courts

Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast is well-done and riveting. It’s also turned out to be very depressing

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I’ve been listening, somewhat belatedly, to Rachel Maddow’s eight-part Ultra podcast, which Rolling Stone described like this in an Oct. 3, 2002, article:

For a historical podcast, Rachel Maddow’s new project could hardly be more timely. As the seditious conspiracy trial seeking to hold the Oath Keepers accountable for their role in the Jan. 6 insurrection ramps up in Washington, D.C., Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra explores a World War II-era prosecution known as the Great Sedition Trial of 1944.

The prosecution – and determined amateur sleuths in the general public — exposed a Nazi-backed plot that connected sitting members of Congress — many of them tied to the original, nativist America First movement — and militias and street thugs who wanted to overthrow the republic and install a fascist, authoritarian regime.

It’s quite riveting. But as I have made my way through episode 5 (“Shut it down”) I’ve had to stop listening because I can tell it’s going to be too depressing in the end because all the clues are there that not a single elected right-wing Republican member of Congress is going to be held accountable for colluding with German spies.

Which brings us to this NPR Fresh Aire interview with Maddow from December of 2022:

GROSS: So you describe the (eventual Ultra) sedition trial as turning into bedlam. There’s so many, like, outrageous things that happened. Like, during the period when potential jurors are questioned before they’re chosen to be jurors, the defense asks some incredible questions, including things like, are you Jewish or do you have a relative who is? Do you read Jewish publications? What does Jew mean? What does international bankers mean? What’s meant by Mongolian Jews? And do you think Jesus was a Jew? And there were no Jews, no African-Americans on the jury, but at least three German Americans. It’s amazing that the judge let this kind of questioning happen and that there were no Jews, but there were three German Americans.

MADDOW: Yeah. This is flummoxing in some ways. I mean, defense counsel can propose all sorts of crazy things to be asked to potential jurors, but it’s up to the judge to decide what actually gets asked. And for Judge Eicher to have allowed some of these questions specifically designed to keep Jews off the jury, and also to sort of push-pull the jury on being disinclined toward any Jewish perspective, is a remarkable thing. And indeed, there were no Jewish people on the jury.

I feel like one of the things that might explain why bedlam broke out and why the trial was so out of control and why things like that happened with selecting the jury pool, it may have had something to do with the fact that Judge Eicher was very inexperienced. He was in his mid-60s by the time the trial was happening, but he’d only been on the bench for two years. He had been a congressman from Iowa. He’d been on – I think – the SEC, had had some other government jobs. He’d had a sort of distinguished career and was well-regarded, but he was not experienced as a judge. When he was put in charge of this trial with, you know, 28 incredibly rowdy, incredibly disruptive and in many cases incredibly eccentric defendants, almost as many defense lawyers, the highest profile case in the country on incredibly inflammatory charges, it was going to be a challenge for any judge, but for somebody who didn’t really know what he was doing yet, he was very clearly overmatched from day one of that trial.

GROSS: And you say that the defense tried to prevent the trial, tried to postpone the trial, tried to have a mistrial declared, and they kept doing that, like, over and over. The trial came to a kind of a dramatic conclusion because the judge went home one night after the trial had been going on for months, had dinner, and then died in his sleep. So what happened after that?

MADDOW: It was a crazy moment. I mean, the trial never got less chaotic from the very beginning. And you can see it in the newspaper coverage at the time that there’s reporters who are planning on being in the courtroom every day, who are planning – you know, and they’re recording with great detail everything that happens. And then the news coverage sort of dwindles over time because nobody can follow what’s going on, and the case is so chaotic and the courtroom is so uncomfortable and it’s so out of control. Judge Eicher’s seven months into the trial when the prosecution, which goes first in a criminal trial, they weren’t even halfway through their presentation seven months into it already. He felt ill one day in the courtroom, went home and died in his sleep that night.

The defendants were given the option that they could allow another judge to come in and pick up where the trial left off, and the defendants did not want to do that. They wanted to start all over again from day one. And of course, they did, because I think the bedlam and chaos in the courtroom was to their benefit at this point. The Justice Department then had to decide whether they were going to do that, whether they were going to start over from day one or whether they were just going to dismiss the charges and let it go. And they let that decision linger for quite a long time, and one of the things that happened in the interim, while it was still possible they could restart the trial, is that the prosecutor asked leave from the court to go to Germany.

A U.S. Army captain who was part of the Nuremberg prosecutions contacted this prosecutor, John Rogge, at the Justice Department and said, hey, you know, we’re interrogating these Nazi leaders here, and all of your sedition defendants’ names keep coming up when we’re interrogating these Nazis about who they were working with in the United States and what they were trying to do. You ought to see this evidence. And Rogge went to Germany to collect that evidence and then brought it back to the Justice Department and – for them to inform their decision as to whether or not to proceed with the case.

GROSS: And they proceeded with the case.

MADDOW: They did not proceed with the case, which is a remarkable…

GROSS: They did not proceed.

MADDOW: No. They allowed the mistrial to be the end of the story. And Rogge’s report from Germany, with all the evidence that was collected from German officials confirming the central charges of the sedition case – that these Americans had been receiving support from Germany, that they were working in cahoots with the German government to try to overthrow the U.S. government and install fascism here – he brought all this evidence back including the names of 24 members of the House and Senate who had been involved in the propaganda part of this operation.

He brought it all back. He gave it to the attorney general. The attorney general brought it straight to the White House, by then occupied by Harry Truman. And Harry Truman said, this report will never see the light of day. This is not a report that will be made to the American people. This will not be given to the court. This will – this is over. This is done. This cannot come out.

After a commercial break, Terri Gross brings it back to the question of prosecutions – or lack, thereof:

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to my interview with Rachel Maddow. Her new podcast series, “Ultra,” is about plots from ultra-right groups to overthrow the U.S. government in the years leading up to World War II.

So none of the congressmen who were colluding with Hitler’s Germany ever got indicted. Is that right?

MADDOW: That’s right. And it’s a good question as to why not.

GROSS: Yeah, why not?

MADDOW: (Laughter) Well, I mean, Viereck himself, who was the German agent, was charged. And in his individual trial and, again, in the evidence that was brought forward against him in the sedition trial, the government laid out what he was doing with these members of Congress including paying them to do this work that had been assigned to him by the Hitler government. So they had the evidence of it. The Justice Department did bring in a couple of members of Congress to testify to the grand jury. They did indict one congressional staffer. They had a lot of evidence about members of Congress having been part of this plot, and they chose not to indict the members. And there isn’t an explanation from that that I think all parties would admit to.

But my view, having sort of marinated in this research for the past year or more, is that the Justice Department just did not want to incur more ire and more wrath from the members of Congress who were already giving them such a hard time for this case. Members of Congress knew they were implicated. They knew what they had done. And they did everything they could to try to get this prosecution blown up from getting, first, one and then the second prosecutor in the case fired by political pressure.

They – in one case, one of the members of Congress who was brought in to testify to the grand jury and who had his congressional staffer indicted, he tried to get the sedition law taken off the books. So it would result in the American justice system no longer having that available as a charge to bring against people who did these things. They really did everything they could to make life miserable for the Justice Department in pursuing this and in so doing, protected themselves, I believe, from being charged when the evidence existed that would have justified a charge.

GROSS: So the legal system never held anybody accountable for this sedition and for the violence that these ultra-right-wing groups were behind, and the congressmen weren’t held accountable. Did the people hold the colluders accountable?

MADDOW: Yes, in almost every instance. And this was a surprise to me and a really interesting part of the research. This, as a prosecution, didn’t work. But the Justice Department’s investigation was of interest to the public. It was done at the same time that there was a lot of journalistic and even activist investigation of these matters. There was really good investigative reporting both in book form and in magazine-and-newspaper journalism done about these scandals at the time. There were activist groups who infiltrated some of these violent ultra-right groups and then publicized their findings about what those groups were doing. They not only brought it to law enforcement; they brought it to the press and made sure that people knew what was happening.

And the result from the public was that almost all the members of Congress who were implicated in this, including some who were seen as presidential timber, some of whom were among the most popular and powerful members of Congress, of their – household names – almost to a one, they were voted out as soon as they came back up before the voters, either voted out in primaries or voted out in general elections including huge figures at the time like Gerald Nye from North Dakota and Burton Wheeler from Montana and Hamilton Fish from New York.

And all of these very powerful, very famous members were thrown out on their ear because constituents and, in some cases, their political parties recognized that – recognized what they’d been doing to help the Nazis. It was a form of political accountability that worked even when criminal accountability fell short.

I think Maddow gives way too much weight here to the idea of public shaming as some form of accountability.

The lessons learned then by the Nazi collaborators in Congress – much like what we see happening thus far with the members of Congress who helped the Jan. 6 rioters try to overthrow our government – were that, yes, you can commit treason or take part in a seditious conspiracy, and the government won’t prosecute you because doing to will be seen as harmful to the fabric of America cohesion.

I will likely finish listening to Maddow’s podcast at some point because she’s quite good and it’s very well done.

But for now I have to take a break to get used to the fact that it’s happened before and Republicans got away with it, just as it’s appearing that the members of Congress who aided and abetted the Jan. 6 rioters will likely get away with it.

Rep. Hamilton Fish III surrounded by reporters at a barber shop on September 19, 1939. Fish had just returned from a trip to Nazi Germany.

One NH legislator wants to end the “gay panic defense” for anti-gay attacks, murders

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There’s been a lot of gay bashers and gay murderers over the years who’ve gotten off lightly in court because they’ve been able to use the so-called “gay panic defense.”

It’s a surprisingly easy sell to some judges and juries that a gay man could flirt with another man and the man who is the object of the flirtation goes temporarily insane to the point of killing the gay man.

It has also often been the case that these allegedly straight men who kill gay men were the instigators of the sexual interest, and then panic post-coitally since someone now knows they have sex with men. Then they kill the gay man to erase the evidence. This is where the “panic” has often entered the crime.

Those of us who’ve been around have often observed that if straight women were able to kill straight men with whom they’ve just had sex and instantly regretted it, society would be littered with the bodies of straight men.

Some prosecutors, judges and juries have been starting to see through this defense. But not all of them.

So it’s good news that one Democratic legislator in New Hampshire is trying to change the laws in that state so that the “gay panic defense” cannot be used:

Incoming state representative Shaun Filiault of Keene campaigned on ending the “gay-panic defense” in homicide cases in the state, and now he is planning legislation to do just that.

Filiault, a Democrat, has requested that legislative staff write up a bill that would prohibit defendants from claiming temporary insanity because of an unwanted same-sex sexual advance.

He said the legal strategy treats the LGBTQ community unfairly.

“A woman who experiences a man’s flirtations would not be able to kill that man and then have her murder charge downgraded to manslaughter simply because she was the object of a man’s flirtations,” Filiault, an attorney, said Wednesday.

“Being the object of a flirtation does not cause temporary insanity, and we should not be treating sexual orientation differently in the law. Let’s have consistency here, and let’s treat a person with equal dignity in the law, and let’s treat a crime as a crime.”

He said his research has shown that the legal defense has been used around the country, although not in New Hampshire.

The American Bar Association has recommended that federal, state and local governments curtail the availability of this defense strategy.

At least 16 states have banned its use, according to a June 7, 2021, report by the Movement Advancement Project, a Colorado-based nonprofit think tank.

Since local courts, prosecutors and police are not required to keep statistics on the gay panic defense, to say it has not happened in NH is a little weird and likely not accurate. I mean, in my experience, it was used a lot for a very long while.

Still, good for newly-elected Rep. Filiault for being proactive.

Incoming state representative Shaun Filiault of Keene

Preventative health care of millions hangs in the balance in TX

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Health care providers — at least the sane ones who follow the Hippocratic Oath — are anxiously awaiting a ruling from one Texas judge that could up-end the requirements vis-a-vis the Affordable Care Act which require insurers to cover basic preventative services.

From the Wall Street Journal’s Stephanie Armour:

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent volunteer panel of health experts, is one of three entities that recommends which preventive services must be covered by health plans and Medicaid expansion. The task force’s recommendations have led to no-cost coverage of such services as mammograms and screenings for colon cancer, HIV, cervical cancer, and gestational diabetes.

Six individuals and two companies opposed the ACA requirement that they provide insurance or purchase plans covering certain preventive services. Their lawsuit argued that the services aren’t needed or violate their religious beliefs.

The plaintiffs objected to coverage of contraception, screenings for sexually transmitted diseases and drug use, and vaccination against human papillomavirus, the sexually transmitted disease known as HPV, according to the lawsuit. They also objected to coverage of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a medicine that helps prevent HIV infection.

Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in September ruled the requirement that the Preventive Services Task Force’s recommendations be covered by most health plans violates the Constitution because he said the task force must be appointed as officers by the Senate or the president, rather than selected as volunteers. He rejected claims that preventive-care recommendations from the two other entities were improper.

The plaintiffs are asking Judge O’Connor to strike down all preventive-coverage requirements since 2010 that have been recommended by the task force. Both parties have prepared input for the judge before he makes a decision on how broadly the ruling will apply. Judge O’Connor could limit any relief to just the plaintiffs in the case, or he could issue a nationwide injunction that would strike down the requirement that insurers cover preventive services recommended by the task force.

We always knew that extremist religious forces were emboldened by Trump, and this is the latest play they are making to control the bodies and health care of millions of Americans.

We will never know how many lives have been saved by the requirement that insurers cover PREP drugs to prevent new HIV infections.

Imagine being trapped in a foreign dictatorship while being forced to pay a business debt that isn’t yours

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This story is wild:

It has been nearly five years since police here told Henry Cai, a U.S. citizen from California, that he couldn’t leave China.

Just before Christmas 2017, he was stopped at the airport at the end of a business trip. Mr. Cai later learned somebody was trying to force him to pay an outstanding debt of several million dollars owed by a Beijing company where he was a director and shareholder.

He thought it was a misunderstanding and expected it to be sorted out quickly. And yet here he remains, stuck in China, the target of a form of Chinese justice known as an exit ban.

His is believed to be the longest-running case of such legal purgatory for an American businessman. Now 61 years old, Mr. Cai has wrangled with China’s judicial bureaucracy, tested the limits of U.S. diplomacy and depleted his savings.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal he said he fears deteriorating U.S.-China relations—which are in the spotlight with the first meeting between President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping as heads of state on Monday—have worsened his quandary.

The U.S. has accused China of using exit bans on Americans and other foreigners “without fair and transparent process under the law.” Diplomats say Americans trapped in legal jeopardy abroad increasingly occupy their time.

Mr. Cai hasn’t been charged with a crime. Instead, court records outline a financial dispute between business partners that has included a police investigation. Mr. Cai said he is being squeezed to pay a debt that isn’t his.

You can read the rest of the Wall Street Journal article by James T. Areddya and Brian Spegele at this link.

Henry Cai, trapped in China. (WSJ photo.)

Right-wing hopes to abolish Obamacare preventative coverage mandates for “homosexuals,” the “promiscuous”

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The fine people over at poz.com have a good article about a sleeper case before a federal court in Texas that could, should it end up at the right-wing Supreme Court, force millions to pay out-of-pocket for preventative medicine that it now required to be covered under the ACA:

A group of patients and employers are arguing that the requirement is unconstitutional. They also contend that some preventive health measures violate protections under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 that prohibit federal and state rules from unduly burdening one’s exercise of religion.

The ACA provisions “make it impossible for these plaintiffs to purchase health insurance unless they agree to pay for preventive-care coverage that they do not want and do not need” and prevent them from buying less expensive health insurance without that coverage, they argue.

And a requirement that health plans pay for a drug that prevents HIV “forces religious employers to provide coverage for drugs that facilitate and encourage homosexual behavior, prostitution, sexual promiscuity, and intravenous drug use,” the group argues.

Neither the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the case nor the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the defendant, responded to requests for comment.

The federal judge hearing the case, Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, in 2018 struck down the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional, only to be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021. Supporters of the law are worried he will decide in favor of the plaintiffs in the new case.

“This judge has shown he is not shy about abolishing the entire Affordable Care Act and issuing nationwide injunctions,” said Wayne Turner, senior attorney at the National Health Law Program, which litigates on behalf of health equity and access to health care for underserved populations. O’Connor has a history of issuing nationwide injunctions involving federal laws, including the ACA.

And ACA supporters are not confident that a ruling striking down the preventive health requirements would be overturned by the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit or ultimately by the U.S. Supreme Court, with its majority of Republican-appointed justices.

This would be a disaster in so many ways. But the extreme Right is feeling powerful now that it has a Supreme Court that will likely uphold many of its more extreme positions in court cases.

The Democrats simply must keep control of the House and Senate.

Fox News owners, big-name stars, set to be deposed in $1.6 billion defamation suit

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This couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.

Some of the biggest names at Fox News have been questioned, or are scheduled to be questioned in the coming days, by lawyers representing Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation suit against the network, as the election technology company presses ahead with a case that First Amendment scholars say is extraordinary in its scope and significance.

Sean Hannity became the latest Fox star to be called for a deposition by Dominion’s legal team, according to a new filing in Delaware Superior Court. He is scheduled to appear on Wednesday.

Tucker Carlson is set to face questioning on Friday. Lou Dobbs, whose Fox Business show was canceled last year, is scheduled to appear on Tuesday. Others who have been deposed recently include “Judge” Jeanine Pirro, Steve Doocy and a number of high-level Fox producers, court records show.

People with knowledge of the case, who would speak only anonymously, said they expected that the chief executive of Fox News Media, Suzanne Scott, could be one of the next to be deposed, along with the president of Fox News, Jay Wallace. Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, whose family owns Fox, could follow in the coming weeks.

The depositions are among the clearest indications yet of how aggressively Dominion is moving forward with its suit, which is set to go to trial early next year, and of the legal pressure building on the nation’s most powerful conservative media company. There have been no moves from either side to discuss a possible settlement, people with knowledge of the case have said.

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Read the rest here.

Fox News host Jeanine “Box of Wine” Pirro is among the network’s stars set to be deposed in Dominion lawsuit.

Two PA judges, who sent kids to prison so the judges could get kickbacks from private kids prison, ordered to pay $200 million

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As someone who spent the latter part of his childhood stuck in the foster care system, I can attest to sense of helplessness you have when the state has total control over your life.

In some ways that state control was an improvement over my emotionally and sexually abusive alcoholic parents, but in other ways you understood that all it would take is one judge having a bad day and you could be sent to some horrible institution, no question asked.

So I’ve followed the Pennsylvania Kids-For-Cash scandal closely, mostly because there but for the grace of God go I (or any foster kid, really):

Two former Pennsylvania judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200 million to hundreds of people they victimized in one of the worst judicial scandals in U.S. history.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner awarded $106 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges, writing the plaintiffs are “the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions.”

In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care.

Former Luzerne County Court Judges Michael Conahan, front left, and Mark Ciavarella, front right, leave the U.S. District Courthouse in Scranton, Pa., on Sept., 15, 2009. The two Pennsylvania judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200 million to hundreds of children who fell victim to their crimes.

Ciavarella ordered children as young as 8 to detention, many of them first-time offenders deemed delinquent for petty theft, jaywalking, truancy, smoking on school grounds and other minor infractions. The judge often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to put up a defense or even say goodbye to their families.

“Ciavarella and Conahan abandoned their oath and breached the public trust,” Conner wrote Tuesday in his explanation of the judgment. “Their cruel and despicable actions victimized a vulnerable population of young people, many of whom were suffering from emotional issues and mental health concerns.”

If the world made sense, these two judges would die in prison.

One might. The other was released early because of COVID.

You can read the rest of the AP article here.

Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland is turning out to head a Justice Dept. finally willing to go after Wall Street criminals

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One of my favorite chroniclers of the dangerous political times in which we find ourselves is David Dayen at the The American Prospect (TAP). I find his insights to be helpful in understanding the mess we are in, but he is very often hopeful, too.

Such is the case with one of his current articles in TAP. He notes in it that the U.S. Justice Department is finally showing some muscle in prosecuting wrongdoing at the highest echelons of Wall Street — something he starts out by noting has long been absent even in Democratic administrations.

In a country with such a yawning gap between the wealth and influence of elites and the comparatively piddling power of everyone else, to catch what’s really happening at the highest levels of power you must consult news sources like the Vineyard Gazette, a paper covering goings-on in Martha’s Vineyard. A recent chronicle of a book event for former Attorney General Eric Holder offered just such a window.

Holder was asked whether, if he were still running the Justice Department, he would charge Donald Trump, specifically for inciting the riot at the Capitol on January 6th. Holder called out to Lanny Breuer, his head of the Criminal Division while at DOJ, who happened to be in the audience.

“So Lanny, would we bring this case?” asked Holder. “We would bring it in a minute,” replied Breuer, to thunderous applause.

If ever there was a moment of elite historical amnesia, it was this. Lanny Breuer and Eric Holder are jointly responsible as the greatest enablers of criminal impunity in American history. They indicted literally nobody of consequence for the destruction of the U.S. economy in the global financial crisis of 2008, and the mountain of demonstrable fraud that triggered it. In fact, Holder literally had a corner office held for him at Covington & Burling, the corporate defense firm that represented many of the top banks whose executives Holder declined to prosecute, while he served as attorney general.

Why anyone would listen to the views of Holder and Breuer on the subject of holding criminal actors responsible is beyond comprehension. These are two charter members of the chickenshit club.

He then goes on to describe a recent case in which the Justice Dept. sought and won convictions in an important case of Wall Street lying and cheating, something so common it’s shocking it hasn’t happened more often.

But the most hopeful elite accountability moment this week, the one that suggests that maybe the rule of law has a pulse, wasn’t actually conducted with a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. It was a Justice Department victory in a different case that actually holds top officials of one of the nation’s biggest corporate recidivists accountable.

On Wednesday, a jury in Chicago convicted two traders from JPMorgan Chase, including managing director Michael Nowak, who was the head of the bank’s gold trading desk, for financial fraud in gold markets. The traders were engaging in “spoofing,” a practice of entering fake trades to spur activity and boost the commodity price.

Financial-reform observers believe this case involves the most senior bank officers ever charged in recent history, let alone convicted. The Justice Department actually went for a racketeering charge, depicting the precious metals trading desk as a criminal enterprise within the bank. This is incredibly new stuff for a Justice Department that has long been moribund on corporate crime. “RICO is now clearly a valid charge in white-collar criminal cases like this, and that’s a very, very powerful weapon,” said Dennis Kelleher of the financial reform group Better Markets.

You can read the rest of the article at this link.

You can read the Justice Dept. press release about the spoofing case at this link.

It turns out that Trump has ignored previous subpoenas for missing White House records

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Jeez, man. It turns out that the Orange Menace from Mar-A-Lago actually did receive a subpoena for the missing records the FBI went hunting for this week. So the perfectly legal search of his Florida manse came only after they ignored the subpoena — and a Trump lawyer signed a paper saying they had turned everything over already.

Former President Donald J. Trump received a subpoena this spring in search of documents that federal investigators believed he had failed to turn over earlier in the year, when he returned boxes of material he had improperly taken with him upon moving out of the White House, three people familiar with the matter said.

The existence of the subpoena helps to flesh out the sequence of events that led to the search of Mr. Trump’s Florida home on Monday by F.B.I. agents seeking classified material they believed might still be there, even after efforts by the National Archives and the Justice Department to ensure that it had been returned.

The subpoena suggests that the Justice Department tried methods short of a search warrant to account for the material before taking the politically explosive step of sending F.B.I. agents unannounced to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and members-only club.

Two people briefed on the classified documents that investigators believe remained at Mar-a-Lago indicated that they were so sensitive in nature, and related to national security, that the Justice Department had to act.

Of course, the legal toadies in Trumpland are saying the existence of the subpoena proves they were cooperating and the search by the FBI was not needed.

Sure, sure.

I totally believe that they weren’t ignoring the subpoena and trying to run out the legal clock, just as Trump does every time he faces legal peril.

DA who prosecuted black woman for mistakenly voting (after an official told her she could) and judge who sentenced her to five years are ousted from office

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This goes against the media narrative that voters hate progressive DAs and judges, so you won’t hear as much about their loss as you heard about the San Francisco DA losing his race, but it is great news nonetheless.

Voters in Shelby County swept away a slate of tough-on-crime officials on Thursday, ushering in a new era for criminal justice in Tennessee’s most populous county, home to Memphis.

Shelby County has been notorious for punitive practices that leave people languishing in jail for years without a conviction and fuel harsh youth prosecution, largely against Black residents. Local advocates have fought for years to change the system. The county was under federal monitoring by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the rights of Black children between 2012 and 2018. In 2018, a DOJ report found continued violations and discrimination in juvenile courts, and characterized the policies of the district attorney’s office as a “toxic combination for African-American youth.”

The local officials who oversaw that system, District Attorney Amy Weirich and Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael, were both ousted on Thursday. The winners, Steve Mulroy in the DA race and Tarik Sugarmon in the juvenile judge race, ran on reform agendas and secured eight-year terms.

Mark Ward, a local criminal court judge, also appears to have lost his re-election bid. Ward sparked an outcry earlier this year for sentencing Pamela Moses, a Black activist who was erroneously told by a state agency that she was eligible to register to vote, to six years in prison. That case was prosecuted by Weirich’s office, and Moses decried the aggressive charges as a scare tactic.

You can read the rest of the Bolts article by Daniel Nachanian at this link.

Pamela Moses at trial.