A Michigan judge dismissed criminal charges Tuesday against 15 Republicans accused of trying to falsely certify President Donald Trump as the winner of the 2020 election, saying that because they seriously believed him, there was no intent to commit fraud.
District Court Judge Kristen D. Simmons' dismissal is a major blow to prosecutors as similar cases in four other states have been muddied with setbacks. Each of the defendants, including a few high profile members of the Republican Party in Michigan,
faced eight charges of forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery, the top charge punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
The effort to secure fake electors was central to the federal indictment against Trump that was abandoned shortly before his second term.
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Investigators said the group met at the Michigan GOP headquarters in December of 2020 and signed a document falsely stating they were the state’s “duly elected and qualified electors,” even though President-elect Joe Biden won Michigan by nearly 155,000 votes, a result confirmed by a GOP-led state Senate investigation in 2021.
Prominent Michigan MAGA activist and former Michigan Republican Party Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock was one of the accused. Her attorney, Nicholas Somberg, told reporters after the hearing that the state attorney general’s office had engaged in a “malicious prosecution.”
“There needs to be major consequences for the people who brought this,” he said.
For now, Chicagoans are describing confusion and anxiety over threats of federal intervention in the nation’s third-largest city. President Donald Trump said Monday that he intends to send in National Guard members from other states as well.
The Supreme Court's emergency docket ruling Monday lifting a restraining order against stopping people based on indiscriminate factors like race, language, job or location is boosting Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Attorney General Pam Bondi applauded the decision, posting on social media: “Now, ICE can continue carrying out roving patrols" without "judicial micromanagement.”
Voto Latino co-founder Maria Teresa Kumar called it a “direct attack on Latino and other communities of color — with nearly 130 million of nonwhite Americans now potentially being subject to the Trump Administration’s racially motivated policing.“
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Judge Simmons said she saw no intent to commit fraud: Whether they were “right, wrong or indifferent,” they “seriously believed” there were problems with the election, the judge said. “I believe they were executing their constitutional right to seek redress.”
Prosecutors in Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona have also filed criminal charges related to the fake electors scheme. None have neared the trial stage amid procedural and appellate delays. Technically, Trump is still a defendant in the Georgia case, but as the sitting president, it is highly unlikely that any prosecution against him could proceed while he’s in office.
The effort to secure fake electors was central to the federal indictment against Trump that was abandoned shortly before he began his second term.
District Court Judge Kristen D. Simmons said in a court hearing that the 15 Republicans will not face trial. They were accused of attempting to falsely certify Trump as the winner of the 2020 election in the battleground state. Tuesday’s dismissal is a major blow to prosecutors as similar cases in four other states have been muddied with setbacks. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, announced the charges over two years ago.
Each member of the group, which included a few high profile members of the Republican Party in Michigan, faced eight charges of forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery. The top felony charges carried a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.
A federal appeals court heard oral arguments Tuesday in the case of a U.S. military contractor ordered to pay $42 million for contributing to the torture and mistreatment of three detainees at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison decades ago. The Reston, Virginia-based CACI says the lower court lacked jurisdiction.
Suhail Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili and Asa’ad Al-Zubae testified at last year’s trial that they were subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, forced nudity and other cruel treatment at the prison during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. A jury awarded each $3 million in compensatory damages and $11 million in punitive damages.
The three did not allege that CACI’s interrogators explicitly inflicted the abuse themselves, but argued CACI was complicit because its interrogators conspired with military police to “soften up” detainees for questioning with harsh treatment. CACI has denied any wrongdoing. Photos of the abuse released in 2004 shocked the world.
Fox dropped 5.3% after Rupert Murdoch’s family said they’ve reached a deal on control of the 94-year-old mogul’s media empire after his death. The agreement ensures that there will be no change in direction at Fox News.
The deal creates a trust establishing control of the Fox Corp. for Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s chosen heir who has been running Fox in recent years, along with his younger sisters, Grace and Chloe. Their older siblings, Prudence MacLeod, Elisabeth Murdoch and James Murdoch, give up any claims to control of Fox in exchange for stock currently valued at $3.3 billion, according to The New York Times, which first reported news of the deal.
It ends a drama that has been like a real-life version of HBO’s “Succession,” only with huge financial implications and an impact on U.S. politics. Fox and its conservative opinion dominates ratings as the go-to network for Trump and his team to spread news.
Adding to concerns about the health of the nation’s economy, the Labor Department reported Tuesday that employers added 911,000 fewer jobs than originally reported from April 2024 through March.
These so-called benchmark revisions are issued every year. The preliminary numbers are intended to better account for new businesses and ones that had gone out of business. Final revisions come out early the next year.
When last year’s revisions showed 818,000 fewer jobs from April 2023 through March 2024, Trump declared the numbers had been rigged to conceal economic weakness and help Democrats in the 2024 election. However, he did not explain why the government revised them downward before voters went to the polls.
American tech companies played a far greater role in designing and building the Chinese surveillance state than was previously known, an Associated Press investigation has found.
They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warningsfrom the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.
It’s a cautionary tale for other countries at a time when the use of surveillance technology worldwide is rising sharply, including in the United States. Emboldened by the Trump administration, U.S. tech companies are more powerful than ever, and Trump has rolled back a Biden-era executive order meant to safeguard civil rights from new surveillance technologies.
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China has used what it learned from the U.S. to turn itself into a surveillance superpower, selling technologies to countries like Iran and Russia. Surveillance tech also now includes artificial intelligence systems that Israel uses to help identify people to kill in its war against Hamas. And the Trump administration uses AI to help track and detain migrants in the U.S.
“Because of this technology … we have no freedom at all,” said Yang Caiying, now in exile in Japan, whose family in China has been trapped in an increasingly tight noose of surveillance. “At the moment, it’s us Chinese that are suffering the consequences, but sooner or later, Americans and others, too, will lose their freedoms.”
Read the main takeaways from the AP investigation
Blasting what it calls sanctuary laws in Chicago and Illinois, the Trump administration said its latest effort targets people without legal permission to live in the U.S. who have criminal records. Its announcement of “Operation Midway Blitz” included mugshots of 11 foreign-born men it said should be deported.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has been locked in a back-and-forth with Trump for days, and Mayor Brandon Johnson have defended the state and city’s extensive sanctuary laws, which bar coordination between local police and immigration agents. They're accusing Trump of using scare tactics, particularly with Latino residents in the nation’s third-largest city.
Trump denies he signed it, and Republicans are supporting this claim after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee posted a picture on social media of a sexually suggestive birthday message for Jeffrey Epstein in a birthday book.
The president has said he did not create the drawing of a curvaceous woman it includes. Trump has filed a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, over a report that described such a page in detail.
Disaster survivors are having to wait longer to get aid from the federal government, according to a new Associated Press analysis of decades of data. On average, it took less than two weeks for a governor’s request for a presidential disaster declaration to be granted in the 1990s and early 2000s. That rose to about three weeks during the past decade under presidents from both major parties. It’s taking more than a month, on average, so far during Trump’s current term, the AP found.
The delays mean individuals must wait to receive federal aid for daily living expenses, temporary lodging and home repairs. Delays in disaster declarations can also hamper recovery efforts by local officials, uncertain whether they will receive federal reimbursement for cleaning up debris and rebuilding infrastructure. The AP collaborated with Mississippi Today and Mississippi Free Press on the effects of these delays for this report.
“The federal government has turned its back on its own people,” said Bob Griffin, dean of the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany in New York. “It’s a fundamental shift in the position of this country.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said Trump is making sure federal tax dollars “are spent wisely to supplement state actions, not replace them.”
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