“For 11 days, Musk — the world’s richest man and a prominent backer of President-elect Donald Trump — allegedly failed to properly disclose that he had acquired a major stake in Twitter, the SEC said in a court filing in Washington. As a result, the agency said Musk benefited from “artificially low prices” as he snatched up shares in the company, which he eventually purchased for $44 billion and renamed X.
“In total, Musk underpaid Twitter investors by more than $150 million for his purchases of Twitter common stock during this period,” the SEC said in its complaint. “Investors who sold Twitter common stock during this period did so at artificially low prices and thus suffered substantial economic harm.””
“The sort of lawsuits Trump is filing against media companies are “the latest workaround that wealthy and powerful people who want to bully the press have found to attempt to circumvent the well-established safeguards for the press under the First Amendment against
“Whether you’re hot or cold on DOGE’s government-slashing potential, everyone agrees it needs data to survive. Record access lawsuits might starve it of them.”
“the lawsuit argues — in often dramatic terms — that the Appointments Clause of the Constitution calls for someone with such significant and “expansive authority” as Musk to be formally nominated by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
“There is no greater threat to democracy than the accumulation of state power in the hands of a single, unelected individual,” says the lawsuit, filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez and officials from Arizona, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, California, Nevada, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. “Although our constitutional system was designed to prevent the abuses of an 18th century monarch, the instruments of unchecked power are no less dangerous in the hands of a 21st century tech baron.” Two of the 14 states are led by Republican governors.”
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“The suit filed by the 14 states says the Constitution blocks the president from overriding “existing laws concerning the structure of the Executive Branch and federal spending.” As a result, the suit says, the commander-in-chief from is forbidden from creating — or even “extinguishing” — federal agencies, and from “slashing federal programs or offering lengthy severance packages as a means of radically winnowing the federal workforce,” in a nod to the Trump administration’s “deferred retirement” offer to government employees.”
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“”[T]he President does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally dismantle the government. Nor could he delegate such expansive authority to an unelected, unconfirmed individual,” Thursday’s lawsuit says.”
“In an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) on ABC’s This Week last March, host George Stephanopoulos repeatedly and inaccurately asserted that Donald Trump, now the president-elect, had been “found liable for rape.” A week later, Trump sued ABC and Stephanopoulos for defamation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, noting that a jury had deemed Trump civilly liable for “sexual abuse,” not “rape.” Over the weekend, ABC News announced that it had reached a $15 million settlement with Trump in the form of a contribution to Trump’s presidential library. ABC also agreed to cover $1 million in Trump’s legal expenses.
The settlement is highly unusual in the annals of Trump’s many lawsuits against news outlets, which typically feature claims with a much weaker legal and empirical basis. Some Trump critics explicitly or implicitly faulted ABC for folding, saying its decision is apt to have a chilling impact on journalism. But any such threat can be mitigated by applying normal standards of journalistic care—standards that Stephanopoulos conspicuously failed to uphold in this case.
In his interview with Mace, Stephanopoulos was talking about two cases involving the journalist E. Jean Carroll’s allegation that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. In one case, a New York jury last year concluded that Carroll had proven, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Trump had “sexually abused” her. The jurors also agreed that Trump had defamed Carroll by calling her a liar and awarded her $5 million in damages. But they expressly concluded that Carroll had failed to prove Trump had “raped” her.”
“The state eventually dropped the charges against Miller. His two years in jail, however, took a toll, according to his criminal defense attorney, who said Miller’s cancer was in remission but recurred after the state locked him up, as he could not access his medication.
Following his release, Miller sued Craycraft. The district court concluded Craycraft was entitled to absolute immunity. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit subsequently noted that Craycraft’s alleged chicanery was “difficult to justify and seemingly unbecoming of an official entrusted with enforcing the criminal law.” But that court went ahead and ratified the grant of absolute immunity anyway—a testament to the malfeasance the doctrine permits.
Core to the decision, and to similar rulings, is Imbler v. Pachtman (1976), the precedent in which the Supreme Court created the doctrine of absolute prosecutorial immunity. The Court ruled that a man who had spent years in prison for murder could not sue a prosecutor who allegedly withheld evidence that eventually exonerated him.
Plaintiffs’ only way around this doctrine is proving that a prosecutor committed misconduct outside the scope of his prosecutorial duties. It’s a difficult task. Louisiana woman Priscilla Lefebure sued local prosecutor Samuel C. D’Aquilla after he sabotaged her rape case against his colleague Barrett Boeker, then an assistant warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.”
“his victory virtually guarantees that he will never face serious legal accountability for an avalanche of alleged wrongdoing.”
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“Even the civil cases against him will now face new obstacles. Presidents can, in some circumstances, be subject to civil penalties from private lawsuits, but Trump will surely try to use the cloak of the presidency to avoid paying the hundreds of millions of dollars he owes in judgments for sexual abuse, defamation and corporate fraud.”
“On May 22, 2022, Michael Jennings, a pastor at a church in Childersburg, Alabama, was watering his out-of-town neighbor’s flowers when another neighbor called 911 to report a suspicious person. Two police officers, Christopher Smith and Justin Gable, soon arrived and began questioning Jennings.
Body camera footage of the incident shows that Jennings told the officers that his name was “Pastor Jennings” but refused to hand over his I.D. card, saying “I’m not gonna give you no I.D., I ain’t did nothing wrong….I used to be a police officer.”
“Come on man, don’t do this to me. There’s a suspicious person in the yard, and if you’re not gonna identify yourself—” said one of the officers, before Jennings interjected, “I don’t have to identify myself.”
The officers arrested Jennings, and he was booked at the Childersburg City Jail on obstruction of government operation charges. The charges were dropped just days later, and he then sued, claiming that the officers wrongfully arrested him and violated his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search or seizure.
Last December a judge dismissed the suit, ruling that the officers had qualified immunity, protecting them from civil liability. (Qualified immunity is the doctrine that shields officials from federal civil rights claims unless their alleged actions violated “clearly established” law, with “clearly established” defined extremely narrowly.) But Jennings appealed, and last Friday a three-judge panel for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision.”
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“Even if the officers had a right to demand Jennings identify himself, Jennings still complied with the state’s ID requirements. He told the officers who he was, that he lived across the street, and why he was in his neighbor’s yard.
“While it is always advisable to cooperate with law enforcement officers,” the opinion reads, “Jennings was under no legal obligation to provide his ID. Therefore, officers lacked probable cause for Jennings’ arrest for obstructing government operations because Jennings did not commit an independent unlawful act by refusing to give ID.”
With the court’s decision, Jennings can continue suing the officers who wrongfully arrested him. But it shouldn’t have taken this intervention for Jennings to be able to lodge his lawsuit in the first place. Stringent qualified immunity protections made police officers—and other government actors—virtually unaccountable for violating citizen’s rights. The fact that Jennings’ clear-cut case was dismissed in the first place reveals the deep flaws in that system.”
Trump played a key role in destroying the USFL in the 1980s?
“The NFL would later introduce extensive evidence designed to prove that the USFL followed Trump’s merger strategy, and that this strategy ultimately caused the USFL’s downfall. The merger strategy, the NFL argued, involved escalating financial competition for players as a means of putting pressure on NFL expenses, playing in the fall to impair NFL television revenues, shifting USFL franchises out of cities where NFL teams played into cities thought to be logical expansion (through merger) cities for the NFL, and, finally, bringing an upcoming antitrust litigation..”
“Over the past five years, Chicago taxpayers have forked over nearly $400 million to resolve lawsuits stemming from officer misconduct, according to a new analysis of city data. While around 1,300 police officers were named in the lawsuits, just 200 were responsible for more than 40 percent of the total cost.”