(As is said on my other favorite blog, Our Failed Political Press at work again. sigh The money graf here: A foreign national under federal fraud prosecution making a purchase that results in $18 million cash payment to the president-elect has all the makings of a major scandal. But it has been virtually ignored by several major media outlets.
The banana is not Sun’s most notable recent purchase.
On November 25, Sun purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, a new crypto venture backed by President-elect Donald Trump. Sun said his company, TRON, was committed to “making America great again.”
World Liberty Financial planned to sell $300 million worth of crypto tokens, known as WLF, which would value the new company at $1.5 billion. But, before Sun’s $30 million purchase, it appeared to be a bust, with only $22 million in tokens sold. Sun now owns more than 55% of purchased tokens.
Sun’s decision to buy $30 million in WLF tokens has direct and immediate financial benefits for Trump. A filing by the company in October revealed that “$30 million of initial net protocol revenues” will be “held in a reserve… to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve is met, a company owned by Donald Trump, DT Marks DEFI LLC, will receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.”
So before Sun’s purchase, Trump was entitled to nothing because the reserve had not been met. But Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve, so now Trump is entitled to 75% of the revenues from all other tokens purchased. As of December 1, there have been $24 million WLF tokens sold, netting Trump $18 million.
Sun is also joining World Liberty Financial as an advisor, making Sun and the incoming president business partners.
While Trump has the cash, Sun’s tokens are effectively worthless. To comply with U.S. securities law, WLF tokens are “non-transferable and locked indefinitely in a wallet or smart contract until such time, if ever, [WLF tokens] are unlocked through protocol governance procedures in a fashion that does not contravene applicable law.” The only thing that Sun can do with his tokens is participate in the “governance” of World Liberty Financial. Right now, the only thing World Liberty Financial does is sell tokens.
Any foreign national paying an incoming president $18 million weeks before entering the White House should raise red flags. Sun’s purchase is even more alarming because the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently prosecuting him for fraud.
The SEC’s ongoing prosecution of Sun
On March 22, 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three companies he owns. The SEC accused Sun of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token “through extensive wash trading.” Wash trading involves “the simultaneous or near-simultaneous purchase and sale of a security to make it appear actively traded without an actual change in beneficial ownership.” In other words, according to the SEC, Sun made it seem like there was a lot of interest in crypto tokens he issued when much of the trading was fraudulent and manufactured by Sun.
The SEC also charged Sun with “orchestrating a scheme to pay celebrities to tout” his crypto tokens “without disclosing their compensation.” Federal law requires people who endorse securities to “disclose whether they received compensation for the promotion, and to specify the amount.” The celebrities involved included Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy.
Lohan paid $40,000, and Paul paid about $100,000 to settle the charges against them without admitting liability. Soulja Boy did not respond to the lawsuit, and a default judgment was issued against him.
Sun posted on X that he believes the SEC “complaint lacks merit” and complained that “the SEC’s regulatory framework for digital assets is still in its infancy and is in need of further development.”
The litigation against Sun is ongoing, with a federal judge considering a motion by Sun’s attorneys to dismiss the charges. The current SEC Chairman, Gary Gensler, who announced the charges against Sun, will step down when Trump takes office in January. A new SEC commissioner appointed by Trump could settle or dismiss the charges against Sun.
How Trump can use the power of the presidency to unlock hundreds of millions in profits for himself
Through World Liberty Financial, Trump can reap massive personal profits from creating a more permissive regulatory environment for crypto ventures.
In addition to his 75% share of revenues over $30 million, Trump’s company was also awarded 22.5 billion WLF tokens. At the current sale price, these tokens are worth more than $300 million. That is more than 20 billion tokens being offered for sale publicly. (This makes the “governance” value of WLF tokens, which was already questionable, effectively worthless. No matter how many tokens you own, Trump will always be able to outvote other token holders.)
Right now, Trump’s tokens — like those purchased by Sun — are worthless because they cannot be transferred. But Trump could appoint a new SEC chairman who is friendly to the crypto industry and who would create new rules allowing the WLF tokens and similar crypto assets to be legally traded. If the price of the tokens increases when they hit the open market, which is a possibility for a crypto token backed by the President of the United States, the value of Trump’s tokens could be in the billions.
That appears to be exactly the path Trump is taking. WIRED reports that Trump is “asking the crypto industry to weigh in on potential picks.” Among the leading contenders is Paul Atkins, a former SEC Commissioner, who, since leaving the agency in 2008, has run a consulting firm that works with crypto companies. Atkins is also co-chair of the Token Alliance, an initiative of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, the lobbying group for the crypto industry. He is also a member of the Chamber of Digital Commerce’s Board of Directors.
Another top contender, former SEC General Counsel Robert Stebbins, has said that the SEC should “pause most of its crypto lawsuits while clearing a path for the firms to do business without the overhang of litigation.” But Stebbins’ candidacy underscores the need for Sun to forge a favorable relationship with Trump. Stebbins acknowledged that, even if it takes a more permissive view toward the crypto industry, it may want to consider continuing to pursue litigation involving fraud.
Major media outlets obsessed with banana, ignore Sun’s payment to Trump
A foreign national under federal fraud prosecution making a purchase that results in $18 million cash payment to the president-elect has all the makings of a major scandal. But it has been virtually ignored by several major media outlets.
The New York Times, for example, has published five articles about Sun’s purchase of the banana but none about Sun’s $30 million purchase of WLF tokens and his business partnership with Trump. The Washington Post has published three articles about the banana, but its coverage of Sun’s purchase of WLF tokens was limited to one short paragraph in a larger editorial about the crypto industry. (The paragraph does not explain how Trump personally profits from Sun’s token purchase.) The Wall Street Journal did publish a short piece about Sun’s token purchase on its “Live Update” blog, but the piece was not viewed as significant enough to be included in the print edition. The paper published two articles, plus a video, focused on the banana. One of the Wall Street Journal articles about the banana was published on the front page of the paper.
Vanity Fair’s Donald Trump cover has gone viral (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/Vanity Fair)
Vanity Fair’s new cover featuring Donald Trump has gone viral following his victory in the US presidential election.
Trump staged what has been called an astonishing political comeback, beating his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and taking five out of the seven key battleground states, with two still to declare. In addition, the Republicans took back control of the senate and appear to be on course to keep their grip on the house of representatives.
In the wake of Trump’s success, the popular Condé Nast culture, fashion and current affairs magazine published a digital cover which featured a close-up image of him alongside the words: “34 felony counts, 1 conviction, 2 pending cases, 2 impeachments and 6 bankruptcies, 4 more years. The 47th American president.”
Alongside an image of the cover shared on social media, were the words: “Four years after launching an unprecedented attack on democracy and leaving the White House in disgrace, the convicted felon and twice-impeached politician will return to Washington DC as the 47th president of the United States.”
The cover quickly went viral, attracting 1.3 million likes on Instagram in less than 24 hours.
One person responded: “These are literally facts, not opinions, and people are still so pressed about it.” Someone else said: “The ‘four more years’ sounds heavy.”
Having easily surpassed the 270 electoral college votes needed for victory, Trump appeared on stage in West Palm Beach, Florida, alongside his family and vice-president-elect JD Vance, in front of crowds of cheering supporters.
Donald Trump. (Getty)
“Look what happened, is this crazy?” Trump said. “I will fight for you and your family and your future, every single day. I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body.”
He described the result as a “magnificent victory for the American people” and promised voters that “this will truly be the golden age of America”.
He said MAGA (Make America Great Again) was a “movement like nobody’s ever seen before” and was “the greatest political movement of all time”.
The president-elect went on to say: “There’s never been anything like this in this country and maybe now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly”.
“We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”
In a speech where she conceded defeat, Harris said she would “not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign”, adding: “Hear me when I say: the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up. This is a time to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.”
Special counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks about an unsealed indictment against former President Donald Trump on Aug. 1, 2023, in Washington, D.C.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Donald Trump started this year fighting two federal prosecutions that threatened to send him to prison. But he will end it free and clear of his most significant criminal legal problems.
With his resounding victory at the polls, and a longstanding Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president, the key question is not if, but when, prosecutors move to dismiss or delay his federal election interference case in Washington, D.C.
Trump recently said he would fire special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds” after he returned to the White House. Now, that won’t be necessary to bring his federal criminal troubles to an end.
Smith is taking steps to end both federal cases against Trump before the president-elect takes office, according to a source familiar with the Justice Department deliberations.
1. What are the outstanding cases the federal government has lodged against Trump?
A grand jury in Washington indicted Trump this year on four felony charges in connection with his effort to cling to power in 2020, culminating in the violent siege on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Judge Tanya Chutkan had set a trial date for March 2024, but that date came and went, after the Supreme Court accepted the case and ultimately handed Trump significant immunity from prosecution for official actions he took in the White House.
The judge is just now beginning to consider what parts of the prosecution’s case amount to official acts, and which are private conduct of a person seeking rather than holding office.
The Justice Department has appealed in a separate criminal case against Trump that accuses the former president of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort and refusing to the return them to the FBI.
Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, dismissed the documents case on July 15, the first day of the Republican National Convention this year, reasoning that the way the special counsel had been appointed violates the Constitution. The Justice Department has been seeking review by a higher court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
2. What does Trump’s election victory mean for these cases?
They’re on life support and likely to end even before the inauguration in January.
On the campaign trial, now President-elect Trump has vowed to fire the special counsel, Jack Smith, on his first day in office. But Trump would not need to dismiss Smith or order any new DOJ officials to fire Smith in order to end the criminal prosecutions.
President-elect Donald Trump delivers remarks during the Georgia state GOP convention in June 2023 after a grand jury indicted him on 37 felony counts in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents probe.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
In 2000, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the federal government on its powers and boundaries, concluded that a sitting president could not be indicted or prosecuted because that “would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.”
Administrations led by Republicans and Democrats have adopted the DOJ policy against prosecuting presidents.
The Florida case involving classified documents is a bit more complicated. DOJ could file notice with the appeals court that it is abandoning the appeal. But that case involves two other defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira.
Dismissing the appeal outright would also mean walking away from cases that prosecutors built against those two defendants, Trump’s personal aide and the property manager at Mar-a-Lago.
What’s more, the federal government may have a broader interest, because Cannon’s reasoning could upend the way special prosecutors have been appointed for decades.
But one DOJ veteran who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly told NPR that Cannon’s ruling would not be considered binding precedent, so the stakes could be lower.
Former Attorney General William Barr says voters have evaluated the allegations against Trump—and decisively rendered their own verdict.
“Further maneuvering on these cases in the weeks ahead would serve no legitimate purpose and only distract the country and the incoming administration from the task at hand,” Barr said in a written statement first reported by the Guardian.
3. What happens to the special counsel, Jack Smith?
Special counsels are obligated to file a report on their actions with the Attorney General when they finish their work. The current attorney general, Merrick Garland, has pledged to make most of those reports public.
If Smith’s written report is not complete by Inauguration Day, it will be up to new DOJ leaders to decide its fate.
Mike Davis, a Trump ally, told a conservative interviewer this week that the attorney general “is probably President Trump’s most important appointment.”
Davis told the interviewer that Smith’s entire office should be fired and said, “After today, Jack Smith, you’re going to be the hunted: legally, politically and financially. So lawyer up, buddy.”
4. Trump also faced criminal charges in two states, New York and Georgia. How will the election reshape those cases?
A jury in New York this year convicted Trump on 34 criminal charges related to bookkeeping for an alleged hush money payment to an adult film actress shortly before the 2016 election.
Justice Juan Merchan scheduled a hearing for Nov. 12 to assess how the Supreme Court’s immunity decision might affect that case. It’s not clear whether the criminal sentencing for Trump set for Thanksgiving week will occur. Trump’s lawyers may seek to stop it given the election results.
The case against Trump in Fulton County, Ga., over alleged election interference, has been on pause for months while a higher court considers possible conflicts of interest involving District Attorney Fani Willis. There’s a hearing scheduled in that appeal Dec. 5.
It, too, could be overtaken by events — and a strategy of delay and deflection by Trump’s lawyers that appears to have succeeded beyond imagination.
Republicans really hate people voting. They know they are unpopular and they know the more votes the more democrats win. So this is 1930s Germany brownshirt stuff, this is gang thug rule that the maga want. We need to understand what these people really are. In their world might makes right. In their world the most violent person wins. They grew up idolizing Rambo type movies. They are stunted child school yard bullies. Hugs.
A Vancouver ballot box was burned in an arson Monday morning, authorities report – with possibly hundreds of ballots damaged in the fire.
KATU was on the scene at Fisher’s Landing Transit Center in Vancouver shortly after 4 a.m., where heavy smoke was seen coming from inside a dropoff ballot box.
Our photographer Evan Bell captured grey smoke steadily billowing out of the Park and Ride ballot box at Fisher’s Landing Transit Center near Southeast 162nd Avenue just after 6 a.m.
Multiple police units were in the area, and the ballot box was cordoned off by police tape as it continued to smoke.
Around 6:30 a.m., KATU captured footage of first responders releasing a pile of actively burning ballots onto the ground, which continued to smolder and smoke heavily even after the flames were put out.
The Clark County elections auditor told us that the last ballot pickup at that location was 8 a.m. Sunday. Hundreds of ballots were inside at the time of the burning, and KATU was told there were maybe only a few that could be saved.
Voters who dropped off ballots at that location after 11 a.m. Saturday need to contact the Election Auditor’s Office IMMEDIATELY for a new ballot.
A link to the Clark County Elections page, with contact information for the Auditor’s Office, can be found HERE.
Ballot Box Fire – A Clark County Elections ballot drop box at the Fisher’s Landing Transit Center is smoking heavily. Police are on scene. #LiveOnK2pic.twitter.com/40E09hZolz
Vancouver Police released the following statement at 9 a.m.:
This morning at about 4:00 a.m., Vancouver Police responded to an arson at a ballot box located at 3510 SE 164th Ave. It was reported that the ballot box was smoking and on fire. Officers arrived and located a suspicious device next to the box. The ballot box was smoking and was on fire. Members of the Metro Explosive Disposal Unit (MEDU) arrived and safely collected the device, and the fire was extinguished. Detectives from the Vancouver Police Arson team and the Vancouver Fire Marshals also responded.
The FBI is continuing the investigation of this incident.
Just a few hours earlier, Portland police had responded to an arson at a SE Portland ballot box.
Investigators say that an incendiary device was set off inside the box, causing a fire.
The fire was extinguished and the device was cleared, and the PPB is investigating the incident. The status of the ballots in the burned box has not been provided.
Tengrain’s Mock Paper Scissors has the pleading, which has been unsealed. Though there are redactions, they’re easily ID’d by people like us who pay attention, and there’s a nice index of them on MPS’s page. The link to the pleading, which is delicious (the pleading, I mean,) is also here.
The former president’s lawyers are trying to get ahead of what could be his campaign’s October surprise.
Donald Trump’s lawyers are scrambling to get ahead of what could be this election’s October surprise: the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report detailing evidence in the election fraud case against the former president.
In a court filing on Tuesday, Trump’s legal team accused the Department of Justice of putting together a “politically motivated manifesto” specifically timed to influence voters “in the final weeks of the 2024 Presidential election while early voting has already begun throughout the United States.”
They asked U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to highly redact the report or stop it from appearing in the court’s public docket altogether.
The report, which runs approximately 180 pages and was filed last Thursday under seal pending the judge’s approval for public release, would reveal grand jury testimony and what Trump lawyers called “sensitive witness statements” gathered by federal investigators over recent years.
Trump’s team says prosecutors must explain “why their proposed public disclosure … will not pose risks to potential witnesses and unfairly prejudice the adjudication of this case.” Ironically, their argument comes after Trump, for months, has been complaining that a judge-imposed gag order has prevented him from attacking former allies for assisting FBI agents and testifying against him.
Trump’s defense attorneys, John F. Lauro and Todd Blanche, turned that narrative upside down, claiming that the DOJ special counsel is hypocritically publicizing investigative materials after vehemently trying to keep them secret in Trump’s classified records case. (Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed those charges this past summer, and the case is on appeal.)
“Now that public disclosure serves their politically motivated mission, the special counsel’s office takes a different view. The office believes President Trump’s constitutional rights to
impartial jurors and fair proceedings — to say nothing of witness privacy and even safety — all take a back seat to the office’s political goals,” they wrote.
Unstated in today’s filing is that the potentially disastrous timing of this report — and its existence — is only due to the Trump team’s delay tactics in the case. Trump managed to push back the trial by fighting the indictment all the way up to the Supreme Court, which granted him an expansive new definition of presidential immunity. That opinion ultimately sent the trial judge on a fact-finding mission to figure out what alleged misconduct counts as personal versus official actions — hence Smith’s latest report.
Trump’s lawyers initially tried to file their counterargument under seal, but Chutkan ordered the D.C. federal court’s clerk to post it publicly by midday Tuesday.
The judge gave Trump’s team until noon today to file their proposed redactions to the report and until Oct. 10 to go over what they want to keep secret in what’s expected to be a large and detailed appendix to the report. Chutkan could order the report’s release at any time after that.
Republicans, uh, robbed of another campaign issue. From the FBI:
The FBI released detailed data on over 14 million criminal offenses for 2023 reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program by participating law enforcement agencies. More than 16,000 state, county, city, university and college, and tribal agencies, covering a combined population of 94.3% inhabitants, submitted data to the UCR Program through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the Summary Reporting System.
The FBI’s crime statistics estimates, based on reported data for 2023, show that national violent crime decreased an estimated 3.0% in 2023 compared to 2022 estimates:
Murder and non-negligent manslaughter recorded a 2023 estimated nationwide decrease of 11.6% compared to the previous year.
In 2023, the estimated number of offenses in the revised rape category saw an estimated 9.4% decrease.
Aggravated assault figures decreased an estimated 2.8% in 2023.
Robbery showed an estimated decrease of 0.3% nationally…
Well, we hear there’s someone who’s been found by a jury to be a sexual abuser and who’s been convicted of 34 felonies who’s running for President, so there’s that.
Since 2016, I’ve felt sort of hyperaware about the potentiality of Russian disinfo because obviously, WikiLeaks and the IRA. Per the Senate Intelligence Committee, in multiple volumes, this was anything but a hoax. The claim Trump didn’t welcome it and appreciate it is more than answered by his campaign’s silence about it and even attempted cover-up. Money was funneled through Facebook and Twitter ads and RW-pressure groups like NRA. I joke that we are still living in 2016 because we are still finding out how that election was, well, weird.
I deleted a post about how weird it was that Benny Johnson was a dupe to launder Russian talking points in the Tenet exploit because I realized that his basic dopiness and right-wing credulity is a whole fucking bigger mood than I was handling at the moment. We get that RW dopey incendiaries are out here–and they are pretty well-funded domestically as it is. Like, you pick a random concern-trolling “Liberty” “Freedom” “Heritage” or “Family”-labelled group from the last 100 years, and it was probably founded by some freaky Christian billionaire bigot family like the DeVos, Wilkes, Prince, Mellon, Coors, Koch, Busch, etc. The family-tree of theocratic and Bircher-light think tankitude has been incestuous and generously endowed since forever.
But where there is money and batshit, you have a real problem–people who love the hell out of money and don’t care what degree of batshit they spew. If you wanted useful idiots for foreign actors, this is one way you could open up a path for useful idiots to wrongfully mobilize people by playing on their fears and so on. Propaganda is cheap and effective. Even when we try to sanction the fuck out of the players to try and make it prohibitively costly to shit in the US litterbox–someone will try it.
Part of the reason why is we have a great big permission-structure to lie on the GOP side of things. We talk about it, but I don’t think we talk about it as much as we need to. The media is in part at fault, but also, money has generated a whole right-wing puke funnel, just feeding viewers like baby birds. And the results of the propaganda: fear and anger–short circuit logical critical thinking pathways. Well-fed ducklings become sitting ducks.
The internet influencer thing though, is even more perverse. There’s no reason to believe these people are anything but cons. I’ve thought of it as the “Triumph of the Swill”, because it’s propaganda without even artistry or competence. It relies on people being poorly educated or getting hopped-up on the idea that contrarianism is “independent thinking”–because you are a super genius of rare qualities, you can see through Big Atmosphere’s lies since Joseph Priestly and reject climate change, or see where that shill Jenner was headed with his vaccination/germ theory nonsense. You have clearly beat the mentality of Darwin and Le Compte de Buffon regarding that evolution jazz, too.
Conspiracy theories proliferate and why not? Anything might be true once anything can be called false.
Why not DARVO Russia and Ukraine? Why not introduce a little Holocaust denial? Why not suggest civil wars are actually good and healthy, or that secession could be beneficial to a large US State?
Harmful, wrongheaded views can be pimped out to attractive or engaging morons, who speak down to controversy-curious people without the tools to resist. They’ll even have you believing education itself is a problem and suggest you do away with it.
I think it’s good it’s being addressed, but the right wing is super-great at trying to say their free speech right are denied whenever they get told to stop being shills for utter bullshit. I get the feeling the pool of people who have been Russian-cash injected and super-bullshit charged will widen. And yes to people maybe being made examples of, because the shit has to stop.
But we clearly have a problem with toxic “elements” in our political environment. Some remediation feels like a good thing. Geting people to realize and care that one side has been enabling foreign propaganda to influence us and to recognize it as a national security threat is very important–that we haven’t been screaming about it enough since 2016 feels like a failure.
Also the Feds need to do Posobiec and Flynn. because I can’t believe those asses aren’t being handled from elsewhere.
Defendants Are Senior Leaders of Hamas Responsible for Planning, Supporting, and Perpetrating Hamas’s October 7 Terrorist Attacks in Israel Resulting in the Brutal Murders of More Than a Thousand Innocent Civilians, Including Over 40 American Citizens
The Justice Department announced today the unsealing of terrorism, murder conspiracy, and sanctions-evasion charges against six senior leaders of Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization. The charges relate to the defendants’ central roles in planning, supporting, and perpetrating the terrorist atrocities that Hamas committed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 (the October 7 Hamas Massacres), involving the murders and kidnappings of countless innocent civilians, including American citizens, which was the culmination of Hamas’s decades-long campaign of terrorism and violence against Israel and its allies, including American citizens. The defendants are either deceased or remain at large.
“The Justice Department has charged Yahya Sinwar and other senior leaders of Hamas for financing, directing, and overseeing a decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and endanger the national security of the United States,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “On October 7th, Hamas terrorists, led by these defendants, murdered nearly 1200 people, including over 40 Americans, and kidnapped hundreds of civilians. This weekend, we learned that Hamas murdered an additional six people they had kidnapped and held captive for nearly a year, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23 year old Israeli American. We are investigating Hersh’s murder, and each and every one of Hamas’ brutal murders of Americans, as an act of terrorism. The charges unsealed today are just one part of our effort to target every aspect of Hamas’ operations. These actions will not be our last.”
“Yahya Sinwar and the other senior leaders of Hamas are charged today with orchestrating this terrorist organization’s decades-long campaign of mass violence and terror — including on October 7th. On that horrible day, Hamas terrorists viciously massacred nearly 1,200 innocent men, women, and children, including over 40 Americans, kidnapped hundreds more, and used sexual violence as a weapon of brutality,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “Since that horrific day, we have worked to investigate and hold accountable those responsible, and we will not rest until all those who kidnapped or murdered Americans are brought to justice. Our thoughts continue to be with the families of all the victims of this barbaric terrorist attack.”
“From the moment Hamas launched its horrific attack on October 7, the FBI has been dedicated to identifying and charging those responsible for these heinous crimes,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “The FBI has and will continue to relentlessly investigate these attacks on civilians, including Americans. Hamas is a Foreign Terrorist Organization with a long history of violence, and the group’s actions have resulted in increased terrorism threats in the U.S. and against American interests throughout the world. Countering terrorism remains our number one priority, and our work continues.”
“The core mission of the National Security Division is to protect Americans from violent terrorists and extremist organizations like Hamas,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel on October 7 are intolerable, and the Justice Department will not rest in our pursuit to hold Hamas accountable for perpetrating its campaign of terror, death, and destruction.”
“For decades, Hamas and its leadership have dedicated themselves to the eradication of the State of Israel, and to murdering, maiming, and brutalizing anyone — including dozens of Americans — who stood in their way,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York. “The October 7 Hamas Massacres – in which over 40 American citizens were murdered – is only the latest act of savagery carried out by Hamas. This office has long been dedicated to serving as a bulwark against terrorism, and striking blows against its leaders. Our commitment is clear: if you hurt one member of our community, you hurt all of us — and we stand with all victims of Hamas’ reign of terror. We will bring justice to this terrorist organization from the top down for the atrocities they have committed.”
According to court documents, Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya, commonly known as Hamas, is a terrorist organization that was founded in 1987, and has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) by the United States since 1997. From its inception, Hamas’ stated purpose has been to create an Islamic Palestinian state throughout Israel by eliminating the State of Israel through violent holy war, or jihad. Hamas also promotes attacks against the U.S. and its citizens and, over more than two decades, Hamas has murdered and injured dozens of Americans as part of its campaign of violence and terror. (snip-More)
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday swiftly rejected Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, spurning the former president’s attempt at an end-run around the state court where he was convicted and is set to be sentenced in two weeks.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s ruling — just hours after Trump’s lawyers asked him to weigh the move — upends the Republican presidential nominee’s plan to move the case to federal court so that he could seek to have his conviction overturned in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling.
Hellerstein, echoing his denial of Trump’s pretrial bid to move the case, said the defense failed to meet the high burden of proof for changing jurisdiction and that Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records involved his personal life, not official actions that the Supreme Court ruled are immune from prosecution. (snip-more on the page, but this is the news.)
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