Jen Psaki is joined by political reporter Ashley Parker and legal experts Andrew Weissmann and Neal Katyal to break down the latest updates in Donald Trump's criminal hush money trial, including former aide Hope Hicks' emotional testimony.
“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results.” That was former President Donald Trump on Wednesday, playing cute with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s question over whether he’d accept the outcome of Wisconsin’s presidential election. As my colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim pointed out, Trump has a long track record of similar statements, offering sham justifications to disguise the fact that he doesn’t feel bound by election results. The events of Jan. 6, 2021, laid bare the true...
“Full-blown famine” is present in the northern part of Gaza and is spreading south, said Cindy McCain, the executive director of the World Food Programme. “What I can explain to you is that there is famine — full-blown famine — in the north, and it’s moving its way south,” McCain told NBC’s Kristen Welker in an interview to air on Sunday. McCain’s comments are not an official declaration of famine, which must meet certain criteria, but she said it’s based on what WFP employees have seen and...
In an attempt to crowdsource enforcement of an anti-trans bathroom law that went into effect this week, Utah’s state auditor has rolled out an online complaint form to report trans people in bathrooms. Released on Wednesday, the so-called hotline complaint form allows people to report alleged violations of House Bill 257, which requires individuals to use restrooms and changing rooms in government buildings that correspond with their sex assigned at birth. The legislation has caused fear and...
When Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel in 2017, many saw it as a healthy sign of adherence to the rule of law in this country — a sign that Donald Trump was not above the law. Fast-forward seven long years, and we now await a Supreme Court decision on the question of whether Trump, as president of the United States, could order the murder of a political adversary and get away with it. That and so much more suggest that that day in 2017 is long gone. We appear increasingly...
An auditing firm that counted Trump Media among its clients has been barred from practicing accounting for committing “massive fraud,” the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Friday. BF Borgers and its owner, Benjamin F. Borgers, were charged with “deliberate and systemic failures” to comply with audit standards in more than 1,500 filings, the SEC said on Friday. The firm also falsely claimed to clients that it was adhering to those standards and falsified documents to make it appear so,...
It’s hard to think of a famous Supreme Court plaintiff with whom former President Donald Trump has less in common than Lee Yick, a Chinese immigrant who was convicted of operating an unlicensed laundry in late-19th-century San Francisco. Yick sued, arguing that San Francisco’s pattern of denying permits to virtually every Chinese applicant while granting them to virtually every white applicant violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court’s 1886...
In a troubling move that overturns criminal justice reforms passed in 2018, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law Wednesday a Republican-backed bill expanding the use of cash bail. Starting July 1, judges will be required to set bail in cases where previously they could have decided to release people without financial conditions. People who are legally presumed innocent but can’t afford to pay bail will be stranded in jail on charges for minor, nonviolent misdemeanor offenses that wouldn’t...
Perhaps the most challenging thing about having written a book about the 1968 presidential election is that every time there is political violence or student protests in America, people compare those events to that ill-fated year — and they are pretty much always wrong. Take, for example, the increasingly omnipresent talk about how the pro-Palestinian anti-war protests roiling American college campuses today bear similarity to those protests 56 years ago opposing the war in Vietnam. Sen. Bernie...
The House voted Wednesday on a bill to change how antisemitism is investigated in schools. The final tally — 320-91 — masks how controversial the legislation is or that some Democratic lawmakers voted for it while effectively under duress. Seizing on the pervasive “chaos on campus” narrative, lawmakers passed a bill that doesn’t work to protect Jews on college campuses as its supporters claim, but to stifle dissent around the United States’ Israel policies and criticism of the Israeli...
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said that he will join House Speaker Mike Johnson in inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress. Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish member of Congress, sharply criticized Netanyahu in March but intends to co-sign a draft of the invitation that the Republican speaker sent over last month, his office told the Washington Examiner. A spokesperson for Schumer's office said the timing was being worked out. The development comes...
Conservatives are trying to make secession a thing again. Last week in Louisiana, the state’s Supreme Court paved the way for a largely white enclave within Baton Rouge to break off and form its own city, which will be named St. George. The push to cleave off this part of Baton Rouge from its less affluent and more diverse surrounding areas has been years in the making. It started in 2012 when a group led by white conservatives claimed that they needed a separate school district, based on claims...