case

It was not a good day for Dr. Phil.

Phillip McGraw, the genial celebrity psychologist who spent a career calling out the behavior of others and doling out zingers, found himself upbraided by a bankruptcy judge.

Merit Street Media, McGraw’s new network, had filed for bankruptcy protection in July, a little more than a year after he launched the media startup, and then sued its distribution partner, Trinity Broadcasting Network.

During a nearly three-hour hearing in Dallas last month, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Scott Everett said that he’d “never seen a case” like the Chapter 11 filing McGraw’s company was attempting.

Everett cited evidence indicating McGraw had “violated” a court order by deleting “unflattering” text messages that allegedly described his plan to use the bankruptcy to “wipe out” creditor claims.

“What makes this case unique, unfortunately, is that it has been plagued with the attempted destruction of relevant evidence and less than truthful testimony by some of the key players,” said Everett, alluding to McGraw and his associates in the case.

Everett ruled that Merit Street be liquidated.

Following the hearing, a spokesperson for McGraw’s production company vigorously denied the accusation that he destroyed evidence and said he is appealing the ruling.

“Dr. McGraw’s excellent record of integrity, success and service to millions over two decades speaks for itself,” said Chip Babcock, attorney for McGraw’s production company.

The unraveling of McGraw’s media venture was a gut punch for the celebrity therapist who has assiduously built a reputation — and tremendous personal wealth — as one of the most trusted voices on television. But his fortunes faded amid a dying market for syndicated TV and clashes with a distributor and partner.

After 21 years as host of the successful syndicated talk show “Dr. Phil,” McGraw went out on his own last year. He launched Merit Street Media in Texas, a company that he said would promote “family values” and serve as an antidote to “woke” culture, only to find that his ambitions collided with a new television reality.

Unlike “Dr. Phil,” Merit Street was untethered to the well-oiled machine of Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, where it was filmed, and top-tier distribution partner CBS.

Moreover, the sheer force of McGraw’s personality could not overcome the fact that linear TV is on the wane. Syndicated daytime TV shows are no longer the cash cows they used to be as most viewers consume content through streaming and other digital outlets such as YouTube and TikTok.

“By the time he put this new company together, the ‘Dr. Phil’ era had kind of ended,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “There is a shelf life to these characters and he reached his.”

An Oprah favorite

McGraw rose from clinical psychologist to an American living room staple and self-help guru in the late 1990s after Oprah Winfrey anointed him as her protégé.

Television’s then-reigning queen hired McGraw to prepare for her libel case brought by Texas cattlemen in 1997. They claimed her comments during an episode about mad cow disease disparaged them and caused beef prices to drop.

Winfrey prevailed, but it was McGraw, a former linebacker with the commanding presence of a sheriff from an old-time western, who emerged victorious.

Oprah Winfrey launched “Dr. Phil” after he advised her during her Texas cattlemen’s libel trial in the late 1990s.

(Christopher Smith / Invision / AP)

Much like books, pajama sets and certain chocolate brands, McGraw became one of Oprah’s favorite things. Recast as “Dr. Phil,” she featured him during weekly segments on her hugely popular talk show, starting in 1998. By 2002, a “Dr. Phil” spinoff began airing five days a week, produced by Winfrey’s Harpo Productions.

The show was distributed by CBS Media Ventures and filmed on a soundstage at Paramount studios on Melrose Avenue with a live audience, and it became the de facto voice for home viewers.

McGraw quickly earned a massive following for dispensing advice to cheating spouses, drug addicts, troubled teens, meddling in-laws, infamous criminals and celebrities. He delivered his no-nonsense, often blunt assessments wrapped in folksy Southern sayings such as “No matter how flat you make a pancake, it’s still got two sides.”

For more than two decades, “Dr. Phil” was a top-rated syndicated daytime talk show — 11 of those seasons at No. 1 — garnering 31 Daytime Emmy nominations. He was catapulted to stardom, appearing everywhere from late-night talk shows to sitcom cameos, even a character on “Sesame Street,” Dr. Feel. In 2020, he received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

Dr. Phil McGraw with his wife, Robin McGraw, his son Jay McGraw and his wife, Erica Dahm, as well as their two children, London and Avery, at the ceremony celebrating Dr. Phil receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.

(Getty Images)

McGraw leveraged “Dr. Phil” as a launching pad for his ever-growing empire of bestselling books and various ancillary businesses, including a virtual addiction recovery program, a telemedicine app and production company, Stage 29, with his son Jay McGraw that produced shows like daytime’s “The Doctors.”

But as McGraw’s popularity and influence grew, so did the controversies.

The family of Britney Spears criticized him after he visited the troubled pop star when she was hospitalized on a psychiatric hold and issued a news release saying she was “in dire need of both medical and psychological intervention.”

A spokesperson for the Spears family said, “Rather than helping the family’s situation, the celebrity psychologist caused additional damage.”

McGraw later told viewers on his show that “I definitely think if I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn’t make any statement at all. Period.”

Claims of conflict

Questions were also raised that McGraw used his show to promote businesses and products connected to his family and affiliates, sometimes without fully disclosing those ties.

In 2006, McGraw settled a lawsuit for $10.5 million with consumers who alleged that he defrauded them by making false claims about a line of nutritional and weight-loss supplements that he endorsed on “Dr. Phil.”

He faced a Federal Trade Commission investigation into false advertising and the line was eventually discontinued.

McGraw denied the allegations and did not admit to wrongdoing or misrepresentation in the settlement.

“Dr. McGraw’s career stands among the most successful in television history,” Babcock said. “His programs always have been completely transparent, with all brand integrations under full network oversight and full FCC compliance.”

The on-air promotion of McGraw’s family businesses, such as his wife Robin McGraw’s skincare line and lifestyle brand and his son Jay McGraw’s books during “integrations,” also drew scrutiny.

Dr. Phil McGraw and son Jay McGraw.

(Jason LaVeris / FilmMagic)

“Dr. Phil” episodes frequently featured guests suffering from addiction who were often offered the opportunity to check into a treatment facility at the end of the episode.

In 2017, an investigation by STAT News and the Boston Globe alleged that the show highlighted specific treatment facilities in exchange for those recovery programs purchasing various products affiliated with McGraw.

A spokesman for the show had denied the allegations, saying that “any suggestion that appearances on Dr. Phil’s show are linked to the purchase or use of this program is false.”

McGraw’s wattage remained undimmed. He continued to branch into new ventures. He launched a podcast in 2019, “Phil in the Blanks,” and prime-time TV shows like “Bull,” a legal drama on CBS based on his experiences as a trial strategist, and another CBS legal drama, “So Help Me Todd.”

The “Dr. Phil” show has said that since its premiere, it has provided $35 million in resources to its guests after they appeared.

During the last years of “Dr. Phil,” staffers and viewers noticed that programming began to shift away from advising relationships, parenting and money issues to more conservative and cultural issues such as immigration and transgender athletes.

“He took a political slant already, but once COVID hit, [the show] skewed more and more political,” said one former longtime “Dr. Phil” staffer who declined to be named out of fear of retaliation.

During an appearance on Fox News in April 2020, McGraw said that pandemic lockdowns would be more fatal than the virus, drawing a widespread backlash on social media.

McGraw later posted a video saying he supported CDC guidelines but was concerned about the mental health effects of long-term quarantine.

“He was very good about getting big stories, but we had no input, and believe me, if we ever wanted to or tried, we’d be just told ‘no,’” said a former executive at CBS, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject matter.

Starting over in Texas

In 2023, McGraw announced that he was leaving CBS and returning to Texas to launch a new venture and broaden his audience, citing “grave concerns for the American family” and that he was “determined to help restore a clarity of purpose as well as our core values.”

Merit Street built a studio in a former AT&T call center in Fort Worth. Many of the staffers were veterans of “Dr. Phil” or had worked on McGraw-related content and relocated from Los Angeles to Texas.

Dr. Phil and President Trump at the National Day of Prayer event at the White House in May.

(Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)

The network, whose name was derived from meritocracy (with shades of main street), premiered in April 2024.

“Merit Street Media will be a resource of information and strategies to fight for America and its families, which are under a cultural ‘woke’ assault as never before,” McGraw said in a statement.

McGraw aired “exclusive” interviews with Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his flagship, “Dr. Phil Primetime.”

Programming consisted of a slate of news, entertainment and conservative commentary programs with former syndicated television stars Nancy Grace and Steve Harvey, whose Steve Harvey Global had a 5% stake in the company, according to Merit’s bankruptcy filings.

In January, McGraw made headlines when he taped interviews with Trump’s top border policy advisor Tom Homan during controversial immigration raids by ICE agents in Los Angeles.

But Merit struggled to find an audience; only 27,000 viewers tuned into the network weekly during 2024, placing it at 130 out of 153 U.S. channels, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

“It’s totally false to say Merit had bad ratings,” Babcock said. “For a startup, it was like a rocket ship; at one point it passed CNN in the first few months of its existence.”

Merit soon scrapped the live audience for “Dr. Phil Primetime” and eventually production on its original programming came to a halt.

Four months after the network’s debut, the company cut 30% of its staff, including workers who had relocated from Los Angeles.

Facing mounting debts, Merit filed for bankruptcy protection in July, listing liabilities of at least $100 million.

“You could see the writing on the wall,” said the former CBS executive. “Ratings for syndication were dropping.”

While still a household name, McGraw was part of a waning breed of TV syndication stars — Judge Judy, Maury Povich and Ellen DeGeneres among them — whose shows were fast becoming nostalgic relics.

Former McGraw staffers from his CBS days said it appeared that he thought he could simply translate his name recognition and longtime popularity to the new venture, but failed to grasp the new digital media landscape.

“The programming model that he launched in 2024 was more appropriate two decades earlier,” said Syracuse University’s Thompson.

Merit Street faced internal strife as well, according to former staffers and court filings.

Former employees described tensions between Los Angeles transplants and less experienced nonunion crews.

“It was total disorganization,” said one former field producer who had worked for the “Dr. Phil” show and then relocated to Texas to work for Merit Street, who declined to be named out of fear of retribution. “Everyone kept saying this was a startup, and maybe it was. People made decisions but had no idea what they were doing,” the producer added.

A representative of McGraw’s production company conceded the startup had growing pains.

“The company thought they could produce the same quality production with less people,” he said.

Compounding matters, relations between Merit and its business and broadcast partner TBN also soured.

Merit alleged in its lawsuit that TBN provided “comically dysfunctional” technical services, with teleprompters and monitors blacked out during live programs before a studio audience.

The suit further alleged that TBN failed to pay TV distributors and had reneged on its promise to cover $100 million in production services and other costs.

McGraw, through his production company, bankrolled the struggling enterprise from December 2024 to May 2025, lending it $25 million, according to Merit’s lawsuit.

For its part, TBN accused McGraw and his production company Peteski Productions of “fraudulent inducement,” alleging in a countersuit that it had invested $100 million into Merit and that McGraw and Peteski had failed to bring in promised advertising revenue.

TBN said McGraw reached out to the company as a potential replacement for CBS as a distribution partner during the latter half of 2022.

“McGraw specifically represented to TBN that he wanted to change networks because of what he perceived to be CBS’s censorship of the content aired on the ‘Dr. Phil Show.’ As McGraw put it, ‘I don’t want snot-nose lawyers telling me what I can and can’t say on TV,’” the lawsuit states.

Instead, they claimed in their complaint, McGraw and his company engaged in a “fraudulent scheme” to fleece TBN, a not-for-profit corporation.

In a statement to Variety, a spokesperson for McGraw and his production company called TBN’s lawsuit “riddled with provable lies.”

TBN did not respond to a request for comment.

Merit also clashed with another partner: Professional Bull Riders, which in November 2024 canceled its four-year contract with Merit and pulled its content, claiming the company had failed to pay the fees it owed.

Professional Bull Riders claims Merit Street stopped paying its broadcast fees and is owed $181 million.

(Anadolu via Getty Images)

PBR, which later signed with Fox Nation and CBS, alleged in a separate lawsuit that Merit breached their contract and is seeking $181 million.

“We’re glad he’s being held accountable,” said Mark Shapiro, the president and chief operating officer of TKO Group Holdings, parent company of PBR, in a statement to The Times.

“Merit Street agreed to work out its differences with PBR in a confidential proceeding which is ongoing. We were therefore surprised that PBR would publicly accuse us of violating our agreement when the facts are in dispute,” the company said in an earlier statement.

Two weeks after Merit filed for bankruptcy, McGraw announced the launch of another new network, Envoy Media Co., that would include live, “balanced news,” original entertainment programming and “immersive viewer experiences,” as well as original programming from friend and former Merit stakeholder Steve Harvey.

Last month, Envoy struck a distribution deal with Charter Communications.

“Dr. McGraw remains deeply proud of his past work and the millions of people it has reached. He’s now turning that same purpose and energy toward Envoy Media,” Babcock said.

But the Merit legal drama is far from over.

TBN has since alleged that Merit Street filed for bankruptcy in bad faith as a way to secure funding for Envoy.

A spokesperson for Peteski called TBN’s allegation “blatantly false” and said Envoy is independently financed.

Earlier this month, Judge Everett rejected Merit’s motion to pause the company’s liquidation while his ruling is appealed. He cited deleted texts in which McGraw described plans by Merit to file for bankruptcy protection to “wipe out” debts from its main creditors, TBN and PBR.

“Candor to the court is critical,” said Everett during his original ruling, and then declared that Merit Street Media “was as dead as a door nail when the bankruptcy was filed.”

Richard Rider would love to have Gov. Pete Wilson’s job. He dreams of hacking away at bureaucracy, crushing all new tax legislation under a huge rubber stamp that reads “VETO.” He’s even imagined the sound this would make: whoooomp!

Rider, the Libertarian candidate for governor, is a realist, however. The 49-year-old stockbroker from San Diego knows that a minor party candidate such as himself has no hope of being elected governor Nov. 8. Still, he thinks he can help defeat Wilson (whom Rider deems a “wimp” and a “Benedict Arnold” masquerading as a Republican), which is why, not long ago, he wrote Democrat Kathleen Brown a letter asking for $500,000.

“I’m the Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate. Normally that might elicit nothing more from you than a yawn. But I can get you elected,” Rider wrote. “What you need is a third candidate to drain votes from Wilson. I can do that. . . . Dollar for dollar, there is no better use for your campaign funds than in my race for governor.”

Rider’s pitch must have sounded presumptuous coming from a man unknown to most Californians. Like the other minor party candidates for governor–Jerome McCready of the American Independent Party and Gloria La Riva of the Peace & Freedom Party–Rider was not invited to participate in the recent televised debate between Wilson and Brown. He lacks money, exposure and governmental experience.

But Rider has one very powerful thing going for him: a dissatisfied electorate. A recent Times poll shows that California voters are unhappy with Brown and Wilson and that three out of every five are planning to vote for the “lesser of two evils” for governor. If just a tiny fraction of those people vote for a so-called third party candidate, political analysts say, it could alter the race.

“In this state, where elections are won or lost by 1 or 2 points, third party candidates can decide elections,” said Bill Press, chairman of the California Democratic Party, who has followed Rider’s candidacy with interest. “If I had an extra $500,000, I would give it to Richard Rider and it would be money well spent. . . . Every vote he gets is one vote Pete Wilson doesn’t.”

Taken together, the four minor parties that have qualified to appear on the California ballot–American Independent, Green, Libertarian, and Peace & Freedom–represent 456,000 voters, or about 3% of the state’s electorate.

The American Independent and Libertarian parties, though they differ on many principles, are both committed to strictly limiting the power of government and to cutting taxes. Conventional wisdom says that to vote for one of these parties’ candidates is to take a vote away from a Republican candidate.

The Green and the Peace & Freedom parties, though also very different from one another, both seek social justice and equality. These parties are more likely to appeal to voters who might otherwise cast ballots for Democrats.

These minor parties’ candidates face an uphill battle. Virtually ignored by the press and by their more mainstream rivals, they have trouble raising the money needed for expensive broadcast advertising and direct mail flyers. As a result, minor party candidates can campaign tirelessly, making speeches and walking precincts, and still remain largely unknown.

La Riva, the Peace & Freedom candidate for governor, is a printer and labor organizer in San Francisco. McCready, the American Independent nominee, runs a shop that sells pre-hung doors and other construction materials in Castroville. Rider, who closed his financial planning business at the end of last year, is the only minor party candidate who has campaigned for governor full time.

Nevertheless, Press, the Democratic Party chairman, believes that politicians who ignore these alternative candidates do so at their own peril. This year, he has gone so far as to donate his own money to keep a Green Party gubernatorial candidate from competing with Brown.

Leading up to the June primary election, three candidates were vying for the Green gubernatorial nomination–despite widespread concern within the party that a Green nominee would siphon votes from Brown in the general election. Then, one Green leader launched a campaign urging Greens to vote for “None of the Above”–an option that allows Greens to choose no candidate.

Eager to safeguard Brown voters, Press sent a $500 donation to the none-of-the-above campaign, dubbed Friends of Nobody. Then he sent letters to his friends asking them to do the same.

“I raised $5,000 to $6,000 or more for their campaign,” Press said proudly, recalling that the effort to gain more votes for no one than for any of the candidates was successful. “Nobody won. Which I considered a victory.”

Third party candidates are familiar with this kind of circular reasoning. They see no shame in losing, as long as they have introduced new ideas into the race. And they believe that every vote cast for a minor party candidate puts a little more pressure on the major parties to shape up.

That is why a conservative such as Rider is working so hard to help a Democrat such as Brown. Rider is probably the only Brown supporter who wants to do away with state income taxes, abolish the workers’ compensation system and phase out all welfare payments. He wants to repeal the law that requires motorcyclists to wear helmets. He believes the Endangered Species Act will result in the nationalization of all property. And he supports the death penalty–which Brown opposes, though she pledges to enforce it as governor.

“Obviously, I’m no fan of the Democrats’ pipe dream of a socialist utopia. . . . Kathleen Brown would make a terrible governor,” Rider said.

But Brown would do less damage than Wilson, Rider added, and a Brown victory would send a clear signal to the GOP. If he could do that, Rider said, he would feel like a winner no matter how badly he lost.

And, he said, Wilson is not a true Republican.

“Brown is a very ineffective Democrat. Wilson is a very effective Democrat. It’s time the Republican Party stopped running stealth Democrats for governor,” Rider said. “If I pull enough conservative votes to cause Wilson to lose, then Republicans will have to start running real limited-government candidates such as Ron Unz.”

Rider is a big fan of Unz, the 32-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur who challenged Wilson for the Republican gubernatorial nomination last spring. Before the primary, Rider endorsed Unz, knowing full well it might cost him some votes. Then after Unz lost, while winning 34% of the Republican vote, Rider began presenting himself as the next best thing.

Unz recently wrote letters that were published in the state’s major newspapers urging his supporters not to launch an Unz write-in campaign Nov. 8. Although he stopped short of endorsing Rider, Unz asked the 700,000 people who voted for him to support “candidates up and down the ticket who are true to the core values of the Republican Party–smaller government, lower taxes and fewer regulations.”

Rider said that is as good as an Unz endorsement. After all, Rider proposes cutting 90% of all state regulations. And he so abhors taxes that he closed his financial planning office in large part to avoid paying them.

“I was working until July 19 for the government,” he said. “For a Libertarian, that’s unacceptable.”

Rider has made sacrifices to run for governor. To enable him to afford campaigning full time, Rider and his wife pulled their two sons out of private school. (“May God forgive me for that,” he said.) The campaign, headquartered in one of his spare bedrooms with a “Rider for Governor” bumper sticker taped to the door, is truly no-frills.

His phones are answered by two volunteers–retirees who refer to Rider as “Guv.” When Rider is on the road, he often sleeps on supporters’ couches. Recently, when he heard about a promotion for a time-share condominium, he and his wife went and sat through the pitch. The reason: In exchange for their time, they received free plane tickets to San Francisco, a city where Rider wanted to campaign.

Most of the $40,000 Rider has been able to raise has gone to buy cable television time for his lone commercial, which features the candidate in a butcher’s smock, whacking a sausage with a meat cleaver and exclaiming, “Wilson won’t cut taxes, but I will!” By Nov. 8 this spot will have aired in the state’s five major media markets, and Rider hopes that combined with his frequent talk-radio appearances, it will get people’s attention.

Wilson campaign officials do not appear worried. With the latest Times poll showing the incumbent 9 points ahead of Brown among likely voters, Rider is barely a blip on the radar screen.

But against all odds, Rider perseveres. He knows that some people see voting for him as a waste.

“We’ve been taught since childhood that third parties are dangerous or crazy or both,” he said, recalling that when he first heard about the Libertarian Party in the 1970s he thought it was a “left-wing, commie group.”

“And yeah, sure, we’re not going to win,” he said. “But the success of a third party is in changing the direction of the country. . . . You vote to send a message to whoever’s in power that this is the direction you want to go.”

Meanwhile, the fund-raising message Rider sent Brown has yet to yield a single penny. Brown campaign spokesman John Whitehurst said he was unaware of the letter asking for $500,000.

Rider is not bitter. If Brown is not farsighted enough to see that a hefty donation to Rider for Governor could result in her own election, he said, it is her loss.

“I keep checking the mail,” he said. “Without my effort, they’re dead meat.”

Nov. 27 (UPI) — A federal judge who oversaw the sex trafficking case against Jeffrey Epstein on Wednesday demanded prosecutors explain how they are protecting victims’ privacy after the release of unredacted documents.

New York-based Judge Richard Berman issued the order in response to a letter raising alarm about how the names of some of Epstein’s victims were included in a trove of documents released by Congress earlier this month.

The order comes amid a recent push for more transparency into the investigation of Epstein, a now-deceased financier who had ties to the wealthy and powerful.

However, Bradley Edwards and Brittany Henderson, attorneys representing the victims, wrote in a letter to Berman on Tuesday that transparency cannot “come at the expense of the privacy, safety and protection of sexual abuse and sex-trafficking victims.”

“These women are not political pawns,” the attorneys wrote. “They are mothers, wives and daughters. These are women who were abused by Jeffrey Epstein, and in some instances by others, and who have already had their rights violated in the past by the government.”

The House Oversight Committee has released dozens of documents from the Justice Department and Epstein’s estate that exposed victims’ identities, causing them “significant emotional distress,” they wrote. Victims have already been approached by the press after their names were released, the attorneys wrote.

The attorneys called the situation “absolutely unacceptable and a problem that must be rectified prior to the release of any additional documents.” One victim described being unable to sleep or function after the release.

The Department of Justice unsuccessfully asked Berman to unseal grand jury transcripts and exhibits in Epstein’s case. However, the victims’ attorneys wrote in their letter that the documents reveal little compared to the department’s investigative files.

Earlier this month, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed a bill directing the DOJ to release files on its investigation into Epstein.

U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton wrote to a separate judge Wednesday that the department “intends to redact or withhold victim information to the fullest extent permitted” by the recently passed law.

Reporting from Washington — The Supreme Court signaled Monday it is not anxious to revisit the abortion controversy in the year ahead, disappointing conservative activists who were cheered by the appointment of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

After weeks of debate behind closed doors, a divided court turned down appeals backed by 13 conservative states that sought to defund Planned Parenthood.

The court’s action leaves in place federal court rulings in much of the country that prevent states from denying Medicaid funds to women who go to a Planned Parenthood clinic for healthcare, including medical screenings or birth control. It is already illegal in most cases to use federal money like Medicaid to pay for abortions, but some states wanted to go further, cutting off all Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood because the organization offers the procedure using alternative revenue sources.

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch, accused their colleagues of allowing a “politically fraught issue” to justify “abdicating our judicial duty.”

The lower courts are divided on the Medicaid funding dispute, making the high court’s refusal to clarify the issue all the more surprising to some.

“We created the confusion. We should clear it up,” Thomas wrote in Gee vs. Planned Parenthood. “So what explains the court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood.’ ”

The brief order denying the appeals from Louisiana and Kansas suggests Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Kavanaugh were not willing to hear the cases.

The high court’s refusal to hear an appeal petition is not a ruling, and it will not prevent the justices from taking up the issue in the future or ruling against Planned Parenthood eventually.

Kavanaugh’s vote against hearing the case was noteworthy since it was his first abortion-related case, but it does not necessarily reflect how he would rule in future cases. Many legal experts predict Kavanaugh would vote to restrict or overturn the landmark Roe vs. Wade abortion ruling.

For now, however, the chief justice may have preferred to avoid controversies that result in a 5-4 split along ideological lines, particularly in the aftermath of the fierce partisan fight over Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Last month, Roberts objected to President Trump’s criticism of an “Obama judge” and issued a statement saying, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”

Even so, if the court had agreed to decide the Medicaid dispute, the justices could well have split along the usual conservative versus liberal lines, with the five Bush or Trump appointees on one side and the Clinton and Obama appointees on the other side in dissent.

In their appeals, lawyers for Kansas and Louisiana pointed to a recent split among the U.S. appeals courts. Last year, the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, breaking with others, upheld Arkansas’ decision to cut off funding to Medicaid to Planned Parenthood clinics.

It takes four justices to hear a case, and these appeals were considered in a series of closed-door meetings since late September. But the court’s conservatives were unable to gain the needed fourth vote. Kavanaugh took his seat in the second week of October, and his supporters have assumed he would vote in favor of restricting abortion rights when given the opportunity.

Catherine Foster, president of Americans United for Life, said her group was disappointed with the court’s action. “We join the dissent in calling on the court to do its duty,” she said.

“The pro-life citizens of states like Kansas and Louisiana, through their elected representatives, have clearly expressed their will. They do not want Medicaid tax dollars used to prop up abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an antiabortion nonprofit. “The pro-life grass roots will not stop fighting until every single tax dollar is untangled from the abortion industry.”

Planned Parenthood called the outcome a victory for patients. “As a doctor, I have seen what’s at stake when people cannot access the care they need, and when politics gets in the way of people making their own healthcare choices,” said Dr. Leana Wen, the group’s president. “We won’t stop fighting for every patient who relies on Planned Parenthood for life-saving, life-changing care.”

In the last decade, conservative states have sought to defund Planned Parenthood because it is the nation’s largest single provider of abortions. None of the Medicaid money pays for abortions, and most of the state funding bans have been blocked by federal judges.

Medicaid is jointly funded by the federal government and the states, and Congress has said its funds may not be used to pay directly for abortions, except when the woman’s life is in danger or in cases of rape or incest. But more than 2 million people go to Planned Parenthood clinics for birth control and general healthcare, including cancer screenings and pregnancy tests. And for low-income women, this healthcare can be paid for through Medicaid.

Republican lawmakers who sponsored the defund laws argue the states should not indirectly subsidize facilities that perform abortions.

But lawyers for Planned Parenthood and their patients have gone to federal courts and won rulings blocking most of the laws from taking effect. They have done so by relying on a provision in the Medicaid Act that says eligible patients may go to any doctor’s office, hospital or clinic that is “qualified to perform” the required medical services. If a federal law creates a right for individuals, plaintiffs like the Planned Parenthood patients may go to court and sue if that right is denied.

But in their appeals, lawyers for Kansas, Louisiana and 13 other states argued that Medicaid is a healthcare spending agreement, not a law that establishes rights for individuals. If so, they said, states may decide who is a qualified provider of healthcare.

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In a fiery rebuttal to allegations he’d criminally misrepresented facts in his mortgage documents, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin) sued Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte on Tuesday — accusing him of criminally misusing government databases to baselessly target President Trump’s political opponents.

“Pulte has abused his position by scouring databases at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — two government-sponsored enterprises — for the private mortgage records of several prominent Democrats,” attorneys for Swalwell wrote in a federal lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C. “He then used those records to concoct fanciful allegations of mortgage fraud, which he referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution.”

They said Pulte launched his attack on Swalwell at a particularly inopportune time, just as Swalwell was launching his campaign for California governor.

Pulte’s attack, Swalwell’s attorneys wrote, “was not only a gross mischaracterization of reality” but “a gross abuse of power that violated the law,” infringing on Swalwell’s free speech rights to criticize the president without fear of reprisal, and violating the Privacy Act of 1974, which they said bars federal officials from “leveraging their access to citizens’ private information as a tool for harming their political opponents.”

Pulte, the FHFA and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

Pulte has previously defended his work probing mortgage documents of prominent Democrats, saying no one is above the law. His referrals have exclusively targeted Democrats, despite reporting on Republicans taking similar actions on their mortgages.

Swalwell’s lawsuit is the latest counterpunch to Pulte’s campaign, and part of mounting scrutiny over its unprecedented nature and unorthodox methods — not just from targets of his probes but from other investigators, too, according to one witness.

In addition to Swalwell, Pulte has referred mortgage fraud allegations to the Justice Department against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who have all denied wrongdoing and suggested the allegations amount to little more than political retribution.

James was criminally charged by an inexperienced, loyalist federal prosecutor specially appointed by Trump in Virginia, though a judge has since thrown out that case on the grounds that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was illegally appointed. The judge also threw out a case against former FBI Director James Comey, another Trump opponent.

Cook’s attorneys slammed Pulte in a letter to the Justice Department, writing that his “decision to use the FHFA to selectively — and publicly — investigate and target the President’s designated political enemies gives rise to the unmistakable impression that he has been improperly coordinating with the White House to manufacture flimsy predicates to launch these probes.”

Schiff also has lambasted Trump and Pulte for their targeting of him and other Democrats, and cheered the tossing of the cases against James and Comey, calling it “a triumph of the rule of law.”

In recent days, federal prosecutors in Maryland — where Schiff’s case is being investigated — have also started asking questions about the actions of Pulte and other Trump officials, according to Christine Bish, a Sacramento-area real estate agent and Republican congressional candidate who was summoned to Maryland to answer questions in the matter last week.

Pulte has alleged that Schiff broke the law by claiming primary residence for mortgages in both Maryland and California. Schiff has said he never broke any law and was always forthcoming with his mortgage lenders.

Bish has been investigating Schiff’s mortgage records since 2020, and had repeatedly submitted documents about Schiff to the federal government — first to the Office of Congressional Ethics, then earlier this year to an FHFA tip line and to the FBI, she told The Times.

When Trump subsequently posted one of Schiff’s mortgage documents to his Truth Social platform, Bish said she believed it was one she had submitted to the FHFA and FBI, because it was highlighted exactly as she had highlighted it. Then, she saw she had missed a call from Pulte, and was later asked by Pulte’s staff to email Pulte “the full file” she had worked up on Schiff.

“They wanted to make sure that I had sent the whole file,” Bish said.

Bish said she was subsequently interviewed via Google Meet on Oct. 22 by someone from the FHFA inspector general’s office and an FBI agent. She then got a subpoena in the mail that she interpreted as requiring her to be in Maryland last week. There, she was interviewed again, for about an hour, by the same official from the inspector general’s office and another FBI agent, she said — and was surprised their questions seemed more focused on her communications with people in the federal government than on Schiff.

“They wanted to know if I had been talking to anybody else,” she said. “You know, what did I communicate? Who did I communicate with?”

Schiff’s office declined to comment. However, Schiff’s attorney has previously told Justice Department officials that there was “ample basis” for them to launch an investigation into Pulte and his campaign targeting Trump’s opponents, calling it a “highly irregular” and “sordid” effort.

The acting FHFA inspector general at the time Bish was first contacted, Joe Allen, has since been fired, which has also raised questions.

On Nov. 19, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) — the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — wrote a letter to Pulte denouncing his probes as politically motivated, questioning Allen’s dismissal and demanding documentation from Pulte, including any communications he has had with the White House.

Swalwell’s attorneys wrote in Tuesday’s lawsuit that he never claimed primary residence in both California and Washington, D.C., as alleged, and had not broken any laws.

They accused Pulte of orchestrating a coordinated effort to spread the allegations against Swalwell via a vast network of conservative influencers, which they said had “harmed [Swalwell’s] reputation at a critical juncture in his career: the very moment when he had planned to announce his campaign for Governor of California.”

They said the “widespread publication of information about the home where his wife and young children reside” had also “exposed him to heightened security risks and caused him significant anguish and distress.”

Swalwell said in a statement that Pulte has “combed through private records of political opponents” to “silence them,” which shouldn’t be allowed.

“There’s a reason the First Amendment — the freedom of speech — comes before all others,” he said.

A Georgia judge has dismissed the sprawling 2020 election interference case against Donald Trump, ending the final effort to prosecute the president for allegedly attempting to overturn his loss to Joe Biden.

Peter Skandalakis, who took over the case after the initial prosecutor’s removal, asked Judge Scott McAfee to dismiss the charges on Wednesday.

Trump’s lawyer Steve Sadow praised the decision to end the “political persecution” against the president.

The dismissal concludes the last of Trump’s four criminal cases, only one of which saw trial and resulted in a conviction.

A Georgia appeals court removed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the case after it determined a romantic relationship with a special prosecutor created an “appearance of impropriety”.

Skandalakis, executive director of the nonpartisan agency Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, appointed himself to the case after Willis’ disqualification and when other state prosecutors declined to take the case.

In Wednesday’s motion to a Fulton County judge, he said he was discontinuing the case “to serve the interests of justice and promote judicial finality”.

“As a former elected official who ran as both a Democrat and a Republican and now is the Executive Director of a non-partisan agency, this decision is not guided by a desire to advance an agenda but is based on my beliefs and understanding of the law,” Skandalakis added.

Around five million votes for president were cast in Georgia in 2020, with Biden winning the critical swing state by just under 12,000 votes.

Trump and some of his allies refused to accept the result, and the state quickly became a focal point for efforts to overturn the election.

In January 2021, The Washington Post published a recording of Trump speaking with Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,” Trump said in the recording.

Willis began investigating Trump’s activities soon after the report, convening a special grand jury to weigh the facts.

Willis filed an indictment in August 2023 alleging that Trump conspired with 18 other defendants to interfere in the election result. The charges included racketeering and other state offences.

The group “refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and wilfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump”.

Four co-defendants took plea deals with prosecutors that resulted mostly in fines, suspended sentences and community service, including attorneys Sidney Powell, Kenneth Cheseboro, and Jenna Ellis.

Wednesday’s dismissal also applies to the remaining co-defendants, including former New York mayor and Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, chief of staff during Trump’s first presidency.

Mr Sadow, president Trump’s lead attorney in the case, praised the decision to drop the charges.

“The political persecution of President Trump by disqualified DA Fani Willis is finally over,” he said. “This case should never have been brought. A fair and impartial prosecutor has put an end to this lawfare.”

The Georgia election interference case was once considered the most threatening of Trump’s four criminal indictments, because he could not pardon himself from state-level charges if he returned to office.

Prosecutors brought Trump to the Fulton County Jail, where they took his mugshot.

Legal experts who closely followed the case were not surprised by its dismissal. A judge tossed out several of the charges in 2024, and Willis was disqualified a few months later.

Willis’ removal raised doubts about whether a replacement would take up such a complicated prosecution. Trump’s 2024 election essentially put his case on hold until his term ends in 2029.

“It was incredibly unlikely it was going to go forward anyway, because the amount of financial resources and man hours necessary to take on this case didn’t seem to be within the scope of what Peter Skandalakis had,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at the Georgia State College of Law.

However, Mr Kries was surprised by some of Skandalakis’ reasoning for dropping the case.

“I think the report itself to me is a little more surprising because it seems to give the president and some of his allies a lot of benefit of the doubt, given what the evidence brought forth looked like,” he said.

Trump has also faced a series of other criminal proceedings.

These include a 2024 conviction in a New York hush-money case, and he is appealing against it.

Two additional federal cases – one alleging he conspired to overturn the 2020 election and another accusing him of unlawfully retaining classified documents – were dropped following his return to the White House.

He also faces several high-profile civil lawsuits which are progressing through the appeals courts.

Earlier this month, Trump asked the US Supreme Court to review the $5m (£3.6m) civil case brought by writer E Jean Carroll, after a federal appeals court upheld the award and declined to rehear the matter. The court said he defamed and sexually abused Ms Carroll, allegations he denies.

In August, a New York appeals court threw out a $500m civil fraud penalty against Trump that resulted from a separate, civil fraud lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

A special counsel team on Wednesday demanded a 15-year prison term for former Prime Minister Han Duck-soo on charges of abetting former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s imposition of martial law.

Special counsel Cho Eun-suk’s team made the request during the final hearing of Han’s trial at the Seoul Central District Court, making him the first of dozens of defendants in the martial law case to receive a sentencing recommendation.

“Though the defendant was, in fact, the only person who could have stopped the insurrection situation of this case, he abandoned his duty as a servant of the entire nation and took part in the insurrection crime through a series of acts before and after the declaration of martial law,” a member of the special counsel team said.

Han has been indicted on charges of abetting the ringleader of an insurrection, playing a key role in an insurrection and perjury, all in connection with the martial law imposition.

In addition to attending a Cabinet meeting shortly before Yoon declared martial law on Dec. 3, he allegedly revised the proclamation afterward to enhance its legitimacy, discarded it and lied under oath at the Constitutional Court.

The special counsel team asked the court to consider the immense damage to the nation and the people and his uncooperative attitude in the investigation process.

“This case was an act of terror on the democracy of the Republic of Korea, and the nation and the people as a whole were the victims,” the team member said.

“By strictly punishing the defendant, we must ensure this unfortunate history of the Republic of Korea does not repeat itself,” he added.

Han is expected to be the first to receive a verdict in the martial law case as the court previously stated plans to deliver its ruling on Jan. 21 or 28 next year.

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Fans of Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs might want to hold their ears when the wrongful death trial brought by his widow and parents against the Angels resumes Monday.

The Angels are about to present their defense and, according to people with knowledge of the Angels’ strategy, their attorneys plan to portray Skaggs as a selfish, secretive opioid addict who for years manipulated teammates and team communications director Eric Kay into obtaining illicit pills for him to chop up and snort.

Skaggs, a first-round draft pick of the Angels in 2009 out of Santa Monica High, was one year away from free agency when he died of an overdose July 1, 2019. He died after snorting a counterfeit opioid pill laced with fentanyl in his hotel room during an Angels trip to play the Texas Rangers in Arlington.

The left-handed starter was 27 and in the midst of his best season of seven in the big leagues when he died. His performance has been pointed to by Skaggs family lawyers as evidence he wasn’t a drug addict, but instead an athlete who took pain pills to stay on the field.

So far, testimony in a small, spare courtroom on the ninth floor of the Orange County Superior Court has favored the plaintiffs — Skaggs’ widow, Carli, and parents, Debbie Hetman and Darrell Skaggs.

Their lawyers called 21 witnesses over 24 days in court, attempting to establish that the pitcher’s fatal overdose was the result of the Angels’ negligent supervision of Kay, an admitted longtime opioid addict who is serving 22 years in prison for providing Skaggs with the pill.

The plaintiffs are asking for about $120 million in future earnings as well as additional millions for pain and suffering and punitive damages. Neither side is optimistic that a settlement can be reached ahead of a verdict.

Transcripts of trial testimony and interviews with people on both sides not authorized to speak publicly about the case provided a glimpse of the Angels’ defense strategy and what the plaintiffs have accomplished so far.

The Angels pared down their witness list at the request of Judge H. Shaina Colover, who has insisted the case go to the jury by Dec. 15. The Angels complained that two weeks might not be long enough to present their case, giving the plaintiffs an unfair advantage, even suggesting the issue could lead to a mistrial.

Skaggs’ lawyers, however, pointed out that the defense has taken longer to cross-examine witnesses than it took them to conduct the direct examinations. And Colover said a reason for the difference in the number of witnesses is that 12 people called by Skaggs’ lawyers were on the witness lists of both sides.

Like an MLB manager constructing a lineup, Skaggs lawyers led by Rusty Hardin were purposeful in the order they presented witnesses. They began their case by calling a string of Angels executives to poke holes in the team’s contention that they knew nothing about Kay’s addiction. Key witnesses refuting those denials included Kay’s wife, Camela, and Hetman.

Skaggs’ lawyers also presented text messages that indicated Kay’s supervisor, Tim Mead, and Angels traveling secretary Tom Taylor not only were aware of Kay’s addiction, but did not act decisively to isolate him, get him into inpatient rehab or terminate his employment.

The plaintiffs called witnesses to establish that not only were the Angels negligent on how they dealt with Kay’s addiction, they put his interest ahead of other employees and the organization by allowing him to continue working despite his bizarre behavior on the job.

The last witness before the court went into recess until Dec. 1 was human resources expert Ramona Powell, who testified that the Angels did not follow their own policies in evaluating and responding to Kay’s behavior. She said that had the team done so, Kay could have been terminated well before 2019.

Expect Angels lead attorney Todd Theodora to counter that Skaggs violated his contract and was guilty of fraud by concealing his drug problem for years. Furthermore, Skaggs allegedly continued to pressure Kay to procure opioids for him even after Kay completed drug rehab shortly before the fateful trip to Texas.

During opening arguments, Theodora stated that the Angels “know right from wrong,” but he is expected to assert that the case is more about what the team didn’t know. Kay and Skaggs have been described as masters at concealing their drug use. The Angels contend that had the team known of their addiction, officials could have provided them with treatment and perhaps Skaggs would be alive.

Testimony has already established that the Angels immediately informed MLB that Kay told co-worker Adam Chodzko that he was in Skaggs’ hotel room the night the pitcher died. Expect the Angels attorneys to take it a step further and assert that Kay might not have been prosecuted if the Angels hadn’t acted so swiftly.

Witnesses expected to be called by the defense include Angels president John Carpino and former MLB general manager Dan Duquette. The jury will view video of depositions given by former Angels players C.J. Cron, Matt Harvey, Cam Bedrosian and Blake Parker if they cannot testify in person.

The testimony of players can cut both ways, as evidenced by statements made by two players who testified for the plaintiffs — current Angels outfielder and three-time most valuable player Mike Trout and former relief pitcher Mike Morin.

Trout testified that Skaggs was “like a brother” to him, that he cried when told he’d died and that he had no clue about drug use. But Trout also hedged when asked whether he had offered to pay for Kay’s rehab, saying he just told him he’d help any way he could.

Morin, who pitched for the Angels from 2014 to 2017, said Kay sold him opioids “five to eight times” after an arm injury made him desperate to overcome pain and return to the mound. Yet under cross examination, Morin conceded that Skaggs was responsible for his own actions.

Carpino is responsible for the Angels’ day-to-day operations and his office is adjacent to those of Mead, Taylor and formerly Kay. Duquette, former general manager of the Montreal Expos, Boston Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles, is expected to testify that Skaggs’ future career earnings would have been no more than $30 million because of his drug use and history of injuries.

Skaggs’ lawyers called earnings expert Jeff Fannell, a former labor lawyer for the MLB Players Assn., who testified that Skaggs would have earned between $109 million and $120 million and could still be pitching.

WASHINGTON — The Texas redistricting case now before the Supreme Court turns on a question that often divides judges: Were the voting districts drawn based on politics, or race?

The answer, likely to come in a few days, could shift five congressional seats and tip political control of the House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.

Justice Samuel A. Alito, who oversees appeals from Texas, put a temporary hold on a judicial ruling that branded the newly drawn Texas voting map a “racial gerrymander.”

The state’s lawyers asked for a decision by Monday, noting that candidates have a Dec. 8 deadline to file for election.

They said the judges violated the so-called Purcell principle by making major changes in the election map “midway through the candidate filing period,” and that alone calls for blocking it.

Texas Republicans have reason to be confident the court’s conservative majority will side with them.

“We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote for a 6-3 majority last year in a South Carolina case.

That state’s Republican lawmakers had moved tens of thousands of Black voters in or out of newly drawn congressional districts and said they did so not because of their race but because they were likely to vote as Democrats.

In 2019, the conservatives upheld partisan gerrymandering by a 5-4 vote, ruling that drawing election districts is a “political question” left to states and their lawmakers, not judges.

All the justices — conservative and liberal — say drawing districts based on the race of the voters violates the Constitution and its ban on racial discrimination. But the conservatives say it’s hard to separate race from politics.

They also looked poised to restrict the reach of the Voting Rights Act in a pending case from Louisiana.

For decades, the civil rights law has sometimes required states to draw one or more districts that would give Black or Latino voters a fair chance to “elect representatives of their choice.”

The Trump administration joined in support of Louisiana’s Republicans in October and claimed the voting rights law has been “deployed as a form of electoral race-based affirmative action” that should be ended.

If so, election law experts warned that Republican-led states across the South could erase the districts of more than a dozen Black Democrats who serve in Congress.

The Texas mid-decade redistricting case did not look to trigger a major legal clash because the partisan motives were so obvious.

In July, President Trump called for Texas Republicans to redraw the state map of 38 congressional districts in order to flip five seats to oust Democrats and replace them with Republicans.

At stake was control of the closely divided House after the 2026 midterm elections.

Gov. Greg Abbott agreed, and by the end of August, he signed into law a map with redrawn districts in and around Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.

But last week federal judges, in a 2-1 decision, blocked the new map from taking effect, ruling that it appeared to be unconstitutional.

“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” wrote U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown in the opening of a 160-page opinion. “To be sure, politics played a role” but “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”

He said the strongest evidence came from Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. She had sent Abbott a letter on July 7 threatening legal action if the state did not dismantle four “coalition districts.”

This term, which was unfamiliar to many, referred to districts where no racial or ethnic group had a majority. In one Houston district that was targeted, 45% of the eligible voters were Black and 25% were Latino. In a nearby district, 38% of voters were Black and 30% were Latino.

She said the Trump administration views these as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders,” citing a recent ruling by the conservative 5th Circuit Court.

The Texas governor then cited these “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” when he called for the special session of the Legislature to redraw the state map.

Voting rights advocates saw a violation.

“They said their aim was to get rid of the coalition districts. And to do so, they had to draw new districts along racial lines,” said Chad Dunn, a Texas attorney and legal director of UCLA’s Voting Rights Project.

Brown, a Trump appointee from Galveston, wrote that Dhillon was “clearly wrong” in believing these coalition districts were unconstitutional, and he said the state was wrong to rely on her advice as basis for redrawing its election map.

He was joined by a second district judge in putting the new map on hold and requiring the state to use the 2021 map that had been drawn by the same Texas Republicans.

The third judge on the panel was Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee on the 5th Circuit Court, and he issued an angry 104-page dissent. Much of it was devoted to attacking Brown and liberals such as 95-year-old investor and philanthropist George Soros and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“In 37 years as a federal judge, I’ve served on hundreds of three-judge panels. This is the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed,” Smith wrote. “The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas.”

The “obvious reason for the 2025 redistricting, of course, is partisan gain,” Smith wrote, adding that “Judge Brown commits grave error in concluding that the Texas Legislature is more bigoted than political.”

Most federal cases go before a district judge, and they may be appealed first to a U.S. appeals court and then the Supreme Court.
Election-related cases are different. A three-judge panel weighs the facts and issues a ruling, which then goes directly to the Supreme Court to be affirmed or reversed.

Late Friday, Texas attorneys filed an emergency appeal and asked the justices to put on hold the decision by Brown.

The first paragraph of their 40-page appeal noted that Texas is not alone in pursuing a political advantage by redrawing its election maps.

“California is working to add more Democratic seats to its congressional delegation to offset the new Texas districts, despite Democrats already controlling 43 out of 52 of California’s congressional seats,” they said.

They argued that the “last-minute disruption to state election procedures — and resulting candidate and voter confusion —demonstrates” the need to block the lower court ruling.

Election law experts question that claim. “This is a problem of Texas’ own making,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The state opted for a fast-track, mid-decade redistricting at the behest of Trump.

On Monday, Dunn, the Texas voting rights attorney, responded to the state’s appeal and told the justices they should deny it.

“The election is over a year away. No one will be confused by using the map that has governed Texas’ congressional elections for the past four years,” he said.

“The governor of Texas called a special session to dismantle districts on account of their racial composition,” he said, and the judges heard clear and detailed evidence that lawmakers did just that.

In recent election disputes, however, the court’s conservatives have frequently invoked the Purcell principle to free states from new judicial rulings that came too close to the election.

Granting a stay would allow Texas to use its new GOP friendly map for the 2026 election.

The justices may then choose to hear arguments on the legal questions early next year.

NEW YORK — Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, pleaded not guilty Monday to charges he profited from rigged poker games involving several Mafia figures and at least one other ex-NBA player.

Billups, a five-time All Star and onetime Clippers player and assistant coach who won a championship with the Detroit Pistons, was arraigned in a federal court in Brooklyn on money laundering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy charges involving a scheme to rig mob-backed illegal poker games in Manhattan, Las Vegas, Miami and the Hamptons.

Both charges carry a maximum punishment of 20 years in prison. Others implicated face charges of running an illegal gambling business, robbery conspiracy and extortion conspiracy.

Prosecutors said Monday that plea negotiations have begun with some defendants, though they didn’t name them.

U.S. District Court Judge Ramon Reyes said he hoped to bring the sprawling case to trial by next September, urging lawyers in the courtroom to “do what you have to do.”

Billups, who wore a dark gray suit during Monday’s brief arraignment, spoke only to answer the judge’s yes or no questions. His lawyer, Marc Mukasey, entered his not guilty plea.

They declined to comment to reporters afterward, but one of Billups’ lawyers has called him a “man of integrity” and said he denies the charges.

“To believe that Chauncey Billups did what the federal government is accusing him of is to believe that he would risk his Hall of Fame legacy, his reputation and his freedom. He would not jeopardize those things for anything, let alone a card game,” Chris Heywood said after Billups appeared in federal court in Portland, Ore., when prosecutors first announced the indictment on Oct. 23.

Billups, 49, was released on a $5-million bond secured by his family’s Colorado home. He must refrain from gambling and can have no contact with other defendants or alleged victims. He has surrendered his passport and can only travel to seven states, including Oregon and New York, and Washington, D.C.

Inducted last year into the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame, Billups was arguably the most prominent among more than 30 people charged in last month’s sprawling federal takedown of illegal gambling operations linked to professional sports.

In addition to his arraignment, Billups and his co-defendants, including ex-NBA player and assistant coach Damon Jones, appeared for a status conference on Monday and are due back in court on March 4.

Prosecutors say the poker-rigging scheme utilized sophisticated technology such as altered card-shuffling machines, hidden cameras in chip trays, special sunglasses and X-ray equipment built into the table to read cards.

Jones, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and others are also charged with allegedly scheming to allow gamblers to exploit insider information about players to win NBA bets.

Prosecutors say the poker scheme Billups was involved in defrauded victims of an estimated $7 million starting in at least 2019.

They say he served as a celebrity “face card” that could draw wealthy, unsuspecting players to the games. Prosecutors said during one game, the scheme’s organizers exchanged messages saying one of the victims “acted like he wanted Chauncey to have his money” because he was “star struck.”

Prosecutors say Billups, who earned about $106 million from his playing days, received a portion of the ill-gotten gains. After one rigged game in October 2020, for example, they say he was directly wired $50,000.

The scheme organizers also had to share a portion of their proceeds with the Gambino, Genovese and Bonanno mob families for operating within the illegal poker games run by the New York criminal enterprises, prosecutors said.

Mafia members, in turn, helped commit violent acts, including assault, extortion and robbery, to ensure repayment of debts and the continued success of the operation, they said.

Billups was selected as the third overall pick in the 1997 draft by the Boston Celtics after starring in college for the Colorado Buffaloes. He played 17 years in the NBA, with stints with the Toronto Raptors, Denver Nuggets, Minnesota Timberwolves, New York Knicks and Clippers.

But he is perhaps most beloved in the Motor City, where he earned the nickname “Mr. Big Shot” for his knack of making clutch shots.

Billups was named the NBA Finals MVP during the Pistons’ title run in 2004 and had his No. 1 jersey retired by the team.

After retiring in 2014, Billups embarked on a career as a TV analyst before pivoting to coaching.

He was hired as Portland’s coach in 2021 and signed a multiyear extension with the Trail Blazers earlier this year after the team missed out on the playoffs for the fourth straight season in 2024. Billups previously served as an assistant coach for the Clippers.

After his arrest, he was placed on unpaid leave and the Trail Blazers named assistant coach and former NBA player Tiago Splitter as interim coach.

Marcelo writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press reporter Michael R. Sisask contributed to this story.

For decades, the Stahl House in the Hollywood Hills has been a rarity — a globally known icon of Midcentury Modernism and Los Angeles glamour, still in the hands of the family who commissioned it in 1960. But now it’s for sale.

The asking price is $25 million, which might seem a startling figure for a two-bedroom, 2,300-square-foot home on a snug lot. But that figure might not surprise lovers of modernist architecture who know it as Case Study House #22.

It was designed for the Stahl family by architect Pierre Koenig, captured on black-and-white film by photographer Julius Shulman and has been admired worldwide ever since.

The Architect’s Newspaper called it “one of the world’s most famous buildings.” Los Angeles magazine called Shulman’s image “perhaps the most famous picture ever taken of Los Angeles.”

“There are no comps for the Stahl house. It’s incomparable,” said William Baker, architecture director for the real estate firm the Agency Beverly Hills. The home was included in the company’s fall catalog Nov. 12.

By Friday afternoon, Baker said, he had received hundreds of inquiring calls. In considering offers, Baker said, the family is open to individuals or institutions — “someone who’s going to understand it, honor the house and the story about it.”

The Stahls purchased the lot in 1954 for $13,500 and enlisted Koenig to design the house after other architects were daunted by the slope of the lot. Koenig’s solution was a cantilevered L-shaped structure with walls of steel and glass, a pool and a free-standing stone-faced fireplace between the living and dining areas.

The second bedroom can only be accessed through the primary bedroom — “an efficient use of space” for a family of five, Baker said. The Stahl family has said the home cost $37,500 to build.

Shortly after the home’s completion, photographer Julius Shulman made a black-and-white photograph that became emblematic of the era. It shows the home at night, with two young women sitting inside in a cantilevered corner, its floor-to-ceiling windows revealing the lights of the L.A. Basin glittering in the background.

To bring up the lights, Shulman later told Los Angeles magazine, he used a seven-minute exposure. The resulting image, along with others Shulman made of the house, is now owned by the Getty Research Institute.

In years since, the home has served as a filming location for many TV and film productions, including the 1968 pilot episode of “Columbo” and the movies “Galaxy Quest” (1999) and “Nurse Betty” (2000).

“This home has been the center of our lives for decades, but as we’ve gotten older, it has become increasingly challenging to care for it with the attention and energy it so richly deserves,” the Stahl family announced on its website. Bruce and Shari Stahl, the surviving children of original owners Buck and Carlotta Stahl, added, “[O]ur tour program will continue unchanged for the time being, and we will provide ample notice before any adjustments are made.”

For the last 17 years, the house has been open for tours, most recently on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, starting at $60 per adult during the day, $90 in the evening, with advance booking required and tight limits on photography. However, the Stahl website indicates all tours are sold out through the end of February.

The real estate listing notes that the home is “a protected landmark and the only Case Study House with original family ownership.”

In nominating it for the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, Amanda Stewart of the Los Angeles Conservancy called it “perhaps the most iconic house constructed in the Case Study House Program.” That program, sponsored by John Entenza’s Arts & Architecture magazine from 1945 to 1966, yielded 25 completed homes, today considered top exemplars of Midcentury home design.

“There’s not a lot of these Case Study houses left. I think there are 19 now,” Baker said. (Baker also said he had recently handled the sale of Case Study House #10 in Pasadena to a buyer who lost a home in January’s Pacific Palisades fire.)

The Stahl home stands on Woods Drive just north of West Hollywood’s city limit, about a quarter of a mile from Chateau Marmont.

Many architecturally important Southern California Modern homes have landed in the hands of institutions, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (1921), owned by the city of Los Angeles; the Schindler House (1922), owned by the Friends of the Schindler House and operated by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture; and the Eames House (1949), owned by the nonprofit Eames Foundation. The Sheats-Goldstein Residence, designed by John Lautner in 1961-63 and renovated by Lautner in the 1990s, has been promised by owner James Goldstein to the L.A. County Museum of Art.

Jockey Dylan Kitts has been given a nine-year ban in a racing corruption case.

The rider and associate John Higgins conspired together to commit a corrupt practice by agreeing to stop a horse achieving its best possible position, it was found.

Kitts, 24, admitted to a disciplinary hearing he prevented his mount Hillsin from running on his merits when finishing third in a handicap hurdle at Worcester in July 2023.

Higgins, who has been banned from racing for 12 years, was deemed to be the mastemind behind the plan to stop Hillsin winning.

He is the father-in-law of Premier League footballer Ashley Barnes and is an associate of the horse’s owner Alan Clegg, who was not charged by the British Horseracing Authority (BHA).

Trainer Chris Honour was judged not to be part of the conspiracy but was found to have misled stewards and was fined £750.

Nov. 21 (UPI) — House Republicans have called on former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to testify before a committee investigating Jeffrey Epstein.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., issued congressional subpoenas seeking Bill Clinton’s testimony Dec. 17 and Hillary Clinton a day later as the committee investigates the Epstein case, USA Today reported.

“The committee looks forward to confirming their appearance and remains committed to delivering transparency and accountability for survivors of Epstein’s heinous crimes and for the American people,” Comer said in a statement.

Comer on Aug. 5 sought the Clintons’ testimonies regarding their relationship with former financier and convicted sex offender Epstein, but their attorney asked Nov. 3 that they be allowed to submit a “written proffer of what little information” they have to share, according to the New York Post.

Comer accused the Clintons of demanding the House committee scrap any plans for them to appear before it when responding to the attorney’s request.

The committee chairman also said the attorney admitted the Clintons have relevant information regarding the matter.

“It is precisely the fact President Clinton and Secretary Clinton each maintained relationships with Mr. Epstein and Ms. [Ghislaine]Maxwell in their personal capacities as private citizens that is of interest to the committee,” Comer told the Clintons’ attorney.

Some legal experts have suggested the Clintons could claim executive privilege to avoid testifying before the committee, but others say the relationships they maintained while in their personal capacities would not be subject to executive privilege, according to the New York Post.

Maxwell unlikely to testify

While the Clintons are scheduled to appear before the House committee next month, Politico reported Maxwell has invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if she were brought before the committee.

“I could spend a bunch of taxpayer dollars to send staff and members down there,” Comer said. “If she’s going to plead the Fifth, I don’t know that that’s a good investment.”

Maxwell is imprisoned for 20 years after being convicted on child-sex-trafficking charges in 2022.

Comer subpoenaed her testimony in July, but Maxwell said she only would testify after the appeals she filed regarding her conviction were addressed.

The Supreme Court since has denied her request to reassess her conviction.

Maxwell also has sought immunity against future prosecutions in exchange for her committee testimony, which Comer said will not happen.

She did participate in a two-day deposition with the Justice Department in July and afterward was transferred from a Florida prison to a minimum-security prison in Texas.

FBI, police protect Epstein files storage

The location where the Justice Department’s Epstein investigation files is being guarded after Mark Epstein, brother of Jeffrey, on Tuesday accused the FBI of scrubbing the files of any mention of Republicans while they are being held at its Central Records facility in Winchester, Va., Bloomberg reported.

Mark Epstein claimed a “credible source” told him the files were being doctored, and his claim was shared on social media. Several people suggested protesting the FBI’s Winchester office and possibly seizing the files.

FBI officials deemed such comments to be viable threats against the facility and the files and enhanced its security at the location. Police officers also are protecting Central Records facility officials and staff.

Summers and wife visited Epstein’s island

While the FBI is more closely guarding the Epstein investigation files, The Boston Globe reported that former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and his wife, Elisa New, flew to Epstein’s privately owned Little Saint James island in the U.S. Virgin Islands 10 days after their 2005 wedding.

The trip was part of their extended honeymoon celebration and was a brief visit, Summers’ spokesperson Steven Goldberg.

Summers and New “have repeatedly expressed their regret for having any association with Jeffrey Epstein,” Goldberg said in a statement shared with the Boston newspaper Friday.

“Mr. Summers and Ms. New spent their honeymoon in St. John and Jamaica in December 2005, which was long before Mr. Epstein was arrested for the first time,” Goldberg said.

“As part of that trip, they made a brief visit of less than a day to Mr. Epstein’s island.”

Flight log records indicate Summers and New flew aboard Epstein’s private plane when they traveled from Bedford, Mass., to Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, on Dec. 21, 2005.

They met with Maxwell and Epstein’s personal pilot, Larry Visoski, while on the island and during the same year that Florida investigators began looking into Epstein’s activities.

Despite Epstein’s subsequent arrest and guilty plea to two state charges that resulted in his designation as a sex offender and a year in jail, Summers, who also is a former Harvard University president, continued his friendly relationship with the financier.

That ended when Epstein was arrested in 2019 and later that year hung himself while jailed in New York City.

New also maintained her friendly relationship with Epstein and in 2014 thanked him for a donation that he made to support her academic research as a poetry professor at Harvard.

The financial gift from Epstein was not included in Harvard’s 2020 report regarding his activities involving the university.

New in 2018 also emailed Epstein regarding the novel Lolita, which is about an older man sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl, The Boston Globe reported.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that found Texas’ 2026 congressional redistricting plan likely discriminates on the basis of race.

The order signed by Justice Samuel Alito will remain in place at least for the next few days while the court considers whether to allow the new map favorable to Republicans to be used in the midterm elections.

The court’s conservative majority has blocked similar lower court rulings because they have come too close to elections.

The order came about an hour after the state called on the high court to intervene to avoid confusion as congressional primary elections approach in March. The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.

The order was signed by Alito because he is the justice who handles emergency appeals from Texas.

Texas redrew its congressional map in the summer as part of Trump’s efforts to preserve a slim Republican majority in the House in next year’s elections, touching off a nationwide redistricting battle.

The new redistricting map was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats, but a panel of federal judges in El Paso ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the civil rights groups that challenged the map on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters were likely to win their case.

If the ruling holds for now, Texas could be forced to hold elections next year using the map drawn by the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2021 based on the 2020 census.

Texas was the first state to meet Trump’s demands in what has become an expanding national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the state’s new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

The Supreme Court is separately considering a case from Louisiana that could further limit race-based districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It’s not entirely clear how the current round of redistricting would be affected by the outcome in the Louisiana case.

Sherman writes for the Associated Press.

Los Angeles County prosecutors moved to drop manslaughter charges Friday against two Torrance police officers who shot and killed a Black man in 2018, attempting to end a seven-year saga that saw the case rejected and then reexamined by three different district attorneys.

Matthew Concannon and Anthony Chavez were indicted in 2023 for the shooting death of Christopher Deandre Mitchell, a 23-year-old car theft suspect who was in possession of an air rifle at the time he was killed.

Michael Gennaco, a special prosecutor hired earlier this year by Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman to review the case, filed a motion to dismiss charges late Thursday, saying he did not believe prosecutors could prove voluntary manslaughter at trial. Attorneys for the officers filed a joint motion in agreement, they said in court Friday.

But in a surprising move, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta declined to rule on the motion Friday, because the case is currently under the jurisdiction of the California Supreme Court. Concannon’s attorneys had previously filed a writ of habeas corpus after Ohta rejected a motion to dismiss the charges.

“I am not going to rule on this because it would be inappropriate for me to do that at this point. The Supreme Court has to tell us its decision,” Ohta said.

One of Concannon’s attorneys, Matthew Murphy, said he felt Ohta was punishing the defendants for exercising their right to challenge Ohta’s prior ruling. Ohta slapped that argument down, pointing out it was the defense team who put the case before the California Supreme Court.

Ohta signaled he wouldn’t decide the motion until the case was withdrawn from the Supreme Court, and even then, he would need time to review the filings.

Ohta said he was “surprised” that the motion was filed at 3 p.m. on Thursday, giving him little time to digest it ahead of Friday’s 8:30 a.m. appearance.

“It’s going to be a lot of work. I’m not just going to orally say yes go ahead and dismiss the case, case dismissed,” the judge said.

Murphy said he would move to withdraw the habeas filing.

Chavez and Concannon were among those investigated in 2021 when the district attorney’s office uncovered a thread of racist text messages sent by members of the Torrance Police Department. The Times has never seen evidence that either of the two officers sent racist messages, but the scandal infuriated community activists, who have long called for them to face justice for killing Mitchell.

Jeff Lewis, a civil attorney for Concannon, said his client “never sent or replied to any racist messages.”

The shooting incident occurred when officers approached Mitchell while he was seated in the car in a Ralph’s parking lot. They said they spotted what was later revealed to be a “break barrel air rifle” between his legs.

Concannon told authorities he saw Mitchell reaching for what he believed to be a real firearm and opened fire, according to the district attorney’s office. Chavez fired two rounds immediately after. The two officers then retreated and waited for backup.

Nearly 30 minutes elapsed before anyone checked on Mitchell, who was then pronounced dead of gunshot wounds, according to court records.

Concannon and Chavez were initially cleared of all wrongdoing by then-Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey. But when George Gascón swept into office on a police accountability platform and ousted Lacey in 2020, he hired a special prosecutor to reexamine several cases Lacey declined to prosecute, including Mitchell’s death.

But Lawrence Middleton, the special prosecutor brought on by Gascón, did not obtain an indictment in the case until 2023, more than two years after he had been hired to reconsider charges in shootings by police.

The statute of limitations for involuntary manslaughter, an easier case to prove than the voluntary manslaughter charges that Middleton brought, expired in late 2021. Concerns about the timeline Middleton would face to pursue the cases Gascón targeted were raised almost immediately after he joined the D.A.’s office.

Middleton appeared in the courtroom Friday morning and sat beside Mitchell’s mother and a number of activists who have long monitored the trial. All declined to comment.

Middleton previously argued the officers “created the jeopardy that led to the shooting,” by needlessly confronting Mitchell when he was not a threat and had no means of escaping arrest as the car was parked facing a wall, according to grand jury transcripts. But Ohta disallowed that evidence after a hearing in late 2023. The shooting happened in 2018, two years before a change in California law modified the threshold by which fatal uses of force are judged.

Hochman fired Middleton shortly after ousting Gascón in the 2024 election cycle, a move which drew praise from one of Concannon’s attorneys at the time. Gennaco was hired a short time later. He also declined to comment on Ohta’s refusal to rule on the dismissal motion.

In an interview, Hochman said that while he did not believe the officers were “innocent” he also did not think prosecutors could meet the legal bar needed to prove voluntary manslaughter. He said Gascón and Middleton bungled the case.

Hochman questioned Middleton’s attempt to argue that the officers executed the arrest of Mitchell so poorly that they caused the situation that required the use of deadly force.

That evidence of so-called “officer-created jeopardy” was deemed inadmissible by Ohta last year.

The evidence might have been admissible under a change in California law passed in 2020, which lowered the standard for charging officers in fatal use-of-force cases, but it did not apply retroactively, Hochman said.

“These are difficult cases. The fact that they’re difficult doesn’t mean we won’t bring them when they are appropriate,” Hochman said. “I’d say we probably spent hundreds of hours on the 12 seconds that were involved in the case.”

Hochman would not say directly if he believed the officers should have been charged with involuntary manslaughter.

“What we’re saying is this would have been a potential charge for the grand jury to consider. I can’t tell you how the grand jury would have come out on it,” he said. “It certainly would have been something that was up for consideration.”

Chavez is no longer employed by the Torrance Police Department. Concannon remains on administrative leave. An agency spokesman declined to comment.

In the 2021 scandal, The Times uncovered messages that were replete with racial slurs and descriptions of violence against Black men and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

In one string of messages, officers used the N-word to describe Mitchell’s relatives and joked about what would happen after Concannon and Chavez’s names were made public.

“Gun cleaning Party at my house when they release my name??” one officer asked, according to a summary of the text messages made public in a 2022 court filing, which redacted the names of the officers sending the messages.

“Yes absolutely let’s all just post in your yard with lawn chairs in a [firing] squad,” another replied.

Lewis said in a letter to The Times that Concannon was “never a part of any text thread where an N-word was used to describe Mitchell’s family.”

Concannon and Chavez are the last officers connected to the scandal with pending cases.

Cody Weldin and Christopher Tomsic — whose criminal case led to the exposure of the scandal — struck a plea deal earlier this year to vandalism charges for spray painting a swastika on a car towed from a crime scene.

David Chandler, another officer investigated as part of the scandal, pleaded no contest earlier this month to assault charges for shooting a Black suspect in the back. Chandler will eventually see his case dismissed under the terms of the agreement.

All three officers had to give up their rights to be peace officers in California under the terms of their plea deals.

The Torrance Police Department and the California Attorney General’s office entered into an “enforceable” agreement to reform earlier this year.

Nov. 20 (UPI) — The Justice Department on Thursday ended its case against a woman who was shot after allegedly ramming a Customs and Border Protection vehicle in October.

Marimar Martinez, 30, and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz, 21, were charged with assault for following and allegedly ramming a Chevrolet Tahoe driven by CBP agent Charles Exum on Oct. 4, the Chicago Sun Times reported.

U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois Andrew Boutros filed court papers to end the prosecution on Thursday without citing a reason, though.

U.S. District of Northern Illinois Judge Georgia Alexakis granted the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case against both defendants early Thursday evening, KTEN reported.

“Border Patrol law enforcement officers were ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles,” the Department of Homeland Security said Thursday in a prepared statement, as reported by NBC News.

Martinez “was armed with a semi-automatic weapon and has a history of doxing federal agents,” the DHS added.

Her attorney agreed she had a firearm in her vehicle but argued that she was not brandishing it.

Both defendants pleaded not guilty, but evidence revealed Exum bragged in messages to others about shooting five times and causing seven wounds.

During a recent hearing, a defense attorney asked Exum why he apparently bragged about shooting Martinez while using the Signal messaging app.

He said he is a firearms instructor and “I take pride in my shooting skills.”

Exum was participating in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “Operation Midway Blitz” when Martinez and Ruiz allegedly boxed in the vehicle he was driving and then struck it.

The defendants said Exum struck them with the vehicle he was driving and then shot Martinez.

A state judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed by former Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva that alleged the county defamed him, violated his rights and unfairly flagged his personnel file with a “do not rehire” tag.

In a 26-page order, Superior Court Judge Gary D. Roberts on Wednesday granted a request by the county to reject the lawsuit under California’s Anti-SLAPP law, writing that Villanueva’s claims lack “minimal merit.”

The case’s dismissal is “a major victory,” according to Jason Tokoro, an attorney for the county.

“We are pleased that the Court agreed with the County that former Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s claims are barred by California’s anti-SLAPP statute and had no merit,” he wrote in an emailed statement Thursday. “The County can now close this chapter.”

The decision marks the third time a court has dismissed Villanueva’s assertions that the county had treated him unfairly and caused him to suffer “humiliation, severe emotional distress, mental and physical pain and anguish, and compensatory damages.”

The complaint in Villanueva’s lawsuit filed in June said it was an “attempt to clear his name, vindicate his reputation, and be made whole for the emotional distress defendants’ actions have caused him.”

Villanueva previously tried to sue in federal court. In September 2024, a judge in the Central District of California rejected the former sheriff’s $25-million federal lawsuit over the allegations, then did so again in May after Villanueva refiled the case.

Villanueva did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. The Sheriff’s Department declined to comment.

The dispute began after Inspector General Max Hunstman claimed in 2022 that Villanueva engaged in a “racially based attack” by insisting on calling Huntsman by the name he was given at birth, Max-Gustaf. Villanueva also described Huntsman as a Holocaust denier, an allegation for which he did not provide any evidence and which the inspector general has denied.

The county investigated Huntsman’s allegation and slapped the former sheriff with the “do not rehire” label. Each year, a county panel recommends dozens of government employees be disciplined for a wide range of unethical behavior ranging from theft to privacy violations by adding “do not hire” or other restrictions to their personnel files.

In his state lawsuit, Villanueva argued it was unfair for him to be subject to a “do not hire” designation while multiple public officials who had engaged in illegal conduct avoided the tag. Villanueva has maintained that he never discriminated against or harassed anyone.

“The unprecedented decision by the Board to place Villanueva on a ‘Do Not Hire’ was the result of a defamatory charge of discrimination and harassment,” the former sheriff wrote in the June complaint.

Around the same time Huntsman made his allegation, Esther Lim, then-justice deputy for county Supervisor Hilda Solis, made a complaint alleging that Villanueva had a pattern of harassing women of color during livestreams on social media. The allegation also prompted an investigation and a “do not hire” tag, which Villanueva has disputed.

It’s sheer coincidence that I’m writing here on the same subject as my Los Angeles Times colleague Jonah Goldberg’s most recent column: The crying need to amend the Constitution to do something about the much-abused presidential pardon power, the only unchecked power that a president has.

The fact that both Goldberg, a right-of-center commentator, and I, center-left, would near-simultaneously choose to vent on this topic — to call, in effect, for a national uprising against this presidential prerogative despite the evident difficulty of amending the Constitution — is telling: It’s a reflection of Americans’ across-the-spectrum disgust with how modern presidents have perverted it for personal and political benefit, usually on their way out the door. (Goldberg makes the case to get rid of the pardon power altogether. I would give Congress a veto, so presidents still can right actual wrongs of the justice system, as the founders intended.)

Yes, “both sides” are culpable. And yet, Goldberg and I agree, one president has surpassed all others in the shamelessness of his pardons: Donald Trump. In just 10 months he’s built a track record sorrier than that of his first term, which is saying something, and elevated clemency reform to an imperative.

We can’t stop Trump before he pardons again. Nor, probably, would an amendment campaign succeed before (if?) he leaves office in January 2029. But Americans of all political stripes can at least join in getting the process rolling, if only to protect against future presidents’ abuses.

From his first day in office, when Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 rioters who beat cops and stormed the Capitol to overturn his 2020 defeat, already 20 times this year he’s either pardoned or commuted the prison sentences of additional scores of undeserving hacks, fellow election deniers, war criminals, donors, investors in Trump businesses and career criminals who just happen to support him. (Recidivism among Trump’s beneficiaries is proving a problem; among the new charges: child sex abuse.)

The clemency actions have come so fast and furious that they hardly register as the scandals that they are, especially as the news about them vies for attention with the many other outrages of Trump’s presidency.

“No MAGA left behind,” Trump pardon attorney “Eagle Ed” Martin brazenly posted in May and again this month in announcing preemptory pardons for former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and more than 75 other Republicans who were part of the fake-elector schemes to reverse Trump’s 2020 losses in battleground states, as well as other efforts after the 2020 election to keep him in power.

Those grants were followed last weekend by mercy for two more MAGA militants: Suzanne Kaye, a Florida woman sentenced to prison for threatening in video posts to “shoot their [expletive] a–” if FBI agents tried to question her about her involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection, and Daniel Edwin Wilson of Kentucky, who was among those pardoned for his crimes on Jan. 6 but later sentenced by a Trump-appointed district judge on gun charges related to an illegal cache of weaponry that agents found at his home.

To Trump, absolving his supporters as victims of a supposedly weaponized justice system in effect absolves him as well, and furthers his false narrative — his big lie — that the 2020 election was stolen from him. As Martin, the White House pardon attorney, wrote in this month’s passel of pardons: “This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election.” The opposite is true.

Lo, Trump’s mercy knows no bounds — of propriety, that is. The president won’t even rule out a pardon for convicted child-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, longtime procurer for, and participant with, Jeffrey Epstein in the sexploitation of young girls.

Even if Trump’s abuse of the pardon power isn’t unprecedented, its scale and shamelessness is. His Day One mass pardons for Jan. 6 participants set the tone. That action kept his 2024 campaign promise to “free the J-6 hostages,” but it broke an earlier, videotaped vow he’d made on Jan. 7, 2021, when anger at the Capitol attack was near-universal: “To those who broke the law, you will pay.” Hundreds did pay, convicted by juries and judges of both parties and sentenced to up to 22 years in prison. Until Trump got back in power.

Need evidence of how Trump’s pardons corrode the rule of law? Last December, weeks before he returned to the White House, yet another Jan. 6 participant, Philip Sean Grillo, was sentenced. The Reagan-appointed federal judge in the case, Royce Lamberth, admonished: “Nobody is being held hostage. … Every rioter is in the situation he or she is in because he or she broke the law, and for no other reason.” Grillo shouted back, as U.S. marshals led him off: “Trump’s gonna pardon me anyways.” He was right, of course.

Then there’s this: In September, after a Republican former Tennessee House speaker and his aide were sentenced in a fraud case, the government’s announcement quoted a senior FBI agent in Nashville calling the punishment “a wake-up call to other public officials who believe there are no consequences for betraying the public trust.” On Nov. 7, Trump pardoned both men.

Trump’s promiscuous use of his power has even spawned a niche business of Trump-connected lawyers peddling their influence to pardon-seekers willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to get out of jail not-so-free.

Consider the case of Changpeng Zhao, billionaire founder of the crypto exchange Binance, who served time in 2023 for facilitating money laundering, including for terrorist groups. Zhao didn’t just hire Trump-friendly lawyers. His company helped secure a $2-billion investment in the Trump family’s crypto startup. Last month, Trump pardoned Zhao. “I heard it was a Biden witch hunt,” he nonchalantly told CBS News’ “60 Minutes.”

Zhao’s success alone should be scandal enough to fuel a campaign to repeal or reform the pardon power. But there is so much more. And we surely haven’t seen the last.

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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The Justice Department acknowledged in court Wednesday the grand jury that charged former FBI Director James Comey was not presented with a copy of the final indictment, a concession that may further imperil a prosecution already subject to multiple challenges and demands for its dismissal.

The revelation is the latest indication of a troubled presentation of the case to the grand jury by an inexperienced and hastily appointed U.S. attorney named to the job just days earlier by President Trump.

Concerns about the process surfaced earlier in the week when a different judge in the case said there was no record in the transcript he had reviewed of the grand jury reviewing the indictment that was actually presented against Comey.

Lindsey Halligan, the interim U.S. attorney in charge of the case, said under questioning that only the foreperson of the grand jury and a second grand juror were present for the returning of the indictment.

Comey has pleaded not guilty to charges accusing him of making a false statement and obstructing Congress and has denied any wrongdoing.

The Justice Department has denied that the prosecution was vindictive or selective and insists that the allegations support the indictment.

Trump fired Comey as FBI director in May 2017 as Comey was overseeing an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. The two have been publicly at odds ever since, with Trump deriding Comey as “a weak and untruthful slime ball” and calling for his prosecution.

Tucker and Kunzelman write for the Associated Press.

A French court rejected all claims brought by UFC-Que Choisir against Perrier, after the consumer group claimed the firm’s natural mineral water was deceptively labelled.

In early June, UFC-Que Choisir filed an emergency motion with a court in Nanterre near Paris seeking a recall of all Perrier bottles in circulation, as well as a temporary ban on sales of the natural mineral water.

The case centred on a dispute over the use of a filtration treatment, which the group said was contrary to French and European law. UFC-Que Choisir also claimed that the water posed health risks.

UFC-Que Choisir insisted that its demands would not have caused Perrier’s Vergèze plant to close, but it hoped that the bottles produced there would be sold as drinking water and not natural mineral water.

The consumer group noted that natural mineral water typically sells for 100 to 300 times the price of tap water.

Nestlé says decision proves Perrier’s food safety is ‘guaranteed’

The court in Nanterre said a health risk to consumers was not proven to the level required for an emergency ruling, a ruling welcomed by Nestlé.

“Today’s decision confirms that the food safety of Perrier natural mineral waters has always been guaranteed”, it said.

The company said it operates under an integrated quality management system, shared with, and controlled by, the relevant authorities to ensure the food safety of all its products.

“The results of our analyses are constantly shared with the authorities who regularly test our mineral waters, both at source and the finished product, to confirm compliance with the applicable regulatory requirements, including food safety and quality standards.”

UFC-Que Choisir must pay €5,000 to Nestlé, according to a court statement.

The Nanterre ruling was the latest twist in a series of scandals hounding Nestlé in France.

In a 2024 report, the Occitanie Regional Health Agency (ARS) warned of the possibility of halting Perrier production because of persistent bacterial contaminationin water drawn from wells at the Vergèze plant.

An inquiry commissioned by France’s Senate then found that the French government had covered up the use of illegal water treatments for years, particularly with regard to Nestlé.

Nestlé said it has since stopped using these prohibited treatments, instead switching to its current filtration methods.