This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Republican-led legislatures have passed anti-protest laws drafted by an extreme right corporate lobbying group in a third of all American states since 2018, as part of a backlash against Indigenous communities and environmentalists opposing fossil fuel projects, new research has found.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) helped draft legislation criminalizing grassroots protests against pipelines, gas terminals, and other oil and gas expansion projects in 24 states under the guise of protecting critical infrastructure.

ALEC, which is funded by rightwing state lawmakers, corporate sponsors and trade groups, and wealthy ideologues, creates model legislation on a whole range of conservative issues such as gun control, abortion, education funding and environmental regulations.

The laws were passed in 17 Republican-controlled states, including Oklahoma, North and South Dakota, Kansas, West Virginia and Indiana, where protesters now face up to 10 years in prison and million-dollar fines, according to a new report from the nonprofit Climate Cabinet.

This story was published in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity.

As she opened her $1,600 property tax bill in February, Edith Baltazar suddenly lost her appetite for the eggs she’d prepared for lunch with her daughter. Her thoughts raced: Would their home be taken away if she couldn’t pay it?

Baltazar’s daughter wept. The family would have to make a difficult decision: the property tax or $2,000 for diabetes medication.

The taxes won.

“Sometimes you have to choose—pay your property taxes instead of paying your water bill and everything else,” said Baltazar, recalling the stressful experience in a July interview.

“I just need some space” is a disingenuous way to tell a romantic partner you’re Just Not That Into Them. As the top Michigan court ruled last week, it’s also a disingenuous way to attempt to remove from the Michigan midterm ballot an abortion-rights referendum that received 325,000 more voter signatures than the required 425,000. 

But that’s what Citizens to Support Michigan Women and Children argued last month in a complaint to Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers. The anti-abortion group alleged the proposed ballot measure text, which sought to explicitly insert into Michigan’s constitution reproductive rights up until fetal viability, lacked enough spacing between words, rendering the verbiage into “groupings of letters that are found in no dictionary and are incapable of having any meaning.”

To be clear, the amendment is at the very least legible. Restaurants and magazines probably shouldn’t employ the ballot measure’s maker to design their menus or page layouts, but it’s not the “hodgepodge of nonsensical gibberish” that Citizens to Support Michigan Women and Children made it out to be.

Part of the proposed amendment to the Michigan constitution.

AP

Dear Gov. Greg Abbott,

Was it already a year ago that you declared Texas’ “Goal Number One” was to “eliminate rape,” after a reporter asked how you could justify signing a 6-week abortion ban without rape exceptions? How’s that going for you?

Or, more specifically, how’s it going for the Texans who report an estimated 13,500 rapes to their local authorities annually, according to the FBI’s most recent crime stats? Did you know that’s a vast undercount, since 90 percent of Texas survivors never report to law enforcement, much less identify their experiences as sexual assault, given the social stigma and victim-blaming around it? 

Did you have those numbers in mind this week, when you said during a taping of Lone Star Politics that your state’s abortion laws didn’t need a rape exception, because survivors “can get the plan B pill that can prevent pregnancy from occurring in the first place”? Do you know how much you sound like Todd Akin? Do you realize that emergency contraception must be taken within 5 days, costs up to $50, and is believed to work less effectively for those with a higher body mass index? 

While we’re on that topic, how do you feel about the right to contraception, which 195 of your Republican colleagues in Congress voted against codifying on July 21? Did you know that the anti-abortion movement is explicitly targeting birth control next, by expanding the definition of abortion to include contraception? Is that where you plan to draw the line, after years of helping anti-abortion activists push through their agenda in Texas?

The US Department of Veterans Affairs will begin offering abortion services for the first time, opening up new options for veterans and other VA beneficiaries whose pregnancies resulted from rape or incest or otherwise pose a threat to their health. Under a new Biden administration interim rule that takes effect immediately, pregnant veterans and their eligible family members will be able to receive abortion counseling at VA hospitals. Those that qualify will be able to get an abortion, regardless of state laws. 

The VA is preparing to provide abortions services in “as many locations as possible,” the department announced Friday. VA doctors will have case-by-case discretion to decide, along with their patients, when a pregnancy puts a patient’s health at risk. Those who seek abortions under the rape or incest provisions won’t be required to provide a police report; self-reporting will be considered sufficient evidence.

VA secretary Denis McDonough called the policy shift a “a patient safety decision.” Fifteen states currently ban abortion in all or almost all cases, and some states—like Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma—don’t allow exceptions for survivors of rape or incest. People who want or need to end their pregnancies in those states currently must travel elsewhere or seek out abortion medications online, a legally gray area.

“We came to this decision after listening to VA health care providers and Veterans across the country, who sounded the alarm that abortion restrictions are creating a medical emergency for those we serve,” Shereef Elnahal, the VA’s under secretary for health, said in a statement. “Offering this care will save Veterans’ health and lives, and there is nothing more important than that.”

The shift in policy brings the VA in line with the Defense Department, which offers abortions to military service members in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life, according to the Washington Post. But the services are little-used: Annually, fewer than two dozen service members receive abortions at military hospitals, with others seeking care from private clinics. About 300,000 women of childbearing age currently receive health care through the VA.

Intermingled with top secret, secret, and confidential documents that federal agents seized from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last month were more than three dozen empty folders marked “classified,” according to a court filing unsealed today. Still more empty folders were labeled “return to staff secretary/military aide”—a reference to the White House official responsible for the flow of documents to the president.

The disclosure of so many empty folders raises questions about whether the FBI recovered all the sensitive government documents it was seeking. According to the unsealed filing, agents found classified documents mixed in with news clippings, books, clothes, gifts, and hundreds of other government documents and photos without classification markings. 

Trump’s attorneys are trying to convince a federal judge in West Palm Beach, Florida, to appoint a “special master” to decide whether any of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago were subject to executive privilege or attorney-client privilege—even though FBI says its document screeners have already reviewed them. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice and intelligence officials are reviewing the classifications of the recovered documents and starting to assess the potential risks their mishandling poses for national security, according to Politico. The DOJ is investigating Trump for potential violations of the Presidential Records Act, the Espionage Act, and obstruction of justice.

Read the list of recovered documents here.



A few hours before President Joe Biden delivered his fiery speech calling former President Donald Trump and “MAGA Republicans” representatives of “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” Trump went on a conservative radio show and seemingly did his best to prove Biden’s point.

Speaking to Wendy Bell, an independent talk-radio host, Trump insisted, as usual, that he won the 2020 election—the strategic “Big Lie” his advisors planned even before voting took place. He said that if he runs again and wins the presidency, he would look “very, very favorably” at full pardons, plus a government apology, for the rioters who stormed the US Capitol and attacked police officers on January 6 in their attempt to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results.

In a new development, Trump added that he was financially supporting some of the people prosecuted for their involvement in the mayhem.  “They were in my office actually two days ago. It’s very much on my mind. It’s a disgrace what they’ve done to them,” Trump said. 

Later that night, in a speech reportedly motivated by lingering claims of election fraud ahead of this fall’s midterm elections, Biden condemned the Capitol rioters in scorching, abstract language, calling on listeners to defend democracy against the threat posed by Trump and his millions of supporters. “We can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American. They’re incompatible,” Biden said in his prime-time address. “We can’t allow violence to be normalized in this country. It’s wrong. We each have to reject political violence with all the moral clarity and conviction this nation can muster now.”

Ten times during his speech, Biden singled out Trump’s supporters as “MAGA Republicans,” a group he said was “not the majority of Republicans” but a more extreme faction that threatened US democratic traditions. “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution,” he said. “They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election…They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fanned the flames of political violence.” 

After Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state officials in February to launch child abuse investigations targeting parents who helped their transgender kids get gender-affirming health care, a 14-year-old trans girl became so anxious about the prospect of losing access to her medications that she was pulled out of school and hospitalized for days. Some doctors and pharmacies around the state stopped offering teenagers life-saving puberty blockers and hormone treatments. A mental health provider in Austin abruptly withdrew care from a suicidal trans boy, leaving his parents to sleep on his bedroom floor night after night to ensure he didn’t kill himself. Many families fled the state.

Those are just some of the stories in a legal brief submitted to a state court last week on behalf of two LGBTQ-focused nonprofits and 13 Texas families with transgender kids. The families are begging the court to make permanent a prior temporary injunction prohibiting state officials from investigating parents under Abbott’s order. Although Texas’ Department of Family and Protective Services hasn’t yet ripped any trans children in Texas from their homes and sent them to foster care, the families argue its investigations have already had tragic consequences.

Since Abbott’s directive took effect, the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), one of the nonprofits cited in the brief, has received at least 60 reports from families struggling to obtain health care for trans children. Some doctors reportedly denied prescriptions for kids at the onset of puberty, hoping that it might be legally safer to offer them treatment at a later point. The nonprofit is working with 27 families in two metro areas who could not obtain puberty blockers, reversible prescriptions that give trans kids a chance to explore their gender identity as they grow older while temporarily delaying the puberty changes in their body that could make their gender dysphoria worse. Equality Texas, the other nonprofit in the brief, says kids have been turned away by doctors or denied prescriptions at pharmacies in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and the city of Garland.

Families say they’re also afraid to get their trans children other types of health care, worried that the kids’ gender identity and medical history might become known to the hospital and be shared with state authorities. According to the brief, when one trans kid went to a hospital for emergency psychiatric treatment, hospital staffers reported the mother to state officials, who accused her of child abuse. In another case, a trans child almost slept in a hallway at a mental health facility because the facility, citing legal risks, didn’t want to admit the kid to a ward. TENT intervened.

“As a result of losing healthcare,” the families in the brief saw their kids experience “a variety of debilitating symptoms, including anxiety, depression, and thoughts of self-harm.” The 14-year-old girl I mentioned, identified as A.P., was so “paralyzed with anxiety” that she was pulled out of eighth grade and had to finish the academic year at home. A nonbinary teen identified as C was devastated when their school cited the governor’s order as a reason to rescind approval of a learning unit about nonbinary gender identities, which the teen had hoped would help bullies at school become more understanding. A 9-year-old started crying when their parents told them to no longer talk publicly about being trans. “The child has since expressed fear of being…put up for adoption, sharing the heartbreaking worry that ‘nobody would adopt me because I am trans,'” the brief says.

Donald Trump’s plan to exact revenge on Big Tech—and make billions by launching his own social media empire and taking it public—was always going to be a long shot. And while it’s not yet dead, the obstacles are mounting.

For starters, Trump Media & Technology Group is reportedly not making payments to vendors. Last week, Fox Business reported that RightForge, an internet hosting company that markets itself as friendly to conservative customers who can’t find hosting elsewhere, has not been paid since March. That’s no small matter; RightForge is reportedly providing much of the technical underpinning of the TruthSocial platform—and the company is apparently owed as much as $1.6 million. A representative for TMTG did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones, but it would not be altogether surprising if TruthSocial is facing a cash crunch. Making money running a social media business is, at best, a dicey proposition. Twitter, which has more than 230 million users, managed to lose $270 million last quarter. TruthSocial has perhaps 2 million active users (Trump himself has 3.9 million total followers).

But the plan was never to have TruthSocial pull itself up by its bootstraps, making its way on whatever revenue it could scrape together. From the beginning—the nascent media business was announced last September—Trump’s goal has been to take the whole operation to the stock market, where (theoretically) huge sums of money can be raised from investors. But Trump’s toxic post-January 6 reputation has made that more difficult; in the wake of the insurrection, a number of financial institutions cut ties with him, closing his bank accounts and swearing off any more lending. With no big banks to back an IPO, Trump turned to something called a SPAC—a special purpose acquisition company, or a blank-check company—to take TMTG public. The idea is to merge his company with a company that is already public, but has no business to speak of. That would short-circuit the need to have a lengthy IPO. But it also offers a lot of opportunities for the deal to run into trouble, which is what appears to be happening now.

Last September, Trump announced TMTG would merge with Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC), a SPAC company that had gone public and was looking for a partner. After the proposed deal was revealed, DWAC’s share price rocketed above $97. It has since fallen below $30, where it currently sits. The deal, which caused such excitement initially, was supposed to happen quickly. Like most SPACs, DWAC has rules in its organizing charter that make it clear that the company’s founders have to find a merger partner expeditiously, or else give back the money they raised from investors. The deadline for DWAC to make its merger with TMTG happen is Sept. 8. 

DWAC”s founders have asked investors to approve an extension of that deadline—and on Sept. 6, shareholders will be able to vote to give the company another year to complete the deal. There is no guarantee that investors will approve the deadline extension—although most would likely lose money if the company was forced to shutter itself and return the funds it had raised in its IPO.

Representative-elect Mary Peltola just made history. With a 51-49 upset victory over ex-governor Sarah Palin, confirmed Wednesday by the state’s Division of Elections, Peltola has won Alaska’s sole seat in the House of Representatives—making the former state legislator and fisheries manager the first Alaska Native person elected to Congress. She succeeds longtime GOP Rep. Don Young, a family friend whose death in office earlier this year triggered a special election. In March, when Young died, Peltola was a fairly obscure ex-politician vying with more than 50 challengers to finish his term. By August, polls pegged her as a clear favorite over the Trump-endorsed Palin, whose celebrity kept her at the top of early polls.

Peltola’s win was more than one kind of first. She also becomes the first Alaskan to win a ranked-choice election, a system that sends votes to second-choice candidates when voters’ favorites are knocked out. She joins a tiny club: Alaska is just the second state to adopt the system, which supporters call a “bulwark against extremism,” and this race was the state’s first to use it.

That change came into play when prominent independent Al Gross withdrew from the race unexpectedly—after landing one of four spots in the general election. Gross, Democrats’ favorite in Alaska’s 2020 Senate race, wouldn’t commit to caucusing with the Democratic Party. But his largely centrist voters broke for Peltola, and his withdrawal left a lopsided ballot, splitting conservative voters between two Republican candidates.

Peltola’s biggest challenge might have been Palin’s unmatched celebrity. Although Palin hasn’t held office in Alaska since 2009, when she abruptly resigned her governorship, she’s still Alaska’s best-known politician on the national stage. And Palin’s been a vocal player in the Trump movement, winning the ex-president’s consistent backing—Trump went as far as campaigning for her hours after the FBI’s August raid of his Mar-a-Lago home.

Alaskans, in any case, were keen to participate. State officials announced that they’d counted nearly 200,000 ballots in the open primary, the third-highest primary turnout in state history. There’s any number of reasons that could be: Palin’s notoriety likely drew both supporters and opponents, and the governorship is also on the ballot, with Republican incumbent Mike Dunleavy facing strong Democratic and independent challengers. GOP senior Sen. Lisa Murkowski is up for re-election as well—after landing a place on Trump’s enemies list by voting to convict him for his role in the January 6th attacks on the US Capitol. (Murkowski and her Trump-backed primary opponent, Kelly Tshibaka, both advanced to November’s general election.) The state has also kept the process remarkably accessible, with many voters able to vote early both by mail and in person, a key consideration for Alaskans in distant and rural areas.

We know what Donald Trump did: He absconded from the White House with classified and top secret documents that belonged to the US government; he mishandled these highly sensitive records in his Mar-a-Largo lair (see this photo); he resisted the efforts of the government to retrieve these records; he employed a legal team that falsely certified that all classified material had been returned; and his actions prompted the Justice Department to investigate whether he and his crew obstructed justice or violated other federal laws, including the Espionage Act. 

The big question is why. Why did FPOTUS, as he has been dubbed in Justice of Department court filings, run off with the most classified of documents, including records based on confidential human sources? It seems clear that this was no accident. Had it been inadvertent, Trump and his aides would have quickly responded to requests from the National Archives to return the goods, and they would have sent back all the requested material, not merely a portion. And if they had errantly not returned the full complement of super-secret papers, they presumably would have snapped-to and FedExed the rest back once informed by the Archives and the FBI that the former guy still improperly possessed hush-hush documents from his reign. 

Though one can never discount incompetence in the course of such matters, the known evidence suggests Trump really, really wanted to keep these papers. In its legal filings following the FBI raid on Trump’s club, though, the Justice Department has not presented its view of Trump’s motives. But that hasn’t stopped a frenzy of speculation on the internet. Nor should it. Given that Trump ran for president in 2016 charging that Hillary Clinton had harmed national security by using a personal server for her email when she was secretary of state and vowing that he would “enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information,” this scandal is yet the latest sign of the brazen hypocrisy and blatant corruption at the root of his MAGA demagoguery and its embrace by the Republican Party. This affair warrants full examination, and that includes the reasons for Trump’s apparent flouting of the law. So let’s look at a few possible explanations. 

The Double-Agent Theory. The most outlandish notion is that Trump hung on to these papers because he wanted to sell or give these secrets to another government. The Russians? The Saudis? He’s either an operative in cahoots with a foreign power or an operator who wants to cash in. Though Trump has a record of slipping classified information to Moscow, it’s difficult to imagine him plotting to sell secrets. That would entail a fair bit of organizing and hard work. It’s not easy being a spy. And there are less troubling ways for FPOTUS to make a bundle these days. Trump has been pocketing money from the Saudis for hosting golf tournaments. (Jared Kushner’s private equity fund banked a whopping $2 billion from a fund controlled by Mohammad bin Salman, the murderous Saudi leader). Trump may want to share top US government secrets with certain overseas governments because he feels an affinity for them or their leaders. (See Vladimir Putin.) But assuming he read these documents—or was briefed on them and paid attention—he could pass along the information without having to possess the records themselves. 

They’re Mine! Throughout his presidency, Trump demonstrated that he’s a big believer in that old French saying, l’etat est moi. He was not the custodian of the US government and the servant of the national interest; he was the government and his interests were the government’s interests. In this warped view, all these records belong to him and exist for his benefit. He has exclusivity and can control how they are used. Maybe he believes some of these records could help him prove one of the scads of untrue conspiracy theories he has promoted over the years. Perhaps he wants to use them for a memoir. Or to show them off to his pals in the Mar-a-Lago buffet line? Or one day place them in an exhibit in his presidential museum? (Will he charge his MAGA followers an entrance fee?) Why should anyone else possess his love letters with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un? Spite is a large part of Trump’s psychological algorithm. It’s not a stretch to envision Trump, scorned by the voters and fired from the presidency, defiantly hanging on to documents he was not allowed to keep and shooting the bird at the (Deep State!) bureaucrats and intelligence community he despised. Mine, mine, mine.

Most Americans are unfamiliar with the unique experience of hoarding classified documents. But thanks to Donald Trump’s apparent habit of doing exactly that, we now have photographic evidence of what that looks like—or at least how the former president did it at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

The Justice Department, in a late-night filing on Tuesday, included a photo of just some of the documents seized at Trump’s Palm Beach club. The image—described in the filing as a “redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the “45 office”— shows several documents clearly and boldly labeled “Top Secret SCI.” Other documents appear to be obscured in order to conceal their content. To the right is a box these items were apparently stored in; it also included a framed Time magazine cover featuring Trump. All of this rests upon what this writer finds to be ugly, embarrassingly outdated carpeting. Meanwhile, Trump seems upset that the photo makes him look messy.

But beyond the photo, the most damning allegation in the DOJ’s filing is the assertion that government documents had “likely” been concealed and that federal investigators had “multiple sources of evidence” indicating that Trump aides had failed to turn over all the requested documents. The filing was a response to Trump’s latest demand to appoint an independent special master to review the seized material. The DOJ opposes that request, arguing that it would be inappropriate and significantly harmful to “important governmental interests, including national security interests.”

This is not a good look. Alas, the same Republicans who spent years screaming about some emails have registered the following shoulder shrug:

That TIME Magazine cover was huge threat to national security. https://t.co/yy0AOmxMEh

When Albert Diaz, then 41, took his seat in the Social Security Administration’s hearing room in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in October 2011, he had to lower himself onto his left buttock to avoid stabbing pain in his right leg. His dominant arm, the right one, was locked in a brace to keep it from curling in toward his body. He shook uncontrollably, a side effect of an electrical stimulation device implanted in his spinal cord to manage relentless pain. Three years earlier, Diaz had fallen backward three stories down an elevator shaft while working as a maintenance director in a luxury apartment building. Since the accident, his family of nine had relied largely on his wife’s teaching salary. His application for federal disability benefits was denied, and after waiting a year for a hearing, he’d come to appeal that decision before an administrative law judge (ALJ).

During the half-hour hearing, the judge asked him whether he attended church or belonged to any clubs, what TV shows he liked, and if he had any hobbies. They talked about his pain and how his family has to help him bathe, get dressed, and shave. Following his testimony, a vocational expert spent a few minutes testifying about what someone in Diaz’s condition could do for work. The conversation went like this: First, the judge asked the expert to imagine a hypothetical person of Diaz’s age, education, and work experience. Now, she said, imagine that this person can do light work, but the light work is limited. “There would be a bilateral lower extremity push/pull limitation,” she clarified, “occasional climbing, balancing and stooping but never on ladders, never kneeling, crouching or crawling. There would be a bilateral, overhead reach limitation, a need to avoid vibration and hazards.”

The judge then asked the vocational expert whether there were any jobs, anywhere in the economy, suited to such a person. Considering only the factors the judge had described, the expert answered that the person could be a “greeter/host,” and indicated that there were about two or three hundred such jobs in northeastern Pennsylvania. Or maybe a “price marker”—who attaches price labels to merchandise—1,100 to 1,200 jobs.

Two months later, the judge denied the claim, citing her belief that Diaz was able to do things like “perform occasional climbing, balancing, and stooping”—which is to say, she thought he could still work. In the nearly eight years it would take him to successfully appeal that denial, Diaz lost his house.

With a bite out of every paycheck, workers pay into the federal system of Social Security Disability Insurance just in case something happens that makes them unemployable. (A parallel program, Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, provides payments to low-income people with disabilities). Of the roughly two million disability claims the SSA receives each year, two-thirds are initially denied. Those who appeal get their claims reconsidered, and if they’re denied again, which most are, they go before an ALJ. It’s the claimant’s best chance for a reversal—last year, slightly more than half of such claims were approved.

The unprecedented FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents former President Donald Trump allegedly took from the White House—for which he’s being investigated for potential violation of federal laws that include the Espionage Act—set Republicans and Trump supporters off on a frenzy earlier this month. From Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling to defund the law enforcement agency to several GOP lawmakers fear-mongering over the weaponization of IRS agents to come after citizens, the reactions, in the words of my colleague Inae Oh, were “extremely amped up, conspiratorial, and ready for battle.” 

In extremist online circles, calls for civil war and violence against law enforcement picked up, with analysts identifying rhetoric such as “lock and load” and “when does the shooting start?” On August 11, that discourse and increased online threats against federal officials and facilities translated into real-world violence when an armed Ohio man was killed after trying to breach an FBI office in Cincinnati. A few days later, a man in Pennsylvania was arrested and charged with threatening the FBI for posts saying ““My only goal is to kill more of them before I drop” and ““If You Work For The FBI Then You Deserve To Die.” 

Now, House Democrats are urging social media companies to address the spike in calls for violence against law enforcement on their platforms in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago raid. “We are concerned that reckless statements by the former President and Republican Members of Congress have unleashed a flood of violent threats on social media that have already led to at least one death and pose a danger to law enforcement officers across the United States,” the letter signed by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee and Rep. Stephen F. Lynch of Massachusetts, thee chairman of the National Security Subcommittee, reads. “We urge you to take immediate action to address any threats of violence against law enforcement that appear on your company’s platforms. The letters were also sent to executives of eight companies, including Facebook’s parent group Meta, Twitter and TikTok, in addition to far-right websites such as Gab, Gettr, Rumble, and Trump’s Truth Social, according to the New York Times.

The letter asks for information about how many identified threats to federal law enforcement have been removed from the platforms and whether they have experienced an increase in such threats since the FBI raid of Trump’s Florida estate.

Federal Judge Leigh Martin May from Georgia rejected a request from Sen. Lindsey Graham to delay his testimony before a grand jury investigating former President Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 elections in the state. Graham is scheduled to testify next week. “Under the circumstances, further delay of Senator Graham’s testimony would greatly compound the overall delay in carrying out the grand jury’s investigation,” the Obama-appointed judge wrote in a ruling. “Further delay thus poses a significant risk of overall hindrance to the grand jury’s investigation, and the Court therefore finds that granting a stay would almost certainly result in material injury to the grand jury and its investigation.” Sen. Graham’s legal team had appealed an earlier ruling by Judge May ordering him to testify and asked her to stay the order pending the appeal, but she found that granting the request would not serve the public interest. 

Last month, Fulton County issued subpoenas for Graham, Rudy Giuliani, and other Trump allies as part of a probe into what prosecutors have characterized as “coordinated attempts to unlawfully alter the outcome of the 2020 elections.” The South Carolina GOP senator initially tried to quash the subpoena by arguing the District Attorney’s questioning focused on two phone calls he made to made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger following the November 2020 election, which constituted “legislative acts” as part of his work as senator and former chair of the Judiciary Committee.and were, therefore, protected under the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution. 

The blow to Sen. Graham’s legal maneuvering comes a few days after Giuliani gave a six-hour closed-door testimony at an Atlanta courthouse. “Grand juries, as I recall, are secret,” Trump’s former personal lawyer told reporters. “They ask the questions and we’ll see.” Giuliani’s lawyers had tried to postpone his testimony saying he had undergone a stent heart surgery that prevented him from flying.

On Thursday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made a spectacle of a press conference to announce the arrest of 20 people with felony convictions for voter fraud. Surrounded by law enforcement, DeSantis, who’s running for re-election and has his eye on the GOP nomination for the 2024 presidential race, touted the work of the state’s newly created election crime task force and said the former felons, who make up a minuscule proportion of the more than 11 million Floridians casting ballots in the state, were ineligible to vote because they had previously been incarcerated for murder or sexual assault charges. The people arrested have since been charged with a third-degree felony that could lead to $5,000 in fines and up to five years in prison. “This is just the opening salvo,” the governor said. “This is not the sum total of 2020.” 

DeSantis’ latest political stunt scapegoats ex-felons and willfully ignores the shortcomings in the implementation of an amendment to restore voting rights, which the governor himself has tried to undermine, and that has led to confusion about voting eligibility. In 2018, 65 percent of Florida voters approved a change to the state’s constitution known as Amendment 4 to allow people convicted of felonies who had completed their sentences to vote, with the exception of those convicted of murder or a sexual offense. My colleague Pema Levy wrote about the potential impact of the historic amendment at the time: 

Returning the franchise to formerly convicted felons could upend the political landscape in Florida, a state divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The majority of those who were disenfranchised are expected to support Democrats, since felon disenfranchisement, a policy embraced and expanded after the Civil War specifically to deny voting rights to black men, has always had a disproportionate effect on African Americans and Latinos in Florida. This gives the Legislature, the incoming Republican governor, and his cabinet an incentive to thwart the will of the people. 

Five of the people arrested on Thursday told the Miami Herald they were unaware that they weren’t eligible to vote because of the nature of their offenses “and had faced no issue registering.” They’re not alone in facing criminal charges over voting fraud allegations. In 2019, DeSantis signed a bill requiring that felons pay court fines and fees before having their rights to vote restored. Opponents of the bill compared it to a “modern poll tax” and pointed out that the state doesn’t keep a centralized database tracking people’s legal financial obligations, which has led ex-felons to unknowingly register to vote without having paid outstanding fees and being charged with voter fraud as a result, a ProPublica investigation showed. 

“What DeSantis wanted from his event on Thursday was for the media to elevate his assertion that he’s taking a hard-line position against fraud,” Philip Bump writes in the Washington Post. “What he demonstrated most effectively, though, is how he has repeatedly taken steps that restrict voting access despite the undeniably minor frequency of fraud in Florida elections (as he himself has pointed out).” 

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Democrats’ new climate legislation, which President Joe Biden signed into law this week, has been described as “transformative” and “game-changing.” But perhaps the most apt word is “shocking”—in a good way, for once. According to analysis after analysis, it’s become clear that this is what the United States needs to make good on promises to fight climate change. For climate scientists long accustomed to shouting into the wind—or at least their Twitter feeds—it’s something to celebrate. “We’re so pumped about this bill,” says Morgan Rote, director of US climate at the Environmental Defense Fund.

In a bill as sprawling as this one, compromises will always be necessary. Provisions for new oil and gas leases are the obvious doozy, slotted in to appease Senator Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.). So are potential compromises on environmental permitting, which include ample deference to oil and gas pipelines. But perhaps nothing is as confusing—or as potentially far-reaching and long-lasting—as the bill’s generous incentives for “clean” hydrogen. If this bill allows more fossil fuel development, it’s with the tacit hope that the industry is facing an inevitable decline. The theory is that it’ll kick the bucket anyway as demand for oil and gas withers, outmoded and outcompeted by cleaner sources of energy. Hydrogen? It’s here to stay.

That push isn’t new, exactly. The provisions, which are modeled after those that helped kickstart solar investment decades ago, build on other recent efforts, like an $8 billion investment in the Biden administration’s 2021 infrastructure bill to build Hydrogen Hubs across the country that can serve as epicenters of the fuel’s production and distribution. Those were widely derided as potential “bridges to nowhere,” without incentives that would ramp up hydrogen supply and demand. This bill has them, with production tax credits that get more generous depending on how “clean” the hydrogen is.

Using hydrogen is undoubtedly clean—it is combined with oxygen to produce water vapor and energy and has applications for powering utilities, homes, and cars. But it can involve dirtier sources of energy, often natural gas, which contains climate-warming methane. One reason hydrogen has backers in the oil and gas industry is because the fuel, which can come in gas or liquid forms, allows for the repurposing of fossil fuel infrastructure that is poised to be abandoned during the shift to renewables.

The Department of Transportation says that airlines must start providing more information to passengers stranded by flight delays and cancellations—and even start providing perks to passengers who have had their travel interrupted through no fault of their own. Letters signed by Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg were sent on Friday to major airlines warning that if they do not improve their treatment of customers, the Biden administration might create rules to formalize new rights for consumers.

The warning comes as 2022 has seen both a massive increase in travel—passengers are returning to the air following the pandemic—and a massive increase in flight disruptions. Airlines are largely blaming staff shortages, specifically a lack of pilots, whose ranks have been depleted over the course of the pandemic by voluntary retirements and a lack of recruiting new replacements. This summer thousands of flights have been canceled across the country, snarling air travel, and often leaving passengers stranded with few options to get to their destination. As many as 24 percent of flights in the United States have been delayed so far this year and 3.2 percent have been canceled. 

Earlier this month, the DOT said it would start making new rules in order to facilitate refunds from airlines to passengers when flights have been canceled or not taken for health reasons. On Friday, Buttigieg told NBC News that airlines were a long way from delivering the kind of service that should be expected of them.

“The message to the airlines is that you’ve got to make it easier for passengers to understand their rights,” Buttigieg said. “And you’ve got to support passengers when they experience delays or cancellations.”

In his letter, Buttigieg said airlines should begin offering passengers more help. Those who have delays of three hours or more should receive meal vouchers, for instance, and passengers forced to stay overnight due to delays or cancellations should be given free lodging or hotel vouchers.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will appear at a rally in Pittsburgh for Pennsylvania’s GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano on Friday, sparking outrage from Jewish groups in DeSantis’ home state. DeSantis is one of the few GOP politicians who comes close to former president Donald Trump in terms of popularity among conservative voters, and his fundraising is on a record-breaking pace. But Mastriano is considered to be much further on the extremist fringes of the political spectrum—even for a Republican. 

Mastriano, who easily won the GOP primary earlier this year, is facing Democrat Josh Shapiro in November and is currently trailing by a sizable margin. In fact, Mastriano may owe some of his success in the primary to a Democratic effort to back the candidacy of someone so far to the right, he would defeat moderate GOP candidates who might have been more palatable to voters. Mastriano, often described as a Christian-nationalist, supports a total ban on abortion, expanded gun rights, and claims climate change is just “pop science.” He also has denied that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and has said that if elected governor, he would force everyone in the state to re-register to vote. In May, he suggested he would only certify a national election result if a Republican won. 

But he also has gushingly described DeSantis as the model governor and described his own vision of turning Pennsylvania into the “Florida of the north.” The flattery seems to have worked, as it appears that the invitation to DeSantis did not originate with Mastriano. In a Facebook posting, Mastriano said that DeSantis had contacted him about appearing.

Doug Mastriano says Ron Desantis reached out to him about doing a rally for him, and it will be Friday in Pittsburgh: “My goal as Governor is to make PA the Florida of the north. He set the gold standard for the good a Governor can do leading a state.” pic.twitter.com/KUzII1Mdnu

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 18, 2022

Donald Trump has offered a swirling array of excuses for why he took secret documents from the White House, stashed them around his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, and refused to return them to the US government—which precipitated a raid by a team of FBI agents. The most recent Trump World narrative is not that the documents weren’t secret or needed to be kept secure. Actually, his lawyers now say, Trump is very interested in securing sensitive government documents. The reasoning seems to be that a country club allowing thousands of people to wander the grounds for a fee, will keep the material—said to include information labeled with the highest level of restriction, including some documents related to our nuclear arsenal—more secure than the ultra-secure, fortified residence of the most powerful person in the world, surrounded by law enforcement and military defenses. Also known as the White House.

On Laura Ingraham’s FOX News show Thursday night, Trump’s attorney Christina Bobb, told Ingraham that safeguarding the documents was all Trump was ever interested in.

Ingraham: Was there a limited number who had access to that storage room…
Bobb: Yes.. Mar-a-Lago is secure.. just getting on to the compound is hard.. Only certain members of staff can get down there.. It’s a very limited number of people that can get down there pic.twitter.com/5seWpty8h0

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 19, 2022

After all, documents were kept in a basement storage room that not many people had access to. Plus, only one key existed for the lock on the door, Bobb said. When Ingraham pressed her to clarify that only one or two people were able to access the room, Bobb demurred, settling on “a very small number of people.”