Attention to the Unseen

Mark Joseph Stern writes: The North Carolina Supreme Court tossed a grenade into the state’s election on Monday, violating both state and federal law to grant Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cynical, last-minute removal from the ballot. Its 4–3 decision will compel election administrators to destroy nearly 3 million already-printed ballots that featured Kennedy’s name and redesign 2,348 different ballot styles across the state to accommodate the eleventh-hour change. This complex process will significantly delay the distribution of new ballots—which will,…

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The Daily Beast reports: Elon Musk secretly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into an effort to turf a Democratic prosecutor in Texas, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The Texas resident and Tesla and SpaceX CEO was the chief financier of Saving Austin, a group that distributed incendiary material attacking District Attorney José Garza during the Democratic primary, including fliers that baselessly accused him of “filling Austin’s streets with pedophiles & killers,” the Journal reports. Alongside…

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CBS News reports: Federal prosecutors in California unsealed an indictment Monday charging two people with leading an online group of white supremacists that maintained a list of high-profile targets to assassinate and urging group members to commit hate crimes. A 37-page indictment filed on Sept. 5 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California alleges that Dallas Erin Humber and Matthew Robert Allison led the group known as “Terrorgram,” a network of channels, group chats and users…

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The Associated Press reports: Americans were duped out of more than $5.6 billion last year through fraud schemes involving cryptocurrency, the FBI said in a report released Monday that shows a 45% jump in losses from 2022. The FBI received nearly 70,000 complaints in 2023 by victims of financial fraud involving bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies, according to the FBI. The most rampant scheme was investment fraud, which accounted for $3.96 billion of the losses. “The decentralized nature of cryptocurrency,…

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The Daily Beast reports: White nationalist Nick Fuentes may have once dined with former president Donald Trump but he has now turned on him for finally admitting that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. “He’s admitting… ‘I lost by a whisker’. So what was the point? What’s the point of any of it you lost in 2020? Seriously? What are we even doing anymore then? You’re a loser… you lost to Joe Biden, you deserve to be charged….

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  Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke last appeared on Democracy Now! in January to discuss an attack on Columbia’s campus targeting pro-Palestinian student activists with a foul-smelling liquid that led to multiple hospitalizations. Following her interview, Franke now faces termination after two Columbia professors filed a complaint against her claiming she had created a hostile environment for Israeli students; she also became a target for Republican lawmakers. Franke joins Democracy Now! to discuss the campaign against her, the ongoing…

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The Associated Press reports: The Justice Department has charged a Russian-born U.S. citizen and former adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign with working for a sanctioned Russian state television network and laundering the proceeds. Indictments announced Thursday allege that Dimitri Simes and his wife received over $1 million dollars and a personal car and driver in exchange for work they did for Russia’s Channel One since June 2022. The network was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022 over Russia’s…

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ProPublica and Documented report: Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses. Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the…

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The New York Times reports: The United States on Wednesday announced a broad effort to push back on Russian influence campaigns in the 2024 election, trying to curb the Kremlin’s use of state-run media and fake news sites to sway American voters. The actions include sanctions, indictments and seizing of web domains that U.S. officials say the Kremlin uses to spread propaganda and disinformation about Ukraine, which Russia invaded more than two years ago. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on…

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ProPublica reports: Judge Aileen M. Cannon has shown bias in handling criminal charges against former President Donald Trump and should be reversed and removed from the case to “preserve the appearance of justice,” a public interest group argued in a legal filing on Tuesday. The brief filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and joined by a retired federal judge and two constitutional lawyers is a direct legal assault on Cannon’s decision to throw out special counsel Jack…

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