Tag: breonna taylor

The Past 24 Hours or So – Trump Administration, Protests/Racial & Social Issues, and Presidential Campaign Updates

Read Time: 5 Minutes

Trump Administration

  • In a bombshell report, the GOP-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that Trump campaign contacts with Russian spies amounted to “a grave counterintelligence threat.” Over the course of nearly 1,000 pages, the Senate report pulverizes President Trump’s endless claims that the “Russia collusion hoax is the greatest political scandal in the history of this country.”

New evidence makes it abundantly clear: Not investigating the vast number of “alarming” Trump connections to Russian intelligence operatives would have amounted to a “dereliction of duty and responsibility” by America’s law enforcement agencies.

More importantly, the Senate report shows that the FBI’s probe of the Trump campaign and special counsel Robert Mueller did not go nearly far enough.

  • The president of the U.N. Security Council, Indonesia, said on Tuesday it was “not in the position to take further action” on a U.S. bid to trigger a return of all U.N. sanctions on Iran because there is no consensus in the 15-member body.
  • U.S. consumer confidence fell for the second straight month in August as households worried about the economic outlook.

The Conference Board said on Tuesday its consumer confidence index dropped to a reading of 84.8 this month from 91.7 in July. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the index edging up to a reading of 93 in August.

  • A federal court has struck down a Pentagon policy requiring immigrant troops to serve for six months to a year before they are eligible for expedited citizenship, calling it “arbitrary and capricious” and violates the Administrative Procedure Act.
  • Miles Taylor, the former Trump administration official who has endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, says that President Trump offered to pardon Homeland Security officials who broke the law to carry out illegal tasks he wanted, allegedly saying “do it. If you get in trouble, I’ll pardon you.”
  • President Trump tweeted that he plans to nominate acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to take on the role in a full-time capacity after the agency has gone more than a year without a Senate-confirmed leader.
  • On July 24, President Trump held a highly-touted signing ceremony for four executive orders aimed at lowering drug prices and gave pharmaceutical companies until Aug. 24 to make a deal. 

That deadline passed at midnight on Tuesday without the announcement of any deal with drug companies. The White House has not moved forward with the order and is not saying if it will.

  • New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the Trump administration aimed at stopping what she said was an effort to disrupt operations at the U.S. Postal Service at a time when a pandemic has prompted millions more people than usual to plan to vote by mail.

Hawaii, New Jersey, New York City and the City and County of San Francisco joined the suit. 

Protests/Racial and Social Issues

  • Jacob Blake’s father told the Chicago Sun-Times that his son is now paralyzed from the waist down after being shot by police over the weekend.
  • A GoFundMe to support Jacob Blake and his family has raised over $1 million just one day after the fundraising campaign was launched. 
  • Lawyers representing the family of Jacob Blake, the Black man shot in the back at point-blank range by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin announced that a civil suit would be launched against the Kenosha Police Department.
  • Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) will increase the National Guard presence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the second night of unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
  • The Gwinnett County Police Department fired the police officer who was shown on video using a Taser in the arrest of a Black woman on her front porch, the authorities said.

“One of our core values is courtesy,” the department said in a statement. “We strive to conduct ourselves in a manner that promotes mutual respect with the community and our peers. The investigation in this case has shown that Officer Oxford violated our policy and did not meet our core values.”

  • Protesters reportedly began gathering Monday afternoon at an event titled “Resist RNC 2020” near the site of the Republican National Convention, with the group later growing to more than 100 demonstrators marching peacefully. 

But seven were ultimately arrested and 2 were hospitalized after police confronted the crowd with pepper spray. Video also depicts police using bikes to knock down demonstrators, with one woman getting her legs run over.

  • For the third consecutive night, unrest unfolded in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Nearly two hours after the 8 p.m. curfew took effect, police were heard on a bullhorn telling a group of protesters at the Kenosha Courthouse that they were taking part in an “unlawful assembly.” 

The police fired tear gas into the crowd of protesters. 

A CNN team saw either officers or guardsmen perched on the roof of the courthouse shooting pellets down at rowdy protesters.

  • At least 64 people were arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, as crowds marched Tuesday over the death of Breonna Taylor.

The protests were largely peaceful but a large group of demonstrators “crossed several intersections, creating dangerous situations as traffic continued to try to make its way in the area,” Robert Schroeder, interim chief for the Louisville Metro Police Department, told reporters.

Officers gave directions to stay on the sidewalk and those who did not were eventually arrested.

  • A federal grand jury has indicted four men on arson charges in connection to the burning of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct building at the end of May amid protests over the death of George Floyd.
  • Fabiana Pierre-Louis is set to become the first Black woman on the New Jersey Supreme Court, The New York Times reported.

Pierre-Louis, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, will also be the court’s only Black judge and, at 39, its youngest.

  • The Detroit Lions canceled practice on Tuesday. Players and coaches addressed the media with “The World Can’t Go On” and “We Won’t Be Silent” signs. The team’s message: Football is not important today after what happened over the weekend to Jacob Blake.

Presidential Campaign

  • The former cast of “The West Wing” plans to reunite for the first time in 17 years to promote When We All Vote, the voter registration initiative co-chaired by former first lady Michelle Obama.
  • Donald Trump continued to shift money from his donors to his business last month, as his reelection campaign paid his private companies for rent, food, lodging and other expenses, according to a review of the latest Federal Election Commission filings. The richest president in American history, who has yet to donate to his 2020 campaign, has now moved $2.3 million of contributions from other people into his private companies.
  • The Supreme Court has declined to take up an emergency petition from Montana Secretary of State Cory Stapleton (R) to allow candidates for the Green party to appear on the state’s ballots this fall.

Democrats had convinced people to disavow their support for the third party candidates after it was revealed that the Republican Party funded the signature-gathering effort to get the contenders’ names on the ballot under the Green Party and that the Green Party itself did not support the effort. 

  • Georgia congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory and has expressed racist and anti-Muslim views, said she was invited and plans to be in attendance when President Trump accepts the Republican presidential nomination from the White House later this week.
  • House Democrats are launching an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s expected speech to the Republican National Convention, raising concerns that the move is an illegal violation of the Hatch Act and a breach of State Department regulations.

Sources:  ABC News, Associated Press, The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, Forbes,  Fox News,The Hill, Independent, MSNBC, NBC News, NJ.com, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

The Past 24 Hours or So

Read Time: 5 Mniutes

Trump Administration

  • New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal tweeted: “I can confirm: New Jersey will be suing @USPS. Voting by mail is safe, secure, and reliable. We intend to keep it that way. As AG, I’ve made it my mission to hold accountable those who try to corrupt our political process. Lawsuit coming soon.”
  • Pennsylvania and Washington state Attorneys General said they plan to launch separate lawsuits seeking to reverse alterations to postal delivery procedures, the removal of mail sorting machines and limits on overtime that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has rolled out in recent weeks.
  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he doesn’t share President Trump’s “concern” surrounding the U.S. Postal Service and mail-in voting ahead of the November election and said the agency “is going to be just fine.”
  • Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said in a statement that he would halt operational changes and cost-cutting to the U.S. Postal Service until after the 2020 election to “avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail.”
  • The Senate Intelligence Committee released its final investigative report on Russia, the 2016 election, the FBI and the Trump campaign.

Some notable highlights in the report:

  • “The Committee found evidence suggesting …it was the intent of the Campaign participants in the … meeting, particularly Donald Trump Jr., to receive derogatory information… from a source known, at least by Trump Jr., to have connections to the Russian government.”
  • “The Committee found that certain FBI procedures and actions in response to the Russian threat to the 2016 elections were flawed.”
  • Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked closely with a Russian intelligence officer who may have been involved in the hack and release of Democratic emails during the election.
  • “The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. “
  • “Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks.”
  • “Russia is actively interfering again in the 2020 U.S. election to assist Donald Trump, and some of the President’s associates are amplifying those efforts. It is vitally important that the country be ready.”
  • The report ends “It is our conclusion, based on the Committee’s Report that the Russian intelligence services’ assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process and Trump and his associates’ participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era.” 
  • Former CIA operations officer, Evan McMullin, tweeted: “This Senate report on Russian interference in 2016 confirms that Trump’s campaign chairman did provide critical targeting data to the Kremlin through his associate Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intel officer. It’s the greatest betrayal of the country ever.”
  • Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone unexpectedly dropped the appeal of his seven federal felony convictions for seeking to thwart a House investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Stone had his sentence commuted by the president last month.

  • The Department of Justice sued Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, accusing the drugmaker of causing the submission of false claims to Medicare by using kickbacks to boost sales of its multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone.
  • President Trump said that he rejected a proposal from the Pentagon to cut military health care by $2.2 billion during the pandemic. 
  • Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., are suing the Trump administration over a new rule that would allow for the transportation of liquefied natural gas by rail, citing environmental, health and safety risks.
  • A coalition of 30 trade groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has sent a blistering letter to Congress and the White House blasting President Trump’s executive order on payroll taxes, saying it was unworkable without congressional action and warning that it will leave employees with massive tax bills once the deferral is over.
  • The Trump administration has officially expanded hunting and fishing at nearly 150 national wildlife refuges and fish hatcheries, increasing hunters’ ability to kill big game, migratory birds and other animals – a move that worries environmentalists who say the weakened protections could harm ecosystems and jeopardize protected species by allowing hunters to go after more predators.

Protests/Racial and Social Issues

  • Thomas Lane, one of the police officers that is charged in connection with the killing of George Floyd, is calling for the charges against him to be dropped, claiming that Floyd died from an overdose of fentanyl, not from former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
  • A billboard demanding the arrest of the officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor at her home in Louisville, KY, was vandalized, the Louisville Courier Journal reported Tuesday. 

The billboard, featuring Taylor’s face with the words, “Demand that the police involved in killing Breonna Taylor be arrested and charged,” was vandalized with red paint.

  • NBA star LeBron James and members of the Los Angeles Lakers wore caps that built upon President Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” logo to call for justice for Breonna Taylor. The hats struck the words “Great Again” and replaced them with the message: “Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.”
  • A federal judge in Texas ruled in favor of a Black student whose school district prohibited him from wearing his hair in dreadlocks, issuing a preliminary injunction against the district and allowing the 16-year-old to wear locks without fear of punishment.
  • Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said that he’s in favor of capping property tax revenue from Texas cities that decide to cut funding from their police departments.
  • A federal judge temporarily blocked a Trump administration policy that would scrap ObamaCare’s nondiscrimination protections for sex and gender identity, one day before it was set to take effect.

The rule, issued during Pride Month, made clear that the government’s interpretation of sex discrimination would be based on “the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology.”

Presidential Campaign

  • Democrats officially nominated former Vice President Joe Biden to be their presidential nominee, setting up an election battle against President Trump in November.

Sources:  ABC News, Associated Press, The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, Fox News,The Hill, Independent, NBC News, NJ.com, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

The Past 24 Hours or So – Protests/Race Relations News

Read Time: 2 Minutes

  • Breonna Taylor Taylor, a 26-year-old Black EMT, died in March after she was fatally shot by plainclothes police who arrived at her home in Louisville late at night to execute a no-knock warrant as part of a drug case but no drugs were found.

FBI investigators say the months-old case is a “top priority” for them and their “best agents” are working on it.

  • Police are looking to identify a white man and white woman who vandalized a city-approved Black Lives Matter mural in Martinez, California, on the Fourth of July.

The woman was caught on video by onlookers as she painted over the words “Black Lives Matter” on the street in front of the Contra Costa County courthouse while the man appeared to film her on his phone. Authorities are asking the public to identify the couple so they may be “held accountable for their actions,” Martinez Police Chief Manjit Sappal said in a Sunday press release.

“The community spent a considerable amount of time putting the mural together only to have it painted over in a hateful and senseless manner,” the release said. “The City of Martinez values tolerance and the damage to the mural was divisive and hurtful.”

  • Police in Lincoln City, Oregon, said this weekend that they arrested 7 men on various charges after a group of white people they were a part of allegedly harassed a Black family on Independence Day by using racial slurs and Nazi salutes.

At one point, the agency said officers at the scene had to form “a line between the group of white persons and the black family allowing the black family to safely leave the beach and return to their room.”

  • A predominantly Black group of heavily armed protesters marched through Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta on Saturday, calling for removal of the giant Confederate rock carving at the site that civil rights activists consider a monument to racism.
  • Several hundred people gathered in Sydney on Sunday as part of weekend-long protests in Australia’s large cities in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and increased focus of the mistreatment of indigenous peoples.
  • In an apparent appeal to race-based voters, Monday morning the president Tweeted in defense of the confederate flag and accused NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace of propagating a hoax: “Has @BubbaWallace apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers & officials who came to his aid, stood by his side, & were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another HOAX? That & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!”

Sources:  ABC News, The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Financial Times, Fox News,The Hill, NBC News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, NJ.com, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

The Past 24 Hours or So – Protests/Race Relations and Trump Administration News

Read Time: 6 Minutes

Protests/Race Relations News

  • Boston city officials voted to remove “The Emancipation Statue” depicting President Lincoln standing tall above a formerly enslaved Black man kneeling at his feet. Critics argue the controversial monument is a “reductive representation” of the role Black Americans played in the abolition movement and the Civil War.
  • House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on Thursday he plans to introduce legislation withholding federal funding for states and cities that don’t enforce laws protecting statues and monuments.
  • GOP Rep. Andy Biggs is calling for the White House to dissolve its coronavirus task force so that health officials like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx can’t contradict many of Trump’s “stated goals and actions” when it comes to the economy.
  • U.S. Senators Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) are proposing scrapping Columbus Day as a federal holiday and replacing it with Juneteenth.
  • Newly released body-camera footage shows two officers laughing about shooting protesters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with rubber bullets, with one saying, “Did you see me fuck up those motherfuckers?” Fort Lauderdale Police Chief Rick Maglione defended the footage and said his officers were under attack.

Video shows protesters were mostly peaceful, however, and police were responding to a water bottle being thrown at them because another officer had pushed a kneeling woman to the ground.

  • Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley has confirmed that soldiers who were deployed to Washington, D.C. to quell the protests over George Floyd’s death were given bayonets, knife-like attachments for rifles and other guns that allow them to be used as spears.

The members of the division and the regiment never were sent to the demonstrations to respond and were told no weapons would enter the city without orders or before nonlethal response methods were analyzed.

  • Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson called on protesters across the U.S. to cease efforts to dismantle statues of some historical figures and called on state leaders to dismantle “autonomous zones,” an apparent reference to the now-dismantled Seattle Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone.
  • The NFL is planning to have “Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing,” long referred to as the Black national anthem, played or performed before games during the first week of this year’s season.
  • An Aurora, CO police officer who was involved in taking pictures reenacting the police chokehold used on Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who died three days after the encounter, has resigned from the force.

The photos show officers from the Aurora Police Department posing inappropriately near his memorial site and reenacting the carotid restraint used on McClain before his death

  • A husband and wife were charged with assault Thursday, one day after pulling a gun on a Black mother and her two daughters amid an alteration in Oakland County, Mich.

Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper charged Jillian and Eric Wuestenberg with one count each of felonious assault.

  • As statues are removed in the U.S., Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has offered to take the statues and move them to Spain. Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya has sent diplomatic letters to “federal, state and local authorities” in the United States to address the issue. 

“We have made them aware of the importance we award to this shared history with the United States, as shared as it is unknown.”

  • Parole, a historically Black suburb of Annapolis, MD, will soon be the site of a large mural of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed Black woman who was fatally shot by police in her home in Kentucky earlier this year.

According to The Capitol Gazette, the mural of Taylor, which also will feature the phrase “Black Lives Matter” along with her date of birth and death, is expected to span 7,000-square feet across several basketball courts at Chambers Park, with creators aiming to make it visible from space.

  • FedEx has requested the NFL’s Washington team change its name from the Redskins. A FedEx spokesperson released this statement: “We have communicated to the team in Washington our request that they change the team name.”

FedEx is the title sponsor of the team stadium in Landover, MD.

  • Fans of Waverly-Shell Rock High School baseball team in Iowa taunted the opposition’s only Black player with racially charged insults. Charles City High School’s Center Fielder, Jeremiah Chapman, said, “They called me Colin — I assumed they were just calling me Colin Kaepernick.” After making a play, “They said, ‘You need to go back to the fields to do your job.’”

“They looked at me and said, ‘You should have been George Floyd,'” the Minneapolis man killed by a police officer. “Then they started chanting ‘Trump 2020,'” Chapman said.

Waverly-Shell Rock High School put out a statement on their Facebook page saying they “fully acknowledge” the remarks happened. “This behavior is unacceptable. We make no excuses, because there are none,” the post said. “We do, however, wish to make a sincere apology to the Charles City school district and community and, in particular, the young man towards whom these comments were directed.”

Administration News

  • The U.S. Supreme Court says it will decide whether US House investigators can get access to grand jury material from Mueller’s special counsel team; the court will hear the case during the new term in the fall, delaying Congress’ potential access to the material.
  • The U.S. economy added 4.8 million jobs in June.
  • The Commerce Department’s internal watchdog is accusing the department of “actively preventing” it from releasing a full report expected to detail a “flawed process” during what is now known as the Sharpiegate controversy.
  • The Trump administration has reportedly awarded a contract to a California-based tech startup to set up hundreds of “autonomous surveillance towers” along the U.S.-Mexico border to aid its immigration enforcement efforts. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced on Thursday that the towers, which use artificial intelligence and imagery to identify people and vehicles, were now a “program of record” for the agency and that 200 would be deployed along the southern border by 2022.

  • A little-known North Dakota construction firm that was awarded the single largest border wall contract–after its CEO praised the president in a slew of conservative media appearances–is now defending its product as experts warn the structure is in danger of collapsing, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune reported Thursday.

Several experts interviewed for the report said poor planning and shoddy engineering have left the wall “in danger of falling into the Rio Grande.”

  • Mark Burkhalter, president Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Norway, is facing demands that he abandon his pursuit of the diplomatic post following the unearthing of a 1994 court filing indicating his involvement in the production of a racist campaign flier against an African American politician in Georgia.

Burkhalter  helped create a flier that distorted and exaggerated the features of Gordon Joyner, a candidate for county commissioner in north-central Georgia. Joyner was pictured with some features darkened, a large Afro, enlarged eyebrows and a warped eye.

Joyner sued for libel, resulting in an out-of-court settlement, an apology signed by Burkhalter and three other men, and payment of an undisclosed sum.

  • Geoffrey Berman, the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, who resigned last month under pressure from Attorney General William Barr, will testify to the House Judiciary Committee next week about the circumstances of his departure, according to a congressional aide.
  • Weeks after the firing of former U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, Richard Donoghue, a top Washington deputy to U.S. Attorney General William Barr, is under consideration to replace an outgoing prosecutor for the Eastern District of New York, CNN reported.
  • Former Trump administration officials said President Trump’s national security advisers began limiting their briefing of the president on matters relating to Russia due to his frequent pushback on such assessments, CNN reported.

Former officials responsible for briefing Trump on national security issues said they found he frequently became angry when being presented with intelligence implicating Russia in political interference.

“The president has created an environment that dissuades, if not prohibits, the mentioning of any intelligence that isn’t favorable to Russia,” a former senior national security staffer told the network.

  • President Trump retweeted a series of tweets from ACT for America, which is an anti-Muslim hate group. 

Sources:  ABC News, The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Financial Times, Fox News,The Hill, NBC News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, NJ.com, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post