New York Times reporter David Enrich also says White House counsel Donald McGahn once called senior Trump aides ‘morons’ The bizarre scene is described in Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice, a book by David Enrich of the New York Times that will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy. Enrich reports that “once he regained the capacity for speech”, the lawyer to whom Trump offered a stallion supposedly worth $5m “stammered … ‘This isn’t the 1800s. You can’t pay me with a horse.’” Accounts of Trump refusing to pay legal and other bills are legion. In New York, his business and tax affairs are the subject of civil and criminal investigations. Trump’s reluctance to pay legal fees also featured in his attempt to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, which has landed him in further legal jeopardy.

John Miller recently slipped into apparent perjury about mosque surveillance before the City Council, but he's trustworthy enough for CNN.

BATAVIA, N.Y. (AP) — The crowd swayed on its feet, arms pumping, the beat of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” thumping in their chests. The people under the revival tent hooted as Michael Flynn strode across the stage, bopping and laughing, singing the refrain into his microphone and encouraging the audience to sing along to the transgressive rock anthem. “We’ll fight the powers that be just/Don’t pick our destiny ’cause/You don’t know us, you don’t belong!” The emcee introduced him as “America’s General,” but to those in the audience, Flynn is far more than that: martyr, hero, leader, patriot, warrior. The retired lieutenant general, former national security adviser, onetime anti-terrorism fighter, is now focused on his next task: building a movement centered on Christian nationalist ideas, where Christianity is at the center of American life and institutions. Flynn brought his fight — a struggle he calls both spiritual and political — last month to a church in Batavia, New York, where thousands of people paid anywhere from a few dollars to up to $500 to hear and absorb his message that the United States is facing an existential threat, and that to save the nation, his supporters must act.

Employing a warmed-over, cynical strike-breaking tactic, Brianna Keilar implies striking teachers are harming children’s mental and educational well-being.

A training facility and grounds for police in Chicago questions whether architects should be involved in carceral projects.

A pregnant Black activist serving four years in prison for her behavior at racial justice protests will have her sentence reconsidered as she struggles to reach her due date behind bars. Raising questions about free speech and equal justice, Brittany Martin, 34, was found guilty this spring of breaching the peace in a high and aggravated manner over comments she made to police. Her lawyers have been pushing for a lesser sentence amid increasing concerns about her health and that of her baby, due in November. Advocates with Black Voters Matter have been circulating a petition calling for her release. Civil rights attorney and former state lawmaker Bakari Sellers will tell the judge on Sept. 12 that the punishment is unjust. “She’s in jail because she talked in America,” said Sybil Dione Rosado, her trial attorney. “She’s a dark-skinned Black woman who is unapologetically Black and radical."

The Senate candidate decried the "miserably peculiar American diety [sic] called Democracy" and more in emails to his Stanford vegetarian co-op.

Legal analysts lit up social media on Monday in response to the broad and potentially devastating order by Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Donald Trump appointee to the Southern District of Florida, temporarily halting the criminal investigation of the former president and his alleged pilfering of classified documents. Her order further authorized a special master to identify and return the small fraction of materials seized in last month’s court-approved search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence that may belong to him. One analyst after another meticulously detailed the failings of Cannon’s reasoning: It was “untethered to the law,” “a political conclusion in search of a legal rationale,” “deeply problematic,” “laughably bad.” At some point, one truly runs out of euphemisms for lawless partisan hackery. It’s possible to agree with every one of these criticisms but still find them less than satisfying. Because at the end of the day, no matter how much withering criticism she faces, Cannon still gets to put on the black robe and run interference for her benefactor. She will still get a standing ovation at some future Federalist Society gathering. She remains in control of this case. But it’s not just Cannon: Many smart lawyers also noted that the Justice Department now faces the unenviable task of having to appeal this decision up to higher courts that are filled with Trump appointees, which takes the sting out of the opprobrium: For all we know, the Trump-stacked 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals or five radical justices on the Supreme Court may also greet her outrageous decision with a standing ovation. So the problem is not just the extreme and heinous flaws in Cannon’s ruling. It’s also the Trump-shaped world in which Cannon operates, with impunity, which we will all have to endure for the foreseeable future. It’s the brutal reality that we may face a steady stream of depraved decisions like Cannon’s for the rest of our lives—and the pain of hearing from every quarter that nothing can be done to remedy it. We watched the same pattern play out at the end of this last Supreme Court term. One case after another blew up decades of existing precedent and tests and doctrine and replaced them with Rorschach exams that transformed contemporary Republican policies into constitutional law. Smart lawyers dutifully digested these opinions and set to work figuring out just how the EPA, or public school districts, or state legislatures that want to stop mass shootings can plausibly work around these new tests. And of course, were we living in a rational regime in which the rule of law governed, that would make perfect sense. But if the last term at the Supreme Court and indeed Cannon’s baffling new order mean anything, they signify that in this new age of legal Calvinball, one side invents new “rules” and then the other scrambles to try to play by them. For every single legal thinker who read the Mar-a-Lago order to mean, quite correctly, that ex-presidents are above the law, furrowing your brow and pointing out its grievous errors only takes you halfway there. The better question is what, if anything, do you propose to do about it? The furrowing is cathartic, but it’s also not a plan. If there were a principle that best embodies why progressives are losing ground so quickly—even as they are correct on the facts, and the law, and the zeitgeist—it must be this tendency to just keep on lawyering the other side’s bad law in the hopes that the lawyering itself will make all the bad faith and crooked law go away. But for those who are genuinely worried that democracy will rise or fall based on whether a case lands before their judges or others, merely explaining legal flaws in pointillist detail isn’t an answer. And soberly explaining that Cannon was wrong about most stuff but correct about two things is decidedly not an answer, either. You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to them.

Police arrested Ashley Banks on May 25 with an unregistered gun and a small amount of marijuana. Under normal circumstances, the 23-year-old from Gadsden would have been able to post bond and leave jail until her criminal trial. But Banks admitted to smoking pot on the same day she found out she was pregnant – two days before her arrest. In Etowah County, that meant she couldn’t leave jail unless she entered drug rehab, leaving her in limbo for three months. She’s not the only one, according to attorneys involved in her case. Several pregnant women and new moms accused of exposing their fetuses to drugs have been held for weeks or months inside the Etowah County Detention Center under special bond conditions that require rehab and $10,000 cash. "The court has a duty to consider the safety of the children and others within our community," wrote the judge when denying the release of a mother arrested at the hospital six days after giving birth.

Conversations about debt are never purely about economics. They are always, also, conversations about power, morality and shame. The debate over President Biden’s student loan relief plan is no exception. Immediately after the initiative was announced, opponents of debt cancellation began denouncing slacker baristas, overeducated Ivy League lawyers and impractical lesbian dance theory majors. Immune to accusations of hypocrisy, Republican members of Congress who had received hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars in federal relief castigated student debtors who might receive $10,000 to $20,000 in aid. It was a stark reminder that shame, like wealth, is not evenly distributed in our society. For working-class people, insolvency is often seen as a sign of profligacy and personal irresponsibility, while large corporations and the wealthy routinely walk away from their obligations and are celebrated as savvy for doing so. Donald Trump can boastfully call himself the “king of debt” for his string of strategic bankruptcies; the average debtor would never dare. Debts are, first and foremost, financial burdens. But most people in arrears must shoulder a boulder of shame as well. This is the factor most commentary about Mr. Biden’s student debt relief plan has missed. The mass cancellation of federal student loans will not only remove a crushing economic weight for tens of millions of people; it will lift a significant emotional one, too. This psychological shift could, in turn, have further political implications, by emboldening those who find their obligations overwhelming to engage in collective action aimed at winning more relief and changing the policies that make indebtedness so pervasive. To understand what a pivotal moment this is, we must first appreciate just how profoundly the moral decks are usually stacked against regular debtors. Even the seemingly innocuous phrase “loan forgiveness” implies culpability and blame, when in reality the majority of debtors are simply struggling to make ends meet — a problem likely to be most acute for Black and brown people, who tend to lack family wealth and access to credit on fair terms.

The names of hundreds of U.S. law enforcement officers, elected officials and military members appear on the leaked membership rolls of a far-right extremist group that's accused of playing a key role in the Jan.

Earlier this year, Motherboard reported about an internal Facebook document that said the company has no idea where users’ data goes, and what the company is doing with it. During a previously sealed court hearing in March, two veteran Facebook engineers confirmed what the leaked document revealed. “It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly the—where the [user] data flows,” said Eugene Zarashow, a Facebook engineering director who’s worked at the company since 2011, according to his LinkedIn profile. “I would be surprised if there's even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively,” Zarashow added, referring to the question of exactly where personal data may be stored within 55 Facebook subsystems, which were the subject of the hearing. A transcript of the engineers’ testimony was included in a newly unsealed court document. The Facebook’s engineers testimony was first reported by The Intercept.

Dallas' encampment sweeps have gotten more tense in recent months, with some activists showing up in protest with rifles. The city has a plan to deal with the armed encounters.

The massive field at Hosford Middle School in Southeast Portland had, for decades, been used as a de facto dog park. For most of those years, it was a peaceful relationship between pup owners and the school: Dogs could roam the field surrounding the school so long as owners cleaned up after their pooches and kept them leashed. But last year, Portland Public Schools finished erecting a fence around the field and locked its gates, after a number of incidents since 2019, including a student being bitten by a dog and an armed man wandering onto the property. Since then, dog owners have been routinely cutting locks, entering the field and getting in heated confrontations with school security guards. And the battle has escalated since school began last week. In a letter sent to school families and neighbors last week, Hosford principal Jill Liddle wrote that dog owners were regularly harassing, following and threatening school staff since school had begun. She reported that people were throwing feces at the building. A video shared with WW shows a campus security guard asking a dog walker to keep his dog on a leash as he’s leaving the field. The man starts screaming at the guard: “Fuck you! We hate you! We fucking hate you! The whole community despises you now! We’re going to keep cutting this shit open day after day!” The guard reminds the man it’s his own tax dollars paying for the repairs, and the dog owner approaches him, yelling: “Why don’t you shut your fucking mouth? You’re obviously fucking unhinged!”

Athletes are increasingly being hospitalized — or worse — from trying to cut weight. Will combat sports ever stop it?

What has Johnson’s culture of corruption wrought?

With cannabis now legal, people return to the plant traditionally used to add a savory characteristic to their dishes.

If the drug becomes significantly cheaper than newer, better diabetes treatments, more people could die from the disease.

California lawmakers passed a bill that aims to promote pay equity by requiring employers to post salary ranges with job listings in the state. The bill, SB 1162, "would require an employer with 15 or more employees to include the pay scale for a position in any job posting." It also would require companies to include median and mean hourly rates for each combination of race, ethnicity, and sex within each job category in their pay data reports to the state. The legislation will become law in California if Governor Gavin Newsom signs the bill before September 30, 2022. Newsom has not expressed an opinion on the bill. SB 1162 is similar to a Colorado law passed to deal with salary disparities. Colorado approved the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act in 2019 and created rules to implement the law in 2021. However, employers like DigitalOcean have ducked Colorado's rules by not offering certain positions to state residents.

After an unprecedented harmful algae bloom first turned San Francisco Bay a murky brown color and then littered its shores with dead fish, many people assumed it was yet another climate disaster to add to the list, along with extreme drought, wildfires and heat waves. While scientists suspect climate change played a role in triggering the bloom, what fueled it is not a mystery. Algae blooms need food to grow, and this one had plenty: nutrients originating in wastewater that the region’s 37 sewage plants pump into the bay. In other words — we wouldn’t have this problem without the poop and pee of the Bay Area’s 8 million residents.