Political Glance
It’s the day after Mother’s Day, the first one Elizabeth Soto has spent apart from her three children. Sitting in jail in Wichita Falls, Texas, her face is washed out by the overhead fluorescent lighting, and her dingy jumpsuit blends into the cinder block walls surrounding her.
Speaking through a glass separator, she tells me she celebrated the holiday with her children over the jail’s video-call system while they had dinner at their grandmother’s. “I’ve been a full-time mother all of their lives,” she said. “I’ve never been away from them.”
Soto’s children have not visited her in jail, which lies on Texas’s northern border near Oklahoma, hours from their home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Elizabeth Soto has only seen her husband, Ines Soto, once over the past year, the longest they’ve spent apart since they first started dating more than 20 years ago. He is being held in a federal prison more than 100 miles away.
On Tuesday, Elizabeth was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison; Ines’s sentencing is set for 1 July. All because, as she put it: “They didn’t like my book club.” Her laugh doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
Last year on the Fourth of July, a small group from Dallas-Fort Worth held a night-time noise demonstration, setting off fireworks outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility south of the cities, in solidarity with the detainees. A few protesters broke away and spray-painted graffiti on employees’ cars and a security post, slashed the tires on a government van, and broke a security camera. The facility’s guards ordered the protesters to disperse, and most of them did. When a police officer arrived at the scene, drawing his gun, an armed protester shot her rifle, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.
‘This is injustice’: how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison
Bill Gates says Epstein sought to blackmail him over extramarital affairs
The Microsoft founder Bill Gates told US members of Congress that the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had sought to “blackmail” him over his extramarital affairs, according to a transcript of the testimony.
The tech pioneer testified behind closed doors before the House oversight committee on 10 June regarding his friendship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 as he awaited trial for sex crimes.
According to the transcript released by the committee on Tuesday, Gates spoke of “veiled” threats and said Epstein had considered exploiting his own knowledge of Gates’s extramarital affairs to force him to remain in Epstein’s orbit, even as Gates was distancing himself from Epstein.
“I was not blackmailed, but you know, as you look at these emails, you know, it looks like Mr Epstein’s brainstorming was going in that direction,” Gates added, referring to documents from the Epstein case released in January by the US Department of Justice.
Appeals court rules Michigan doesn’t have to hand over sensitive voter data
Michigan is not obligated to hand over sensitive voter data to the Trump administration, a federal appeals court decided on Wednesday.
A divided three-judge panel for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Title III of the 1960 Civil Rights Act does not authorize the Justice Department to compel the state to provide its unredacted voter roll, which contains the dates of birth, partial social security numbers and driver’s license numbers of every registered voter in the state.
Judge Andre Mathis, a Biden appointee, authored the majority opinion. He was joined by Senior Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., a Clinton appointee.
Judge John Nalbandian, who was nominated by President Trump in his first term, dissented.
The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia in an attempt to force compliance with its demand, but those efforts have been repeatedly rejected at the district court level. Its cases against California, Oregon, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine and Maryland have also been dismissed.
Federal judge bars Trump from implementing proof of citizenship requirement to vote
A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Donald Trump's administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote.
The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston effectively converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago, in which she temporarily blocked many of Trump's efforts to overhaul elections, into a permanent ban.
Casper rejected the administration's argument that the lawsuit to block the changes brought by Democratic state attorneys general was premature because the rules had yet to be implemented. Instead, she agreed that the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to regulate elections, and that Trump's requirements violated the separation of powers.
The Constitution "does not grant the President any specific powers over elections," she wrote.
Earthquake rattles northern California, magnitude measured at 5.6
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President Donald Trump abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for landmark housing affordability legislation Wednesday, saying he wanted Republicans in Congress to pass a major election reform bill first.
A couple hours later, Trump arrived at Capital Hill for a previously scheduled lunch with Republican senators.
Addressing whether the SAVE America Act, a bill that affects voter registration laws, is more important than the housing bill, he said: “Every election is important. They want a lot of communists to come in.”
The housing bill, which passed the Senate and House of Representatives by large, bipartisan margins this week, was a significant – and rare – victory on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers and experts called it a sweeping "first step" in tackling the nation's housing crunch.
If Congress remains in session, the housing bill can become law without the president's signature 10 days after it was presented to him.
People fired over Charlie Kirk posts get big payouts for First Amendment retaliation
By the time Maria Ruhtenberg was fired from her job last September for posting about Charlie Kirk's assassination, few people even knew what she had written.
The posts and comments she had made on Facebook were only visible to her friends. Just one person, a Facebook friend she barely knew, complained to her employer. "I don't even know how we became Facebook friends, honestly," said Ruhtenberg.
After the conservative activist was shot, Ruhtenberg wrote things like "live by the sword, die by the sword" and "you reap what you sow" and that she disagreed with Kirk's views about the Second Amendment. Ruhtenberg also said that "whoever shot [Kirk] should go to prison."
Two days after that complaint, a right-wing outlet in Iowa emailed Ruhtenberg's employer to ask for a comment about her posts. The next day, she was terminated, less than five days after her initial post. Ruhtenberg had spent 15 years as a public defender for the state of Iowa.
Trump’s acting intelligence chief fires dozens of staff members – report
Several staff members have reportedly been fired from the US office of the director of national intelligence (DNI), multiple outlets have reported. These firings come less than a week after Donald Trump appointed Bill Pulte as the acting director after former director Tulsi Gabbard announced she was leaving the post in late May.
CBS reported on Tuesday that more than 50 career and political staff members had been dismissed, with six individuals fired and 45 “sent back to their home agencies”.
The DNI has not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment on the reported firings.
CNN first reported that Pulte, who also leads the federal housing finance agency, was considering the dismissal of hundreds of staff members on 19 June on the same day he assumed the role of acting director.
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