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U.S. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan says that former President Donald J. Trump may be said to have “raped” E. Jean Carroll, even though a jury specifically declined to find that he had done so in his recent civil trial in New York. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post reported the judge’s finding — approvingly, calling it a “clarification”: [Kaplan] says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood. The filing from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan came as Trump’s attorneys have sought a new trial and have argued that the jury’s $5 million verdict against...

The U.S. Justice Department has asked a federal judge to hold Donald Trump's office in contempt of court for failing to fully comply with a subpoena to return all classified documents in the former president's possession, the Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell has not yet held a hearing or ruled on the request, the newspaper reported. One of the key areas of disagreement centers on the Trump legal team's repeated refusal to designate a custodian of records to sign a document attesting that all classified materials have been...

Judge Rules On Election Workers’ Suit Against Giuliani A federal judge on Monday declined to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani by two women who served as election workers in Georgia in November 2020. In the lawsuit filed last December, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss accused Giuliani of defaming them by falsely stating that the pair had engaged in election fraud while counting ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta. The lawsuit says Giuliani repeatedly pushed debunked claims that the mother-and-daughter pair pulled out suitcases of illegal ballots and committed other...

WASHINGTON (CN) — A federal judge imposed a prison sentence plus house arrest and probation on a Tennessee man who stormed the Capitol, saying the government wants to keep an eye on people like him as the 2024 presidential election approaches. U.S. District Chief Judge Beryl Howell spoke at the Thursday hearing about the “conundrum” many sentencing judges are facing as they decide how to sentence a nonviolent Capitol riot defendant like Blake Reed, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building. There’s a trade-off in punishment, she said, with jail time on...

One of the things that’s bewildered me for almost 20 years is why poll workers are so often Democrats. I assumed it was because Republicans were too passive and disinterested to get involved at the ground level. This matters because, as both Stalin and Biden said, what ultimately matters is who counts the votes—and the next closest thing to counting the votes is being a poll worker. I just learned that I owe Republicans an apology. It turns out that, in 1982, the RNC entered into a consent decree that prohibited it from aggressively enlisting poll workers, and that consent...

One of the more bizarre January 6 cases delved further into the peculiar when an accused Capitol rioter who was arrested while touring in a Broadway production of "Jesus Christ Superstar" earlier this month attended his first court hearing on Monday. James Beeks, an actor who was playing Judas in the musical production, was arrested in Milwaukee last week on charges related to the Capitol riot after investigators attended two performances of the show to find him... ...The actor's antics irritated Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, when he declined to represent himself, saying,...

On the eve of a public hearing, President Joe Biden’s commission released a series of reports on various proposals to reform the Supreme Court. The report appeared to reject the idea of expanding the court, receptive to term limits for justices, and proposed confronting the so-called “shadow docket” with increased transparency.Setting out explicitly to avoid “partisan conflict” and “polarization,” the commission disappointed many on the Democratic Party’s left flank by criticizing the idea of adding justices to the Supreme Court — a theory described as “expansion” by its supporters and “court packing” by its critics. Former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

Please note 2 of the links in the body of this text no longer work. There should still be enough information for you to do additional research to verify or contradict. Following is the original text from my blog post of December, 2, 2012: In the Presidential election of 2012, I experienced the longest lines at early voting that I have ever seen. I read articles from different parts of the country reporting the same phenomenon. On election day there were excessive lines with many polling places required to stay open hours longer than normal to accommodate all of the...