Monday, Sep 30th
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Political Glance
The boxes reportedly contained important records of communication, gifts and letters from world leaders, which, according to the Post, is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
The newspaper added that the boxes retrieved from the Florida estate included correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as well as a letter from former President Obama to Trump.
Dozens of local and state Republican leaders who showed their loyalty to Donald Trump by casting fake electoral votes for him a year ago may now face prison time in return for that devotion.
Because as the House select committee investigating the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, starts to look into the origins of the scheme to send “alternate” ballots to Congress from states narrowly won by Joe Biden, the 59 ersatz Trump electors who claimed to be “duly elected and qualified” could face federal charges ranging from election fraud to mail fraud, in addition to a range of state-level charges.
And in two of the states, the Democratic attorneys general are openly calling on the Department of Justice to act.
“I believe it’s critical that the federal government fully investigates and prosecutes any unlawful actions in furtherance of any seditious conspiracy,” said Josh Kaul, attorney general of Wisconsin, where 10 Republicans filed papers claiming to be the state’s electors even though Biden narrowly won there.
A Capitol police sergeant seriously injured in the Jan. 6 insurrection called it a “disgrace” that former Vice President Mike Pence recently seemed to downplay the significance of the day after officers risked their lives to save his.
“That one day in January almost cost my life,” Sgt. Aquilino Gonell told NPR in an interview this week.
“We did everything possible to prevent him [Pence] from being hanged and killed in front of his daughter and his wife. And now he’s telling us that that one day in January doesn’t mean anything. It’s pathetic,” Gonell said. “It’s a disgrace.”
Gonell was attacked by the mob on Jan. 6, 2021, and dragged by his leg. He still does not have full use of his left arm.
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to block the National Archives from turning over records from his time in the White House to the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Lower court rulings directing the National Archives to hand the material over to Congress were wrong, his lawyers said in their appeal.
"The decisions below effectively gut the ability of former presidents to maintain executive privilege over the objection of an incumbent, who is often, as is the case here, a political rival," they said.
The House committee is asking for a trove of documents related to the events surrounding the riot, including records of communication between the White House and the Justice Department leading up to Jan. 6. Trump objected, asserting executive privilege, but President Joe Biden declined to back up that assertion. Instead, he directed National Archives to hand over the material.
A member of Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign arranged and participated in a meeting at which a Georgia election worker says she was pressed by a Chicago publicist to falsely admit voting fraud.
The revelation directly ties a senior figure in the former president’s political operation to an extraordinary late-night Jan. 4 meeting in which a $16-an-hour election worker faced pressure to implicate herself in a baseless conspiracy theory, stoked by Trump himself, as he sought to overturn his Georgia election loss.
Harrison Floyd - who was executive director of a national campaign coalition called Black Voices for Trump in 2020 - told Reuters on Monday that he asked Chicago publicist Trevian Kutti to visit the Atlanta area to speak with 62-year-old temporary election worker Ruby Freeman. Floyd said he then participated by phone in a meeting Kutti held with Freeman at a police station in Georgia’s Cobb County.
Donald Trump’s new social media venture announced Saturday it has won a commitment for $1 billion from an unidentified “diverse group of institutional investors” — even though his operation missed a partial launch deadline last month.
Trump’s Truth Social media venture was supposed to launch an invitation-only beta test version of the social media site last week, but it didn’t happen. It still only exists as a largely promotional website (with a waiting list) six weeks after Trump announced the venture.
CNBC called the deadline the first “test” of whether Trump could deliver what he promised.
The share price of Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) — the SPAC company that plans to merge with the former president’s Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (TMTG) — has dropped dramatically since skyrocketing after the former president first announced the project.
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A U.S. appeals court on Friday upheld its decision to put on hold an order by President Joe Biden for companies with 100 workers or more to require COVID-19 vaccines, rejecting a challenge by his administration.
A three-member panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans affirmed its ruling despite the Biden administration's position that halting implementation of the vaccine mandate could lead to dozens or even hundreds of deaths.
"The mandate is staggeringly overbroad," the opinion said.
"The mandate is a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers)," Circuit Court Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote for the panel.
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