Archive article https://archive.ph/s4W3F

The Louisiana House Judiciary Committee April 16 passed a bill essentially eliminating New Orleans’ clerk of criminal court just weeks before Calvin Duncan, a Black man who was wrongfully imprisoned for decades before being elected to the position last year, is set to take office.

The committee quickly passed Senate Bill 256 by Sen. Jay Morris, a Monroe Republican, on an 8-5 vote in a push to get it before Gov. Jeff Landry so that it can take effect before Duncan starts his term as criminal clerk of court on May 4.

The bill would combine the city’s criminal and civil courts under one clerk of court position.

Lawmakers aren't supposed to shorten a politician’s term once they start office, so backers of the bill are trying to avoid having Duncan take office before the bill goes into effect, thus letting him serve out a 4-year term.

But Rep. Kyle Green, a Marrero Democrat, said he wondered if the governor signing the bill before May 4 would count as lawmakers cutting current Clerk of Criminal Court Darren Lombard’s term short.

“We’ll just have to see what happens in the courts, I guess,” Morris said.

In her testimony during the hearing, ACLU of Louisiana Advocacy Director Sarah Whittington also questioned whether the bill would require a new election altogether.

Morris has said Clerk of Civil Court Chelsey Richard Napoleon would simply become clerk of both courts. But Whittington pointed out that the legislature is essentially creating an entirely new office and eliminating both the criminal and civil clerks, and as such, it could require a new election to fill the position.

Rep. Mandie Landry, a New Orleans Democrat, said she believed that behind-the-scenes political infighting may have given the governor and other Republicans an opportunity that they would not otherwise have had if Lombard had won.

Landry noted that Congressman Troy Carter, former Congressman Cedric Richmond and Mayor Helena Moreno all backed Lombard, who Duncan bested with 68% of the vote in November. That combined with the Landry administration's hostility toward Duncan may have created an opening the governor could use to keep Duncan out of office.

“He is being targeted, and I know you found yourself in the middle of dirty New Orleans politics,” Landry said to Morris. “I don't think you knew that before you got in because you probably wouldn't have gotten in.”

Duncan said he believed the governor and Attorney General Liz Murrill were ultimately behind the push to get rid of his job. He was exonerated in 2021 after serving 28 years in prison, but he said the attorney general’s office, then under Jeff Landry and Murrill, pressured him to drop his petition for compensation for his conviction, threatening his law license.

During his election last year, Murrill wrote a letter to Duncan telling him to stop calling himself exonerated “to avoid further action” from the AG’s office.

The FBI director has called the allegations ‘false reporting’ and said he would sue the Atlantic reporter who published them

FBI Director Kash Patel has threatened to sue over bombshell claims reported in a magazine profile that the Trump administration official is deeply paranoid about being fired and often drinks to excess, alarming officials at the law enforcement agency and beyond.

On April 10, according to the magazine, the director flew into a paranoid “freak-out” when faced with a technical issue with a computer system. The report claims Patel thought it was a sign he was being fired and he began calling aides and allies in a panic.

The most explosive allegations in the article are regarding Patel’s alleged excessive drinking.

The official is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication at clubs in Washington and his home city of Las Vegas, according to the piece, violating FBI conduct standards and potentially leaving the nation’s top law enforcement official vulnerable to coercion or exploitation.

Early in his time leading the bureau, meetings had to be rescheduled to later in the day to accommodate his nighttime drinking, the report claims.

The US attack on Iran has made the need for renewable energy inarguable. Environmentalists are now being seen for the pragmatists that they are

Secret memos obtained by The New York Times illuminate the origins of the court’s now-routine “shadow docket” rulings on presidential power.

The whole shift to rulings with big impact and no reasoning was because the Republicans desperately wanted to stop climate regulations:

By a 5-to-4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning.

The whole thing is absolutely insane:

Even as they debated the Obama plan’s possible burden on the power industry, in the entire chain of correspondence obtained by The Times, not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.

Even though those harms cost far more than Obama's Clean Power Plan did — it would have on net saved money.

Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit demanding detailed voter data from Rhode Island, a decision that follows similar rulings in a handful of other states.

U.S. District Court Judge Mary McElroy sided with Rhode Island’s top election officials and civil rights advocates, writing that federal law does not permit the U.S. Department of Justice “to conduct the kind of fishing expedition it seeks here.”

McElroy’s decision is similar to other rejections by federal judges across country since the Justice Department began seeking detailed voter data from the states. The information includes dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, the subject of intensifying speculation about a potential retirement before the midterm elections, is not expected to leave the bench this year, sources close to the justice have told ABC News.

Alito, 76, has been hiring clerks for next term and intends to continue serving into at least 2027, the sources who have spoken to Alito told ABC.

The court's most senior member -- 77-year-old conservative Justice Clarence Thomas -- is also expected to remain on the bench.

The daughter of Colombian and Dominican immigrants, Mejia ran on an adamantly anti–Donald Trump message and secured a whopping 70 percent of the vote as a result. The Associated Press called her victory shortly after the votes started rolling in.

70 percent.... wow!

The progressive Democrat’s positions echo several of the policies that made Sanders a national phenomenon, including support for universal health care coverage, tuition-free college, student loan forgiveness programs, and strengthening unions and expanding labor protections in order to bolster America’s middle class.

She sounds like a Democrat who wants to win and is against genocide.

Mejia has also been vocal in her criticism of Israel, publicly denouncing the state’s war on Palestine as a genocide. That caught the attention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which funneled money into the race to bolster her opponents. In the end, the pro-Israel lobby’s efforts may have been one of the reasons that voters in New Jersey sent Mejia to Congress.

Awesome!

The artificial-intelligence-generated fake influencers have surged on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in an apparent bid to hook conservative voters.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Straight fucking market manipulation.