Eric Adams case: Judge to consider Trump's push to drop corruption charges against NYC mayor
The federal judge overseeing the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams is set to hear from the attorneys Wednesday afternoon about the Justice Department's controversial motion to dismiss the charges against him.
The DOJ move prompted an exodus of prosecutors that disagreed with the decision. Eight federal prosecutors, including the interim US attorney for the Southern District of New York, have resigned in protest. Four deputy mayors have departed City Hall as well.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who will attend the hearing, has said the case should be dismissed without prejudice, meaning it could be revived, because of 'appearances of impropriety and risks of interference with the 2025 elections in New York City' and because continuing the case would 'interfere with the defendant's ability to govern in New York City' and threaten President Donald Trump's immigration policies.
Adams has consented in writing to the deal and denies any 'quid pro quo' with the administration for dropping the charges in exchange for boosting Trump's immigration agenda.
Judge Dale Ho, a Biden appointee, said the parties should be prepared to discuss the reason for the dismissal motion, what Adams has agreed to, and the next procedural steps in the case.
The judge could appoint a special prosecutor to continue the case.
If Judge Ho were to reject the motion to dismiss the case against Adams, there's little precedent of what happens next. The judge scheduled the hearing amid growing calls from top Democrats for the embattled Democratic mayor to step down or be removed from office and as former prosecutors urge the judge to not approve the dismissal without digging deeper into the circumstances surrounding the deal.
The Justice Department has moved to dismiss the case under Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which says the government may 'with leave of the court' dismiss an indictment.
Adams is scheduled to go to trial on five criminal charges, including bribery, in April. He has pleaded not guilty.
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Hamilton Spectator
34 minutes ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Marines take over some security in LA while cities across US prep for ‘No Kings' rallies
LOS ANGELES (AP) — After a week of protests over federal immigration raids, about 200 Marines moved into Los Angeles on Friday to guard a federal building in the city while communities across the country prepped for what's anticipated to be a nationwide wave of large-scale demonstrations against President Donald Trump's polices this weekend. The Marine troops with rifles, combat gear and walkie-talkies took over some posts from National Guard members who were deployed to the city after the protests erupted last week . Those protests sparked dozens more over several days around the country, with some leading to clashes with police and hundreds of arrests. The Marines had not been seen on Los Angeles city streets until Friday. They finished training on civil disturbance and have started to replace Guard members protecting the federal building west of downtown, so the Guard soldiers can be assigned to protect law enforcement officers on raids, the commander in charge of 4,700 troops deployed to the LA protests said. The Marines moved into Los Angeles before Saturday's planned 'No Kings' demonstrations nationally against Trump's policies, which will also happen the same day as a military parade in Washington, D.C., when troops will march and tanks will rumble through the streets of the nation's capital. The Marines' arrival also came a day after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked a federal judge's order that had directed Trump to return control of Guard troops to California. The judge had ruled the Guard deployment was illegal, violated the Tenth Amendment, which defines the power between state and federal governments, and exceeded Trump's statutory authority. The judge did not rule on the presence of the Marines. Military mission Some 2,000 National Guard troops were deployed to Los Angeles this week. Hundreds have provided protection to immigration agents making arrests. Another 2,000 Guard members were notified of deployment earlier this week. None of the military troops will be detaining anyone, Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, the commander of Task Force 51 who is overseeing the 4,700 combined troops, said. 'I would like to emphasize that the soldiers will not participate in law enforcement activities,' Sherman said. 'Rather, they'll be focused on protecting federal law enforcement personnel.' Roughly 500 National Guard members have been used to provide security on immigration raids after undergoing expanded instruction, legal training and rehearsals with the agents doing the enforcement before they go on those missions. By mid-afternoon Friday, more than a dozen Marines were stationed outside the 17-story Wilshire Federal Building, replacing some members of the National Guard at various entrances. They mostly appeared to be checking tickets from members of the public who were there to renew their passports. The building is the same place Democratic U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla on Thursday was forcefully removed from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's news conference and handcuffed by officers as he tried to speak up about the immigration raids. There were no protesters around the building. Occasionally, a passing driver shouted from their window, registering a mix of anger and support for the military presence. Sherman said the U.S. Marine Corps is responsible for guarding U.S. embassies overseas so they are well-trained on how to defend a federal building. California vs. Trump California Gov. Gavin Newsom has called the troop deployment a 'serious breach of state sovereignty' and a power grab by Trump, and he has gone to court to stop it. The president has cited a legal provision that allows him to mobilize federal service members when there is 'a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.' A federal judge said in a ruling late Thursday that what is happening in Los Angeles does not meet the definition of a rebellion and issued an order to return control of the Guard to California before the appeals court stopped it from going into effect Friday. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump thanked the appeals court Friday morning. 'If I didn't send the Military into Los Angeles, that city would be burning to the ground right now,' he said. The court will hold a hearing on the matter Tuesday. Under federal law, active-duty forces are prohibited by law from conducting law enforcement. The Trump administration has characterized the city as a 'war zone,' which local authorities dispute. Recent protesters have drawn a few hundred attendees who marched through downtown chanting, dancing and poking fun at the Trump administration's characterization of the city. There have been about 500 arrests since Saturday, mostly for failing to leave the area at the request of law enforcement, according to the police. There have been a handful of more serious charges, including for assault against officers and for possession of a Molotov cocktail and a gun. Nine officers have been hurt, mostly with minor injuries. An 8 p.m. curfew has been in place in a 1-square-mile (2.5-square-kilometer) section of downtown. The city of Los Angeles encompasses roughly 500 square miles (1,295 square kilometers). Protests have ended after a few hours with arrests this week largely for failure to disperse. No Kings The 'No Kings' demonstrations are planned in nearly 2,000 locations around the country , according to the movement's website. A flagship march and rally is planned for Philadelphia, but no protests are scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C., where the military parade will be held. Participants are expected to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation, organizers say. In Florida, state Attorney General James Uthmeier warned that any protesters who become violent will be dealt with harshly. States face questions on deploying troops Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has put 5,000 National Guard members on standby in cities where demonstrations are planned. In other Republican-controlled states, governors have not said when or how they may deploy troops. A group of Democratic governors in a statement called Trump's deployments 'an alarming abuse of power.' Washington state Gov. Bob Ferguson took to social media Friday to call for peaceful protests over the weekend, to ensure the military is not sent to the state. 'Don't give him an excuse to try and federalize the National Guard like he did in California,' he said. Military parade The military parade in Washington which Trump had unsuccessfully pushed for during his first term — will also feature concerts, fireworks, NFL players, fitness competitions and displays all over the National Mall for daylong festivities. The celebration Saturday also happens to be Trump's birthday. The Army expects as many as 200,000 people could attend and says putting on the celebration will cost an estimated $25 million to $45 million . ___ Taxin reported from Santa Ana, California. Baldor contributed from Washington. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
I'm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is (Again)
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive. The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil ('I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,' The American Prospect's David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. 'One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze,' my colleague Nick Miroff, who has been present at the demonstrations, wrote. [Read: Stephen Miller triggers Los Angeles] As is common in modern protests, there has also been ample viral footage from news organizations showing militarized police responding aggressively in encounters, sometimes without provocation. In one well-circulated clip, an officer in riot gear fires a nonlethal round directly at an Australian television correspondent carrying a microphone while on air; another piece of footage shot from above shows a police officer on horseback trampling a protester on the ground. All of these dynamics are familiar in the post-Ferguson era of protest. What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown. Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what's happening in L.A. varies considerably. Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms. It is possible that one's impression of the protests would be incorrectly skewed if informed only by Bluesky commentators, MSNBC guests, or self-proclaimed rational centrists. The right, for example, has mocked the idea of 'mostly peaceful protests' as ludicrous when juxtaposed with video of what they see as evidence to the contrary. It's likely that my grasp of the events and their politics are shaped by decades of algorithmic social-media consumption. Yet the situation in L.A. only further clarifies the asymmetries among media ecosystems. This is not an even playing field. The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone. (It is not, despite President Donald Trump's wildly disproportionate response, which includes deploying hundreds of U.S. Marines to the area and federalizing thousands of National Guard members.) I spent the better part of the week drinking from this particular firehose, reading X and Truth Social posts and watching videos from Rumble. On these platforms, the protests are less a news event than a justification for the authoritarian use of force. Nearly every image or video contains selectively chosen visuals of burning cars or Mexican flags unfurling in a smog of tear gas, and they're cycled on repeat to create a sense of overwhelming chaos. They have titles such as 'CIVIL WAR ALERT' and 'DEMOCRATS STOKE WW3!' All of this incendiary messaging is assisted by generative-AI images of postapocalyptic, smoldering city streets—pure propaganda to fill the gap between reality and the world as the MAGA faithful wish to see it. I've written before about how the internet has obliterated the monoculture, empowering individuals to cocoon themselves in alternate realities despite confounding evidence—it is a machine that justifies any belief. This is not a new phenomenon, but the problem is getting worse as media ecosystems mature and adjust to new technologies. On Tuesday, one of the top results for one user's TikTok search for Los Angeles curfew was an AI-generated video rotating through slop images of a looted city under lockdown. Even to the untrained eye, the images were easily identifiable as AI-rendered (the word curfew came out looking like ciuftew). Still, it's not clear that this matters to the people consuming and sharing the bogus footage. Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country's largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives. On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I've seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers' market—and lots of pictures of the city's unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it's hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it's unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters 'to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.' [Read: I'm running out of ways to explain how bad this is] In the cinematic universe of right-wing media, the L.A. ICE protests are a sequel of sorts to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. It doesn't matter that the size and scope have been different in Los Angeles (at present, the L.A. protests do not, for instance, resemble the 100-plus nights of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and police that took place in Portland, Oregon, in 2020): Influencers and broadcasters on the right have seized on the association with those previous protests, insinuating that this next installment, like all sequels, will be a bigger and bolder spectacle. Politicians are running the sequel playbook—Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a rightly criticized New York Times op-ed in 2020 urging Trump to 'Send in the Troops' to quash BLM demonstrations, wrote another op-ed, this time for The Wall Street Journal, with the headline 'Send in the Troops, for Real.' (For transparency's sake, I should note that I worked for the Times opinion desk when the Cotton op-ed was published and publicly objected to it at the time.) There is a sequel vibe to so much of the Trump administration's second term. The administration's policies are more extreme, and there's a brazenness to the whole affair—nobody's even trying to justify the plot (or, in this case, cover up the corruption and dubious legality of the government's deportation regime). All of us, Trump supporters very much included, are treated as a captive audience, forced to watch whether we like it or not. This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump's second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are. The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
37 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Appeals court won't reconsider ruling that Trump must pay E. Jean Carroll $5M in sex abuse case
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal appeals court won't reconsider its ruling upholding a $5 million civil judgment against President Donald Trump in a civil lawsuit alleging he sexually abused a writer in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. In an 8-2 vote Friday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Trump's petition for the full appellate court to rehear arguments in his challenge to the jury's finding that he sexually abused advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and defamed her with comments he made in October 2022. Carroll testified at a 2023 trial that Trump turned a friendly encounter in spring 1996 into a violent attack after they playfully entered the store's dressing room. A three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld the verdict in December, rejecting Trump's claims that trial Judge Lewis A. Kaplan's decisions spoiled the trial, including allowing two other Trump sexual abuse accusers to testify. The women said Trump committed similar acts against them in the 1970s and in 2005. Trump denied all three women's allegations. In an opinion Friday, four judges voting to reject rehearing wrote: 'Simply re-litigating a case is not an appropriate use' of the process. 'In those rare instances in which a case warrants our collective consideration, it is almost always because it involves a question of exceptional importance,' or a conflict between precedent and the appellate panel's opinion, Judges Myrna Pérez, Eunice C. Lee, Beth Robinson and Sarah A.L. Merriam wrote. All four were appointed by President Joe Biden, Trump's one-time Democratic rival. The two dissenting judges, Trump appointees, Steven J. Menashi and Michael H. Park, wrote that the trial 'consisted of a series of indefensible evidentiary rulings.' 'The result was a jury verdict based on impermissible character evidence and few reliable facts,' they wrote. 'No one can have any confidence that the jury would have returned the same verdict if the normal rules of evidence had been applied.' Carroll's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said in a statement: 'E. Jean Carroll is very pleased with today's decision.' 'Although President Trump continues to try every possible maneuver to challenge the findings of two separate juries, those efforts have failed. He remains liable for sexual assault and defamation,' said Kaplan, who is not related to the judge. Trump skipped the trial after repeatedly denying the attack ever happened. He briefly testified at a follow-up defamation trial last year that resulted in an $83.3 million award. The second trial resulted from comments then-President Trump made in 2019 after Carroll first made the accusations publicly in a memoir. Kaplan presided over both trials and instructed the second jury to accept the first jury's finding that Trump had sexually abused Carroll. Arguments in that appeal are set for June 24. The Associated Press does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done. ___
