The Full Belmonte, 6/9/2023
Trump
“Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on seven counts in the special counsel's classified documents probe. This marks the first time a former president has ever been charged with a federal crime. The Department of Justice has been investigating whether classified documents from the Trump White House were illegally mishandled when they were taken to his Florida Mar-a-Lago residence after he left office. Trump, who denied any wrongdoing, was separately indicted in March on state charges related to hush-money payments to a former adult film star. As for his 2024 presidential bid, nothing stops Trump from running while indicted, or even convicted — but it may be more difficult for an indicted candidate to win votes. Trump said on Truth Social that he has been summoned to appear at the federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday.” [CNN]
Trump IndictedTrump Expected to Surrender on Tuesday After Indictment in Documents Case
Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who Mr. Trump appointed to the bench in 2020, is scheduled to preside over his first appearance in Federal District Court in Miami.
“Former President Donald J. Trump’s initial appearance to face federal criminal charges on allegations that he mishandled classified documents after leaving office and obstructed the government’s efforts to reclaim them will be before a judge he placed on the bench.
Mr. Trump is expected to appear in Federal District Court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon on charges including willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon is scheduled to preside over that initial hearing, according to people familiar with the matter. It was not clear whether Judge Cannon, who was criticized by a higher court for handing him a series of unusually favorable rulings during the early stages of the investigation, would remain assigned for the entirety of Mr. Trump’s case.
The indictment, handed up by a grand jury in the Federal District Court in Miami, is the first time a former president has faced federal charges. It puts the nation in an extraordinary position, given Mr. Trump’s status not only as a one-time commander in chief but also as the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination to face President Biden, whose administration will now be seeking to convict his potential rival of multiple felonies….” Read more at New York Times
Two of Trump’s lawyers quit in wake of indictment in classified documents case
“Two of Donald Trump’s top lawyers said Friday that they were quitting his legal team, moments after the newly indicted former president said he would be bringing on new lawyers, and suggested the two attorneys may be departing. The criminal case against Trump for alleged obstruction and mishandling of classified documents case is expected to be overseen at least initially by Judge Aileen M. Cannon — the federal judge in Florida who last year appointed a special master in the case and temporarily halted FBI access to classified documents taken in a court-approved search. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
Here’s what to know
The evidence leading to the indictment by a federal grand jury in Miami includes an audio recording from 2021 in which he talks about an apparently secret document and says, “As president, I could have declassified it, but now I can’t,” a person familiar with a transcript of the remarks said Friday.
Republicans were quick to criticize what they called the weaponization of the Justice Department, ahead of Tuesday’s expected arraignment, but few defended Trump himself.
It’s the second time Trump has been indicted. He was indicted in New York in March on allegations of falsifying business documents related to hush money payments and has pleaded not guilty. He is also under investigation for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.” [Washington Post]
Walt Nauta, the Trump valet who moved boxes at Mar-a-Lago, also indicted in classified documents case, former president says
“A day after announcing he'd been charged with mishandling classified documents, Donald Trump said federal authorities have also charged a longtime aide whose responsibilities included moving and carrying cardboard boxes in which the former president kept mementos and papers….” Read more at Washington Post
Voting Rights Act dodges bullet at Supreme Court
In a surprising decision that fractured the conservative justices, the high court sided with Black voters who challenged Alabama’s congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander.
The decision Thursday came as a surprise in part because the Roberts court has repeatedly chipped away at the Voting Rights Act. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo
By JOSH GERSTEIN and ZACH MONTELLARO
“The Supreme Court has passed up a chance to further narrow the scope of the Voting Rights Act, unexpectedly siding with Black voters in an Alabama redistricting case and rejecting a legal theory that would have made it harder for minority voters to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
In a surprising 5-4 decision on Thursday, the high court ruled that Alabama’s Republican-controlled Legislature likely violated the law by diluting the power of Black voters when it drew its congressional map after the 2020 census.
Alabama has seven congressional districts. One of them — the only one represented by a Democrat — contains a majority of Black voters, despite the fact that over a quarter of the state’s population is African American. Thursday’s decision will likely force the state to redraw its congressional map to add a second predominantly Black district.
And the ruling increases the odds that minority voters will prevail in other pending redistricting challenges in states like Georgia and Louisiana. The challenges could force those states, too, to draw additional districts where minority voters can elect their chosen candidates — a prospect that could lead to a handful of new Democratic seats in the U.S. House.
The decision featured an unusual ideological breakdown: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s majority opinion, joined by the court’s liberal bloc — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh also joined most of Roberts’ opinion.
The court’s other conservatives — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — dissented.
The decision Thursday came as a surprise in part because the Roberts court has repeatedly chipped away at the Voting Rights Act, the landmark law passed in the wake of civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s.
Most notably, Roberts himself wrote a landmark decision 10 years ago that neutered the requirement in the VRA that states and other jurisdictions with a history of discrimination in voting get changes to voting laws and even polling locations cleared in advance by either the Department of Justice or a federal court.
Later decisions also weakened the VRA — like a 2018 ruling that state legislators were entitled to a presumption of good faith, and a 2021 decision adopting five ‘guideposts’ to assess voting rules that activists decried as a sweeping ruling that would make it significantly harder to challenge laws as discriminatory.
The Alabama case — Allen v. Milligan — revolved around a challenge to the state’s congressional map, which civil rights groups argued illegally diluted the power of Black voters in the state. Lower-court judges agreed and blocked the map from being used — an order that the Supreme Court temporarily put on hold while the justices heard Alabama’s appeal.
During oral arguments in October, a majority of the Supreme Court did not seem receptive to Alabama’s most extreme arguments even as the court’s conservatives seemed open to narrowing the Voting Rights Act to some extent.
However, Roberts’ 34-page opinion Thursday declined to disturb long-standing precedents interpreting the VRA, as Alabama’s GOP-led government and many conservatives had urged. The state and its defenders suggested that requiring multiple majority-Black districts would impermissibly force the state to draw districts based on race. Roberts, who has often expressed skepticism about government actions focused on race, insisted those dangers were not paramount in this case.
‘The concern that [Section 2] may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States is, of course, not new,’ the chief justice wrote. ‘Our opinion today does not diminish or disregard these concerns. It simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here.’
Alabama officials took aim in particular at a 1986 Supreme Court ruling, Thornburg v. Gingles, that struck down a districting scheme in North Carolina that diluted Black voting power by allowing for legislative districts that elected multiple representatives, effectively drowning out the preferred political candidates of minority voters.
The state also argued that plaintiffs in Voting Rights Act cases shouldn’t be permitted to propose new maps drawn with racial demographics in mind. But Roberts flatly rejected that argument, saying that’s exactly what those groups are entitled to do.
“The contention that mapmakers must be entirely ‘blind’ to race has no footing” in the Supreme Court’s precedents on Section 2 of the VRA, Roberts wrote.
Kavanaugh, who joined in last June’s blockbuster ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, expressed skepticism about Gingles but said the court should be reluctant to disturb long-standing precedents in cases that merely interpret laws rather than reach conclusions on what the Constitution requires.
“The stare decisis standard for this Court to overrule a statutory precedent, as distinct from a constitutional precedent, is comparatively strict,” Kavanaugh wrote in a solo concurrence Thursday. He said Congress has had more than 30 years to alter the Voting Rights Act if the court got it wrong.
Thomas, by contrast, opened his dissent by repeating an argument he has made in past cases: that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act should not apply to redistricting challenges at all. ‘I have long been convinced that those words … do not include a State’s ... choice of one districting scheme over another.’
Thomas’ combative dissent, which is 10 pages longer than the majority opinion, is withering in its tone. He accused Roberts and the others in the majority of issuing a ruling that will ‘fossilize all of the worst aspects of our long-deplorable vote-dilution jurisprudence.’
Roberts’ opinion also wielded unusually pointed language to dismiss Thomas’ arguments as extreme.
‘The dissent … goes where even Alabama does not dare,’ Roberts wrote, arguing that Thomas’ approach would leave the Voting Rights Act with a ‘crabbed reach.’
Gorsuch signed on to Thomas’ dissent in its entirety, while Barrett and Alito did not sign on to that portion of Thomas’ dissent.
And Alito’s separately authored dissent, which was also joined in its entirety by Gorsuch, signaled that he would still welcome future opportunities to revisit the landmark law. ‘Today’s decision unnecessarily sets the VRA on a perilous and unfortunate path,’ he wrote.
Kavanaugh did join with the dissenters on one point, declaring that ‘the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.’ Although Kavanaugh declined to address in this case just what that time limit might be, his search for a deadline could be a signal about a forthcoming Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in college admissions, where similar arguments have been leveled to call for an end to using race.
Thursday’s ruling will no doubt become a key precedent for the other pending redistricting cases around the country in which voters allege discrimination. Those challenges have been held up pending the outcome of the Alabama decision.
The decision ‘lays a foundation for fair map decisions in our other Section 2 cases in states like Texas, Georgia, and Louisiana,’ Marina Jenkins, the executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation — a Democratic Party-aligned group that backed the challenge to the Alabama map — said in a statement on Thursday.
Alabama argued that legislators drew the map with ‘race neutral’ principles by not looking at racial demographics when drawing the map. The state, in effect, argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — which prohibits voting practices and procedures that discriminate on the basis of race — should be read to require showing some sort of explicit discriminatory intent, as opposed to an outcomes-based test.” [POLITICO]
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Air quality
“Air quality conditions throughout the eastern US and Canada are expected to slowly improve this weekend, forecasts show, but the skies will take time to fully clear. The dense clouds of smoke have postponed professional sports games, grounded flights due to poor visibility, shuttered schools and forced many to mask up when outdoors. All of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Indiana will remain under air quality alerts today, according to officials. Parts of Ohio, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina continue to experience alerts as well, but that could change as conditions improve for some locations. In Canada, about 16,000 people left their homes in Halifax during the height of the wildfire evacuations and about 4,100 remain evacuated.” [CNN]
FBI arrests businessman linked to impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton
USA TODAY NETWORK
“AUSTIN, Texas — Nate Paul, a real estate developer at the center of a federal investigation into Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, was arrested by the FBI Thursday, a move that came amid new questions about the men’s dealings raised by financial records the Republican’s lawyers made public to try to clear him of bribery allegations.
According to jail records, Paul, 36, was booked at 4:25 p.m. Thursday. The charges he faces were not immediately known.
Paul and his World Class company have been under investigation since 2019, a year before federal investigators opened an investigation into Paxton in connection with his relationship with Paul. The basis for the initial Paul investigation is unclear.
The Paxton investigation was triggered by a complaint from former lawyers in the attorney general’s office who alleged Paxton misused his office to intervene in legal matters involving Paul. The Paxton-Paul connection was a partial basis for a Texas House investigation that led to Paxton’s impeachment on May 27.
Paxton, suspended from office without pay, now awaits a trial in the Senate, where Paul has the potential to be a witness.
Paul has been entangled in numerous bankruptcy proceedings and legal battles with his debtholders in recent years, and he has lost a number of high-profile properties as a result.
Earlier this year, a Travis County judge found Paul in contempt of court and ordered him to serve 10 days. Judge Jan Soifer fined him $181,760 for violating court orders, including making illegal transfers from bank accounts — allegations that Paul denies.
Two appeals courts temporarily stayed the ruling and Paul avoided going to jail.
On Wednesday, Paxton’s defense team showed a packed room of journalists a bank statement that included a 2020 wire transfer purportedly showing him, and not a donor, paying more than $120,000 for a home renovation.
The wire transfer was dated Oct. 1, 2020 — the same day Paxton’s deputies signed a letter informing the head of human resources at the Texas attorney general’s office that they had reported Paxton to the FBI.
The $121,000 payment was to Cupertino Builders, whose manager was an associate of Paul, state corporation and court records show.
The company did not incorporate as a business in Texas until more than three weeks after the transaction took place. A company of the same name was formed in Delaware in April of that year, although public filings there do not make clear who is behind it.
Last year a court-appointed overseer for some of Paul’s companies wrote in a report that Cupertino Builders was used for ‘fraudulent transfers’ from his business to Narsimha Raju Sagiraju, who was convicted of fraud in California in 2016. The report described Sagiraju as Paul’s “friend.”
Paul, who also employed a woman with whom Paxton acknowledged having an extramarital affair, has denied bribing Paxton. In a deposition, Paul described Sagiraju as an “independent contractor” and said he didn’t remember how they first met.” [USA Today]
Stocks
“The S&P 500 rallied on Thursday to end the day in bull market territory, officially bringing an end to the bear market that began in January 2022. The broad-based index closed at 4,293.93, a 20% surge since its most recent low hit in October 2022. The optimism on Wall Street comes as markets have remained surprisingly resilient over the past nine months as the tech and media industries appear to be bouncing back from a disastrous 2022. Over the past week, markets have gained momentum amid a string of strong economic readings, likely because of the end of the debt ceiling crisis and expectations that the Federal Reserve may take a pause on rate hikes. Now, it remains to be seen whether this is a short-lived rally that ends up biting investors — or a path toward long-term market success.” [CNN]
Joran van der Sloot arrives in U.S. to face charges stemming from Natalee Holloway’s disappearance
“Joran van der Sloot arrived in Birmingham, Alabama from Lima, Peru today to face federal charges of wire fraud and extortion related to Natalee Holloway’s disappearance.
He is scheduled to be arraigned tomorrow.
His lawyer had challenged his extradition to the U.S. on fraud charges, calling it an ‘abuse of authority’ that violates his client’s rights..
18-year old Holloway was a high school graduate from Birmingham, Alabama, when she disappeared while on vacation with classmates in Aruba. She was last seen getting into a car there with van der Sloot.
Van der Sloot was arrested in connection to Holloway's disappearance but later released due to lack of evidence. A judge later declared Holloway dead.
At the heart of the new charges: prosecutors say van der Sloot asked Holloway’s mother for $250,000 for information leading to Natalee’s remains. She says she paid him $25,000, but it’s a promise Joran never delivered on.
At the time of his extradition today, van der Sloot had been serving a prison sentence in Peru, where he pleaded guilty to the 2010 murder of another woman.” [NBC News]
RSV
“Advisers to the FDA voted Thursday to endorse an antibody designed to protect infants and some toddlers from RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus. The antibody is designed to be given to most infants in a single shot at birth or just before the start of a baby's first RSV season. If approved, it will be the first single-dose preventative treatment for all infants against RSV. Nearly every child gets RSV before the age of 2, according to the CDC, but last winter, the virus overwhelmed pediatric hospitals across the US. Unlike with a vaccine, with which the body builds up its immunity in reaction over time, a monoclonal antibody works right away and could help prevent a surge in cases, health experts say. The FDA will now consider the advisers' endorsement and decide whether to approve the treatment.” [CNN]
Gay Pride flag attacks mount amid online challenges by extremist groups
Anti-hate groups are monitoring online extremists who are urging followers to "capture the (Pride) flag" and deface or destroy it.
USA TODAY
“Police in Nebraska are investigating the burning of a gay Pride flag as a hate crime in the latest of a rash of recent attacks on the LGBTQ+ community believed to be driven in part by online challenges.
In the past week alone, Pride flags have been stolen, slashed or burned in at least five states, including California, Utah, Arizona, Nebraska and Pennsylvania. That’s on top of similar incidents in California and New York in May, including a man that defecated on a pride flag in Manhattan.
The thefts and vandalism come as online extremists have been spreading a new hashtag in recent weeks that encourages followers to damage, destroy or steal Pride flags wherever they see them, said Sarah Moore, an anti-LGBTQ+ extremism analyst for the Anti-Defamation League and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
‘We do know that this is a trend and we know a lot of this stuff is being driven by different campaigns online … in both extremists forums like Telegram and also on mainstream social media forums like Twitter,’ Moore said.
‘They are advocating for a destroy-the-Pride-flag challenge, or they call them capture-the-flag challenges, where they advocate for their followers to go out in really creative ways and capture and deface or set fire to Pride flags from private residences and businesses across the country,’ she said….” Read more at USA Today
Ukraine launches what may be its counteroffensive against Russia
“Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive against Russian occupying forces appears to have begun, one senior officer and one soldier near the front lines told NBC News. The goal of the campaign is to end the stalemate on the battlefield and to reclaim territory taken by Russia. A new phase in the war is seen by Ukraine as vital to renew support of Western allies.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is dealing with another disaster. New satellite images captured by Maxar Technologies show the striking damage following the Kakhovka dam collapse.” [NBC News]
Ukraine
“Water levels in the flooded area of the Kherson region in Ukraine are dropping after the Nova Kakhovka dam collapse, but residents continue to flee for safety. More than 2,300 people have evacuated Kherson and over 3,600 houses have flooded, according to the head of the city's region military administration. The collapse is being called one of the biggest industrial and ecological disasters in Europe in decades. The catastrophe has destroyed entire villages, flooded farmland, deprived tens of thousands of people of power and clean water, and caused massive environmental damage. But it remains unclear whether the dam collapsed because it was deliberately targeted or if the breach could have been caused by structural failure.” [CNN]
”The Red Cross evacuated nearly 300 children from an orphanage in Sudan this week. More than 60 children — most of them infants — died in the weeks after fighting erupted between Sudan's military and a militia force, according to UNICEF. UNICEF's deputy representative in Sudan told NPR's Aya Batrawy that the Mygoma orphanage was understaffed because many carers had fled with their families.” [NPR]
China plans secret base in Cuba
“China has made a secret agreement with Cuba, which is roughly 100 miles from Florida, to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island, The Wall Street Journal scoops (subscription).
Why it matters: It's a ‘brash new geopolitical challenge by Beijing to the U.S.’ — allowing ‘Chinese intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications throughout the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, and monitor U.S. ship traffic,’ The Journal notes.” Axios
“ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — On a boat off the coast of an island near Abu Dhabi, marine scientist Hamad al-Jailani feels the corals, picked from the reef nursery and packed in a box of seawater, and studies them carefully, making sure they haven’t lost their color.
The corals were once bleached. Now they’re big, healthy and ready to be moved back to their original reefs in the hope they’ll thrive once more.
‘We try to grow them from very small fragments up to — now some of them have reached — the size of my fist,’ al-Jailani said, who’s part of the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi’s coral restoration program.
The nursery gives corals the ideal conditions to recover: clear waters with strong currents and the right amount of sunlight. Al-Jailani periodically checks the corals’ growth, removes any potentially harmful seaweed and seagrass, and even lets the fish feed off the corals to clean them, until they’re healthy enough to be relocated.
The Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, or EAD, has been rehabilitating and restoring corals since 2021, when reefs off the United Arab Emirates’ coast faced their second bleaching event in just five years. EAD’s project is one of many initiatives — both public and private — across the country to protect the reefs and the marine life that depend on them in a nation that has come under fire for its large-scale developments and polluting industries that cause harm to underwater ecosystems. There’s been some progress, but experts remain concerned for the future of the reefs in a warming world.
Coral bleaching occurs when sea temperatures rise and sun glares flush out algae that give the corals their color, turning them white. Corals can survive bleaching events, but can’t effectively support marine life, threatening the populations that depend on them.
The UAE lost up to 70% of their corals, especially around Abu Dhabi, in 2017 when water temperatures reached 37 degrees Celsius (99 degrees Fahrenheit), according to EAD. But al-Jailani said 40-50% of corals survived the second bleaching event in 2021.
Although the bleaching events ‘did wipe out a good portion of our corals,’ he said, ‘it did also prove that the corals that we have are actually resilient ... these corals can actually withstand these kind of conditions.’
Bleaching events are happening more frequently around the world as waters warm due to human-made climate change, caused by the burning of oil, coal and gas that emits heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Other coral reef systems around the world have suffered mass bleaching events, most notably Australia’s Great Barrier Reef….” Read more at AP News
June 9, 2023
By German Lopez
Donald Trump in January.Doug Mills/The New York Times
Another indictment
“Donald Trump has been indicted again. He is now the first president, former or current, to be charged with a federal crime.
The charges stem from an investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents that he kept after he left the White House. Federal officials tried to get those documents back, and Trump is accused of resisting their efforts and trying to keep the files for himself.
Trump faces at least seven criminal counts, my Times colleagues reported. They include willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice. The Justice Department has not confirmed or announced the charges.
It is not unusual for federal officials to misplace or accidentally hold on to classified documents. Such files were found in the homes of President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. What is unusual in Trump’s case are his apparent efforts to keep the documents as federal officials asked him to return them.
Trump described the charges and investigation as part of a political witch hunt. ‘I’m an innocent man,’ he said in a video last night. ‘I’m an innocent person.’
Today’s newsletter will explain the case and whether the charges could affect Trump’s third run for president, and offer a selection of the best coverage of the indictment, from The Times and elsewhere.
The case
The charges go back to January 2021, when Trump left office and some documents were packed in boxes shipped from the White House to his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. The National Archives, which keeps presidential records, tried for much of the following year to get back the documents, which were considered government property. In January 2022, Trump turned over 15 boxes of material after what his lawyers claimed was a ‘diligent search.’
But Trump did not turn over everything in his possession. In August, an F.B.I. search at Mar-a-Lago turned up more than 100 classified documents.
In a court filing, the Justice Department noted that in just hours of searching, the F.B.I. recovered ‘twice as many documents with classification markings’ as Trump’s search did — casting doubt on how much he cooperated with the government’s pursuit of the records. Since then, the Justice Department has been investigating the extent to which Trump tried to hide the documents, even after the government served him with a subpoena to return them.
Trump has argued that he was allowed to keep the files because he declassified them before taking them home. But officials appear to have a recording of Trump discussing a sensitive military document and acknowledging that it was not declassified. Investigators have also interviewed Mar-a-Lago staff and reviewed security camera footage to build their case.
Beyond that, we know relatively little about what information the documents contain. Dozens taken from Mar-a-Lago had classified markings.
There is another important detail: Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the case, secured an indictment against Trump in Miami, not Washington. Florida, a state that Trump won twice, could provide a jury that is friendlier to him than a Democratic stronghold like Washington.
What’s next
Trump is expected to be arraigned in Miami on Tuesday, at which point prosecutors will probably release details of the charges.
In the meantime, Trump’s campaign is already fund-raising off the indictment. The charges do not prevent him from running for president. He might not be tried or convicted before the 2024 election. He could campaign, and even try to govern, from prison, according to legal experts.
‘In a week in which three other Republicans — Mike Pence, Chris Christie and Doug Burgum — declared their 2024 candidacies, the indictment of Trump guarantees he will completely dominate the political conversation,’ wrote my colleague Shane Goldmacher, a national political reporter.
Trump’s standing in the Republican primary actually improved after he was charged this year in New York for a scheme to cover up potential sex scandals in his 2016 run for president. The trial in that case is scheduled for 2024.
Republican lawmakers signaled their continued support for Trump. ‘Sad day for America,’ Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican and longtime Trump ally, tweeted last night. ‘God Bless President Trump.’
Trump faces two more criminal investigations. Another federal inquiry led by Smith is examining Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. And a prosecutor in Georgia is investigating Trump’s election interference in that state. Charges could come from those investigations in the coming weeks or months.
For more
Trump assailed Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information. Now, the issue is sure to be central in his re-election campaign, Peter Baker writes.
Trump was sitting by the pool with advisers at his New Jersey golf club when the indictment call came.
Smith was selected as special counsel for his experience with high-stakes cases against politicians. He ran the Justice Department unit that investigates public corruption.
A Times investigation shows how Trump stored classified documents in high-traffic areas at Mar-a-Lago.
Moving a prosecution to Florida could avert a time-consuming legal battle over the trial venue, The Washington Post reported.
Voters are entitled to a determination of Trump’s guilt or innocence at a trial before the election, Norman Eisen, Andrew Weissmann and Joyce Vance write in Times Opinion.
Evidence suggests that the prosecution in the documents case is strongerthan the Manhattan indictment, David A. Graham writes in The Atlantic.” [New York Times]
Lawyers blame ChatGPT for tricking them into citing bogus case law
By LARRY NEUMEISTER
FILE - The ChatGPT app is displayed on an iPhone in New York, May 18, 2023.A judge is deciding whether to sanction two lawyers who blamed ChatGPT for tricking them into including fictitious legal research in a court filing. The lawyers apologized at a hearing Thursday, June 8, 2023, in Manhattan federal court for their roles in written submissions that seemed to leave Judge P. Kevin Castel both baffled and disturbed at what happened. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
“NEW YORK (AP) — Two apologetic lawyers responding to an angry judge in Manhattan federal court blamed ChatGPT Thursday for tricking them into including fictitious legal research in a court filing.
Attorneys Steven A. Schwartz and Peter LoDuca are facing possible punishment over a filing in a lawsuit against an airline that included references to past court cases that Schwartz thought were real, but were actually invented by the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.
Schwartz explained that he used the groundbreaking program as he hunted for legal precedents supporting a client’s case against the Colombian airline Avianca for an injury incurred on a 2019 flight.
The chatbot, which has fascinated the world with its production of essay-like answers to prompts from users, suggested several cases involving aviation mishaps that Schwartz hadn’t been able to find through usual methods used at his law firm.
The problem was, several of those cases weren’t real or involved airlines that didn’t exist.
Schwartz told U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel he was ‘operating under a misconception ... that this website was obtaining these cases from some source I did not have access to.’
He said he ‘failed miserably’ at doing follow-up research to ensure the citations were correct.
‘I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases,’ Schwartz said.
Microsoft has invested some $1 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
Its success, demonstrating how artificial intelligence could change the way humans work and learn, has generated fears from some. Hundreds of industry leaders signed a letter in May that warns ‘mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.’…. Read more at AP News
“Prejudice over race, sex and crime could be supercharged by artificial intelligence, with some experts predicting that as much as 90% of the internet’s content could be AI generated within a few years. Our analysis of 5,100 images produced by one model, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, found that those for every high-paying job were dominated by men with lighter skin tones, while darker ones more commonly had prompts like ‘fast-food worker’ and ‘social worker.’” Bloomberg
Images generated by Stable Diffusion for the query “a color photo of a housekeeper.” Source: Bloomberg
Dave Sandford / Getty Images
The South Florida magic remains strong
“Just 2:13 seconds remained in the game, and despair had set in for the Florida Panthers. They’d had a great run. A No. 8 seed reaching the Stanley Cup Final is something to be lauded. But they were staring down a 3-0 series deficit. It was almost over.
Then Matthew Tkachuk — who else? — happened, slapping in the game-tying goal right in front of the net to send the home crowd into a frenzy. The goal sent the game into overtime, where Carter Verhaeghe netted this laser. Panthers win, 3-2.
Instead of a slow march toward the end, we have a series.
What a way to win your franchise’s first-ever Stanley Cup game, right? Florida goalie Sergei Bobrovsky rediscovered his form after looking off for this series’ first two games. Tkachuk was nails again, scoring the goal and recording an assist. The Panthers have life.
They’ve also won 10 straight overtime games, luck that had been reserved for their opponent, the Golden Knights, in these playoffs. What happens when you pit two of the luckiest teams against each other with the Stanley Cup on the line? Hopefully a long series.” [The Athletic]
Tyler Schank / Getty Images
It's a three-peat
“Oklahoma is once again the college softball champion after a 3-1 win last night over Florida State. The Sooners finish the season at a staggering 61-1 with 53 straight wins. It’s the program’s third national title in a row, its fifth in the last seven seasons and sixth in the last 10. Only UCLA (1988-90) has achieved the same feat in softball. Oklahoma’s run is nearly unparalleled through much of Division I women’s history, with UConn hoops (one three-peat and one four-peat since 2002, lol) as the most recent benchmark.
There have been plenty of lower-level dynasties (think North Dakota State football), but three-peats at the top of college sports are extremely rare. Georgia football has a chance to do it this year. What Patty Gasso has built at Oklahoma is something we simply don’t see often, especially at a school that played its home games at a city park when Gasso arrived.” [The Athletic]
ARTS AND IDEAS
Joan Rivers in 1984.Mike Maloney/Mirrorpix, via Getty Images
A comedy ‘crown jewel’
“Throughout decades in comedy, Joan Rivers kept a meticulous catalog of her jokes, with 65,000 typewritten cards organized by subjects such as “Parents hated me,” “Las Vegas” and “No sex appeal.” The largest category was “Tramp,” which included 1,756 jokes.
Now, years after Rivers’s death, her family is donating the archive to the National Comedy Center, a high-tech museum in Jamestown, N.Y. It will be the focus of an interactive exhibition that allows visitors to explore the files in depth.” [New York Times]
Pat Robertson, broadcaster who helped make religion central to GOP politics, dies at 93
By BEN FINLEY
“VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) — Pat Robertson, a religious broadcaster who turned a tiny Virginia station into the global Christian Broadcasting Network, tried a run for president and helped make religion central to Republican Party politics in America through his Christian Coalition, has died. He was 93.
Robertson’s death Thursday was confirmed in an email by his broadcasting network. No cause was given.
Robertson’s enterprises also included Regent University, an evangelical Christian school in Virginia Beach; the American Center for Law and Justice, which defends the First Amendment rights of religious people; and Operation Blessing, an international humanitarian organization.
For more than a half-century, Robertson was a familiar presence in American living rooms, known for his ‘700 Club’ television show, and in later years, his televised pronouncements of God’s judgment — usually delivered with a smile, as a gentle lament — that blamed natural disasters on gays and feminists and accused Black Lives Matter demonstrators of being anti-Christian….” Read more at AP News
”Lives Lived: As President Reagan’s interior secretary, James Watt sparked a national debate over the use of public lands. Watt died at 85.” [New York Times]