Tag: Department of Justice
What Do We Owe a Prison Informant?
Recently, a man whom I’ll call Cyrus, who has spent the past several years in Georgia prisons, told me a story. It was about a cellmate whom I’ll call Timmy, who had borrowed Cyrus’s cell phone. Cell phones are ubiquitous in U.S. prisons, despite prohibitions against their use by inmates. Guards who smuggle them in can make a lot of money: a fifty-dollar Walmart phone may sell for twenty-five hundred dollars on the inside. Many inmates can’t afford to pay
Trump’s Open Plot to Break the Federal Government
Of the many targets Donald Trump has attacked over the years, few engender less public sympathy than the career workforce of the federal government—the faceless mass of civil servants that the former president and his allies deride as the “deep state.”
Federal employees have long been an easy mark for politicians of both parties, who occasionally hail their nonpartisan public service but far more frequently blame “Washington bureaucrats” for stifling your business, auditing your taxes, and taking too long to
They Are Still With Him
Come November of next year, Donald Trump might be elected president of the nation whose democracy he attempted to overthrow. Although it’s early, Trump is polling strongly against his successor, President Joe Biden, despite having been indicted for state and federal crimes, including a conspiracy to keep himself in power after his 2020 election loss.
The indictment, filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith yesterday, offers a detailed recounting of Trump’s effort to “overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential
Trump’s Offense Against Democracy Itself
The events that culminated in the rollout of the Justice Department’s most recent indictment of Donald Trump, on Tuesday, had a familiar ring: a barrage of social-media broadsides and gratuitous insults from the putative defendant, and hours of breathless cable-TV vamping about news that had not yet happened. (“A micro-development, but that’s all we have right now, Jake,” the CNN senior legal correspondent, Paula Reid, told the anchor Jake Tapper at one point.) In the early afternoon, reporters who had
The First Great Crisis of a Second Trump Term
Both his supporters and and his opponents assume that former President Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy will go away if he can win the 2024 presidential election. That’s a big mistake. A Trump election in 2024 would settle nothing. It would generate a nation-shaking crisis of presidential legitimacy. Trump in 2024 means chaos—and almost certainly another impeachment.
Trump’s proliferating criminal exposures have arisen in two different federal jurisdictions—Florida and the District of Columbia—and in two different state jurisdictions, New York and
A Special Counsel for Hunter Biden and His Family Business?
Is a special counsel really worse than a politicized Justice Department? That depends.
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The Boss and His Botched Coverup
News is, by definition, hard to predict. For most of this year, many economists had been expecting a recession—some declared it all but a certainty—but, on Wednesday, the Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell revealed that his staff is no longer forecasting a prolonged downturn. A day later, U.S. growth data for the second quarter of 2023 came in at an unexpectedly strong annual rate of 2.4 per cent. Consumer confidence is rebounding. “In hopeful moment, storm clouds over Biden economy
Police Are Spreading Authoritarianism Under the Guise of Counterterrorism
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
Big Tech Is Stuck – The Atlantic
The dramatic, multidimensional implosion of Meta; the nuclear train wreck of Elon Musk’s Twitter; the momentous labor uprising against Amazon—it wasn’t just an unusually disastrous year for America’s biggest tech companies. It was a reckoning.
The tech giants that have shaped our lives, online and off, over the course of the 21st century have at last hit a wall. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple all saw their valuations fall, sometimes precipitously. Many slashed their workforces; at least 120,000 tech
How to Crush a Movement for Racial Justice
Little Rock, Ark.—It’s a scorching July day during the pandemic’s first summer. in the month since the murder of George Floyd, residents have gathered frequently in front of the Arkansas State Capitol, marching to protest the police killings of Black people across the country.
But today there’s something more confrontational on