blog

April 8, 2023

New York Indictment Is Just the Beginning of Trump’s Mounting Legal Woes

The New York district attorney’s case against Trump is a strong one.

On March 30, Donald J. Trump was charged in New York with 34 felony counts of “Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree,” for attempting to hide hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. In the historic Indictment and accompanying Statement of Facts, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has amassed a strong case against Trump. Statements of Facts, which provide a road map of the case, are frequently used in complex white-collar crime cases.

This is the first sentence of the Statement of Facts:

The defendant DONALD J. TRUMP repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.

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March 27, 2023

ICC Charges Putin With War Crimes While US and Israeli Leaders Enjoy Impunity

The U.S. celebrates the charges against Putin, but pressures the ICC to refrain from prosecuting Israelis and Americans.

On March 17, a little more than one year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced that the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) had issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for the commission of war crimes in Ukraine. The PTC also issued an arrest warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, commissioner for children’s rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, for the same war crimes.

While the U.S. celebrates the arrest warrant against Putin, it has pressured the ICC to refrain from prosecuting Israelis and Americans. There is a double standard in the ICC’s treatment of the situations in Ukraine and Palestine. This is largely due to political coercion by the United States, which isn’t even a party to the ICC’s Rome Statute.

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March 21, 2023

For 20 Years, Team Bush Has Escaped Prosecution for Their War Crimes in Iraq

One year after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the International Criminal Court charged him with war crimes.

On March 20, Iraqis mark the 20th anniversary of the horrific U.S.-U.K. bombing of Baghdad, dubbed “Shock and Awe.” In rapid succession, “coalition forces” dropped 3,000 bombs, including many that weighed 2,000 pounds, on Baghdad in what The New York Times called “almost biblical power.”

Although they launched an illegal war of aggression and committed war crimes in Iraq, 20 years later the leaders of the U.S. and the U.K. have never faced criminal accountability. By contrast, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has already charged Russian President Vladimir Putin with war crimes just one year after his unlawful invasion of Ukraine. He is the first non-African leader to be charged by the ICC, which frequently succumbs to pressure from the United States.

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March 15, 2023

Daniel Ellsberg Is Calling on All of Us to Work to Avert Nuclear War

The legendary whistleblower has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

The legendary Daniel Ellsberg has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In a March 1 email to friends, Dan wrote, “I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live … it might be more, or less.” He will turn 92 on April 7.

Dan displayed uncommon courage in 1971 when he publicized the 7,000-page top-secret Pentagon Papers while working at the Rand Corporation. As a consultant to the Department of Defense, Dan drafted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s plans for nuclear war.

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March 4, 2023


Student Loan Forgiveness Program Appears Headed for Defeat in the Supreme Court

The right-wing “justices” seemed impervious to the economic plight of tens of millions with debilitating student debt.

A right-wing majority of the Supreme Court is on the verge of denying student debt relief to more than 40 million borrowers. On February 28, the high court heard oral arguments in a pair of cases challenging President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. Instituted to ameliorate the effects of the COVID pandemic, the program could provide up to $20,000 of debt relief to people with federally held loans.

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February 26, 2023

Arkansas’s Anti-BDS Law Remains in Effect Because SCOTUS Refused to Review It

While the far right Israeli regime escalates its repression of Palestinians, the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to disturb an Arkansas law that requires government contractors to certify they are not boycotting Israel or “Israeli-controlled territories.”

The high court didn’t specifically uphold Arkansas’s anti-boycott law. However, the court declined to review the case because there were not four “justices” who agreed to hear it. So Arkansas’s anti-Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) law remains in effect.

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February 23, 2023

Biden Administration Takes Its Capitulation to Israel to an Absurd New Level

As the new right-wing Israeli regime ramps up its oppression of Palestinians, the Biden administration has taken its capitulation to Israel to a new and absurd level. After nominating an independent expert to serve on a human rights commission, the U.S. State Department withdrew the nomination because the expert accurately called Israel an apartheid state. A week later, the United States prevented the United Nations Security Council from voting to condemn Israel’s illegal settlements in Palestinian territory.

On February 10, the State Department nominated Professor James Cavallaro as an independent expert on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Cavallaro is “a leading scholar and practitioner of international law with deep expertise in the region as well as the Inter-American human rights system,” the State Department declared. Cavallaro, executive director of the University Network for Human Rights (UNHR), was a member of the IACHR from 2014-2017 during the Obama administration and even served as its president.

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February 13, 2023

New Israeli Regime Moves Toward “Cleansing” All Palestinians From Palestine

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s religious Zionist coalition, which was sworn in on December 29, 2022, declared in its manifesto that Jews have the “exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.” To that end, in a little over a month, the Israeli regime has killed Palestinians, demolished their homes, mounted incursions into occupied Palestinian territory and endeavored to change laws and policies to accelerate the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Palestine.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Nakba — the Arabic word for “catastrophe.” In 1948, Israel assumed control over more than three-quarters of Palestine. Upwards of 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes or forced to flee and Israel confiscated much of their land.

Now, Israel’s new extremist regime — the most anti-Palestinian in Israeli history — aims to finish the job by incorporating all of the occupied Palestinian territories into Israel.

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February 6, 2023

“Broken Windows Policing” Gave Rise to SCORPION Unit That Killed Tyre Nichols

The Memphis police officers who killed Tyre Nichols were members of a unit called SCORPION — the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in our Neighborhoods. But far from “restoring peace,” these officers turned the streets of Memphis into a violent scene of torture that led to the death of Nichols.

SCORPION was modeled after the bogus theory of “broken windows policing ”: the thoroughly debunked idea that if cops make arrests for minor offenses, it will prevent the commission of serious ones. But it didn’t work out that way. Under the guise of enforcing a traffic law, the officers who murdered Nichols committed much more serious crimes. After Nichols was killed, SCORPION was disbanded.

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January 25, 2023

Prosecution of Assange Would Lead to End of the First Amendment, Advocates Warn

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg joined other leading journalists, attorneys and human rights defenders to call on the Biden administration to drop its extradition request and indictment against journalist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, citing the grave threat Assange’s prosecution would pose to journalism worldwide.

“Every empire requires secrecy to cloak its acts of violence that maintain it as an empire,” Ellsberg testified during the Belmarsh Tribunal held on January 20 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The tribunal is named after London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, where Assange has been held for nearly four years, fighting extradition to the United States. The Belmarsh Tribunal, inspired by the Russell-Sartre tribunal of the Vietnam War, was sponsored by Democracy Now!, Defending Rights & Dissent, Courage Foundation, DiEM25, The Intercept, The Nation and PEN International.

Assange is charged with violations of the Espionage Act for exposing evidence of U.S. war crimes and faces 175 years in prison if convicted.

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