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Arizona prosecutors ordered to send fake elector case back to grand jury
Business Law Info |
2025/05/21 15:09
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Arizona prosecutors pressing the case against Republicans who are accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election results in President Donald Trump’s favor were dealt a setback when a judge ordered the case be sent back to a grand jury.
Arizona’s fake elector case remains alive after Friday’s ruling by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers, but it’s being sent back to the grand jurors to determine whether there’s probable cause that the defendants committed the crimes.
The decision, first reported by the Washington Post, centered on the Electoral Count Act, a law that governs the certification of a presidential contest and was part of the defendants’ claims they were acting lawfully.
While the law was discussed when the case was presented to the grand jury and the panel asked a witness about the law’s requirements, prosecutors didn’t show the statute’s language to the grand jury, Myers wrote. The judge said a prosecutor has a duty to tell grand jurors all the applicable law and concluded the defendants were denied “a substantial procedural right as guaranteed by Arizona law.”
Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat whose office is pressing the case in court, said in a statement that prosecutors will appeal the decision. “We vehemently disagree with the court,” Taylor said.
Mel McDonald, a former county judge in metro Phoenix and former U.S. Attorney for Arizona, said courts send cases back to grand juries when prosecutors present misleading or incomplete evidence or didn’t properly instruct panel members on the law.
“They get granted at times. It’s not often,” said McDonald, who isn’t involved in the case.
In all, 18 Republicans were charged with forgery, fraud and conspiracy. The defendants consist of 11 Republicans who submitted a document falsely claiming Trump won Arizona, two former Trump aides and five lawyers connected to the former president, including Rudy Giuliani.
Two defendants have already resolved their cases, while the others have pleaded not guilty to the charges. Trump wasn’t charged in Arizona, but the indictment refers to him as an unindicted coconspirator.
Most of the defendants in the case also are trying to get a court to dismiss their charges under an Arizona law that bars using baseless legal actions in a bid to silence critics.
They argued Mayes tried to use the charges to silence them for their constitutionally protected speech about the 2020 election and actions taken in response to the race’s outcome. Prosecutors said the defendants didn’t have evidence to back up their retaliation claim and that they crossed the line from protected speech to fraud.
Eleven people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claimed Trump had carried the state in the 2020 election.
President Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document later was sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.
Prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin have also filed criminal charges related to the fake electors scheme. |
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Budget airline begins deportation flights for ICE with start of Arizona operations
Business Law Info |
2025/05/13 00:53
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A budget airline that serves mostly small U.S. cities began federal deportation flights Monday out of Arizona, a move that’s inspired an online boycott petition and sharp criticism from the union representing the carrier’s flight attendants.
Avelo Airlines announced in April it had signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to make charter deportation flights from Mesa Gateway Airport outside Phoenix. It said it will use three Boeing 737-800 planes for the flights.
The Houston-based airline is among a host of companies seeking to cash in on President Donald Trump’s campaign for mass deportations.
Congressional deliberations began last month on a tax bill with a goal of funding, in part, the removal of 1 million immigrants annually and housing 100,000 people in U.S. detention centers. The GOP plan calls for hiring 10,000 more U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and investigators.
Avelo was launched in 2021 as COVID-19 still raged and billions of taxpayer dollars were propping up big airlines. It saves money mainly by flying older Boeing 737 jets that can be bought at relatively low prices. And it operates out of less-crowded and less-costly secondary airports, flying routes that are ignored by the big airlines. It said it had its first profitable quarter in late 2023.
Andrew Levy, Avelo’s founder and chief executive, said in announcing the agreement last month that the airline’s work for ICE would help the company expand and protect jobs.
“We realize this is a sensitive and complicated topic,” said Levy, an airline industry veteran with previous stints as a senior executive at United and Allegiant airlines.
Financial and other details of the Avelo agreement — including destinations of the deportation flights — haven’t publicly surfaced. The AP asked Avelo and ICE for a copy of the agreement, but neither provided the document. The airline said it wasn’t authorized to release the contract.
Several consumer brands have shunned being associated with deportations, a highly volatile issue that could drive away customers. During Trump’s first term, authorities housed migrant children in hotels, prompting some hotel chains to say that they wouldn’t participate.
Avelo was launched in 2021 as COVID-19 still raged and billions of taxpayer dollars were propping up big airlines. It saves money mainly by flying older Boeing 737 jets that can be bought at relatively low prices. And it operates out of less-crowded and less-costly secondary airports, flying routes that are ignored by the big airlines. It said it had its first profitable quarter in late 2023.
Andrew Levy, Avelo’s founder and chief executive, said in announcing the agreement last month that the airline’s work for ICE would help the company expand and protect jobs. |
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Court won’t revive a Minnesota ban on gun-carry permits for young adults
Business Law Info |
2025/04/25 14:32
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The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Minnesota asking to revive the state’s ban on gun-carry permits for young adults.
The justices also left in place a ban on guns at the University of Michigan, declining to hear an appeal from a man who argued he has a right to be armed on campus. No justice noted a dissent in either case.
Taken together, the actions reflect the high court’s apparent lack of appetite for cases that further explore the constitutional right to “keep and bear arms.”
The court has repeatedly turned away gun cases since its 2022 ruling that expanded gun rights and a clarifying 2024 decision that upheld a federal gun control law that is intended to protect victims of domestic violence.
The decision not to hear the Minnesota case was somewhat surprising because both sides sought the Supreme Court’s review and courts around the country have come to different conclusions about whether states can limit the gun rights of people aged 18 to 20 without violating the Constitution.
The federal appeals court in St. Louis ruled that the Minnesota ban conflicted with the Second Amendment, which the court noted sets no age limit and generally protects ordinary, law-abiding young adults.
In January, the federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down a federal law requiring young adults to be 21 to buy handguns.
In February, a federal judge declined to block Hawaii’s ban on gun possession for people under 21.
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US immigration officials look to expand social media data collection
Business Law Info |
2025/03/31 18:48
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U.S. immigration officials are asking the public and federal agencies to comment on a proposal to collect social media handles from people applying for benefits such as green cards or citizenship, to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The March 5 notice raised alarms from immigration and free speech advocates because it appears to expand the government’s reach in social media surveillance to people already vetted and in the U.S. legally, such as asylum seekers, green card and citizenship applicants -- and not just those applying to enter the country. That said, social media monitoring by immigration officials has been a practice for over a decade, since at least the second Obama administration and ramping up under Trump’s first term.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a 60-day notice asking for public commentary on its plan to comply with Trump’s executive order titled “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” The plan calls for “uniform vetting standards” and screening people for grounds of inadmissibility to the U.S., as well as identify verification and “national security screening.” It seeks to collect social media handles and the names of platforms, although not passwords.
The policy seeks to require people to share their social media handles when applying for U.S. citizenship, green card, asylum and other immigration benefits. The proposal is open to feedback from the public until May 5.
“The basic requirements that are in place right now is that people who are applying for immigrant and non-immigrant visas have to provide their social media handles,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, managing director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University. “Where I could see this impacting is someone who came into the country before visa-related social media handle collection started, so they wouldn’t have provided it before and now they’re being required to. Or maybe they did before, but their social media use has changed.”
“This fairly widely expanded policy to collect them for everyone applying for any kind of immigration benefit, including people who have already been vetted quite extensively,” she added.
What this points to — along with other signals the administration is sending such as detaining people and revoking student visas for participating in campus protests that the government deems antisemitic and sympathetic to the militant Palestinian group Hamas — Levinson-Waldman added, is the increased use of social media to “make these very high-stakes determinations about people.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service said the agency seeks to “strengthen fraud detection, prevent identity theft, and support the enforcement of rigorous screening and vetting measures to the fullest extent possible.”
“These efforts ensure that those seeking immigration benefits to live and work in the United States do not threaten public safety, undermine national security, or promote harmful anti-American ideologies,” the statement continued. USCIS estimates that the proposed policy change will affect about 3.6 million people.
How are social media accounts used now?
The U.S. government began ramping up the use of social media for immigration vetting in 2014 under then-President Barack Obama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In late 2015, the Department of Homeland Security began both “manual and automatic screening of the social media accounts of a limited number of individuals applying to travel to the United States, through various non-public pilot programs,” the nonpartisan law and policy institute explains on its website.
In May 2017, the U.S. Department of State issued an emergency notice to increase the screening of visa applicants. Brennan, along with other civil and human rights groups, opposed the move, arguing that it is “excessively burdensome and vague, is apt to chill speech, is discriminatory against Muslims, and has no security benefit.”
Two years later, the State Department began collecting social media handles from “nearly all foreigners” applying for visas to travel to the U.S. — about 15 million people a year.
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Supreme Court makes it harder for EPA to police sewage discharges
Business Law Info |
2025/03/07 15:24
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A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday made it harder for environmental regulators to limit water pollution, ruling for San Francisco in a case about the discharge of raw sewage that sometimes occurs during heavy rains.
By a 5-4 vote, the court’s conservative majority ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency overstepped its authority under the Clean Water Act with water pollution permits that contain vague requirements for maintaining water quality.
The decision is the latest in which conservative justices have reined in pollution control efforts.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court that EPA can set specific limits that tell cities and counties what can be discharged. But the agency lacks the authority “to include ‘end-result’ provisions,” Alito wrote, that make cities and counties responsible for maintaining the quality of the water, the Pacific Ocean in this case, into which wastewater is discharged.
“When a permit contains such requirements, a permittee that punctiliously follows every specific requirement in its permit may nevertheless face crushing penalties if the quality of the water in its receiving waters falls below the applicable standards,” he wrote.
One conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett, joined the court’s three liberals in dissent. Limits on discharges sometimes still don’t insure water quality standards are met, Barrett wrote.
“The concern that the technology-based effluent limitations may fall short is on display in this case,” Barrett wrote, adding that “discharges from components of San Francisco’s sewer system have allegedly led to serious breaches of the water quality standards, such as ‘discoloration, scum, and floating material, including toilet paper, in Mission Creek.’”
The case produced an unusual alliance of the liberal northern California city, energy companies and business groups.
The EPA has issued thousands of the permits, known as narrative permits, over several decades, former acting general counsel Kevin Minoli said.
The narrative permits have operated almost as a backstop in case permits that quantify what can be discharged still result in unacceptable water quality, Minoli said.
With the new restrictions imposed by the court, “the question is what comes in place of those limits,” Minoli said.
Alito downplayed the impact of the decision, writing that the agency has “the tools needed” to insure water quality standards are met.
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Musk gives all federal workers 48 hours to explain what they did last week
Business Law Info |
2025/02/23 18:04
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Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been given little more than 48 hours to explain what they accomplished over the last week, sparking confusion across key agencies as billionaire Elon Musk expands his crusade to slash the size of federal government.
Musk, who serves as President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting chief, telegraphed the extraordinary request on his social media network on Saturday.
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk posted on X, which he owns. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Shortly afterward, federal employees — including some judges, court staff and federal prison officials — received a three-line email with this instruction: “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”
The deadline to reply was listed as Monday at 11:59 p.m., although the email did not include Musk’s social media threat about those who fail to respond.
The latest unusual directive from Musk’s team injects a new sense of chaos across beleaguered multiple agencies, including the National Weather Service, the State Department and the federal court system, as senior officials worked to verify the message’s authenticity Saturday night and in some cases, instructed their employees not to respond.
Thousands of government employees have already been forced out of the federal workforce — either by being fired or offered a buyout — during the first month of Trump’s administration as the White House and Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency fire both new and career workers, tell agency leaders to plan for “large-scale reductions in force” and freeze trillions of dollars in federal grant funds.
There is no official figure available for the total firings or layoffs so far, but The Associated Press has tallied hundreds of thousands of workers who are being affected. Many work outside of Washington. The cuts include thousands at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense, Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service and the National Parks Service, among others.
Labor union leaders quickly condemned the ultimatum and threatened legal action.
AFGE President Everett Kelley called the new order an example of Trump and Musk’s “utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people.”
“It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life,” Kelley said. “AFGE will challenge any unlawful terminations of our members and federal employees across the country.”
Musk on Friday celebrated his new role at a gathering of conservatives by waving a giant chainsaw in the air. He called it “the chainsaw for bureaucracy” and said, “Waste is pretty much everywhere” in the federal government.
McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson at the Office of Personnel Management, confirmed Musk’s directive and said that individual agencies would “determine any next steps.”
What happens if an employee is on leave or vacation? Again, she said individual agencies would determine how to proceed.
In a message to employees on Saturday night, federal court officials instructed recipients not to respond.
“We understand that some judges and judiciary staff have received an email ... directing the recipient to reply with 5 accomplishments from the prior week. Please be advised that this email did not originate from the Judiciary or the Administrative Office and we suggest that no action be taken,” officials wrote.
Judges around the country got emails from Musk’s team in late January, apparently by mistake, U.S. District Judge Randolph Daniel Moss said earlier this month. Moss said he’d also gotten a message and ignored it.
The National Weather Service leadership acknowledged some confusion in a message to its employees late Saturday as well.
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