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An OBAMA APPOINTED judge just saved NPR and PBS. That means your vote from 2012 is helping stop corruption and protect free speech FOURTEEN years later. This is why you vote
MAJOR BREAKING: A federal judge just blocked Trump’s order to end funding for NPR and PBS.
President exceeded his authority and his proclamation of an ‘invasion’ at southern border is unlawful, court rules
Maanvi Singh at The Guardian:
A federal court has ruled that Donald Trump’s proclamation of an “invasion” at the US-Mexico border is unlawful, saying that the president had exceeded his authority in suspending the right to apply for asylum at the southern border. As part of his crackdown on immigration, Trump abruptly closed the southern border to tens of thousands of people who had been waiting to cross into the US legally and apply for asylum, signing a proclamation on the day of his inauguration that directed officials to take action to “repel, repatriate, or remove any alien engaged in the invasion across the southern border of the United States”. In a ruling on Wednesday, US district judge Randolph Moss ruled in favor of 13 people seeking asylum in the US and three immigrants’ rights groups who argued that it was unlawful to declare an invasion and unilaterally ban the right to claim asylum. Moss ruled that nothing in the Immigration and Nationality Act or the US constitution “grants the president or his delegees the sweeping authority asserted in the proclamation and implementing guidance”. He also asserted the constitution did not give the president the authority to “adopt an alternative immigration system, which supplants the statutes that Congress has enacted and the regulations that the responsible agencies have promulgated”. The ruling will not take effect immediately; rather Moss has given the Trump administration 14 days to seek emergency relief from the federal appeals court. But if Moss’s ruling holds up, the Trump administration would have to renew processing asylum claims at the border. “This decision is a win for human dignity and the rule of law. It sends a clear message: the government cannot use cruelty as a weapon against people fleeing violence,” said Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project – one of several immigrant rights groups that are plaintiffs in the case.
“Today’s ruling makes clear three salient points that transcend immigration at the border and speak to who we are as Americans. First, we are a nation of laws. Second, the Trump administration’s sweeping invocation of executive branch authority transgresses the bounds established by our constitution and our legislative branch. And third, the judicial branch is what stands between us and anarchy,” said Javier Hidalgo, legal director at the immigrant rights group Raices. “The Trump administration’s prerogative is once again found to be unlawful. It is increasingly clear where the illegality lies, and it is not with the immigrant families upon whom this administration is inflicting unfathomable harm.”
[...] The district court ruling comes after a landmark supreme court decision last week in a case challenging Trump’s attempt to unilaterally end the country’s longstanding tradition of birthright citizenship. On Friday, the country’s highest court ruled to curb the power of federal judges to impose nationwide rulings impeding the president’s policies. But because the case challenging Trump’s asylum ban was filed as a class-action lawsuit, it is not affected by the higher court’s restriction.
The Trump Regime got handed an L by District Judge Randolph Moss, as he ruled that Donald Trump’s faux “emergency” declaration of an “invasion” at the US/Mexico Border to justify an asylum ban was unlawful.
See Also:
AP, via HuffPost: Judge Blocks Trump Administration Order Barring Asylum Access At Border
Randolph Moss
A judge ruled Trump’s efforts to defund PBS and NPR were unlawful, finding that an executive order infringed on First Amendment rights.
Cheyenne Roundtree at Rolling Stone:
A federal judge has ruled that President Trump’s efforts to defund PBS and NPR were unlawful, finding that a May 2025 executive order infringed on the news organisations’ First Amendment rights. “The Executive Order seeks to exclude NPR and PBS from receiving federal grants or other funding … because their news coverage, in his view, tips left, and because they were critical of him,” U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss said in a 62-page opinion and order Tuesday. “It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the President does not like and seeks to squelch.”
“The message is clear: NPR and PBS need not apply for any federal benefit because the president disapproves of their ‘left-wing’ coverage of the news,” continued Judge Moss, an Obama appointee. However, he noted, the First Amendment, “does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type.” The rebuke came a little under a year after Trump signed an executive order last May titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidisation of Biased Media,” which directed federal agencies to terminate “any direct or indirect funding of NPR and PBS” over alleged “bias” in the outlets’ reporting and their “partisan” news coverage. The public broadcasters quickly took the Trump administration to court, vehemently disputing the White House’s accusations of bias, and arguing that the executive order violated the First Amendment. [...]
While the executive order was deemed unlawful and unenforceable by Judge Moss, a Republican-majority Congress previously voted to rescind $500 million in annual funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was the agency responsible for dispersing the federal funds to PBS and NPR, according to The New York Times. And after the executive order was issued, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting shut down.
Judge Randolph Moss ruled that Donald Trump’s anti-American executive order (EO 14290) stripping federal funding from NPR and PBS to be a gross infringement of 1st Amendment expression. The GOP-controlled Congress later voted to ratify the rescissions to NPR and PBS funding.
See Also:
AP, via HuffPost: Judge Blocks Trump Order To End Funding For NPR And PBS
A federal judge on Sunday ruled President Donald Trump illegally installed Ken Cuccinelli as his acting Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
David Badash at NCRM:
A federal judge on Sunday ruled President Donald Trump illegally installed Ken Cuccinelli as his acting Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Cuccinelli, who has a history of promoting white nationalist, anti-LGBTQ, and misogynistic policies and beliefs, has ties to a hate group, is the former Virginia Attorney General who lost his bid to become that state’s Republican governor.
In his 55-page decision U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled “that Cuccinelli was not lawfully appointed to serve as the acting Director of USCIS,” and therefore certain directives related to removal of undocumented immigrants seeking asylum he implemented “must be set aside.”
"The president of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever could," a lawyer for Papadopoulos said.
Ken Dilanian at NBC News:
WASHINGTON — The man whose boozy conversation with a diplomat may have launched the federal government's investigation into Russian election interference was sentenced Friday to 14 days in jail and one year of supervised release for lying to the FBI.
The defendant, George Papadopoulos, a one-time up-and-comer from Chicago who served as a foreign policy adviser on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, pleaded guilty last October to making a false statement when the FBI interviewed him in January 2017.
"I made a terrible mistake," Papadopoulos, 31, said in a statement to Judge Randolph Moss in the Washington, D.C., courtroom. "I hope to have a second chance to redeem myself."
Moss said he thought Papadopoulos' remorse was genuine.
"I do credit the sense that he does feel remorse," Moss said. However, the judge added, the crime was "a calculated exercise of self-interest over the national interest. He was seeking to assist himself in a way that placed his own personal ambitions above the interests of the United States."
The government recommended a sentence in line with what Alex van der Zwaan, the Dutch attorney who also pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe, received: 30 days in jail. Papadopoulos, was also ordered to pay a fine of $9,500, is the second person sentenced in Mueller's investigation.
Papadopoulos' lawyers argued for probation in court Friday, making the case that "the president of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever could."
That was because, in January 2017, shortly before Papadopoulos was interviewed by — and lied to — the FBI, Trump proclaimed that the Russia investigation was a "witch hunt" and "fake news," one his lawyers, Thomas Breen, told the court. Breen argued that those comments influenced Papadopoulos's decision to lie to the FBI.
At another point, Breen talked about going to the FBI field office in Chicago in February 2017 and seeing a picture of Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions on the wall. He told the judge Friday that at the time, he mused to himself that he and his client were there to cooperate in an investigation that potentially could implicate those two men.
Court documents suggest Mueller's office had hoped to secure Papadopoulos' cooperation, but quickly concluded he could not be trusted when he began meeting with reporters. A scheduled FBI cooperation interview was cancelled.
But even without his active help, the court record suggests that Mueller's team learned a lot from his emails and texts, as well as from seizing his phone.
Prosecutors say Papadopoulos was solicited by a professor with ties to Russian intelligence, Joseph Mifsud, who told the young Trump aide that the Russians possessed incriminating information about Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails" — before it was widely and publicly known that Russia had stolen Democratic emails.
Papadopoulos initially lied to the FBI about the timing of his interactions with the professor, suggesting they happened before he started working for Trump, while actually it was afterward.
Prosecutors say Mifsud arranged a meeting in London cafe between Papadopoulos and a young woman he falsely described as Russian President Vladimir Putin's niece.
Papadopoulos related the talk of Democratic emails to an Australian diplomat during what The New York Times described as a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016. The diplomat reported the conversation to his American counterparts, who were seeing other evidence that Russia was making a play to interfere in the 2016 election.
Thus began the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Russia's election interference operation, American officials have confirmed — an investigation that was taken over by Mueller in May 2017.
Papadopoulos has never publicly named those within the Trump campaign he told about the offer of emails from the professor, but he has said he was in regular touch with campaign chairman Paul Manafort, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and other top campaign officials.
He also used his connections to the professor to seek to broker a meeting between Trump and Putin. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who ran the Trump campaign foreign policy operation, has said he quickly rejected that idea when Papadopoulos raised it at a meeting in March 2016.
But in a pre-sentencing filing last week, Papadopoulos's lawyers presented a different account, saying that candidate Trump "nodded with approval and deferred to Mr. Sessions who appeared to like the idea and stated that the campaign should look into it."
Papadopoulos married Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos while awaiting sentencing. She made numerous media appearances during that time. Initially, she suggested that Papadopoulos could be harmful to Trump, likening him to John Dean, the White House counsel who helped bring down Richard Nixon.
More recently, she urged Trump to pardon her husband, said he was treated unfairly and suggested he was considering withdrawing his guilty plea.
