WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has filed a first-ever petition to a secretive and dormant court created 30 years ago to consider government requests to deport “alien terrorists” from the United States.
The Alien Terrorist Removal Court was established in 1996 but had never received a petition until Wednesday, when the Justice Department filed an application seeking the removal of an individual whose name is withheld from the single-page document posted on the court’s website.
The chief judge of the five-member court, Joan Ericksen, said in a written response to the petition that a hearing was held Thursday during which the court had “questions about the nexus that the government alleges between the actions of the respondent and the specific sections and subsections it invokes with respect to those actions.”
“The answers persuaded the Court that the Government could benefit from the opportunity for more thoughtful consideration,” wrote Ericksen, a federal judge in Minnesota.
She directed the Justice Department to provide more information by Wednesday.
The court’s authorities emerged from the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which permits the attorney general to file under seal applications for the deportation of a suspected “alien terrorist.” If an application is granted, the court must hold a public hearing at which the government has the burden to prove that the individual satisfies that definition. Applications must be approved by the attorney general or deputy attorney general.
Federal law says that an individual could qualify as an “alien terrorist” by, among other factors, having “engaged in a terrorist activity,” endorsing or espousing terrorist activities and by belonging to a political or social group that encourages terrorist activity.
The court has been dormant since its creation, having received — until last week — no applications and conducting no hearings, according to a summary posted on the Federal Judicial Center website. It comprises five judges selected by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
The Trump administration has moved aggressively over the last year to carry out deportations, including invoking a 1798 wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to remove Venezuelan migrants who officials accuse of being part of a terrorist gang. During a hearing in that case last year, the Washington judge presiding over it, James Boasberg, indicated that the Alien Terrorist Removal Court would be the natural forum to consider a request for deportation on national security grounds.
“In fact, Congress has an answer for us, doesn’t it? Because they created the Alien Terrorist Removal Court,” he said. “So if there’s a national security concern with having these hearings … you can always go to the ATRC, which would be a first, but that’s what it’s there for, right?”
The petition was first reported by Court Watch, an independent news site.
California has some of the nation’s toughest gun laws, but state lawmakers are concerned that a new technology is allowing criminals to obtain firearms by building them from scratch. By using 3-D printers, they warn, lawbreakers are able to make key components of untraceable “ghost guns” with the press of a button.
Ghost guns, which authorities say make it more difficult to investigate shootings because they lack serial numbers, have been a growing problem for law enforcement nationwide. According to federal data, the number of privately made firearms recovered in crimes surged from more than 1,600 in 2017 to nearly 27,500 in 2023. California leads the nation in recoveries over that period.
In response, legislators are seeking to mandate that all 3-D printers sold in the state come equipped with software that prohibits users from making triggers and other gun parts. A bill passed the Assembly in May and is advancing through the Senate.
But the proposal has drawn opposition from a diverse coalition, which includes civil liberties groups, tech companies and 3-D printing enthusiasts as well as Hollywood effects studios, who argue that “firearm blocking software” will also prohibit legitimate designs and expose makers to government or corporate surveillance.
Share via
Inside a San Fernando workshop, Samuel McBride makes movie monsters come to life for the camera. One of his latest creations, an animatronic hand, clutches when he pulls a trigger that he built using a 3-D printer.
McBride says the technology has transformed the work at Legacy Effects, where he is a lab manager, but he’s worried it will soon be off-limits because of a proposed change in California law.
McBride fears the law would interfere with the making of devices like the one that activates his lifelike hand.
“If I just took apart this trigger and put it on a printer, how is anyone, computer or human, going to tell me how I intend to use it?” he asked.
Backers of the proposed law say it has the potential to help save lives.
“As gun violence continues to devastate our communities, we cannot allow 3-D printing technology to become a new pipeline for untraceable weapons,” said Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, the bill’s author.
Critics of the proposed California law note that 3-D printed guns represent a small subset of ghost guns recovered by law enforcement at crime scenes. According to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, most “privately made firearms” recovered by police are assembled from mail-order kits or unfinished parts rather than printed at home.
Jorge Perez of Monster City Studios holds a sculpture made with a large, industrial 3-D printer.
(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
“This fight is not over whether ghost guns are dangerous,” said David Tobin, an independent creator leading the coalition. “It is over whether the state can or should require a consumer tool to surveil a person’s designs before they are allowed to make something.”
Everytown for Gun Safety, a national nonprofit that advocates for gun control and has pushed for the passage of California’s bill, pointed to rising 3-D printed firearm recoveries across 20 major cities and warned that homemade plastic parts can help people bypass background checks or turn handguns into automatic weapons.
Krystal LoPilato, who advocates for policy at Everytown, said the group has successfully guided a similar bill through the New York state Legislature.
A handgun frame made using a 3-D printer is held for display at the office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
LoPilato said the policy aims to be proactive, rather than allowing more violence to take place before regulating the problem. Opponents counter that California already bars unlawful firearm manufacturing with 3-D printers, and that ghost gun recoveries have declined since the state adopted a series of new laws and enforcement efforts.
A June 1 letter to lawmakers, signed by a group of 3-D printing companies, stagecraft and prop-making studios and industry stakeholders, argued that AB 2047 raises 1st Amendment concerns and would harm businesses. The letter was signed by a wide variety of companies and individuals, including Prusa Research, a prominent 3-D printer manufacturer.
“To an algorithm, a gun barrel and a piece of pipe are the same grooved cylinder,” Jakub Kmošek, head of public affairs at Prusa, said in a statement to The Times. “This bill will only make it harder to build, repair, experiment, and innovate in California.”
Alan Scott, Legacy Effects’ co-founder, said 3-D printing has become central to the company’s survival in an industry where budgets are tighter and deadlines are shorter.
“Everything’s just got to be done faster these days. You don’t get to reduce the quality. We couldn’t stay in business if we weren’t 3-D printing,” Scott said.
To solve this problem, Bauer-Kahan put an entertainment industry exception in the bill, exempting “printers manufactured for and sold exclusively to entertainment industry stagecraft and propmaking studios” from the software requirement.
McBride, Legacy’s 3-D lab manager, said those printers do not really exist.
Legacy uses the same general-purpose machines available to other businesses willing to invest in the equipment, and no printers are marketed exclusively for Hollywood, he said.
1
2
1.A 3-D printed sculpture concept at Monster City, a special effects studio in Santa Clarita.(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)2.3-D printing advocate David Tobin showcases a robotics kit at Monster City.(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
Legacy also worries about privacy. Major studios require strict secrecy before a movie or show is released. To accommodate this, the company shares design files through encrypted servers and protected internal systems.
“We’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring all that technology here under the umbrella of our NDAs and our IP protection,” McBride said.
Bauer-Kahan noted at a Senate hearing that she is working to address concerns raised by 3-D printing users and industries that rely on the technology.
Paul Powers, chief executive of Physna, a company whose technology could be used to block gun parts on 3-D printers, said the strongest criticisms of AB 2047 “misunderstand how the software works.”
“Something that vaguely looks like a gun part is not considered to be a match,” he said.
Powers also responded to surveillance concerns by clarifying that his company’s software only blocks the printer from making prohibited parts — it doesn’t flag them to authorities or log users’ intellectual property.
“There’s no communication with anyone; it doesn’t go anywhere,” he said.
But Marleen Vogelaar, chief executive of Thangs3D, a platform for independent creators to share and sell 3-D printable designs, said that answer does not resolve her broader concerns about how AB 2047 would work in practice.
“These databases will always lag behind innovation and can be easily circumvented and generate false positives that block legal designs and wrongly flag everyday makers,” she said at a Senate hearing this month. “The bill also creates serious privacy and security risks by giving third parties access to analyze designer’s files. That threatens intellectual property and adds digital surveillance in a state that values data privacy.”
If the bill passes, the state’s Department of Justice would publish a roster of compliant printers. Printers not on the list would be banned from sale or transfer in California beginning in December 2029.
Aubrey Rodriguez, a legislative advocate with American Civil Liberties Union California Action, an advocacy organization formed by the ACLU’s three affiliates in the state, said the bill would ask ordinary users, schools and businesses to accept a new layer of control based on software they still do not trust.
Rodriguez said the proposal risks creating “a permanent back door into the privacy of our own homes, ripe for exploitation.”
“Once this new infrastructure exists, it is a simple software update away from tracking political dissent or preventing 3-D printing designs deemed inappropriate,” Rodriguez said.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Justice civil rights division was created in 1957 with an initial focus on combating racial inequality and protecting voting rights.
But in the first two years of President Trump’s second term, its mission has been reimagined.
Now, the division is focused on combating diversity initiatives, rolling back pro-transgender policies and rooting out allegations of election fraud.
It had for decades investigated police departments for using excessive force. Now it investigates police departments with excessive delays in approving gun permits.
California has served as the division’s laboratory for all of these changes, or, as one former civil rights staffer put it, its “punching bag.”
The civil rights division has been involved in twice as many cases in California as in any other state, according to a Times analysis of cases brought by the Justice Department.
And an examination of press statements by the civil rights division shows that California has accounted for a higher proportion of actions in the second Trump administration than during the same time period in the Biden administration.
The division is led by Harmeet Dhillon, a Californian and a conservative legal crusader, who made her name bringing legal challenges against many of the state’s institutions and once served as the chair of the San Francisco Republican Party.
More recently, she was a leading legal figure in challenges to COVID-19 mandates and has shown steadfast support for Trump; her firm represented him in his successful 2024 fight to remain on the ballot in Colorado.
The Times spoke with a dozen former attorneys in the division, nearly all of whom said that the division has taken on a more partisan approach under Dhillon’s leadership and that the changes in the second Trump administration are far more dramatic than anything that occurred during Trump’s first term.
“It is an ideological civil rights division in a way that we’ve never seen before,” said Regan Rush, the former chief of the division’s special litigation section, which largely focused on investigations into police departments and prisons.
Rush is now director of the Red Line for Civil Rights at Democracy Forward, a nonprofit group that tracks the division’s activities.
In response to questions from The Times, Dhillon wrote that the division’s actions aren’t political.
“This Department speaks plainly and directly when we identify violations of federal law. Being clear about violations of federal civil rights law isn’t political or combative — it’s transparent,” Dhillon said. “I stand behind the work we’ve done since I took over the Civil Rights Division.”
While California produced President Reagan — a hero on the right who as governor frequently sparred with UC Berkeley, as Dillon does today — the state has now become, in conservative circles, a symbol of everything wrong in America.
“If there’s any state that is the antithesis of the Trump administration, it’s California,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley.
Dhillon said the division brings cases wherever it sees violations of federal law.
“California is where some of the most significant violations of federal civil rights law have occurred, as our enforcement actions demonstrate,” she said.
Former attorneys in the division said the desire to target California was obvious to them.
As one example, the division has announced more than a dozen actions involving universities in California, largely focused on allegations of antisemitism — the subject of an earlier Trump executive order — at University of California campuses and alleged racial preferences in hiring in the UC system and in the admissions practices at several medical schools in the state.
The division concluded that the medical schools at UC Davis and UCLA racially discriminated against white and Asian applicants and that UCLA failed to adequately respond to complaints of antisemitic harassment of Jewish and Israeli students. Other investigations are ongoing.
A pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA in 2024.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
“We were never explicitly told that California institutions are of a particular interest, but it was something that was very easy to notice,” said Ejaz Baluch, a former Justice Department attorney who worked on the employment litigation team that looked into allegations that antisemitism at UC campuses had created a hostile work environment.
Trump’s priorities
Dhillon told podcast host Michael Malice in May that she was in “constant contact” with the White House on a “daily, sometimes several-times-a-day basis.”
That represents a major shift from how the division previously operated, said her predecessor, Kristen Clarke, who was the assistant attorney general overseeing the division during the Biden administration.
“There was a fairly sturdy and necessary wall between the Justice Department and the White House,” Clarke said. “This is a complete 180.”
Dhillon has said she sees her job as enforcing civil rights law through the lens of Trump’s executive orders, which took aim at diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, immigration and pro-transgender policies, among other conservative priorities.
She said that while the division “operates within the administration’s law enforcement priorities … investigative and prosecutorial decisions, including which matters to pursue and how, are made by the Division based on the law and the facts.”
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said that the division’s changes under Dhillon represent a stark shift from how it operated in the past.
“It is now very much the anti-civil rights department,” Schiff said. “We’re living in this upside-down world where departments that were set up for one purpose are acting in a way that’s antithetical to the purpose of the department.”
Dhillon said that under her leadership, the division “enforces federal civil rights laws evenhandedly, on behalf of all Americans.
“That includes protecting religious liberty, Second Amendment rights, and women’s and girls’ spaces, standing against illegal race-based policymaking and DEI, and defending parents’ fundamental right to direct their children’s upbringing and education.”
Her reorientation of the division led to a mass exodus of career staff — nearly three-quarters of the roughly 400 attorneys who were there at the beginning of 2025, by Dhillon’s telling.
That’s far more departures than in the first Trump administration.
“I said, ‘My way or the highway,’ and my way isn’t my way, it’s President Trump’s way,” Dhillon told Malice.
Dhillon told The Times that the division has added 100 new lawyers and staff in the last 15 months and plans to hire 100 more.
Prisons and police
As the division has shifted its focus to align with the priorities laid out in Trump’s executive orders, it has shut down a number of cases brought during prior administrations.
Former attorneys in the division worry that other preexisting cases are languishing.
In March, the division opened an investigation into two women’s prisons in California — California Institution for Women in Chino and the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, 35 miles northwest of Fresno — over whether they had violated the rights of other female inmates by housing transgender women in the facilities.
“There have been allegations of sexual assaults, rape, voyeurism and a pervasive climate of sexual intimidation due to the presence of males in the women’s prison,” the Justice Department said in announcing the investigation, misgendering transgender inmates.
Former attorneys in the division said that leadership also sought to open an investigation into the impact of transgender housing policies on juvenile institutions in California, but didn’t find sufficient evidence to warrant opening an investigation.
The investigation into transgender inmates at the women’s prisons came as a prior investigation into the same two prisons remains unresolved over reports from hundreds of women that they had been sexually abused by guards, even as evidence supporting the allegations mounts.
Separate from the civil rights investigation, one of the former guards at the Chowchilla facility was found guilty in January 2025 of more than 60 counts of sexual abuse of inmates and sentenced to 224 years in prison.
“We haven’t seen any kind of relief,” said Megan Marks, former deputy chief in the division’s special litigation section and the deputy director and managing editor for the Red Line for Civil Rights at Democracy Forward.
Dhillon said both investigations into the two women’s prisons are “being pursued vigorously and simultaneously.”
For the last three decades, the division has investigated allegations of police misconduct, authority it was granted by Congress after the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department officers.
But in the second Trump administration, the division has closed a number of active police investigations and moved away from what Dhillon characterized to Malice as a “standing order to persecute police departments and impose nonsense restrictions on them.”
Instead, the division has brought actions against law enforcement agencies deemed to have failed to protect the rights of gun owners.
California was the first target.
The division filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit in September 2025, alleging that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had systemically denied people their 2nd Amendment rights because of long delays in approving concealed carry permits.
Last month, it filed a second gun rights lawsuit in California, this time against the state and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, over the state’s ban on Glock pistols, which acting U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche characterized as a “blatant trampling of our rights by the California government.”
Changing tone
Former attorneys in the civil rights division say the pugnacious tone in press releases, such as the one announcing the lawsuit opposing the Glock ban, and in numerous social media posts by Dhillon announcing her intent to open investigations, represents a major shift from how the department has operated in the past.
“What really stands out more than any other civil rights division is how much they demonize and personalize,” said Christy Lopez, a former attorney in the division who is now a professor at Georgetown Law. “We tried to build rapport with the jurisdiction.”
Dhillon defended the approach she and the division have taken.
“Our job is to enforce the law and ensure compliance,” Dhillon said. “That includes public messaging to ensure the public is both aware of what the law requires and knows when others violate the law. We’ve designed our messaging strategy with this goal in mind, and we are pleased with the effect it’s had.”
Numerous former lawyers in the division also said that the current leadership has put its thumb on the scale at the outset of investigations.
“We were basically fed an answer before we conducted an investigation, which is the total antithesis of how these investigations are supposed to be conducted,” said one former Justice Department attorney who worked on the investigation into allegations of antisemitism in the UC system and requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Attorneys visited UC Berkeley and UC Davis, but found enough evidence only at UCLA to bring a lawsuit on claims that antisemitism created a hostile work environment.
One of Dhillon’s early top deputies, former Huntington Beach City Atty. Michael Gates, denied that politics played a role in decision-making in his time in the division.
“We evaluated every case on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “There was nothing about politics that influenced any of that.”
Gates, who left the department in November, is now the Republican candidate challenging Bonta to be state attorney general.
Dhillon said to The Times that she is “proud of the record we’ve built” and believes the division has been “active and effective.”
But its former leaders worry that with the exodus of attorneys and the changing nature of the division’s approach, it has lost the ability to fulfill its mission.
“Where does it leave the division today?” said Clarke, its former leader. “It’s a broken agency not able to adequately stand up and defend the civil rights of all Americans.”
When Victor Marx was 3 years old, he was forced into a voodoo ritual involving a beheaded cat. At age 7, he killed a man.
Or so Marx says.
But he was not just a precocious child.
As an adult running a “high-risk” Christian ministry, Marx says he rescued 45,000 women and children from captivity and abuse. As a civilian, he supposedly called in a U.S. military airstrike that killed 70 ISIS fighters. He’s exorcised demons — and can do so over the telephone, he says, if need be.
True or, most likely, false, those woolly claims and epic tales of derring-do aren’t the weirdest thing about Marx.
A political newcomer, Marx eked out his victory in a three-way race by less than 2,500 votes out of more than 520,000 cast. (It took almost nine days to declare a winner, but surely you knew that already, given the national outcry over how long it took Colorado to count its ballots. Oh, wait. Never mind.)
Although slender, Marx’s victory delivered a strong statement: about the grave condition of mainstream Republicanism; about the increasing embrace of oddity and extremism by a deeply disaffected slice of the American electorate; about the unsettled and unsettling nature of today’s politics.
“It’s almost cult-like,” Dick Wadhams, a former Colorado GOP chairman, said of Marx’s support. “You talk to some of these people, and there is no doubt in their mind he will be governor, because God has decided that he’s going to be governor.”
There’s fat chance of that. (Please don’t smite me.)
Colorado has elected only one Republican governor in the last 55 years, and that was back in 2002. It’s been 10 years since a Republican won any statewide office. The Democratic nominee, Atty. Gen. Phil Weiser, is as close to a November shoo-in — after stomping U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in the primary — as it gets.
But Marx, 61, a former Marine and expert in martial arts, is nothing if not swaggering. His role model is, of course, the political disrupter and fabulist-in-chief currently occupying the White House.
Like President Trump, Marx relies heavily on personal charisma, a strong social media presence and the purposeful shunning of campaign norms which, to the politically alienated, speaks to his independence from the establishment and offers a welcome break from the same old, same old.
He casts himself as a problem-solver and negotiator par excellence. He skimps on policy and skipped most of the preprimary debates; at the one he did attend, Marx brought his dog, a Dutch shepherd, onstage. In lieu of a closing statement, Marx prayed.
When asked, he hasn’t backed off his fantastical claims. But Marx hasn’t done a very good job substantiating them.
As a young boy growing up in Louisiana, he says, his abusive stepfather — the one who supposedly involved him in a satanic feline decapitation — drove him to rural Mississippi, where Marx shot and killed a man. Police told Colorado Public Radio they had no record of any unsolved homicides from that time.
“I don’t think that’s important,” Marx replied. “It’s actually kind of — it’s an odd question to me.”
Actually, it’s not.
(Conceding the Republican race, state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer — the runner-up — conspicuously declined to endorse Marx, urging voters to “choose the path that is best for Colorado” in November. “For the record,” she added. “I still haven’t killed anyone.”)
In many ways, Marx is a mainstream conservative Republican. He founded All Things Possible Ministries, a Christian nonprofit that tends to refugees and other victims of trauma. His focus on law and order, tax relief, small government and deregulation are all standard GOP fare.
But his florid tales of youthful homicide, telephonic exorcisms, personally intercepting human smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico border — well, not so much.
Most voters will probably have a hard time getting past those autobiographical extravagances, which could spell trouble — depressed GOP turnout, guilt by association — for other Colorado Republicans, including freshman Rep. Gabe Evans, who’s fighting to hang onto a closely fought congressional seat in the north-central part of the state.
“The Colorado Republican Party right now is impotent and irrelevant,” said Wadhams, who fought unsuccessfully against its takeover by Trump-worshiping zealots. “The ironic twist to this story is that polling has shown over the past several months that voters are getting restless about what they see as the decline of Colorado in terms of education, energy, roads and transportation.”
Just last week, the annual Colorado Health Foundation issued its annual Pulse Poll, a dour report card on the state of the state that found three-quarters of respondents were concerned they may not be able to live there in the future.
But don’t expect Democrats to lose their sovereignty anytime soon.
That’s what happens when a party and its voters stop seriously competing and instead indulge their passions and fever dreams. You get candidates, and political caricatures, like Victor Marx.
The US has launched a new wave of strikes on Iran after two American soldiers were killed by Iranian strikes in Jordan. President Donald Trump called it ‘swift punishment’, as Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou-Castro reports.
July 18 (UPI) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mandani on Saturday said his government is reviewing whether it could legally arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over accusations of war crimes.
In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the prime minister’s arrest over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including starvation and attacking a civilian population.
“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani told The New York Times. “He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court, and what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these past many years.”
Mandani said his legal team is reviewing the city’s options.
“We’re not talking about a personal assessment of Benjamin Netanyahu,” the mayor told The Times. “We’re talking about the International Criminal Court and the fact that they have a warrant out for this prime minister’s arrest, and I think it’s important to talk about the weight that that has as a charge and that also, as the mayor of New York City, I’ll be following the laws of New York City.”
Netanyahu has denied the ICC charges and disputes the court’s jurisdiction.
In a previous interview, the prime minister claimed without evidence that Mandani is a Hamas supporter.
“He is with the terror actors,” he told WABC. “I think, secretly, he hates America.”
Michael Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., called Mandani’s comments “pure political theater.”
“The U.S. is not party to the Rome Statute that underlies the ICC,” he wrote on X, adding, “The U.N. Headquarters Agreement grants diplomatic protections to visiting heads of government.”
Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for a coup attempt, was placed under further restrictions on Friday for breaching conditions of his house arrest. File Photo by Andre Borger/EPA-EFE
July 18 (UPI) — Brazil’s top court on Saturday denied a request from former President Jair Bolsonaro to be visited by Argentinian President Javier Milei while under house arrest.
The attempted visit by Milei, a political ally of the far-right Bolsonaro, was part of a campaign to drum up political support for the son of the former president, who is running against leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
He was already barred from participating in national politics as part of his sentence.
But Bolsonaro was placed under further restrictions on Friday for breaching conditions of his house arrest, after he wrote a political letter supporting his son’s candidature for president.
The son, right-wing state Sen. Flavio Bolsonaro, then showed the endorsement letter during a live stream on social media.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes barred Bolsonaro from receiving any visits of a “political-electoral” nature until after Brazil’s general elections in October.
Bolsonaro’s defense lawyers argued in court he was unaware that his son would divulge his writing on social media, though the former president titled the text “letter to the Brazilian people.”
“The letter — written and personally signed by Jair Messias Bolsonaro — was addressed ‘to the Brazilian people,’ demonstrating that it was not of a private nature but rather intended for political and electoral purposes, with dissemination to the general public, using Flavio Nantes Bolsonaro as an intermediary, or in his own words, as his ‘spokesperson,'” Moraes wrote in his decision, G1 reported.
“The text of the ‘Letter to the Brazilian People,’ therefore, clearly shows that Jair Messias Bolsonaro intended to communicate with his political supporters through his son’s social media accounts,” the justice added.
Bolsonaro is now barred from receiving visits for 30 days, except by his medical and legal teams.
He is also not allowed to be visited by his son for 90 days.
A federal prosecutor in Texas has shared new details about the moments before an immigration officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo that cast doubt about the government’s claim that the man struck an ICE vehicle before he was shot.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer killed Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national and longtime American resident, on July 7 as he was driving to a Houston construction job site with three co-workers, including his brother. ICE has acknowledged he was not the target of the operation.
The shooting sparked protests in the nation’s fourth-largest city, echoing Salgado Araujo’s family’s calls for transparency. The family describes him as a hardworking father who was close to obtaining legal status in the U.S. after living in the country for 35 years.
The shooting came just days before two other men were killed, in Florida and Maine, in confrontations in President Trump’s federal immigration crackdown, renewing scrutiny on the Department of Homeland Security’s law enforcement tactics.
Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said for the first time Thursday that ICE officers were targeting two Guatemalan men who were potentially subject to deportation. He said they were driving a van similar to the one Salgado Araujo was driving when he was killed. In an earlier statement released the day Salgado Araujo was killed, Homeland Security said he was targeted in an immigration enforcement operation and he was living in the country without legal permission.
Reitz also said that the officers believed that Salgado Araujo and the passengers in his car fit the description of the Guatemalan men the agents were looking for.
Four officers driving two separate law enforcement vehicles attempted to pull over Salgado Araujo’s van using their police lights. Salgado Araujo then made a U-turn and drove over a median to evade getting pulled over, Reitz said.
Later that morning, the officers again encountered Salgado Araujo’s van and for the second time tried to pull him over, this time essentially surrounding the vehicle, Reitz said. Two of the four agents got out of their cars and told Salgado Araujo to put the vehicle in park. Just before he was shot, one of the agents was “partially inside the van or immediately next to it” when Salgado Araujo tried to reverse the van and then drive forward again, Reitz said.
An earlier Homeland Security statement accused Salgado Araujo of “weaponizing” his vehicle. The agency said he rammed his van into a law enforcement vehicle and said an officer opened fire in self-defense. The most recent statement from the U.S attorney’s office, however, didn’t mention any collision between Salgado Araujo’s van and a law enforcement vehicle. It also didn’t explicitly say that the officer feared for his life. There are no reported injuries among the officers involved.
The latest statement didn’t name the officer who killed Salgado Araujo, nor did it specify whether the officer who fired the shot was the same person who was next to, or partially inside, the van.
Reitz also said in the statement that officers “saw in plain view several small bags of a white, crystal-like substance inside the van” and that the FBI later executed a search warrant to investigate for possible illicit substances.
Salgado Araujo’s brother, who was in the van when the shooting happened, has been in ICE detention since the incident. His attorney said the white substance was a salt mixture that the men used as electrolytes to stay hydrated while doing manual labor in the grueling Texas heat.
Few photos or videos surrounding the shooting in Houston have emerged on social media, unlike other deaths involving federal immigration officers.
A protest by India’s youth-led Cockroach Janta Party has intensified after activist Sonam Wangchuk was forcibly moved to a hospital on the 21st day of his hunger strike. Party founder Abhijeet Dipke was splashed with ink after beginning a fast in solidarity.
Mamdani had pledged to arrest Netanyahu during campaign for mayor and says he is consulting city’s legal advisers.
Published On 18 Jul 202618 Jul 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said that he is consulting with city authorities over the possibility of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September.
In an interview with The New York Times (NYT) released on Saturday, Mamdani reiterated his view that Netanyahu, who is the subject of an ICC arrest warrant for possible crimes against humanity in Gaza, must be brought to justice for the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in the Hague,” Mamdani told The Interview, a show produced by the NYT.
“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” he added. “And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years.”
Mamdani, a democratic socialist who has emerged as an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause, pledged to arrest Netanyahu if he came to New York City during his mayoral campaign. Some questioned the feasibility of that promise.
The mayor said that he was in “active conversation” with the city’s law department about whether he has the authority to have Netanyahu arrested, should he travel to New York.
“Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” he said.
Asked about Mamdani’s call to have him arrested, Netanyahu told radio personality Sid Rosenberg that he thinks Mamdani secretly “hates America”.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, also insisted that Netanyahu will be at the UNGA meeting in New York this September, despite the threats of arrest.
During his campaign for mayor, Mamdani was the target of frequent Islamophobic vitriol and insults. Rosenberg referred to the New York mayor hopeful as a “cockroach”, before later apologising.
Mamdani’s election to mayor and his continued calls for accountability regarding Netanyahu point to a dramatic swing among Democratic voters away from Israel.
A poll in May found that nearly three-quarters of Democratic voters oppose US aid to Israel, up from 45 percent three years ago.
Nearly half of those surveyed said that their party was too supportive of Israel, whose war on Gaza has been termed a genocide by a growing number of human rights organisations, international officials, and scholars.
While that shift has yet to translate into concrete policy change at the top of the party, which includes stalwart supporters of Israel, many Democratic politicians have slowly begun to adjust their positions.
Nearly half of the Democratic members of the US House of Representatives voted to end US aid to Israel earlier this week, a measure of the shifting politics around the issue that commentators believe would have been unthinkable just several years ago.
BILLINGS, Mont. — The U.S. Interior Department on Friday canceled a rule meant to protect plants and animals that are determined to be threatened with extinction, the latest step by the Trump administration to dismantle key provisions of the landmark Endangered Species Act at the behest of industry.
Instead of receiving automatic protections, imperiled species will need individualized protection plans once they are added to the threatened species list. That’s a potentially lengthy process in which companies could seek exemptions for oil and gas drilling, mining and other development where those species live.
Opponents said it would make it harder to save wildlife awaiting federal protections and in danger of disappearing, such as monarch butterflies and alligator snapping turtles.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement that the Endangered Species Act had been used for too long “to stop almost any new project in America, driving up costs for families, weakening our competitiveness, and undermining our national security.”
“Success should be measured by species recovery and delisting, not by adding more species to the list,” Burgum added.
A second change finalized Friday requires officials to analyze economic effects when deciding whether habitat is critical to a species’ survival. Critics say it gives corporations an opportunity to put their thumb on the scale so officials will allow development in those areas.
“If you’re exempting certain industries that cause habitat destruction, in many instances you’ll be exempting the main threat to those species,” said Noah Greenwald with the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity.
Officials made similar changes during Trump’s first term, but they were reversed under the Biden administration.
The rules that gave what some consider “blanket protections” to threatened species were first adopted for wildlife in 1975 and for plants in 1977.
Two groups, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the Property and Environment Research Center, sued the Biden administration in 2024 after officials restored the blanket protections rule. They argued the rule unfairly imposed the same restrictions on landowners when a species’ status improves from endangered, which is more dire, to threatened.
That removed incentives for landowners to participate in species recovery, said Jonathan Wood, vice president at the Montana-based research center.
Wood said the Trump administration’s approach allows officials to “better reward progress and encourage proactive conservation.”
There have been no species added to the endangered or threatened lists in Trump’s second term. By comparison, more than 20 species were added in Trump’s first term, and about 60 under President Biden.
About 30 species are currently proposed to be listed as threatened. Besides monarchs and alligator snapping turtles, they include California spotted owls and various snakes, fish, clams and insects.
Changes to government policies for endangered plants and wildlife have come faster and extended further in Trump’s second term than in his first.
The administration in March exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said environmentalists’ lawsuits threatened to hobble domestic energy supplies as the U.S. wages war against Iran.
A week before the latest rule change, Interior officials sharply narrowed the definition of what constitutes “harm” to a species. The change would allow development in critical wildlife habitat so long as the animals themselves are not immediately killed or injured.
Officials this week sharply reduced the amount of critical habitat in the Rocky Mountains designated for Canada lynx, forest-dwelling wildcats that are threatened by climate change and other pressures.
Also this week, Burgum said in a visit to Montana that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would turn over more management authority for grizzly bears to states where the bruins live. That’s been a long-standing priority for the Republican governors of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.
The Endangered Species Act is credited with bringing back animals including the California condor, the bald eagle and the American alligator from the brink of extinction.
Burgum noted Friday that 97% of the species that have been given protections still have them. That’s a frustration for Republican lawmakers who say species should be taken off the endangered and threatened lists more quickly once they’ve recovered.
WASHINGTON — President Bush, formally abandoning the central pledge of his 1988 presidential campaign, declared Tuesday that preserving a healthy economy will require new taxes.
“It is clear to me that both the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require” a series of measures including “tax revenue increases” as well as spending cuts, Bush said in a written statement issued after a breakfast meeting with congressional leaders of both parties.
He specifically mentioned the possibility of trimming “entitlement and mandatory” spending programs, a reference to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other benefit programs. He did not specify the type of tax increase he had in mind.
With his statement, Bush abandoned his campaign pledge–”Read my lips, no new taxes”–and opened the door to a “grand compromise” with Congress that could narrow or even close the federal deficit. Richard G. Darman, Bush’s budget director, has been advocating such a compromise almost since the day Bush took office.
At the same time, however, Bush may have sparked a full-scale revolt among conservatives in his party, many of whom believe that higher taxes are far worse for the country than continued deficits. He may also have given up what many Republican strategists see as the party’s most important issue–low taxes.
Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garaden Grove) said the President’s announcement that he would consider raising tax revenues set off a “firestorm” among conservative Republicans.
“I signed a letter today . . . that said, ‘Mr. President, we hope that (tax) rates are untouchable, that they are absolutely radioactive.’ ”
Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), one of the most fiscally conservative members of Congress, said, “The Democrat game plan all along in this Congress has been to break George Bush of his promise not to raise taxes and so to lay the foundation of a campaign against him by saying he broke his promise and he can’t be trusted.
“And frankly, I’d disappointed in Mr. Bush. I thought he was smarter than falling for that.”
Democratic leaders, by contrast, welcomed Bush’s new stance, which was prepared, word by word, during the breakfast meeting.
Administration and congressional negotiators, who have been meeting since May 9 to try to craft a deficit-reduction package acceptable to all parties, have discussed a host of potential tax increases.
Some proposals, such as increased “user fees” and hikes in tobacco and alcohol taxes, might be relatively easy for Bush to embrace. The Administration has already proposed roughly $20 billion in new user fees and other minor revenue increases.
But Tuesday’s statement was made necessary because Democratic leaders said that package was unacceptable. And while White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said it was up to the negotiators to decide what to do next, he pointedly refused to rule out broader tax increases.
Republicans, however, may find it difficult to accept Democratic demands to increase income taxes for the wealthiest Americans. “I can’t see Democrats agreeing unless there are (income tax) rate changes that ensure that (the final package) is not unfair to the poor and middle class,” said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.).
Budget negotiators hope to work out a final package before Congress leaves Washington for its August recess.
Before Tuesday’s developments, said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.), the budget talks “were stalemated, going nowhere. The President broke an impasse.”
Bush himself told reporters at the White House Rose Garden Tuesday afternoon: “It is essential that these talks get moving and get moving faster. I want to see this economy grow. I want jobs. I want to see the deficit down.”
Democratic leaders had insisted when the talks began that they would not get involved in specific negotiations unless Bush publicly admitted that a tax increase would be needed.
At the time, the White House insisted that all issues were “on the table” and that Bush would impose “no preconditions” on the talks. But Democrats had insisted on a more explicit statement.
After Bush gave them what they had sought, Democratic leaders appeared solemn and reserved as they struggled to avoid seeming to take political advantage of Bush’s retreat.
“We hope this is not going to be the subject of a political campaign effort,” said House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) “Someone who wants to complain about taxes being raised will have to complain against both parties.”
When the negotiations began, Democrats feared that Republicans would maneuver them into a corner–forcing them to call for a tax increase and then campaigning against them as “tax-and-spend” liberals.
Many Republican candidates for the Senate this fall already have been doing just that, much as Bush had done in 1988. In that year, Bush’s favorite line–”Read my lips, no new taxes”–formed the centerpiece of his standard stump speech.
Tuesday’s statement not only abandoned that pledge but also gave up on a central tenet of the Republican political philosophy for the past decade–that the deficit is caused by too much spending, not by too little revenue.
Fitzwater, explaining Bush’s decision, said that closing the deficit without new taxes would require spending cuts so large that they “would be unacceptable to all parties.”
The White House estimates that the federal deficit will be roughly $160 billion in fiscal 1991, which begins on Oct. 1. The Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction law would require about $100 billion in across-the-board spending cuts unless the President and Congress agree on a new budget plan.
To mollify conservatives, Bush aides spent much of the day circulating word that the White House was not agreeing to anything beyond the approximately $20 billion in new user fees and related taxes that Bush has already advocated.
“I’m not changing my mind at all” on taxes, Bush insisted during a 45-minute session with 15 Latino reporters from around the country.
Vice President Dan Quayle echoed the theme. “It should not be viewed as a change of policy,” he said in an interview in Los Angeles, where he was raising money for GOP candidates. “This is a deficit reduction summit, not a tax increase summit.”
Asked if he would now admit that Bush was breaking his campaign pledge against new taxes, Fitzwater responded with a laugh: “Are you crazy? . . . Everything we said was true then, and it’s true now. We feel he said the right thing then; he’s saying the right thing now.”
Democratic leaders reacted with some anger to the White House damage control efforts.
“The President’s statement is clear and unambiguous,” said Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.). “He said that it is clear to him that tax increases are required. This is a new statement by the President. Any attempt by White House officials or other Republicans to describe the statement otherwise are totally inconsistent with what occurred today.”
Even Fitzwater conceded as much as he listed a series of factors that had forced Bush to change his mind.
The most important was the weakening of the economy since Bush took office. Fitzwater noted that economic statistics continue to show interest rates higher and growth rates lower than the White House had hoped. Bush advisers and most Democratic economists hold deficits at least partly responsible, a point conservatives dispute.
Moreover, the mounting cost of the savings and loan bailout has swelled the deficit, Fitzwater said.
Not all members of Bush’s party, however, were willing to abandon their belief that new taxes are worse than continued deficits.
“Any tax rate increase now threatens recession,” Rep. C. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) said in a statement. “Just the prospect of a tax increase is like a dagger pointed at the jugular vein of the American economy.”
Within hours of Bush’s statement, 90 Republican members of Congress signed a letter to Bush declaring “we were stunned by your announcement that you would be willing to accept tax revenue increases as a part of a budget summit package.”
Rep. Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad), who represents southern Orange County, said he was “a little bit disappointed and a little bit surprised, because I think it was in a way caving in on the issue.”
“A tax increase is unacceptable,” the GOP congressmen wrote. “We will not vote for a budget package that increases tax rates for the American people.”
Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), one of the authors of the Gramm-Rudman law, said that an agreement may not be worth having if it means a tax increase.
Times staff writers George Ramos and Robert W. Stewart in Washington and Cathleen Decker in Los Angeles contributed to this story.
GEORGE BUSH ON TAXES Oct. 12, 1987: “There are those who say we must balance the budget on the back of the workers–raise taxes again. . . . I am not going to raise taxes again.” Announcement of candidacy in Houston. Jan. 16, 1988: “I want to be the President who finally whips the budget into shape by holding the line on taxes.” Televised debate with five Republican rivals in Manchester, N.H. May 31, 1988: “I’m not going to propose a tax increase.” After meeting with campaign economic advisers at summer home in Kennebunkport, Me. June 14, 1988: “That’s the difference–as plain as day–between us. Tax cuts vs. tax hikes. I will not raise your taxes, period.” At Cincinnati rally, comparing his position with that of Democratic front-runner Michael S. Dukakis. June 24, 1988: “I’ve ruled them all out.” At a Cincinnati news conference, when asked if Bush included excise taxes or other “revenue enhancers” in his rejection of new taxes. July 9, 1988: “If you go to Yosemite Park with your trailer . . . you may have to pay a little more.” At Atlanta news conference, conceding that costs of some programs might rise for users but asserting that voters understood the difference between user fees and tax hikes. Aug. 18, 1988: “My opponent won’t rule out raising taxes, but I will, and the Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say to them ‘Read my lips: no new taxes.’ ” Acceptance speech, Republican National Convention, New Orleans. Jan. 31, 1990: “That budget brings federal spending under control. It meets the Gramm-Rudman target. It brings that deficit down further and balances the budget by 1993 with no new taxes.” State of the Union address, discussing budget he proposed to Congress. March 13, 1990: “You know my position and I have no intention of changing that position.” At White House news conference, when asked if he could promise no new taxes this year. May 24, 1990: “Things are complicated out there on this subject. . . . I’d like to do it exactly the way I propose. I’m now enough of a realist to realize that it might not be done exactly that way.” At White House news conference, when asked if he could fulfill his campaign promise. June 26, 1990: “It is clear to me that both the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require . . . tax revenue increases.” Written statement after meeting with congressional leaders. PROJECTED IMPACT OF VARIOUS TAX INCREASES
Revenue Impac Proposal Next Year Fossil Fuels Tax fuels linked to global $23 warming Social Security Raise tax on benefits to 12 high earners Energy Impose 5% tax on wide range 14 of energy sources Gasoline Raise tax to 21 cents per 12 gallon from 9 cents Stock Market 0.5% tax on stock and bond 8 transactions Cigarettes, Raise 32 cents per pack and 10 Alcohol 25 cents per ounce Income Increase top income tax 4 rate to 33% Acid Rain Tax sources of air 3 pollution Estate Tax capital gains held 2 until death
t (in billions) Proposal Five Years Fossil Fuels $163 Social Security 100 Energy 80 Gasoline 59 Stock Market 58 Cigarettes, 51 Alcohol Income 42 Acid Rain 22 Estate 10
Source: Congressional Budget Office
PERSPECTIVE ON CHANGE–White House feared that Democrats would quit budget talks and blame Bush. A15
WASHINGTON — For Mary Fisher–mother, artist, philanthropist and HIV-positive woman–the moment is now.
She tries hard not to think about the future: her future, or the possibility that her children will face their future without her. When she feels the fear, it comes “in that reflective place you find yourself in at night, when you’re forced to find a quiet time,” she said.
“I allow my work and my children to fill my time, so I don’t have to think about those things on a daily or hourly basis,” she said. “I couldn’t get through the days if I did.”
Nor does Fisher dwell on her medical situation with her two young sons, who are now 6 and 4. Neither of them is infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS.
“The best thing I can do for them is be with them, look them straight in the eye, answer their questions as best I can and be here, be involved in their lives as best I can,” she said. “They know I have a disease. I don’t know if they’re relating it to what their dad had–and I don’t know if I want them to relate to it, because I’m not sick.
“I don’t want to instill my fears–if I have them–in my children,” she added.
It has been nearly two years since Fisher, 45, seared the public consciousness with her speech before the Republican National Convention.
Standing before her fellow Republicans, she spoke in calm, gentle tones–but delivered a personal story that shocked the hall into silence.
“I think she reaches people that activists like myself can never reach, which is people who respond to maternal warmth and not to yelling,” said playwright Larry Kramer, a close friend of Fisher’s who is a founding member of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).
“That’s why she is as important as we are, maybe more so,” he said. “We’re a funny pair because she’s always saying to me: ‘Larry, I wish I had some of your anger.’ And I’m always saying to her: ‘Mary, I wish I had some of your compassion.’ I see her speeches on TV and say: ‘Mary, why don’t you get angrier?’ And she says: ‘Larry, I can’t.’ But I think she’s exceedingly effective being as she is, and I don’t want her to change a decibel.”
Fisher challenged the Republican Party to confront the AIDS epidemic with candor and compassion and to make the issue its own.
Since then, she has traveled the nation, speaking in churches, schools, prisons–wherever there is an audience that can learn from her message: If it can happen to me, it can happen to you.
In many quarters, “people perceive AIDS as a depressing subject and don’t want to take personal responsibility,” Fisher said from the home she now rents in a Maryland suburb outside Washington, where she moved her family from Boca Raton, Fla., last summer.
“They try to make me an exception,” she said. “I am not unusual. I am unusual only because I am speaking out. . . . The point is, there are a lot of me’s out there, women with small children who are (HIV) positive, women who are devastated, women who are scared to talk about it. I know, because they come to me when I am traveling. It’s truly amazing.”
In some ways, Fisher is wrong–she is unusual in the framework of the AIDS epidemic: She is wealthy — the daughter of longtime GOP fund-raiser and Detroit real estate mogul Max Fisher — and she works for herself at home (she creates art using handmade paper) so she has no “workplace problem” with AIDS.
And she has enough money to keep her children sheltered, although she has not isolated them.
Moreover, she is a longtime Republican with impeccable political credentials and connections.
Fisher includes former Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George Bush and their families among her closest friends. She once worked in the Ford White House, and photographs of Ford and her two sons, Max and Zachary, adorn her living room.
But AIDS is the great leveler, so she is also right–in many ways, she is no exception at all.
Fisher was infected by her former husband, Brian Campbell, who reportedly was at one time an intravenous drug user. He has since died of AIDS. Women infected through heterosexual contact have become a rapidly growing population.
Fisher said it took a long time for her to come to grips with her infection–and to speak about it.
“The discovery that we are HIV-positive tends to divide our lives into ‘before’ and ‘after,’ ” Fisher wrote in a newly published collection of her speeches, “Sleep with the Angels,” subtitled, “a mother challenges AIDS.”
The book, she says, “is not just about AIDS, it’s about children. It’s about religion. It’s about how we as a people deal with each other, and it’s about my life, my relationships with others and the unconditional love that’s out there.”
Kramer, who is quick to criticize others involved in AIDS activities, has only praise and affection for Fisher.
“It’s impossible not to like Mary because she is so caring and loving and motherly and interested, and because she puts her arms around you and gives you wonderful hugs,” he said.
Fisher learned in July, 1991, that she was infected, but she said it took six months before she was ready to tell her story publicly.
After she did, and after she spoke to the GOP convention, Bush appointed her to the now-defunct National Commission on AIDS, replacing Earvin (Magic) Johnson, the HIV-positive retired Los Angeles Lakers star who quit over what he said was an unresponsive Administration.
Fisher also founded the Family AIDS Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising AIDS awareness nationwide.
The network, she says, plans to give “care-giver” awards this spring because “they are the people who take care of us. They are the people who do not leave this epidemic.” She also said she hopes that the organization can raise enough money for small AIDS research grants.
Currently, Fisher has no symptoms and takes no AIDS medication. “I feel really healthy, and am doing fine,” she said. “As far as I know, everything is good.”
Fisher said she intends to keep doing everything she is doing for as long as she can, speaking quietly and forcefully about the epidemic to whoever will listen.
“If we can create a dialogue and keep it going, I believe it’s the only way we can make a difference,” she said.
Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Noah Goldberg, with an assist from Connor Sheets, giving you the latest on city and county government.
As Los Angeles city officials deal with the fallout from last month’s Lineage warehouse fire, one powerful lobbying firm has been at the center of the efforts.
The company said in a filing to the city’s Ethics Commission that it would be lobbying the mayor and other city officials and would also handle “crisis communications and work related to impact of facility fire.”
Shortly after the fire started, Lineage CEO Greg Lehmkuhl got on the phone with Mayor Karen Bass, and the mayor suggested that Lineage give money to the nonprofit California Community Foundation to disburse to local organizations, according to Jeff Rivera, the company’s chief operating officer.
California Community Foundation has also hired M Strategic Communications to lobby the mayor and other city officials related to reforms to the city’s mansion tax.
After Bass’ suggestion, M Strategic Communications put its two clients, Lineage and CCF, in touch. By that point, according to M Strategic, CCF had already created a fund to help with the emergency.
The lobbying firm also has close ties to Bass. One of its two principals is Shannon Murphy, who was a deputy chief of staff to Bass when Bass was speaker of the State Assembly more than a decade ago. Murphy remains a close confidant of Bass, according to a source with knowledge of the mayor’s office.
M Strategic Communications subcontracted some of the work in its June 19 contract with Lineage to Yusef Robb, who was an unpaid advisor and spokesperson to the mayor until early June.
Robb initially continued to serve as an unpaid, unofficial advisor to the mayor, though no longer as a spokesperson. After The Times and other outlets reported on his work for Lineage last Saturday, Robb said he would no longer serve as an unpaid advisor.
CCF has been paying out the $2 million in funds to more than 20 groups to provide relief to Boyle Heights residents.
During a raucous town hall in Boyle Heights last week, where residents booed the officials who spoke, Bass noted that Airbnb was providing short-term rental assistance for people who live close to the fire.
As it turns out, Airbnb is also a client of M Strategic Communications, which was brought on to help legalize vacation home rentals in the city.
Airbnb has provided more than 1,000 nights of free housing to local residents since the fire, the company said.
“We are grateful that so many of those we work with step up when Los Angeles is in need,” said Chris Modrzejewski, a principal at M Strategic Communications.
Whither auditors?
L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia investigates inefficiencies, fraud and other issues in the city’s more than 40 departments, whose budgets add up to more than $46 billion per year.
He employs eight auditors and five fraud, waste and abuse investigators, which he says is far from enough. He has requested more staff, to no avail.
On Thursday, Mejia endorsed Councilmember Nithya Raman for mayor, arguing that she would better fund his department and would be more open and transparent with information than Bass’ office has been.
“Nithya believes in the power of transparency and accountability as a tool,” Mejia said during a press conference with Raman.
Raman did not provide specific numbers on how many people she would hire for Mejia’s team.
“I’ve committed to ensuring that we’re fully funding that fraud, waste and audit team,” she said. “The other piece is not standing in the way, but actually opening the door when the controller asks for information about various programs and departments.”
Bass did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
You’re reading the L.A. on the Record newsletter
Sign up to make sense of the often unexplained world of L.A. politics.
By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service, which include arbitration and a class action waiver. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy such as personalizing your experience and ads.
Fire funds
Local leaders aren’t happy that Congress still hasn’t appropriated supplemental funding to assist with recovery from the Palisades and Eaton fires.
The catastrophic fires were extinguished more than a year-and-a-half ago, but federal lawmakers have yet to fund a combined request for $15.7 billion from the L.A. city and county governments.
That’s different from what happened after past disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, when Congress appropriated large portions of the amounts that were requested.
The federal money would go toward projects like restoring and rebuilding infrastructure, parks, schools and senior centers, as well as housing and residential support.
The delays have slowed the recovery process and hamstrung reconstruction efforts, according to Bass and L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger.
This week, the pair sent joint letters to congressional leaders and members of the county’s congressional delegation, calling on them to fund the requests.
They also lamented the fact that the Trump administration’s recent $87.6 supplemental funding request did not detail support for fire victims.
Bass and Barger called on Congress to appropriate supplemental funds “to cover the infrastructure and rebuilding needs associated with the Eaton and Palisades fires.”
State of play
— ROBB JOBS: While serving as a top informal advisor to Bass, Yusef Robb was also working as a crisis communications consultant for Lineage, the company whose cold storage warehouse in Boyle Heights erupted in flames last month. Robb stepped down as an advisor to the mayor following The Times and other outlets’ reporting.
— FREE AND FOR SALE: Robb worked for the mayor as an unpaid spokesperson and advisor for months earlier this year, at the same time that he had a $587,500 contract with Los Angeles World Airports.
— ANOTHER ONE GONE: A top spokesperson for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass departed Monday after a brief tenure, joining a growing list of communications aides who have left over the last nine months. Kolby Lee, who started as Bass’ director of communications in February, said he was resigning to spend time with family and loved ones.
— AIRING GRIEVANCES: The contractor for Los Angeles International Airport’s long-awaited automatic people mover train filed a lawsuit against the city, amid ongoing disputes over project delays.
— PROJECT NIXED: The state has rescinded a $73.4-million grant for a new mental health and drug treatment facility in San Pedro, putting the future of the controversial project in jeopardy. Neighbors had picketed outside the property at 2100 S. Western Ave. and packed a town hall in April to oppose the project, with some expressing fears about drug users coming to the area.
—TO FLOCK OR NOT TO FLOCK: Less than a week after the Los Angeles Police Department halted its relationship with Flock Safety over concerns about how the company shares data from automated license plate readers, police officials said they are working out a new agreement — this time with more protections.
— HEAT WAVE: The Bass administration has appointed a new chief heat officer. Daniela Simunovic took on the role on May 31 after the administration discreetly fired Marta Segura, the first person to hold the position. Simunovic served as Bass’ senior director of climate and sustainability for three years.
QUICK HITS
Where is Inside Safe? This week, the mayor’s signature homelessness program went to Chatsworth in City Councilmember John Lee‘s district, bringing 22 people inside.
On the docket next week: The L.A. City Council remains on recess next week.
Stay in touch
That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.
After a gunman killed 17 students and staff at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the survivors became the big story, not the shooter. Many students in the liberal enclave, as well as family members of the victims, rallied to agitate for stricter gun control laws.
But not all of them. One of those exceptions was Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed inside the school. Pollack pressed his case for President Trump’s reelection at the Republican National Convention on Monday night on the grounds that he thought the school’s liberal policies on student discipline had contributed to his daughter’s death.
“After my daughter’s murder, the media didn’t seem interested in the facts. So I found them myself. I learned that gun control laws didn’t fail my daughter. People did,” Pollack said, blaming “far-left Democrats in our school district” for adopting insufficiently harsh disciplinary measures to catch previous red flags about the gunman, a troubled former student.
“I was just fine with the old approach to discipline and safety — it was called discipline and safety,” Pollack said, criticizing the school’s “restorative justice” policy. “But the Obama-Biden administration took Parkland’s bad policies and forced them into schools across America.” He praised Trump for ending support for those policies, and told listeners their children’s safety depended on Trump being reelected.
The Times profiled Pollack in 2019. A native of Long Island, N.Y., who voted for Trump in 2016, Pollack was angered by the media’s close focus on gun policy rather than on other factors leading up to the shooting. Pollack appeared at the White House a week after the massacre.
“I’m pissed,” Pollack shouted in a listening session at the White House. “It’s not about gun laws right now. That’s another fight, another battle. Let’s fix the schools and then you guys can battle it out.”
Pollack was also critical of the student activists who survived the massacre and then called for tighter gun control policies. “They just got famous off the death of these kids,” Pollack told The Times in 2019. “Their agenda was to get famous and spew more of their liberalism ways without looking at the facts.”
Joe Biden said Sunday that he would pick a woman to run as his vice president.
“I commit that I will, in fact, pick a woman to be vice president,” Biden said at the Democratic presidential debate in Washington. “There are a number of women who are qualified to be president tomorrow. I would pick a woman to be my vice president.”
Sanders did not make the same commitment when pressed by a moderator.
“In all likelihood, I will” select a woman as running mate, Sanders said.
“For me, it’s not just nominating a woman, it is making sure we have a progressive woman, and there are progressive women out there,” Sanders said.
Biden also committed to nominating a black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, which would be a first in the nation’s history.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office in charge of protecting California against terrorism has tracked demonstrations staged by political and antiwar groups, a practice that senior law enforcement officials say is an abuse of civil liberties.
The Times obtained reports prepared for the state Office of Homeland Security in recent months that contain details on the whereabouts and purpose of a number of political demonstrations throughout California.
The source of the information is listed in some cases as federal law enforcement agencies, including the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, an investigative arm of the U.S. Homeland Security department.
Political activities cited in the reports include:
* An animal rights rally outside a Canadian consulate office in San Francisco to protest the hunting of seals.
* A demonstration in Walnut Creek at which U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) and other officials spoke against the war in Iraq.
* A Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom gathering at a courthouse in Santa Barbara in support of an antiwar protester — a 56-year-old Salinas woman — facing federal trespassing charges.
California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer’s office learned of the monitoring activity more than two months ago. On Friday, a spokesman condemned the actions, saying they violated the groups’ constitutional right of free speech.
“When people exercise their 1st Amendment rights to rally, march and protest, they should not have to worry that intelligence officials are watching them or their activities are in any way being painted with the terrorism brush,” Lockyer spokesman Tom Dresslar said in an interview.
“That kind of conduct by anti-terrorism intelligence agencies threatens civil liberties, runs counter to our values and violates this office’s policy regarding criminal intelligence gathering,” Dresslar said.
The Times obtained two of the reports, which were compiled daily. The state homeland security office declined to release others.
The office is a 53-person operation that grew out of the Sept. 11 attacks and is financed primarily by federal money. Officials there said the details about the rallies were reported by SRA International, a company hired to provide counter-terrorism analysis.
The officials said such information made it into only the two reports that The Times obtained, out of 60-some daily intelligence reports produced since March.
No reports were produced before March, said Chris Bertelli, spokesman for the state office. When officials in the agency learned of the practice, he said, they ordered it stopped.
Copies of the reports were shared with the California Highway Patrol and the attorney general’s office. Nothing else was done with the information about the demonstrations, Bertelli said.
The reports are on the letterhead of a California anti-terrorism partnership that includes the homeland security office, the attorney general and the Highway Patrol.
Dresslar said staffers in Lockyer’s office saw the reports and raised concerns with their superiors, who complained to the Office of Homeland Security.
“When we discovered their existence, we informed OHS officials that we had absolutely no use for that kind of information,” Dresslar said. “Collecting information on protests has no legitimate anti-terrorism intelligence function. None. No intelligence agency has any need to maintain this kind of information.”
The reports obtained by The Times contain summaries of news articles about the war in Iraq, animal rights activists and terrorism. One has a section titled “Upcoming California Protests,” followed by summaries of the demonstrations. Each includes an entry for “officer safety issues.” No issues are cited.
One group whose antiwar rally was in the reports criticized the state agency’s practice.
“It seems like a waste of taxpayer dollars and a creeping invasion of our 1st Amendment rights to demonstrate and speak,” said Devlin Donnelly, assistant coordinator for the Chico Peace and Justice Center, which held a rally in Chico in March calling for an end to the war in Iraq.
Schwarzenegger had “no information and no knowledge that this was happening,” said Adam Mendelsohn, the governor’s communications director. “The governor feels that this particular information gathering is totally inappropriate and unacceptable.”
Anti-terrorism ideas from the state homeland security office have stirred qualms before.
Past and present members of the attorney general’s office said they were troubled by a meeting at the security office last September in which federal and state officials discussed ways to prevent Islamic militants from recruiting prison inmates. In attendance were officials from the FBI, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and various local law enforcement agencies, according to documents obtained by The Times.
One account of the meeting is provided in a whistle-blower complaint filed by a former high-ranking official in the attorney general’s office, Edward Manavian.
The complaint says homeland security information analyst William Hipsley proposed monitoring private conversations in state prisons between inmates and Islamic clergymen and, citing a potential national security threat from Iran, getting a list of Iranians living in California.
State law makes it a felony to eavesdrop on conversations between a person in custody and his attorney, doctor or religious advisor.
Brian Parriott, a spokesman for the state prison system, said it is not the corrections department’s practice to listen in on private conversations between inmates and visitors from the clergy.
And Mark Schlosberg, a policy director for the ACLU’s San Francisco office, said it is discriminatory to compile databases on broad groups of people based on national origin without any specific link to criminal activity.
“It’s contrary to our constitutional protections and our systems, and it’s also ineffective in terms of law enforcement,” Schlosberg said.
The state homeland security office denied Manavian’s version of events and issued rebuttals from Hipsley and a staff member who also attended.
In a written statement, Hipsley said that he never suggested “Muslim clerics offices be ‘bugged’ ” and that the subject of Iran never came up.
George Aradi, an assistant deputy director for information analysis, concurred in a separate statement.
Manavian was demoted in February. In his complaint, he said that happened in part because he refused to cooperate with “attempts to violate the civil rights of citizens in this state.”
He resigned in April. His complaint is pending before the state Personnel Board, and a hearing is scheduled in late July.
Lockyer’s office publicly criticized the monitoring actions after an inquiry from The Times.
But Allen Benitez, assistant chief of the attorney general’s criminal intelligence bureau, had told one of his bosses in a memo April 18 that the security office was gathering information on “political groups” and protests. He voiced concerns that such tracking “may not be allowed under the law.”
Lockyer’s office handled the matter privately with the security office, Dresslar said.
Questions about the office come at a time when assessments by nonpartisan reviewers have concluded the state is unprepared for a terrorist attack or natural disaster.
Schwarzenegger casts himself as being immersed in efforts to prepare California for disaster, making repeated public visits to the state’s emergency command center outside Sacramento, where he has watched over exercises simulating what would happen in a disaster, such as an earthquake or flood.
But a report by the legislative analyst’s office last year said California lacks “a unified strategic approach to homeland security.”
And more recently, the state’s Little Hoover Commission watchdog agency issued a report saying it is unclear who would take charge in the event of an emergency or terrorist attack.
Political analyst Eric Ham argues President Donald Trump’s renewed focus on election security and his push for the SAVE Act are attempts to expand federal authority over US elections ahead of November’s midterms.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) has privately expressed interest in running for a full U.S. Senate term after getting appointed as a temporary replacement for her late brother, Lindsey Graham, according to three people familiar with the deliberations.
The people, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said she has started having conversations about a potential campaign.
Plans for Lindsey Graham’s funeral were also announced Friday. There will be a service in Washington on July 28 and more in South Carolina on July 29.
Darline Graham’s eventual decision could dramatically shake up the scramble to fill her late brother’s seat after he died last weekend. The filing period for a special primary runs from July 21-28, and the primary is scheduled for Aug. 11.
Several other noteworthy politicians — including Reps. Russell Fry, Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman, as well as Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette — have been eyeing a run.
Darline Graham’s conversations were first reported by Semafor.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Darline Graham to serve the remainder of her brother’s term, which ends in January.
The first woman to represent the state in the Senate, Darline Graham called it “such an honor,” as dozens of her brother’s staffers and campaign advisors stood behind her, some with eyes glassy from welling tears.
“Lindsey has always been there for me. And now, I will be there for him,” she said.
Lindsey Graham died on Saturday at age 71. A preliminary report from the medical examiner said he suffered a tear in his aorta.
He never married or had a family of his own, but his sister was often by his side for the political touch points of his career, speaking at events and appearing in some of his campaign ads.
In his announcement on Monday, McMaster made no reference to her as a placeholder or symbolic appointment.
However, a person familiar with McMaster’s thinking but unauthorized to speak publicly said the governor, in selecting Darline Graham, had never contemplated that she would run for the seat herself.
Sen. Tim Scott, another South Carolina Republican, said he would not endorse any candidate in the primary because he also serves as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
But, he said, “as Tim Scott, the voter of South Carolina, I might indeed wade into the water at some point.”
“I think the truth of the matter is that Darline has so far been off to a remarkable start,” Scott told reporters, asking about her as a possible special primary contender. “ ‘Why not her?’ would be my question.”
When he died, Lindsey Graham had millions in his campaign account and was expected to raise much more heading into the general election. But those aren’t funds that Darline Graham could directly access, if she were to run, according to Bradley A. Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission.
Under federal rules, Lindsey Graham’s campaign would be limited to transferring just $2,000 to a potential Darline Graham candidacy. However, Smith said there is no limit on how much it could transfer to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which could — thanks to a Supreme Court decision last month — “spend an unlimited amount in coordination with Darline’s campaign.”
“It can’t be earmarked for Darline’s campaign, but in those circumstances I’m sure that the party will make sure she’s not short of cash,” said Smith, now serving as a professor at Capital University Law School in Ohio.
Kinnard and Kim write for the Associated Press. Kim reported from Washington.
United States President Donald Trump has threatened to impose additional tariffs against Canada, as a penalty for the wildfire smoke that has clouded cities across North America.
On Friday, Trump complained about the air quality on social media, as officials in Canada continue to battle 896 active blazes across the country.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
Roughly 200 are burning in the province of Ontario, where Premier Doug Ford said 81 are still out of control. Trump, however, blamed the fires on Canadian governance.
“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush,” Trump wrote.
“The United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!”
He pledged to call Prime Minister Mark Carney, accusing the Canadian leader’s government of negligence.
“The cost is incalculable,” Trump added, saying the expense would be added to existing tariffs against Canadian exports to the US.
The post is the latest example of the US president wielding the threat of heightened tariffs to impose a wide range of demands on foreign countries.
Since returning to the White House for a second term in January 2025, Trump has ratcheted up pressure against Canada, using tariffs as a means of pressuring the country to increase border security and change trade practices he considered unfair.
Trump has also pushed Canada to cede its sovereignty and become the “51st” US state.
Scientists have attributed the proliferation of wildfires across North America to a range of factors, including hot and dry conditions worsened by climate change.
But the right-wing Trump has repeatedly blamed left-leaning and centrist politicians for mismanagement when powerful wildfires erupt.
Trump, for example, repeatedly attacked California Governor Gavin Newsom when his state was fighting wildfires around the city of Los Angeles in 2025.
He blamed the fire destruction on the state’s approach to water management and its endangered species protections.
“I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this,” Trump wrote at the time, though experts say his accusations had little basis in fact.
During his first term, Trump also attacked California, saying that the state should have raked its forest floors to prevent wildfires.
“I said, you’ve got to clean your floors. You’ve got to clean your forests,” Trump told a rally in 2020.
Scientists say that multiple factors can contribute to large wildfires, including heightened heat, drought and overly repressive fire policies that prevent natural burns, resulting in overgrown landscapes.
The risk of damage is also heightened by the increasing number of people living in areas where the wildlands meet urban development.
In mid-July, Ontario saw its largest conflagration of the year so far, when several smaller fires merged in Wabakimi Provincial Park, destroying First Nations communities.
Ford, Ontario’s premier, said on Friday morning that 10 communities had been evacuated.
He thanked leaders across Canada, as well as in US states like Massachusetts and Minnesota, for providing support.
“Neighbours have each other’s backs, which is why Ontario has always been there for our American partners in their time of need,” he wrote on social media.
But Republicans, including Trump and US Representative Bill Huizenga of Michigan, have used the recent blazes to criticise Canada for its fire policy.
“Canada’s inability to mitigate, contain, and prevent its wildfires must be addressed,” Huizenga wrote on social media on Thursday. “These annual fires significantly harm not only our health and quality of life, but also our economic prosperity.”
On Friday, Trump reiterated his position that Canada’s fires could have been prevented through debris removal.
“Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result,” Trump wrote.
“This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”
The wildfire smoke has prompted concerns about the viability of hosting the FIFA World Cup final in New Jersey this weekend.
But the Trump administration itself has faced pushback over its wildfire preparedness.
The New York Times reported on Friday that the Trump administration had slashed funding for wildfire research, including laboratories that study the effects of wildfire smoke on human health.
Paramount Skydance’s top antitrust attorney told a judge Friday that David Ellison’s company would voluntarily delay its proposed $111-billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery at least until mid-August amid a legal challenge brought by 12 state attorneys general.
The states, led by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, have asked a judge to issue a temporary restraining order that would prevent Paramount from finalizing its deal as the court battle ramps up. Paramount made the pledge in hopes of avoiding such a ruling that would tie its hands — and give the states an early win in the litigation.
Federal District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said she would decide by Wednesday whether to issue a restraining order.
Tech scion David Ellison has been a regular in Washington D.C. this year as he races to consolidate Warner Bros. Discovery — less than a year after his family bought Paramount.
(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
Friday’s hearing in Oakland opened the first chapter in the fight over the blockbuster deal that both sides agree would dramatically reshape Hollywood. Two century-old film studios — with rights to Harry Potter, Batman, “Top Gun,” “The Big Bang Theory” and “Game of Thrones” — would be combined, and HBO and CNN would come under new ownership.
Antitrust attorney James H. Weingarten, of the Washington law firm Milbank, represents California and the other states. He told the judge it would be impossible to untangle the two companies if they are allowed to combine.
“If this merger is allowed to close … the harms begin,” Weingarten said. “The job losses, the synergies — that’s the fancy word for ‘we’re going to save money and there might be job cuts.’ All of that process starts rolling.”
Bonta filed the suit Monday, alleging the proposed merger — the largest in Hollywood in decades — would violate the U.S. Clayton Antitrust Act, a 112-year-old law to prevent mergers that weaken competition and raise costs for consumers.
The lawsuit alleges antitrust violations in three markets where the two companies currently compete: wide-release films, potential blockbuster movies and cable television, where the combined entity would own more than 50 cable channels.
Paramount shares fell 4.3% to $8.75 on Friday. Warner stock slipped 1.5% to $26.87 — below Paramount’s offer of $31 a share.
More than two dozen lawyers attended Friday’s hearing, including from Colorado, Oregon, Washington and New York who came to support California, which is leading the case.
Paramount, represented by antitrust lawyer Jeffrey L. Kessler, argued a temporary restraining order was not necessary. The two sides should instead focus on the next big step — whether the judge issues a preliminary injunction, he said. Such a ruling could delay the deal for months.
Kessler said Paramount should be allowed a hearing to defend against a preliminary injunction by the end of August. The company wants to wrap up the litigation by late September to avoid a higher payout to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders.
In a show of confidence earlier this year, Paramount offered Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders a “ticking fee” of 25 cents for every quarter after Sept. 30 — until the deal was done. Such payments would cost Paramount more than $7 million a day, which Kessler called a “massive injury.”
California Atty Gen. Rob Bonta is leading a coalition of 12 state attorneys general to try to halt Hollywood’s biggest merger in decades.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Paramount would also have to pay Warner a $7-billion breakup fee should the deal fall apart.
Kessler argued the states had not made a sufficient case that competition would be harmed. “We don’t think they’ve come close to jumping through that hurdle,” Kessler said.
Earlier this year, Kessler represented the state attorney generals in their winning case against Live Nation Entertainment. A jury found that Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, operated as a monopoly. This time, Kessler is representing corporate interests.
Prominent Los Angeles litigator Daniel Petrocelli is representing Warner Bros. Discovery.
Paramount hired attorney Jeffrey Kessler to lead its antitrust defense.
(Noah Berger / Associated Press)
The case was assigned to Martínez-Olguín Wednesday after Paramount requested an earlier judge be removed because he formerly worked as a labor attorney.
Martínez-Olguín said she inherited the case because she was already overseeing another lawsuit dealing with the merger — not because Paramount had agitated for a change.
WASHINGTON — President Trump and his allies escalated attacks on U.S. elections on Friday, after the president’s prime-time effort to convince Americans that that the nation’s voting systems are fundamentally flawed, and threatened to punish California and other Democratic states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials with fines and prison if they don’t turn over voter rolls to federal officials seeking to root out purported illegal voting by non-citizens.
“Try us,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X in response to Mullin’s threats. He added that “California has free, fair, and secure elections” and that the state “will fight for them.”
The administration’s threats — made less than four months before the November midterm elections — are a continuation of an aggressive Trump-led campaign to use the federal government to attempt to overhaul the nation’s voting systems and sow public mistrust in elections.
The administration has tried for months to compel Democrat-led states into handing over sensitive voter data to the federal government, but the efforts have run into resistance in courts, in part out of concern for privacy laws. The courts have also reaffirmed in many cases that the Constitution gives states — not the federal government — primary authority over elections.
On Friday, Mullin said his agency has found “as many as” 190,832 possible non-citizens registered to vote in California, along with more in three other Democratic-led states. He said Homeland Security arrived at those numbers by checking the four states’ public voter records.
He vowed to withhold federal election security grants from states until they agree to the administration’s demands, including having their voter registration lists “scrubbed” and their election security systems updated.
“If these states want a grant and they want to be reimbursed to run federal elections, they are going to have to implement security measures,” Mullin said at a news conference. “We need to make sure that individuals who are legally able to vote are voting.”
Newsom said the state had “no idea” where that claim came from. The administration has not made its methodology public, and the system Mullin’s department has used to check for non-citizens in the past has inaccurately flagged some citizens as non-citizens. Past election reviews have found non-citizen voting is rare.
“There is plenty of reason to be suspicious of the claims from the administration,” said Brendan Fisher, director of strategic investigations at the Campaign Legal Center, “and every reason for voters to have confidence in our elections.”
Mullin’s remarks came the day after Trump delivered a prime-time address about vulnerabilities in the election system, claims that largely were not backed up by the evidence he provided. The White House released a trove of declassified documents that fell short of showing that any American election had been affected by fraud or foreign interference.
The White House dug in on the strategy Friday morning, deploying agency heads to continue amplifying the idea of election vulnerabilities, even after fact-checks showed most of his claims were exaggerated and had been previously known, investigated or debunked.
“SAVE OUR ELECTIONS,” the White House said on X.
Trump also used his address to pressure Congress to pass legislation that would tighten voting restrictions and could make it harder for millions to register to vote and cast ballots. While hardline Republicans applauded him, others in the party have rebuffed his request.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Friday that he did not understand why Trump is focusing on a past election when Republicans should focus on what is ahead.
“I think historically the midterms for the party in power are really tough,” Cornyn said. “So, yeah, I am concerned about it. We ought to be talking about things looking forward that our constituents are most concerned about.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said the nation’s electoral systems are safe, and while he thinks election officials need to be “vigilant,” he said he is more concerned about economic issues ahead of the midterms..
Discussing the legislation ahead of the speech Thursday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said it would be “impossible” to carry out changes to the nation’s voting laws in time for the midterms.
“The only thing that will occur is an undermining of the integrity of our elections right now,” Tillis said on the Senate floor.
David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, called Mullin’s threats “laughable.”
“There is no significant pool of federal grant money appropriated, so this threat has no teeth for any state. None of them are expecting any significant federal funds for elections,” Becker said.
Mullin told reporters Friday the federal government plans to use public records requests to try to obtain the voter roll information in order to investigate whether non-citizens have voted. Any member of the public can make a public records request; the move signals that the government has few remaining avenues to force the state to turn over voter data.
But Mullin appeared to acknowledge the limitations, saying: “I obviously can’t force the states.” He later threatened to levy fines, penalties or criminal charges against elections officials in states that don’t comply with the government’s demand.
If their behavior wasn’t criminal, Mullin said he would make sure state and county officials — who do not work for the federal government — would “never work for the federal government again.”
More than a dozen courts have ruled against the Justice Department’s highly unusual demand for state voter rolls. The federal government is not entitled to the data under federal law, Becker said.
He said previous government investigations into non-citizen voting have found that most people flagged against DHS’ database were either citizens or non-citizens who had never registered themselves to vote.
The Trump administration has used a database from an immigration verification system to flag possible non-citizen voters, but election officials have found that method misidentified some voters. Even with citizens mistakenly included in the count, the number of possible ineligible voters was extremely low — in Texas, 0.0001% of voters.
While Trump’s speech prompted warnings from his critics that he could be laying the groundwork to take further steps to interfere with or tighten restrictions on elections, experts said he was running out of moves.
Becker predicted that Trump would not actually attempt to cancel elections or send officers to the polls and that courts would block the president if he declared a national emergency to exert control over elections.
“But I think there are people in the administration, including the president himself, who would like us all to think this is possible,” he said.
Fisher said Trump may be trying to lay the groundwork to dispute the midterm results if he doesn’t like the outcome, but said his powers to do so are limited.
“There’s safeguards and laws in place to protect the freedom to vote,” Fisher said, “and voters should tune out the noise and continue to participate in our democracy.”
