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The New York Times


BREAKING NEWS;
Louisville, Ky., will pay Breonna Taylor’s family $12 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit after she was killed in a botched police raid.

Tuesday, September 15, 2020 12:40 PM EST

Besides the multimillion-dollar settlement, among the highest to be awarded in a police killing in recent years, the city has also agreed to institute a number of changes in policing.

They will impose more scrutiny on officers during the execution of search warrants, like the one that precipitated the death of Ms. Taylor, and make mandatory safeguards that were common practice in the department but were not followed the night of the March 13 raid.

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Trump's campaign paid $2.3 million in donor money to his private business, filings show

by Sonam Sheth

Business Insider August 25, 2020, 5:13 PM EDT

President Donald Trump's campaign has paid $2.3 million in donor funds to his private businesses so far, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Forbes, which first reported on the filings, pointed to an instance in which one of Trump's companies received nearly $38,000 in campaign funds for rent.

In another, the campaign shelled out $8,000 to the Trump Corp. last month for "legal & IT consulting," according to the filings.

This isn't the first time the president's campaign has become entangled with his personal finances.

In July, The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold reported that Trump's campaign sent nearly $400,000 to the Trump Organization in just two days.

President Donald Trump's private business has received $2.3 million in campaign funds so far, according to recent Federal Election Commission filings.

Forbes, which first reported on the filings, said that in one instance, Trump Tower Commercial LLC, which owns the Trump Organization's building on Fifth Avenue, received nearly $38,000 in campaign-donor money to cover rent last month. In another instance, the Trump campaign shelled out $8,000 to the Trump Corp. last month for "legal & IT consulting," according to the FEC filings.

The Trump campaign also coordinated with the Republican National Committee to pay Trump Tower Commercial LLC another $225,000, Forbes said.

This isn't the first time the president's campaign has become entangled with his personal finances. In July, The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold reported that Trump's campaign sent nearly $400,000 to the Trump Organization in just two days.

Documents showed that the campaign channeled $380,000 to the president's personal business in 43 transactions, Fahrenthold said, adding that the Trump Organization told him the money was for a weeklong "donor retreat" at Mar-a-Lago in March.

Open Secrets, an arm of the Center for Responsive Politics that closely tracks money in politics, first spotted the payments in Federal Election Commission filings from the Trump Victory Committee, a joint fundraising committee between Trump and the Republican National Committee.

In February, The Post reported that the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service exorbitant rates to protect the president when he traveled to his properties. Receipts and documents showed that US taxpayers shelled out more than $471,000 to Trump's properties from January 2017 to April 2018, the report said.

Trump also frequently hosts foreign leaders at Mar-a-Lago, where they pay the market rate. After Trump became president, several countries with embassies in Washington, DC, began hosting parties and events at Trump properties in what ethics experts described as a bid to curry favor with the president.

The RNC has spent more than $2 million at Trump Organization hotels and resorts. And Trump's campaign, which is funded in part by donations from the president's supporters and big-dollar donors, has spent more than $14 million at his properties.

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Trump keeps telling people to vote twice, even though that’s a crime

The president’s baseless campaign against mail-in voting continues.

By Cameron Peters

9/12/2020

President Donald Trump violated Twitter rules once again on Saturday, by encouraging North Carolina voters to commit a felony offense.

In a tweet, the president urged voters in the state, which is expected to feature a number of competitive races in November, to vote twice — once by mail and once in person. Voting twice is illegal in the state of North Carolina, as it is in all states. Twitter quickly hid the tweet for violating site rules about protecting “civic and election integrity,” though it has not been taken down, having been deemed to be of public interest.

Not only is voting twice is a crime in North Carolina, even Trump’s tweet might be a violation of North Carolina election law, which specifies that “to induce another to [commit a fraud to register or vote at more than one precinct or more than one time], in the same primary or election” is unlawful.

Saturday’s tweet is not the first time Trump has made the suggestion that it would be wise to vote twice, which, again, is very much illegal. He also urged voters to vote twice earlier this month at a campaign stop in Wilmington, North Carolina, and he has repeatedly railed against mail-in voting, though there is no evidence that the system is any more vulnerable to fraud than in-person voting (all forms of voter fraud in the US are vanishingly unlikely).

In addition to being illegal, Trump’s advice is also wrong. As North Carolina board of elections director Karen Brinson Bell explained the first time Trump suggested double voting, “absentee ballots that are received on Election Day are not counted until after the election.”

In other words, if a North Carolina voter’s mail-in ballot hasn’t been counted by Election Day, that doesn’t mean anyone is trying to “take your vote away” — their ballot will still be counted as long as it’s postmarked by November 3 and received by November 6. Those who requested a mail-in ballot, but did not use it, are still allowed to vote in person, however.

It’s also not a great idea for voters who have already cast a ballot to be thronging to polling places on Election Day from a logistics perspective. As Bell notes, “it would lead to longer lines and the possibility of spreading Covid-19.”

The president has made it clear that the real motivation for his attacks on mail-in voting is political. In March this year, he told Fox & Friends that he was opposed to Democrats’ efforts to make it easier to vote because “if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

In other words, his opposition to vote-by-mail — and his advocacy for double voting — are nakedly political gambits, ones made all the more transparent for the fact that he himself voted by mail in the Florida primary recently.

However, Trump could actually be undermining his own chances this November, particularly with respect to his attacks on mail-in voting. According to Politico’s Anita Kumar, some Republican strategists are worried that the president’s fusillade of anti-mail-in voting rhetoric could drive down turnout and cost him the election.

Though an overwhelming majority of all registered voters, and a slimmer majority of Republicans, reported confidence in mail-in voting in a recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll conducted by Ipsos, a far higher proportion of Republicans than Democrats and independents indicate that they are not confident in a mail-in ballot being accurately counted.

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Appeals court keeps Flynn case alive, won't order dismissal

ERIC TUCKER

Associated Press August 31, 2020, 12:19 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court in Washington on Monday declined to order the dismissal of the Michael Flynn prosecution, permitting a judge to scrutinize the Justice Department's request to dismiss its case against the President Donald Trump's former national security adviser.

The decision keeps the matter at least temporarily alive and rejects efforts by both Flynn's lawyers and the Justice Department to force the prosecution to be dropped without any further inquiry from the judge, who has for months declined to dismiss it.

Federal prosecutors moved in May to dismiss the prosecution even though Flynn had pleaded guilty and admitted lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation about his Russian contacts during the presidential transition period. He was awaiting sentencing when the government asked to dismiss the case.

But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, signaling his skepticism at the government's motion, refused to immediately grant the request and instead appointed a retired federal judge to argue against the Justice Department's position.

His lawyers then sought to bypass Sullivan and obtain a order from the federal appeals court that would have required the judge to immediately force the judge to dismiss the case.

At issue before the court was not the merits of the Flynn prosecution but rather whether Sullivan could be forced to grant the Justice Department's dismissal request without even holding a hearing to scrutinize the basis for the motion.

“We have no trouble answering that question in the negative,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion for the eight judges in the majority.

Flynn was the only person charged in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation who had been a White House official. Mueller's probe investigated ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

He was questioned by the FBI at the White House, just days after Trump's inauguration, about his conversations with the then-Russian ambassador to the U.S. pertaining to sanctions that had just been imposed by the Obama administration for election interference. The conversation alarmed law enforcement and intelligence officials who were already investigating whether the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia to sway the presidential election in Trump's favor. They were puzzled by the White House's public insistence that Flynn and the diplomat had not discussed sanctions.

But the Justice Department argued in May that the FBI had insufficient basis to interrogate Flynn about that conversation, which Attorney General William Barr has described as fully appropriate for an incoming national security adviser to have had.