incident to USSS.
By Brandon Drenon | BBC News

Seven bodies have been found on a property in a small town in rural Oklahoma during a search for two missing teenagers, authorities say. Police said they believe the teenagers they were looking for, Ivy Webster, 14, and Brittany Brewer, 16, were among the dead. The corpse of Jesse McFadden, a felon and registered sex offender who police said the girls were travelling with, was also found.

Police did not list the cause of death. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol issued an endangered missing person advisory for the two teenagers on Monday. The girls had reportedly spent the weekend with McFadden, according to a local news affiliate of BBC's US media partner CBS, but never returned home.

A search warrant for McFadden's home led police to Henryetta, a small town of about 6,000 people, where they discovered the bodies of seven people. Okmulgee County Sheriff Eddy Rice said he believes Ivy and Brittany were found in the search, but said the state medical examiner will need to confirm the identities of the victims.
Story by Sarah K. Burris

On Monday, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow recalled a 2009 story about Republican lawmakers who went to Uganda, pretending to be experts in sexual orientation. At the time, they encouraged the country to have zero tolerance for homosexuality in their country and said it was what was a problem in the United States.

So, Uganda drafted what became known as the "Kill the Gays" bill, which would require all homosexual people to be hanged. The backlash was so huge that the Republicans claimed that they had nothing to do with that and that they would never have suggested something so extreme.

But Maddow recalled speaking to those on the ground in Uganda who made it clear that those Republicans and conservatives were the ones that inspired the "Kill the Gays" bill. Now, that policy is mainstream in the GOP in the United States, she explained with a slew of headlines splashed on the screen. And a conservative Arizona group is pushing the same law again.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy slammed a Russian reporter who asked a question about the GOP leader's stance on U.S. aid to Ukraine. "I do not support what your country has done in Ukraine," McCarthy said from Jerusalem Monday.
Opinion by Suzanne Moore

Iwonder if, in all the deliberations about the results of the local elections on Friday, we will hear about the number of people who had turned up to vote without the right ID and were refused. Will these numbers be recorded? For this is the first time that the electorate has to use photo ID. Not just any photo ID, but only those specified. A passport, a driving licence, travel cards if you are over 60 but not for anyone younger.

It’s a year since the Elections Act was passed, which requires ID before ballot papers can be issued in polling stations for local, general election and referendums. When this bill was going through the House, the Lords tried to amend it with a large majority voting for more kinds of ID to be acceptable, such as student ID, library cards and bills. The amendment did not make it through, so we are now stuck with this expensive new system, which many believe is a form of voter suppression.
Story by By David Lawder, Trevor Hunnicutt, Andrea Shalal and David Morgan
By David Lawder, Trevor Hunnicutt, Andrea Shalal and David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday summoned the four top congressional leaders to the White House next week after the Treasury warned the government could run short of cash to pay its bills by June. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a letter to Congress that the agency will be unlikely to meet all U.S. government payment obligations "potentially as early as June 1" without action by Congress.

The estimate raised the risk that the United States is headed for an unprecedented default that would shake the global economy, adding new urgency to political calculations in Washington, where Democrats and Republicans were girding for a months-long standoff.
By Bernd Debusmann Jr | BBC News, Washington

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that the US may run out of cash by 1 June if Congress fails to raise or suspend the debt ceiling. Reaching the debt ceiling would mean that the government is unable to borrow any more money. On Monday, Ms Yellen urged Congress to act "as soon as possible" to address the $31.4tr (£25.12tr) limit. President Joe Biden has called a meeting of congressional leaders on the issue on 9 May.

The debt ceiling has been raised, extended or revised 78 times since 1960. In this instance, House Republicans have demanded drastic spending cuts and a reversal of some aspects of President Biden's agenda - including his student loan forgiveness programme and green energy tax credits - in exchange for votes to raise the debt ceiling. This, in turn, has prompted objections from Democrats in the Senate and from President Biden, who said last week that the issue is "not negotiable".
Story by aharoun@insider.com (Azmi Haroun,Kelsey Vlamis,Erin Snodgrass)

Supreme Court justices and America's top political brass are struggling to tackle a baseline ethics question that the Romans grappled with millennia ago. "There's a really practical issue of, 'Who will guard the guardians?' That's a question that the Romans asked over 2,000 years ago," Doron Kalir, a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and an expert in legal ethics, told Insider.
Story by Tom Boggioni

An early investor in Dominion Voting Sytems recalled the impact a report by Fox News host Maria Bartiromo had on himself and his parents – which was so extreme they gave serious consideration to fleeing the U.S. over fears for their safety, he said in an interview with Axios.

Days after Fox settled the defamation lawsuit with Dominion for a stunning $787.5 millionmillion, Hootan Yaghoobzadeh sat down to talk about his involvement with the company and the current state of affairs.

Currently the Managing Director of Staple Street Capital, Yaghoobzadeh explained he joined forces with Dominion in 2018 after seeing potential for enormous growth, and told Axios, "Management grew the business by 4.5 times. But once the defamation happened, the world collapsed for us."
Story by David Jackson, USA TODAY

An attorney for Donald Trump continued to challenge the credibility of rape accuser E. Jean Carroll on Monday after the ex-president's legal team failed a bid to dismiss the case.

U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan denied Trump's motion to dismiss, which claimed that the judge had made "pervasive unfair and prejudicial rulings" against him during the trial's opening days last week.

Trump attorney Joe Tacopina then resumed his cross-examination of Carroll, who stuck by her story that Trump attacked her after a chance meeting at a Manhattan department store in 1996.
Ashley Capoot

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and his police department have asked residents to help fight vehicle theft in the city by placing Apple AirTags in their cars.AirTags are small, circular tracking devices that allow users to monitor the location of their belongings through the “Find My” app on their iPhones. If a vehicle is stolen with an AirTag inside, residents will be able to track their car and work with police officers to recover it.

“It’s a really amazing piece of ingenuity,” Adams said at a press conference Sunday. Apple sells AirTags starting at $29, and Adams said a nonprofit organization in New York has donated 500 of the devices to distribute to residents for free.
Story by Brandon Gage

United States Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) on Monday blamed Friday's massacre in Cleveland, Texas on asylum-seekers from Central and South America. Law enforcement agencies have reportedly hit a "dead end" searching for the thirty-eight-year-old suspect, who murdered five of his neighbors with an AR-15 after they asked him to stop firing off rounds in his yard. One of the victims was a nine-year-old boy.

And while the alleged attacker does have a history of deportation and flouting immigration laws, the idea that foreign nationals are responsible for a significant number of mass shootings is false. According to Statista, "Between 1982 and April 2023, 74 out of the 142 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by white shooters. By comparison, the perpetrator was African American in 25 mass shootings, and Latino in 11. When calculated as percentages, this amounts to 52 percent, 17 percent, and seven percent respectively." But these facts were nowhere to be found in Roy's statement to Fox News.
Story by Bruce Maiman

While all eyes were on what the Supreme Court would do over the abortion pill mifepristone, the justices reviewed another case of considerable weight in that very same week that slipped under the radar for most of us — one having to do with religious liberty. The central question: How far must employers go to accommodate the religious views of their employees?

The components are simple enough. The U.S. Postal Service delivers packages on Sundays, mostly Amazon packages. Full-time career employees, called “regulars” in the business, are not required to deliver them. That task falls to part-time workers called rural carrier associates, or RCAs.

Regulars work five days a week. RCAs fill in on the days regulars have off, which could be any of the six days the post office delivers mail, Monday through Saturday. Most regulars pick Saturday as their off day, but it could be any day of the week. With the advent of online shopping, Sunday package delivery became part of the postal workweek.
Story by Greg Stohr

(Bloomberg) -- The US Supreme Court will consider overturning a decades-old legal doctrine that has given federal regulators broad power to define their authority, accepting an appeal that aims to put new constraints on environmental, consumer-protection and financial-watchdog agencies.

The move sets up the nine-month term that starts in October as a potential blockbuster for the power of regulatory agencies. The court, which has already rolled back agency power in a series of cases, said previously it will consider whether the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding system is constitutional.

The appeal by four New Jersey fishing companies asks the court to overturn the watershed 1984 Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council ruling. That decision said courts should defer to administrative agencies when they offer a reasonable interpretation of an unclear statute.
Story by Ryan Naumann

Hunter Biden’s ex-fling Lunden Roberts has fired off a subpoena to Wells Fargo as she attempts to uncover information about his finances, RadarOnline.com has learned. According to court documents obtained by RadarOnline.com, Roberts’ attorney Clinton Lancaster has demanded Wells Fargo turn over all documents, records or other materials in its possession, custody or control related to Hunter Biden.

The move comes days after Lunden of telling the court she had evidence that Hunter failed to disclose all of his income sources. As RadarOnline.com previously reported, Lunden sued Hunter for paternity & support in 2019. She said he was the of her daughter Navy Roberts. Eventually, a DNA test proved that Hunter was indeed the dad.
Story by Sean O'Kane and Chester Dawson

(Bloomberg) -- Lordstown Motors Corp. may be forced to cease operations and file for bankruptcy after manufacturing giant Foxconn told the electric-vehicle company that it’s prepared to pull out of a production partnership.

The deal with Foxconn Technology Group could unravel after the Taiwanese company threatened to withhold funding, something that could force Lordstown into insolvency, the company warned in a securities filing on Monday. Lordstown said it was also seeking alternative financing.

“If we are unable to resolve our dispute with Foxconn in a timely manner on terms that allow us to continue operating as planned, identify other sources of funding, identify a strategic partner and resolve our significant contingent liabilities, we may need to curtail or cease operations and seek protection by filing a voluntary petition for relief under the bankruptcy code,” Lordstown said.
Story by Tom Boggioni

Politicians have always taken their own parties to task to prove their independence come election time, but Donald Trump has turned it into a bloodsport with his vicious attacks on the Republican party, Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman wrote Monday.

Worse still, he notes, Trump has opened the door for his closest allies and rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to join in his ugly bashing of the party.

In his column, Waldman wrote, "As the 2024 GOP presidential primary gets going, it’s becoming clear that Trump has remade presidential politics in an under-appreciated way: He has made it practically a requirement that GOP candidates campaign on open hostility toward their own party."

Pointing to Trump's recently calling unnamed GOP lawmakers "freaks, neocons, globalists, open-borders zealots and fools,” Waldman noted that prominent Republicans seeking to raise their national profiles have joined in the attacks.
Stephanie Moore

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The sheriff in Richland County, South Carolina, gave an update on the Saturday night shooting at a park that injured multiple people. Sheriff Leon Lott said the shooting happened during what he calls a "flash party" at Meadowlake Park.
Advice columnist is seeking damages for alleged rape in New York department store changing room in 1996, and for defamation
Chris McGreal in New York

The advice columnist E Jean Carroll returns to the witness stand on Monday to face another day of cross-examination in her lawsuit against Donald Trump for alleged rape and defamation.

Last week, Carroll denied that she falsely accused Trump of assaulting her in order to sell books and for political ends. She is seeking damages for alleged rape in a New York department store changing room in 1996, and for defamation after Trump accused her of lying when she went public with her accusations in a book. Carroll said she was motivated to speak up after the New York Times exposed Harvey Weinstein’s crimes and fired the #MeToo movement.

Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, is expected to ask Carroll about a conversation she had at a party with George Conway, then the husband of one of Trump’s top White House aides, Kellyanne Conway. Carroll has already acknowledged that Conway, a vocal critic of Trump to the embarrassment of his now former wife, prompted her to sue the former president. Last week, Tacopina sought to discredit Carroll’s account by dwelling on why she didn’t scream during the alleged attack. “I was in too much of a panic to scream,” she responded. “You can’t beat up on me for not screaming.”
CBS News

The City of Virginia Beach declared a state of emergency after a tornado moved through the area Sunday and damaged dozens of homes, downed trees and caused gas leaks. City officials said it's unclear how many homes had been damaged but they estimated between 50 and 100, after the tornado touched down just after 6 p.m., CBS affiliate WTKR-TV reported. "Based on the debris signature on radar, damage reports, and videos of the storm, we can confirm that there was a tornado," the National Weather Service in Wakefield, Virginia said in a tweet.
Lightfoot warns the Texas governor to pause new transfers of migrants as the city’s resources are stretched thin. Texas plans to resume busing migrants on Monday.
By Allison Novelo | Chicago Sun-Times

In a letter sent to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot urged his administration to stop plans to bus migrants to Chicago, calling the move “inhumane” and “dangerous.”

According to the letter, the Texas leader plans to resume busing migrants to cities throughout the United States, including Chicago, starting Monday. With more than 8,000 migrants already arriving into Chicago since August of last year, the mayor wrote in her letter to Abbott, “We simply have no more shelters, spaces or resources.”
A.G. Gancarski

The Donald Trump, campaign is still salty about Ron DeSantis’ travels. Though MAGA Inc. failed in its attempt to get the Florida Ethics Commission interested in its case that DeSantis flouted Florida’s “resign-to-run” law while “skirting federal campaign finance laws,” the group still is casting aspersions on the Governor’s stepped up travel schedule.

Of issue in a Sunday night email: the Governor’s just concluded four-country tour. “DeSantis has abdicated his duty to the people of Florida by jet setting across the country and across the globe on the taxpayers’ dime. It would be one thing if this globalist media tour was effective, but Team DeSantis couldn’t even manage that,” MAGA Inc. asserts.

“Upon returning home to a state battered by storms, DeSantis faced dismal headlines like “Ron DeTedious: DeSantis Underwhelms Britain’s Business Chiefs,” and “‘I think he’s in trouble’: Growing number of Ron DeSantis donors and allies hope for a shake-up.”
The man, said to have used an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in the slayings of five neighbors, apparently slipped past a local, state and federal law enforcement dragnet.
By Dennis Romero

A man suspected of using an AR-15 rifle to kill five neighbors execution-style continued to elude an army of law enforcement hunting for him outside Houston over the weekend. Authorities said Sunday afternoon that Francisco Oropesa, 38, appeared to have slipped past a 2-mile dragnet of more than 150 law enforcement officers in Cleveland, Texas, about 45 miles north of Houston, on Saturday. On Sunday, they said, more than 250 officers were continuing the search.
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