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Category: Law/Crime

The DOJ’s antitrust case against Google is ambitious but risky

The DOJ’s antitrust case against Google is ambitious but risky

CNBC reports: The Department of Justice’s latest challenge to Google’s tech empire is an ambitious swing at the company with the potential to rearrange the digital advertising market. But alongside the possibility of great reward comes significant risk in seeking to push the boundaries of antitrust law. “DOJ is going big or going home here,” said Daniel Francis, who teaches antitrust at NYU School of Law and previously worked as deputy director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition,…

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How pharmaceutical companies inflate prices on their best-selling drugs at the expense of patients and taxpayers

How pharmaceutical companies inflate prices on their best-selling drugs at the expense of patients and taxpayers

The New York Times reports: In 2016, a blockbuster drug called Humira was poised to become a lot less valuable. The key patent on the best-selling anti-inflammatory medication, used to treat conditions like arthritis, was expiring at the end of the year. Regulators had blessed a rival version of the drug, and more copycats were close behind. The onset of competition seemed likely to push down the medication’s $50,000-a-year list price. Instead, the opposite happened. Through its savvy but legal…

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Trump’s killing spree: The inside story of his race to execute every prisoner he could

Trump’s killing spree: The inside story of his race to execute every prisoner he could

Rolling Stone reports: In the final moments of Brandon Bernard’s life, before he was executed by lethal injection at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Dec. 10, 2020, President Donald Trump picked up the phone to entertain a final plea for mercy on Bernard’s behalf. The call was not with Bernard’s family or his attorneys. Nor was it with representatives from the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney office, who had recommended just days earlier that Trump spare Bernard’s life….

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Supreme Court failed to disclose financial ties with expert brought in to review leak probe

Supreme Court failed to disclose financial ties with expert brought in to review leak probe

CNN reports: The Supreme Court did not disclose its longstanding financial ties with former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff even as it touted him as an expert who independently validated its investigation into who leaked the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. The court’s inquiry, released last week with Chertoff’s endorsement, failed to identify who was responsible for the unprecedented leak. The decision to keep the relationship with Chertoff quiet is a reflection of a pattern of opacity at the…

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Durham inquiry into Russia investigation veered into a criminal investigation related to Trump himself

Durham inquiry into Russia investigation veered into a criminal investigation related to Trump himself

The New York Times reports: By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Mr. Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane” after all. On one of Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham’s trips to Europe, according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials…

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Louisiana routinely overdetains inmates (sometimes called ‘slaves’), violating Constitution, U.S. says

Louisiana routinely overdetains inmates (sometimes called ‘slaves’), violating Constitution, U.S. says

The Washington Post reports: Louisiana correction authorities routinely confine thousands of inmates beyond their release dates each year, in violation of the Constitution and wasting taxpayer funds, the U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday. Overdetention is not unheard of in other states, nor in federal facilities, but the scale of Louisana’s actions — which the Justice Department attributed to state authorities being “deliberately indifferent” to “systemic” shortcomings — is significant. (If Louisiana were a country, it would have world’s most incarcerated…

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Timothy Snyder connects the dots: FBI, McGonigal, Manafort, Deripaska, Trump, and Putin

Timothy Snyder connects the dots: FBI, McGonigal, Manafort, Deripaska, Trump, and Putin

In a 20-tweet thread, Timothy Snyder outlines the timeline and connections that now scream out for further investigation following the indictment of Charles McGonigal, the former Special Agent in Charge (“SAC”) of FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in New York: In April 2016, I broke the story of Trump and Putin, using Russian open sources. Afterwards, I heard vague intimations that something was awry in the FBI in New York, specifically counter-intelligence and cyber. We now have a suggestion as to why….

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The improbability of George Santos’ $199 expenses

The improbability of George Santos’ $199 expenses

Politico reports: Rep. George Santos’ congressional campaign reported dozens of transactions just cents below the threshold that would have triggered a requirement to preserve spending records — an unusual spending pattern that is now part of broader complaints about alleged financial improprieties. Santos, who admitted in December that he faked parts of his biography, already faces a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission alleging his campaign repeatedly reported suspicious expenses. Those included eight charges of exactly $199.99 at an…

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Archives weighs asking past presidents, VPs to look for classified items

Archives weighs asking past presidents, VPs to look for classified items

The Washington Post reports: The National Archives is weighing whether to ask living former presidents and vice presidents to review their personal records to verify that no classified materials are inadvertently outstanding, according to two people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations. The deliberation comes after the discovery and return of a limited number of records bearing classified markings in recent weeks at President Biden’s home and a think tank bearing…

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Former FBI executive allegedly ‘committed the very violations he swore to investigate’ by taking payments from Russian oligarch

Former FBI executive allegedly ‘committed the very violations he swore to investigate’ by taking payments from Russian oligarch

The New York Times reports: A former high-level F.B.I. official has been indicted in New York and Washington, D.C., on charges of taking money from a former foreign intelligence service agent and conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions on Russia by taking secret payments from a Russian oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, the authorities said on Monday. The former official, Charles McGonigal, who had been the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division in New York before he retired in…

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UK government helped sanctioned Putin ally sue British journalist

UK government helped sanctioned Putin ally sue British journalist

Open Democracy reports: The UK government helped the boss of Russia’s murderous mercenary army to circumvent its own sanctions and launch a targeted legal attack on a British journalist, openDemocracy can reveal. Yevgeny Prigozhin is the founder of Wagner, a private army that the US government last week announced it would designate a “transnational criminal organisation”, allowing it to impose even tougher sanctions on the group. For years it has been accused of human rights abuses and war crimes in…

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Supreme Court leak investigation ends with justices appearing as above the law

Supreme Court leak investigation ends with justices appearing as above the law

The New York Times reports: Last spring and summer, employees of the Supreme Court were drawn into an investigation that turned into an uncomfortable awakening. As the court marshal’s office looked into who had leaked the draft opinion of the decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, law clerks who had secured coveted perches at the top of the judiciary scrambled for legal advice and navigated quandaries like whether to surrender their personal cellphones to investigators. The “court family” soon…

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Federal judge rules Trump is ‘the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process’

Federal judge rules Trump is ‘the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process’

The New York Times reports: In a scathing ruling, a federal judge in Florida on Thursday ordered Donald J. Trump and one of his lawyers together to pay nearly a million dollars in sanctions for filing a frivolous lawsuit against nearly three dozen of Mr. Trump’s perceived political enemies, including Hillary Clinton and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey. The ruling was a significant rebuke of Mr. Trump, who has rarely faced such consequences in his long history of…

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In Supreme Court leak investigation, justices were questioned but not asked to give a sworn affidavit

In Supreme Court leak investigation, justices were questioned but not asked to give a sworn affidavit

CNBC reports: Each of the Supreme Court’s justices was questioned — some of them multiple times — as part of an investigation into last year’s leak of a draft opinion of the ruling that ended up overturning the court’s landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision, the head of that probe revealed Friday. The statement came a day after the Supreme Court refused to say whether the justices were among the nearly 100 court staffers and clerks who were questioned in…

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Special Counsel has questioned several officials about Trump’s handling of Russia probe papers

Special Counsel has questioned several officials about Trump’s handling of Russia probe papers

Murray Waas reports: On the eve of Donald Trump’s last day in office as President, Trump sent a memo to his attorney general, and also the directors of National Intelligence and the CIA, directing them to declassify thousands of pages of highly classified government papers pertaining to the FBI’s investigation into the Russian Federation’s covert intervention into the 2016 US presidential election to help elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton. But Trump was stymied in his efforts to make the…

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Suspect in shootings at New Mexico Democratic officials’ homes called himself the ‘MAGA King’

Suspect in shootings at New Mexico Democratic officials’ homes called himself the ‘MAGA King’

Insider reports: The failed GOP candidate accused of plotting shootings at Democratic officials’ homes called himself “the MAGA King” and said he was “researching his options” after he lost his state election by nearly 50 points. Republican Solomon Pena ran for New Mexico’s House District 14 in 2022, but lost to incumbent Democrat Miguel P. Garcia — with Garcia claiming 74% of the votes and Pena only 26%. But Pena refused to concede, tweeting “I dissent. I am the MAGA…

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