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Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
Appeals Court Tries To Get To The Bottom Of A 4th Wrongful Deportation
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. On May 7, just 28 minutes after a U.S. appeals court ordered that a Salvadoran man not be removed from the United States, the Trump administration deported him to El Salvador. The Trump administration told the Second Circuit in a filing last week that the wrongful deportation was the result of 'a confluence of administrative errors.' The fourth known wrongful deportation in the opening months of Trump's anti-immigration jihad was first reported by the nonprofit news outlet Investigative Post. The Trump administration's admission that the deportation of Jordin Alexander Melgar-Salmeron was in error came only after the appeals court had ordered the government to respond to a list of nine questions about what had happened in the case. Among the pointed questions posed by the appeals court: 8. What is the Government's overall understanding as to why Petitioner was removed on May 7, 2025 despite an express assurance made to this Court that the Government would forbear from removing Petitioner until May 8, 2025? 9. What is the Government's overall understanding as to why Petitioner was removed at 10:20 a.m. EST on May 7, 2025 despite an existing order from this Court staying removal pending consideration of his Petition for Review? Politico has a good rundown on the specific details of the underlying case. But for our purposes, the apparent violation of the appeals court order (the administration argues it was not a violation because it was an error …) is front and center. The appeals court has given both sides additional time to propose what the next steps in the case should be. A lawyer for Melgar-Salmeron told Politico that he intends to ask the court to order his client's return from El Salvador and to hold Trump administration officials in contempt. With the Kash Patel era at the FBI in full swing, the bureau is shifting significant resources to immigration enforcement and away from other high priority cases, but agents have been told by higher-ups not to document the shift in order to avoid creating a paper trail, CNN reports. AP: Kristi Noem said an immigrant threatened to kill Trump. The story quickly fell apart NYU law professor Ryan Goodman goes deep on the Trump administration's invocation of the state secrets privilege. The TL;DR: 'It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Trump administration is invoking the doctrine here to impede accountability and judicial remedies for official conduct that courts have found unlawful.' As the House GOP megabill that enshrines the Trump II agenda heads to the Senate, a closer look at the provision that appears intended to weaken the federal judiciary by making it harder to enforce contempt of court violations. Henry Farrell, on the apparent rupture between President Trump and the Federalist Society: I am not the kind of expert who can provide plausible predictions about whether the Federalist Society will prevail over the Trump administration, or vice-versa, or what terms they might meet if they find some compromise. My best guess – and it is just a guess – is that Emil Bove's confirmation process will tell us a lot about what happens afterwards. But which side wins and which loses in the bigger contest will have important consequences for the kind of conservatism that prevails, and for the kind of America that we're going to live in. WSJ: 'At least 11 big companies are moving work away from law firms that settled with the administration or are giving—or intend to give—more business to firms that have been targeted but refused to strike deals, according to general counsels at those companies and other people familiar with those decisions.' CNN: The White House is looking to strike a deal with a high-profile school, said the first source, who is involved in the higher education response. 'They want a name-brand university to make a deal like the law firms made a deal that covers not just antisemitism and protests, but DEI and intellectual diversity,' this person said. 'They want Trump to be able to stand up and say he made a deal with so-and-so – an Ivy League school, some sort of name-brand school that gives them cover so they can say, 'We don't want to destroy higher education.'' Asked if any of the schools are inclined to make such a deal, the source said, 'Nobody wants to be the first, but the financial pressures are getting real.' We always knew the Trump purges were merely the first step in a plan to install loyalists throughout government, though 'loyalist' doesn't fully capture the mix of unqualified, deeply compromised, and/or unfit candidates Trump is selecting: Inspectors General: After his mass purge of inspectors general, President Trump is turning to people like former Rep. Anthony D'Esposito (R-NY), who was defeated for re-election in 2024 after he was accused of putting his mistress and his fiancée's daughter on his payroll. D'Esposito is Trump's nominee for Labor Department inspector general. State: 'If you want to know who's running the State Department these days, it helps to peruse the website of a relatively new, conservative-leaning organization called the Ben Franklin Fellowship,' Politico reports. U.S. Office of Special Counsel: After terminating the U.S. special counsel without cause, Trump has nominated conservative lawyer Paul Ingrassia, 30, who has ties to antisemitic extremists. A thoughtful reflection by M. Gessen as we settle in for the long haul: 'As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news.' The COVID vaccine remained on the CDC's schedule for healthy children 6 months to 17 years old despite Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s earlier public announcement. The Guardian: 'Senior officials at the US Department of Veterans Affairs have ordered that VA physicians and scientists not publish in medical journals or speak with the public without first seeking clearance from political appointees of Donald Trump, the Guardian has learned.' After her epic town hall face plant dismissing concerns about Republican Medicaid cuts with the memorable line – 'Well, we all are going to die.' – Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) doubled down with a creepy af video shot in a cemetery:
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
New Details Emerge On Trump Administration's Defiance Of The Courts
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. New details about the extent of the Trump administration's stonewalling in the case of the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia were revealed in a court filing Thursday. After six weeks of what was originally supposed to be two weeks of expedited discovery, the government has provided virtually no meaningful discovery responses, Abrego Garcia's lawyers report. Normal discovery disputes would not usually be newsworthy, but this comes in the context of a contempt of court inquiry. The administration's defiance on discovery and the associated gamesmanship cut against its already-dubious claims that it has complied with the order by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return – an order endorsed and echoed by the Supreme Court. Judge Xinis had ordered the discovery into Abrego Garcia's status and what the government had done and planned to do to facilitate his release from imprisonment in his native El Salvador for two reasons: (i) to pressure the Trump administration to abide by her Supreme Court-backed order to facilitate his return; and (ii) to determine whether the administration had violated her order with sufficient bad faith to constitute contempt of court. After the Trump administration late Wednesday asked for an extension of the May 30 deadline by which all discovery is to be completed, Abrego Garcia's lawyers filed a blistering response demonstrating how little discovery the government has produced so far. It was already clear from public filings that the government had offered witnesses for deposition who had little or no personal knowledge of the facts of the case, in contravention of the judge's order. The precise details of that defiance are unclear because many filings remain under seal. The new details show how desultory the government's document production has been, too. As of two weeks ago, the government had only produced 34 actual documents. In the subsequent two weeks it was given in which to produce rolling discovery, it coughed up a total of one additional partial document, according to Abrego Garcia's filing. 'This is far from a good faith effort to comply with court ordered discovery. It is reflective of a pattern of deliberate delay and bad faith refusal to comply with court orders,' Abrego Garcia's lawyers argued in opposing the extension request. 'The patina of promises by Government lawyers to do tomorrow that which they were already obligated to do yesterday has worn thin.' Abrego Garcia's lawyers say the government document production has included what they characterize as 'makeweight,' non-responsive copies of existing filings in the case and of other publicly available materials that aren't new or pertinent. 'Zero documents produced to Plaintiffs to date reflect any efforts made to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release and return to the United States,' they say (emphasis theirs). Judge Xinis wasn't buying it either. 'Assertions of diligence notwithstanding, Defendants have offered no explanation as to why they could not produce any additional documents on a rolling basis, as they had agreed could be accomplished during the May 16, 2025 hearing,' Xinis wrote yesterday when she denied the administration's request to extend the discovery deadline. In addition to the paucity of document production, the government has still not fully responded to the limited set of interrogatories that the judge approved for the expedited discovery, Abrego Garcia's lawyers say. The Trump DOJ lawyers have also engaged in low-rent gamesmanship, Abrego Garcia's lawyers say. While the government told the court that it had attempted to confer with them about the request to extend the deadline, in fact the DOJ lawyers reached out at 11:35 p.m. and filed their request an hour later without waiting for Abrego Garcia's lawyers to respond. 'This is hardly a good faith attempt to obtain Plaintiffs' position,' Xinis observed in a footnote. Petty gamesmanship aside, the constitutional and real-world implications of the Abrego Garcia case remain enormous. The pace of the defiance has slowed since the flurry of activity in mid-March, but the constitutional clash is no less real now that it was then. '[T]he Government has engaged in a pattern of intentional stonewalling and obfuscation—all in service of delaying the inevitable conclusion, which is that it has not done anything to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return,' his lawyers concluded in their latest filing. 'More time will not change this, but it will multiply the prejudice to Abrego Garcia, who remains in unlawful custody in El Salvador.' The big constitutional clashes are happening in anti-immigration cases where the underlying facts are often less important than the Trump administration's conduct in court, which can be hard for laypeople to follow. The action (and often inaction) can devolve into complicated procedural maneuvering and legal arguments, so the challenge in covering these cases is to find ways to breathe life into them because they're so important: In one of the best pieces I've read in a while, Adam Unikowsky unpacks the Alien Enemies Act case out of Texas that the Supreme Court has already weighed in on and which appears to be a likely vehicle for the big decisions it will make on the AEA. Steve Vladeck unravels the third country deportations case out of Massachusetts which didn't seem nearly as urgent as the AEA cases until the Trump administration started its extreme shenanigans. President Trump has gone after the courts, his own judicial appointees, the Federalist Society, and now his Supreme Court whisperer Leonard Leo. NYT: Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans Passing through Nashville last night, I caught a freewheeling set of mostly Beatles covers by the bluegrass band Greenwood Rye. Here's a recent sampling (with a different lineup of musicians):
Winnipeg Free Press
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Explosive and techy tales set to open local theatre seasons
On the heels of particularly strong 2024 production years, the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre and Theatre Projects Manitoba have each announced the shows slated for their 2025-26 seasons. Under the artistic direction of Suzie Martin, Theatre Projects Manitoba (TPM) continues the company's tradition of homegrown storytelling, kicking off its season with an innovative and potentially explosive, multi-tiered production of O.G.I. (The Only Good Indian). Each incarnation 'recruits a new artist to step into the radical headspace of a suicide bomber,' the description reads. 'In turn, each performer straps themselves into a suicide vest — and struggles to rationalize to the audience such an 'irrational decision.'' Written and performed by Debbie Patterson, Hazel Venzon, Eric Plamondon, Jivesh Parasram and Tom Arthur Davis, the original production burbles with intrigue and potential for thought-provoking drama. Set to run inside Prairie Theatre Exchange's Colin Jackson Studio Theatre from Sept. 18 to 27, O.G.I. promises to be a pressurized experiment in storytelling for its performers and audiences alike. Developed by the ever-mobile One Trunk Theatre at various stops along TPM's annual live art trade route, The Martian and the Mound was concocted with citizens and artists throughout southern Manitoba, with premières planned in Neubergthal (Oct. 17-19), Morden (Oct. 31-Nov. 2) and at the Gas Station Arts Centre (Nov. 14-17). Performed by Morden's Candlewick Players, the show, written by Andraea Sartison (Ponderosa Pine), follows Dr. Phoenix Albright, an archaeologist from the red planet investigating a mysterious, magnetic 'pull' beneath a Manitoba mound. Following stagings of David Yee's among men and Armin Wiebe's The Recipe, TPM will partner with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre for the third consecutive year. Local playwright Trish Cooper's Holland, directed by Martin, tells the story of married couple Carrie and Paul, who aim to meet their disabled child's best interests while contending with an antagonistic social worker. Holland (Feb. 4-21 at the Tom Hendry Warehouse) is Cooper's second original script to be staged by the RMTC in a two-year span following 2024's The Comeback. At Winnipeg Jewish Theatre, artistic and managing director Dan Petrenko has constructed a season built around two 10-day productions and a pair of limited engagements. The company's 38th regular season begins at the Berney Theatre with the Dev Hynes-scored JOB The Play, a techy therapy comedy written by American playwright Max Wolf Friedlich (Sept. 11-21), followed by a reading of playwright-in-residence Alex Poch-Goldin's The Right Road to Pontypool. A creation centred on early 20th-century entrepreneur Moishe Yukle Bernstein's efforts to carve out space for Jewish summertime recreation in a small Ontario town where mostly Protestants resided (Nov. 22-23). The season closes with RIDE, a real-life musical about a 19th-century Bostonian — a Latvian Jewish immigrant named Annie Cohen Kopchovsky — who, under the name Annie Londonderry, became the first woman to ride her bicycle around the world (April 16-26). A bonus production of a 'top secret surprise musical' has also been programmed for two nights (May 22-23) at an undisclosed venue. Ben WaldmanReporter Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the Free Press while earning his degree at Ryerson University's (now Toronto Metropolitan University's) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. Read more about Ben. Every piece of reporting Ben produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump Admin Signals It Will Return One Wrongfully Deported Man
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. In what could be a major breakthrough, the Trump administration told a federal court Wednesday that it has taken affirmative steps to retrieve an unlawfully deported Guatemalan man and return him to the United States so that he can receive the due process he was initially denied. It was the first concession of its kind that the Trump administration has made in the handful of cases where courts have ordered it to facilitate the return of wrongfully deported foreign nationals and which have become the focal point of a constitutional clash between President Trump and the judiciary. The concession comes in the case of O.C.G., a gay man who had succeeded in U.S. immigration court at not being deported to his home country but whom the Trump administration them immediately deported to Mexico., which in turn sent him to Guatemala. In his immigration court hearing, the man claimed to have been previously kidnapped and raped in Mexico, but the immigration judge (probably correctly, under current law) said the case at hand was limited to Guatemala. O.C.G.'s situation emerged in a larger case in federal court in Massachusetts challenging third country deportations without notice and hearing. It's the same case where the Trump administration tried to get around a court order with last week's deportation flight to South Sudan. The government alerted the court of its efforts to return O.C.G. in a filing that said certain paperwork had already been completed and that the administration 'is currently working with ICE Air to bring O.C.G. back to the United States on an Air Charter Operations (ACO) flight return leg.' A few words of caution about what this means for O.C.G. and the other 'facilitate' cases: O.C.G. is not back yet. Throughout his business and political life President Trump has dragged his feet at every step of litigation, including later stages after concessions have been made or a settlement reached. While this is a significant step compared to the previous defiance, it's not a done deal yet. Unlike Kilmar Abrego Garcia and 'Cristian,' the other two major 'facilitate' cases, O.C.G. was not incarcerated after his deportation. He has remained in hiding in Guatemala, not in prison. That distinction is one that the administration may use to justify not similarly returning other wrongfully deported migrants. Unlike Cristian and the dozens of others incarcerated at CECOT in El Salvador, O.C.G. wasn't deported under the Alien Enemies Act, which the Trump administration has sought to use as an entirely separate legal basis for removals and will likely use to distinguish O.C.G.'s case. All of which is to say that while the administration's signal that it will abide by the court order to facilitate O.C.G.'s return is a potential breakthrough that undermines its legal position in other cases, I'd caution against leaping to the conclusion that it is the beginning of a wholesale walk-back of the administration's outrageous conduct in these key anti-immigration cases. In one of the most obtuse judicial opinions you'll ever encounter, U.S. District Judge Michael E. Farbiarz of New Jersey ruled that the Trump administration's attempt to deport Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist, was likely unconstitutional, but stopped short of ordering Khalil's release until both parties can file further briefs. Education Secretary Linda McMahon provided valuable evidence on national TV that the Trump administration is targeting universities for illegitimate political reasons: President Trump announced his plan to nominate his former criminal defense attorney, now serving as the No. 3 at the Justice Department to a coveted seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit (which covers PA, NJ, DE, and the USVI). Bove has been a leading figure in rapidly bringing the Justice Department firmly under Trump White House control, erasing its storied independence and eroding its professional reputation. Trump's social media post announcing Bove's nomination to the lifetime seat on the appeals court described the job in startling political terms: 'He will end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.' Following on remarks from U.S. pardon attorney Ed Martin, President Trump confirmed he is considering pardoning the violent extremists convicted in the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), falsely claiming that they 'got railroaded.' President Trump pardoned former Rep. Michael Grimm, the Staten Island Republican who resigned from Congress in 2015 and did prison time for tax fraud. Grimm was paralyzed last year in a horseback riding accident. Trump has now pardoned a total of nine members of Congress convicted of corruption and/or tax crimes. Grimm wasn't the only corrupt politician among the more than two dozen people Trump pardoned yesterday, a list that included political allies of his. The kicker to Trump's pardonpalooza: Trump is exacting retribution against more than three dozen former death row inmates whose sentences President Biden commuted by sending them to the nation's only 'supermax' prison. A judge has cleared the way for those transfers, saying the inmates had not yet exhausted their administrative remedies with the Bureau of Prisons, a necessary predicate to filing their federal lawsuits. Nancy Marks, one-time campaign manager to ousted Rep. George Santos (R-NY), avoided jail time for her role in his campaign finance schemes. The ousted fabulist congressman was sentenced last month to seven years in prison. Her possible cooperation with investigators against Santos has never been confirmed. 'I'm going to leave that an enigma,' her lawyer said. CBS News parent Paramount has offered $15 million to settle Donald Trump's bogus lawsuit against it for how it edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign. Trump is holding out for $25 million and an apology, but Paramount executive are leery of paying more than the going rate for these corrupt settlements of spurious Trump lawsuits because it might expose them to legal liability, the WSJ reports: During the Trump-suit negotiations, one sticking point for Paramount executives has been whether a settlement could expose directors and officers to liability in potential future shareholder litigation or criminal charges for bribing a public official, according to people familiar with the conversations. By settling within the range of what other companies have paid to end litigation with Trump, some Paramount executives hope to minimize such liability, some of the people said. Paramount is eager to settle for its own corrupt purpose: winning government approval for a planned merger. The Court of International Trade blocked major elements of President Trump's regimen of massive tariffs, ruling that he had exceeded his statutory authority and usurped Congress' role. HHS has undermined the county's capacity to fight future influenza pandemics by cancelling a $600 million contract with Moderna to develop flu vaccines. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blindsided CDC officials with his surprise announcement on social media that he was unilaterally changing the government's guidance on who should get COVID vaccines and when. A massive chunk of Switzerland's Birch Glacier – destabilized by climate change – came loose, unleashing a debris flow that almost completely wiped out an already-evacuated Alpine village. The BBC has video of the shock wave advancing across the valley floor.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Trump's Weaponization Of DOJ Takes A Even More Sinister Turn
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. I'll catch you up on the rest of the news from over the long weekend in a moment, but first I wanted to give you just a taste of the level of insanity that the Justice Department and the FBI have already descended to four months into Trump's second term. We were steeled for the retributive attacks on the Trump and Jan. 6 prosecutions, but what is also beginning to emerge is a three-prong revisionist attack on the rule of law that attempts to target: (i) other past prosecutions of right-wing extremists; (ii) public corruption convictions of every style and flavor; and (iii) other MAGA hobby horses and conspiracy theories A quick rundown of the latest extreme developments: In a social media post on Memorial Day, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced the bureau is either re-opening or giving new resources and attention to: the 2023 discovery of cocaine in the Biden White House; the 2022 leak of the Supreme Court's draft Dobbs decision; and the Jan. 5-6, 2021 Capitol pipe bombs outside the two party HQs. (Astute readers will note that those last two probes aren't necessarily going to yield right-wing friendly storylines.) In a recent podcast, senior Trump DOJ official Ed Martin, who is now the U.S. pardon attorney, said that he is going to take a 'hard look' at pardoning two men convicted in the 2020 conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). 'In my opinion these are victims just like January 6,' Martin said. In the same vein, Martin trumpeted the Memorial Day pardon of a Virginia sheriff convicted of federal bribery charges who was set to report to jail today. In a measure of the madness, Martin reposted celebratory tweets from notorious Trump pardon recipients Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. Recall that Martin is also serving as the chieftain of the DOJ 'Weaponization Working Group,' which makes this rah-rah tweet about the sheriff's pardon particularly revealing about the weaponization that is really going on: Kate Shaw: 'The court may believe that it retains the ultimate authority to check presidential lawlessness, even as it signs off on the elimination of many other constraints on presidential power. The danger is that by the time the court tries to exercise that authority, it may be too late.' Steve Vladeck: 'And if the unitary executive theory is subject to exceptions for contexts in which the practical consequences of eliminating an agency's independence would be too extreme, then it's not much of a theory. Rather, it's just a balancing test—for those agencies that are 'too important' to be subject to direct, partisan political control and those that aren't. Conceding that point would suggest that agency independence is not presumptively unconstitutional; and that one must do more than just wave their hands at the 'unitary executive theory' to explain why dozens of statutes Congress has enacted over more than a century protecting different agencies and officers from direct presidential control are unconstitutional.' WSJ: Judges Weigh Taking Control of Their Own Security Amid Threats Charlie Savage: Judges Keep Calling Trump's Actions Illegal, but Undoing Them Is Hard Sam Bagenstos: 'In many of the cases in which Trump has acted unlawfully, there is no single, discrete decision that demonstrates the violation. Rather, the violation emerges from a very large series of decisions — mass firings of employees, mass terminations of grants, widespread failures to spend appropriated money. The administration may say that each of these decisions was made on its own merits, but the fact that the government made the same decision over and over belies that assertion; the mass decision-making itself demonstrates that the administration was unlawfully refusing to carry out the programs created and funded by Congress.' U.S. District Judge John Bates of Washington, D.C. offered a rousing defense of the First Amendment in knocking down the Trump executive order targeting Jenner & Block. Some of the big law firms who struck deals with President Trump are now being inundated with pro bono requests from MAGA world, the NYT reports. Boston, Part I: In a closely watched case, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy on Friday ordered the Trump administration to arrange the return of a gay Guatemalan man who was deported to Mexico without notice or hearing. Boston, Part II: In the fight over the deportation flight to South Sudan, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued a scathing rebuke Monday of the Trump administration for asking him to reconsider and pause his order requiring due process for the deportees (emphasis his): '[T]he Court accepted Defendants' own suggestion that they be allowed to keep the individuals out of the country and finish their process abroad.' Texas: After the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay that shielded the Trump administration from answering tough questions from a federal judge in an Alien Enemies Act case, the family of the Venezuelan man who brought the lawsuit voluntarily dismissed it for reasons that remain unclear. In Trump's latest attack, a draft letter obtained by the NYT shows the administration is set to cancel all remaining federal funding for Harvard. This comes after a federal judge on Friday immediately blocked the administration's attempt to ban international students at the university, part of a larger dispute over unprecedented demands by the government for data on international students. The Texas Legislature has taken another step closer to bringing higher education in the state more firmly under partisan political control. Breaking … NPR sued President Trump this morning over his executive order purporting to federal funding for public broadcasting. The executive producer of the PBS series 'American Masters' insisted on removing a scene critical of President Trump from a documentary about the comic artist Art Spiegelman two weeks before it was set to air, the NYT reports. The Pentagon has promoted Kingsley Wilson to press secretary despite her history of antisemitic comments, the Jewish Insider reports. USA Today: 'President Donald Trump used the presidential seal at his multi-million-dollar dinner with crypto investors despite the White House saying it was a private rather than official event, according to a social media post from a Chinese billionaire who attended the event.' A bronze plaque intended to honor law enforcement who defended the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack is instead gathering dust in a Capitol basement utility room.
