May 28, 2024

In the News

The Connecticut Centinal: A Celebratory State Supreme Court Decision

By Don Pesci

.....Courts, acting to preserve constitutional prerogatives, provide a great service to the public when they put a bit in the mouth of unelected, runaway, quasi-legislative agencies acting all too often on behalf of powerful political incumbents. And the Connecticut Supreme Court did just in a recent unanimous decision involving former State Senator Joe Markley, current State Senator Rob Sampson, and Connecticut’s State Election Enforcement Commission.

There are several enduring lessons that should be drawn from the decision, many of them mentioned by Markley and Sampson in a recent media release.

NTD (Video): Free Speech Case Involving Women’s Sports and California Library Settled by Attorneys

By Daniel Monaghan

.....A free speech case involving women’s sports and a California library ends in a legal settlement. Attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom and the Institute for Free Speech settled with Yolo County Library after they allegedly violated the First Amendment rights of several women’s groups.

National Review: How Merchan Enabled Prosecutors’ Effort to Convict Trump Based on Improper Evidence

By Andrew C. McCarthy

.....Former FEC commissioner Bradley Smith’s testimony would have established that Trump cannot have willfully violated FECA. Because NDAs are not campaign expenditures, Trump did not have a FECA legal duty with respect to them (i.e., a duty not to cause others to make expenditures exceeding a low dollar amount and to disclose expenditures to the FEC). Ergo, he could not have intentionally flouted a known legal duty. But Merchan barred Smith from testifying, even as he allowed Pecker and Cohen to tell the jury, repeatedly, that they made excessive campaign expenditures intending to influence the election.

Wall Street Journal: Alvin Bragg Hasn’t Proved His Case in the Trump Trial

By The Editorial Board

.....Then there’s the fateful legal question, which is whether paying hush money even counts as a campaign expense. Brad Smith, formerly of the Federal Election Commission, persuasively argues no. A political candidate might choose, for example, to settle a meritless lawsuit against his business rather than face questions on it from voters. But that motivation wouldn’t convert the settlement into campaign activity.

Mr. Smith was ready to take the stand this week, but the defense decided not to call him, given limits that Judge Merchan placed on his testimony. “It’s elementary that the judge instructs the jury on the law, so I understand his reluctance,” Mr. Smith wrote. Yet if Mr. Trump is convicted, the odds seem reasonable that an appellate court might say paying off Stormy wasn’t illegal in the first place.

The Courts

New York Times: Trump Lawyers Assail Limited Gag Order Request in Documents Case

By Alan Feuer

.....In an angry court filing, the lawyers pushed back hard against the request by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to revise Mr. Trump’s conditions of release by forbidding him to make any public comments that might endanger federal agents working on the prosecution.

On Friday evening, Mr. Smith’s team requested what amounted to a limited gag order on Mr. Trump, prompted by what it called “grossly misleading” social media posts the former president made last week falsely claiming that the F.B.I. had been authorized to kill him when agents searched Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club and residence, in August 2022...

In their motion to Judge Aileen M. Cannon in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Mr. Trump’s lawyers said that Mr. Smith’s request was “an extraordinary, unprecedented and unconstitutional censorship application” that “unjustly targets President Trump’s campaign speech while he is the leading candidate for the presidency.”

Mr. Trump’s legal team said that Mr. Smith’s request should be stricken from the docket and that he and his prosecutors should face contempt sanctions for filing it in the first place.

Congress

Ministry Watch: Will the Foreign Grant Reporting Act Have Unintended Consequences?

By Kim Roberts

.....A new piece of legislation introduced earlier this month would require not-for-profit organizations to report grants they make to foreign entities.

The Foreign Grant Reporting Act (H.R. 8290) is authored by Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA). He says his goal is to bring more transparency into the growing tax-exempt sector.

The bill would require that nonprofits provide basic information about foreign recipients of grants just as they do about domestic recipients: name, address, the aggregate amount, and whether the entity is a charity.

In his remarks during a hearing of the House Committee on Ways and Means, Smucker said the bill arose out of a discussion of “how foreign money can influence U.S. elections and domestic policy.”

He also noted that “tax-exempt organizations such as National Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Peace are currently under investigation for possibly providing material support to Hamas, which is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

The committee unanimously reported the legislation out of the committee favorably.

Internet Speech

Washington Post: Debunking misinformation failed. Welcome to ‘pre-bunking’

By Cat Zakrzewski, Joseph Menn, Naomi Nix, and Will Oremus

.....Election officials and researchers from Arizona to Taiwan are adopting a radical playbook to stop falsehoods about voting before they spread online, amid fears that traditional strategies to battle misinformation are insufficient in a perilous year for democracies around the world.

Modeled after vaccines, these campaigns — dubbed “prebunking” — expose people to weakened doses of misinformation paired with explanations and are aimed at helping the public develop “mental antibodies” to recognize and fend off hoaxes in a heated election year.

In the run-up to next month’s European Union election, for example, Google and partner organizations are blanketing millions of voters with colorful cartoon ads on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram that teach common tactics used to propagate lies and rumors on social media or in email.

National Review: Election Season Is Handling AI Just Fine So Far

By Dominic Pino

.....One variety of fearmongering about artificial intelligence was really just a subset of the media’s fearmongering about “misinformation,” i.e., that some voters might be duped into believing things that aren’t true in such a way that it would affect their voting.

A cynic might say we already have a word for that phenomenon: “campaigning.” But we saw an example of how this might look when someone made robocalls with an AI-generated voice that sounded like President Biden, spreading false information about elections in the lead-up to the New Hampshire primaries.

This is an abuse of a new technology. Do we need new laws and regulations to prevent it?

It turns out authorities already have legal tools to counter it.

Free Expression

New York Times: A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing

By James Kirchick

.....This month, an account on X with the handle @moyurireads and 360 followers published a link to a color-coded spreadsheet classifying nearly 200 writers according to their views on the “genocide” in Gaza. Titled “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?,” it reads like a cross between Tiger Beat and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The novelist Emily St. John Mandel, the author of “Station Eleven” and “Sea of Tranquility,” earned a red “pro-Israel/Zionist” classification because, according to the list’s creator, she “travels to Israel frequently talks favorably about it.” Simply for posting a link to the Israeli chapter of the Red Cross, the novelist Kristin Hannah was deemed a “Zionist,” as was the author Gabrielle Zevin for delivering a book talk to Hadassah, a Jewish women’s organization. Needless to say, the creator of the list — whose post on X announcing it garnered over a million views within a few days — encourages readers to boycott any works produced by “Zionists.”

The States

Center Square Ohio: Ohio senators want to change constitution to stop political dark money

By J.D. Davidson

.....Two Ohio senators want federal lawmakers to amend the U.S. Constitution to eliminate the idea that money equals free speech.

Senate Democratic Leader Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood, and Sen. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, want Senate Resolution 180 to push a federal move to eliminate what they call corporate personhood and end or limit dark political money.

New Mexico Political Report: State Ethics Commission sues Apodacas dark money operation

By Marjorie Childress

.....The State Ethics Commission on Friday sued a dark money group and its president, Jeff Apodaca, to force disclosure of the sources behind the money paying for political advertising in support of legislative candidates running in the June 4 primary election.

The New Mexico Project registered as a domestic nonprofit corporation in New Mexico last fall, and has since spent thousands of dollars on political advertising. But the group hasn’t identified its donors.

In its 49-page complaint to the state’s Second Judicial District in Bernalillo County, the commission wrote that it is bringing the action to “stop Defendants’ ongoing efforts to frustrate the public’s right to know,” citing 2019 reforms to the state’s Campaign Reporting Act that attempt to eliminate “dark money.”

Those changes specifically targeted “independent expenditures” for disclosure – money that groups spend on political advertising without input from candidates.

To make its case, the commission draws heavily upon Apodaca’s own words made through numerous media outlets, including the KKOB radio shows of Bob Clark and T.J. Trout, and a column by Apodaca published in The Santa Fe New Mexican.

It noted that Apodaca used the term “independent expenditure” to describe the group’s spending, on Clark’s May 1 radio show…