A group of former officials with the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to scrutinize a controversial deal that granted President Donald Trump and his family sweeping immunity from past tax audits. 

They alleged that the deal to resolve Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax documents in exchange for immunity from past audits was "unprecedented and breathtakingly improper."

A federal judge tossed out the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit to access West Virginia’s unredacted voter rolls, which marks 13 straight court losses for the department’s floundering effort to seize sensitive voter data from every state.

U.S. District Judge Thomas E. Johnston, who was appointed by former president George W. Bush, granted West Virginia’s motion to dismiss DOJ’s lawsuit Monday. In a scathing order, Johnston found the department failed to make a sufficient legal argument for its demand of sensitive voter data.

President Donald Trump’s DOJ is on an impressive losing streak in its voter roll lawsuits. On Friday, a federal judge tossed DOJ’s lawsuit seeking New York’s unredacted voter roll for the same reasons that Johnston dismissed the West Virginia lawsuit. Last month, DOJ scored its first appeals court loss when a three-judge panel for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of the DOJ’s Michigan lawsuit. But Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon, seemingly unfazed from losing, asked for a rehearing before the full Sixth Circuit.

A group of former officials with the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to scrutinize a controversial deal that granted President Donald Trump and his family sweeping immunity from past tax audits. 

They alleged that the deal to resolve Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax documents in exchange for immunity from past audits was "unprecedented and breathtakingly improper."

Graham consistently denied being gay until the end of his life. When comedian Chelsea Handler made insinuations about his sexuality online in 2018, the Senator responded to the allegations, saying, “To the extent that it matters, I’m not gay.”

However, while Rose’s recent post following Graham’s death is one of the most direct instances of a queer person alleging that Graham had hired them for sex work, it isn’t the first. In 2020, porn performer Sean Harding posted online, implying that an unnamed Republican senator had hired multiple gay sex workers, including him. People connected the story to Graham based on the nickname “Lady G,” a codename sex workers in D.C. allegedly used to refer to the South Carolina legislator. The nickname followed Graham for what would turn out to be the final years of his life.

As recently as 2025, right-wing influencer and Trump ally Laura Loomer said that Graham was gay while testifying under oath for a deposition. “Several of President Trump’s staff have told me in confidence that Lindsey Graham is gay,” Loomer said during the deposition, which she later defended online, saying she did not want to perjure herself.

She also referred his attorney for possible professional discipline.

The fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself after he dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for the unlawful leak of his tax returns in 2019. The honey pot payments were pitched as reparations, paid for by U.S. taxpayers through the Department of Justice, to virtually any right-winger that felt targeted by the previous presidential administration.

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” wrote U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in a 56-page order Monday.

Williams ruled that any entities affiliated with the slush fund settlement—including the president, the Treasury Department, and the IRS—were “prohibited” from using the details of the arrangement in any official capacity. She also referred Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar for possible professional discipline.

She noted that while Trump had the right to pursue legal action over the unauthorized publication of his tax returns, he chose not to do so while he was still a private citizen. Instead, Trump did not bring the charges until he had returned to the White House and subsequently appointed his former lawyer, Todd Blanche, atop the Justice Department.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/67858678

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/49422613

Source

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/63361992

A federal judge tossed out the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit to access West Virginia’s unredacted voter rolls, which marks 13 straight court losses for the department’s floundering effort to seize sensitive voter data from every state.

U.S. District Judge Thomas E. Johnston, who was appointed by former president George W. Bush, granted West Virginia’s motion to dismiss DOJ’s lawsuit Monday. In a scathing order, Johnston found the department failed to make a sufficient legal argument for its demand of sensitive voter data.

President Donald Trump’s DOJ is on an impressive losing streak in its voter roll lawsuits. On Friday, a federal judge tossed DOJ’s lawsuit seeking New York’s unredacted voter roll for the same reasons that Johnston dismissed the West Virginia lawsuit. Last month, DOJ scored its first appeals court loss when a three-judge panel for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of the DOJ’s Michigan lawsuit. But Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon, seemingly unfazed from losing, asked for a rehearing before the full Sixth Circuit.

Opinion

After being shut out of the investigations by the Trump administration, Minnesota prosecutors announced on Monday that federal investigators finally turned over reams of unseen evidence related to shootings by immigration agents that killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti and injured Julio Sosa-Celis in January.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced that after "six months of relentless collective effort," state and local prosecutors had "obtained hard drives of previously withheld evidence" about the killings, which took place during the administration's aggressive surge of immigration agents in and around Minneapolis and sparked a wave of protests.

Moriarty added that prosecutors had also obtained some physical evidence that was "previously withheld" by federal investigators. This includes the SUV that Good, a 37-year-old US citizen and mother of three, had been driving when she was shot through her driver's side window by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross as she appeared to be leaving the scene of an enforcement operation.

Attorney Antonio Romanucci and the legal team representing the family of Good said in a statement that turning over the vehicle and other evidence was "an important and meaningful step towards justice and accountability," and that they were "grateful for the resumption of regular investigatory protocols, which is not only important for the families impacted in these cases, but it is essential for the community and the country."

Shortly after Good was shot, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin portrayed her as a “violent rioter" who had attempted to run over Ross with her car, which then-Secretary Kristi Noem claimed was an "act of domestic terrorism." But video evidence showed that her wheels were pointed away from the agent, indicating that she was attempting to leave.

Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller similarly described Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, another US citizen, as a "would-be assassin” while DHS said he showed up at a protest against ICE attempting to "massacre law enforcement" based on the fact that he was carrying a legal firearm when he was shot by two Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents.

Videos showed that Pretti had intervened to stop agents from harming another protester and only held his phone during the confrontation, never reaching for his gun.

Sosa-Celis, a 24-year-old Venezuelan national, was called a "violent criminal alien" by DHS, which accused him and his two roommates of having attacked agent Christian Castro with snow shovels, leading Sosa-Celis to be shot in the leg through the door of the home.

Assault charges against him and his roommate were dropped by federal prosecutors after video and medical evidence showed that Castro had not been attacked. ICE Director Todd Lyons acknowledged that the agents had lied about the incident, and Castro has since been arrested after being charged by Moriarty's office as part of an independent investigation.

Neither Ross nor the two CBP agents who shot Pretti—Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez—have been charged.

Federal authorities have repeatedly rejected demands from Minnesota officials to cooperate with investigations into the three shootings and grant access to evidence and the ability to interview witnesses.

In the case of Pretti, agents blocked investigators with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from entering the shooting scene after the BCA had obtained a search warrant and removed physical evidence before Minnesota investigators could document it. This included Pretti's gun, cellphone, and body camera footage, and other physical and digital evidence.

In March, Minnesota sued the Trump administration over its refusal to cooperate with the investigations, a lawsuit that was still ongoing as of Monday.

The federal government did not explain its sudden change of direction. The Associated Press described it as part of an agreement in which Minnesota agreed to share evidence it had collected in Castro's case if the federal government shared evidence it was withholding about the shootings of Good and Pretti.

Moriarty thanked the federal officials for "their willingness to consider changing course to share evidence and promote public trust."

But Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison emphasized that it "should never have taken this long."

"I remain deeply troubled that the federal government spent more than half a year attempting to conceal this evidence from state investigators," he said in a statement. "And I hope this is the beginning of a major course correction on the part of the federal government."

US Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) agreed that "this took way too long" and said, "It's not enough."

"Minnesotans' trust has been fundamentally broken," she said. "There's a long way to go before we get true justice for ICE killing two of our neighbors."

The federal government's decision to turn over evidence to Minnesota officials came less than a week after an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican father in Houston, whom DHS claimed had attempted to attack officers with his car, only to once again be undermined by video and witness accounts.

DHS has acknowledged that it was not attempting to target Salgado for removal and had mistaken his van for someone else's.

Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has said that, just like in Minnesota, the federal government was refusing to share evidence with local officials.

“The federal government has not invited us in,” Teare said. “The federal government is not collaborating with us with this investigation.”

On Monday, ICE agents killed another man in Maine, 26-year-old Colombian father Joan Sebastian Guerrero, who was reportedly shot several times after stopping his vehicle, according to video footage.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said Guerrero “weaponized” his vehicle and attempted to ram officers. One eyewitness told Reuters they saw a federal SUV ram Guerrero's car.

According to Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), Mullin said that Guerrero, who was authorized to work in the US and had a Social Security number, was not the target of the warrant agents were executing.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

Damn, I need to rant about this with company, so thanks in advance for reading. Spoilers ahead.

I have a (bad) habit of replaying these games on a yearly basis. There's mutiple reasons, the most prominent perhaps is the fact that up until the end of the third game, they are so engaging and fun, the stakes are always incredibly high and ultimately, your decisions really shape the world around you. Curing the genophage, saving the geth, destroying the collectors, defeating Sovereign - it's slop, but it's fun slop.

Then you get to Earth by the end of the games and everything starts falling apart. The "beam" between Citadel and Earth is suddenly called "the conduit" by everyone and there is no explanation for it, and it's not like there wasn't the conduit in the first game. At the very end, once the crucible is activated, nobody apart from Shepard knows what the thing does. Still, the fleets are all fleeing, including the Normandy, but nobody knows what's going on. That probably includes the players by that point.

There is so much more in between these examples, but I don't have the beans to go over all of it. It's just a fucking mess.

Source

It's in Not the Onion because Hegseth has a history of leaking information because of his alcohol problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group_chat_leaks

A federal judge tossed out the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit to access West Virginia’s unredacted voter rolls, which marks 13 straight court losses for the department’s floundering effort to seize sensitive voter data from every state.

U.S. District Judge Thomas E. Johnston, who was appointed by former president George W. Bush, granted West Virginia’s motion to dismiss DOJ’s lawsuit Monday. In a scathing order, Johnston found the department failed to make a sufficient legal argument for its demand of sensitive voter data.

President Donald Trump’s DOJ is on an impressive losing streak in its voter roll lawsuits. On Friday, a federal judge tossed DOJ’s lawsuit seeking New York’s unredacted voter roll for the same reasons that Johnston dismissed the West Virginia lawsuit. Last month, DOJ scored its first appeals court loss when a three-judge panel for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of the DOJ’s Michigan lawsuit. But Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon, seemingly unfazed from losing, asked for a rehearing before the full Sixth Circuit.

Opinion

President Donald Trump plans to claim in a Thursday night speech that newly declassified intelligence reports reveal a foreign nation’s plans to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, two White House officials told MS NOW on Monday.

Trump will be joined by officials including CIA Director John Ratcliffe, acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, FBI Director Kash Patel and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, according to one of the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the internal plans, MS NOW reported.

Trump earlier Monday afternoon announced on Truth Social that he “will be making a Speech to the Nation on Thursday evening, at 9 P.M. Eastern,” without providing further details.

The province says roughly 450 square kilometres of Crown land in northeastern B.C. is being set aside as a protected area for the next 10 years, covering an area larger than the city of Surrey.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.myserv.one/post/30337928

“You’ll recall that Graham once stated if Trump became the Republican nominee for president, ‘the party would be destroyed and they would deserve it’,” Mason said. “But ten years ago, he made a superseding deal to keep his senate seat in a pact signed in blood, which is generally how these things work.”

Cross posted from https://libretechni.ca/post/1833701

Only one notch above junk level.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.myserv.one/post/30337928

“You’ll recall that Graham once stated if Trump became the Republican nominee for president, ‘the party would be destroyed and they would deserve it’,” Mason said. “But ten years ago, he made a superseding deal to keep his senate seat in a pact signed in blood, which is generally how these things work.”