<A major documentary on the Ohio State University (OSU) sexual abuse scandal that is expected to renew attention on then-OSU coach and now Republican Congressman Jim Jordan is currently in the middle of production.

The untitled Max (HBO) film, produced by George Clooney and directed by Academy Award-winner Eva Orner, will tell the story of decades of abuse by former OSU sports doctor Richard Strauss through the eyes of victims “including All American wrestlers and football players, many of whom have not spoken out until now”, the streaming site said in a statement last year.

A staffer at Clooney’s production house Smokehouse Pictures told The Independent they were “still thick in production on it”.

Attention on the scandal intensified in recent weeks as Jordan began his ill-fated run for House Speaker, only to be cast aside by the same chaotic forces he helped to foster within the party. Mr Jordan has denied any knowledge of the abuse by Strauss, despite numerous witnesses stating they discussed it with him directly.

Several victims have since gone on record to say that Mr Jordan’s alleged participation in the culture of silence that enabled Strauss’ abuse to go unpunished should have disqualified him from the speakership.

Mike Schyck is one of the more than 300 victims of Strauss’ abuse and revealed that he was flown to Columbus, Ohio, for multiple days of interviews with Ms Orner and the production crew.

The filmmakers also travelled to his home in Englewood, Florida, for further interviews with him and his family members.

Mr Schyck told The Independent that he and other survivors are quietly hoping the film will have an enormous impact on ongoing attempts to hold OSU accountable, but that focus on Mr Jordan’s role in the scandal was being cynically exploited by his political enemies.

“People are trying to get soundbites to affect what he is doing politically,” Mr Schyck said. “I have one sole purpose and that’s to help my teammates and all the other athletes seek justice.”

The documentary had been slated for release later this year or possibly early next year, Mr Schyck told The Independent, but that following conversations with Ms Orner, he now understands that the release had been delayed as the filmmakers continued to uncover fresh details.

“She says it’s an ever changing thing. New data comes forward every day. They’re waiting for a final product as we all are.”

They spent time trailing him at Lemon Bay High School on Florida’s Gulf Coast, where as head wrestling coach he mentored his son to two state championships.

Survivors were also asked to send boxes of photos, clippings, and documents to the filmmakers from their time at Ohio State.

Mr Schyck had been upset by the rush to criticise Mr Jordan for his role in the culture of silence surrounding Strauss’ abuse, whose victims spanned multiple sports and began long before Mr Jordan arrived at the university in 1986, and continued after he left in 1994.

“Over 30 years, how many (OSU) assistant coaches came and went and we’re isolating one? Jordan made his choices as to how he would navigate through this and I fault him for that. But for isolating him, I think it’s irresponsible,” he told The Independent.

The attacks on Mr Jordan, who is often referred to as “Gym Jordan” by critics, marginalises the suffering of the survivors, says Schyck.

“People are uneducated about the case, and revile him for his political beliefs and they’re going to pile on in any way they can,” said Mr Schyck.

Strauss, who died in 2005, was accused of preying on hundreds of students between the 1970s and 1990s ranging from genital fondling to rape during medical checks.

Mr Schyck is one of dozens of victims who have spent the past five years in litigation with the university where he spent eight years as a student and assistant wrestling coach.

After Strauss’ crimes came to light in 2018, Mr Jordan strongly denied any knowledge of them.

A 2019 independent investigation by law firm Perkins Coie found that university staff knew of complaints about Strauss’ conduct as early as 1979 but failed to investigate or act meaningfully.

The report found that dozens of members of the Ohio State athletic department, including 22 coaches, knew about complaints or rumours about Strauss.

Mr Jordan was not mentioned by name, and told reporters in 2019 that he felt vindicated by its findings.

A spokesman for Mr Jordan did not respond to multiple requests for comment by The Independent about the documentary.

OSU has already admitted to failing to protect students and paid out $60m to settle claims by nearly 300 victims....>

<.....But it has fought to dismiss five remaining lawsuits by dozens of other students. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the cases could proceed despite the statute of limitations running out.

After issuing public apologies and paying out millions to victims, Ohio State denied it ever “admitted” to any wrongdoing in a court filing earlier this month, which according to Mr Schyck is just the latest example of the way it has gaslit the victims for decades.

Pre-trial hearings for Mr Schyck’s case in the Southern District of Ohio are due to take place in November.

Mr Jordan has been named in at least one of the outstanding lawsuits, and scrutiny on his knowledge of the abuse will likely continue.

Mr Schyck told The Independent he had been through the gamut of emotions in agreeing to tell his story to the documentary makers.

“I can get emotional. I’m a fiery guy. And through this I’ve found myself crying over certain things,” he said.

“I’m nervous about that because I don’t know how that’s going to play. I never wanted to be in a position where I’m talking about this. I’m a private guy and to have that under the microscope, it’s a little scary.”

He said the filmmakers had gone to painstaking lengths to expose the university’s role in covering up the abuse, and that it has the potential to be a “game changer”.

“They’re not going to pull any punches, they’re going to try and show accountability where it should be had,” said Mr Schyk. “There’s so many layers to what happened. It’s not only about the abuse that happened, but the betrayal from it.”

He believes the scandal could come to be seen alongside former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar’s years of abuse at Michigan State University as among the worst university sexual abuse scandals in US history. Michigan State has agreed to pay out more than $500m to dozens of Nassar’s victims.

The documentary was first announced in February 2021, and is being produced by Clooney and long-time filmmaking partner Grant Heslov, along with Sports Illustrated Studios/101 Studios.

It is based on Jon Wertheim’s Sports Illustrated’s October 2020 story “Why Aren’t More People Talking About the Ohio State Sex Abuse Scandal?”.

A spokesperson for Clooney told The Independent he was not available to talk about the documentary “at this time”.

A spokesperson for Max’s owner Warner Media said there was no information to share about a possible release date.

Ohio State did not respond to a request for comment about the documentary.

With heavyweight Hollywood backers and a director with Academy and Emmy Award-winning pedigree, the film is likely to attract significant Oscar buzz, which could also influence its release date.>

<We live in the age of self-aggrandizing victimhood. Why take responsibility for your own actions when you can blame outside forces? The election was rigged. The media is out to get me. My neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard no longer want me shilling my books at the local library.

And while there are certainly cases where bad things happen through outside forces, over the past few years this kind of performative victimhood (as a way to avoid responsibility) has taken on a life of its own through a different kind of moral panic: one in which people who are simply facing reasonable consequences for their own speech or actions try to tie themselves awkwardly to actual unfair scenarios of opprobrium, in order to frame the criticism as unfair.

We saw this a few years ago in the infamously milquetoast Harper’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate, in which a bunch of mostly uncontroversial claims were made regarding the importance of “the free exchange of ideas,” while implying that “cancel culture,” was somehow a grave threat. The letter gave vague descriptions of a few scenarios that seemed unfair, without exploring the details and nuances. But, even worse, it lumped together scenarios where there were likely reasonable arguments for why someone might face the consequences of their own actions, with the relatively rare scenarios in which public ridicule or humiliation was perhaps unwarranted.

Last week we saw a new entrant in this genre—self-importantly dubbed, “The Westminster Declaration”—talking up concerns about international censorship.

To be clear, I have many concerns about international censorship, and have spent much of the past two decades fighting against all sorts of government censorship campaigns across various countries. I’ve fought in court for free speech rights and criticized attempts by governments around the globe to move towards censorship.

And thus, I think there is much in the Westminster Declaration that is worth supporting. We’re seeing laws pushed, worldwide, that seek to silence voices on the internet. Global attacks on privacy and speech-enhancing encryption technologies are a legitimate concern.

But the Declaration—apparently authored by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, along with Andrew Lowenthal, according to their announcement of the document—seeks to take those legitimate concerns and wrap them tightly around a fantasy concoction. It’s a moral panic of their own creation, arguing that separate from the legitimate concern of censorial laws being passed in numerous countries passed, there is something more nefarious—what they have hilariously dubbed “the censorship-industrial complex.”

To be clear, this is something that does not actually exist. It’s a fever dream from people who are upset that they, or their friends, violated the rules of social media platforms and faced the consequences.

But, unable to admit that private entities determining their own rules is an act of free expression itself (the right not to associate with speech is just as important as the right to speak), the crux of the Westminster Declaration is an attempt to commingle legitimate concerns about government censorship with grievances about private companies’ moderation decisions.

Taibbi and Shellenberger were two of the leading writers of the so-called “Twitter Files,” supposed pieces of investigative journalism built on information Elon Musk allowed them to see—mostly emails of former Twitter employees—to try to understand how pre-Musk Twitter made moderation decisions.

Unfortunately, Taibbi and Shellenberger had little understanding of what they were looking at, meaning they made confused and often blatantly incorrect or misleading interpretations.

If you read the Twitter Files’ underlying documents, they actually showed a company that struggled with the same moderation decisions that every company struggles with. They showed a company that more often than not pushed back on or ignored reports sent from government entities (which reported content to be evaluated against a site’s rules, just like anyone else could report spam or harassment).

Just as one example, Taibbi and Shellenberger stated that the Election Integrity Partnership (a consortium of academic researchers, which is not the government, though it did accept a small number of reports from election officials) reported 22 million tweets to Twitter. This was false. It flagged 2,890 tweets (it later studied 22 million tweets to understand how disinformation spread) for Twitter to look at, and Twitter reviewed them and did nothing about most of them, only taking action on a small fraction of the flagged content (less than 30 percent)....>

<.....And when Twitter actually took action, more often than not it added context (i.e. using its own speech, which you’d think these defenders of free expression would support). In the extremely rare cases where content was removed (in less than 10 percent of the flagged tweets), the tweets were either phishing scams or outright lies about when and how to vote—in other words, tweets that were so illegal someone just got sentenced to seven months in prison over them.

Anyone who actually understands how social media works found the Twitter Files the opposite of scandalous. They actually showed a surprising level of competence by the former team at Twitter, tasked with the impossible job of keeping 200+ million people from fighting all the time or, worse, scamming others.

With the Westminster Declaration, Taibbi and Shellenberger seek to transform the emptiness of their Twitter Files reporting into a modern day Pentagon Papers, by adding it to legitimate attempts by governments to pass dangerous censorial laws that strip away speech rights, and pretending that these are all the same. (Even more ridiculously, the Declaration’s authors imply that the Twitter Files—which showed private companies exercising their own speech rights—are somehow worse than governments passing speech suppressing laws.)

As with the Harper’s Letter, Taibbi and Shellenberger were able to convince some true free speech supporters to sign onto this declaration, and then surrounded them with people who are grifters of the first order. The “cancel culture” brigade is out in force, signing on to the declaration to declare themselves victims of attacks on free speech.

There are too many names to go through them all, but the list includes long-term grievance peddlers like Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, and Glenn Greenwald, who have spent the past few years insisting that the powers that be wish to silence them, even as they get more attention than ever before.

Let’s look at one example: Peter Boghossian, a philosopher who was found to have violated research ethics rules while he was an assistant professor at Portland State University, and subsequently has become such a defender of “free expression” and “classical liberalism” that he has become a guest instructor at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a Hungarian organization funded by Hungary’s extremely illiberal autocratic leader, Viktor Orban, to steer Hungarian academics from going too woke. (Nothing says free expression and liberal debate like working for an authoritarian strongman at a university whose entire role is to shut down teaching on topics you disapprove of.)

Another example is Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist and ethics professor, who has become the darling of many who seek to regulate social media after claiming the evidence shows that social media is the cause of both the fall of democracy and mental wellbeing.

Leaving aside the fact that social scientists reviewing the data Haidt relied on for both claims have highlighted that he misread the data in both cases, it seems odd for him to sign on to this document, which effectively argues that any attempt by social media companies to mitigate harms on their platform (the very harms that Haidt keeps insisting are dangerous to society) is somehow an attack on the rights of free expression the document insists must be protected.

The only consistent way to read this is Haidt arguing that social media creates real harms to society, but any social media company attempting to minimize those harms is a threat to the fabric of democracy.

But there is no consistency here in any of this.

That is the Westminster Declaration in a nutshell. It’s inherently contradictory. To protect our free speech rights, we must take away the free speech rights of others.

The Taibbi/Shellenberger interpretation of the Twitter Files is an attempt to shut down the rights of private companies to enforce their own rules and cultivate their own communities, by laundering it with actual censorial government acts.

Even worse, their framing seeks to shut down and destroy the free speech rights of academic organizations that are studying how disinformation spreads. For all their talk of supporting free speech, the inclusion of the (misrepresented) Twitter Files is literally the opposite: an attempt to silence debate, research, and exploration in how to respond to nonsense—the very nonsense many of those who signed the Westminster Declaration make their living spreading.>

<Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., is leading a bipartisan team of lawmakers to stop the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from finishing a database that contains the private information of investors, calling it a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The Consolidated Auto Trail, or CAT, was originally proposed in 2010 to help regulators track order and trading activity throughout U.S. markets on equities and options. The database will list all the financial holdings and personal information of investors, including their name, phone number, address, brokerage accounts, birthdate and Social Security number.

"Collecting and storing personal data in the CAT serves no regulatory purpose. It’s unconstitutional, and it puts about 158 million Americans at risk," Kennedy told FOX Business. "Since the SEC seems set on ignoring the Fourth Amendment, I’ve introduced a bill that would stop the SEC from requiring brokers to give investors’ personal information to the CAT."

In response to the regulator’s September announcement, Kennedy, R-La., and Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., sent a letter to the U.S. Comptroller Gene Dodaro on Oct. 5 saying the CAT has experienced several operational delays as market participants, SEC commissioners and members of Congress continued to raise concerns over the growing costs related to the list’s implementation.

When the CAT was first approved in 2016, plan participants estimated the average annual costs of operating the plan at a little more than $51 million. By March of this year, the CAT published a 2023 budget of $223 million, according to the SEC.

Adopted on Sept. 6, the SEC's funding model for the database is called the Executed Share Model. The model will allocate two-thirds of CAT operating costs on brokers and one-third to exchanges, burdening over 80% of CAT costs to industry member broker-dealers, according to the American Securities Association.

When the list is fully operational between 2024 and 2025, companies and investors trading on the U.S. stock exchanges will have just 24 hours to fulfill the SEC’s request for the information.

"The SEC will be required to delete any personally identifiable information that it may collect as part of a specific investigation as soon as that issue is resolved — so bureaucrats can’t build a perennial database that exposes investors’ private information," Kennedy added.

Introduced in the House by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., in July, Kennedy’s Protecting Investors’ Personally Identifiable Information Act was designed to safeguard data that could reveal the identity of American investors.

According to Kennedy’s bill, should the SEC attain personally identifiable information, the commission will destroy that data no later than one day after the investigation’s conclusion.

"The SEC would only be able to obtain personal information on a case-by-case basis," Kennedy said.

The SEC declined to comment on the proposed legislation.

"The CAT has been expensive, far more costly than anyone imagined it would be," SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in a statement last month. "CAT’s considerable costs need to be allocated, and no allocation method is ideal. And regardless of which approach we choose; most costs ultimately will come out of investor pockets."

While the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the brokerage industry raised "meaningful" and "understandable" objections to the allocation of expenses, the Wall Street regulator said that given the price tag of more than $500 million to date and billions to come, "discontent would be inevitable under almost any method of allocation, as reaction to previous fee filing models has shown," Peirce followed in her September statement.

"Bureaucrats are known for overreach, and a new Republican bill will protect the American people from this invasion of privacy," ASA chief executive Chris Iacovella said in a recent interview with FOX Business. "Democrats think the SEC needs this information to stop insider trading, which is untrue, as the commission brings an average of 100 cases per year under the current system. Additionally, some Democrats strongly support a surveillance state."

Joining the ASA and Kennedy’s fight against the SEC’s CAT list are legislators from both the House and Senate, including Republican Sens. Michael Rounds of South Dakota; Jerry Moran of Kansas; David Daines of Montana; John Boozman and Tom Cotton of Arkansas; and Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, as well as Rep. Loudermilk.

Attorneys general from Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia have also taken a stance alongside Kennedy, the ASA confirmed.

<The House Republicans were giddy, boisterous, maybe a little punch-drunk after a lengthy day — at the end of a lengthy several weeks — spent trying to select a new leader for their party’s conference. They had at last landed on one, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), and crowded around him as he answered questions from reporters.

One came from ABC News’s Rachel Scott.

“Mr. Johnson,” she began, “you helped lead the effort to overturn the 2020 election results —”

Johnson began shaking his head, a disappointed look on his face. His colleagues around him began to groan.

“ — do you stand by—” Scott continued, but by then the conference members had decided that no such line of questioning would be allowed.

Loud boos. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), at one point his conference’s selection for the speakership, laughed. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) mockingly told Scott to “shut up” more than once.

Johnson turned his attention away. “Next question,” he said.

Scott didn’t get an answer to her question — though, of course, in a sense she did. But she also managed to unintentionally expose the central reason that the party has taken so long to unify around a leader: It’s still torn between two factions, one beholden to Donald Trump and his politics, and the other not.

As the history books will note, Johnson was the second person nominated to serve as speaker by his party’s conference. Not the second person in total; that number is now up to four in the three weeks since Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was removed from his position thanks to a motion brought by right-wing Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). Johnson was the second nominee on Tuesday.

A few hours earlier, the caucus had settled on Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), someone generally viewed as acceptable to enough of the party’s two poles to manage the harder task of winning a majority of votes cast by the full House. But Emmer’s forward progress came to a sudden halt, thanks in part to Trump.

Emmer had done the ring-kissing that is expected of Republican congressional leaders. (McCarthy’s trip to Mar-a-Lago in early 2021 is by now the stuff of legend.) But suddenly Trump weighed in against his candidacy, hard. Emmer, the former president wrote on social media, was a RINO, a Republican-in-name-only — a pejorative that Trump generally uses not to reflect a person’s politics but their personal loyalty.

His bid for the speakership had other obstacles, certainly; other legislators, mostly ones closer to Trump, offered criticisms of Emmer’s tenure and views. We are in an era where legislative histories are often stripped of context and converted to litmus tests, and this was quickly deployed against Emmer. But it’s hard to believe that had Trump offered a full-throated endorsement of Emmer this wouldn’t have been more muted.

After all, this wasn’t Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the fringe-right megaphone who had been Trump’s initial pick for the job. The opposition McCarthy faced on the House floor in January was generally from his party’s more conservative wing, from legislators whose districts had voted more heavily for Trump in 2020. When Jordan was the nominee for speaker, though, the opposition came from the other side, from less-conservative legislators in districts Trump had won more narrowly or even lost.

Those less-conservative members of the caucus who blocked Jordan weren’t likely to dig in as much against someone who was closer to McCarthy. But the more conservative ones, given the space to do so by Trump, certainly were.

One of those who had ultimately voted against Jordan, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), told reporters about one of the issues that was cited in opposition to Emmer: his failure to vote to reject electors for Joe Biden in January 2021.

This did, in fact, put Emmer in the minority in his conference. Most Republicans who currently serve in the House voted to reject the electors submitted by Arizona or Pennsylvania — not because there was evidence that those states awarded Biden their electoral votes incorrectly but as a demonstration of fealty to Trump’s unrelenting insistence that he’d won the election.

They voted to reject those electors in the hours after the Capitol riot; they took the position that the intended aim of the rioters — subverting the election results — was good, even if the tactics put their own lives at risk.....>

<.....Scott asked about this at the GOP’s celebratory news conference because Johnson was central to the House effort to call the election results into question. In December 2020, shortly before the electors were formalized and sent to Washington to be counted, Johnson led the effort to get Republican legislators to join an amicus brief in support of a particularly ridiculous legal challenge to the results. (The Supreme Court rejected it out of hand.)

At the time, the New Yorker’s Issac Chotiner asked Johnson about that effort, Chotiner at times deploying sarcasm to press the legislator. Johnson insisted that his objections were centered on offering Trump legal pathways to elevating questions about fraud — questions that, even at that point, had been almost entirely adjudicated. He also suggested that his effort was meant to press the court to allow state legislators freer rein in appointing electors, something he said was “hang[ing] over the election cycle this year.” (“It didn’t come up in the debates, but it was the underlying issue,” Chotiner wryly observed.)

“I say this for Americans of both parties or any party, or whoever they voted for: we all should have an interest in these very specific clauses of the Constitution being followed,” Johnson said at one point.

“That was a big thing about why people supported Trump originally — the importance of following the Constitution closely,” Chotiner replied.

Missing the dig, Johnson agreed.

“Sure, sure. Exactly,” he said. “As an aside, I was on a radio interview this morning and was asked, “What do we do now? Don’t we need to beat them at their own game?” And what is implied is, “They cheated; we need to cheat better than they do.” And my response is, “Wait a minute. We are supposed to be the Party that stands for the rule of law.”

In a different radio interview the month before, Johnson had offered his thoughts on these alleged cheaters.

“It is evil. I mean, look, the integrity of our election system in our constitutional republic is an essential foundation of making our system work,” he said. “And when people lose their faith in those foundations and our institutions of government, then they just want to resolve their disputes in the streets.”

Fast-forward to January 2021, after more weeks without evidence of fraud but with escalating anger and rhetoric from Trump. On the morning of the Jan. 6 riot, Johnson shared his plan to serve as the point of the sitting president’s spear on the House floor.

His argument was not that the election was stolen through acts of evil. It was that the expansion of access to voting that accompanied the coronavirus pandemic was at times of questionable legality, which meant that a number of votes should be thrown out as invalid. This was a popular bit of rhetoric for those eager to align with Trump and his base but unwilling to keep hyping increasingly obviously untrue claims of fraud.

It is also a fundamentally more anti-democratic argument, contrary to Johnson’s insistence to Chotiner. It’s not that the vote was tainted in a way that didn’t reflect the will of the voters; it’s that some of that will should be set aside in a way that alters the results of the contest.

It is very much the sort of question that the next House speaker should be asked to explain. But on Tuesday night, Johnson was safely ensconced in a bubble within a bubble that protected him. The immediate bubble was that cadre of colleagues who shouted down Scott’s question. The broader bubble is the one in which all of them operate — the one maintained by Trump’s rhetoric and right-wing media like Fox News in which questioning legislators’ willingness to try to subvert the 2020 election is an unacceptable demonstration of left-wing activism. In this universe, the only people asking why members of Congress would try to undermine the election results are socialist weirdos. The outcry that Scott endured was forged in that crucible.

It is also fundamentally the Republican conference’s problem. They are beholden to that media universe and to Trump, in part because the legislators have so willingly handed over their power to them. Emmer was unacceptable — as McCarthy was and as Scalise was — because he wasn’t sufficiently embedded in that bubble. Jordan was, but he lost because there was still some tugging from outside the bubble, but that end of the rope generally loses such tugs-of-war.

On Tuesday night, Johnson’s candidacy appeared to be bubble-sufficient while not being too embedded to turn off the less conservative members of the conference. We’ll see if that holds on the floor. But if he’s elected speaker, Johnson will at some point again be asked about his efforts to subvert the 2020 vote, and he won’t be surrounded by a cluster of hooting allies who can drown the question out.

<One of the attorneys representing Donald Trump in his civil fraud trial got into a heated exchange on Wednesday with one of the lawyers from Attorney General Letitia James' legal team.

Attorneys Christopher Kise and Alina Habba continued the day's proceedings by cross-examining former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who first took the stand on Tuesday and was in the same room as the former president for the first time in five years.

Cohen is a witness for the state of New York as part of James' $250 million lawsuit alleging inflation of the net worth by Trump, two of his sons and the Trump Organization. Trump has maintained his innocence, rebuking the accusations in the suit by claiming political motivations by Democrats intended to negatively impact his 2024 presidential bid.

As Habba continued questioning Cohen today, including about excerpts from his book Revenge and from older news stories in which he expressed his affinity for Trump, a verbal argument reportedly broke out between Kise and the attorney general's office's lawyer, Colleen Faherty.

Faherty repeatedly interrupted Habba's line of questioning, according to The Daily Beast's Jose Pagliery, who was present in the courtroom. It prompted Kise to call her out, to which Judge Arthur Engoron requested respect for the state's legal team.

Kise reportedly mentioned the attorney general's office trying to sanction him in the past, adding that respect isn't given but earned. He also mentioned that he had been practicing law for 30 years without sanctions until he encountered attempts by the attorney general.

"I've argued four cases before the Supreme Court—they want me to be respectful to them?" Kise said.

James' office wanted to sanction Trump's legal team for continuing to raise "previously-rejected arguments" in their motions, according to court filings.

James called the defense lawyers' statements "frivolous and sanctionable" because "sophisticated defense counsel should have known better."

Within the past week, Engoron threatened "serious sanctions" for Trump's legal team due to the president becoming close to violating a gag order by way of his social media posts.

Cohen testified on Tuesday that he lied to Congress under Trump's direction and for his benefit.

"I was asked to increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected," Cohen said about Trump's 2011 financial statement, adding that it was his responsibility to reverse engineer various assets "in order to achieve a number that Mr. Trump asked" for.

Trump fired back post-testimony, referring to Cohen as "a disgraced felon."

"Michael Cohen was a complete and total disaster in the Biden Inspired Trial today. Lie after lie, and getting caught each time," Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday.

According to Pagliery, Cohen may have subjected himself to perjury based on new testimony in which he reportedly attempted to walk back his previous guilty plea for tax evasion even though he admitted guilt to a federal judge.

Cohen reportedly said he lied to that judge, which Habba and company deemed as perjury. The state called the accusations "showmanship.">

<One of former president Donald Trump’s favorite monickers for President Joe Biden is “Sleepy Joe,” in reference to the president’s supposed decline in mental faculties.

However, Trump, who is only three years younger than Biden, is not immune to committing his own public flubs and gaffes, as a recent incident raises doubts on his own mental capability to hold the White House for another four years.

In a rally in Derry, New Hampshire, Trump attempted to name-drop one of his supposed international leader friends who support him.

“The whole world is exploding. You know I was very honored—Victor Orban, did anyone ever hear of him? He’s probably one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. Right? He’s the leader of Turkey,” Trump boasted to the crowd.

Except Victor Orban is the prime minister of Hungary, and Turkey’s president is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. However, Orban and Erdoğan do share the distinction of being viewed as autocrats – leaders who wield absolute power in their own countries, similar to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

In another incident, Trump, criticizing Biden’s response toward Russia and the possible threat of a nuclear war, told supporters that Biden was poised to lead America into “World War 2,” and at the same time claimed that he beat former president Barack Obama in the 2016 presidential elections.

World War II ended when the Allied forces defeated Nazi Germany and the Axis powers way back in 1945. Trump did win the 2016 presidential election, but his opponent was Hilary Clinton, not Obama – who in turn, was ineligible for re-election, having served two terms in the White House already.

Joe Scarborough, who was a former representative under the Republican party, mocked Trump’s faux pas, suggesting that Trump’s media team might “want to take out the ‘cognitively impaired’ (in reference to Biden) part of his speeches from now on.”

Jonathan Lemire, who shares a show with Scarborough on MSNBC, echoed the sentiments. “That’s an attack line the Republicans and Trump love to use (against Biden) but, man, that does seem like he was looking in the mirror just there.”

“Trump is only three years younger and anyone watching Trump day in, day out says he’s changed too.” Lemire added.

However, Biden’s own public gaffes have been highlighted more – both in the media and among many prominent Republican personalities, and polls show that voters are more concerned over Biden’s mental capabilities than they are about Trump’s.

According to a fairly recent poll conducted by NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ, only 38.22% of American voters said that they were “very concerned” about Trump’s “cognitive health”. Significantly more voters, or 52.21%, expressed the same concern about president Biden. A larger percentage of voters also said that they were “not at all concerned” about Trump’s mental faculties – 22.91% – compared to the 13.19% the said [sic] the same of Biden.>

<A rambling social media screed in which Donald Trump dubbed court witnesses "weaklings and cowards" could be seen as an “implicit threat," a Washington Post opinion piece said Wednesday.

The former U.S. president took to Truth Social Tuesday night, soon after reports surfaced that Mark Meadows, his co-defendant and former chief of staff, had been granted immunity to deliver key testimony in the federal trial involving attempts to overturn the 2020 election result.

“Some people would make that deal, but they are weaklings and cowards, and so bad for the future [of] our Failing Nation,” Trump wrote.

“You can keep your family and your wealth, and, perhaps, if you can make up some really horrible ‘STUFF’ [about] him, we may very well erect a statue of you in the middle of our decaying and now very violent Capital.”

Washington Post analyst Aaron Blake called Trump’s Tuesday night post one of his “most brazen,” and suggested it may have violated conditions of his pretrial release, which include a pledge not to intimidate a witness.

“Trump is clearly intent upon testing what Chutkan will permit,” Blake wrote. “It’s difficult to see how that implicit threat of public opprobrium wouldn’t weigh on these witnesses and others who might cut their own deals.”

The comments could also run afoul of Chutkan’s limited gag order, which was suspended Friday as the judge considers how best a challenge [sic] to it from Trump’s attorneys.

Trump has already been fined twice for violating another gag order in his New York civil case, whose judge has threatened to throw the 2024 presidential candidate in prison.

Blake believes Trump will only continue to get more brazen, raising serious questions about whether the lead conservative candidate in the 2024 presidential election should be in any way silenced.

“Trump isn’t going to stop doing this and will probably just keep upping the ante,” Blake wrote.

“The big question is when a judge might decide that, whatever the drawbacks of severely sanctioning a presidential candidate and leader of a major political party, the alternative could be even worse.”>

<The Oregon Supreme Court will decide whether Republican state senators who carried out a record-setting GOP walkout during the legislative session this year can run for reelection.

The decision, announced Tuesday, means the lawmakers should have clarity before the March 12 deadline to file for office, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.

The senators from the minority party are challenging a 2022 voter-approved constitutional amendment that bars state lawmakers from reelection after having 10 or more unexcused absences. Oregon voters overwhelmingly approved the ballot measure that created the amendment following Republican walkouts in the Legislature in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

In an official explanatory statement, as well as in promotional materials and news coverage, the measure was touted as prohibiting lawmakers who stay away in order to block legislative action from seeking reelection.

That’s the meaning that state elections officials have chosen to adopt. Earlier this year, Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade announced that 10 senators would be prohibited from seeking reelection.

Nine Oregon Republicans and an independent clocked at least 10 absences during this year’s legislative session in order to block Democratic bills related to abortion, transgender health care and guns. The walkout prevented a quorum, holding up bills in the Democrat-led Senate for six weeks.

Five of those senators – Sens. Tim Knopp, Daniel Bonham, Suzanne Weber, Dennis Linthicum and Lynn Findley – have objected. In a legal challenge to Griffin-Valade’s ruling, they argue that the way the amendment is written means they can seek another term.

The constitutional amendment says a lawmaker is not allowed to run “for the term following the election after the member’s current term is completed.” Since a senator’s term ends in January while elections are held the previous November, they argue the penalty doesn’t take effect immediately, but instead, after they’ve served another term.

The senators filed the challenge in the Oregon Court of Appeals but asked that it go directly to the state Supreme Court. State attorneys defending Griffin-Valade in the matter agreed.

Several state senators with at least 10 absences during the most recent legislative session have already filed candidacy papers with election authorities.

Statehouses around the nation in recent years have become ideological battlegrounds, including in Montana, Tennessee and Oregon, where the lawmakers’ walkout this year was the longest in state history.

Arguments in the Oregon case are scheduled to start Dec. 14.>

<"The Problem with Jon Stewart" has been abruptly canceled at Apple TV+ just weeks before taping for Season 3 was scheduled to begin. The political talk show, which embraced the same general format and irreverent humor that its host made popular on "The Daily Show," marked Stewart's return to the medium after a six-year hiatus. The reason for the show's cancellation, however, isn't as simple as just low viewership or dwindling interest.

Stewart has never shied away from making enemies. His work on "The Daily Show" spearheaded a whole movement of comedically-tinged, left-leaning political talk shows that includes John Oliver's critically acclaimed "Last Week Tonight" and other now-defunct series like Hasan Minhaj's "Patriot Act" and "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee." Throughout his career, Stewart has used his platform to comment on everything from American warmongering and domestic gun laws to racial justice and veterans' healthcare. His style has always been bold, and he's often lambasted right-wing politics and corporate America in particular.

Now it seems that those strong views may have led to the cancellation of "The Problem." A report from The New York Times cites several sources close to the show who have claimed that Apple and Stewart parted ways over "creative differences." However, the report suggests that Apple's real motivation is far more political than artistic.

According to The New York Times, "The Problem with Jon Stewart" was canceled in part because of several topics intended for Season 3 -- specifically, episodes focused on China and artificial intelligence. These are both areas where Apple has major vested interests, so it seems plausible that executives outside the company's entertainment division might blanch at the prospect of funding and hosting high-budget critiques.

It's impossible to say for certain, of course, as Season 3 has now been canceled, but it's hard to imagine a commentator like Stewart coming out in support of widespread AI development. The technology has become incredibly polarizing over the past year, in large part due to legal questions over the right of generative AI to use uncredited work as inspiration. Apple has already picked a clear side in that debate, with the company planning to spend close to $1 billion annually going forward in efforts to catch up to competitors in the AI space.

The Times report doesn't clarify exactly what Season 3 of "The Problem" was going to cover regarding China, but Apple has an obvious desire to maintain strong relationships there as well. More than 95% of Apple's phones, computers, tablets, and other devices are made in China -- a staggering figure made even more striking by the allegations that Apple has faced of unethical working conditions in its Chinese factories.

Based on the New York Times report, it seems clear how a commentator like Jon Stewart might cause friction in a tech megacorporation like Apple. In some ways, it's surprising that his series lasted this long. The first two seasons already tackled issues like gender-affirming care for transgender minors and the United States' rampant gun violence epidemic. Sources told the Times that with the 2024 presidential election coming up, Apple likely feared being caught in the political crosshairs of boycotts and controversy.

Unfortunately, this isn't the first instance of a streaming giant giving up on this kind of programming. Netflix canceled "Patriot Act" after two years and six seasons. In the years prior, the streamer gave up on other short-lived talk shows like Chelsea Handler's "Chelsea" and "The Joel McHale Show." John Oliver -- an alumnus of Stewart's "Daily Show" -- has had the most success in recent years with "Last Week Tonight," which has earned dozens of Emmy wins over the course of a run that's approaching 10 years. But of course, HBO is quite different from more modern platforms like Netflix and Apple TV+.

Some of these cancellations are surely the result of programming mismatches. After all, talk shows are a classic TV formula, and they've certainly struggled to find an audience on streaming. But in the case of "The Problem," it's hard not to see Apple's rug-pull as media censorship. The more that companies like it and Amazon expand their streaming empires, the more people like Stewart will likely run afoul of corporate interests.>

<When I moved into the classroom full time, after four decades on the beat and in newsrooms, I thought I was well-equipped to prepare a new generation of journalists for the challenges that await them.

I was wrong.

It’s not the pedagogy that’s flummoxed me. It’s not the technology. It’s the hostility that I now find myself trying to coach my students to rise above. Weeks after I arrived on the campus of the Missouri School of Journalism, a student on a routine assignment was spat upon in 2018 and called “fake news.” A year or so ago, two student reporters for our NPR affiliate – at a political rally to which the station had been invited – were told to “go back to China.” We never publicized the incident but did call it to the attention of a party leader, who apologized to editors in private conversations.

Now it’s happened again. My colleagues at the Missouri School of Journalism and I have learned that one of our most outstanding young alumni has become the latest target of this sort of hate speech. Only this time, it did not come from some random ignoramus.

Smearing the messenger is a page straight out of China, Russia

In a radio interview, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen was asked to respond to a story written by Flatwater Free Press reporter Yanqi Xu (pronounced “Yen-chee Shu”). It detailed high levels of the pollutant nitrate found in the groundwater near his family’s massive hog operations.

First, Pillen said he hadn’t read the story. Then he added: “All you got to do is look at the author. The author is from communist China. What more do you need to know?”

Way to change the subject, governor. Instead of trying to respond to legitimate questions raised by a journalist, smear the messenger.

I’ll leave it to Yanqi’s editor, Matt Wynn, to tell you what more you need to know about this fine young journalist who grew up in Guangzhou, earned her master's degree at the University of Missouri-Columbia and joined the Flatwater Free Press in Omaha two years ago. He sums it up as well as any of her admiring mentors could. Let’s focus on the tactics used to question her.

Pillen’s gambit – trying to discredit a story by taking aim at the reporter’s character – was a page straight out of the dictators’ handbook.

Consider:

In Russia, Vladmir Putin jails Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as a “spy.” Now comes news that Putin has upped his hostage count, arresting Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reporter Alsu Kurmasheva on a similar charge.

In Niger, coup leaders accuse journalist Samira Sabou of treason.

In Guatemala, the regime sentenced José Rubén Zamora, the publisher of a leading newspaper, on trumped up charges of fiscal irregularities.

In the Philippines, former President Rodrigo Duterte’s slanders, online and in court, against Maria Ressa were so outrageous that her courage in the face of them won Ressa a Nobel Peace Prize.....>

<.....Is America still home of the free, the brave and the First Amendment?

We need to ask ourselves why tactics that are common in nondemocratic countries are now being deployed right here in the home of the free, the brave and the First Amendment.

Wake up and smell the rot America. There’s a formula that fits each of these cases: People with money and power are trying to mobilize populist resentment – resentment that by all rights should be aimed at them – toward journalists.

In other words, the elites label the very people who are calling out their privilege “the elites.” To accomplish this jujitsu, they use inflammatory code words – words like “communist” and “China.” Words that elicit strong emotions and distract from the real issues at hand.

All too often it works. Stoking hate is a lot easier than answering legitimate questions.

Because I know that, I thought long and hard about writing this piece. I know it could inflame an army of trolls for whom, the record shows, women journalists are favorite targets. More sobering, I know that because Yanqi is young and Asian in addition to being a woman, she’ll be more of a magnet.

In 2021, according to one report, hate crimes against Asian communities in the United States went up 339%. According to the latest national survey commissioned by Stop AAPI Hate, half of Asian American and Pacific Islander respondents said they have experienced discrimination.

Racism is a major public health issue: Survey shows increase in anti-Asian hate, discrimination. Here's how we can stop it.

Either Nebraska Gov. Pillen doesn’t know this, and is inexcusably clueless about the demons of hate that his intemperate speech could stir up, or – worse – he does know it and is hoping it will aid and abet his campaign of intimidation.

In the America where I grew up, people are supposed to be judged, not by some accident of birth, but by the merits of their work and the content of their character. On those counts, Yanqi scores way higher than her detractor. She’s willing to put herself on the line for that most American of values: the ability to speak truth to power.

What counts is not where Yanqi was born – a matter over which she had no control – but where she chose to practice her profession: in a country where the press is (so far) free. She chose to be trained at a school that’s the home of journalism’s first code of ethics. That code, written more than a century ago, presciently advises journalists to be “unswayed by the appeal of privilege or the clamor of the mob.”

Score Yanqi Xu an A+. Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen can call her all the names he wants. This former teacher is proud to call her – and her standup editor, Matt Wynn – #MizzouMade.>

<At least six people were offered or discussed plea deals in the Fulton County, Georgia, indictment concerning former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, sources told CNN.

The details of the plea deals were not disclosed. Sources told CNN that pro-Trump lawyer Robert Cheeley received an offer and former county elections supervisor Misty Hampton and former White House aide Micahel Roman are in talks about a potential deal.

Attorneys for Cheeley, Hampton, and Roman did not respond to a request for comment.

Cheeley's attorney Richard Rice told CNN that the Fulton County's District Attorney's Office made an offer "some time ago" and it was declined.

"To say that we are currently in discussions with the DA's office would be an inaccurate representation of what is going on," Rice told the outlet.

A Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump and 18 co-defendants in mid-August under the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Using the racketeering law allows prosecutors to charge multiple people with various crimes under one case by arguing that those offenses were committed as part of a singular criminal enterprise or goal.

So far, four people have accepted plea deals from the Fulton County district attorney's office: Georgia attorney Kenneth Chesebro; ex-Trump attorneys Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell; and bail bondsman Scott Hall.

Part of District Attorney Fani Willis' strategy could be to get as many co-defendants to flip on Trump in order to isolate him and others at the top of the indictment. Legal experts previously told Insider that having a large group of co-defendants is beneficial because some of them could feel compelled to cooperate with investigators in order to get lighter sentences.

"That could very well be the case but not necessarily," Melissa Redmon, a former deputy district attorney at the Fulton County District Attorney's Office told Insider. "It could be that the prosecution is wanting to resolve as many of the cases as possible. There is still value in a defendant admitting their role in the enterprise even if they don't directly implicate anyone else."

A Fulton County spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Prosecutors could offer more plea deals in the future, but that could depend on whether they can give something defendants are willing to take, Redmon said.

So far, Redmon noted, the co-defendants who have accepted plea deals have gotten a dismissal or reduction of charges.

Powell, for example, pled guilty to six misdemeanor counts and received six years of probation. None of the co-defendants who have accepted deals have had to plead guilty to the racketeering charge or received prison time.

And looking at more top co-defendants in the indictment, prosecutors might be less willing to dismiss charges, Redmon said.

One source familiar with the DA's strategy told CNN that Rudy Giuliani, Trump's former personal attorney and one of the key co-defendants in the case, has not received a plea deal.

"The closer you get to those at the top of the indictment, the state is likely not as willing to reduce or dismiss (charges), even if they are willing to recommend probation," Redmon said. "So someone like Giuliani may still get an offer, but it may require him to plead to the indictment including the RICO count."

Ted Goodman, Giuliani's political adviser, told Insider in a statement that the only deal Giuliani is making "is to tell the truth" and accused Georgia prosecutors of being partisan Democrats "focused on their own partisan politician ambitions and keeping President Donald Trump out of the White House.">

<Democratic Representative Maxwell Frost called out his Republican colleague Lauren Boebert for previously referring to the U.S. Constitution as "junk" during a House subcommittee hearing Wednesday.

Frost's statements came out during a hearing for the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, which heard from a group of witnesses Wednesday as part of its proceedings on global religious extremism. Democrats on the subcommittee invited Amanda Taylor, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, to testify at the meeting.

Taylor told House members during her testimony that Christian nationalism—the belief that the U.S. is defined by Christianity—is the "single greatest threat to religious liberty in the United States today." Some conservatives have argued that the Republican Party should embrace Christian nationalists, including Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has previously described herself as one.

While prompting questions to Taylor, Frost spoke about how Christian nationalism posed a threat to Democratic institutions, and Taylor agreed.

"And this threat to Democracy has made its way to Congress," Frost said, making mention of Greene's past statements that praised the political ideology.

"My colleague, Representative Lauren Boebert, said, 'The church is supposed to direct the government,'" Frost continued, quoting Boebert. "'The government is not supposed to direct the church. I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk.'"

"Junk being the Constitution and Bill of Rights," Frost asserted.

Newsweek on Wednesday reached out to Boebert's press office via email for comment on Frost's statement.

Frost was quoting a statement Boebert made in June 2022 during a speech to the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colorado, in which Boebert told the crowd: "The reason we had so many overreaching regulations in our nation is because the church complied."

"The church is supposed to direct the government," Boebert continued. "The government is not meant to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it. And I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk, that's not in the Constitution. It was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does."

Boebert was referring to an 1802 letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, in which he called for the separation of church and state. Under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Congress is not permitted to make laws "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Boebert's statements were previously condemned by political experts, including Andrew Seidel of Americans United, who told The Denver Post at the time, "We are about to get a very brutal real-world lesson in what it's like to live in a country that doesn't have that separation."

The congresswoman has also faced calls from American Christians to resign and repent after indirectly making a death wish toward President Joe Biden. In a petition posted in March, the online Christian community Faithful America said Boebert was "known for weaponizing religion to seize power and restrict the rights of anyone different than her," and that her comments regarding Biden was an "entirely new level.">

<Fox News host Sean Hannity has said he has a "personal security plan" in the event he finds himself in a mass shooting.

His comments come after at least 16 people were gunned down in Maine on Wednesday evening, with police searching for a person of interest. Robert Card is being hunted by hundreds of police officers on the streets of Lewiston, where people were gunned down at a restaurant and a separate bowling alley.

Speaking on his Fox News show with Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley about the shooting, Hannity suggested people have a "personal security plan" to prepare for being involved in a shooting.

He said: "When something like this happens, what is your plan? What do you do? I have a personal security plan. I train in mixed martial arts."

Hannity also said he was a "big believer in the Second Amendment" but his belief came "with the prayer that I would never have to use it."

His comments have drawn ire and been mocked on social media by the public and politicians.

Posting on X, formerly Twitter, Illinois Rep. Sean Casten wrote: "There is something so dysfunctional about saying 'We could live in communities where you don't have to worry about getting shot, but I'd prefer to keep the guns and fight my way out.' You're not Josey Wales. You're just a rich dude with a Fox News gig," adding Hannity should "to thine own self be true."

X user Brian Tyler posted: "Republicans' new plan to stop mass shootings: Karate chop the AR-15s."

Another, Dr. Amaya Deakins wrote: "Yes, he trains to block bullets with his body," followed by a series of laughing emojis. Russell Drew posted in response to the clip: "This is an interesting new argument from Republicans who are against gun safety: The only thing that can fight bad people with guns are good people who know MMA."

During the interview, Haley called for "serious law and order" in response to the shooting, as well as the defunding of so-called sanctuary cities and to acknowledge "the cancer in America that is mental health."

The shooting in Lewiston, Maine's second-largest city, started shortly before 7 p.m. on Wednesday. Police first received calls about a shooter at a bowling alley. A short time later, another shooting was reported at a nearby bar and grill restaurant.

Police are seeking one person, Robert Card, in connection with the incident. Card is a trained firearms instructor and is believed to be in the army reserve, stationed in Saco, Maine, according to a release made by police on Wednesday evening. The Associated Press has reported that Card spent two weeks in a mental health facility over the summer.

Police released an image of Card on Facebook, saying he should be considered "armed and dangerous" and that members of the public should not attempt to approach or make contact with him. Residents of Lewiston and nearby Lisbon have been told to stay "inside your home with the doors locked" and shelter in place while police search for Card.

Newsweek has contacted Fox News via email for comment.>

<Fulton County prosecutors have been in talks about potential plea deals with at least six more co-defendants in the Fulton County, Georgia, indictment related to former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, CNN reported.

District Attorney Fani Willis' office has a clearly defined strategy: to persuade as many co-defendants as they can to cooperate against Trump “to convict” the most serious offenders, legal experts say.

“This has been Willis’ strategy the whole time,” former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Salon. “She never wanted to try 19 defendants. She wanted 18 guilty pleas and one trial against Donald Trump.”

Robert Cheeley, a pro-Trump lawyer, declined a plea agreement, his attorney told the news outlet. But at least five other co-defendants, including former Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Hampton and former Trump campaign official Mike Roman, have engaged in discussions regarding potential plea deals with the D.A.’s office, according to CNN. Three other defendants have also been in talks about a potential plea deal with prosecutors.

Among the 19 defendants in the Fulton County case, four individuals, including three attorneys who played direct roles in Trump's efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia, have already agreed to plea deals. In some instances, they have pleaded guilty to felony charges in return for a more lenient sentencing recommendation.

"Taking a no-time misdemeanor or felony deal is a no-brainer for co-defendants,” Rahmani said. “The offer is too good to pass up. These aren’t career criminals who have done or are used to prison time.”

This is a “significant win” for a prosecutor in a large conspiracy case, who can get lower-level co-defendants to plead guilty and cooperate by offering up information and testimony against higher-level defendants, like Trump, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and several others, Bennett Gershman, a former New York prosecutor and law professor at Pace University, told Salon.

“She is continuing to build momentum,” Gershman said. “Several other co-defendants, seeing the others plead guilty and the far riskier consequences of not pleading and facing trial will also take pleas and cooperate. The D.A.’s strategy is working almost to perfection.”

Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted in August under the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act by a grand jury in Fulton County after more than a two-year investigation by Willis into potential 2020 election interference in Georgia.

With the help of RICO, which was passed to address organized crime, prosecutors charged multiple individuals with various crimes under one case by arguing that these individuals worked together in a criminal enterprise.

“In a criminal conspiracy case like this one, the most difficult task for the prosecutors is proving the agreement – the meeting of the minds required by conspiracy charges,” Paul Saputo, a Texas-based defense attorney, told Salon.

The prosecutors need people who can testify about coordination and planning to get “at the heart of the conspiracy,” he added.

“Getting insiders to cooperate can make or break the case because the insiders know just that,” Saputo said. “The plea deals here will require cooperation with the state and allow jurors to peek behind the curtain as to just what the actors involved were planning.”...>

<....With each person who accepts a plea deal in exchange for cooperation with the state, the strength of the state's case grows, he explained, adding that the cooperating witnesses can “paint a compelling picture of the depth of the conspiracy.”

So far, four people have accepted plea deals, including Georgia attorney Kenneth Chesebro, ex-Trump attorneys Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell and the bail bondsman Scott Hall. The current case charges the ex-president alongside 14 remaining co-defendants of engaging in a "vast racketeering enterprise,” The Messenger reported.

As part of her strategy, Willis may be trying to get as many co-defendants to cooperate against Trump in an attempt to isolate him and others at the top of the criminal enterprise.

In a conspiracy case, guilty pleas “tend to snowball,” and that is exactly what we’re seeing here, Saputo explained. The state's evidence will get stronger with each passing plea as more and more insiders share information with the state and admit wrongdoing.

“You might be able to attack the credibility of a single person or maybe two people, but once enough insiders come out willing to testify about the existence of a conspiracy, it begins to strain credibility that all of your former colleagues were acting on their own or in a vacuum,” Saputo said.

The conspiracy is being “narrowed and tailored” to convict after a trial of the most serious offenders, Gershman said. It gives the prosecution the chance to hone the evidence, use resources much more efficiently and focus entirely on the major offenders — Trump and his closest advisors.

But this isn’t where the case ends, Saputo added. Trump and the others can still attack each person as an admitted wrongdoer.

“And they can argue that while perhaps the others were conspiring to help Trump, Trump had no knowledge of that,” Saputo said. “But eventually, even a Trump card can't pull a joker out of the hat.”>

<In the wake of accepting a plea deal in the Georgia racketeering case involving Donald Trump and his allies' attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis' legal troubles may be just beginning, Newsweek reported.

After pleading guilty to a felony charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, Ellis will face five years of probation, pay a $5,000 fine and perform 100 hours of community service.

But legal experts say her guilty plea will also trigger a review by Colorado Attorney Regulation Counsel Jessica Yates that could be much more damaging.

Yates is quoted as saying lawyers are prohibited from committing "a criminal act that reflects adversely on the lawyer's honesty, trustworthiness, or fitness as a lawyer in other respects."

"The Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel reviews a self-report of a criminal conviction and the underlying facts in relation to that rule and our procedural rules, and may pursue discipline, an alternative to discipline, or other action consistent with all of those rules," she added in a statement to Newsweek.

Legal analyst Whitney Traylor told a local news outlet that admitting to the "aggressive attempt" to "overthrow the election with no constitutional basis" may "ultimately hurt her in regard to her law license" because she told the judge in the case she failed to do her due diligence.

"That is the standard of a lawyer," he continued. "When you look at when you are going to get disbarred, it's a matter of 'did you meet your due diligence? Did you do what a reasonable lawyer would do?' And she's acknowledging, 'No I didn't do that,' so she's going to have a really tough case when that comes around.">

<After Hamas’s brutal surprise attack and massacre of Israeli civilians, policymakers are searching for the most effective ways to fight terrorist organizations. They can take an important lesson from something that recently happened to Hamas when it tried to use bitcoin to finance its operations.

Hamas thought it could flout Western surveillance and international sanctions by embracing the world’s leading digital asset. It thought wrong, and the story is illuminating for those who mistakenly believe that bitcoin provides a safe space for criminals, money launderers and the financiers of terror.

Earlier this month, Israeli law enforcement successfully located and froze multiple cryptocurrency accounts that Hamas had used to solicit donations. Israel then funneled the assets into its own treasury — the same treasury that is funding the war to wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth.”

The terrorist organization’s crypto scheme backfired badly, and this wasn’t even the first time it had backfired this year. In April, Hamas begged supporters to stop sending donations via bitcoin, specifically. In a surprise press statement, it announced it was suspending bitcoin donations “to ensure the safety of donors and protect them from any harm.” The terrorist network cited “the intensification of prosecution and the redoubling of hostile efforts against anyone who tries to support the resistance through this currency” as the logic behind this decision.

So what happened? Isn’t bitcoin ideal for money laundering? Isn’t it the preferred currency of terrorists and criminals the world over?

Quite the opposite. Hamas discovered all too late that making illegal transactions in bitcoin is a financial suicide mission. That’s because the open, transparent nature of the blockchain is a panopticon for intelligence agencies, allowing them to track transactions in real time with a speed and precision that would be unthinkable in the world of fiat currency.

Unlike paper money or computer files, the bitcoin blockchain is permanent, transparent and immutable. This means that each network transaction, whether it’s worth a few cents or millions of dollars, becomes fossilized on the blockchain like a prehistoric bug in digital amber.

These fossilized transactions include every donation to Hamas ever made through this medium. All law enforcement has to do is connect a transaction with a wallet and a wallet with an identity —a task which, in practice, it has had little difficulty doing.

It is for that reason that illicit activity makes up such a small fraction of transactions in the cryptocurrency space — about one quarter of one percent, according to a study by analytics firm Chainalysis. That is an especially small amount when compared to the 2 to 5 percent of fiat currency transactions attributed to money laundering and the like, according to United Nations data.

In other words, if you don’t like what certain people do with bitcoin, you are going to hate the U.S. dollar.

It’s an important lesson that certain lawmakers in Washington have yet to learn. And unfortunately, some of them are not open to learning facts that contradict their preconceived ideas.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who openly boasts of raising an “anti-crypto army,” talks about cryptocurrency as if it were terrorist blood money. She remains heedless of countless examples where Western intelligence has leveraged the public nature of the blockchain to choke off illicit financing. This includes not only the most recent example with Hamas, but also 300 crypto accounts the Department of Justice seized to throttle funding for terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. She might also find illuminating the recent high-profile criminal prosecution of a Manhattan rapper and her husband, who were easily caught when they tried to launder billions in stolen bitcoin. Again, it was the transparency of the blockchain that exposed them....>

<.....Warren’s bill, the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act, aims to solve a problem that no one has. It that would classify nearly all crypto industry participants — from wallet providers to miners to validators — as financial institutions, subjecting them to the onerous compliance regime of the Bank Secrecy Act. Under this bill, a teenager running a bitcoin mining rig in his basement could be subject to the same compliance burdens as JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.

But wallet providers, miners, and validators are not banks. They do not hold custody of assets. They certainly should not be collecting or storing the sensitive personal financial information of individual users of an asset. They merely provide infrastructure — the open-source software and computing power to help secure the network. Much like Microsoft, which also supplies a lot of software and cybersecurity products to financial institutions, they are not financial institutions.

It would be impossible for the industry to comply with Warren’s requirements, and she knows this. The point of her bill is not to improve national security or stop money laundering, but to kill digital asset innovation.

Instead of participating in Warren’s farce, Congress should seriously explore how to help federal law enforcement crack down on actual illicit finance. The Financial Technology Protection Act — a bipartisan bill introduced by Senators Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) — is a critical first step in that direction. It creates a working group to study and report on how terrorists actually use new financial technologies to advance their missions and ways Congress and regulatory agencies can combat them. Congress could take its findings and construct a regulatory regime that addresses actual risks, not imaginary ones.

This would help deter criminal activity such as money laundering while still preserving the ethos of personal freedom that has long defined the digital asset industry.

Terrorists and criminals — from Hamas and Al-Qaeda to the early drug runners of Silk Road — learned the hard way that bitcoin is not ideal for illicit finance. Lawmakers across the country have yet to receive the memo. So we’re circulating it today and asking that they adjust their policymaking accordingly.>

<Mark Meadows has reportedly reached an immunity agreement with special counsel Jack Smith in exchange for his testimony.

The former White House chief of staff has, according to reports, spoken to Smith's team at least three times, including once before a federal grand jury that indicted Trump in August on four counts related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, but legal expert Kim Wehle wrote in a new column for The Bulwark that Meadows poses a threat to other current and former government officials.

"Meadows’s cooperation is significant for a number of reasons, including that he was at the heart of everything related to the Trump 'Stop the Steal' effort, including the pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence and the fake electors scheme in several states," wrote Wehle, a former assistant U.S. attorney.

A number of administration officials and Republican lawmakers, including newly elected House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) assisted Trump in his wide-ranging effort to remain in the White House despite losing the election, and Meadows can tell prosecutors about the depth of their involvement.

"Not only is Meadows positioned to corroborate the astonishing testimony of credible witnesses like [his former aide Cassidy] Hutchinson, but he can speak firsthand as to Trump’s knowledge and state of mind in all of this, which is obviously crucial to Smith’s criminal case against the ex-president," Wehle wrote. "Meadows might also illuminate the involvement of other high-level officials whose participation in the criminal enterprise that produced the January 6th insurrection has yet to appear in any indictment.">

<No, James Biden’s $200,000 payment to his brother isn’t the proof of a mass “influence peddling scheme” far-right Republicans like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene would have you believe it is, a new FactCheck report finds.

FactCheck's review of the House Oversight and Accountability committee's case against the Biden family, based on a bank statement subpoena that found a 2018 payment between brothers, found more evidence of bombast than bribes, the organization said Thursday.

“As has been the case so often in the House investigation of the finances of Joe Biden’s family members,” the report states, “the claims have outpaced the evidence so far.”

The Biden nay-sayers, who also include Reps. James Comer and Lauren Boebert, contend James' payment to Joe’s on the same day he received a $200,000 check from the for-profit hospital chain Americore Health proves what Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called “money laundering.”

Yet as the FactCheck analysis found, it might also have been the struggling hospital’s last-ditch effort to hitch its wagon to a big political name, as they state in a bankruptcy court complaint filed in July 2022.

And a lawyer for James Biden says brother Joe — not yet a U.S. presidential hopeful, let alone president — was simply being paid back for a short-term loan he sent his brother.

That's why committee Democrats accused Republicans of cherry-picking bank records and ignoring those that didn't align with their conspiracy theory.

“These records actually show that President Biden was the one who stepped in to help family members when they needed support,” Rep. Jamie Raskin said on Oct. 20.

FactCheck confirmed the second half of this account with images of James and Sara Biden’s check to Joe entitled “loan repayment.”

Despite this evidence, Comer took to Fox News three days later to boast, “We just proved that Joe Biden benefited from his family’s influence peddling scheme."

The FactCheck report notes it remains unclear which narrative is true, but that in a nation where you’re innocent until proven guilty, it’s up to Republicans to make a case.

“The records don’t prove one way or another if Joe Biden was involved in the Americore Health enterprise,” FactCheck states. "But the burden remains with Republicans on the oversight committee to prove their case.”>

<Donald Trump's lawyers attacked his Republican predecessors in order to save the former president in a court filing on Thursday in his federal January 6 case.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) charged Trump in August on four criminal counts in special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into the former president's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, when a group of his supporters violently protested the election results in a failed effort to block congressional certification of President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. He has claimed, without evidence, the election was stolen via widespread voter fraud.

Prosecutors also investigated Trump and his allies' alleged efforts to submit false slates of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College from seven key states that he narrowly lost in 2020. Trump maintains his innocence in the case, accusing prosecutors of targeting him for political purposes. He has pleaded not guilty, as well as in the other three indictments he is currently facing.

Trump's attorneys offered their latest defense of Trump in a filing Thursday, arguing the former president is being treated differently than past presidents accused of illegal conduct.

"American history teems with situations where the opposing party vigorously contended that a sitting President acted criminally in the exercise of his official responsibilities. Yet, when the opposing party took power, none of these Presidents was ever prosecuted, until 2023," the filing reads.

Trump's attorneys continued to cite several examples of presidents evading prosecution for what some viewed as illegal acts, naming several Republican presidents by name.

For instance, they pointed to the former President Richard Nixon's actions in the "Saturday Night Massacre," when he asked three DOJ officials to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, or when former President George W. Bush's critics accused him of lying to Congress to "induce the Iraq War on false allegedly pretenses."

The filing also said former President Barack Obama was not prosecuted for authorizing a drone strike that killed U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. Critics have said the strike constitutes an extrajudicial killing, violating his due process, but government officials argued al-Awlaki's alleged ties to terror groups made him a legitimate war target. A drone strike also killed his 16-year-old son two weeks later.

"Though many at the time believed these official actions were criminal, and their political opponents eventually took power in every case, none of these Presidents were ever charged with any crime for official acts. Our history thus reflects a strong tradition against prosecuting Presidents for their official acts," the former president's attorneys wrote.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's campaign for comment via email.

The filing is the latest attempt from Trump's attorneys to argue that he is facing a double standard than other former presidents. They have argued that his prosecutions are politically motivated as he remains the frontrunner to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge overseeing the January 6 case, has set the trial for March 4, 2024. His attorneys have brought several recent motions aimed at getting the case dismissed, but legal experts remain skeptical they will be able to do so.>