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      in Elections

      Newsmax agrees to pay $40m to settle defamation suit over false election claims

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      The conservative news outlet Newsmax agreed to pay the voting equipment company Smartmatic $40m last year as part of a settlement in a defamation suit over Newsmax’s decision to broadcast false claims about the 2020 election, a new filing revealed.The parties did not reveal details of the settlement when it was reached in September, but Newsmax disclosed the settlement amount in a public 7 March financial filing. The news outlet said it had also offered Smartmatic the option to buy stock in the company and that it had paid $20m of the settlement amount so far.A Newsmax spokesperson declined to comment beyond the statement the company issued after the settlement last year.Smartmatic voting equipment was only used in one jurisdiction in the United States during the 2020 election. Nonetheless, allies of Donald Trump and other conservative outlets repeated false claims that the company hacked votes and sent them overseas.Smartmatic sued Newsmax, the far-right network One America News and Fox for defamation, claiming they broadcast false claims about the company after the 2020 election. It previously settled with One America News and the case against Fox is ongoing. In January, A New York appellate judge said the company’s $2.7bn suit against Fox could proceed.Fox agreed to pay Dominion voting systems, another voting equipment company, $787.5m to settle a defamation suit over election claims in 2023.All of the cases are being closely watched by first amendment scholars as tests of whether libel law could be an effective tool for curbing misinformation. In the case between Dominion and Fox, for example, the legal process made public internal Fox messages showing prominent hosts and key personnel were aware the information about the company was false. More

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      in US Politics

      Judge orders Trump administration to reinstate most fired probationary staff

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      A federal judge in California granted a preliminary injunction to reinstate thousands of fired probationary workers at federal agencies as part of a lawsuit filed by the American Federation of Government Employees.The ruling by the judge William H Alsup in the US district court for the northern district of California applies to fired probationary employees at the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of the Interior and the Department of the Treasury.At least 30,000 probationary employees working for the federal government have been fired as part of the efforts of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” to slash the federal workforce and government expenditures.Many of the employees were fired with the cited reason being poor performance, though workers have disputed this based on positive performance evaluations.Alsup said it was a “lie” that the probationary workers who were fired had performance issues.“It is sad, a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said in court on Thursday.The judge also forbade the office of personnel management from providing any guidance to federal agencies on which employees should be terminated. Alsup authorized depositions and ordered further briefing on whether the administrative channel for fired workers to appeal their terminations is available or has been destroyed due to firings at the appeals board and office of special counsel personnel.“[The] AFGE is pleased with Judge Alsup’s order to immediately reinstate tens of thousands of probationary federal employees who were illegally fired from their jobs by an administration hellbent on crippling federal agencies and their work on behalf of the American public,” Everett Kelley, national president of the union said in a statement.“We are grateful for these employees and the critical work they do, and AFGE will keep fighting until all federal employees who were unjustly and illegally fired are given their jobs back.”The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday that the judge overstepped his bounds.“A single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the executive branch,” she said, adding: “The Trump administration will immediately fight back against this absurd and unconstitutional order.”Before the judge’s order, the US Department of Justice had declined to make the acting head of the office of personnel management, Charles Ezell, available to testify on the firings in court.In an earlier ruling, Alsup said on 27 February that the firing of probationary employees was illegal because the office of personnel management had no authority to order it.The OPM updated the 20 January memo on probationary employees, which the American Federation of Government Employees argued reveals an admission it unlawfully directed the firings.“OPM’s revision of its Jan 20 memo is a clear admission that it unlawfully directed federal agencies to carry out mass terminations of probationary employees – which aligns with Judge Alsup’s recent decision in our lawsuit challenging these illegal firings,” the union said in a statement earlier this month. “Every agency should immediately rescind these unlawful terminations and reinstate everyone who was illegally fired.” More

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      in US Politics

      Judge orders Elon Musk and Doge to produce records about cost-cutting operations

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      Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, have been ordered by a federal judge to turn over a wide array of records that would reveal the identities of staffers and internal records related to efforts to aggressively cut federal government spending and programs.US district judge Tanya Chutkan’s order forces Musk to produce documents related to Doge’s activities as part of a lawsuit brought by 14 Democratic state attorneys general that alleges Musk violated the constitution by wielding powers that only Senate-confirmed officials should possess.Chutkan said in her 14-page decision that she was allowing the state attorneys general to obtain documents from Musk to clarify the scope of his authority, which would inform whether he has been operating unconstitutionally to the extent that Doge’s activities should be halted.The judge also suggested that the so-called discovery requests, which she limited to only documents and not any depositions, could include the identities of Doge staffers in order to establish the scope of the Doge operation. Chutkan’s order does not apply to Donald Trump.For weeks, Musk has taken great pains to conceal how Doge operates, starting with his own involvement in the project. Musk himself is a “special government employee”, which the White House has said means his financial disclosure filing will not be made public.The White House then subsequently said in court filings that Musk was a senior adviser to the president, a designation that it claimed meant Musk had no actual or formal authority to make government decisions, even though it contradicted how Trump had spoken publicly about Musk.The issue at the center of the lawsuit is a provision of the constitution that says government officials who act and wield power as heads of departments are “principal officers” who can exercise that authority only if first nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.Musk’s role has been ambiguous because he is not Senate confirmed but has ordered steep cuts to federal agencies and programs as the titular head of Doge, until his moves precipitated legal claims that threatened to make him vulnerable to constitutional challenges and public records requests.The White House has also tried to further resist legal discovery about Musk’s activities by citing his senior adviser title to invoke executive privilege protections. But Chutkan found that document requests and written responses were not so broad that it would burden the executive branch.It is the second setback for Doge in as many days, after another federal judge in Washington DC ruled that it was wielding so much power that its records would likely have to be subject to public records requests.US district judge Christopher Cooper, citing reporting by the Guardian, said the “unprecedented” authority of Doge and its “unusual secrecy” in how it bulldozed through the federal government meant it needed to go through thousands of pages of documents sought by a liberal watchdog group. More

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      in US Politics

      Judge temporarily blocks Trump order punishing law firm tied to Clinton

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      A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked a vast portion of Donald Trump’s executive order that threatened to hurt a major law firm from taking effect, ruling the president used national security concerns as a pretext to punish the firm Perkins Coie for once working with Hillary Clinton.The executive order Trump issued last week stripped security clearances from Perkins Coie lawyers, mandated the termination of any contracts and barred federal government employees from engaging with its attorneys or allowing them access to government buildings.Trump said in the executive order he had deemed Perkins Coie a national security risk principally because it hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton presidential campaign in 2016, which produced the “dossier” that pushed discredited claims about Trump’s connections to Russia.The US district judge Beryl Howell rejected Trump’s contentions and entered a temporary restraining order on Wednesday that halted most of the executive order. The restraining order did not apply to the revocation of clearances, since Perkins Coie had not sought that in their request.“It sends little chills down my spine,” Howell said of Trump using national security grounds to punish Perkins Coie, comparing the executive order to a “bill of attainder” – a legislative act that inflicts punishment without a trial, and is expressly barred by the US constitution.The justice department had argued that Perkins Coie’s lawsuit was deficient because the executive order had not caused any harm to them – for instance, none of its lawyers had been stopped from entering a federal government building – and that the concerns were speculative.The department also suggested that the claim by Perkins Coie that they had lost clients as a result of the executive order could not be verified because the clients might have changed law firm for any number of reasons.Howell rejected both of those contentions, accepting a 20-page declaration by a partner at Perkins Coie that one justice department lawyer had already declined to meet with him on account of the executive order, and that some clients had expressly cited the order in dropping Perkins Coie.She also sided with Perkins Coie that financial loss counted as irreparable harm in this case – it usually does not – since the continued loss of clients in such a way threatened the very existence of the law firm, given it interacts with the federal government in the majority of its cases.The justice department accurately argued that even if Howell thought the executive order was unwise or otherwise disagreed with its motivations, the power to strip clearances and deem entities a national security threat was part of the president’s powers, and Trump did not need to provide a justification.“It is fundamentally the president’s prerogative, not reviewable by the courts, whether somebody is trustworthy with the nation’s secrets. The president has made that finding here and everything else in the executive order … flow from that determination,” said Chad Mizelle, the justice department’s chief of staff, who, in an unusual move, argued the case before Howell.But Howell took issue with the claim that Perkins Coie was a national security risk purely because Trump viewed the contents of the Fusion GPS dossier, prepared by a former British spy, as entirely false, and noted that the two lawyers involved with the Clinton campaign left the firm years ago.She also said the executive order appeared punitive because Trump had previously failed in suing Perkins Coie in his personal capacity, saying: “This ground is a personal grievance that president Trump has already attempted to pursue in a personal lawsuit that was dismissed in its entirety by a court in the southern district of New York.”“To the extent that this executive order appears to be an instance of president Trump using taxpayer dollars in government resources,” Howell said, “to pursue what is a wholly personal vendetta, advancing such political payback is not something which the government has a cognizable interest.”The roughly three-hour hearing in federal district court in Washington DC came a day after Perkins Coie requested a temporary restraining order on the advice of Williams and Connolly, another elite firm in the nation’s capital known for taking cases against government overreach.Perkins Coie had initially reached out to the firm Quinn Emanuel, which has previously represented people in Trump’s orbit, including Elon Musk, the Trump Organization itself, and New York mayor Eric Adams, whose corruption charges were dropped by the justice department last month.But Quinn Emanuel declined to take Perkins Coie as a client, as its top partners decided not to become involved in a politically-sensitive issue that could make themselves a target by association just as they have been on the rise as a power center in Washington DC.While other law firms have discussed whether to file amicus briefs or declarations supporting Perkins Coie, the firm was ultimately taken on by Williams and Connolly. They advised Perkins Coie to ask for an emergency hearing and temporary restraining order, both of which Howell granted. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump is using Mahmoud Khalil to test his mass deportation plan | Heba Gowayed

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      On 8 March, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University, was apprehended from university housing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. Khalil, a Palestinian and student leader at the Columbia encampments last year, was told by the arresting officers that his green card had been “revoked”, an action that only an immigration judge can decide. It has since been revealed that he is in Ice custody in La Salle, Louisiana, a detention site notorious for abuse.On Truth Social, Donald Trump celebrated the apprehension of Khalil, whom he called “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” and bragged of more arrests to come.Khalil has not been accused, by anyone, of violating the law. Instead, his apprehension is a dangerous example of deportation as a retaliation for first amendment-protected speech. Simply put, Khalil was punished for protesting against US complicity in what is widely recognized as a genocide in Gaza. The Trump administration has exploited anti-Palestinian racism as a means to test its mass deportation goals: whitening the nation by eliminating immigrants and insisting that those who are here not challenge those in authority. Khalil’s arrest and detention reveals the fragility of our first amendment protections, of who does and does not have a voice in our nation.As a professor, I am troubled by the central role that academia, which in its ideal form is a bastion of free speech and critical thought, is playing in this assault on human rights. Universities and colleges have become consumed by a politics of consent, where to appease donors and politicians, leadership has collaborated in the targeting of their own students, and faculty largely remain silent in the face of assaults on them.As Israel began its bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, students across the nation set up encampments on their campuses, reminiscent of the anti-apartheid movement of decades past. The Gaza protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, with like-minded students from all backgrounds sharing meals and community.View image in fullscreenColumbia University administrators, for their part, called the the New York City police department to brutalize and arrest their students, criminalizing them. They have since sealed off the public spaces on their campus and restricted access to them, including illegally closing the 116th through street rather than risk any protest on the campus lawn. The brutality is ongoing: just last week, nine students from Barnard were arrested in a new escalation.Much has been written about the “Palestine exception” – the idea that advocating for Palestine is excluded from free speech protections. Well before 7 October 2023, people had been fired, sanctioned, or retaliated against for their writing and speech on issues related to the occupation of Palestine by Israel. Since then, the number has ballooned to thousands of cases as repression has intensified.In the lead-up to his arrest by Ice, Khalil reached out to Columbia twice asking for help, describing a “dehumanizing doxing campaign led by Columbia affiliates Shai Davidai and David Lederer” including a tweet by Davidai, a faculty member at Columbia, who called Khalil a “terror supporter” and tagged Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, to demand his deportation.Rubio deployed the racialized language of “terrorism” to announce that he would target international students for “visa denial or revocation, and deportation”. The announcement was applauded by Senator Tom Cotton and the House committee on foreign affairs, which tweeted from its official account: “Terrorist sympathizers are not welcome in the United States of America. Thank you @SecRubio and @POTUS for your leadership. Deport them all!”The campaign against Khalil, which White House officials admit is a blueprint for targeting other students, was successful. It was later reported that Rubio himself signed the warrant for his arrest, using a little-known provision in the law that allows the secretary of state to unilaterally determine whose presence is warranted in the nation. It means that the fate of Palestinians such as Khalil is being left to those who would dox a student, to those who want to ethnically cleanse Gaza.Democratic politicians came to Khalil’s defense even as they continued to condemn the protests that he was a part of, even as they saw it fitting to use the power of the federal government to sanction students for daring to speak out. In a statement criticizing the arrest, Hakeem Jeffries still felt compelled to describe Khalil exercising his right to protest as creating “an unacceptable hostile academic environment for Jewish students”.Columbia has not issued any statement of support for Khalil or for other immigrant students. Instead, the school updated its website stating that Ice could enter campus property without a judicial warrant in the case of “risk of imminent harm to people or property”. In other words, Columbia is endorsing that deportation – the torturous and forcible removal of a person from their life – is a fitting consequence for protest. It instructed its faculty to continue operating as “usual”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe implications of this are extraordinary and alarming. It means that as the country takes an authoritarian turn, as the laws become more McCarthyist, more draconian, this university and others are choosing to align themselves with that turn, to go above and beyond to apply the “law”, even if it means greenlighting the abduction of their students.To be sure, Columbia is not the only campus guilty of silencing pro-Palestinian voices. Last year I protested outside the City College of New York as my own students were loaded into police vans at the behest of chancellor of the City University of New York. In February, an advertisement for a Palestine studies position was removed from our hiring platform due to the intervention of the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, who deemed it to be “antisemitic” because it included the words “genocide” and “apartheid”.I am regularly in conversation with faculty who have lost their jobs, with students who have been expelled from their institutions for protest, with people across universities, across the country, who have been doxed and sanctioned and reprimanded for their voice.The tools of oppression, wielded against those students and faculty whose opinions run contrary to those who are in power, are now undermining the very foundations of this democracy. The freedom of Khalil – who is not a political symbol, but an expectant father – the freedom of everyone who raises their voice for Palestine, and the freedom of Palestinians themselves are tethered to all of our freedoms. Khalil’s safety is tied to that of every immigrant, whether on a student or an H1-B visa, or a permanent resident, or even a naturalized citizen. His freedom is tethered to everyone who cares about their right to free expression.As his case is adjudicated in the courts, which considers its legal dimensions, it is not just Mahmoud Khalil who is on trial, but the entirety of a nation teetering on the edge of authoritarianism. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump’s January 6 pardon doesn’t cover FBI murder plot conviction, judge rules

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      A man pardoned by Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection who also was convicted of plotting to kill federal agents investigating him is still legally liable for the plot, a judge ruled on Monday.Edward Kelley was pardoned by Trump for his role in the US Capitol riot, but he remained in prison on separate charges. The Tennessee man had developed a “kill list” of FBI agents who had investigated him for the Capitol attack.On his first day in office, Trump issued pardons and commutations to more than 1,500 people convicted for their roles in the January 6 insurrection, including militia members. But other rioters had separate charges that the courts and the justice department are working through.In Kelley’s case, the justice department argued he was not pardoned by Trump for the plotting charges. In Monday’s ruling, the US district judge Thomas Varlan deniedKelley’s motion to dismiss the charges, saying the case “involved separate offense conduct that was physically, temporally, and otherwise unrelated to defendant’s conduct in the D.C. Case and/or events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021”.The plotting charges stemmed from “entirely independent criminal conduct in Tennessee, in late 2022, more than 500 miles away from the Capitol”, Varlan wrote.Prosecutors allege Kelley – who was the fourth rioter to enter the Capitol on January 6 and was carrying a gun – was developing a plan to murder law enforcement agents. They produced recordings of his planning activity, including Kelley giving instructions to “start it”, “attack”, and “take out their office”.“Every hit has to hurt,” he allegedly says in one recording.A cooperating defendant testified against Kelley and said he and Kelley were planning to attack the FBI field office in Knoxville with car bombs and drones, and were strategizing over how to assassinate FBI employees at their homes or in public places.While most participants in the events of January 6 who were in prison have been released, some are still inside because of other charges, both related and unrelated to the Capitol riot. It is not yet clear what will happen to some rioters who were charged with gun crimes during searches of their homes when authorities were serving January 6 warrants. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump calls arrest of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil ‘first of many to come’

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      Donald Trump said on Monday that the arrest of a prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, was the “first arrest of many to come”.“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” the US president wrote in a post on Truth Social.He added: “Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country – never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.”The White House amplified Trump’s comments in a post on X reading “Shalom, Mahmoud”, using a Hebrew word for goodbye.Trump’s remarks come as over the weekend federal immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card who is a recent Columbia graduate, and took him into custody, reportedly acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.In his statement on Monday, Trump said that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) took Khalil into custody after his executive order and claimed, without evidence, that similar activists on college campuses are paid agitators, not students.Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between protesters and university administrators.Khalil’s attorney said this weekend that the arrest took place on Saturday night, when Khalil was in his university-owned apartment building, just a few blocks from Columbia’s main campus in New York. Several Ice agents entered the building and took him into custody.According to emails obtained by Zeteo, Khalil appealed in an email to Columbia for protection one day before Ice entered his apartment, telling the university’s interim president that he was being subjected to a “dehumanizing doxxing campaign” led by Columbia affiliates.“I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that Ice or a dangerous individual might come to my home,” he wrote to Katrina Armstrong on 7 March, according to Zeteo. “I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.”In a letter posted online Monday, Armstrong said that “rumors suggesting that any member of Columbia leadership requested the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on or near campus are false”.At first, it was reported that Khalil was taken to an immigration detention facility in New Jersey, but his wife said she could not locate him there.As of Monday morning, it appeared that he was now listed as being in Ice custody at La Salle detention facility in Louisiana.Free speech organizations, first amendment advocates and some New York City leaders expressed outrage in response to the unprecedented arrest and ongoing detainment of Khalil, calling it unconstitutional, “an egregious violation of the first amendment” and a “frightening weaponization of immigration law”.On Monday, a judge set a hearing for Wednesday in Manhattan federal court to consider Khalil’s challenge to his detention. More