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Category: Law/Crime

How Trump’s crackdown on law firms is undermining legal defenses for the vulnerable

How Trump’s crackdown on law firms is undermining legal defenses for the vulnerable

Reuters reports: When the Texas Civil Rights Project needed lawyers to help dozens of people arrested during U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, legal director Dustin Rynders turned to a familiar strategy. He contacted major law firms that for decades had provided free legal services to nonprofits like his. On that April day in Houston, he called his usual contacts, many at firms that had previously handled challenges to Trump’s immigration policies. Before Trump’s return to the White House, they…

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Emil Bove’s confirmation was only possible because of the cowardice of Democrats

Emil Bove’s confirmation was only possible because of the cowardice of Democrats

Jay Willis writes: On Tuesday evening, the Senate voted to confirm Emil Bove, President Donald Trump’s criminal defense attorney-turned-Justice Department hatchetman, to a life-tenured judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Bove first made headlines for firing dozens of January 6 prosecutors shortly after Trump took office, parroting the president’s description of these cases as a “grave national injustice.” According to multiple whistleblowers, in March, Bove told his Justice Department subordinates that they might need to say “fuck you” to judges who were…

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Venezuelan men sent to CECOT on what they endured and reuniting with their families

Venezuelan men sent to CECOT on what they endured and reuniting with their families

By Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica, Ronna Rísquez, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News, photography and additional reporting by Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune This story was originally published by ProPublica Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his…

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Senate Democrats are using a 1928 law to pressure Trump to release the Epstein files

Senate Democrats are using a 1928 law to pressure Trump to release the Epstein files

Greg Sargent writes: Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but they also call for creative ones. Faced with a criminal president and a GOP congressional majority that’s wholly devoted to shutting down any and all transparency and accountability for him, Democrats will have to get increasingly resourceful in their efforts to crack through that facade. The very tentative good news is: They actually have options to do just that. This is why you should pay attention to the news…

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The clowns leading the FBI ‘have no idea what they’re doing’

The clowns leading the FBI ‘have no idea what they’re doing’

Quinta Jurecic writes: Michael Feinberg had not been planning to leave the FBI. But on May 31, he received a phone call from his boss asking him about a personal friendship with a former FBI agent who was known for criticizing President Donald Trump. Feinberg, an assistant special agent in charge at the FBI’s field office in Norfolk, Virginia, realized right away that he was in the crosshairs of the bureau’s leadership at an unusually chaotic time. If his 15-year…

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Delusions are getting crafted into legislation that’s designed to obscure the reality of climate change

Delusions are getting crafted into legislation that’s designed to obscure the reality of climate change

NBC News reports: For years, outlandish theories about the U.S. government using airplanes to spray harmful chemicals over U.S. homes or powerful elites controlling the weather were relegated to the fringes of society. Not anymore. As the internet has provided rocket fuel for such claims, Republican lawmakers across the country are introducing, passing and enacting laws to ban “weather modification” and environmental geoengineering and allude to the use of “chemtrails,” a longtime theory that planes are spreading chemical agents on…

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Israel is committing genocide, says Israeli human rights group

Israel is committing genocide, says Israeli human rights group

B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, reports: Since October 2023, Israel has shifted its policy toward the Palestinians. Its military onslaught on Gaza, underway for more than 21 months, has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives….

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Trump can’t quell the Epstein uproar with distractions

Trump can’t quell the Epstein uproar with distractions

Reuters reports: President Donald Trump’s super powers as a public figure have long included the ability to redirect, evade and deny. But the Republican’s well-worn methods of changing the subject when a tough topic stings politically are not working as his White House fends off persistent unrest from his usually loyal base about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. Trump has scolded reporters, claimed ignorance and offered distractions in an effort to quash questions about Epstein and the…

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Trump order pushes forced hospitalization of homeless people

Trump order pushes forced hospitalization of homeless people

The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to find ways to make it easier to forcibly hospitalize homeless people with mental illness and addiction for longer periods — an effort to fight what the administration calls “vagrancy” threatening the streets of U.S. cities. An executive order signed Thursday pushes federal agencies to overturn state and federal legal precedent that limits how local and state governments can involuntarily commit people who pose a risk to themselves or…

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Genocide has become a spectacle as Israeli soldiers and U.S. contractors murder starving Palestinians

Genocide has become a spectacle as Israeli soldiers and U.S. contractors murder starving Palestinians

  A former US veteran who was employed at a food distribution site in Gaza has accused members of the Israel Defence Forces and American colleagues of deliberately targeting and killing unarmed Palestinian civilians. Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Aguilar, a former special forces veteran, was recruited to work for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a joint Israeli-US scheme replacing the United Nations food distribution operation in Gaza. He has told the BBC he witnessed the IDF shooting at the crowds of Palestinians, firing…

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‘We are starving’

‘We are starving’

Ruwaida Amer writes: I am so hungry. I’ve never meant those words in the way I do now. They carry a kind of humiliation that I can’t fully describe. Every moment, I find myself wishing: If only this were just a nightmare. If only I could wake up and it would all be over. Since last May, after I was forced to flee my home and take shelter with relatives in Khan Younis refugee camp, I’ve heard those same words…

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Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison describe ‘hell on Earth’

Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison describe ‘hell on Earth’

NPR reports: Carlos Daniel Terán, 19, still remembers the words a prison warden told him when he entered El Salvador’s mega-prison, CECOT. “He told us we were never going to leave this place,” Terán recalled. It was March of this year. Terán had just been transferred from an immigration detention center in Texas to the notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo — known as CECOT — a maximum-security prison built to house accused Salvadoran gang members. El Salvador’s own justice…

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LA grand jurors refuse to be intimidated by Trump’s screaming top federal prosecutor

LA grand jurors refuse to be intimidated by Trump’s screaming top federal prosecutor

The Los Angeles Times reports: To bystanders at the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, it sounded as though U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli would not take no for an answer. A prosecutor had the irate Trump administration appointee on speakerphone outside the grand jury room, and his screaming was audible, according to three law enforcement officials aware of the encounter who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The grand jury had just refused to indict someone accused…

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Tracking of Comey cellphone location is evidence that the Trump regime is abusing its spying powers

Tracking of Comey cellphone location is evidence that the Trump regime is abusing its spying powers

Freedom of the Press Foundation reports: A recent news report about Secret Service surveillance of former FBI Director James Comey suggests that the Trump administration is abusing its spying powers. You may remember that the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security launched an investigation into Comey for posting a picture on Instagram during his beach vacation of seashells spelling out “8647.” Conservatives claimed that Comey’s post was a threat to our 47th president, Donald Trump. Never mind that “86”…

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Under siege from Trump and Musk, Media Matters falls into crisis

Under siege from Trump and Musk, Media Matters falls into crisis

The New York Times reports: Media Matters, a nonprofit group that has played a key role in liberal politics, is struggling to withstand months of legal assaults by President Trump’s allies, offering a glimpse of what might be in store for even well-funded targets of his retribution campaigns. The organization, which is funded by some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, has racked up about $15 million in legal fees over the past 20 months to defend itself against lawsuits…

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DOJ whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, speaks out

DOJ whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, speaks out

  An explosive whistle-blower report claims that the Justice Department is asking government lawyers to lie to the courts, and that this has forced career officials to chose between upholding the Constitution and pledging loyalty to the president. Rachel Abrams speaks to the whistle-blower about his career in the Justice Department and his complaint saying he was fired for telling the truth.