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Category: Law/Crime

Ending affirmative action may be just the beginning

Ending affirmative action may be just the beginning

Aziz Huq writes: It is easy to think of the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill’s affirmative action programs as the end of a long road. A court with a Republican-appointed majority has been chipping away at the legality of using race to allocate state benefits since the Reagan administration. And a young lawyer in Reagan’s White House by the name of John Roberts candidly condemned state affirmative action measures in blunt terms as “highly objectionable.” Now, after…

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‘A tragedy for us all’: Supreme Court Justice Jackson blasts majority’s affirmative action ruling

‘A tragedy for us all’: Supreme Court Justice Jackson blasts majority’s affirmative action ruling

CNBC reports: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson excoriated her colleagues who voted to strike down race-conscious college admissions policies, accusing the majority of “turning back the clock” on affirmative action. “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” Jackson wrote in a thundering dissent to the major court ruling Thursday. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” she wrote. “History speaks. In some form,…

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There’s a time bomb in progressives’ big Supreme Court voting case win

There’s a time bomb in progressives’ big Supreme Court voting case win

Richard L. Hasen writes: It is indeed a cause for celebration that the United States Supreme Court, on a 6-3 vote in Moore v. Harper, rejected an extreme version of the “independent state legislature” theory that could have upended the conduct of elections around the country and paved the way for state legislatures to engage in election subversion. But after the celebration comes the inevitable hangover, and with all the hoopla it is easy to miss that the Supreme Court…

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Trump’s audio masterpiece of self-incrimination

Trump’s audio masterpiece of self-incrimination

Margaret Hartmann writes: Audio recordings have landed Trump in hot water time and again — from the Access Hollywood tape to his “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the recorded call in which he asked Georgia’s secretary of State to steal the 2020 election for him. Nevertheless, in July 2021, Trump agreed to let a publisher and writer working on his former chief of staff Mark Meadows’s book record their conversation, then proceeded to brag about how he had a highly classified document about Iran at…

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Trump tricks small donors to pay his own legal fees rather than paying for them himself

Trump tricks small donors to pay his own legal fees rather than paying for them himself

The New York Times reports: Facing multiple intensifying investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has quietly begun diverting more of the money he is raising away from his 2024 presidential campaign and into a political action committee that he has used to pay his personal legal fees. The change, which went unannounced except in the fine print of his online disclosures, raises fresh questions about how Mr. Trump is paying for his mounting legal bills — which could run into…

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Who wins in the Hunter Biden plea deal

Who wins in the Hunter Biden plea deal

Norman Eisen writes: We might have expected a fight from Hunter Biden and his lead trial counsel Abbe Lowell rather than news of Tuesday’s plea deal with the Justice Department. After all, Lowell did not become one of America’s most successful trial lawyers by pleading his clients out. But the deal, negotiated by Biden’s lead criminal counsel Chris Clark, requiring Hunter Biden to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and to admit to felony gun possession, was a good one. That was true for Hunter Biden, his…

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Republicans are torching democracy to deny women abortions

Republicans are torching democracy to deny women abortions

Rolling Stone reports: Kierre Morgan has had an abortion, but it was the abortion she didn’t have that transformed her into an activist. She was 17 and in denial, at first, about being pregnant at all. Under Ohio law, she needed permission to terminate her pregnancy, and — after considering whether she could use a fake ID — she finally had a conversation with her adoptive parents. They overruled her decision. “Their options were: I could have my daughter, and…

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No Labels using dark money to fund campaign for unnamed third party candidate

No Labels using dark money to fund campaign for unnamed third party candidate

Politico reports: No Labels’ bid to run a third party presidential candidate in 2024 has sparked a number of questions about political motivations. Chief among them: Who, exactly, is paying for this thing? The centrist group consists of a constellation of entities, some of which disclose donor names. But the main one is a nonprofit which, unlike political parties, does not have to reveal the names of its funders. And in an interview with POLITICO, its CEO, Nancy Jacobson, declined…

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IRS agent told Congress of Hunter Biden invoking his father in business deal

IRS agent told Congress of Hunter Biden invoking his father in business deal

The New York Times reports: The lead I.R.S. agent investigating whether Hunter Biden committed tax crimes told Congress his team uncovered evidence that Mr. Biden had invoked his father, who was then out of office, while pressing a potential Chinese business partner in 2017 to move ahead with a proposed energy deal, House Republicans said. In testimony made public on Thursday, Gary Shapley, an I.R.S. agent since 2009 who supervised the tax agency’s investigation into Hunter Biden, said his team…

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Will Judge Cannon give Trump a favorable jury?

Will Judge Cannon give Trump a favorable jury?

Jeffrey Abramson, Eugene R. Fidell, and Dennis Aftergut write: On Tuesday, Federal District Court Judge Aileen Cannon launched the Florida trial for Donald Trump’s national security case on a “rocket docket,” setting the trial date on August 14. That date will likely not hold, but it might reassure those who have worried about her assignment to the case, concerned that she might, among other things, slow-walk it. That reassurance won’t end the concerns, of course. Legal experts (among others) lost…

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Ex-FBI analyst who, like Trump, kept classified documents in her bathroom, receives nearly four-year prison sentence

Ex-FBI analyst who, like Trump, kept classified documents in her bathroom, receives nearly four-year prison sentence

The Kansas City Star reports: A former FBI intelligence analyst from Dodge City, Kansas, who kept hundreds of classified documents at her home, including in her bathroom, was sentenced to nearly four years in prison by a federal judge in Kansas City on Wednesday for violating the same part of the Espionage Act that former President Donald Trump is accused of breaking. The sentencing for willful retention of national defense information was the first since a federal grand jury indicted…

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Inside Moms for Liberty’s close relationship with the Proud Boys

Inside Moms for Liberty’s close relationship with the Proud Boys

Vice News reports: Alexandra Caballero was already well-known in Miami’s far-right scene as an organizer of anti-mask protests at school board meetings when, in August 2021, she joined the city’s chapter of the extremist “parental rights” group known as Moms for Liberty. For six months, Caballero told VICE News that she was happy to be a member of the group. Founded in 2020, Moms for Liberty portrays itself as a wholesome, grassroots movement that is focused on protecting students. However,…

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Justice Alito doth protest too much

Justice Alito doth protest too much

The New York Times reports: Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took the unusual step late Tuesday of responding to questions about his travel with a billionaire who frequently has cases before the Supreme Court hours before an article detailing their ties had even been published. In an extraordinary salvo in a favored forum, Justice Alito defended himself in a pre-emptive article in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal before the news organization ProPublica posted its account of a…

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There is no shared American value system

There is no shared American value system

Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Podhorzer write: In another least-surprising surprise of our times, last week Donald Trump expressed his intent, if elected to a second term as president, to utilize his Justice Department to destroy his political opponent. The New York Times reported that Trump had promised, in a speech after his arraignment, to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire…

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How Leonard Leo, architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, helped DeSantis flip the state Supreme Court

How Leonard Leo, architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, helped DeSantis flip the state Supreme Court

The Washington Post reports: For decades, the ambitions of Florida’s Republican governors were stymied by the liberal-leaning state Supreme Court. That is, until Ron DeSantis was elected. The court let him erase a congressional district with a large Black population. It opened the door to a law making it easier to impose the death penalty. Now, it’s poised to rule on the governor’s plan to outlaw most abortions in the third-most-populous state. The hard-right turn was by design. DeSantis seized…

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Team Trump suspects his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is a ‘rat’

Team Trump suspects his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is a ‘rat’

Rolling Stone reports: Earlier this year, Donald Trump sent some of his lawyers and political advisers on a “small fact-finding mission,” as a person with knowledge of the matter describes it to Rolling Stone. The former president wanted to know, according to that source and another person close to Trump: “What is Mark doing?” Trump was referring to his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Justice Department investigators and Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office had been keen on…

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