In Buffalo, New York, city officials say they will pause efforts to collect amusement license fees from local music venues. A law allowing the city to collect the fees has been on the books since 1927, but the city only began attempting to collect the money earlier this month. The fees are charged per event, based on the price of tickets. Some venue owners told local media the fees could cost them $10,000 to $25,000 a year, and larger venues said
In Buffalo, New York, city officials say they will pause efforts to collect amusement license fees from local music venues. A law allowing the city to collect the fees has been on the books since 1927, but the city only began attempting to collect the money earlier this month. The fees are charged per event, based on the price of tickets. Some venue owners told local media the fees could cost them $10,000 to $25,000 a year, and larger venues said the fees could cost them as much as $100,000. Some city council members said they were caught off guard by the move to collect the fees and plan to address the issue when the council meets again in September.
BAE Systems and GlobalFoundries are teaming up to strengthen the supply of chips for national security programs, aligning technology roadmaps and collaborating on innovation and manufacturing. Focus areas include advanced packaging, GaN-on-silicon chips, silicon photonics, and advanced technology process development.
Onsemi plans to build a $2 billion silicon carbide production plant in the Czech Republic. The site would produce smart power semiconductors for electric vehicles, renewable energy
BAE Systems and GlobalFoundries are teaming up to strengthen the supply of chips for national security programs, aligning technology roadmaps and collaborating on innovation and manufacturing. Focus areas include advanced packaging, GaN-on-silicon chips, silicon photonics, and advanced technology process development.
Onsemi plans to build a $2 billion silicon carbide production plant in the Czech Republic. The site would produce smart power semiconductors for electric vehicles, renewable energy technology, and data centers.
The global chip manufacturing industry is projected to boost capacity by 6% in 2024 and 7% in 2025, reaching 33.7 million 8-inch (200mm) wafers per month, according to SEMI‘s latest World Fab Forecast report. Leading-edge capacity for 5nm nodes and below is expected to grow by 13% in 2024, driven by AI demand for data center applications. Additionally, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC will begin producing 2nm chips using gate-all-around (GAA) FETs next year, boosting leading-edge capacity by 17% in 2025.
At the IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology & Circuits, imec introduced:
Functional CMOS-based CFETs with stacked bottom and top source/drain contacts.
CMOS-based 56Gb/s zero-IF D-band beamforming transmitters to support next-gen short-range, high-speed wireless services at frequencies above 100GHz.
ADCs for base stations and handsets, a key step toward scalable, high-performance beyond-5G solutions, such as cloud-based AI and extended reality apps.
Wolfspeedpostponed plans to construct a $3 billion chip plant in Germany, underscoring the EU‘s challenges in boosting semiconductor production, reports Reuters. The North Carolina-based company cited reduced capital spending due to a weakened EV market, saying it now aims to start construction in mid-2025, two years later than 0riginally planned.
Micron is building a pilot production line for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) in the U.S., and considering HBM production in Malaysia to meet growing AI demand, according to a Nikkei report. The company is expanding HBM R&D facilities in Boise, Idaho, and eyeing production capacity in Malaysia, while also enhancing its largest HBM facility in Taichung, Taiwan.
Kioxiarestored its Yokkaichi and Kitakami plants in Japan to full capacity, ending production cuts as the memory market recovers, according to Nikkei. The company, which is focusing on NAND flash production, has secured new bank credit support, including refinancing a ¥540 billion loan and establishing a ¥210 billion credit line. Kioxia had reduced output by more than 30% in October 2022 due to weak smartphone demand.
Europe’s NATO Innovation Fund announced its first direct investments, which includes semiconductor materials. Twenty-three NATO allies co-invested in this over $1B fund devoted to address critical defense and security challenges.
The second meeting of the U.S.–India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) was held in New Delhi, with various funding and initiatives announced to support semiconductor technology, next-gen telecommunications, connected and autonomous vehicles, ML, and more.
Amazon announced investments of €10 billion in Germany to drive innovation and support the expansion of its logistics network and cloud infrastructure.
Quantum Machinesopened the Israeli Quantum Computing Center (IQCC) research facility, backed by the Israel Innovation Authority and located at Tel Aviv University. Also, Israel-based Classiq is collaborating with NVIDIA and BMW, using quantum computing to find the optimal automotive architecture of electrical and mechanical systems.
Global data center vacancy rates are at historic lows, and power availability is becoming less available, according to a Siemens report featured on Broadband Breakfast. The company called for an influx of financing to find new ways to optimize data center technology and sustainability.
Renesas completed its acquisition of Transphorm and will immediately start offering GaN-based power products and reference designs to meet the demand for wide-bandgap (WBG) chips.
Revenues for the top five wafer fab equipment (WFE) companies fell 9% YoY in Q1 2024, according to Counterpoint. This was offset partially by increased demand for NAND and DRAM, which increased 33% YoY, and strong growth in sales to China, which were up 116% YoY.
The SiC power devices industry saw robust growth in 2023, primarily driven by the BEV market, according to TrendForce. The top five suppliers, led by ST with a 32.6% market share and onsemi in second place, accounted for 91.9% of total revenue. However, the anticipated slowdown in BEV sales and weakening industrial demand are expected to significantly decelerate revenue growth in 2024.
About 30% of vehicles produced globally will have E/E architectures with zonal controllers by 2032, according to McKinsey & Co. The market for automotive micro-components and logic semiconductors is predicted to reach $60 billion in 2032, and the overall automotive semiconductor market is expected to grow from $60 billion to $140 billion in the same period, at a 10% CAGR.
The automotive processor market generated US$20 billion in revenue in 2023, according to Yole. US$7.8 billion was from APUs and FPGAs and $12.2 billion was from MCUs. The ADAS and infotainment processors market was worth US$7.8 billion in 2023 and is predicted to grow to $16.4 billion by 2029 at a 13% CAGR. The market for ADAS sensing is expected to grow at a 7% CAGR.
Security
The CHERI Alliance was established to drive adoption of memory safety and scalable software compartmentalization via the security technology CHERI, or Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions. Founding members include Capabilities Limited, Codasip, the FreeBSD Foundation, lowRISC, SCI Semiconductor, and the University of Cambridge.
In security research:
Japan and China researchers explored a NAND-XOR ring oscillator structure to design an entropy source architecture for a true random number generator (TRNG).
University of Toronto and Carleton University researchers presented a survey examining how hardware is applied to achieve security and how reported attacks have exploited certain defects in hardware.
University of North Texas and Texas Woman’s University researchers explored the potential of hardware security primitive Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) for mitigation of visual deepfakes.
Villanova University researchers proposed the Boolean DERIVativE attack, which generalizes Boolean domain leakage.
Post-quantum cryptography firm PQShield raised $37 million in Series B funding.
Former OpenAI executive, Ilya Sutskever, who quit over safety concerns, launchedSafe SuperintelligenceInc. (SSI).
EU industry groups warned the European Commission that its proposed cybersecurity certification scheme (EUCS) for cloud services should not discriminate against Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, reported Reuters.
Cyber Europetested EU cyber preparedness in the energy sector by simulating a series of large-scale cyber incidents in an exercise organized by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA).
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a number of alerts/advisories.
Education and Training
New York non-profit NY CREATES and South Korea’s National Nano Fab Center partnered to develop a hub for joint research, aligned technology services, testbed support, and an engineer exchange program to bolster chips-centered R&D, workforce development, and each nation’s high-tech ecosystem.
New York and the Netherlands agreed on a partnership to promote sustainability within the semiconductor industry, enhance workforce development, and boost semiconductor R&D.
Rapidus is set to send 200 engineers to AI chip developer Tenstorrent in the U.S. for training over the next five years, reports Nikkei. This initiative, led by Japan’s Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC), aims to bolster Japan’s AI chip industry.
Product News
UMCannounced its 22nm embedded high voltage (eHV) technology platform for premium smartphone and mobile device displays. The 22eHV platform reduces core device power consumption by up to 30% compared to previous 28nm processes. Die area is reduced by 10% with the industry’s smallest SRAM bit cells.
Alphawave Semi announced a new 9.2 Gbps HBM3E sub-system silicon platform capable of 1.2 terabytes per second. Based on the HBM3E IP, the sub-system is aimed at addressing the demand for ultra-high-speed connectivity in high-performance compute applications.
Movellus introduced the Aeonic Power product family for on-die voltage regulation, targeting the challenging area of power delivery.
Cadence partnered with Semiwise and sureCore to develop new cryogenic CMOS circuits with possible quantum computing applications. The circuits are based on modified transistors found in the Cadence Spectre Simulation Platform and are capable of processing analog, mixed-signal, and digital circuit simulation and verification at cryogenic temperatures.
Renesas launched R-Car Open Access (RoX), an integrated development platform for software-defined vehicles (SDVs), designed for Renesas R-Car SoCs and MCUs with tools for deployment of AI applications, reducing complexity and saving time and money for car OEMs and Tier 1s.
Infineon released industry-first radiation-hardened 1 and 2 Mb parallel interface ferroelectric-RAM (F-RAM) nonvolatile memory devices, with up to 120 years of data retention at 85-degree Celsius, along with random access and full memory write at bus speeds. Plus, a CoolGaN Transistor 700 V G4 product family for efficient power conversion up to 700 V, ideal for consumer chargers and notebook adapters, data center power supplies, renewable energy inverters, and more.
Ansysadopted NVIDIA’s Omniverse application programming interfaces for its multi-die chip designers. Those APIs will be used for 5G/6G, IoT, AI/ML, cloud computing, and autonomous vehicle applications. The company also announced ConceptEV, an SaaS solution for automotive concept design for EVs.
Fig. 1: Field visualization of 3D-IC with Omniverse. Source: Ansys
QP Technologiesannounced a new dicing saw for its manufacturing line that can process a full cassette of 300mm wafers 7% faster than existing tools, improving throughput and productivity.
NXP introduced its SAF9xxx of audio DSPs to support the demand for AI-based audio in software-defined vehicles (SDVs) by using Cadence’s Tensilica HiFi 5 DSPs combined with dedicated neural-network engines and hardware-based accelerators.
Avionyx, a provider of software lifecycle engineering in the aerospace and safety-critical systems sector, partnered with Siemens and will leverage its Polarion application lifecycle management (ALM) tool. Also, Dovetail Electric AviationadoptedSiemens Xcelerator to support sustainable aviation.
Research
Researchers from imec and KU Leuvenreleased a +70 page paper “Selecting Alternative Metals for Advanced Interconnects,” addressing interconnect resistance and reliability.
A comprehensive review article — “Future of plasma etching for microelectronics: Challenges and opportunities” — was created by a team of experts from the University of Maryland, Lam Research, IBM, Intel, and many others.
Researchers from the Institut Polytechnique de Paris’s Laboratory of Condensed Matter for Physics developed an approach to investigate defects in semiconductors. The team “determined the spin-dependent electronic structure linked to defects in the arrangement of semiconductor atoms,” the first time this structure has been measured, according to a release.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory-led researchers developed a small enclosed chamber that can hold all the components of an electrochemical reaction, which can be paired with transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to generate precise views of a reaction at atomic scale, and can be frozen to stop the reaction at specific time points. They used the technique to study a copper catalyst.
The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved a clinical trial to test a device with 1,024 nanoscale sensors that records brain activity during surgery, developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego).
Events and Further Reading
Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:
Event
Date
Location
Standards for Chiplet Design with 3DIC Packaging (Part 2)
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.
In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:
Surgeon General: Why I’m Calling for a Warning Label on Social Media Platforms (New York Times
New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s response to the horrifying shootings in Buffalo in 2022 was not to look for ways to limit access to guns or improve mental health care. It was not to look into why law enforcement ignored the threats that the shooter had made, which they were aware of. It was not to figure out why the 911 dispatcher who answered the first call about the shooting hung up on the caller after getting mad at them for whispering.
No, it was to blame the internet.
Blaming the internet
New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s response to the horrifying shootings in Buffalo in 2022 was not to look for ways to limit access to guns or improve mental health care. It was not to look into why law enforcement ignored the threats that the shooter had made, which they were aware of. It was not to figure out why the 911 dispatcher who answered the first call about the shooting hung up on the caller after getting mad at them for whispering.
Blaming the internet is a very convenient scapegoat for politicians who are in over their heads with societal-level problems.
On Thursday, Hochul became the living embodiment of the “won’t someone please think of the children” meme. She gleefully signed an easily unconstitutional bill that will not protect children, and which will likely do real harm. She signed the SAFE For Kids Act, which bans algorithmic feeds for kids. In signing the bill she literally said:
“Today, we save our children.”
There are just a few problems with this, all of which Hochul’s office (and the sponsors of this bill) have been told about, only to be dismissed as “talking points from big tech.”
Problem 1: There remains no study showing that algorithmic feeds are somehow “addictive” or even a problem. It’s all based on vibes (and adults who seem unable to put down their own phones).
Problem 2: What actual studies show is that if you force chronological feeds on people, a few things happen, none of which “save our children.” First, users get annoyed because they see less of the stuff they go to social media for. This doesn’t make them use less social media, it just makes them switch to other social media. It also exposes those on the chronological feed to more untrustworthy content and disinformation. I’m not sure why Kathy Hochul thinks that exposing kids to more disinformation is “saving our children,” but someone should ask her.
Problem 3: This bill requires age verification, which has already been ruled to be unconstitutional by multiple courts. It is also a privacy nightmare, as has been described multiple times in the past. Creating a world that puts kids’ private data at risk is not “saving our children.”
Problem 4: The requirement about how websites can order content is just a blatantly obvious First Amendment infringement. I mean, just imagine if the NY legislature told a newspaper that it could no longer prioritize some headlines over others and had to lay out the newspaper in the order the stories were written? Everyone would immediately recognize the First Amendment problems with such a law. But this is no different.
Problem 5: Algorithms are a hugely important tool in keeping kids safe online, by minimizing or hiding more harmful or problematic content. And Hochul and the NY legislature are telling social media companies that such tools must be removed from their arsenal.
Hochul told a reporter, “we’ve checked to make sure, we believe it’s constitutional.” And, that’s just laughable. Checked with whom? Every attempt I saw to call out these concerns was brushed off as “just spewing big tech’s talking points.”
The Constitution is not a “big tech talking point.” What the actual research shows is not a “big tech talking point.”
I’m not against chronological feeds as a general concept. They’re great for those that want them. Lots of services already offer them as an option. But mandating them, and especially mandating them for certain ages (necessitating dangerous age verification), doesn’t solve any legitimate problem and makes it harder for trust & safety teams to actually help protect kids.
I recognize that this signing happened the same day that Hochul’s approval ratings and favorability hit all-time lows. So, it’s no surprise that she’s trying populist nonsense and embracing moral panics. But perhaps she should try actually doing things to actually help, rather than things already proven harmful?
As of early May, more than three years after New York legalized recreational marijuana, just 119 licensed dispensaries were serving that market in the entire state. Unauthorized pot shops outnumbered legal outlets by 20 to 1, according to The New York Times, with more than 2,000 operating in New York City alone. The state had less than one licensed pot store per 100,000 residents—in contrast with about six in Massachusetts, 10 in Maine, 11 in Co
As of early May, more than three years after New York legalized recreational marijuana, just 119 licensed dispensaries were serving that market in the entire state. Unauthorized pot shops outnumbered legal outlets by 20 to 1, according to The New York Times, with more than 2,000 operating in New York City alone. The state had less than one licensed pot store per 100,000 residents—in contrast with about six in Massachusetts, 10 in Maine, 11 in Colorado, 19 in Oregon, and 48 in New Mexico.
Legislators and regulators could have avoided this "disaster," as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently called it, had they learned from the mistakes of other states that have struggled to displace the black market. Yet New York politicians somehow did not anticipate what would happen after people could legally use marijuana but could not obtain it from legal sources.
Legislators did not allow home cultivation, and they initially did not allow medical dispensaries to serve recreational consumers. New York created a complicated, costly, and sluggish licensing process that prioritized "equity" and "diversity" above efficiency. The state imposed burdensome fees, taxes, and regulations that made it difficult for legal dispensaries to compete with the unlicensed stores that sprang up to fill the supply gap.
New York did not let medical dispensaries enter the market until last December. Even then, it charged companies $20 million for the privilege of operating up to three outlets.
New businesses faced fees up to $300,000, and regulators gave priority to retail applicants who were deemed disadvantaged, including people with marijuana conviction records and their relatives. Those preferences provoked lawsuits that further delayed the licensing process, and they blocked applicants who might have been better equipped to run a successful business.
Despite these problems, Hochul remains proud of New York's "social equity" program. But she has ordered a bureaucratic overhaul to speed up retail license approvals and has voiced support for cutting the state's heavy marijuana taxes, which currently include a three-tiered wholesale tax based on THC content as well as a 13 percent retail tax.
Legislators should keep in mind that licensed shops are competing with a black market where the tax rate is zero. New York also should reexamine the onerous regulations that make legal weed more expensive and less accessible.
Although Hochul has promised to "shut down illicit operators," any such crackdown is apt to inflict the sort of harm that legalization was supposed to ameliorate, punishing entrepreneurs for filling the yawning gap left by the state's misguided policies and administrative incompetence. Nor is enforcement likely to succeed, given the abysmal track record of the war on weed—a crusade that legislators supposedly ended three years ago.
In recent years, Massachusetts, New York, California, and Washington, D.C., have all implemented bans on flavored tobacco products in an attempt to reduce smoking rates among younger populations. Despite these bans, flavored tobacco products are still easily accessible—and it's never been more apparent. Walk into the nearest convenience store and you'll likely find an assortment of flavored tobacco products to choose from—strawberry banana, blue
In recent years, Massachusetts, New York, California, and Washington, D.C., have all implemented bans on flavored tobacco products in an attempt to reduce smoking rates among younger populations. Despite these bans, flavored tobacco products are still easily accessible—and it's never been more apparent.
Walk into the nearest convenience store and you'll likely find an assortment of flavored tobacco products to choose from—strawberry banana, blue raspberry, spearmint, black cherry. Whether or not your city or state bans these products, they'll likely be fully stocked and at your disposal.
In 2021, the D.C. Council banned the sale of flavored tobacco products within a quarter-mile of middle schools and high schools. New York City took things a step further by banning the sale of flavored tobacco products throughout its five boroughs.
Yet, citywide bans on the sale and purchase of flavored tobacco products have utterly failed. Two new studies conducted by the market researcher WSPM Group show just how many tobacco products are being consumed and disposed of in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Researchers went through the trash in the two cities and found that over 99 percent of the vapes collected from the urban trash cans were flavored tobacco products, despite consumers in those cities being barred from legally purchasing those products.
Something similar happened when Massachusetts banned menthol cigarettes in 2019. Proponents of the ban argued that it would lower smoking rates among black adults, the primary consumers of menthol tobacco products. In reality, the prevalence of smoking among black adults increased after the ban was implemented, as did the sale of menthol cigarettes in surrounding states. Bay Staters were driving out-of-state to purchase menthol cigarettes in higher quantities to stockpile for their own use or to sell on the newly created black market. Smokers were undeniably worse off after their state government took away their right to choose and forced them into a black market.
And who supplies vendors with these illicit flavored vapes filling the shelves of corner stores across the nation? China, of course—though most consumers likely aren't aware of that. Of the 2,000 e-vapor products collected from the trash in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding cities of Arlington, Alexandria, Bethesda, and Silver Spring, 99.5 percent of the packaging and products were exported from China. When the nearest 7-Eleven carries a variety of flavored vapes, few will consider where they came from or imagine that they are illegally imported items. Last year, the FDA sent out notices to 22 retailers warning them of coming fines if they did not stop selling unauthorized e-cigarettes, but those banned products can still be seen on store shelves and in smokers' hands throughout the country.
Adults should be able to purchase whatever tobacco products they please—and the trash tells us they will do just that. Banning flavored tobacco products will never stop people from smoking—instead, lawmakers are once again causing unregulated and potentially dangerous black markets to rise up and meet the demand. It's time that policy makers discard the idea that they can control individuals' personal choices.
A man who has been identified as a wealthy investment banker allegedly slugged a woman in the face, causing her to fall to the ground, as shown in a video that circulated over the weekend. (See video below, posted by sami.) — Read the rest
The post Man who punched a woman in the face at New York event identified as millionaire banker (video) appeared first on Boing Boing.
A man who has been identified as a wealthy investment banker allegedly slugged a woman in the face, causing her to fall to the ground, as shown in a video that circulated over the weekend. (See video below, posted by sami.) — Read the rest
"In 2016," Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe writes, quoting Democracy Docket's Marc Elias, "Donald Trump seemed to pull an inside straight by narrowly winning" Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin "while losing the popular vote by 3 million. We now know Trump committed 34 felonies to win that election. Without these crimes, he seems almost certain to have lost to Hillary Clinton. She would have been sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. She would have
"In 2016," Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe writes, quoting Democracy Docket's Marc Elias, "Donald Trump seemed to pull an inside straight by narrowly winning" Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin "while losing the popular vote by 3 million. We now know Trump committed 34 felonies to win that election. Without these crimes, he seems almost certain to have lost to Hillary Clinton. She would have been sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. She would have filled two Supreme Court vacancies and enacted her legislative agenda."*
Since those 34 felonies involved falsified business records that were produced in 2017, that claim is logically impossible. Yet this gloss on the former president's New York conviction echoes similarly puzzling claims by many smart and ostensibly well-informed observers. In their eagerness to embrace the prosecution's dubious "election fraud" narrative, they nonsensically assert that Trump retroactively ensured his 2016 victory by disguising a 2017 hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services.
Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer, paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from telling her story about sex with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006. When Trump paid Cohen back in 2017, prosecutors said, he caused the falsification of business records to cover up the arrangement with Daniels by misrepresenting the reimbursement as compensation for legal work. However you view that misrepresentation, it obviously had no impact on the outcome of the election. Yet Tribe, Elias, and other people bizarrely insist that it did.
"Two years shy of this country's 250th birthday," Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said on CBS last Sunday, "12 New York jurors have convicted former president Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election." The dates of those records—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries—ranged from February 14, 2017, to December 5, 2017. All of them were created after Trump was elected. You might expect that a historian would pay attention to chronological consistency.
You might expect the same from editorialists at major newspapers. Yet according to a May 30 Washington Posteditorial, the jury found Trump "guilty of felony falsification of business records in order to influence the 2016 election." A New York Times editorial published the same day likewise claimed the jury found Trump "guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging." Barring time travel, of course, nothing Trump did in 2017 could have "influence[d] the 2016 election" or "prevent[ed] voters from learning about" that "sexual encounter" before they cast their ballots.
The same temporal difficulty is apparent in news coverage of Trump's trial. "Prosecutors will attempt to make the case that Trump falsified business records to tip the 2016 race," Al Jazeera said in April. "Trump faces 34 felony counts alleging that he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information to influence the 2016 presidential election," NPR reported a week later.
Judging from some accounts of the trial's outcome, prosecutors succeeded in proving that the 2017 records reached back in time to influence the 2016 election. "Former President Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election," NPR reported. The subhead of a Times story published the day after the verdict said, "The former president was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 campaign." The Associated Press reported that the jury found Trump "guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex."
These confounding characterizations reflect the bait and switch at the heart of the case against Trump. "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate," Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in January. "It's an election interference case." In his opening statement, lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo claimed the case was about "election fraud, pure and simple."
There was nothing "pure and simple" about the case, which did not involve "election fraud" at all. Although the prosecutors repeatedly insinuated that there was something inherently criminal about trying to hide potentially damaging information from voters, that is not true. And although they averred that Cohen's payment to Daniels amounted to an illegal campaign contribution under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), that interpretation of the statute is controversial. In any case, fronting the hush money did not constitute "election fraud," which is usually understood to mean interfering with the casting, counting, or reporting of votes.
Trump was not charged with violating FECA by soliciting Cohen's "contribution." The Justice Department declined to bring that case, probably because it would have been hard to prove that Trump "knowingly and willfully" violated the statute, given the fuzziness of the distinction between personal and campaign expenditures. Even if the deadline for prosecuting Trump under FECA had not passed, Bragg would have no authority to enforce that statute. So instead he resorted to an elaborate workaround that relied on various possible combinations of interacting statutes and questionable assumptions about Trump's knowledge and intent.
The FECA claim was just one of three dueling theories for treating Trump's alleged falsification of business records as a felony rather than a misdemeanor. The other two theories did not hinge on the assumption that the Daniels payment was illegal. And since the jurors were told they did not have to settle on any particular theory, it is not clear which one they found most compelling. Even if they split three ways on that crucial point, they were still allowed to reach a guilty verdict.
All of this is pretty confusing, so it is not surprising that many people have inaccurately described the meaning of the verdict, especially since Bragg and his underlings repeatedly misrepresented the nature of the case. But it is surprising that so many people who should know better have described the verdict in a way that could not possibly be true.
*CORRECTION: This post has been revised to clarify that Tribe was quoting Elias.
This week all nine Supreme Court justices found in favor of the NRA. Not because they all like what the NRA is selling (although some of them probably do) but because the behavior of New York State, to try to silence the NRA by threatening third parties, was so constitutionally alarming. If New York could get away with doing what it had done, and threaten a speaker’s business relationships as a means of punishing the speaker, then so could any other state against any other speaker, including tho
This week all nine Supreme Court justices found in favor of the NRA. Not because they all like what the NRA is selling (although some of them probably do) but because the behavior of New York State, to try to silence the NRA by threatening third parties, was so constitutionally alarming. If New York could get away with doing what it had done, and threaten a speaker’s business relationships as a means of punishing the speaker, then so could any other state against any other speaker, including those who might be trying to speak out against the NRA. Like with the 303 Creative decision, the merit of this decision does not hinge on the merit of the prevailing party, because it is one that serves to protect every speaker of any merit (including those at odds with, say, the preferred policies of states like Texas and Florida, which would cover those conveying pretty much every liberal viewpoint).
The decision was written by Justice Sotomayor, which was something of a welcome surprise given how she’s gotten the First Amendment badly wrong in some of her more recent jurisprudence, including her dissent in 303 Creative and her decision in the Warhol case, where its expressive protection was conspicuously, and alarmingly, absent from her analysis entirely. But in this case she produced a good and important decision that contemporizes earlier First Amendment precedent, and, importantly, in a way entirely consistent with it. In doing so the Court has strengthened the hand of advocates seeking to protect speakers from a certain type of injury that state actors have been trying to use to silence them.
The Court does not break new ground in deciding this case. It only reaffirms the general principle from Bantam Books that where, as here, the complaint plausibly alleges coercive threats aimed at punishing or suppressing disfavored speech, the plaintiff states a First Amendment claim. [p.18]
In these cases it’s not a direct injury, because the First Amendment pretty clearly says that state actors cannot directly silence expression they do not like (although, true, we still see cases where the government has nevertheless tried to go that route). What this decision says is that state actors also cannot try to silence speakers indirectly by threatening anyone they need to interact with to no longer interact with them.
[A] government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly: A government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf. [p.11]
Here, the New York official, Vullo, pressured insurance companies she regulated to not do business with the NRA.
As superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, Vullo allegedly pressured regulated entities to help her stifle the NRA’s pro-gun advocacy by threatening enforcement actions against those entities that refused to disassociate from the NRA and other gun-promotion advocacy groups. Those allegations, if true, state a First Amendment claim. [p. 1]
As alleged Vullo did more than argue that the companies not do business with the NRA, which might be a legitimate exercise of a government official’s ability to try to persuade.
A government official can share her views freely and criticize particular beliefs, and she can do so forcefully in the hopes of persuading others to follow her lead. In doing so, she can rely on the merits and force of her ideas, the strength of her convictions, and her ability to inspire others. What she cannot do, however, is use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression. See Rosenberger, 515 U. S., at 830 (explaining that governmental actions seeking to suppress a speaker’s particular views are presumptively unconstitutional). In such cases, it is “the application of state power which we are asked to scrutinize.” NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U. S. 449, 463 (1958). [p.8-9]
What she did also went beyond a legitimate exercise of regulatory authority.
In sum, the complaint, assessed as a whole, plausibly alleges that Vullo threatened to wield her power against those refusing to aid her campaign to punish the NRA’s gun-promotion advocacy. If true, that violates the First Amendment. [p.15]
[A]lthough Vullo can pursue violations of state insurance law, she cannot do so in order to punish or suppress the NRA’s protected expression. So, the contention that the NRA and the insurers violated New York law does not excuse Vullo from allegedly employing coercive threats to stifle gun-promotion advocacy. [p.17]
It was using that regulatory authority against a third party as a means of punishing a speaker for its views that violated the First Amendment.
As discussed below, Vullo was free to criticize the NRA and pursue the conceded violations of New York insurance law. She could not wield her power, however, to threaten enforcement actions against DFS-regulated entities in order to punish or suppress the NRA’s gun-promotion advocacy. Because the complaint plausibly alleges that Vullo did just that, the Court holds that the NRA stated a First Amendment violation. [p.8]
Nothing in this case gives advocacy groups like the NRA a “right to absolute immunity from [government] investigation,” or a “right to disregard [state or federal] laws.” Patterson, 357 U. S., at 463. Similarly, nothing here prevents government officials from forcefully condemning views with which they disagree. For those permissible actions, the Constitution “relies first and foremost on the ballot box, not on rules against viewpoint discrimination, to check the government when it speaks.” Shurtleff v. Boston, 596 U. S. 243, 252 (2022). Yet where, as here, a government official makes coercive threats in a private meeting behind closed doors, the “ballot box” is an especially poor check on that official’s authority. Ultimately, the critical takeaway is that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech, directly or (as alleged here) through private intermediaries. [p.19]
This decision is not the first time that courts have said no to this sort of siege warfare state officials have tried to wage against speakers they don’t like, to cut them off from relationships the speakers depend on when they can’t attack the speakers directly.
The NRA’s allegations, if true, highlight the constitutional concerns with the kind of intermediary strategy that Vullo purportedly adopted to target the NRA’s advocacy. Such a strategy allows government officials to “expand their regulatory jurisdiction to suppress the speech of organizations that they have no direct control over.” Brief for First Amendment Scholars as Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioner 8. It also allows government officials to be more effective in their speech-suppression efforts “[b]ecause intermediaries will often be less invested in the speaker’s message and thus less likely to risk the regulator’s ire.” [p.19]
One such earlier decision that we’ve discussed here is Backpage v. Dart, where the Seventh Circuit said no to government actors flexing their enforcement muscles against third parties in a way calculated to hurt the speaker they are really trying to target. But instead of there being just a few such decisions binding on just a few courts, suddenly there is a Supreme Court decision saying no to this practice now binding on all courts.
The big question for the moment is what happens next. There are still several cases pending before the Supreme Court – the two NetChoice/CCIA cases and Murthy v. Missouri – which all involve questions of whether the government has acted in a way designed to silence a speaker. The NetChoice/CCIA cases are framed a bit differently than this case, with the central question being whether state regulation of a platform directly implicates the platform’s own First Amendment rights, but for the Court to rule in NetChoice and CCIA’s favor and find that platforms do have such rights it would need to recognize that what Texas and Florida are trying to do in regulating Internet platforms is punish viewpoints they don’t favor. But if the Court could recognize that sort of viewpoint punishment is what the state of New York was trying to do indirectly here, perhaps it can also recognize that these other states are trying to do it directly there.
Meanwhile, in Murthy v. Missouri, the legal question is closer to the one raised here, and indeed the case was even heard on the same day. In that case the federal government is alleged to have unconstitutionally pressured platforms to cut certain speakers off from their services. It would be the same unconstitutional mechanics, to punish a speaker by coming after a third party the speaker depends on, but as even this decision suggests, only if the conduct of the government was in fact coercive and not simply an expression of preference the platforms were free to take or leave.
Which is why the concurrences from Justices Gorsuch and Jackson may be meaningful, if not for this NRA case but for others. With the latter concurrence Jackson appears to want to ensure that government actors are not chilled from exercising legitimate enforcement authority if they also disfavor the speaker who is in their regulatory sights.
The lesson of Bantam Books is that “a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.” Ante, at 11. That case does not hold that government coercion alone violates the First Amendment. And recognizing the distinction between government coercion and a First Amendment violation is important because our democracy can function only if the government can effectively enforce the rules embodied in legislation; by its nature, such enforcement often involves coercion in the form of legal sanctions. The existence of an allegation of government coercion of a third party thus merely invites, rather than answers, the question whether that coercion indirectly worked a violation of the plaintiff’s First Amendment rights. [p.2 Jackson concurrence]
In her view, the earlier Bantam Books case the decision is rooted in is not the correct precedent; Jackson would instead look at cases challenging retaliatory actions by the government as a First Amendment violation, and here she thinks that analytical shoe better fits.
[It] does suggest that our First Amendment retaliation cases might provide a better framework for analyzing these kinds of allegations—i.e., coercion claims that are not directly related to the publication or distribution of speech. And, fortunately for the NRA, the complaint in this case alleges both censorship and retaliation theories for how Vullo violated the First Amendment—theories that, in my opinion, deserve separate analyses. [p.4 Jackson concurrence]
As for the Gorsuch concurrence, it is quite brief, and follows here in its entirety:
I write separately to explain my understanding of the Court’s opinion, which I join in full. Today we reaffirm a well-settled principle: “A government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf.” Ante, at 11. As the Court mentions, many lower courts have taken to analyzing this kind of coercion claim under a four-pronged “multifactor test.” Ibid. These tests, the Court explains, might serve “as a useful, though nonexhaustive, guide.” Ante, at 12. But sometimes they might not. Cf. Axon Enterprise, Inc. v. FTC, 598 U. S. 175, 205–207 (2023) (G ORSUCH , J., concurring in judgment). Indeed, the Second Circuit’s decision to break up its analysis into discrete parts and “tak[e] the [complaint’s] allegations in isolation” appears only to have contributed to its mistaken conclusion that the National Rifle Association failed to state a claim. Ante, at 15. Lower courts would therefore do well to heed this Court’s directive: Whatever value these “guideposts” serve, they remain “just” that and nothing more. Ante, at 12. “Ultimately, the critical” question is whether the plaintiff has “plausibly allege[d] conduct that, viewed in context, could be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress the plaintiff ’s speech.” Ante, at 12, 19.
What seems key to him is the last line, and reads like a canary of an issue potentially splitting the Court in Murthy, where there the government clearly engaged in communications with intermediary platforms but the question is whether those communications amounted to attempts at persuasion, which is lawful, or coercion, which is not.
Meanwhile, this case itself will now be remanded. The Court ruled based on the facts as the NRA pled them – as was procedurally proper to do at this stage of the litigation – but it’s conceivable that when put to a standard of proof there won’t be enough to maintain its First Amendment claim. And even if the claim survives, the state for its part can still litigate whether it has an immunity defense to this alleged constitutional injury. So the matter has not yet been put to rest, but presumably the underlying First Amendment question it raised now has.
Last January, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg summed up his case against Donald Trump this way: "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate. It's an election interference case." That gloss made no sense, because the records at the center of the case—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries that allegedly were aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for lega
Last January, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg summed up his case against Donald Trump this way: "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate. It's an election interference case."
That gloss made no sense, because the records at the center of the case—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries that allegedly were aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services—were produced after the 2016 presidential election. At that point, Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, had already paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, and Trump had already been elected. The prosecution's case against Trump, which a jury found persuasive enough to convict him on all 34 counts yesterday, was peppered with temporal puzzles like this one.
A New York Times editorial concedes that "many experts" have "expressed skepticism about the significance of this case and its legal underpinnings, which employed an unusual legal theory to seek a felony charge for what is more commonly a misdemeanor." Yet the Times also claims the jury found Trump "guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging." How did records created in 2017 "prevent voters from learning" about the Daniels tryst before they cast their ballots the previous year?
The editorial's characterization of Cohen's payment to Daniels is confounding for a similar reason. "A payoff like this is not illegal by itself," the Times concedes. "What makes it illegal is doctoring business records to mask its true purpose, which prosecutors said was to hide the story from the American people to help Mr. Trump get elected." Again, the "doctoring" of business records happened in 2017. Contrary to what the Times claims, it did not retroactively make the Daniels payment "illegal."
The Times also says the verdict "establishes that Mr. Trump committed crimes in hiding pertinent information about himself from the American people for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election." The verdict does not establish that. Trump was not charged with breaking the law by instructing Cohen to pay off Daniels. And while the contentious characterization of that payment as an illegal campaign contribution figured in one theory for treating the falsification charges as felonies rather than misdemeanors, the other two theories did not hinge on the assumption that the payoff was illegal.
Since the jurors were instructed that they did not need to settle on any particular theory, it is not clear that they unanimously accepted the idea that Trump "committed crimes in hiding pertinent information about himself from the American people for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election." That description, however, is consistent with the prosecution's dubious "election fraud" narrative, which falsely implied that "hiding pertinent information about himself" was inherently criminal.
Although it seems clear that the jury accepted that narrative, even the prosecutors sometimes forgot what they claimed the case was about. They argued that Trump violated an obscure, rarely invoked state law by conspiring with Cohen to influence the presidential election "by unlawful means." They further argued that Trump caused the falsification of business records with the intent of aiding or concealing that crime, which is the element that transformed the charges into felonies. But some versions of that theory were logically impossible.
According to one theory of "unlawful means," Trump facilitated a violation of New York tax law by allowing Cohen to falsely report his reimbursement as income. But since Cohen filed those allegedly fraudulent tax returns in 2018, after Trump had been president for more than a year, his misrepresentation could not possibly have helped Trump win the election.
Under another theory, Trump falsified business records to conceal the falsification of other business records, including the 1099-MISC forms in which the Trump Organization inaccurately described Cohen's reimbursement as income. Since the 1099 forms were issued after the election, it is hard to see how they could have been aimed at ensuring Trump's victory.
These logical difficulties were just one of several reasons to question the prosecution's case, which relied on convoluted theories involving interacting statutes and questionable assumptions about Trump's knowledge and intent. But instead of zeroing in on those weaknesses, Trump's lawyers, presumably at his behest, were determined to deny everything, starting with Daniels' story about sex with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006.
That strategy invited embarrassingly detailed testimony by Daniels, who described a presumptuous Trump abruptly disrobing while she was in the bathroom before engaging in a "brief," condomless sexual encounter "in the missionary position." Contrary to her previous accounts, Daniels implied that the sex was less than fully consensual, citing "an imbalance of power," noting the presence of a bodyguard at the door to Trump's hotel suite, saying Trump's failure to use a condom worried her, and describing her own mental state as hazy, although she added that she was not drunk and had not been drugged.
None of this was legally relevant. When it came to the questions of whether Trump had caused the falsification of business records and his intent in doing so, it did not matter exactly what happened in that hotel suite. Even if Daniels had made the whole thing up, Trump still would have been keen to keep her quiet, whether for personal reasons, business reasons, political reasons, or some combination of the three.
The defense team also insisted that Trump really thought he was paying Cohen for legal work, even though Trump had publicly admitted that he reimbursed Cohen for the Daniels payment. And Trump's lawyers disputed that he "knew about this payment" at the time, even though it defies belief to suppose that Cohen, who was eager to please Trump and conferred with him frequently, would have hatched this scheme on his own, or that he would have fronted $130,000 of his own money without the promise of reimbursement.
Whether Trump approved the misleading records related to Cohen's reimbursement, as Cohen claimed, is less clear. Trump's lawyers hammered at Cohen's credibility on that point, saying jurors should not trust a convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and admitted liar with a powerful grudge against his former boss. But because they were also implausibly claiming that Cohen lied when he said Trump approved the Daniels payoff, the jurors may have discounted any doubts about the veracity of Cohen's account.
If Trump had been willing to concede some of the prosecution's allegations, his lawyers could have focused on the shaky legal argument for charging him with felonies. They not only failed to do that in a cogent way; they insisted on jury instructions that ruled out convicting Trump of misdemeanors rather than felonies.
"Instead of telling a simple story, Mr. Trump's defense was a haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks," defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti observes. "That may work for a Trump rally or a segment on Fox News, but it doesn't work in a courtroom. Perhaps Mr. Trump's team was also pursuing a political or press strategy, but it certainly wasn't a good legal strategy. The powerful defense available to Mr. Trump's attorneys was lost amid all the clutter."
Guilty on all counts: Last night, a jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts. He was convicted of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, with whom he had a tryst, in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Sentencing, which may include prison time but does not necessarily, has been set for July 11. Trump still has appeals to exhaust, and Judge Juan M. Merchan could also choose to
Guilty on all counts: Last night, a jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts. He was convicted of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, with whom he had a tryst, in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
Sentencing, which may include prison time but does not necessarily, has been set for July 11. Trump still has appeals to exhaust, and Judge Juan M. Merchan could also choose to seek probation instead of throwing the presidential candidate in the slammer. In other words: There are a lot of different ways this could play out which would still allow Trump to campaign for president (and be elected).
Since this happened last night, we do not yet have polling data on how this verdict will affect the presidential race. But a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 6 percent of Trump voters would be less likely to vote for their favored candidate if convicted, while "24 percent say they would be more likely to vote for him" and an impressive "68 percent say it would not make a difference." That 6 percent could be consequential in a tight race.
Critics on the left, many of whom are hungry for Trump to receive jail time, and those on the right who are willing to excuse his criminal and norms-shattering behavior time and time again are both frequently wrong, but in this particular case, the legal argument was mighty dubious, writesReason's Jacob Sullum, and the verdict was perhaps reached too swiftly, providing fodder for the argument that this was politically motivated.
"In legal terms, the quick verdict is hard to fathom," writes Sullum. "That's not because there were so many counts to consider, each related to a specific invoice, check, or ledger entry allegedly aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services. Once jurors accepted the prosecution's theory of the case, it was pretty much inevitable that they would find Trump guilty on all 34 counts. But that theory was complicated, confusing, and in some versions highly implausible, if not nonsensical."
The basics: One of the prosecution's basic arguments was that Trump falsified business records with "an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof." That other crime would be a violation of Section 17-152, a New York state election law that considers it a misdemeanor for "two or more persons" to "conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means."
But Judge Merchan told jurors they did not have to agree on what "unlawful means" were used, or what that even means, to reach a unanimous verdict. And prosecutors needed to convince jurors that Trump "knowingly and willfully" engaged in such criminal conspiracy with his fixer, Michael Cohen, which strains credulity: One argument, put forth by prosecutors, was that Cohen "made an excessive campaign contribution, thereby violating the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), when he fronted the money to pay Daniels" (per Sullum)—an offense Cohen pleaded guilty to several years ago and a piece of evidence jurors heard but were instructed to use "to assess Cohen's credibility" but not his guilt—but it is in fact quite plausible that Trump did not know that instructing Cohen to pay Daniels was illegal.
"The prosecutors zapped a dead misdemeanor back into life by claiming a violation under New York's election law 17-152," writes Jonathan Turley at The Hill. "The argument is that the crime was committed to further another crime as an unlawful means to influence the election. However, that other crime can be the falsification of business records. So the jury (or some jurors, at least) could find that some documents were falsified as an unlawful means of falsifying other documents."
HOODWINKED: It's all legally shaky, but that didn't stop prosecutors from making wild arguments (as they do), like one that the hush-money payment (also called "[an] effort to hoodwink the American voter") "could very well be what got President Trump elected" in 2016, and that the cover-up of the Daniels affair amounted to "a subversion of democracy" meant to "manipulate and defraud the voters."
The payment to Daniels "turned out to be one of the most valuable contributions anyone ever made to Trump," Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass argued at one point. But, ultimately, jurors were convinced by these arguments—even if much of the conservative legal movement and punditry (even those who aren't Trump fans) were not.
As far as appeals, Trump has plenty of "material to work with" writes Ankush Khardori at Politico. "What he's got has almost nothing to do with the salacious and supposedly extraneous details offered by Daniels about her sexual encounter with Trump—after all, Trump and his legal team foolishly invited that testimony themselves by denying its existence—but with the underlying legal architecture of the case, which imported complex principles of federal election law into a state law case about false business records."
Scenes from New York: That's enough New York for today.
QUICK HITS
It's pretty fun to play with this tool—called "Build a Trump Voter"/"Build a Biden Voter"—from The Economist.
I'm here for all shots fired at baby boomers but am not sure whether stinginess—also termed frugality or fiscal prudence—is the concern. Why are we trying to audit an entire generation's consumer spending habits? Who cares?
Are you a libertarian left wondering who Chase Oliver is? Ask no more. Watch Just Asking Questions (and send us hate mail/love letters, vows of loyalty, notes of criticism, anything you desire). Some have said my views, espoused within, are "based" but I still do not know what this word means nor will I investigate.
After deliberating for a little more than a day, a Manhattan jury on Thursday found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying 34 business records to aid or conceal "another crime," an intent that turns what would otherwise be misdemeanors into felonies. If you assumed that the jury's conclusions would be driven by political animus, this first-ever criminal conviction of a former president is the result you probably expected in a jurisdiction where Democr
After deliberating for a little more than a day, a Manhattan jury on Thursday found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying 34 business records to aid or conceal "another crime," an intent that turns what would otherwise be misdemeanors into felonies. If you assumed that the jury's conclusions would be driven by political animus, this first-ever criminal conviction of a former president is the result you probably expected in a jurisdiction where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 9 to 1. But in legal terms, the quick verdict is hard to fathom.
That's not because there were so many counts to consider, each related to a specific invoice, check, or ledger entry allegedly aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services. Once jurors accepted the prosecution's theory of the case, it was pretty much inevitable that they would find Trump guilty on all 34 counts. But that theory was complicated, confusing, and in some versions highly implausible, if not nonsensical. Given the puzzles posed by the charges, you would expect conscientious jurors to spend more than an afternoon, a morning, and part of another afternoon teasing them out.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's case against Trump stemmed from the $130,000 that Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer and fixer, paid porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump. When Trump reimbursed Cohen in 2017, prosecutors said, he tried to cover up the arrangement with Daniels by pretending that he was paying Cohen, whom he had designated as his personal attorney, for legal work.
Cohen testified that Trump instructed him to pay off Daniels and approved the plan to mischaracterize the reimbursement. Cohen was the only witness who directly confirmed those two points, and the defense team argued that jurors should not trust a convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and admitted liar with a powerful grudge against his former boss. But even without Cohen's testimony, there was strong circumstantial evidence that Trump approved the payoff and went along with the reimbursement scheme.
The real problem for the prosecution was proving that Trump falsified business records with "an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof"—the element that was necessary to treat the misleading documents as felonies. Prosecutors said the other crime was a violation of Section 17-152, an obscure, little-used provision of the New York Election Law. Section 17-152 makes it a misdemeanor for "two or more persons" to "conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means." But prosecutors never settled on any particular explanation of "unlawful means," and Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over the trial, told the jurors they could find Trump guilty even if they could not agree on one.
According to one theory, Cohen made an excessive campaign contribution, thereby violating the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), when he fronted the money to pay Daniels. Cohen pleaded guilty to that offense in 2018 as part of an agreement that also resolved several other, unrelated federal charges against him. Cohen therefore had a strong incentive to accept the characterization of the Daniels payment as an illegal campaign contribution. While jurors heard about Cohen's guilty plea during the trial, CNN notes, Merchan instructed them that they should consider it only "to assess Cohen's credibility and give context to the events that followed, but not in determining the defendant's guilt."
It is unclear whether Trump violated FECA by soliciting Cohen's "contribution," a question that hinges on the fuzzy distinction between personal and campaign expenditures. Given the uncertainty on that point, it is plausible that Trump did not think the Daniels payment was illegal, which helps explain why he was never prosecuted under FECA: To obtain a conviction, federal prosecutors would have had to prove that he "knowingly and willfully" violated the statute.
The New York prosecutors said Cohen and Trump conspired to promote his election through "unlawful means." Under New York law, a criminal conspiracy requires "a specific intent to commit a crime." Trump's understanding of FECA was relevant in assessing whether he had such an intent, meaning he recognized the nondisclosure agreement with Daniels as "unlawful means." Trump's understanding of FECA therefore also was relevant in assessing whether he falsified business records with the intent of covering up "another crime."
That theory assumed three things: 1) that Trump recognized the Daniels payment as a FECA violation; 2) that he knew about Section 17-152, a moribund, rarely invoked law; and 3) that he anticipated how New York prosecutors might construe Section 17-152 in light of FECA. The first assumption is questionable, the second is unlikely, and the third is highly implausible. Yet you would have to believe all three things to conclude that Trump approved a plan to misrepresent his reimbursement of Cohen as payment for legal services with the intent of covering up a FECA-dependent violation of Section 17-152.
According to a second theory, Trump facilitated a violation of New York tax law by allowing Cohen to falsely report his reimbursement as income. Although that violation is described as "criminal tax fraud," Merchan said it did not matter that Cohen's alleged misrepresentation resulted in a higher tax bill. The judge noted that it is illegal to submit "materially false or fraudulent information in connection with any return," regardless of whether that information benefits the taxpayer.
Putting aside that counterintuitive definition of tax fraud, this theory required believing that Trump, when he reimbursed Cohen, not only contemplated what would happen when Cohen filed his returns the following year but also thought that "unlawful means" somehow would influence an election that had already happened. The logic here was hard to follow.
Likewise with the third theory of "unlawful means." Prosecutors suggested that Trump's falsification of business records was designed to aid or conceal the falsification of other business records. CNN reported that the latter records could involve, among other things, the corporate bank account that Cohen created to pay Daniels, Cohen's transfer of the money to Daniels' lawyer, or the Trump Organization's 1099-MISC forms for the payments to Cohen.
Since the 1099 forms were issued after the election, it is hard to see how they could have been aimed at ensuring Trump's victory. And although the other records predated the election, this theory involves a weird sort of bootstrapping.
Prosecutors said the records related to Cohen's dummy corporation, for example, were falsified because they misrepresented the nature and purpose of that entity, which by itself is a misdemeanor. That misdemeanor was the "unlawful means" by which Trump allegedly sought to promote his election, another misdemeanor. And because Trump allegedly tried to conceal the latter misdemeanor by falsifying the records related to Cohen's reimbursement, those records are 34 felonies instead of 34 misdemeanors.
The theory that Trump falsified business records to conceal the falsification of business records was "so circular as to produce vertigo in the jury room," George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said. If so, the jurors seem to have quickly recovered from their queasiness. They accepted either this dubious theory, one of the others, or possibly some combination of them. Since unanimity was not required, it is possible that some jurors bought the FECA theory, some preferred the double falsification theory, and some concluded that the case was clinched by a tax fraud with no pecuniary benefit.
To disguise the difficulties with its dueling theories, the prosecution averred that Trump committed "election fraud" when he directed Cohen to pay Daniels for her silence, thereby concealing information that voters might have deemed relevant in choosing between him and Hillary Clinton. "This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures, to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior," lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo told the jury in his opening statement. "It was election fraud, pure and simple."
During his summation, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass called the nondisclosure agreement with Daniels "a subversion of democracy." He said it was an "effort to hoodwink the American voter." He told "a sweeping story about a fraud on the American people," as The New York Times put it. "He argue[d] that the American people in 2016 had the right to determine whether they cared that Trump had slept with a porn star or not, and that the conspiracy prevented them from doing so."
Did the American people have such a right? If so, Trump would have violated it even he had merely asked Daniels to keep quiet, perhaps by appealing to her sympathy for his wife. If Daniels had agreed, the result would have been the same. As the prosecution told it, that still would amount to "election fraud," even though there is clearly nothing illegal about it.
The jurors evidently bought this cover story. During deliberations, they revisited the testimony of former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, a Trump buddy whom prosecutors implicated in that "long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election." Pecker's arrangement with Trump, which he described as mutually beneficial, was not the basis for any of the charges against Trump. But his testimony reinforced Bragg's legally dubious claim that Trump engaged in "election interference" when he sought to avoid bad press.
Pecker said he agreed to help Trump in several ways. He would run positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponents. He also would keep an eye out for potentially damaging stories about Trump and alert Cohen to them. The latter promise resulted in two agreements that the Enquirer negotiated with Dino Sajudin, a former Trump Tower doorman who falsely claimed that Trump had fathered a child with a woman hired to clean the building, and former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, who described a year-long affair with Trump. After paying $30,000 to Sajudin and $150,000 to McDougal for exclusive rights to their stories, the Enquirer sat on them.
Again, Trump was not charged in connection with any of this, and much of what Pecker did was constitutionally protected, albeit journalistically unethical. The fact that the jury nevertheless wanted to be read excerpts from Pecker's testimony suggests they accepted the prosecution's commodious understanding of "election fraud," which did not necessarily require any actual lawbreaking, let alone any attempt to interfere with the casting, counting, or reporting of votes.
In short, there was a glaring mismatch between the charges against Trump and what prosecutors described as the essence of his crime, which is not a crime at all. Since they could not charge him with "election fraud" merely because he tried to hide embarrassing information, they instead built a convoluted case that relied on interacting statutes and questionable assumptions about Trump's knowledge and intent.
That approach suggests several possible grounds for appeal. It is not clear, for example, whether a violation of federal campaign finance regulations, even when filtered through Section 17-152, counts as "another crime" under the state law dealing with falsification of business records. Nor is it clear that Section 17-152 applies in the context of a federal election, where federal law generally pre-empts state law. There are also questions about what is required to prove that Trump had "an intent to defraud" when he signed the checks to Cohen.
Bragg's predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., after lengthy consideration of possible state charges based on the Daniels payment, decided they were too legally iffy to pursue. Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor in Vance's office who worked on the Trump investigation, concluded that "such a case was too risky under New York law." In a 2023 book, Pomerantz noted that "no appellate court in New York had ever upheld (or rejected) this interpretation of the law."
Last week, New York Times columnist David French worried about the consequences of a conviction that is overturned on appeal. "Imagine a scenario in which Trump is convicted at the trial, Biden condemns him as a felon and the Biden campaign runs ads mocking him as a convict," he wrote. "If Biden wins a narrow victory but then an appeals court tosses out the conviction, this case could well undermine faith in our democracy and the rule of law." In his desperation to prevent Trump from reoccupying the White House, Bragg has already accomplished that.
What do the National Rifle Association (NRA), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and nine U.S. Supreme Court justices from five presidential administrations all have in common? That list is likely relatively small. But at least one area of overlap was made evident Thursday when the Court published a unanimous ruling that a New York government official allegedly violated the First Amendment by pressuring insurers and banks to sever busines
What do the National Rifle Association (NRA), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and nine U.S. Supreme Court justices from five presidential administrations all have in common? That list is likely relatively small. But at least one area of overlap was made evident Thursday when the Court published a unanimous ruling that a New York government official allegedly violated the First Amendment by pressuring insurers and banks to sever business ties with the NRA, which the ACLU is representing.
The decision resuscitates the gun advocacy group's lawsuit against Maria Vullo, the former head of New York's Department of Financial Services (DFS). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit had previously ruled in her favor.
At the core of the case is Vullo's advocacy following the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After that tragedy, in private meetings with insurance companies, Vullo allegedly expressed she would selectively apply enforcement action to groups that insisted on serving the NRA.
She didn't stop there. She also sent letters titled "Guidance on Risk Management Relating to the NRA and Similar Gun Promotion Organizations" to insurers and banks, in which she encouraged them to "continue evaluating and managing their risks, including reputational risks, that may arise from their dealings with the NRA or similar gun promotion organizations"; to "review any relationships they have with the NRA or similar gun promotion organizations"; and to "take prompt actions to manag[e] these risks and promote public health and safety." And in a press release with then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the two officials urged such companies to terminate their relationships with the gun advocacy group. Some took them up on the suggestion.
The constitutional issue at stake here is similar to the one the Court explored in Murthy v. Missouri, the case that asks if President Joe Biden's administration violated the First Amendment when it sought to convince social media companies to remove content it disliked. During those oral arguments in March, many justices appeared sympathetic to the view that government officials had not overstepped the bounds of their authority and had merely exercised their own free speech rights to persuade those companies to adopt their views, not unlike a White House press secretary promoting an ideological slant to the media.
But in NRA v. Vullo, the Court ruled unanimously that Vullo's actions as alleged by the NRA had crossed the line from persuasion into coercion. "Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors," wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The NRA, she said, "plausibly alleges that respondent Maria Vullo did just that."
The decision sends the case back to the 2nd Circuit, which could still give Vullo qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that shields government officials from suits like the NRA's if the misconduct alleged has not been "clearly established" in prior case law. That outcome is certainly probable, as the 2nd Circuit's original decision not only ruled that Vullo had not violated the Constitution—which the Supreme Court rejected today—but that even if she had, qualified immunity would insulate her from the NRA's claim.
It is difficult to imagine, however, a more obvious violation of the Constitution than the weaponization of government power to cripple advocacy disfavored by the state. The supposed reason for qualified immunity is that taxpayer-funded civil servants deserve fair notice that conduct is unlawful before a victim can seek recourse for those misdeeds. To argue that a government agent could not be expected to understand the contours of the First Amendment here is rather dire.
Many people may struggle to separate the constitutional question from the ideological backdrop. The NRA, after all, is one of the more polarizing lobbying organizations in the country, not least of which because its founding issue—gun rights—is not exactly a topic that elicits cool-headed responses. It has also become an advocacy group not just for firearms but for the Republican Party more broadly and the identity politics associated with it, alienating large swaths of people, to put it mildly.
There is another major group in the country that has followed a similar story arc, just on the other side of the political spectrum: the ACLU. Once a stalwart free speech group—so principled it defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis—it has, in modern times, sometimes actively advocated against civil liberties when those principles transgress progressive politics, an awkward move when considering the group's name. But no matter how much you dislike one or both of them, the NRA and the ACLU coming together here is all the more reflective of the fact that some things, like the First Amendment, really aren't partisan.
To convert a single hush payment into 34 state felonies in the New York case against former President Donald Trump, prosecutors are relying on several interacting statutes, which makes their legal theory convoluted and confusing. Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over Trump's trial, added to the confusion on Wednesday when he instructed the jurors on the conclusions they must reach to find Trump guilty. Shortly before the 2016 election, Michael C
To convert a single hush payment into 34 state felonies in the New York case against former President Donald Trump, prosecutors are relying on several interacting statutes, which makes their legal theory convoluted and confusing. Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over Trump's trial, added to the confusion on Wednesday when he instructed the jurors on the conclusions they must reach to find Trump guilty.
Shortly before the 2016 election, Michael Cohen, then a lawyer working for Trump, paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump. When Trump reimbursed Cohen in 2017, prosecutors say, he caused the falsification of 34 business records—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries—that were aimed at disguising the reimbursement as payment for legal services.
Ordinarily, falsification of business records, which requires "an intent to defraud," is a misdemeanor. But it becomes a felony when the defendant's "intent to defraud" includes "an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof." The prosecution's theory of "another crime" relies on Section 17-152 of the New York Election Law—a statute so obscure that experts said they had never seen another criminal case based on it. That provision makes it a misdemeanor for "two or more persons" to "conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means."
Merchan laid out three possible candidates for "unlawful means" to which prosecutors have alluded. One is debatable, while the other two make little or no sense in the context of Section 17-152. Merchan said the jurors need not settle on any particular theory of "unlawful means," provided they agree that Trump was trying to aid or conceal a violation of Section 17-152.
By fronting the hush money, prosecutors say, Cohen made an excessive campaign contribution, thereby violating the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). Cohen pleaded guilty to that offense in 2018 as part of an agreement that also resolved several other, unrelated federal charges against him. While jurors heard about that guilty plea during the trial, CNN notes, Merchan instructed them that they should consider it only "to assess Cohen's credibility and give context to the events that followed, but not in determining the defendant's guilt."
It is unclear whether Trump violated FECA by soliciting Cohen's "contribution," a question that hinges on the fuzzy distinction between personal and campaign expenditures. Given the uncertainty on that point, it is plausible that Trump did not think the Daniels payment was illegal, which helps explain why he was never prosecuted under FECA: To obtain a conviction, federal prosecutors would have had to prove that he "knowingly and willfully" violated the statute.
The New York prosecutors say Cohen and Trump conspired to promote his election through "unlawful means." Under New York law, a criminal conspiracy requires "a specific intent to commit a crime." Trump's understanding of FECA is relevant in assessing whether he had such an intent, meaning he recognized the nondisclosure agreement with Daniels as "unlawful means." Trump's understanding of FECA therefore also is relevant in assessing whether he falsified business records with the intent of concealing "another crime."
This theory assumes three things: 1) that Trump recognized the Daniels payment as a FECA violation; 2) that he knew about Section 17-152, a moribund, rarely invoked law; and 3) that he anticipated how New York prosecutors might construe Section 17-152 in light of FECA. The first assumption is questionable, the second is unlikely, and the third is highly implausible. Yet you would have to believe all three things to conclude that Trump approved a plan to misrepresent his reimbursement of Cohen as payment for legal services with the intent of covering up a FECA-dependent violation of Section 17-152.
The other two theories that Merchan mentioned seem even less promising.
According to one theory, Trump was facilitating a violation of New York tax law by allowing Cohen to falsely report his reimbursement as income. Although that violation is described as "criminal tax fraud," Merchan said it does not matter that Cohen's alleged misrepresentation resulted in a higher tax bill. The judge noted that it is illegal to submit "materially false or fraudulent information in connection with any return," regardless of whether that information benefits the taxpayer.
Putting aside that counterintuitive definition of tax fraud, this theory requires believing that Trump, when he reimbursed Cohen, not only contemplated what would happen when Cohen filed his returns the following year but also thought that "unlawful means" somehow would influence an election that had already happened. The logic here is hard to follow.
Likewise with the third theory of "unlawful means." Prosecutors say Trump's falsification of business records was designed to aid or conceal the falsification of other business records. CNN reports that the latter records could involve, among other things, the corporate bank account that Cohen created to pay Daniels, Cohen's transfer of the money to Daniels' lawyer, or the Trump Organization's 1099-MISC forms for the payments to Cohen.
Since the 1099 forms were issued after the election, it is hard to see how they could have been aimed at ensuring Trump's victory. And although the other records predated the election, this theory involves a weird sort of bootstrapping.
Prosecutors say the records related to Cohen's dummy corporation, for example, were falsified because they misrepresented the nature and purpose of that entity, which by itself is a misdemeanor. That misdemeanor was the "unlawful means" by which Trump allegedly sought to promote his election, another misdemeanor. And because Trump allegedly tried to conceal the latter misdemeanor by falsifying the records related to Cohen's reimbursement, those records are 34 felonies instead of 34 misdemeanors.
"One of the three crimes is so circular as to produce vertigo in the jury room," George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley observes. "The prosecutors zapped a dead misdemeanor back into life by claiming a violation under New York's election law 17-152. The argument is that the crime was committed to further another crime as an unlawful means to influence the election. However, that other crime can be the falsification of business records. So the jury (or some jurors, at least) could find that some documents were falsified as an unlawful means of falsifying other documents."
Because Merchan said jurors need not agree on which of these theories has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the rationale for convicting him is apt to be muddled. "The judge has ruled that the jury does not have to agree on what actually occurred in the case," Turley says. "Merchan ruled that the government had vaguely referenced three possible crimes that constitute the 'unlawful means' used to influence the election: a federal election violation, the falsification of business records, and a tax violation. The jurors were told that they could split on what occurred, with four jurors accepting each of the three possible crimes in a 4-4-4 split. The court would still consider that a unanimous verdict so long as they agree that it was in furtherance of some crime."
Merchan's instructions did include a caveat that could help Trump. "He said mere knowledge of a conspiracy does not make [the] defendant a co-conspirator," Fox News correspondent Lydia Hu notes. "Prosecutors must prove intent. Also, being present with others when they form a conspiracy does not mean that the defendant is a part of the conspiracy."
On its face, Cohen's testimony regarding Trump's participation in the alleged conspiracy seems crucial in establishing his intent. Cohen said Trump instructed him to pay Daniels. He also said Trump Organization Allen Weisselberg described the plan to reimburse Cohen during a January 2021 meeting, and Trump did not object. Cohen was the only witness who directly testified on those points, and Trump's lawyers argued that he cannot be trusted, noting that he is a convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and admitted liar with a powerful grudge against his former boss.
Merchan said "the jury cannot convict Trump on the testimony of Michael Cohen alone because he is an accomplice, but they can use it if they corroborate it with other evidence," CNN notes. "Even if you find the testimony of Michael Cohen to be believable," Merchan said, "you may not convict the defendant solely upon that testimony unless you also find it's corroborated by other evidence." The other evidence is circumstantial. It includes testimony suggesting that Trump was worried about the impact that Daniels' story would have on the election, that he conferred regularly with Cohen, and that he was a proud penny-pincher who never would have paid Cohen without knowing exactly what it was for.
That evidence supports the inference that Trump knew he was reimbursing Cohen for the Daniels payment (which he has publicly admitted). It also supports the idea that Trump recognized that payment as a campaign expenditure and therefore an illegal contribution. But it does not prove that second claim beyond a reasonable doubt, which helps explain why the prosecution offered jurors two other possible theories of "unlawful means." If they are squeamish about the FECA theory, they can instead rely on the tax theory, despite its temporal difficulties, or they can accept the idea that Trump fabricated business records to conceal the fabrication of business records, even though that proposition makes the mind reel.
Since the jurors do not have to agree on the nature of Trump's "unlawful means," Merchan's instructions invite them to convict him based on a hodgepodge of three dubious theories. But if each of these theories is faulty, mixing them together cannot compensate for their weaknesses.
Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over Donald Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan, yesterday denied a second defense motion for a mistrial. Trump's lead attorney, Todd Blanche, has objected to aspects of porn star Stormy Daniels' testimony about her purported 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, saying some of the details were legally irrelevant and "so unduly and inappropriately prejudicial" that a mistrial was the only remedy. Merchan rejected tha
Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over Donald Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan, yesterday denied a second defense motion for a mistrial. Trump's lead attorney, Todd Blanche, has objected to aspects of porn star Stormy Daniels' testimony about her purported 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, saying some of the details were legally irrelevant and "so unduly and inappropriately prejudicial" that a mistrial was the only remedy. Merchan rejected that argument on Tuesday and again on Thursday, saying the problem that Blanche perceives was largely a result of the defense team's failures during Daniels' testimony and cross-examination.
Among other things, Blanche cited testimony suggesting, for the first time, that Daniels' alleged encounter with Trump was not fully consensual. This dispute illustrates the risk that the salaciousness of Daniels' account will overshadow the legal issue at the center of the case.
Trump is not charged with adultery or sexual assault. He is not charged with trying to keep Daniels from talking about what she says happened, although Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has misleadingly suggested that the essence of Trump's crime was keeping that information from voters during his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump is not even charged with instructing his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pay Daniels $130,000 shortly before the election in exchange for her silence. Rather, he is charged with falsifying business records to disguise his 2017 reimbursement of Cohen as payment for legal services.
Proving those 34 charges does not require demonstrating that Daniels is telling the truth at all, let alone that every detail is accurate. Under the prosecution's theory, Trump would be guilty of falsifying business records even if Daniels made the whole thing up. And assuming that Cohen's payment to Daniels amounted to an excessive campaign contribution (a characterization that Cohen accepted when he pleaded guilty to that offense in 2018), Trump's falsification of business records would be a felony if he was trying to conceal that violation of federal campaign finance regulations.
There are several problems with that theory, including the fuzziness of the distinction between personal and campaign expenditures, the question of whether Trump recognized that the Daniels payoff fell into the latter category (assuming that it did), the uncertainty about Trump's involvement in generating the relevant business records and his motive in doing so, and the attempt to convert a 2016 federal campaign finance violation into a state felony via a moribund New York election law that apparently has never been used before. But one thing is clear: Trump's criminal liability in this case has nothing to do with exactly what happened in his Lake Tahoe hotel suite during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006.
Jurors nevertheless heard a lot about that. For years, Daniels has said she consented to sex with Trump. But during her testimony on Tuesday, she cast doubt on that characterization, saying "I just think I blacked out," although she added that she was not "drunk" or "drugged." She also noted that "there was a bodyguard right outside the door" and said "there was an imbalance of power for sure," since Trump "was bigger and blocking the way," although she conceded that she "was not threatened verbally or physically."
When Blanche complained that Daniels had changed her story, Merchan disagreed. "I disagree with your narrative that there is any new account here," the judge said. "I disagree that there is any changing story." Yet Blanche's complaint is at least partially valid.
It's true that Daniels has mentioned the bodyguard, Keith Schiller, before. He figures prominently in the account she gave in her 2018 memoir Full Disclosure. In that book, she also mentions that Trump did not wear a condom—another detail that Blanche described as irrelevant and prejudicial.
"I was surprised he didn't even mention a condom," Daniels says in Full Disclosure. "I didn't have one with me anyway, because I wasn't meeting him for sex. If I had been, I always brought my own, because I am allergic to latex. Back then I used Avantis"—a brand of nonlatex condoms. While Daniels' testimony on that point was similar, it introduced an element of concern that is not mentioned in the book:
Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger: Was he wearing a condom?
Daniels: No.
Hoffinger: Was that concerning to you?
Daniels: Yes.
Hoffinger: Did you say anything about it?
Daniels: No.
Hoffinger: Why not?
Daniels: I didn't say anything at all.
That exchange, Blanche noted, came after Daniels' testimony that the men with whom she performed in adult films were always required to wear condoms. On Thursday, the defense described the discussion of condoms as "a dog whistle for rape." While that may be an exaggeration, Daniels' testimony that Trump's failure to use a condom worried her certainly reinforced the impression that Daniels was doing something she did not want to do.
Full Disclosure leaves a similar impression—up to a point. After a conversation in which Daniels felt that Trump was treating her respectfully and taking her seriously as a businesswoman, she says, she emerged from a bathroom where she had touched up her makeup to find Trump sitting on a bed in his underwear.
"I had the sense of a vacuum taking all of the air out of the room, and me deflating with it," Daniels writes. "I sighed inwardly, keenly aware of two thoughts in that one moment. There was the simple Oh, fuck. Here we go. But there was also a much more complex, sad feeling that none of what he said was true. He didn't respect me. Everything he said to me was bullshit."
Daniels says she "should have…let him know this wasn't okay." But she didn't. "So, here we go," she writes. "It was an out-of-body experience….I just kind of lay there. A lot of women have been there. He wasn't aggressive, and I know for damn sure I could have outrun him if I tried, but I didn't. I'm someone who doesn't stop thinking, so as he was on top of me I replayed the previous three hours to figure out how I could have avoided this."
In her book, Daniels describes brief, sad, regrettable, and unsatisfying sex, but she emphasizes that it was an experience she easily could have avoided. Although she never quite explains why she decided to go through with it, there is no suggestion that she was incapacitated. But in her testimony, she said "I blacked out," which she suggested explained why "I don't remember" exactly what happened. Blacking out is not the same as "an out-of-body experience," which involves feeling detached from your body while fully conscious.
"I was not drugged," Daniels said. "I never insinuated that I was on drugs. I was not drunk. I never said anything of that sort." In a sidebar discussion, defense attorney Susan Necheles nevertheless objected that "she is making it sound like she was drugged." Hoffinger suggested that Daniels merely meant that she was "dizzy," possibly because she was hungry for the dinner that was promised but never materialized—a point she emphasizes in her book and mentioned in her testimony.
Merchan sustained Necheles' objection. But that did not stop the jury from hearing Daniels imply that she was not fully aware of what was happening that night. Combined with Daniels' references to the bodyguard and the "imbalance of power," that description strongly suggested her consent was not only passive and unenthusiastic but the product of pressure and incapacity.
Daniels strengthened that impression by saying she could not "remember how your clothes got off." There was Trump in his underwear, she said, and "the next thing I know" she was "on the bed," naked. Hoffinger asked whether she "remember[ed] anything other than the fact that you had sex on the bed." Not really, Daniels implied: "I was staring at the ceiling. I didn't know how I got there. I made note, like I was trying to think about anything other than what was happening there." That also prompted an objection from Hoffinger, which Merchan sustained.
In Full Disclosure, by contrast, Daniels recounts the sex in considerable detail, calling Trump "a terrible kisser," quoting what he said to her, describing the position he used, recalling the size and "unusual" shape of his penis, and remarking on his crotch hair. While these are just the sort of details that the defense (and Merchan) would deem out of bounds, they contradict the idea that Daniels was just "staring at the ceiling," that she didn't know "how I got there," or that she was only dimly aware of "what was happening there."
What does all this have to do with Trump's alleged falsification of business records? "All of this has nothing to do with this case," Blanche told Merchan on Tuesday. "The only reason why the government asked those questions, aside from pure embarrassment, is to inflame this jury to not look at the evidence that matters." He noted that Daniels "has testified today about consent, about danger," which is "not the point of this case."
The prosecution argues that the details of Daniels' story matter because they rebut Trump's contention that she invented the whole episode, which in turn goes to his motivation in arranging her nondisclosure agreement and in trying to keep it a secret with phony invoices, mislabeled checks, and fraudulent ledger entries. "Her account completes the narrative of the events that precipitated the falsification of business records," Hoffinger told Merchan. "Her account is highly probative of the defendant's intent, his intent and his motive in paying this off, and making sure that the American public did not hear this before the election. It is precisely what the defendant did not want to become public."
Merchan agreed with Blanche that "there were some things that would probably have been better left unsaid." But he said the fault for that lay partly with Trump's attorneys. "The objections, for the most part, were sustained," he said. "Where there was a motion to strike testimony, for the most part, that motion was granted as well. I will also note that I was surprised that there were not more objections at various times during the testimony….So when you say that, you know, the bell has been rung, the defense has to take some responsibility for that."
Merchan was less patient on Thursday, when the defense again moved for a mistrial. "There were many times when you could have objected but didn't," he told Necheles. She objected when Daniels testified that she "touch[ed] his skin" and when she said "we were in the missionary position," for example, but did not object during the condom exchange, which Blanche later argued was prejudicial and irrelevant. Nor did Necheles object when Daniels described the "imbalance of power" or when she noted that Trump was "definitely several inches taller and much larger" than her. And Necheles' objection to "I just think I blacked out" came late, five sentences after Daniels said it.
Merchan also "chided Mr. Trump's lawyers for missteps during their cross-examination of Ms. Daniels," The New York Timesnotes, "and suggested that the former president's insistence on entirely denying any sexual encounter with Ms. Daniels had opened the door for the prosecution to introduce specific—and graphic—evidence that the encounter did occur." The judge conceded that some details of Daniels' testimony were so needlessly prejudicial that he would have sustained objections to them if the defense had made them. At the same time, he said Daniels could "corroborate her account" by describing details of the encounter because a truthful story "increases the motivation to silence her."
That rationale seems like a stretch, especially since the prosecution has argued that Trump was eager to suppress negative stories even when they were not true. According to testimony that prosecutors presented to establish that pattern, Cohen arranged for the National Enquirer to pay former Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin $30,000 for exclusive rights to his story, which alleged that Trump had fathered a child with a woman hired to clean the building. Although the Enquirer investigated that story and determined that it was not true, prosecutors say, Trump was still keen to stop Sajudin from telling it. That suggests Trump would have wanted to silence Daniels even if her story was equally fictitious, making all the quibbling about the details of that story irrelevant.
The Los Angeles Press Club on Thursday announced the finalists for the 66th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards, recognizing the best work in print, online, and broadcast media published in 2023. Reason, which is headquartered in L.A., is a finalist for 14 awards. A sincere thanks to the judges who read and watched our submissions, as well as to the Reason readers, subscribers, and supporters, without whom we would not be able to produce
The Los Angeles Press Club on Thursday announced the finalists for the 66th Annual Southern California Journalism Awards, recognizing the best work in print, online, and broadcast media published in 2023.
Reason, which is headquartered in L.A., is a finalist for 14 awards.
A sincere thanks to the judges who read and watched our submissions, as well as to the Reason readers, subscribers, and supporters, without whom we would not be able to produce impactful journalism.
Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a finalist for best technology reporting across all media platforms—print, radio, podcast, TV, and online—for her November 2023 print piece, "Do Social Media Algorithms Polarize Us? Maybe Not," in which she challenged what has become the traditional wisdom around the root of online toxicity:
For years, politicians have been proposing new regulations based on simple technological "solutions" to issues that stem from much more complex phenomena. But making Meta change its algorithms or shifting what people see in their Twitter feeds can't overcome deeper issues in American politics—including parties animated more by hate and fear of the other side than ideas of their own. This new set of studies should serve as a reminder that expecting tech companies to somehow fix our dysfunctional political culture won't work.
Science Reporter Ronald Bailey is a finalist for best medical/health reporting in print or online for "Take Nutrition Studies With a Grain of Salt," also from the November 2023 issue, where he meticulously dissected why the epidemiology of food and drink is, well, "a mess":
This doesn't mean you can eat an entire pizza, a quart of ice cream, and six beers tonight without some negative health effects. (Sorry.) It means nutritional epidemiology is a very uncertain guide for how to live your life and it certainly isn't fit for setting public policy.
In short, take nutrition research with a grain of salt. And don't worry: Even though the World Health Organization (WHO) says "too much salt can kill you," the Daily Mail noted in 2021 that "it's not as bad for health as you think."
Managing Editor Jason Russell is a finalist in print/online sports commentary for his August/September 2023 cover story, "Get Your Politics Out of My Pickleball," which explored the emerging fault lines as the government gets involved in America's weirdest, fastest-growing sport:
Pickleball will always have haters—and if its growth continues, local governments will still face public pressure to build more courts. Some critics think the sport is a fad, but strong growth continues for the time being, even as the COVID-19 pandemic ends and other activities compete for time and attention. There's no need to force nonplayers to support it with their tax dollars, especially when entrepreneurs seem eager to provide courts. If pickleball does end up as an odd footnote in sporting history, ideally it won't be taxpayers who are on the hook for converting courts to new uses.
Reporter C.J. Ciaramella is a finalist in magazine investigative reporting for his October 2023 cover story, "'I Knew They Were Scumbags,'" a nauseating piece on federal prison guards who confessed to rape—and got away with it:
Berman's daughter, Carleane, was one of at least a dozen women who were abused by corrupt correctional officers at FCC Coleman, a federal prison complex in Florida. In December, a Senate investigation revealed that those correctional officers had admitted in sworn interviews with internal affairs investigators that they had repeatedly raped women under their control.
Yet thanks to a little known Supreme Court precedent and a culture of corrupt self-protection inside the prison system, none of those guards were ever prosecuted—precisely because of the manner in which they confessed.
Senior Editor Jacob Sullum is a finalist in magazine commentary for "Biden's 'Marijuana Reform' Leaves Prohibition Untouched," from the January 2023 issue, in which he disputed the notion that President Joe Biden has fundamentally changed America's response to cannabis:
By himself, Biden does not have the authority to resolve the untenable conflict between state and federal marijuana laws. But despite his avowed transformation from an anti-drug zealot into a criminal justice reformer, he has stubbornly opposed efforts to repeal federal pot prohibition.
That position is contrary to the preferences expressed by more than two-thirds of Americans, including four-fifths of Democrats and half of Republicans. The most Biden is willing to offer them is his rhetorical support for decriminalizing cannabis consumption—a policy that was on the cutting edge of marijuana reform in the 1970s.
Governments do unconscionable things every day; it is in their nature. But not all transgressions are equal. In the wake of the Iran team's silent anthem protest, an Iranian journalist asked U.S. men's soccer captain Tyler Adams how he could play for a country that discriminates against black people like him. What makes the U.S. different, he replied, is that "we're continuing to make progress every day."
The most perfect and enduring image of a person weaponizing his body against the state was taken after the brutal suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The unknown Chinese man standing in front of a tank didn't have to hold a sign for the entire world to know exactly what the problem was.
Reporter Christian Britschgi is a finalist for best long-form magazine feature on business/government for "The Town Without Zoning," from the August/September 2023 issue, in which he reported on the fight over whether Caroline, New York, should impose its first-ever zoning code:
Whatever the outcome, the zoning debate raging in Caroline is revealing. It shows how even in a small community without major enterprises or serious growth pressures, planners can't adequately capture and account for everything people might want to do with their land.
There's a gap between what zoners can do and what they imagine they can design. That knowledge problem hasn't stopped cities far larger and more complex than Caroline from trying to scientifically sort themselves with zoning. They've developed quite large and complex problems as a result.
Associate Editor Billy Binion (hi, it's me) is a finalist for best activism journalism online for the web feature "They Fell Behind on Their Property Taxes. So the Government Sold Their Homes—and Kept the Profits," which explored an underreported form of legalized larceny: governments across the U.S. seizing people's homes over modest tax debts, selling the properties, and keeping the surplus equity.
Geraldine Tyler is a 94-year-old woman spending the twilight of her life in retirement, as 94-year-olds typically do. But there isn't much that's typical about it.
Tyler has spent the last several years fighting the government from an assisted living facility after falling $2,300 behind on her property taxes. No one disputes that she owed a debt. What is in dispute is if the government acted constitutionally when, to collect that debt, it seized her home, sold it, and kept the profit.
If that sounds like robbery, it's because, in some sense, it is. But it's currently legal in at least 12 states across the country, so long as the government is doing the robbing.
Senior Producer Austin Bragg, Director of Special Projects Meredith Bragg, Producer John Carter, and freelancer extraordinaire Andrew Heaton are finalists for best humor/satire writing across all broadcast mediums—TV, film, radio, or podcast—for the hilarious "Everything is political: board games," which "exposes" how Republicans and Democrats interpret everyone's favorite games from their partisan perspectives. (Spoiler: Everyone's going to lose.)
The Bragg brothers are nominated again in that same category—best humor/satire writing—along with Remy for "Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor Swift Parody)," in which lawmakers find culprits for the recent uptick in thefts—the victims.
Deputy Managing Editor of Video and Podcasts Natalie Dowzicky and Video Editor Regan Taylor are finalists in best commentary/analysis of TV across all media platforms for "What really happened at Waco," which explored a Netflix documentary on how the seeds of political polarization that roil our culture today were planted at Waco.
Editor at Large Matt Welch, Producer Justin Zuckerman, Motion Graphic Designer Adani Samat, and freelancer Paul Detrick are finalists in best activism journalism across any broadcast media for "The monumental free speech case the media ignored," which made the case that the legal odyssey and criminal prosecutions associated with Backpage were a direct assault on the First Amendment—despite receiving scant national attention from journalists and free speech advocates.
Associate Editor Liz Wolfe, Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Video Editor Danielle Thompson, Video Art Director Isaac Reese, and Producer Justin Zuckerman are finalists in best solutions journalism in any broadcast media for "Why homelessness is worse in California than Texas," which investigated why homelessness is almost five times as bad in the Golden State—and what can be done about it.
Finally, Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Video Editor Danielle Thompson, Video Art Director Isaac Reese, and Audio Engineer Ian Keyser are finalists in best documentary short for "The Supreme Court case that could upend the Clean Water Act," which did a deep dive into a Supreme Court case concerning a small-town Idaho couple that challenged how the Environmental Protection Agency defines a "wetland"—and what that means for property rights.
Winners will be announced on Sunday, June 23 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Subscribe to Reasonhere, watch our video journalism here, and find our podcasts here.
After stealthily sneaking past a series of guards in the cold, digital halls of endless data, I’m brought to a new environment, now with a gun in hand and a series of explosive gems floating before me. I have to take all of these objects out as fast as I possibly can. And then, once I’m done, I’ll do it over again,…Read more...
After stealthily sneaking past a series of guards in the cold, digital halls of endless data, I’m brought to a new environment, now with a gun in hand and a series of explosive gems floating before me. I have to take all of these objects out as fast as I possibly can. And then, once I’m done, I’ll do it over again,…
Critical Role is going independent-er. After splitting from Geek & Sundry (and its parent company, Legendary Entertainment) some years ago, the wildly popular actual-play webseries has grown significantly from a singular show into its own network and company. Now it is taking the logical next step and launching its…Read more...
Critical Role is going independent-er. After splitting from Geek & Sundry (and its parent company, Legendary Entertainment) some years ago, the wildly popular actual-play webseries has grown significantly from a singular show into its own network and company. Now it is taking the logical next step and launching its…
A 60-year-old pilot flying a small plane reported engine trouble before making an emergency landing on a Long Island Beach.
The pilot, flying with a 59-year-old passenger, reportedly lost power to his Cessna mid-flight, but was able to aim his small plane towards Cedar Beach, where he successfully crash-landed his plane. — Read the rest
The post Small plane flips into "headstand" as pilot crash lands it on a Long Island beach (video) appeared first on Boing Boing.
A 60-year-old pilot flying a small plane reported engine trouble before making an emergency landing on a Long Island Beach.
The pilot, flying with a 59-year-old passenger, reportedly lost power to his Cessna mid-flight, but was able to aim his small plane towards Cedar Beach, where he successfully crash-landed his plane. — Read the rest
Dennis Powanda and Vincent Yakaitis are bound together by a common experience: They were both criminally charged in connection with an attempted burglary. Powanda was the burglar, and Yakaitis was the property owner. Ah, justice. Indeed, that's not a misprint, parody, or a bad joke (although I wish it were the latter). Powanda was arrested and charged with criminal trespass and burglary, along with other related offenses, for executing the botche
Dennis Powanda and Vincent Yakaitis are bound together by a common experience: They were both criminally charged in connection with an attempted burglary. Powanda was the burglar, and Yakaitis was the property owner.
Ah, justice.
Indeed, that's not a misprint, parody, or a bad joke (although I wish it were the latter). Powanda was arrested and charged with criminal trespass and burglary, along with other related offenses, for executing the botched raid a little before 2:00 a.m. in February 2023 at Yakaitis' property in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania. The government charged Yakaitis, who is in his mid-70s, with using a firearm without a license after he shot Powanda, despite that it appears prosecutors agree Yakaitis justifiably used that same firearm in self-defense.
Whatever your vantage point—whether you care about criminal justice reform and a fair legal system, or gun rights, or all of the above—it is difficult to make sense of arresting and potentially imprisoning someone over what essentially amounts to a paperwork violation. That injustice is even more glaring when considering that Powanda, 40, allegedly charged at Yakaitis, who happens to be about three and a half decades older than Powanda.
Pennsylvania's permitting regime does carve out a couple of exceptions, one of which would seem to highly favor Yakaitis. Someone does not need a license to carry, according to the law, "in his place of abode or fixed place of business." Yakaitis owned the home Powanda attempted to burglarize. The catch: He didn't live there—it reportedly had no tenants at the time of the crime—opening a window for law enforcement to charge him essentially on a technicality.
If convicted, Yakaitis faces up to five years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Quite the price to pay for protecting your life on your own property. The misdemeanor charge also implies that Yakaitis has no history of using his weapon inappropriately, or any criminal record at all, as Pennsylvania law classifies his particular crime—carrying a firearm without a license—as a felony if the defendant has prior criminal convictions and would be disqualified from obtaining such a license. In other words, we can deduce that Yakaitis was a law-abiding citizen and eligible for a permit, which means he is staring down five years in a cell for not turning in a form and paying a fee to local law enforcement. OK.
Yakaitis is not the first such case. In June, law enforcement in New York charged Charles Foehner with so many gun possession crimes that if convicted on all of them he would face life in prison. Police came to be aware of his unlicensed firearms when Foehner defended himself against an attempted mugger—the surveillance footage is here—after which they searched Foehner's home and found that only some of his weapons were licensed with the state.
Prosecutors classified it as a justified shooting. And then they hit Foehner with an avalanche of criminal charges that would have resulted in a longer prison sentence than his assailant would have received, had he survived.
There's also LaShawn Craig, another New York City man whose case I covered in December. He, too, shot someone in self-defense and he, too, was arrested for doing so without a license. Like Foehner, he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, a violent felony in New York. For a paperwork violation.
New York is a particularly relevant case study on the subject, as its highly restrictive concealed carry framework was the subject of a landmark Supreme Court case—New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen—which the majority disemboweled. It wasn't just conservative gun rights advocates who wanted that ruling, although you'd be forgiven for thinking so based on how polarized this debate tends to be. That Supreme Court decision also attracted support from progressive public defenders with The Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, The Bronx Defenders, and Brooklyn Defender Services. As I wrote in June about the amicus brief they submitted to the Court:
[The public defenders] offered several case studies centered around people whose lives were similarly upended. Among them were Benjamin Prosser and Sam Little, who had both been victims of violent crimes and who are now considered "violent felons" in the eyes of the state simply for carrying a firearm without the mandated government approval. Little, a single father who had previously been slashed in the face, was separated from his family while he served his sentence at the Vernon C. Bain Center, a notorious jail that floats on the East River. The conviction destroyed his nascent career, with the Department of Education rescinding its offer of employment.
In many jurisdictions, including New York, it can be expensive and time-consuming to get the required license, which in turn makes the Second Amendment available only to people of a certain class.
So where do we go from here? Those skeptical of rolling back concealed carry restrictions may take comfort in the fact that this doesn't have to be black and white. Governments, for example, can "give eligible persons a 30-day grace period to seek and obtain a permit after being charged, then automatically drop charges and expunge record once obtained," offers Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, or "remove the criminal penalty entirely" and perhaps "make it a fineable infraction," like driving without a license.
Whatever the case, it should be—it is—possible to balance public safety with the right to bear arms, and, as an extension, the right to self-defense. To argue otherwise is to embolden a legal system that incentivizes elderly men like Yakaitis to sit down and take it when someone threatens their life.
Category: Next Week on Xbox Next Week on Xbox: New Games for April 22 to 26
Mike Nelson, Xbox Wire Editor
Published
April 19, 2024
Welcome to Next Week on Xbox! This weekly feature highlights all the games arriving soon on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows, and Game Pass. Discover more about these forthcoming titles below and explore their profiles for additional information (
Welcome to Next Week on Xbox! This weekly feature highlights all the games arriving soon on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows, and Game Pass. Discover more about these forthcoming titles below and explore their profiles for additional information (note that release dates are subject to change). Let’s dive in!
Available on day one with Game Pass! Gather your allies for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, the grand JRPG adventure. Assemble your 6-party team from a cast of over a hundred heroes and shape your destiny in this lush, hand-crafted 2.5D world brimming with war, intrigue, and magic. Manage your town of vibrant characters, play delightful mini-games, and prepare for an unforgettable narrative of boundless charm.
Gather your heroes and journey beyond the dungeons of Castle Hammerwatch to explore a pixelated world like never before. Adventure alone or gather your party to aid King Roland’s resistance, all while helping villagers along the way. Battle beasts, finish off hordes of the undead, and face the forces of evil in this epic ode to classic ARPGs.
As a newly appointed captain of the Pegasus corporation, you must guide a roster of colorful pilots, eclectic advisors, and state-of-the-art landers through a taxing series of missions. Deliver cargo, retrieve resources, and rescue stranded pilots as you navigate a mysterious universe of moons and planets.
Adventure into the beautiful and treacherous lands of Kenzera as Zau, a young shaman who bargains with the God of death to bring his Baba back from darkness. With your cosmic powers and untried courage, advance into unknown mythological lands in this metroidvania title. Will you embrace the dance of the shaman?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants
Re-experience the 2017 arcade classic with three additional stages and six additional boss battles! Take control of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, or Raphael in this classic beat ‘em up inspired by the cult favorite Turtles in Time. Play with your friends through local co-op and dominate the Foot Clan to foil the Shredder’s maniacal plan.
Play a little bird on its journey to find a home after losing its dear friend. You will discover unknown, giant, and beautiful environments and you will be able to enjoy the feeling of flying while exploring a whole world filled with beauty and little secrets.
Expand your farm business, produce cheap and sell your products at high prices. Control the land cultivation process, select the best employees, buy the most appropriate farm equipment, raise livestock, and process the harvested crops. Manage your own farm in the game Farm Tycoon!
Come and visit the famous Big Apple for a brand new cat-spotting adventure! Relax and look around the city, and with enough patience, find over 700 feline friends! The city only gets more vibrant the more cats you find!
An adventure roguelike with permadeath where you must overcome huge mountains. Thanks to the procedurally created environment, no two climbs are the same. Keep your climber alive by always making sure that your vital values don’t get into the critical range. This is made more difficult by a dynamic weather system, day/night changes, and a multitude of randomly generated events.
A distinctive game that recreates Moscow Metro and authentic train controls. 24 stations, various tunnels, and items within them. The game uses modern technologies to show the full experience of Russian capital’s subway — stations on this line will reflect the changes of their era.
Take the role of a nimble rodent separated from his family and lost in a frightening forest filled with fearsome foes! Ratyrinth is a side-scrolling precision platformer with brainteasing level design and retro presentation. Run, jump, cling to walls, swim and climb through mazelike stages presented in minimalistic 2-tone style with fluid pixel art animation.
Available on day one with Game Pass! A soulslike adventure set in a crumbling underwater world. As Kril the hermit crab, you’ll need to wear the trash around you as shells to withstand attacks from enemies many times your size. Embark on an epic treasure hunt to buy back your repossessed shell and discover the dark secrets behind the polluted ocean.
Developed by Masaya in 1997, this robot action game gained popularity at the time thanks to its customizable features, incredible robots, engaging storyline, and its position as the next installment in the Leynos series. The Saturn Tribute version includes new features like Rewind, Quick Save & Load, and Tips functions for smoother gameplay. You can also get power-ups with your Assault Suit.
Available on day one with Game Pass! Manor Lords is a medieval strategy game featuring in-depth city building, large-scale tactical battles and complex economic and social simulations. Rule your lands as a medieval lord — the seasons pass, the weather changes and cities rise and fall.
In this action RPG, players will find a nostalgic and heartwarming world created by Akira Toriyama where you’ll meet the Fiend Prince Beelzebub, his chaperone Thief, and the fearless Sheriff Rao, and follow the team on an extraordinary adventure in search of the Legendary Spring hidden in the desert. The end is only the beginning, as beyond this arid ground lies a new realm to explore.
Travel the world as an up-and-coming pro, go toe-to-toe with the biggest names in tennis, and take Centre Court at Wimbledon, Roland-Garros, the US Open, and the Australian Open as you strive to become a Grand Slam Champion in the MyCareer mode. Or choose from over 24 playable pros and unleash their explosive power and clever finesse against other players locally or online.
Aliens have attacked the planet, and they’re turning innocent people into mindless zombies. It won’t be long before the invaders have destroyed the planet unless somebody with guns stands in their way. That’s where you come in! Lead a cadre of soldiers who are ready to take down every last enemy in their path.
Donald Trump had a rough night, pity-posting about how life hasn't been fair for the corrupt billionaire.
"Four years ago I was a very successful and popular President of the United States," cried the one-term, four-times indicted former president, whose presidency saw 400,000 Americans die from Covid and who lost both the electoral and popular vote to President Joe Biden. — Read the rest
The post Tired Donald Trump posts instead of sleeps, then rages right before trial — about a different tri
Donald Trump had a rough night, pity-posting about how life hasn't been fair for the corrupt billionaire.
"Four years ago I was a very successful and popular President of the United States," cried the one-term, four-times indicted former president, whose presidency saw 400,000 Americans die from Covid and who lost both the electoral and popular vote to President Joe Biden. — Read the rest
Amazon’s new Fallout series is a smash hit and also, pretty dang good, too! And while the series is based on Bethesda’s popular post-apocalyptic RPG franchise of the same name, there are plenty of other games you can play after watching the show if you want more Fallout vibes. Read more...
Amazon’s new Fallout series is a smash hit and also, pretty dang good, too! And while the series is based on Bethesda’s popular post-apocalyptic RPG franchise of the same name, there are plenty of other games you can play after watching the show if you want more Fallout vibes.
A year after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced 34 felony charges against Donald Trump, the former president's trial is about to begin. Yet people are still arguing about how to describe the case. This debate is not merely rhetorical. It reflects the disconnect between the counts that Trump faces, all of which allege falsification of business records, and the essence of his crime as Bragg sees it, which is hiding negative informati
A year after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced 34 felony charges against Donald Trump, the former president's trial is about to begin. Yet people are still arguing about how to describe the case. This debate is not merely rhetorical. It reflects the disconnect between the counts that Trump faces, all of which allege falsification of business records, and the essence of his crime as Bragg sees it, which is hiding negative information from voters.
"Although it has long been referred to as the 'hush money' case," says CNN legal analyst Norman Eisen, "that is wrong. We should call it an 'election interference' trial going forward."
The reason people call it a "hush money case," of course, is that it would not exist but for the $130,000 that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen paid porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election to keep her from talking about her alleged affair with Trump. But Eisen, who served as co-counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump's first impeachment, joins Bragg in arguing that the significance of the case transcends those tawdry details.
"We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate," Bragg said in a January interview with NY1. "It's an election interference case." That sounds important, and it calls to mind the federal charges based on Trump's audacious attempts to remain in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election. But this characterization, which Bragg started emphasizing after Special Counsel Jack Smith unveiled the federal indictment last August, is hard to take seriously.
"As this office has done time and time again, we today uphold our solemn responsibility to ensure that everyone stands equal before the law," Bragg said when he announced the New York indictment in April 2023. "No amount of money and no amount of power changes that enduring principle." Underlining that point, Bragg added: "These are felony crimes in New York. No matter who you are. We cannot normalize serious criminal conduct."
Bragg was on firm ground in arguing that felonies are felonies. But why was this "serious criminal conduct"? Bragg's explanation was underwhelming: "True and accurate business records are important everywhere, to be sure. They are all the more important in Manhattan, the financial center of the world."
In addition to that eye-glazing gloss, Bragg presented the seed of his "election interference" argument. "We allege Donald Trump and his associates repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters," he said.
Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center, echoes that take in a recent New York Times discussion of the case. "The falsification of business records seems rock-solid based on the documentary evidence," she says. "The question for the jurors will be Trump's knowledge and intent." McCord thinks "it's a very winnable case for the D.A." because prosecutors "will give the jurors plenty of evidence" that Trump's motive in falsifying business records was "to prevent information damaging to candidate Trump from becoming public just weeks before the 2016 election."
If you read the indictment and the accompanying statement of facts, you will notice a glaring chronological problem with that account: The criminal conduct that Bragg alleges all happened after the 2016 election. Since Trump was already president, ensuring that outcome could not have been his motive.
Beginning in February 2017, the indictment says, Trump reimbursed Cohen for the hush money with a series of checks, which he disguised as payment for legal services. The indictment counts each of those checks, along with each of the corresponding invoices and ledger entries, as a distinct violation of a state law that makes falsification of business records "with intent to defraud" a misdemeanor.
Since all of this happened after Trump was elected, it is clearly not true that the allegedly phony records "conceal[ed] damaging information…from American voters" in 2016 or that the "falsification of business records" was aimed at "keeping information away from the electorate," thereby helping Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. Eisen concedes this temporal difficulty:
Election interference skeptics contend the charges here are for document falsification by the Trump organization in 2017, after the 2016 election concluded, to hide what happened the year before from being revealed. How can we call this an election interference trial, they ask, if the election was already over when the 34 alleged document falsification crimes occurred?
Those skeptics, Eisen says, overlook the fact that "the payment to Daniels was itself allegedly illegal under federal and state law" and "was plainly intended to influence the 2016 election." Although Cohen "was limited by law to $2,700 in contributions to the campaign," Eisen writes, "he transferred $130,000 to benefit the campaign, allegedly at Trump's direction. That is why Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance violations (in addition to other offenses), for which he was incarcerated. And no one can seriously dispute that the reason he and Trump allegedly hatched the scheme was to deprive voters of information that could have changed the outcome of an extremely close election."
Eisen glosses over the difficulty of distinguishing between personal and campaign expenditures in this context, which is crucial in proving a violation of federal campaign finance regulations. That difficulty helps explain why the Justice Department never prosecuted Trump for allegedly directing Cohen to make an excessive campaign contribution. Contrary to what Eisen says, there is a serious dispute about whether Trump "knowingly and willfully" violated federal election law.
In any case, it is too late to prosecute that alleged crime. And even if it weren't, Bragg would have no authority to enforce federal law.
Falsification of business records can be treated as a felony only if the defendant's "intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof." Bragg has mentioned a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act as one possible candidate for "another crime." But it is plausible that Trump did not think paying off Daniels was illegal. If so, it is hard to see how his falsification of business records could have been aimed at concealing "another crime," even assuming that phrase includes violations of federal law, which also is not clear.
The legality of the hush payment is uncertain because it turns on whether Trump was trying to promote his election or trying to avoid personal embarrassment and spare his wife's feelings. The same ambiguity poses a challenge for Bragg in trying to convict Trump of felonies rather than misdemeanors: Did he falsify business records to cover up another crime or simply to keep his wife in the dark?
As Bragg sees it, Trump "corrupt[ed] a presidential election" by hiding information that voters might have deemed relevant in choosing between him and Clinton. But there is nothing inherently illegal about that: If Trump had persuaded Daniels to keep her mouth shut simply by asking nicely, the result would have been the same. Bragg's "election interference" narrative, insofar as it makes legal sense at all, requires showing that Trump not only tried to prevent a scandal but committed one or more crimes toward that end.
"People want the hush money case to be the big case that can take down Trump because it may be the onlyone that goes to trial before the election," UCLA election law expert Richard Hasen, one of the "skeptics" to whom Eisen alludes, writes in the Los Angeles Times. But "the charges are so minor I don't expect they will shake up the presidential race."
Hasen rejects Bragg's "election interference" framing. "Failing to report a campaign payment is a small potatoes campaign-finance crime," he says. "Willfully not reporting expenses to cover up an affair isn't 'interfering' with an election along the lines of trying to get a secretary of state to falsify vote totals, or trying to get a state legislature to falsely declare there was fraud in the state and submit alternative slates of electors. We can draw a fairly bright line between attempting to change vote totals to flip a presidential election and failing to disclose embarrassing information on a government form."
Although "I certainly understand the impulse of Trump opponents to label this case as one of election interference," Hasen adds, "any voters who look beneath the surface are sure to be underwhelmed. Calling it election interference actually cheapens the term and undermines the deadly serious charges in the real election interference cases."
As much as it amazes me that a found-liable rapist, defamer and fraud is still in business, Donald Trump is at least on the hook for the tab: a New York Judge denied him relief from the $83.3m verdict against him for raping and defaming E. — Read the rest
The post Trump was denied relief from his $450m fraud judgment. Now he's been denied relief from his $83m rape and defamation judgment appeared first on Boing Boing.
Welcome to the police state: Yesterday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that 750 National Guardsmen and 250 state police officers will be deployed to patrol the New York City subway system, Hochul's attempt at combating recent high-profile crimes, like the incident in which an A train conductor's neck was slashed last week. Law enforcement will also start doing bag checks for straphangers, and will bar people who have been convicted of viole
Welcome to the police state: Yesterday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that 750 National Guardsmen and 250 state police officers will be deployed to patrol the New York City subway system, Hochul's attempt at combating recent high-profile crimes, like the incident in which an A train conductor's neck was slashed last week.
Law enforcement will also start doing bag checks for straphangers, and will bar people who have been convicted of violent crimes against subway passengers from using public transit for three years. It's clear how the bag checks will be enforced (in a way that costs the city money and commuters time) but it's not clear how the ban on past offenders will be enforced.
This all comes in addition to the roughly 1,000 New York City Police Department officers who were deployed throughout the subway system last month, and the cameras that have been installed in roughly one-sixth of the subway cars. That was in response to a January spike in major crime—driven mostly by grand larcenies, which are thefts without force—compared with January 2023. But crime stats are notoriously hard to untangle, and just because police are deployed doesn't mean they're effective: Subway crime, which is tracked as its own category, was up 30 percent year over year in 2022 when compared with 2021, despite Adams choosing to deploy police patrols throughout the system.
Hochul's new initiative appears to have already started; when I was going through the Broadway Junction stop last night, which connects the A train to the L, I counted a greater density of law enforcement than I'd seen before.
Bag checks are already happening at Grand Central:
If you're going to introduce a bunch of new police officers and National Guard soldiers into the subway system, what is the point of having them all stand in the same place instead of riding trains and walking laps of stations? pic.twitter.com/dhpdgB3b2X
But political stunts are different than good policing, and this looks more like the first.
Patrol politics: Interpreted as part of the power struggle between Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, this looks like an attempt by the governor's office to either undermine Adams or set the stage to be able to take credit for a decline in crime—if that is in fact what results, which is a big if.
Interpreted as a tactic by major Democrats in major cities to be responsive to people's crime fears, it looks a lot like pandering. Neither Adams nor Hochul is up for reelection this year, but the political tides feel like they're turning in a direction of even soft-on-crime liberals being dissatisfied with the status quo.
There is a vast middle ground between the two loudest types of New Yorkers: the "I ride the subway all the time and it's totally safe, what are you talking about?" and the "this city is a hellscape, I fear for my life every time I leave my house." The truth is somewhere in between: It is common to get on a subway car and have a crazy person yelling. Sometimes they're threatening, but infrequently. I see smoking inside the subway car or urinating inside the station every month or so. I've seen bum fights. I've noticed people passed out in front of the turnstile, blocking access, a few times before; it's hard to know if the person is dead or passed out, and what to do. (Nor is it lost on me that the above sentence is a crazy thing to have to write.)
These situations force hard questions: What do we owe to our fellow New Yorkers, especially those in severe need, who sometimes refuse to help themselves? Should we expect public spaces to be free of threat and despair and, if so, what policing or surveillance should be used to get there? Are these tradeoffs worth it?
But Hochul's plan probably doesn't address the actual issue, which has less to do with a criminal free-for-all and more to do with erratic mentally ill people who essentially use the subway system as free shelter, and sometimes act out with violence. "The [subway disorder] problem got worse in 2017, when Transit Police stopped enforcing loitering and related subway rules to keep homeless and mentally ill people and drug addicts from living and sleeping in the subway system. This was a simply a political choice," wrote Peter Moskos on X. "Before then, people using the system for shelter and not transit would be told to leave. Not arrested. But you can't stay here. After, they were told of shelter options. If they chose not to [accept], they were left alone. 95% chose to remain."
"The right to prohibit behavior on the subway that is permitted on the street (EG begging) was affirmed by Young v. New York City Transit Authority (1990). This was a hard fought battle by the MTA back in the days. It made a huge difference in crime & riders' Quality of Life," added Moskos (in a useful thread), who argued that "turning the subway into a defacto shelter isn't good for homeless people. Nor is it not fair to the rest of us who need to ride the subway."
Exiling mentally ill people from select public spaces doesn't sound like a solution that solves underlying needs. But it is a solution that possibly returns subways to the people who pay for them, and to their original use. Perhaps New Yorkers would instead prefer to have cops going through their handbags during rush hour so they can feel like the city has finally started to do something. The problem is that the something actually matters, and that random searches, which violate people's privacy, should not be taken lightly or instituted for political gain.
Scenes from New York: That's enough New York up above, I think. But here's a subway ad I saw yesterday. End microaggression discourse and return to real issues!
(Liz Wolfe)
QUICK HITS
"Corporations will have to share key details about their role in driving climate change and the threat that warming poses to their operations under a contentious proposal the Securities and Exchange Commission approved 3-2 on Wednesday over intense business opposition," reportedThe Washington Post.
The U.S. is negotiating a six-week ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that Hamas is allegedly refusing to sign onto. Both Qatar and Egypt are also helping to broker it, and all parties view the holy month, Ramadan, as an urgent and looming deadline.
Armed gangs in Haiti are putting pressure on the country's prime minister, Ariel Henry, to resign, and it looks like the country may be heading toward a civil war. So far, gangs have set a bunch of prisoners free, seized the airport, and attacked a police academy.
"Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey swiftly signed legislation on Wednesday passed by the state's GOP-controlled legislature giving physicians who provide in vitro fertilization civil and criminal immunity for any death or damage to embryos," reportedPolitico.
Inside the Satoshi Nakamoto trial in the U.K., which aims to figure out who actually created bitcoin.
Linwei Ding, a Google employee in the U.S. who is originally from China, was just charged with stealing AI trade secrets that he was allegedly feeding to two Chinese companies.
In the Elizabeth Warren formulation of the world, high prices are attributable to greed. So maybe landlords actually just magically became less greedy?
Austin built a shit ton of new housing and now rent is falling 7% year-over-year pic.twitter.com/BI0tWoSkU8
[Gruesome story alert! Skip this post if you're squeamish.]
A walk to school turned ghastly yesterday when a teenage girl spotted a severed body part in a Long Island park.
The student was walking with her friends when she discovered a man's left arm. — Read the rest
The post Gruesome: Teen girl spots severed arm on walk to school in NY — leading police to severed head appeared first on Boing Boing.
Kevin Monahan, 66, shot Kaylin Gillis dead after the car she was in took a wrong turn into his rural New York driveway. He will be in prison until he is at least 91 years old: "I think it's important that people know that it is not OK to shoot people and kill them who drive down your driveway," Judge Adam Michelin said, sentencing him to 25 years to life. — Read the rest
The post The man who killed a woman after a wrong turn into his driveway gets 25 years to life appeared first on Boing Boing.
Kevin Monahan, 66, shot Kaylin Gillis dead after the car she was in took a wrong turn into his rural New York driveway. He will be in prison until he is at least 91 years old: "I think it's important that people know that it is not OK to shoot people and kill them who drive down your driveway," Judge Adam Michelin said, sentencing him to 25 years to life. — Read the rest
Taking crazy pills: Former President Donald Trump said last evening that the civil fraud verdict that will force him to pony up $355 million for inflating his net worth to banks is actually "a form of Navalny" and "a form of communism or fascism." When asked about the Russian state's imprisonment and killing of dissident Alexei Navalny, Trump responded: "It's happening here." The indictments are "all because of the fact that I'm in politics," in
Taking crazy pills: Former President Donald Trump said last evening that the civil fraud verdict that will force him to pony up $355 million for inflating his net worth to banks is actually "a form of Navalny" and "a form of communism or fascism."
When asked about the Russian state's imprisonment and killing of dissident Alexei Navalny, Trump responded: "It's happening here." The indictments are "all because of the fact that I'm in politics," in his telling.
He made these comments last night during a Fox News town hall. On Truth Social, his own alternative social media platform, Trump said, "the sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country."
Alexei Navalny, who was reported dead on Friday, served as an opposition leader in a state that disallows opposition and legitimate voting. Navalny garnered a massive following—more than 6 million YouTube followers, for starters, with at least one video viewed 130 million times—by doing legitimately good journalism digging into the kleptocratic, repressive Putin regime. Navalny offered normal Russians legitimate, well-sourced explanations for why they are so poor: their leaders consistently abdicate responsibility, choosing to enrich themselves. Their leaders are content with everyday people living in squalor and dysfunction, as long as they stay comfortable.
Running for office, and cutting through the state's propaganda, made him so disfavored by the regime that he went into exile. Navalny returned to Russia in 2021 with full awareness that he would be locked up but a devout belief that he ought to continue his work domestically, displaying courage in the face of certain persecution. And sure enough, he was locked up, then sent to an even more remote prison camp called IK-3, in Kharp, which is in the Arctic Circle. His death there was reported last week, but the opposition movement will not die with him. "In killing Aleksei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul," said his widow, Yulia, "but I have another half left—and it is telling me I have no right to give up."
Trump, on the other hand, misrepresented his net worth to banks, defrauding lenders (who…still had a responsibility to do due diligence, a fact ignored in much mainstream media reporting of the case). "Trump claimed his apartment in Manhattan's Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet, nearly three times its actual size," writesReason's Jacob Sullum. "He valued Mar-a-Lago, his golf resort in Palm Beach, based on the assumption that it could be sold for residential purposes, which the deed precluded." But "[New York Attorney General Letitia] James was not able to identify any damages to lenders or insurers," writes Sullum, and "the striking absence of any injury commensurate with the punishment lends credibility to Trump's reflexive complaint that he is the victim of a partisan vendetta."
Both things can be true, that Trump attracts politically motivated ire—which attorneys general and judges are wrong to indulge—and that he also did something wrong by inflating his net worth. But he's a far cry from Navalny—Trump enjoys self-dealing more than fact-finding and truth-telling—and the way this went down, via the court system, where Trump had the right to defend himself, is a far cry from how "justice" gets dispensed in Russia—by Putin, in penal colonies, via murders of anyone whose beliefs threaten the man in charge.
"Clinical psychologists with the Department of Veterans Affairs faced retaliation and ostracization at work after they publicly opposed a gender-inclusion policy that allows men to access women's medical spaces within the VA," reportsNational Review.
RFK Jr.'s "origin story makes this like Odysseus returning to the manor, stringing the bow, this is that iconic moment," said Bret Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast. If you say so, Bret.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just announced a lawsuit against El Paso's Annunciation House, an NGO in charge of a shelter network for migrants, for "facilitating illegal entry to the United States, alien harboring, human smuggling, and operating a stash house." But going after charities that help migrants—whatever you think of the behavior they engaged in to get here—seems like a wrongheaded stunt.
I do not think this is true or that there's much evidence for it:
do you want a black pill?
like… a really really black pill?
George Carlin would be pro-censorship if he were alive today b/c he didn't actually love free speech, he just fucking hated Christians
"The enormous contrast between [Alexei] Navalny's civic courage and the corruption of [Vladimir] Putin's regime will remain," writesThe Atlantic's Anne Applebaum. "Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history."
Related: People were arrested for laying flowers in memory of Navalny.
As Donald Trump tells it, all of the civil and criminal cases against him are part of a Democratic conspiracy to keep him from returning to the White House. Although some of the many charges against him involve credible allegations of serious crimes, they have been overshadowed recently by two New York cases that are much weaker. In 2016, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says, Trump "corrupt[ed] a presidential election" by concealing embar
As Donald Trump tells it, all of the civil and criminal cases against him are part of a Democratic conspiracy to keep him from returning to the White House. Although some of the many charges against him involve credible allegations of serious crimes, they have been overshadowed recently by two New York cases that are much weaker.
In 2016, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says, Trump "corrupt[ed] a presidential election" by concealing embarrassing information from voters. And according to New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose lawsuit resulted in a staggering "disgorgement" order against Trump last week, he defrauded lenders and insurers by habitually inflating the value of his assets.
Bragg and James, both Democrats, argue that Trump was dishonest, which will not come as news to anyone who has been paying attention to the persistent gap between reality and his public statements on matters large and small. But neither Bragg nor James has been able to explain exactly who was victimized by the misrepresentations they cite.
Bragg's criminal case, which is now scheduled for trial on March 25, charges Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records. Each of those is based on an invoice, check, or ledger entry that allegedly was designed to disguise Trump's reimbursement of a $130,000 payment that Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, gave porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election to keep her from talking about her alleged affair with Trump.
Falsifying business records—in this case, mischaracterizing the payments to Cohen as compensation for legal services—is ordinarily a misdemeanor. But Bragg is charging Trump with 34 felonies, each punishable by up to four years in prison, because he allegedly was trying to cover up "another crime."
Bragg says the "criminal activity" that Trump sought to "conceal" included "attempts to violate state and federal election laws." That claim is based on legal interpretations so iffy that Bragg's predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., rejected them after lengthy consideration.
Explaining why he nevertheless is trying to convert one hush payment into 34 felonies, Bragg complains that Trump "hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election." Although Bragg says that offense is "the heart of the case," it is not a crime: If Daniels had simply agreed not to talk about the alleged affair after Trump asked her nicely, the result would have been the same.
James' case likewise lacks any measurable injury to a specific victim, which is not required by the New York law she used to sue Trump. Although she presented plenty of evidence that Trump overvalued his properties and exaggerated his wealth, she did not show that lenders or insurers suffered any losses as a result.
Most notoriously, Trump claimed his apartment in Manhattan's Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet, nearly three times its actual size. He valued Mar-a-Lago, his golf resort in Palm Beach, based on the assumption that it could be sold for residential purposes, which the deed precluded.
New York County Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron also found that the Trump Organization had treated rent-stabilized apartments as if they were not subject to that restriction, assumed regulatory permission for construction that had not in fact been approved, failed to discount expected streams of revenue, dramatically departed from estimates by professional appraisers, and counted Trump's limited partnership interest in a real estate company as cash even though he could not access the money without the company's consent. But the sum that Engoron ordered Trump to pay, which totals nearly half a billion dollars with interest, was styled as "disgorgement" of "ill-gotten gains," not as compensation for damages.
That's because James was not able to identify any damages to lenders or insurers, which she was not legally obliged to do. As in Bragg's case, the striking absence of any injury commensurate with the punishment lends credibility to Trump's reflexive complaint that he is the victim of a partisan vendetta.
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward is in the driver's seat, alongside Nick Gillespie and special guests Zach Weissmueller and Eric Boehm. The editors react to the latest plot twists in Donald Trump's various legal proceedings and the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. 00:41—The trials of Donald Trump in Georgia and New York 25:04—Weekly Listener Question 33:23—Sora, a new AI video tool 43:55—The death of Al
In this week's TheReason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward is in the driver's seat, alongside Nick Gillespie and special guests Zach Weissmueller and Eric Boehm. The editors react to the latest plot twists in Donald Trump's various legal proceedings and the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
00:41—The trials of Donald Trump in Georgia and New York
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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Hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court might strike down rent control this term were dashed today when the Court declined to take up the two remaining rent control cases on its docket. But a short statement from Justice Clarence Thomas otherwise agreeing not to take up the cases does provide rent control critics some optimism that the Court might reconsider the issue at a future date. The cases, 74 Pinehurst LLC v. New York and 335-7 LLC v. City of Ne
Hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court might strike down rent control this term were dashed today when the Court declined to take up the two remaining rent control cases on its docket. But a short statement from Justice Clarence Thomas otherwise agreeing not to take up the cases does provide rent control critics some optimism that the Court might reconsider the issue at a future date.
The cases, 74 Pinehurst LLC v. New Yorkand 335-7 LLC v. City of New York, both involved New York City rental property owners' challenges to their state's stabilization regime and related New York City regulations implementing that regime.
The petitioners argued that the 2019 amendments to New York's rent stabilization law amounted to a physical taking because they prevented property owners from choosing their tenants or withdrawing their property from the rental market. They also argued that New York's post-2019 rent stabilization law amounted to a regulatory taking by tanking the value of their properties and removing avenues to "deregulate" (charge market rents on) their units.
Lower courts rejected these arguments. So, last spring, the landlord plaintiffs in both cases petitioned the Supreme Court to take up their case.
The fact that the two cases stayed on the Supreme Court's docket even after it had declined to take up another, higher profile, and more sweeping challenge to New York's rent stabilization law in October raised hopes that the justices might still take up these cases.
At a minimum, rent control critics offered some hopeful speculation that one or more of the justices might write a lengthy dissent to any court decision to not take up the cases that would outline how another rent control challenge could make its way back to the Supreme Court.
Neither of those things happened today. But today's order wasn't a total loss for rent control opponents.
Justice Clarence Thomas did issue a short statement saying that the "constitutionality of regimes like New York City's is an important and pressing question."
Ultimately, Thomas agreed with the Court's denial of cert, saying that petitioners' claims in their lawsuits "primarily contained generalized allegation." In order to evaluate their "as-applied" challenges, the Court would need to see more specific arguments about the circumstances of individual landlords.
For that reason, Thomas wrote, the 74 Pinehurst and 335-7 pleadings would "complicate" the Court's review.
"Any time you get something more than just a denial, I would say that gives you reason for optimism," says Mark Miller, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which has supported constitutional challenges to rent control. "Oftentimes justices give statements like this to give you a roadmap for how to better tee up the issue."
In the meantime, however, New York City property owners are offered no relief from the state's rent stabilization regime.
Rent-stabilized owners argue the state's limits on rent increases are so punishingly strict that they can't finance basic repairs or turn over vacant units. The ongoing struggles of New York Community Bancorp, which lent heavily to rent-stabilized buildings, are only compounding this problem.
Without greater flexibility to raise rents or obtain private capital, "the future of rent-stabilized buildings is in the hands of the state government," said the Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP) and the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) in an emailed statement reacting to the Supreme Court's decision today. "Thousands of buildings housing hundreds of thousands of tenants are in financial distress. Without action, the homes of many hard-working New Yorkers will deteriorate.
CHIP and RSA had been plaintiffs in another challenge to New York's rent stabilization regime that the Supreme Court also declined to take up last year. Thomas' statement seems to have done little to raise their optimism about future rent control cases.
"We do expect there will be many more challenges to this law, which remains irrationally punitive," they said.
On Friday, New York County Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordered Donald Trump to pay a staggering $355 million for repeatedly inflating asset values in statements of financial condition submitted to lenders and insurers. When the interest that Engoron also approved is considered, the total penalty rises to $450 million. All told, Trump and his co-defendants, including three of his children and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselber
On Friday, New York County Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordered Donald Trump to pay a staggering $355 million for repeatedly inflating asset values in statements of financial condition submitted to lenders and insurers. When the interest that Engoron also approved is considered, the total penalty rises to $450 million. All told, Trump and his co-defendants, including three of his children and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, are on the hook for $364 million, or about $464 million with interest.
On its face, a penalty of nearly half a billion dollars is hard to fathom given that no lender or insurer claimed it suffered a financial loss as a result of the transactions at the center of the case, which was brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. But the law under which James sued Trump and his co-defendants does not require any such loss. The money demanded by Engoron's 92-page decision, which goes to the state rather than individual claimants, is styled not as damages but as "disgorgement" of "ill-gotten gains." It is aimed not at compensating people who were allegedly harmed by Trump's misrepresentations but at deterring dishonesty that threatens "the financial marketplace."
Proving "common law fraud," Engoron notes, requires establishing that the defendant made a "material" statement he knew to be false, that the plaintiff justifiably relied on that statement, and that he suffered damages as a result. Section 63(12) of New York's Executive Law, by contrast, authorizes the attorney general to sue "any person" who "engage[s] in repeated fraudulent or illegal acts or otherwise demonstrate persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting or transaction of business." The attorney general can seek "an order enjoining the continuance of such business activity or of any fraudulent or illegal acts, directing restitution and damages and, in an appropriate case, cancelling" the defendant's business certificate.
"The statute casts a wide net," Engoron observes. It defines "fraud" to include "any device, scheme or artifice to defraud and any deception, misrepresentation, concealment, suppression, false pretense, false promise or unconscionable contractual provisions." Although Engoron found substantial evidence that lenders and insurers relied on the Trump Organization's misrepresentations, the state did not have to prove that they did or that they suffered damages as a result.
"Timely and total repayment of loans does not extinguish the harm that false statements inflict on the marketplace," Engoron writes. "Indeed, the common excuse that 'everybody does it' is all the more reason to strive for honesty and transparency and to be vigilant in enforcing the rules. Here, despite the false financial statements, it is undisputed that defendants have made all required payments on time; the next group of lenders to receive bogus statements might not be so lucky. New York means business in combating business fraud."
Engoron ruled that the appropriate standard of proof was a preponderance of the evidence, which typically applies in civil cases and requires showing that an allegation is more likely than not to be true. "Defendants have provided no legal authority for their contention that the higher 'clear and convincing' standard does, or should, apply," he writes. "A clear and convincing standard applies only when a case involves the denial of, addresses, or adjudicates fundamental 'personal or liberty rights' not at issue in this action."
Engoron had previously ruled that disgorgement of profits is one of the remedies allowed by Section 63(12) in this case. "In flagrant disregard of prior orders of this Court and the First Department [court of appeals], defendants repeat the untenable notion that 'disgorgement is unavailable as a matter of law' in Executive Law §63(12) actions," he wrote in that September 2023 decision, which held that Trump had committed fraud within the meaning of the statute. "This is patently false, as defendants are, or certainly should be, aware that the Appellate Division, First Department made it clear in this very case that '[w]e have already held that the failure to allege losses does not require dismissal of a claim for disgorgement under Executive Law § 63(12).'"
In Friday's decision, Engoron reviews the examples of fraud that he described in the earlier ruling. Most notoriously, they include the claim that Trump's triplex apartment in Manhattan's Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet, nearly three times its actual size. That misrepresentation was included in Trump's statements of financial condition (SFCs) from 2012 through 2016 and was not corrected until after Forbes made the glaring discrepancy public in 2017.
In 2012, former Trump International Realty employee Kevin Sneddon testified, Weisselberg asked him to assess the apartment's value. "In response to the request," Engoron writes, "Sneddon asked Weisselberg if he could see the Triplex, to which Weisselberg responded that that was 'not possible.' Sneddon then asked if Weisselberg could send him a floorplan or specs of the Triplex to evaluate, to which Weisselberg also said 'no.' Sneddon then asked Weisselberg what size the Triplex was, to which Weisselberg responded 'around 30,000 square feet.' Sneddon then used the 30,000 square foot number in ascertaining a value for the Triplex."
The value of Mar-a-Lago, Trump's golf resort in Palm Beach, also figured prominently in the case. The deed to Mar-a-Lago precluded it from ever being used as private residential property, a clause that made it eligible for a lower tax rate. Yet SFCs repeatedly valued Mar-a-Lago as if it could be sold for residential purposes. Engoron notes that Trump "insisted that he believed Mar-a-Lago is worth 'between a billion and a billion five' today, which would require not only valuing it as a private residence, which the deed prohibits, but as more than the most expensive private residence listed in the country by approximately 400%"
Other examples of misrepresentations included treating rent-stabilized apartments as if they were not subject to that restriction, assuming regulatory permission for construction that had not in fact been approved, failing to discount expected streams of revenue, dramatically departing from estimates by professional appraisers, and counting Trump's limited partnership interest in a real estate company as cash even though he could not access the money without the company's consent. More generally, expert testimony indicated, Trump tended to value properties based on rosy "as if" assumptions rather than the "as is" valuations preferred by lenders.
The defendants argued that the accountants charged with compiling the SFCs were responsibile for verifying their accuracy. But as Engoron notes, the accounting firms' role was limited to assembling information provided by the Trump Organization, which they assumed to be accurate. "There is overwhelming evidence from both interested and non-interested witnesses, corroborated by documentary evidence, that the buck for being truthful in the supporting data valuations stopped with the Trump Organization, not the accountants," he says. "Moreover, the Trump Organization intentionally engaged their accountants to perform compilations, as opposed to reviews or audits, which provided the lowest level of scrutiny and rely on the representations and information provided by the client; compilation engagements make clear that the accountants will not inquire, assess fraud risk, or test the accounting records."
Trump also argued that the SFCs were unimportant because lenders and insurers would perform their own due diligence. Engoron was unimpressed by that defense, especially with regard to the insurers. "Because the Trump Organization is a private company, not a publicly traded company," he says, "there is very little that underwriters can do to learn about the financial condition of the company other than to rely on the financial statements that the client provides to them."
Were the Trump Organizations overvaluations "material"? Engoron had already concluded that "the SFCs from 2014-2021 were false by material amounts as a matter of law." Under Section 63(12), he says, materiality "is judged not by reference to reliance by or materiality to a particular victim, but rather on whether the financial statement 'properly reflected the financial condition' of the person to which the statement pertains."
If fraud "is insignificant," Engorion concedes, "then, like most things in life, it just does not matter." But that "is not what we have here," he adds. "Whether viewed in relative (percentage) or absolute (numerical) terms, objectively (the governing standard) or subjectively (how the lenders viewed them), defendants' misstatements were material….The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience."
While there is no precise numerical standard for materiality, Engoron says, "this Court confidently declares that any number that is at least 10% off could be deemed material, and any number that is at least 50% off would likely be deemed material. These numbers are probably conservative given that here, such deviations from truth represent hundreds of millions of dollars, and in the case of Mar-a-Lago, possibly a billion dollars or more."
Did those deviations ultimately matter in the decisions that lenders and insurers made? Engoron's summary provides reason to doubt that they did. Deutsche Bank, he notes, routinely "applied a 50% 'haircut' to the valuations presented by" clients, which a witness "affirmed was the standardized number for commercial real assets." A defense witness opined that lenders generally just want to see "the engagement of a warm body of a billionaire to stand behind the loan in his equity infusion and capital."
James nevertheless argued that Trump, by systematically exaggerating his wealth and the amount of cash he could access, misled lenders about what would happen in the event that the Trump Organization could not meet its obligations. And those misrepresentations, she said, allowed the business to borrow more money on terms more favorable than it otherwise could have obtained.
The difference between the interest rates that lenders charged based on Trump's personal financial guarantee and the rates they would have charged without it was crucial to Engoron's calculation of how much the defendants should disgorge. Over their vigorous objections, he accepted the numbers offered by a state witness, investment bank CEO Michiel McCarty, who compared the rate that Deutsche Bank charged the Trump Organization based on Trump's personal guarantee with the rate it proposed for a loan without that guarantee. By McCarty's calculation, the Trump Organization saved a total of about $168 million in interest on loans for four projects.
By itself, that estimate accounts for nearly half of the disgorgement that Engoron ordered. He also included nearly $127 million in "net profits" from the 2022 sale of the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C., which Trump had converted into a hotel. That deal, James argued, was facilitated "through the use of false SFCs," without which it would not have happened. She also argued that "without the ill-gotten savings on interest rates, defendants would not even have been able to invest in the Old Post Office and/or other projects."
Taking into account the partnership interest "fraudulently labeled as cash," James said, "Trump would have been in a negative cash situation" by 2017 but for the $74 million or so "saved through reduced interest payments." She noted that "the Old Post office loan itself was a construction loan, and its proceeds were necessary to the construction and renovation of the hotel, which enabled the 2022 sale and resulting profits."
Engoron found these arguments, especially the first, persuasive. The profits from the sale of the Old Post Office, he concludes, "were ill gotten gains, subject to disgorgement, which is meant to deny defendants 'the ability to profit from ill-gotten gain.'"
Engoron also counted $60 million in profits from the 2023 sale of a license to operate a golf course at Ferry Point Park in the Bronx, which Trump had obtained from the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation in 2012. "By maintaining the license agreement for Ferry Point, based on fraudulent financials," Engoron says, "Donald Trump was able to secure a windfall profit by selling the license to Bally's Corporation."
Although reliance is not required to prove fraud under Section 63(12), it does implicitly figure in these disgorgement calculations. But for the "fraudulent financials," Engoron assumes, Trump would have had to pay higher interest rates on the four loans, and neither the Ferry Point deal nor the Old Post Office renovation and sale would have happened. The defendants, of course, dispute those counterfactuals.
Explaining the need for continued independent supervision of the Trump Organization, Engoron emphasizes Trump et al.'s "refusal to admit error." After "some four years of investigation and litigation," he says, "the only error (inadvertent, of course) that they acknowledge is the tripling of the size of the Trump Tower Penthouse, which cannot be gainsaid. Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Defendants did not commit murder or arson. They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead, they adopt a 'See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' posture that the evidence belies."
Engoron "intends to protect the integrity of the financial marketplace and, thus, the public as a whole," he writes. "Defendants' refusal to admit error—indeed, to continue it, according to the Independent Monitor—constrains this Court to conclude that they will engage in it going forward unless judicially restrained. Indeed, Donald Trump testified that, even today, he does not believe the Trump Organization needed to make any changes based on the facts that came out during this trial."
Although Engoron says his court "is not constituted to judge morality," his outrage at Trump's financial dishonesty is palpable. That dishonesty, which is consistent with the ego-boosting lies that Trump routinely tells about matters small (e.g., the size of the crowd at his inauguration) and large (e.g., a presidential election he still insists was "rigged" by systematic fraud), is indeed striking. In this case, however, it did not result in any injuries that Trump's lenders or insurers could identify. Under New York law, Engoron says, that does not matter. But maybe it should.
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