Former Las Vegas City Councilwoman Michele Fiore was found guilty Thursday of using money raised for a statue of a fallen police officer for personal expenses, The Hill reported. The Nevada Republican was convicted of one count of conspiracy and six counts of federal wire fraud, with each carrying a penalty of up to 20 years in jail.
Fiore, who once ran for Nevada governor, will be sentenced on Jan. 6 and will likely never serve in political office again. The 54-year-old was found guilty after taking funds raised for a statue that would honor Metropolitan Police Department Officer Alyn Beck, who the Las Vegas Review-Journal noted was killed in the line of duty in 2014.
A political action committee and charity set up for the purpose raked in tens of thousands of dollars for what donors thought would be a memorial. Instead, Fiore used the money for plastic surgery, rent, and to help pay for her daughter's wedding.
Federal prosecutor Dahoud Askar told the jury she "used a tragedy to line her pockets." The jury agreed with that assessment, finding her guilty on all counts after only two hours of deliberation.
In January 2020, the Alyn Beck Memorial Park was opened to the public. It included a statue in Beck's honor that was funded nearly entirely by Olympia Companies, the developer of the planned community where the park was located, as Fiore was well aware.
Nevertheless, Fiore continued to raise funds for the statue between January 2019 and February 2020. By the time her scheme had concluded, she had siphoned off most of the money, leaving just a few hundred dollars in the accounts.
Several individuals, including Gov. Joe Lombardo, were unwittingly caught up in Fiore's scheme. The Nevada Republican contributed $5,000 left over from his campaign to fund the project.
Michael Sanft, Fiore's attorney, attempted to equate Lombardo's donation of his campaign funds, which is allowed by Nevada law, with Fiore's scheme. Federal Prosecutor Alexander Gottfried rightfully pointed out that there's a "pretty big difference" between the two.
Bank records revealed exactly what Fiore did wrong. Prosecutors showed that donation checks deposited into the political action committee's account were then transferred straight to daughter Sheena Siegel, with dates and amounts that lined up perfectly.
Lost in the ugliness of Fiore's conviction is the fallen hero she used as a prop. Fox News reported that on June 8, 2014, a married couple walked into a restaurant where Beck and Officer Igor Soldo were having lunch and shot them in an unprompted attack.
The couple, Jerad and Amanda Miller, also killed one civilian in the process. The shooting spree ended after Amanda shot several rounds into her husband before killing herself.
The senseless violence was blamed on extremism as the couple had radical views. Unfortunately, these views led to the crime that took the life of Beck, who was 41 years old, and left his wife a widow and three children fatherless.
Soldo, just 31 at the time of his death, left behind a wife and a baby. His sister-in-law, Colleen Soldo, said he was a "great guy" and a good father to his child.
Fiore's crimes are unconscionable, and she deserves to spend every day in prison that the judge ultimately sees fit. Stealing is a terrible crime as it is, but doing so while benefitting from a tragedy in this way is disgraceful.
A federal judge in Missouri granted a temporary pause on Thursday of yet another plan by President Joe Biden to redistribute the student loan debt of 30 million borrowers after a judge in Georgia let the previous injunction expire.
Six conservative states got Georgia to pause the plan initially, but the judge there who originally granted the injunction decided that it didn't have standing to pursue the case there.
U.S. District Court Judge J. Randal Hall agreed that Missouri does have standing, however, and U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp quickly stepped in to pause the plan before it could begin being implemented on Monday.
“This is yet another win for the American people,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said in a statement. “The Court rightfully recognized Joe Biden and Kamala Harris cannot saddle working Americans with Ivy League debt.”
The other states that joined the suit were Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, North Dakota and Ohio.
Biden latched onto student loan forgiveness as a way to get younger voters to vote for him, a moot point now that Vice President Kamala Harris is the candidate.
Of course, she will claim that she was every bit as involved as he was in the plan, but it hasn't achieved universal popularity given that many young people are deciding not to go to college due to inflation and better opportunities in the trades.
For someone who has $30 to $40,000 in student loan debt, the idea of loan forgiveness sounds really great, but nobody who goes straight to work after high school will be thrilled with the idea of paying off other people's college loans.
The courts have consistently pushed back on Biden's numerous student loan forgiveness programs, saving taxpayers billions of dollars while I'm sure some borrowers are disappointed to have to pay off their own loans.
The courts still have to make a final decision on this one, but for now, the status quo will continue.
Jack Smith may have impaired Donald Trump's right to a fair trial by releasing a detailed evidentiary brief to the public, a legal pundit for left-wing CBS admitted.
With his January 6th prosecution stalled, Smith took the unusual step of releasing a 165-page filing claiming Trump "resorted to crimes" to stay in power after the 2020 election.
Smith wanted to bring Trump to trial before the 2024 presidential election, but the prosecution has been bogged down in appeals.
In July, the Supreme Court sided with Trump in a historic dispute on presidential immunity, which forced Smith to revise the indictment.
The trial judge, Tanya Chutkan, released a lengthy evidentiary brief from Smith on Wednesday, raising concerns about the jury pool being tainted.
The Supreme Court's "vague" guidelines explain the "unusual" detail in Smith's motions, CBS legal contributor Rebecca Roiphe said. But, she added, it's not a stretch for Trump to now argue his rights are being trampled on.
“And so, you know, I think that’s worth pausing and mentioning that the former president’s argument that this was interfering with his constitutional right to a fair trial, you know, it’s not a far-fetched argument to make given how much detail is actually in there,” she said.
While Smith charges Trump with electoral interference, Smith is doing just that by releasing a gratuitous legal brief ahead of the presidential election, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said.
With no chance of the case proceeding before the election, Smith has no legal reason for releasing the evidence now, McCarthy said. The apparent purpose of Smith's move is to affect the presidential election, in which Trump is the Republican candidate.
"In fact, in most cases, a judge would be concerned about, for example, poisoning or prejudicing against the defendant a jury pool. In most cases a judge would be very concerned that evidence not be broadcast in public without the usual due process cautions that go on in a trial that the defendant be presumed innocent, the fact that allegations are not evidence of anything,” McCarthy continued.
“The point of releasing this now can only be to affect the election. There is no legal need for it.”
While there is no legal justification for what Smith is doing, he has an obvious political incentive: if Trump wins the presidency, Smith's prosecution is in jeopardy.
Donald Trump's former lawyer-turned-enemy, Michael Cohen, wants the Supreme Court to let him sue Trump for alleged government retaliation during the Trump administration.
Cohen claims that he served part of his federal prison sentence in solitary confinement because he criticized Trump in a tell-all book.
In 2018, Cohen pled guilty to tax evasion, campaign finance charges, and lying to Congress. He was sentenced to three years in prison, serving over a year in jail before getting released to home confinement during COVID.
But Cohen wasn't out long before he was brought to solitary confinement, where he spent 16 days.
The government accused Cohen of rejecting terms of his release, but Cohen has accused the Trump administration of political persecution.
A federal judge ruled that Cohen faced "retaliation" and ordered him released, but Cohen continued to press the matter, suing Trump and his Justice Department for damages. An appeals court in January found that Cohen could not claim damages under the law, leading him to petition the Supreme Court.
"The issue is whether the government can revoke a prisoner's approved release to home confinement as punishment for his speech criticizing the president and to prevent further such speech," his lawyer, Jon-Michael Dougherty, wrote in a Supreme Court brief.
Cohen has accused Trump of weaponizing the government against him, echoing a charge Trump has levied at Democrats in a host of criminal and civil cases.
"It is about the exercise of a type of power with which the Founders were well-acquainted and against which they fought a war for independence," Cohen's lawyer wrote. "It involves the sitting President personally and unlawfully intervening to hold a United States citizen in prison for criticizing him."
Despite his criminal past, Cohen resurfaced as the star witness in Trump's "hush money" criminal trial this year. Trump was convicted of "falsifying business records" for labeling reimbursement checks to Cohen - who paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels - as legal fees.
During the trial, Trump's lawyers painted Cohen as an aggrieved witness with a financial stake in Trump's destruction. Cohen faced scrutiny at the time for blasting Trump in paid TikTok videos.
Cohen celebrated the verdict, which Trump has sought to overturn, citing the Supreme Court's historic immunity ruling. Trump's sentencing in the case has been delayed until after the presidential election.
A crucial document from special counsel Jack Smith, which includes information gathered in his investigation into the alleged actions of former president Donald Trump to question the validity of presidential authority after the 2020 election, has been made public by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan.
After the Supreme Court's ruling in July that Trump is entitled to some kind of protection from federal charges, the 165-page brief gives the most complete look at the material that federal prosecutors have accumulated in their case, as Breitbart News reported.
A fresh brief from the prosecution argues that Trump's actions did not qualify for immunity since they were personal and not subject to public scrutiny.
They restated the charges against Trump and provided fresh details about the copious amounts of material they have gathered so far.
Ahead of Election Day, Trump and his associates allegedly prepared to contest the results and pushed Vice President Mike Pence to disregard Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021, according to the document.
"When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office," Smith and his team wrote.
Smith has broken down his filing into four sections. Part one details the accusations leveled against Trump, including details from the indictment.
Next, we have a section that "establishes that nothing the Government intends to present to the jury is protected by presidential immunity." This part lays out the legal concerns surrounding presidential immunity. The last section explains the government's request to the court, which is to determine that Trump is required to appear in court for trial.
Three types of presidential acts were defined by the high court, each with its own degree of immunity: Absolute immunity is granted to actions that are performed within the exclusive constitutional authority of a president, while the presumption of immunity is granted to official acts. Unofficial acts are not entitled to immunity.
Smith's brief contends that Trump's attempt to secure a second term in office was a "private criminal endeavor," rather than one that involved official conduct. Additionally, Smith contends that Trump attempted to overturn the election in his capacity as a candidate, rather than as president.
"The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so," prosecutors wrote.
"Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was a fundamentally private one."
A spokesman for Trump's campaign, Steven Cheung, vilified the release of the filing, saying it was a "falsehood-ridden" statement and "unconstitutional."
"This entire case is a partisan, unconstitutional witch hunt that should be dismissed entirely, together with all of the remaining Democrat hoaxes," he said.
Smith's office has declined journalists' requests for comment.
Letitia James' $454 million judgment against Donald Trump is in danger of unraveling as a New York appeals court examines the "monstrously stretched" substance of the case, according to a legal expert.
Andrew McCarthy, a conservative pundit and former federal prosecutor, said Trump is likely to have his penalty reduced in the "unabashedly politicized" case.
Attorney general James has alleged the case is straightforward, arguing Trump defrauded the public by inflating his assets in his business dealings with high-level banks and insurers. But judges on a mid-level New York appeals court weren't so sure, with one calling the size of the judgment "troubling."
Trump, and others in the business world, have warned that James is setting a chilling precedent that will chase businesses out of New York, especially because there are no victims in the case.
In an article for the New York Post, McCarthy argued that James stretched a consumer protection statue beyond recognition in order to harass Trump. The law she used was "never meant to turn the AG into what James aspires to be: the uber-regulator of all business conducted in the Empire State," McCarthy asserted.
But James won the case with help from a compliant, partisan judge, Arthur Engoron, who found Trump liable before the trial even began and ordered him to pay $454 million.
"As night follows day, Engoron gave her what she wanted; in conjunction with interest charges that continue to compound, the staggering result is nearly $500 million — a corporate death penalty," McCarthy wrote.
While James stretched the law to get her corrupt outcome, the case rests on legal quicksand, McCarthy warned.
Indeed, a five-judge panel of New York's Appellate Division sounded skeptical of James' case last week, with some questioning if she stretched the law too far. The judges noted the sophistication of the financial actors Trump dealt with, suggesting James' consumer fraud case wasn't appropriate.
"Mostly, the judges worried aloud that the AG had overstepped her jurisdiction and had no business refereeing private transactions between sophisticated financial actors," McCarthy wrote.
McCarthy cautioned that a "sweeping" Trump victory is not in the bag, but "a significant reduction in the ludicrous penalty is very likely."
The same appeals court previously lowered Trump's gargantuan $454 million bond payment, which enabled him to freeze collection as James threatened to begin seizing Trump's assets.
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
A legal team from the ADF is asking a federal court in California to put an immediate halt to a ban in the state on political parody.
That was imposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom just weeks ago.
"California's war against political memes is censorship, plain and simple. We shouldn't trust the government to decide what is true in our online political debates. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed two laws punishing political speech, with one law taking effect immediately, just as the election season heated up – a time when we need more speech, not less," explained Jonathan Scruggs, a lawyer with the organization.
"That includes political parody and satire, a type of expression that has been used throughout our nation's history. While lawmakers act as if posting and sharing memes is a threat to democracy, these laws target speech California officials don't like.
"We are urging the court to immediately halt enforcement of the law in effect now and to affirm the right of The Babylon Bee and Ms. Rickert to speak freely about political matters online."
The fight is over a case brought against the state in U.S. District Court there on behalf of the Babylon Bee and others.
The dispute is over the state's demand to censor political memes and satire, a move that has been described as threatening online political speech throughout the state.
WND previously reported as the battle heated up and Newsom, who has faced mockery for his state's high taxes, extremism on social issues like abortion and transgenderism, attempts to interfere with other states and their rights, took chutzpah to a new level.
That, by the way, derives from a Hebrew word meaning "insolence," "cheek" or "audacity."
He signed a law banning parody.
The report said video creator Christopher Kohls is charging Newsom with violations of the First and 14th Amendments with Newsom's "anti-deepfake measure" that was signed into law this week.
California's governor was offended by a parody released by "Mr. Reagan" recently:
In it "Kamala Harris" confirms she is the Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden "exposed his senility at the debate."
She confesses she is the "ultimate diversity hire," as a woman and a "person of color."
"So if you criticize anything I say you're both sexist and racist."
The mockery continues.
The video uses AI-generated audio clips, and it was shared by Elon Musk, collecting more than 100 million views.
Newsom responded:
The lawsuit in federal court in California charges that Newsom's scheme is a flagrant use of "state power to force private social media companies to censor private citizens' speech by purging election-related AI-generated content."
Musk's comment? "You're not gonna believe this, but Gavin Newsom, just announced that he signed a LAW to make parody illegal, based on this video."
He concludes California needs "new leadership."
However, taking on Newsom directly was the Babylon Bee, which prominently announced it has "'obtained this exclusive, official, 100% real Gavin Newsom election ad."
In it, "Newsom" states:
This is a message for the people of America, given in my authentically recorded non-AI voice. Thanks to my leadership over the last several years, California has become a world leader in extremist left-wing governance. My policies were so effective that almost 1 million people are now fleeing the state every year. We even ran out of U-Hauls.
During the COVID pandemic, I locked everyone in their homes and shut down businesses for months. Not the French Laundry, though. That's my favorite restaurant. Last year, I cleaned up the dangerous, messy streets of San Francisco. You know, because Chinese Communist President Xi was coming. And I really wanted to impress him. He's my boss, after all.
This year, I signed legislation that allows me to take custody of your kid if you refuse to give him artificial hormones and chop off his genitals. Because if you don't do that, you're a bigot. And bigots shouldn't be allowed to have kids. I've also led the way in green energy by banning all cars that don't run on electricity. Then I banned almost all the electricity. This is smart leadership.
On my watch, the cost of living and homelessness have skyrocketed. Schools are failing. Drug dealers and human traffickers are pouring across the border. And poop has covered the sidewalks of San Francisco. This is the positive, joyful vision we offer as Democrats.
That's why I'm enthusiastically endorsing Kamala Harris for president in 2024. She'll do to the country everything I did in California. Anyway, I'm California Governor Gavin Newsom, and I approve this 100% real message, which is a recording of my voice without the assistance of any AI whatsoever.
This isn't a deepfake. And you can rest assured that it isn't, because I just signed an unconstitutional law outlawing deepfakes. No one would dare violate it. Thank you, and science bless America.
A prominent left-wing legal pundit predicts that the Supreme Court will side with Donald Trump as he fights an appeal from prosecutor Jack Smith to revive criminal charges over classified documents.
In a stunning move in July, federal judge Aileen Cannon threw out the documents case after ruling that Smith was appointed improperly. Smith has brought the case to the 11th Circuit Appeals court.
Smith has argued that Cannon's decision contradicts long-standing precedent on appointing Special Counsels. Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor and frequent critic of Trump from the left, predicted in a recent podcast that the 11th Circuit will see things Smith's way.
But Kirschner warned that the Supreme Court's "radical" conservative wing might vindicate Trump in the end, like the court has done in some other high-profile cases.
"We know that all bets are off when it comes to what that radical right-wing six-justice block of the Supreme Court will do to try to continue to help Donald Trump," Kirschner said.
This summer, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that presidents are presumptively immune from prosecution, forcing Smith to recalibrate his indictment in a separate January 6th case and slowing down his already delayed prosecution further.
But the court's conservative bloc hasn't been as uniformly favorable to Trump as Kirschner described. Amy Coney Barrett, for example, sided with the liberal wing in a separate January 6th case that touched on charges that Trump faces.
In separate comments to Newsweek, Kirschner conceded that he is "pretty confident" the Supreme Court will overrule Judge Cannon, despite his apparent belief that conservative jurists are biased in Trump's favor.
He noted that other justices failed to join Justice Clarence Thomas when he cast doubt on Smith's authority in the immunity case.
"If other justices found it persuasive, they would have joined or they could've joined. Right?" Kirschner asked.
It isn't just conservative jurists who are casting a skeptical eye on legal efforts against Trump. Last week, a Democratic appeals court in New York called the $454 million verdict in Trump's civil fraud case "troubling," raising the possibility Trump could win a reversal in the future.
Still, many Democrats can't help but a see a corrupt pattern in Trump's court victories. Maybe the problem isn't with the courts, but the partisan prosecutors driving these cases.
This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Colorado was taken over by liberals through a political coup a good number of years ago. Leftists with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank strategically donated to key state legislative races to defeat conservatives, and the result now is a legislature dominated by Democrats and other extremists.
The results were predictable: State and local boards have followed suit, and the state now has a defined agenda to attack Christians and their faith, what with formal state bureaucrats' attacks on a baker who refused to promote same-sex marriages and a web designer who did the same.
The state lost both of those fights, incidentally, at the Supreme Court, which scolded the far-left enclave in the Rocky Mountains for its official bigotry against Christianity.
But the state now has a homosexual multimillionaire governor, Jared Polis, who scooped buckets of cash from the internet when the medium was new, and a far-left secretary of state, Jena Griswold, who tried to throw the GOP's nominee for president this year, President Donald Trump, off the ballot because of her own opinions about him.
The latest battle now comes through the actions of a like-minded local board, a school board in Jefferson County, which encompasses suburbs just to the west of Denver.
There, its officials have decided to require students to share, on school trips, rooms, beds and showers and more with classmates of the opposite sex.
The ADF has brought a legal fight now to the district and lawyer Kate Anderson explained, "Parents, not the government, have the right and duty to direct the upbringing and education of their children, and that includes making decisions to protect their child's privacy."
She said, "JeffCo currently asks students who identify as transgender to choose, with their parents, whether they will share accommodations with students of the same or opposite sex. This is done confidentially, without divulging the private information of any other student. Yet JeffCo rooms all other children based on gender identity without giving those students or their parents the same information or choice."
She explained, "That policy violates parents' right to direct their children's care and protect their privacy. It violates students' rights to bodily privacy. And it threatens the religious freedom of parents and students alike. JeffCo must provide parents with the information they need to make the best decisions for their children. We urge the court to grant our clients' reasonable request for equal treatment and protect their constitutional freedoms as this case continues in the courts."
The results in court, of course, often are unpredictable, and especially so in Colorado where the judiciary has fought multiple corruption scandals in recent years.
The new case is on behalf of three families asking the court to stop Jefferson County Public Schools from requiring their children to share beds, bedrooms, and shower facilities with students of the opposites sex on school-sponsored overnight trips.
The school imposes those requirements on students with no advance notice, or alternatives.
In fact, the Jefferson County schools demand that students be assigned roommates on school trips based on "gender identity."
The current motion pending in the Wailes v. Jefferson County Public Schools case, in federal court in Colorado, is a request that the court instruct the district to stop the schools from requiring "children …. share beds, bedrooms, and shower facilities with students of the opposite sex."
Legal analyst Glenn Kirschner says "all bets are off" if the Supreme Court reviews former President Donald Trump's Florida case dismissal, Newsweek reported. The Trump-hating pundit believes that the conservative-majority high court will side with the former president even if a lower appeals court does not.
Trump has been battling several state and federal charges related to his supposed effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. The Supreme Court gave him a break when it decided 6-3 that much of his conduct fell under presidential immunity.
The former president and current GOP presidential candidate caught another break after his Florida classified documents case. In July, the case was dismissed due to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's ruling that special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the charges, was not properly appointed.
Smith appealed, and Kirschner is "confident" that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit will overturn Cannon's ruling. However, he had little faith that the Supreme Court would back that decision as he railed against the justices.
Kirschner believes the appeals court could undo Cannon's move to nullify Smith's case against Trump. "Maybe they will even sua sponte, on their own, say, now that we've reversed the case and reinstated the prosecution against Donald Trump, we are directing that it be assigned to a different judge, not Judge Cannon," he speculated.
"That wouldn't surprise me either," Kirschner added. However, the NBC News and MSNBC contributor said that would change if the appeal reached the high court.
He could not hide his severe bias against the former president and the Trump-appointed Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. "We know that all bets are off when it comes to what that radical right-wing six-justice block of the Supreme Court will do to try to continue to help Donald Trump," Kirschner claimed.
Once that was out of his system, Kirschner conceded there was a chance that the dismissal could be overturned and that decision upheld upon review. "Every other judge who has decided this issue has ruled that special counsel, independent prosecutors, are lawful and constitutional and we've been using special counsel in one form or another since the 1800s," Kirschner told Newsweek the next day.
"So, to upend all of that would be surprising, though the Supreme Court upended other things in surprising ways recently," Kirschner said. He added that since "Judge Cannon basically ignored or tried to dance her way around that Supreme Court ruling," her ruling might not survive a Supreme Court review regardless.
Kirschner seems committed to the idea that Trump could still face prosecution over the classified documents case. He and others who spend their lives on a crusade against Trump are still holding out hope that they can punish the former president in some way.
Unfortunately for them, Trump has seemed to evade nearly every lawfare attack. Even in his so-called "hush money" case in New York, where he was convicted of 34 felony counts, Trump will not be sentenced before the 2024 election, CNN reported last month.
Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the case, said he was trying to avoid the appearance of election interference. Per Trump's legal team's request, the sentencing hearing will now take place on Nov. 26.
"Adjourning decision on the motion and sentencing, if such is required, should dispel any suggestion that the Court will have issued any decision or imposed sentence either to give an advantage to, or to create a disadvantage for, any political party and or any candidate for any office," Merchan wrote in his ruling. Although this was indeed the right decision, it has defanged the leftists' attempt to sway the race.
It's possible that Cannon's decision to dismiss will eventually be overturned, but it won't matter by then. Trump is clear until Election Day, and the American people will decide his fate rather than the courts, a fact that surely outrages enemies like Kuschner.