The request comes as the Supreme Court prepares to hear a case that could allow cities to ticket and arrest homeless people for sleeping outdoors even when there is no other available shelter. The issue has become a growing point of focus as visible homeless encampments have increased across the country since the pandemic.

To “solve” the problem, local governments have increasingly relied on policing, often through passing camping bans and by coordinating police-led “sweeps” to disperse homeless encampments, and the Congress members noted federal agencies have recently been accused of misconduct as well. 

“There is a troubling pattern of increased violence against unhoused people at the hands of federal agencies,” the Congress members wrote in the letter, which was shared with Motherboard. 

In the letter, Democratic Reps. Cori Bush, Barbara Lee, Jim McGovern and Robert Scott called on the president to increase funding for homeless services, substance abuse treatment and “community-driven alternatives”; free up more federal funding to house homeless people by altering restrictions on federal funding; and track federal law enforcement interactions with unhoused people.

The recommendations, the House members said, were far preferable than the growing push to treat the homeless as criminals that should be punished. 

“Criminalizing homelessness and using law enforcement to punish the unhoused is not only the most expensive and least effective way of addressing the problem, but this approach also creates arrest records, fines, and fees that stand in the way of people in transition securing jobs or affordable housing and discourage organizations that provide support to the unhoused,” they wrote. 

The four House members, who are all part of the body’s poverty task force, suggested the president should use his 2025 budget to tackle the problem head on, saying the “federal government must permanently end the unhoused crisis.” They also urged the president to implement federal protections for community-based organizations who are criminalized for feeding homeless people. (In Houston, for example, volunteers with Food Not Bombs racked up $23,500 in fines over six months last year for offering food to unhoused people in violation of a city law.) 

“As someone who experienced homelessness during a difficult point in my own life, I find it shameful and disgraceful that homelessness is criminalized instead of being treated as what it is—a policy failure,” Lee told Motherboard in an email. “Amid a threat from SCOTUS to worsen the problem, President Biden has an opportunity to invest in effective, humane solutions to this crisis.”

The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness decried the criminalization trend in 2022. And the Biden administration has said publicly that its HUD funding would “provide communities with the resources and tools to respond to homeless encampments humanely and effectively while avoiding approaches that criminalize homelessness.” In 2022, Biden introduced a set of proposals to address unsheltered homelessness and laid out the “bold goal” of reducing homelessness by 25 percent by 2025. That same year, HUD also announced millions of dollars in grants for housing vouchers specifically targeted to unsheltered homelessness. 

The funding has not been enough to stop many people’s drive toward homelessness. Overall, homelessness increased 12 percent between 2022 and 2023—and to the highest total number since at least 2008—a result of both rising housing costs and the end of pandemic era rental assistance and eviction moratoria.

At the local level, politicians have pushed draconian laws as the number of homeless people has increased. As of 2019, three fourths of cities had anti-camping laws, according to the nonprofit National Homelessness Law Center. Last week, Kentucky’s House of Representatives passed a bill that would authorize “deadly physical force” for someone camping on private property who is trying to “dispossess” a property owner of their property. The bill will next move to the state senate.

Such tactics have historically been deployed by cities, but the country has seen more states introduce similar ideas at the state level; since 2021, 15 states have introduced bills that would criminalize homelessness, and in four states those bills have become law, according to the National Homelessness Law Center. 

In their letter, the Congress members argue federal law enforcement, over which the president wields more influence, also shares blame for the problem. They cite the May 2023 shooting of Brooks Roberts by the U.S. Forest Services during a raid at Payette National Forest. Roberts, who was already in a wheelchair, was shot repeatedly and became permanently paralyzed during an operation coordinated with the Bureau of Land Management. 

According to a lawsuit, Roberts was “needlessly and recklessly” shot after he “wheeled out in his wheelchair to find what appeared to be his brother being carjacked or robbed.” In reality, Roberts’ brother was being arrested for illegally parking the family’s mobile home on federal land. In body camera footage, Roberts, who approached officers with a revolver, can be seen telling the officers he did not know they were cops.

The post Democratic Congress Members Call on Biden To Fight Criminalization of Homelessness appeared first on VICE.

A 14-minute video titled “Mohn’s Militia—Call to Arms for American Patriots” appeared on YouTube on Tuesday afternoon. In the video, a man identified as 32-year-old Justin Mohn, sits at a desk in a bedroom wearing plastic gloves. He picks up a severed head, wrapped in plastic. “This is the head of Mike Mohn,” he says to the camera. “A federal employee of over 20 years, and my father.”

Mohn, who appeared to be reading from a script, delivered a conspiracy-laden speech that would not be out of place on widely-watched, far-right broadcasts. 

“The federal government has declared war on America’s citizens and the American states,” he said. “America is rotting from the inside, as far-left woke mobs ravage our once prosperous country.”

He ranted about “the globalist, communist takeover of America” and “bribed members of the deep state.” He went on against  “fifth column” groups, which he said includes undocumented immigrants, the LGBTQ community, Black Lives Matter and antifa, who are working in concert with the “traitorous” federal government to destroy the U.S. 

In the video Mohn declared himself the “the commander of America’s national network of militias” and issued a call to “patriots and militia members” for violence.

“All federal employees are to be killed on site,” he said. “All FBI, IRS and other federal law enforcement offices, as well as federal courthouses, are to be sieged around the country. All federal agents, U.S. marshals, federal judges and border patrol are to be killed or else captured, tortured for information, and publicly executed for betraying their country. Earn your place in heaven by sending a traitor to hell early.” 

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He also went on about a number of other rallying points, ones often spoken about by mainstream right-wing politicians and media figures, including “legitimate” election results and returning to Judeo-Christian roots. 

The gruesome video racked up more than 5,000 views before YouTube removed it for violating its policies on graphic violence and violent extremism. Like many other videos that feature mutilations and death, the video of showing his fathers head initially went viral on Twitter (now called X) where it was shared widely by “verified” users. X is now sending anyone searching for keywords relating to the video to a blank page. 

Police responded to the Mohn residence in Levittown, a suburb of Philadelphia, after receiving a call from Mike Mohn’s wife. The Bucks County DA said that they discovered Mike Mohn’s headless body in the downstairs bathroom, and a machete and a large knife in the bathtub. 

They discovered the head in a cooking pot in a bedroom, as well as bloody rubber gloves. 

Mohn fled the scene in his father’s car and was later apprehended 100 miles away by officers from the Fort Indiantown Gap Police Department. He’d jumped a fence surrounding a National Guard Training Facility there. Police tracked him by pinging his cellphone. 

Mohn’s simmering anti-government hostilities and messianic delusions are something that shined through the man’s robust online footprint. Mohn has self-published multiple books that he sold on Amazon and other online marketplaces, the books ranged in topics but some focused on the political divisions he referred to in the video where he showed off the decapitated head of his father. 

On a now-removed Facebook author page that VICE News viewed when it was active, his latest publication was an essay called “America’s Coming Bloody Revolution.” He purported to be the author of seven books one of which was entitled “The Second Messiah, King of Earth”. In a 2017 book entitled “The Revolution Leader’s Survival Guide,” Mohn wrote a letter to Donald Trump in which he promised to lead a “ peaceful revolution.”

Mohn also had an account on Spotify where he hosted several albums, one of the albums was called “Justin’s Stalkers” and is still currently available online. 

Mohn also was seemingly involved in several lawsuits with the government that focused on affirmative action. In the lawsuit, which was dismissed, Mohn states that the government caused him harm by allowing him to take out student loans and that affirmative action made it so he couldn’t get work. In the video where he brandishes his father’s decapitated head, Mohn mentions the judge who dismissed his lawsuit by name, gives out his address, and calls for a $100,000 bounty on the “heads of all federal judges.” 

Mohn has been denied bail and is still in custody, his next court date is unknown.

The post Man Posted YouTube Video With Father’s Severed Head While Ranting About Joe Biden appeared first on VICE.

According to a story in Mekomit by Yuval Avraham, who last year broke news about the Israeli military’s use of AI for targeting purposes, the numbers were accepted for inclusion in briefings to senior Israeli officials after intelligence services conducted operations and analysis to monitor the health ministry’s information collection methods and its internal communications and determined the statistics were credible. An Israeli intelligence official confirmed the Israeli government’s use of the Gaza ministry numbers to VICE News, while two officials from European intelligence services said they were widely used in official briefings internationally.

“The numbers are heavily relied up for official briefings on civilian casualties because with the exception of strikes on high-value targets, where senior officials are briefed on collateral damage, no civilian casualty figures or estimates are collected,” said the Israeli official, who cannot be identified in the media. “A lot of targets have been hit without prior analysis or estimates and there’s never any follow up collection.”

“You don’t know exactly how many you killed, and who you killed,” an IDF military targeter told Mekomit.

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The Israeli official told VICE News that in the current military operation, which has destroyed most of Gaza’s infrastructure and displaced about two-thirds of its population, the rules of engagement for IDF’s artillery and airborne assets have been loosened, leading to thousands more strikes than typically conducted in past Gaza operations.

“The secret services looked at the health ministry’s collection methods and determined the numbers were generally credible, so instead of collecting their own information they decided to use the [Hamas] numbers.”

“There’s no possibility of collecting exact data in this situation but their system is generally transparent and credible,” said the Israeli official. “But only with civilian deaths, Hamas deaths simply aren’t reported.”

According to the Ministry of Health, which reports to Gaza’s Hamas-led government, at least 27,500 civilians have been killed and more than 63,000 wounded since Israel began military operations in response to the Oct. 7 attacks, which killed at least 1100 Israelis and left more than 250 people hostage. 

In the first weeks of the invasion, as civilian casualty figures began to rise to levels never seen in prior Arab-Israeli conflicts, the numbers of dead and wounded released by the health ministry became a focal point of criticism because of the association with Hamas. Pro-Israeli political interest groups and even U.S. President Joe Biden questioned the impartiality of the toll.

On Oct. 27, he told reporters that he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

The top UN health agency defended its use of the data in a statement to Reuters. 

​”We continue to include their data in our reporting and it is clearly sourced,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement in October.

In response to Biden’s claim, the health ministry released a list of 7,000 names of the dead that human rights researchers and journalists determined were credible.

Two intelligence officials from NATO countries told VICE News that privately the civilian casualty numbers released by the ministry in Gaza were accurate enough to be widely used in intelligence briefings throughout NATO. 

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“We brief these numbers… [Europe] plays a major funding role in the Gaza health system so we have visibility into these operations,” said one official on background. “The numbers cannot be perfectly accurate and there’s two caveats. First, [they] hold no insight into Hamas or other militant casualties. The second is that of course the true casualties are higher than any health ministry figures because there’s unrecovered bodies, half the strip is flattened by air strikes and there’s more dead under that rubble.”

The second official, who analyzes the Middle East for a NATO military intelligence service, said the use of open source health ministry data was “commonplace.”

“I’d be shocked if the Americans weren’t using the same data in all their briefings, everyone understands these numbers are our only way to judge the scale even if we know they won’t be precise,” said the official. 

A senior U.S. official speaking on background refused to discuss the specific contents of top level briefings for U.S. officials on the situation in Gaza, but said intelligence analysis on the conflict used “all available data as part of the process.”

The post Israeli Intelligence Has Deemed Hamas-Run Health Ministry’s Death Toll Figures Generally Accurate appeared first on VICE.

The Houthis control about half of Yemen’s coastline along the Red Sea’s congested sea lanes after a years-long civil war in Yemen that the Iranian-backed group largely won.

Since the fighting in Gaza began in October, the Houthis conducted at least 25 attacks from missile launches to hijackings in response to Israel’s ongoing military operation in the Gaza Strip targeting their key allies in Hamas. The Houthis have also occasionally fired long-range missiles and drones at Israel itself throughout the conflict that began on Oct. 7 of last year after Hamas and its allies killed more than 1200 Israelis and kidnapped over 200.

The statement from 13 countries including the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and multiple EU countries came as the Danish shipping behemoth Maersk said it would mostly suspend using Red Sea routes because of the threat.

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“Ongoing Houthi attacks in the Red Sea are illegal, unacceptable, and profoundly destabilizing,” said the statement issued by the White House. “The Houthis will bear the responsibility of the consequences should they continue to threaten lives, the global economy, and free flow of commerce in the region’s critical waterways.”

The damage to the world economy is shipping through the Red Sea and Suez Canal could be extensive, warned the coalition.

“Nearly 15 percent of global seaborne trade passes through the Red Sea, including 8 percent of global grain trade, 12 percent of seaborne-traded oil and 8 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas trade,” the joint statement read.

A U.S. official confirmed to VICE News that plans for military action led by the U.S. and U.K. had been developed over the past two weeks and could take place at any moment.

“These disruptions have to stop and the president has been clear there will be no further warnings before action is taken,” said the official, who spoke on background to discuss military operations. “There’s been significant patience to prevent the Gaza conflict from spreading regionally but keeping sea lanes open to trade is a core mission of the international community.”

A NATO military official told VICE that attempts to communicate the urgency and seriousness of the warnings to the Houthis had been carried by Omani and Qatari diplomats to the Houthis, who appear to have rejected the demand.

Military action will certainly include air strikes and naval operations against the Houthis’ basic but effective missile and drone programs as well as their fleet of small boats often used to harass sea lanes. On Sunday the Pentagon announced that U.S. helicopters sank three small Houthi vessels as they attempted to hijack a container ship, which led the White House to increase its diplomatic push for international action. But the NATO official said local allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, while supportive of opening the sea lanes, face multiple political and security pressures related to the situation.

“If not for regional political considerations and fear of Iranian or Houthi retaliation, nearly every Arab country would openly join this coalition because of the critical nature of both the Red Sea and Suez to the regional economy,” said the official. “So there’s been a lot of pressure. Unfortunately, the Houthis have traditionally ignored this sort of pressure.”

Close allies of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, with which they share political and religious affiliations, the Houthis forced a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE that invaded Yemen in 2015 into peace talks that were underway at the start of the Gaza conflict.

“They beat the Saudis and Emiratis and now want to try their hand at fighting the U.S. and Israel, it’s as simple as that,” said an Arab diplomat.

The post US Warns Military Action Being Prepared Against Houthis in Red Sea appeared first on VICE.

But while Biden is painting the agreement as a win that will “save lives”, drug policy experts told VICE News they’re skeptical the measure will curb the overdose crisis—and it may make the drug supply worse. 

Biden and Xi met Wednesday in San Francisco, where both leaders were in town for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. According to the New York Times, China will go after the exporting of illicit fentanyl into the U.S. and the manufacturing of precursor chemicals, which are being used to make fentanyl and smuggle it into the country from Mexico.

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China, which has one of the largest chemical industries in the world, already banned the production and sale of finished fentanyl in 2019, under pressure from former President Donald Trump. Prior to that, most fentanyl came to the U.S. directly from China. While the ban resulted in a dramatic drop in fentanyl coming to the U.S. from China, there is now more of it than ever entering the country. Using precursor chemicals from China and India, Mexican cartels began making the illicit opioid themselves, with Customs and Border Protection reporting that fentanyl seizures have increased more than 800 percent since 2019. After the ban, other novel synthetic drugs, like xylazine—the animal sedative used to make tranq dope—and super potent opioids and benzodiazepines became more prominent in the drug supply. Now, tranq, which has been linked to wounds so horrific they’re causing people to have amputations, has spread around the country. 

“It’s probably only a question of time before much more toxic and devastating xylazine mixed with fentanyl also takes over the West Coast retail markets. and that will happen faster if wholesale fentanyl supplies become more expensive or difficult to get,” said Philippe Bourgois, professor of psychiatry and anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles. 

The agreement comes as more than 109,000 Americans died of an overdose in 2022, with over 73,000 deaths linked to fentanyl. The crisis has been whipped into a moral panic by Republicans, with many blaming it on Biden’s “open border,” despite the fact that most people smuggling drugs into the U.S. are Americans.   

The hypervigilance around fentanyl among law enforcement is likely what has spurred the increase in tranq, added Claire Zagorski, a graduate research assistant at University of Texas at Austin. 

“The hotter and hotter it is, the more dangerous it is to move and produce, the riskier it is, the more expensive it is. So it makes perfect business sense on the supply side to try to offset fentanyl production to something that’s less monitored and less prohibited. And so far, tranq has been filling that hole.” 

For decades, heroin, which comes from poppies, was the dominant opioid in the illicit drug supply. But for the last 10 years, North America has dealt with a number of significant changes, including the introduction of fentanyl and tranq, as well as other novel synthetic drugs that haven’t yet been banned by the government. 

Because these drugs are made in labs, rather than as a result of growing crops, Zagorski said it’s easier for cartels to adapt. 

“There’s millions, if not billions, to be made from selling drugs and the demand has not waned,” she said. 

Ben Westhoff, author of the book Fentanyl Inc. which investigated China’s fentanyl industry, said another problem with simply banning precursors is that some of those chemicals are used to make legitimate products. 

In order for the deal with China to have teeth, he said the government would have to require Chinese manufacturers to verify that they’re selling these chemicals to legitimate companies. 

Even then, “I’m sure there’s plenty of ways to circumvent that,” he said. 

He said the ban could cut into the cartels’ profitability by making it more expensive to produce fentanyl, but “the trade would just probably migrate to India, or other countries that don’t have these laws.” 

Zagorski said the problem with supply-side interventions is that they don’t address the demand for these drugs. 

“If we can figure out how to create a safe supply domestically so that people using drugs can get that… they aren’t being pushed back to this increasingly unpredictable toxic drug supply.” 

She said Americans also need to consider what the U.S. is giving up on its end of the deal. According to the Times, the U.S. will lift sanctions on China’s forensic police institute, a government entity that’s been accused of human rights abuses, including collecting the DNA of Uyghurs without consent. 

“Are we selling something that is going to have really horrible consequences for marginalized and minoritized people in China for something that isn’t going to actually make a difference on our end?”

The post China Will Crack Down on Fentanyl Sent to the US. Worse Drugs Could Fill the Vacuum. appeared first on VICE.

The U.S. has largely maintained unwavering public support of Israel’s military actions since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack (although its tone has softened in recent days), as some organizations, including the UN, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have raised concerns that Israel may be breaking international laws surrounding warfare. On Saturday, Cindy McCain, the head of the World Food Programme said their ability to deliver aid is at a “standstill” after Israel cut communications to Gaza amid its largest offensive to date. 

On Oct. 12, in advance of an expected ground offensive, Israel ordered the evacuation of 1.1 million residents in the north of Gaza, demanding they move southward, which the UN called “impossible” and Human Rights Watch described as raising “serious legal and humanitarian red flags,” citing that a forced displacement could be breaking Geneva Conventions. A White House spokesperson defended the order, saying Israel was trying to isolate the civilian population from Hamas militants.  

But as President Joe Biden, along with key allies like the U.K., has publicly maintained strong support for Israel since it began its bombardment of Gaza , some American diplomatic officials have expressed serious concerns about the growing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. 

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In an unclassified diplomatic cable, exclusively seen by VICE News, the U.S. Office for Palestinians affairs in Jerusalem, which reports directly to the State Department on Palestinian issues, warned the White House of the dire situation facing Palestinians in Gaza and impressed upon it the need to take immediate action in order to “save the lives of tens of thousands of people.” 

The cable lays out clear measures “for [the] immediate implementation to alleviate human suffering” and called for the U.S. to press Israel to restore water services, allow aid convoys to deliver fuel, and to provide for the safety of telecom workers in Gaza to restore cellular services.  While the cable does not openly oppose the White House’s stance on Israel, such strongly worded recommendations are relatively rare and suggests some discontent among diplomatic officials. 

The cable reveals internal concern surrounding the military action taken by Israel on Gaza since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7.  Israel has said its aim is to defeat Hamas and inflict severe damage on the besieged strip. Publicly, the White House has declared its support for Israel, and refused to call for a ceasefire. President Biden recently came under fire from Palestinian rights advocates after he cast doubt on the death toll coming out of the Strip because the Health ministry is run by Hamas. 

Since President Biden’s comments, the health ministry has published a 212-page list of the names, ages, sex, and identity card numbers of those killed. As of Saturday the ministry said 7,700 Palestinians, including more than 3,000 children, have been killed in the 20 days since Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage. 

The internal U.S. diplomatic cable, which has been verified by VICE News, discloses a difference of opinion among American officials about the severity of the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

The cable, dated October 24th, is titled “What People Need Now to Survive – Water to Save Lives, and Fuel to Provide Water, Healthcare, and Transport.” It lays out key points relating to the situation faced on the ground by Palestinians as well as recommendations. 

Ten points, labelled “Sensitive but Unclassified,” highlight  concerns including shortages in water and fuel and aid, disclosing that people inside “Gazan shelters have access to as little as half a litre of potable drinking water daily.” It adds that the water shortage is threatening lives and that “52,000 pregnant women are at risk of serious complications or death because they are drinking brackish water.”  It goes on to underscore that the water crisis is “off the scale at all levels” and that “avoidable fatalities will come from salinity and disease, not dehydration.”

A further focus of the cable is the lack of fuel, of which supplies “are all but exhausted.” Numerous points lay out in detail how this is impacting water access, UN aid operations, and life saving medical equipment. It notes that “no fuel has entered Gaza since the start of the conflict and existing fuel supplies are tightly controlled by the UN or located inside gas stations” and that the “Israeli military has banned under threat of bombardment any transport of fuel into Gaza.” 

Neither the State Department nor the Department of Defense was able to provide comment prior to publication. 

The cable also said that Egypt could help provide electricity by turning on an inactive line to Gaza for less than $5 million in assistance. 

The cable ends with estimates from the UN’s Office for The Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs that there are an estimated 1.4 million internally displaced persons in Gaza, with about 590,000 of those sheltering in 150 overcrowded UN designated shelters. The last point in the cable is headlined: “If this Stays an Additional Week, it will be Non-Reversibly Catastrophic.” The cable ends by stating “A UN OCHA [Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] contact described the situation as reaching ‘deep into devastation,’ and begged the United States to urgently ‘prioritize’ a humanitarian response.” 

Some internal dissent within the Biden Administration came to light last week after a U.S. diplomat resigned over America’s unwavering support for Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. Josh Paul was the director of congressional and public affairs at the State Department’s bureau responsible for arms transfers and security assistance to foreign governments. In a letter posted on LinkedIn, Paul said “I cannot work in support of a set of major policy decisions, including rushing more arms to one side of the conflict, that I believe to be shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse”. 

The post US Should Press Israel to Implement Measures to Save ‘Tens of Thousands of Lives’ in Gaza: Internal Cable appeared first on VICE.

“The Biden administration has made junk fees a consumer protection priority, which is phenomenal,” said Erin Witte, director of consumer protection for the non-profit organization Consumer Federation of America. “What we’ve seen is it’s really a bipartisan issue. It affects every single person in every consumer-facing industry.”

The new rules, which are proposed under the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, reach across the entire economy. The FTC rule would make it an illegal deceptive practice to misrepresent the “total costs of goods and services” by omitting fees people must pay from advertised prices and “misrepresenting the nature and purpose of fees.” For example, if a ticket to an event can only be bought online and that purchase comes with a mandatory “convenience fee” or “service fee,” that fee would have to be included in the upfront ticket price. The same would go for resort fees, destination fees, and any other bullshit fee that magically makes the thing you’re buying more expensive once you hit the checkout cart. The CFPB proposed rule targets the financial sector specifically, banning fees for “providing basic information” to customers like checking account balances. 

According to the Biden administration press release, the CFPB will be proposing another rule later this month that would “require financial companies to allow customers to safely, securely, and reliably send their banking transaction data to other companies and banks.” The goal of that rule would be to more easily allow people to “break up with their bank” or manage accounts from multiple providers using the same program.

The Biden administration has previously introduced rules to require broadband companies to disclose all fees in advertised prices, require companies to make it as easy to cancel subscriptions as it is to sign up, and would ban junk fees and “bait-and-switch” advertising from auto dealers, which would also include a ban on “sale of add-ons that have no benefit,” perhaps once and for all putting an end to the sacred “Trucoat” upcharge.

However, these rules do not, by and large, ban junk fees themselves from getting absorbed into the cost of the product or service. As a whole, the Biden administration’s approach to combatting junk fees has largely been one of mandating transparency in the hopes that more accurate pricing would enhance competition and ultimately result in the fees being eliminated, rather than banning them outright, according to Ariel Nelson, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. 

“The idea is if you disclose everything, then maybe another company will attract consumers better if I get rid of this fee and they come to me,” Nelson said.

There are some areas of the economy where this approach likely will not work. For example, Nelson has done research around junk fees affecting incarcerated people and their families for things such as sending emails or making phone calls. She doesn’t think these rules will help them much, because “they’re literally captive consumers and they can’t choose which product they use in most contexts.” Similarly, event tickets often have exclusive sale partners, so people do not have a choice which vendor they buy the tickets from. 

But Nelson does think it will help in a lot of other contexts, such as the rental housing market, which she also researches. There, the mandatory disclosure of hidden fees like trash and maintenance fees, even for things landlords are legally mandated to provide like functional heating systems, would make it much easier for renters to accurately compare how much it will actually cost to live somewhere.

It is also not yet clear how the rules will be enforced or when they will go into effect. It is likely there won’t be a private enforcement component, meaning the FTC itself would have to bring enforcement actions against companies that break the rules, after which they can be fined and forced to pay restitution if found guilty. 

Most of these rules are now working their way through the federal rulemaking process. The FTC and CFPB will receive comments from the public on the rules introduced today, then present a finalized rule. This process can take months or even years. Once it becomes a finalized rule, companies or interest groups can sue to delay or block them by challenging their constitutionality.

Still, this regulatory action on a legitimately infuriating aspect of the American economy is both widely popular and desperately needed. “I would characterize this as a really encouraging and solid first step,” Nelson said, but she would like to see the government take more forceful action against egregious fees that, for example, amount to more than the cost of the product or service. “I think there’s a lot more work to be done on actually prohibiting certain fees.”

The post Sweeping New Rules Would Ban Hidden ‘Junk Fees’ Across the Economy. Here’s What It Means. appeared first on VICE.

Once again, I’ll be hosting 1A on NPR today, covering the week for the House GOP, Trump in court, and a lot more. Check your local listings or download the pod! 

Fool House

Donald Trump, partially gagged in one trial, and facing a potential gag order in another, is willing to become the temporary Speaker of the House. 

Trump gave the magnanimous news to Fox yesterday, as Republicans scramble to find their way out of a self-inflicted leadership crisis that has its roots with, of course, Trump. Even though he may be endorsing Jim Jordan, some House Republicans are thrilled at the idea of Trump taking over stewardship of the very institution a violent mob attacked in his name less than three years ago. 

And that, right there, is the clearest distillation you could ask for of the GOP’s transformation to authoritarianism. Kevin McCarthy spends two years running for speaker by conspicuously working to cover up Trump’s crimes and helping to engineer a cover-up of Jan. 6. He limps into power only after making a series of humiliating concessions that guarantee Trumpist chaos agents like Matt Gaetz control his fate. 

Gavel in hand, McCarthy clings to it with even more feckless concession, like launching an impeachment inquiry he didn’t have the votes to launch, and providing raw Capitol Hill security footage for Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 propaganda effort. 

After all this insult to the democratic institutions he leads, and through a couple self-inflicted legislative crises, McCarthy is finally cut down. And it’s by the very same MAGA nihilists who held his strings all along. 

So naturally, House Republicans, or many of them anyway, are thrilled to give their support to the man who started this anti-democratic spiral in the first place. 

Why would Trump, scheduled to the gills with civil trials, depositions, criminal court dates and a presidential campaign, even nod at taking the job? The answer is obvious. Trump would use the job to force the government and the nation into crisis unless Congress defunds the criminal investigations against him. At this point the job can mean nothing more to him, and nothing less.

Of course this gambit actually coming to pass is highly unlikely, no matter how much Trump and his GOP acolytes would love it. Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise, and other GOPs with an incentive to keep the party from dying must know that forcing 16 House Republicans representing districts won by Joe Biden to vote on a Trump speakership would make their party even more cracked up than it already is. 

Besides, there’s that pesky House GOP Rule 26(a), “A member of the Republican Leadership shall step aside if indicted for a felony for which a sentence of two or more years imprisonment may be imposed.” 

Maybe House Republicans should consider changing this rule. As far-fetched as a Trump speakership is, isn’t it time to clarify that that alleged criminality aimed at the heart of the Constitution is just fine in the Trumpist GOP? Kevin McCarthy just gave up his job trying to prove it. At least do the man the honor of knowing his legacy means something.

Don’t forget to sign your friends up for Breaking the Vote!

Dismissal command 

Trump’s lawyers are moving on multiple fronts to try to keep his various criminal nightmares from ever seeing trial. On Thursday Trump’s team asked Judge Juan Merchan to dismiss the 34-felony-count case in Manhattan alleging that Trump falsified business records as he paid Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about their past affair. The motion, like many from around the Trump Crime Universe, reads like a campaign release, alleging that the case is a politically-motivated effort to keep Trump from running effectively for president. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s team moved for dismissal in the four-count federal coup case, on the grounds that Trump is immune from prosecution because all the alleged activities took place when he was president. Trump’s lawyers have been signaling this appeal since at least August, so we knew it was coming. And it’s not entirely laughable. 

Trump has reason to expect he can get at least an attentive hearing at the Supreme Court for his immunity claims here. Trump’s lawyers are arguing that the immunity presidents enjoy against civil action for things they do while in office also extends to criminal liability. That may be a long shot, but again… this Court. 

But this motion is real mostly for its ability to create delay. Most appeals have to wait until a trial is completely finished. But presidential immunity is an interlocutory appeal, meaning it can go up the appellate chain now. If the appeals take a long time, that could make the March, 2024 trial date for the coup case slip. Which is surely a huge part of the point.

Coffee break

Fani Willis’s first guilty plea in the Fulton County RICO case could spell trouble for a bunch of other defendants. Scott Hall, aka “the bailbondsman,” admitted in court to 12 criminal acts in the voting machine breach part of the conspiracy. He’s agreed to five years probation, a relatively light sentence that’s typical of defendants who are first to plead out. 

But Hall’s connections all over the Coffee County plot and beyond spell trouble for other defendants, including Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, and others. Remember, if you cooperate in exchange for a lighter sentence, you have to tell the whole truth, or the deal’s off. Are other co-conspirators soon to cop a plea and flip? 

Shills to pay the bills

“We’ve lost everything, every dime… all of it is gone,” hot-side-of-the-pillow guy Mike Lindell told NBC News. Lindell says he’s broke, just as his lawyers say they can no longer rep him in the various election lie defamation suits against him because of unpaid fees. 

Ethics cleansing

The onslaught of coverage detailing Justice Clarence Thomas’s financial relationships with billionaires who have business before the Supreme Court paused just long enough for the court to start its new term this week. 

First up, the court rejected John Eastman’s bid to reverse a lower court ruling that exposed his emails under the crime/fraud exception. This started back when the January 6 committee subpoenaed Eastman’s emails about the coup plot, then a District Judge ruled attorney-client privilege doesn’t protect the messages because they contain evidence of a likely criminal conspiracy between Eastman and Donald Trump. 

Eastman is now a co-defendant in the Georgia RICO conspiracy and an unindicted (for now) co-conspirator in the federal coup case. The emails are now evidence, and Eastman wanted their exposure overturned. But the court refused to hear the case.

Here’s the biggest shocker: Clarence Thomas, for whom Eastman once clerked, seemed to get a pang of ethics, and recused himself from the case. Not only did Eastman work for Thomas, and not only did Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, actively support overturning the 2020 election, but Eastman’s emails argue that Thomas was probably the only justice who would support the constitutionality of the coup plot! Good stuff!

Map quest

Alabama Republicans’ long, defiant fight to dilute Black votes is over. For now. After two rounds at the Supreme Court and Republicans’ refusal to obey court orders, a panel of federal judges finally picked a special master’s map yesterday. That map will apportion power in the states seven-member congressional delegation. 

It assigns a second district with majority Black representation. That greatly increases the chances that Black voters, who’d been divided up by previous (and illegal, according to the courts) racial gerrymandering rounds, will have the power to pick their preferred candidate for Congress. Of course, this all goes back to Allen v Milligan, a Voting Rights Act Section 2 case that could have important knock-on effects in several other racial gerrymandering cases across the South. For instance…

The lowest country

The Supreme Court is set to hear yet another racial gerrymandering case next week. This one comes out of South Carolina, where a federal appeals court has already ruled that Republicans diluted Black voters’ influence by instituting an illegal gerrymander in one of the state’s seven congressional districts. 

Geaux try to vote

And now that Alabama has a new map re-empowering Black voters, Louisiana may not be far behind. But two conservative Appeals Court judges look like they’re teaming up to hijack the case, all to delay it long enough to help congressional Republicans hang on in 2024. Seems fishy. 

Reno function

New protections for election workers are going into effect in Nevada, including making harassment, intimidation, and threats a felony. That’s good, since Nevada is home to one of the most anti-democratic, conspiracy-fueled Trumpist movements in the country, and has seen massive turnover of election officials.

Minor threat

This kid has just about enough of North Carolina’s brazen gerrymandering!

“I never took the CPA exam, I never studied for it, so I don’t know all the various components of what GAAP is.”

— Former Trump Org. CFO Allen Weisselberg, talking about Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in a deposition for Trump’s $250 million fraud case. 

Observe and report — Journalist John Harwood spent a career covering Washington at NBC, CNN, The New York Times and elsewhere. Now he’s with ProPublica, where he just delivered an interesting sit-down with President Joe Biden on protecting democracy. Harwood is also one of the clearest voices in Washington for a clear-eyed journalism that avoids a “neutral” stance between democracy and authoritarianism and instead pays attention to what’s at stake. 

So after you watch the Biden interview, check out Harwood’s Q & A with Brian Beutler of the Off Message blog. In my view, this is the kind of approach the media needs in order to faithfully cover politics, and especially Trumpism.

Cajun match — Louisianans go to the polls next week to elect a new secretary of state. The race has GOP candidates clamoring to show they can appease right-wing election conspiracists the most, at least rhetorically. The guy who might win wants the state’s (admittedly outdated) voting systems to move to an all-handcount system—which, according to experts, guarantees more errors and inefficiency. 

Be cruel to your school — Libs of TikTok has become an “anti-woke” sensation in right-wing circles for criticizing and ridiculing transgender youth, their parents, and the policy makers who try to support them. VICE News’ Tess Owen has the story detailing how many of the schools targeted by the account and its creator have become victims of bomb threats and other violent harassment. It’s further, irrefutable evidence of just how entrenched political violence is becoming on the hard right. And lest you think Libs of TikTok is just a voice of the fringe, lots of Republican lawmakers interact with it regularly. These are schools! 

The problem(s) with Rudy — Rudy Giuliani is still refusing to produce discovery in the defamation case Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss have against him. He’s facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sanctions, and his lawyer is suing him for $1.4 million in unpaid legal fees. Rudy’s broke, and he’s now a criminal defendant. What the hell happened to “America’s Mayor” and the former US Attorney who brought down the New York mob? 

Friends of Rudy have long been concerned about his drinking. Now prosecutors are pretty focused on it too. 

Kevin McCarthy got what he deserved.

FROM THE ATLANTIC

A movement to help embattled and stressed election workers.

FROM GOVERNING

Trump’s escalating violent rhetoric is straight out of the autocrat’s playbook. 

FROM THE GUARDIAN

The post Kevin McCarthy Left the House in an Anti-Democratic MAGA Mess appeared first on VICE.

It’s the democracy, stupid

Inflation is down, unemployment is too, and the economy appears headed for a soft landing that avoids a recession. And yet President Joe Biden remains in dangerously unpopular territory for an incumbent facing reelection. 

There are many reasons. One of them is the constant right-wing media drumbeat reverberating with the message, uncontaminated by evidence, that Biden is corrupt. 

That’s the political equation (in shorthand, admittedly) that explained Thursday’s dual events. In Washington, House Republicans continued their effort to muddy up Biden with an impeachment inquiry hearing that included (you guessed it) no evidence of his wrongdoing. And in Arizona, at an event honoring the late GOP Sen. John McCain, the White House provided alternate viewing of the President of the United States identifying MAGA Republicans as a direct threat to democracy who must be defeated in the next election. 

Biden went further than he’s ever gone in publicly describing the direct threat Trump poses to democratic institutions, and the danger that broader GOP silence poses. Republicans—including those on the primary debate stage Wednesday night—have said effectively nothing in response to Trump’s appalling statement that Gen. Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, should be executed. 

“The silence is deafening,” Biden said. 

Biden has made pitches for defending democracy against this internal authoritarian threat before. But this was new: “Whether you’re a Democrat, Republican or an independent, put the preservation of our democracy before everything else,” Biden said, after itemizing Trump’s promises to turn the government into an instrument of retribution for MAGA grievances, and, most importantly, himself. 

Biden’s campaign has been road-testing the message of the recession-dodging, low-unemployment, “America’s back” recovery they call “Bidenomics.” And that makes a lot of sense in an “it’s the economy, stupid” campaign of conventional politics. But so far it just isn’t selling with independent voters.  

That helps explain Biden’s rhetorical pivot to defending democracy. No matter how you feel about the economy, or me, or my age, put preserving the Constitution first. But it also explains the very specific counterprogramming choice Thursday: Pairing a plea for democracy and bipartisan normalcy on one side of the screen with House Republicans’ faltering, Trump-boosting impeachment crusade on the other.

Dems are having a deeper debate over how to counter top-down GOP messaging that’s morphed into full-blown Trump-aligned propaganda. The tl;dr: Establishment Dems like Biden and Nancy Pelosi tend to believe Dems win by talking about and delivering popular economic wins. Like, the White House would argue, Bidenomics. Others believe the only way to counter GOP disinformation and zero-sum politics is a frontal assault confronting voters with the news that the GOP is no longer normal, and that it’s hell-bent on helping Trump get away with crimes and destroy democracy. 

The 2024 election is more than a year away, and there are too many corners to turn to know what path Biden will ultimately choose. But Biden just showed more than a passing curiosity in a new way to run. And Trump isn’t going to get any less threatening.

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Flowers for Engoron

It looks like what’s left of New York AG Letitia James’ massive civil case against Donald Trump, his adult sons, and his business will go to trial Monday. No one seems to know exactly what Justice Arthur Engoron’s bombshell ruling—without even going to trial—that Trump et al participated in years of persistent fraud really means. Including Justice Engoron.

The witness lists for the trial are out. They include the Trump kids, the disgraced former president himself, Michael Cohen, Allen Weisselberg (released from jail in April) and more. 

As of now, the charters that allow Trump to operate in New York State are null and void. What happens with assets like Trump Tower or 40 Wall St. in Manhattan? Will Trump be forced to sell? Will the AG’s $250 million in requested fines stick, or be higher? Apparently that all has to be figured out. 

Those are big questions, worth a lot of money. They’d cause almost anyone to spend an entire day attacking a judge on social media. The appeals are 100% coming.

Local motion

Donald Trump won’t try to remove his 13-count Georgia racketeering and conspiracy case to federal court, his lawyer said in a filing last night. Trump was widely expected to try to move his case out of Fulton County and into US District Court, where he could access a more favorable jury pool and, crucially, keep his eventual trial off of TV. 

That was before Mark Meadows lost his bid to remove his case (that’s still under appeal.) Several other defendants, including former DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark and three of the fake electors, also are yet to successfully remove their cases.  Trump attorney Steven Sadow told the court Trump wouldn’t try, and would put his trust in the Fulton County Superior Court to give him “a fair trial and guarantee him due process of law.” 

Crawl and response

Delay is the only strategy available if Trump wants to make the four felony cases against him go away. So it’s extremely easy to see why his lawyers are now seeking months of delay in both federal cases against him. Yesterday Trump asked for a two-month delay in the federal coup case, and the day before asked for a three-month delay in the Mar-a-Lago docs case. 

Recusenik 

Judge Tanya Chutkan won’t be removing herself from Trump’s four-count felony trial for trying to overturn the election. The ruling this week was no surprise, and couldn’t have been a surprise to Trump’s attorneys. They staked their recusal demand on comments obliquely referring to Trump in the context of sentencing other Jan. 6 defendants. 

Judge Chutkan recusing herself from the case was always the longest of longshots. What’s far more important to Trump is the claim that Chutkan, and the whole process, are weaponizing bias to persecute him. That’s a political claim that Trump will continue to deploy as his bid to avoid prison becomes inexorably tangled with his campaign. 

But there’s something important to watch here. Chutkan is also due to rule on the Special Counsel’s request to partially gag Trump from attacking witnesses, lawyers, the judge, or evidence in the trial. The government argues Trump’s ongoing attacks are attempts to intimidate witnesses and poison the jury pool. 

It’s hard to know how far Judge Chutkan will go. But any ruling to protect the fairness of the trial by limiting Trump’s speech rights will surely be met with even louder howls of bias. When Trump crosses whatever line Chutkan establishes (and he will), he’ll cry louder still.  One could even deduce that goading the judge into a confrontation that feeds a political narrative is exactly what Trump is trying to do.

Are you being served?

You’ve probably seen a lot of Cassidy Hutchinson this week. Remember how she fired her Trump-funded lawyer, got new counsel, then somehow felt freer to tell the truth to the January 6 committee? 

A similar dance is playing out in the Mar-a-Lago documents and obstruction case. Already we know that Yuscil Taveras, the IT guy who was allegedly ordered to delete Mar-a-Lago security footage, avoided indictment after he got rid of his Trump-aligned lawyer and decided to cooperate. Now Judge Aileen Cannon has granted prosecutors’ request to inform other defendants that their lawyers may also have conflicts that prevent them from representing their best interests. 

It’s called a Garcia hearing. And it guarantees that (in this case) Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira are made aware that their lawyers also represent key witnesses in the case, who are likely to testify against the defendants. (You can see the conflict of interest: these lawyers could wind up representing both sides of the case at trial.) 

Nauta and De Oliveira can waive the warnings and stick with their lawyers, but then they can’t appeal later on the grounds that they had conflicted counsel. 

Jack Smith has had just about enough of Trump (or his PAC) keeping potential witnesses against him loyal by paying for their attorneys. In the recent fight over access to Trump’s Twitter account, the Special Counsel called it part of an “obstructive effort” by Trump, who “represents a significant risk of tampering with evidence.”  

No doxx allowed

When court records revealed the names of grand jurors who returned indictments in the Fulton County RICO case, those people were promptly doxxed and harassed. Now Judge Scott McAffee ordered that lawyers, reporters, and anyone else observing the trials of Trump and his 18 co-defendants avoid writing, broadcasting, or describing any identifying info about jurors.  

Crimson tried

SCOTUS this week put a stop to Alabama Republicans’ attempts to ignore an order to stop diluting Black citizens’ votes. It took just one sentence for the court to slap away the GOP’s latest appeal, which should be the final straw: Alabama now has to create a second Black-majority congressional district in its seven-seat map. 

The ruling also likely flips one GOP seat in the House to Democrats, which is a big deal while Speaker (as of this writing) Kevin McCarthy loses control of his angstrom-thin 5-vote majority. 

But more important than House math, the ruling reasserts the federal judiciary over defiant Alabama Republicans, who angered judges by refusing to comply with their orders. Remember, SCOTUS already ruled back in June that Alabama’s dilution of Black votes violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Republicans who run the legislature and the governor’s office turned around and generated new maps that, according to the 11th Circuit, very obviously didn’t come close to an order to create a second district with majority or close-to-majority Black representation. 

But the GOP stuck to it anyway, making sure white voters in heavily conservative Alabama saw them refusing to the last to obey outsiders’ orders that they cede a modicum of power to Blacks. They appealed back to SCOTUS, which, this week said, 5-4, “we meant it.” 

And keep your eyes on Louisiana and Georgia. The Alabama ruling is likely to influence Section 2 racial gerrymandering cases pending in both states. 

Laboratories of monstrosity

I spend a lot of time here chronicling the GOP’s anti-democracy experiment under Trump. Sure, Jan. 6 was cool, but have you ever tried undermining voters’ will at the state level? 

Republicans in Wisconsin are still maneuvering to impeach a State Supreme Court Justice who won election by 11 points (!) because she might rule against their most-gerrymandered-in-America electoral map. Ohio Republicans tried, and failed, to put their unpopular abortion position beyond voters’ reach by raising the threshold to pass referenda from 50% to 60%. 

Now, make way for North Carolina, where Republicans Republicans are about to pass a bill stripping the Democratic governor’s longstanding power to appoint majorities to state and local election boards. Instead, that power will go to the legislature, where Republicans have a gerrymandered supermajority. 

Republicans have already spent years hammering the courts and the legislature to entrench GOP rule in a state where voters are evenly divided. 

“He can go testify under oath if he has strong feelings about that.”

— Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, on Mark Meadows’ claim, through a spokesman, that her accounts of Jan. 6 and the coup attempt are filled with “half truths” and “falsehoods.” 

Western bomblet — Roughly 40% of local election officials in the western region of the country have left their jobs since the 2020 election, according to a report of 11 states released this week. The number represents a massive drain on experience in running elections and raises the risk of errors and inefficiency, it warned. 

In Nevada, 59% of election officials turned over. In Arizona, a hotbed of election conspiracies and threats, it was 80%. Some officials left because of term limits or retirement. But many fled their posts because of harassment and intimidation, according to the report. 

Third time’s a harm — Losing Arizona governor candidate Kari Lake is awaiting a verdict in her third attempt to use the courts to cast doubt on the 2022 election, which she lost. A trial wrapped up this week where Lake is seeking access to 1.3 million Maricopa County voter signatures. Her case doesn’t challenge the election results, but Lake wants access to the signatures in her ongoing disinformation campaign claiming that the election was improperly run. 

Lake lost two other cases related to her 2022 loss. But as a leading MAGA acolyte and likely GOP Senate candidate, she’s extremely likely to use the signatures to publicize voters’ identities and further claim widespread fraud that didn’t happen. 

Fraud-o-matic! — Now you can inflate your property’s value like the Trump Organization does! Just how much would your house be worth if Trump reported it to a bank or insurance company? Use this handy tool to apply Trump’s fraudulent business practices to your own life. A $400,000 home put through the Trump Org’s fraud logic would go for $1 million, $6 million, even more than $13 million. Go nuts! 

Learn to cover Trump right before it’s too late. 

FROM TPM

Trump’s sprawling legal defense effort comes under strain.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

Democracy and distrust: Overcoming threats to the 2024 election.

FROM THE GUARDIAN

The post Is Biden Going to Make 2024 a War Against MAGA? appeared first on VICE.

The real stakes of impeachment

Republicans are going to impeach Joe Biden, no matter what the facts show, because Donald Trump wants them to. He wants revenge, and he wants the equivalency of not being the only guy in the 2024 race to be impeached. That part is simple. 

The other part is simple, too. Trump may very well be a convicted felon on Election Day 2024, possibly for crimes stemming directly from his effort to overturn the last election he ran in. Between now and then, the public will see a deluge of under-oath court testimony showing that the likely GOP nominee is a criminal. 

The value of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s impeachment inquiry isn’t smoking-gun evidence, or even a vote. It’s the months of headlines and credulous “politics as combat” coverage it will generate that will replace the idea “Trump’s corrupt” with “well, ok, but both guys are corrupts” in voters’ minds. 

I have more to say about how that dynamic works (cough Benghazi!) if you care to read it. But the quest to justify and erase Trump’s anti-democratic assault through impeachment wasn’t even the most important news of the week. Because one famous GOP senator outlined the stakes. 

Mitt Romney is retiring from the Senate, and has been spending a lot of time with journalist McKay Coppins in the run-up to the announcement. Coppins has a book on Romney, one of the last principled holdouts of the pre-MAGA GOP, coming out soon. But if you haven’t read the excerpt timed for Romney’s announcement, you should. 

In addition to Romney’s strange eating habits and utter disappointment with his colleagues, there was news (not that many, many Republicans detest Trump privately but are afraid to say so. That’s not news). 

Coppins viewed texts from Romney to Mitch McConnell four days before Jan 6, in which Romney warned the leader of right-wing chatter threatening both men, and especially of Romney’s concern that Trump could use his power to encourage them. This was before Jan. 6. McConnell never responded. 

It’s hard to decide what’s more shocking here: That lawmakers had such detailed advance concerns about Jan. 6 that law enforcement dismissed, or that sitting GOP senators openly discussed the risk of the President of the United States using the security apparatus to harm them.

These days, Romney, one of just seven Republicans to vote to convict Trump for Jan. 6, is attacked regularly by Trump. That translates to a particularly hostile and dangerous environment when he travels and speaks. Coppins reports that the man who a just decade ago was his party’s nominee for president, is now in enough danger that he pays $5,000 a day for protection from his own party’s voters. 

Romney also relates conversations with multiple House and Senate Republicans who told him they wanted to vote to impeach Trump but didn’t out of fear for their own safety and the safety of their families. Let that, as they say, sink in. 

Again, read the piece. It should put Kevin McCarthy’s impeachment inquiry gambit into clear light. 

McCarthy is launching impeachment specifically to obscure Trump’s attack on democracy, and possibly his felony convictions for it. He’s doing it to slide past voters the horror of Jan. 6, the same horror that compelled him to condemn Trump—just days before supplicating to him. 

MAGA Republicans are making clear that a GOP in which dissenters literally fear for their lives—and vote accordingly—is now the only game in town. McCarthy will make impeachment happen, hide the leader’s crimes and help him back into power, or risk becoming one of the dissenters himself. 

After reading the Romney story I thought of one of the quirky biographical tales McCarthy likes to tell. Once, as a young man, he won $5000 in a lottery jackpot. That’s a lot of cash, and back then he used it as seed money to open a deli. It’s ironic that today that $5,000 would pay for exactly 24 hours of the protection McCarthy will need if he crosses Donald Trump. 

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When you’re facing 91 felonies, in four criminal cases, with a total of 20 co-defendants, there are a lot of pre-trial motions. There are wayyy too many to keep track of here, so here are the highlights from Trump’s crime universe (BTW, check out that link for a really weird and fun VICE piece Greg Walters, Madeleine May, and I made back in the innocent days before Trump was charged). 

Fulton County

Severmore – Trump and the 17 Fulton County co-defendants won’t be going to court with Ken Chesebro and Sidney Powell. Judge Scott McAfee ordered the two RICO-accused lawyers’ cases severed from the rest of the alleged co-conspirators. That means there won’t be the one big, giant, 19-defendant trial DA Fani Willis said she wanted. 

It’s not a surprise. McAfee made clear in recent weeks a unified trial under Ken (his job is just…elector) and Sid’s speedy trial request wasn’t going to happen. 

Keep it moving – But speaking of Chesebro and Powell, Judge McAfee also confirmed yesterday that he intends to start jury selection on Oct. 23, with a trial to start Nov. 5. Speedy trial indeed. Both of them made motions to dismiss their charges, Chesebro because he’s a lawyer and Powell because local officials said the hacking of Coffee County voting machines was okay. Good luck with that. 

On second thought – Mark Meadows withdrew his request to stop his prosecution while the 11th Circuit considers his appeal on federal removal. Meadows wants to remove his case to federal court, but he lost, resoundingly, in federal court. Now that decision is in expedited review at the appellate level, so stay tuned. But since his case is severed from Powell and Chesebro, the emergency stay stuff is unnecessary. 

Federal coup case

Donald Trump is trying to get Judge Tanya Chutkan kicked off his four-count federal case. Thing is, the only person who can remove Chutkan right now is… Chutkan. Trump’s lawyers are pointing to statements Chutkan made while sentencing other Jan. 6 defendants as evidence of her incurable bias against him. 

In one case, Chutkan said rioters “were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man—not to the Constitution” and that the rioters had “a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” According to Trump’s lawyers, that’s evidence Chutkan thinks Trump should not be free. 

Recusals are rare, Trump can appeal, and Judge Chutkan’s ruling is expected soon.

Stormy’s hush money

Merchan to his own drum – Trump’s 34-count trial for lying about hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels looks like it’s going to move. That’s not a huge surprise, since Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg signaled over the summer he’d be open to moving the March 25, 2024 trial date to accommodate the defendant’s very busy criminal dance card. 

Now Judge Juan Merchan, who’s presiding, put off a scheduling meeting this week citing Trump’s crowded trial schedule and all its moving parts.

Mar-a-Lago

We finally have a protective order governing how all the classified information in the case will be handled. The big point: Trump appears to have lost his dream to review classified evidence in the luxurious confines of Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster. 

Trump made a request over the summer to build a classified document review facility, called a SCIF, at Mar-a-Lago, just like he had as president. The big problem now is that Mar-a-Lago is the scene of the alleged crime, the crime being mishandling classified docs. Add onto that obstruction (moving boxes so feds can’t find them), and then obstruction of that obstruction (destroying surveillance footage so feds can’t see the box-moving). 

Co-defendant Walt Nauta, the valet, also won’t have access to classified information except in very limited circumstances, since he’s not charged with mishandling them. 

Fail seizure!

Now we know why an 11th Circuit panel barred Jack Smith’s investigators from accessing much of the information on coup insider Scott Perry’s seized phone. Because he’s a congressman, Perry’s communications about the 2020 election, and presumably Trump’s  effort to overturn it, are protected by the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause. 

The three appellate judges ruled that any communications Perry made on his phone, especially while talking with other members of Congress and staff about the Jan. 6 electoral certification, is likely protected. US District Judge Beryl Howell, who originally ruled the phone in-bounds for investigators, will have to approve individual communications from Perry’s phone on a case-by-case basis. 

That’s a victory for Perry, who is identified in the Jan. 6 report as a central congressional figure in the coup plot. Perry may be immune from many searches and some prosecution, but he certainly didn’t think at the time that everything he was doing was legally pure. 

Jack’s back

Perry might be especially grateful that many of his texts and phone records are out of bounds, given that the grand jury that indicted Trump and described six co-conspirators is back in business. The secret gang got back together last week after a four-week break, and is reportedly following the money. They’re digging into how of the cash raised with a “stolen election” pitch was used to fund voting machine breaches in several locations. 

You’ve heard of Coffee County, where a voting machine breach is now part of the Georgia RICO indictment. But don’t forget that defendants have been charged with similar breaches in Michigan, and, of course our favorite, Mesa County, Colo. 

Rioters’ guilt of America

The man who smashed the window Ashlee Babbitt climbed through before she was shot and killed was convicted this week. Zachary Alam, of Virginia, was found guilty of 11 charges, including 8 felonies related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Alam smashed a window to the Speaker’s Lobby just feet from the House floor, where staff and lawmakers were holed up during the riot. He was found guilty of assaulting police officers, obstructing an official proceeding, and other charges. 

Meanwhile, Joseph Padilla, of Tennessee, was sentenced to six-and-a-half years for his role in the riot. Padilla was seen on camera assaulting police officers and boasting about his exploits. Prosecutors say Padilla spent more than three hours on the West Front of the Capitol, rushing barricades and, at one point, throwing a flag pole that struck an officer in the helmet. 

Never gonna give you up

Alabama Republicans are not letting go of their dream of diluting Black voting power, no matter what that court order says. For weeks we’ve been following the Alabama GOP’s defiant refusal to obey the 11th Circuit, and SCOTUS, and change its gerrymandered congressional map to increase Black representation. 

Yup, as predicted, they’re headed back to SCOTUS, asking justices if they’re sure they don’t want to gut what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. Stay tuned.

Peter pall 

Convicted Trump aide and TV coup describer Peter Navarro is trying to get a mistrial. Soon after his guilty verdicts for ignoring two January 6 committee subpoenas, Navarro’s lawyers were back in court arguing that jurors were tainted by seeing protesters outside the courthouse. Jurors took a “fresh-air” break during deliberations while protesters were in the vicinity. They returned the guilty verdicts a short time later, and Navarro’s lawyers say the experience biased the panel against ol’ Pete. Hearing will be in a couple weeks. 

Games, Madison

Hey, why should House Republicans get to impeach all the democratically-elected officials they wish they’d beaten? Wisconsin Senate GOP leader Robin Vos is now shifting his party’s Supreme court impeachment fervor to a panel of former justices. You’ll recall Republicans have been threatening to impeach newly-elected liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz if she tries to rule on the state’s heavily GOP-gerrymandered maps. 

Last week Vos tried to circumvent the new liberal-majority court by offering a bill to have nonpartisan state staffers draw new maps. The Dem governor rejected that plan, so now Vos is “exploring” impeachment, kind of like how Kevin McCarthy is “inquiring” about it in Washington. Everyone’s “just asking questions!” 

Democracy in Wisconsin is a multi-front war. Also this week, Vos and other Republicans voted to replace Megan Wolfe, the nonpartisan head of the Wisconsin Election Commission. They want to replace her ahead of the 2024 election with their own pick. Wolfe promptly sued. 

Oregon trial 

Fox News has two new litigants lining up to sue the network for airing relentless lies about the 2020 election. New York City’s pension funds and the State of Oregon joined up in an east-meets-west lawsuit saying Fox’s “Big Lie” programming amounted to a fiduciary breach that destroyed shareholder value. Fox paid $787 million to settle a suit by Dominion Voting Systems, and another suit from Smartmatic is still pending. 

Basta, Shasta

Back in April, VICE News went to Shasta County, Calif., where MAGA believers on the county board had just voted to outlaw Dominion voting machines and go to a full hand count for more than 110,000 registered voters. That’s a terrible, worst-practice policy based on false theories about voting machines… so California just banned it. 

A bill passed this week bans hand-counts in any election with more than 1,000 voters, or any special election with more than 5,000 voters. The county was planning to hand-count its local elections in November, but that plan is done as soon as the governor signs the bill. 

LOL, Christian soldier

Good one, Mike Pence.

“A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

— Sen. Mitt Romney, who announced he’s retiring from the Senate this week.

Mad sick Mike — One America News Network (OANN) and one of its top personalities settled out of court with a former executive from Dominion Voting Systems earlier this month, after the executive sued them for defamation… for all the reasons you already know. Eric Coomer also sued Mike Lindell, who was so “vulgar, threatening (and) loud” in his deposition that plaintiff’s lawyers asked to do his deposition over, this time in front of the judge.

At one point, Lindell thought attorneys insulted MyPillow, which was also sued. “When you say lumpy pillows, now you’re an asshole. You got that? You’re an asshole.”

Givin’ em the what-fourteen — A little more than a week after one group sued under the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off the ballot in Colorado, another has sued in Minnesota. Last year when this whole 14th Amendment thing was just getting off the ground, I spoke last year with Ron Fein, counsel for Free Speech for People, the group that’s suing in Minnesota.  

The Secretary of State there isn’t keen on the idea that his office can make the call on Trump’s eligibility. And he’s not alone. Most state officials seem to want to stay out of it, since the question is definitely going to the Supreme Court anyway. 

Russia to his defense — Vladmir Putin absolutely does not like how Donald Trump is being treated. 

Jack Smith’s deputy is a “law man” type who’s taken on Trumpworld.

FROM TPM

CNN should become the anti-Fox/pro-truth network.

FROM PRESS WATCH

24 for ‘24: Urgent recommendations for fair and legitimate 2024 US elections.

FROM SAFEGUARDING DEMOCRACY PROJECT

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