It was big news when Rudy Giuliani, once hailed as America’s Mayor, was indicted last month by a district attorney in Atlanta for allegedly being part of a criminal enterprise led by Donald Trump that sought to overturn the 2020 election results. Giuliani was back in headlines this week when he lost a defamation suit filed against him by two Georgia election workers whom he had falsely accused of ballot stuffing. Giuliani’s apparent impoverishment, caused by his massive legal bills, and even his alleged drinking have been fodder for reporters. But another major Giuliani development has drawn less attention: An FBI whistleblower filed a statement asserting that Giuliani “may have been compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as a lawyer and adviser to Trump during the 2020 campaign.

That contention is among a host of explosive assertions from Johnathan Buma, an FBI agent who also says that an investigation involving Giuliani’s activities was stymied within the bureau. 

In July, Buma sent the Senate Judiciary Committee a 22-page statement full of eye-popping allegations, and the document leaked and was first reported last month by Insider (after a conservative blogger had posted it online). According to Buma’s account, Giuliani was used as an asset by a Ukrainian oligarch tied to Russian intelligence and other Russian operatives for a disinformation operation that aimed to discredit Joe Biden and boost Trump in the 2020 presidential race. Moreover, Buma says he was the target of retaliation within the bureau for digging into this.

The FBI declined to comment on Buma’s claims.

Buma’s revelations may only be the start. A source familiar with his work tells Mother Jones that other potential FBI whistleblowers who participated in the investigation involving Giuliani have consulted the same lawyer as Buma and might meet with congressional investigators in coming weeks. That attorney, Scott Horton, declined to comment.

This piece was originally published by Capital & Main.

In January of 2022, Jacklyn Gabel and her co-workers at the Starbucks Coffee location on Mission Street in Santa Cruz began considering the idea of organizing. Four months later, they voted 15-2 to become part of a labor union, Starbucks Workers United.

The goal, Gabel said, was simple: Come together to more effectively bargain on wages, benefits and working conditions.

So how many negotiating sessions has the union held so far with Starbucks?

“None,” Gabel said. “There has never been a bargaining session.”

In recent months, there have been growing concerns about whether 90-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has represented California in the Senate since 1992, can fulfill her congressional duties. No White House judicial nominees were able to be confirmed from February to May of this year, when Senate Republicans blocked an effort to temporarily replace the senator during her three-month absence due to shingles complications. After Feinstein returned to the Capitol, she told reporters she had “been voting” on legislation when she had in fact been absent. In late July, during a Senate Appropriations Committee vote, chair and fellow Sen. Patty Murray told Feinstein, who had begun to deliver a speech, to “just say aye” when voting. Some news outlets and Capitol Hill colleagues have raised concerns that Feinstein has trouble recalling what’s happening and is experiencing memory lapses, but Feinstein, who has said that she will not run for re-election in 2024, has not confirmed any age-related chronic health diagnoses.

Still, House Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents California’s 17th District, has been one of a few Democratic members of Congress openly calling for Feinstein’s resignation—a sign of serious reservations within the party. Being disabled, chronically ill, or having a temporary disability shouldn’t preclude anyone from holding office; the question is whether Feinstein is able to do her job with the kinds of reasonable accommodations disabled and chronically ill workers use every day. That is very much up for debate. 

Reasonable accommodations, which employers are required to provide under the Americans With Disabilities Act, are modifications that help disabled people perform their jobs as capably as non-disabled people. Those accommodations can include, among many other things, working a hybrid schedule, having a sign language interpreter, using a screen reader, or being allowed to sit while working. If someone can’t perform their job despite reasonable accommodations, it could be legal grounds for termination.

There are politicians with disabilities who are able to fulfill their duty to their constituents thanks to such accommodations. Take Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who, to accommodate symptoms caused by a stroke during his 2022 Senate campaign, has used assistive technology like a closed captioning device to better understand people’s speech. Beyond gross jokes and memes (which Feinstein has also been the target of), media responses to Fetterman’s use of assistive tech show how little many know about accessibility—like NBC News reporter Dasha Burns, who interviewed Fetterman during that campaign, jumping to the conclusion that the senator didn’t comprehend what she was saying:

Burns’ Friday interview with Fetterman aired Tuesday. He used a closed-captioning device that printed text of Burns’ questions on a computer screen in front of him. Fetterman appeared to have little trouble answering the questions after he read them, although NBC showed him fumbling for the word “empathetic.” Burns said that when the captioning device was off, “it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation.”

Former President Donald Trump was indicted in Georgia late on Monday on charges related to his desperate attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The charges, brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, follow an investigation that lasted some two and a half years.

The indictment charges Trump with 13 felonies, many centered on allegations that he conspired to violate state laws forbidding the creation and filing of false documents, statements, and writings as part of the plot to send a fake alternate slate of Republican electors. Other charges include soliciting public officials to violate their oath, in relation to Trump’s pressure campaign targeting state officials to help him overturn Georgia’s 2020 results.

The indictment includes alleged violations of Georgia’s powerful RICO law, typically used to prosecute gangs or other criminal organizations. Prosecutors can seek 20-year prison sentences under that anti-racketeering statute.

Charges were also handed down against 18 other people, including several close associates and allies of the former president—among them Rudy Giuliani, attorney Sidney Powell, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis, Republican operative Mike Roman, and Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official.

Trump’s post-election meddling in Georgia was a major prong of his months-long campaign to reverse Joe Biden’s victory—an unprecedented effort that began even before voting took place, and that continued even after the violent attack on Congress on January 6, 2021. The Georgia indictment comes two weeks after federal charges were filed against Trump in connection with these efforts.

Matthew Herrick’s dating profiles depicted a muscular man with olive-green eyes and red-hot bedroom interests. The aspiring actor liked orgies and bondage. He was HIV-positive but preferred unprotected sex. He had a “rape fantasy,” and if he seemed resistant to the advances of would-be partners, it was simply part of what got him off.

Between October 2016 and March 2017, more than 1,100 men accepted invitations to meet Herrick in person. They showed up at his West Harlem apartment in droves, and on several occasions broke into the building. They followed Herrick into public restrooms and approached him at the midtown Manhattan restaurant where he worked as a server, because that’s what they had been instructed to do.

But Herrick had not matched with any of these men online. His dating profiles—and practically everything in them—were bogus. His vengeful ex-boyfriend, Oscar Juan Carlos Gutierrez (whom Herrick had met on a dating app), had created the accounts. He was able to impersonate Herrick because, court documents show, the apps didn’t require him to take any steps to verify his identity.

Herrick eventually got an order of protection against Gutierrez, but the torrent of uninvited houseguests continued. It took almost a year for Gutierrez to be arrested on criminal charges. He was sentenced to prison for criminal contempt, identity theft, and stalking in November 2019.

By that time, the nightmarish experience had taken a severe toll on Herrick’s mental health. “I had extreme insomnia. I was scared to leave my apartment,” Herrick, now 38, recalls. “I was drinking heavily to try to get some sleep,” he adds. “There was a moment where I thought, ‘Do I take my own life, or do I continue fighting? Because I can’t do this anymore.’”

Sam Miele, a fundraiser for Rep. George Santos’ (R-N.Y.) 2020 and 2022 campaigns, has been indicted in federal court for impersonating then–Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s former chief of staff while soliciting donations for Santos.

The indictment, which was unsealed Wednesday, charges Miele with four counts of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft. It states that in 2021 Miele falsely impersonated a high-ranking aide to a member of Congress as part of a scheme to raise money for Santos, who is referred to as “Candidate #1.” As CNBC reported earlier this year, that person was Dan Meyer, who worked at the time as chief of staff for the current House Speaker.

Miele pleaded not guilty Wednesday and was released on $150,000 bond. Miele’s attorney, Kevin Marino, said in a statement that his client “looks forward to complete vindication at trial as soon as possible.”

Miele, who is 27, was a novice in the world of political fundraising. He is a relatively insignificant target on his own, but the indictment signals that the investigation into Santos, who was indicted in May for other alleged schemes, is likely not over. 

The May indictment largely sidestepped Santos’ campaign finance practices. As Mother Jones has reported, many of the top donors to Santos’ 2020 campaign do not appear to exist. A relative told me they did not make the contribution attributed to them during the most recent campaign. Both are potential violations of federal campaign finance law.

Earlier this spring, the Supreme Court hit pause on a controversial ruling in a massive anti-abortion lawsuit with the potential to eliminate nationwide access to the most common method of abortion. The case, brought by anti-abortion organizations and doctors, challenged the FDA’s two-decade-old approval of mifepristone, a pill used in medication abortion.

In April, a far-right federal district court judge in Texas had sided with the anti-abortion doctors, issuing an unprecedented order to suspend mifepristone’s approval. But before his decision could take effect, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to step in and pause the order while it went through appeals. The Court agreed.

On Wednesday afternoon, the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued its decision on the appeal, meaning the case is one step closer to reaching the Supreme Court. The Fifth Circuit ruled that the anti-abortion doctors had waited too long to challenge mifepristone’s FDA 2000 approval—and it also found that the FDA had acted improperly in 2016 and 2021, when it relaxed some rules around how mifepristone can be prescribed. 

The Fifth Circuit’s decision contains bad news for parties on both sides of the case. But because of the Supreme Court’s prior order, the ruling doesn’t have much practical effect—at least for now. “This opinion changes nothing on the ground whatsoever,” says Drexel University law professor David Cohen. “Mifepristone is available the same way today as it was yesterday.”

The next stop for the lawsuit is still the Supreme Court. If SCOTUS takes the case, the justices would have the final word on mifepristone—upholding or invalidating the FDA’s approval, or throwing out the challenge altogether for procedural reasons. “They could do whatever they want,” says Mary Ziegler, a reproductive law expert at the University of California, Davis. According to Ziegler, the court could use the case as an opportunity to weigh in on the Comstock Act, a 19th century anti-obscenity law that abortion-rights opponents are trying to use to ban abortion nationwide. Their claim is that the old law, which makes it a crime to mail any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion,” can be enforced. 

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

Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation has been “disappointing” and failed to deliver protections to car industry workers confronted by the transition to electric vehicles, according to the head of the US’s leading autoworkers union, which has pointedly withheld is endorsement of the president for next year’s election.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed by Biden a year ago this week, has bestowed huge incentives to car companies to manufacture electric vehicles without any accompanying guarantees over worker pay and conditions, Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), told the Guardian.

“So far it’s been disappointing. If the IRA continues to bring sweatshops and a continued race to the bottom it will be a tragedy,” Fain said.

“This is our generation’s defining moment with electric vehicles. The government should invest in US manufacturing but money can’t go to companies with no strings attached. Labor needs a seat at the table. There should be labor standards built in, this is the future of the car industry at stake.”

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out.

In yet another historic indictment, Donald Trump was charged by an Atlanta prosecutor with essentially being a mob boss.

With this expansive set of charges that accuses Trump and 18 others of mounting a wide-ranging and illegal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election—emphasizing actions taken to fraudulently reverse the results in Georgia—Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis declared Trump the head of a “criminal enterprise.” The first of 41 counts in the indictment alleges Trump and his co-conspirators violated the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law that has been used by local and federal prosecutors—including defendant Rudy Giuliani, when he was a US attorney in the 1980s—to pursue Mafia chieftains who were often able to insulate themselves from the criminal deeds of their henchmen. Given Trump’s past ties with mobsters—a significant piece of his biography that has often been overlooked—the use of RICO has an especially sharp resonance.

When Trump ran for president in 2016, I was one of the few reporters who examined his shady record of organized crime connections—particularly his history of making false or contradictory statements about these relations. As I noted then, “when asked about his links to the mob, Trump has repeatedly made false comments and has contradicted himself—to such a degree it seems he has flat-out lied about these relationships, even when he was under oath.” I detailed several of these instances—which have even greater relevance now that Trump is the lead defendant in a RICO case. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane.

* In 2007, Trump sued journalist Tim O’Brien for libel—asking for $5 billion in damages—after O’Brien in his book TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald reported that Trump was no billionaire and only worth between $100 million and $250 million. That book referenced an already established fact: that in the early 1980s Trump began his casino empire in Atlantic City, New Jersey, by leasing property owned by Kenneth Shapiro and Daniel Sullivan. Shapiro, O’Brien wrote, was a “street-level gangster with close ties to the Philadelphia mob,” and Sullivan was a “Mafia associate, FBI informant and labor negotiator.” (Trump also had obtained Sullivan’s assistance when he had trouble with undocumented Polish workers who were demolishing the Bonwit Teller building in Manhattan to make way for Trump Tower.)

Until last week, no study had ever been published that tested period products—tampons, pads, discs, cups, and underwear—using human blood. A team of four women just changed that. 

On August 7, Dr. Bethany Samuelson Bannow and a group at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland released a study to test saturation and capacity levels in menstrual products in hopes of better understanding how to diagnose heavy menstrual bleeding, or HMB, which impacts millions of Americans.

Why had it taken so long to test a product made to contain human blood with human blood? “I think with women’s health, including menstrual health, we’ve been a little bit behind the eight ball,” Dr. Bannow told me. “They didn’t even require women to be included in NIH studies until 1993. I think that that’s telling of what we prioritize as a society.”

Providers trying to diagnose HMB depend on self-reporting, which can be subjective with people falling prey to myths and miseducation. A patient experiencing pain, fatigue, or other related symptoms will come in and ask: Is this normal? To tell if the bleeding is excessive, doctors try to ascertain how many period products are used per hour. But measurement is imperfect. Menstruators change out products for tons of reasons; and products may claim they can sustain a certain amount of “flow,” but their actual capacity is different. That is what Dr. Bannow hoped to make clear in her testing.

The team took 21 different products and saturated or filled them with expired human-packed red blood cells. This isn’t an exact match to menstrual blood—which has clots and secretions—but it’s a lot closer than salty water. In their research, they found that how the companies were labeling the boxes did not match up with their results. The majority of menstrual products reported that they had greater capacity than the testing found.

Donald Trump now faces two indictments and 17 charges related to his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and in both cases, prosecutors are aiming to try the former president before the 2024 vote. But according to some conservative legal scholars, these criminal proceedings may be beside the point when considering whether Trump should be eligible to hold the presidency at all. 

In The Atlantic this weekend, former federal judge J. Michael Luttig and professor of constitutional law Laurence H. Tribe chimed in with their version of an argument continuing to gain traction among legal scholars that the Fourteenth Amendment excludes Trump from holding office again at any level. According to Luttig and Tribe, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Section 3 bars any person who has previously taken an oath to support the Constitution in an official capacity and who later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution from holding an official office again. 

So maybe, if you were to, say, take an inaugural oath to protect the Constitution, and then later take steps like demanding the Georgia Secretary of State “find” the votes to win you the election, or file bogus lawsuits to try and overturn the results, or attempt to obstruct Congress from certifying the results from said election, or lie repeatedly and knowingly to the American people about the results, you can’t be president again? Tribe and Luttig encourage all of us, “regardless of partisan leaning,” to consider these sentences from Section 3 ourselves:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

This argument isn’t just coming from the left. It’s notable that Luttig is considered a conservative legal scholar. He was a corporate attorney, and was later appointed to the federal bench by George Bush Sr. before returning to corporate law. The same argument he makes about Section 3 is supported by legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen in a forthcoming article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. As Tribe and Luttig point out in The Atlantic, “Baude and Paulsen are two of the most prominent conservative constitutional scholars in America, and both are affiliated with the Federalist Society, making it more difficult for them to be dismissed as political partisans.”

Not long ago, I was one of 22 authors honored at a fundraising dinner for my local library. It was a swanky affair, with a multicourse meal, a pair of emcees, and a photographer to capture the rare sight of authors in cocktail attire rather than the sweatpants and baggy T-shirts we tend to favor. Midway through the meal, a waiter placed a full bottle of wine in front of me. “Thanks for giving ’em hell,” he said. “Keep up the good fight.”

An emcee had just announced that my Stonewall Award–winning New York Times bestseller, The 57 Bus, was the 10th most frequently challenged book in Texas and the 35th in the United States last year, a fact that caused the entire room to burst into applause. Bottles of wine are a rare response to such news, but high fives and congratulations are common. Having my book banned is a badge of honor, people often tell me.

I appreciate the sentiment, of course, but it does feel a bit like being congratulated for getting kicked in the teeth by the neighborhood bully. I’m not actually giving the book banners hell, much as I’d like to. I’m receiving hell. We all are: readers, writers, teachers—everyone who cares about the freedom to read.

The American Library Association reports that more than 2,500 books were challenged in 2022, a big uptick from the already astonishing 1,858 challenged in 2021, which was already five times the number challenged in 2019. Last year, some 41 percent of challenged books were by or about LGBTQ people, and 40 percent were by or about people of color. The 57 Bus, a nonfiction narrative about two teenagers on either side of a high-profile crime, is a twofer: One main character is Black, the other nonbinary. The Tennessean reported just last month that The 57 Bus is now one of that state’s top five most challenged books.

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

Beverly Grimmett thought the kids magazines she saw stacked on a coworker’s desk this spring were perfectly innocent, until she picked one up. 

“My stomach turned,” Grimmett said. 

The guides were decorated in bright colors and cheerful cartoons, with titles like, The Kids Guide to Socialism, The Kids Guide to Our One Nation Under God, and, finally, The Kids Guide to the Truth About Climate Change.

Grimmett, who works in construction project management at a six-person office in Norfolk, Virginia, had happened upon one of former Gov. Mike Huckabee’s educational ventures, a series called The Kids Guide from Ever Bright Media, the children’s publishing company he founded.

During a barbecue campaign event on Sunday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told New Hampshire voters that if he makes it to the White House, he will be “slitting throats on day one” in order to root out the so-called “deep state” lurking in the federal government.

“We’re going to have all of these deep state people, you know, we are going to start slitting throats on day one,” DeSantis said during a three-day trip to the Granite State. The event comes as the DeSantis campaign attempts a high-profile reset amid disappointing poll numbers and a major staff reduction. 

The promise to the slit throats of people who essentially don’t exist—that is, unless you’re a conspiracy-addled Republican—aligns with the strategy the DeSantis campaign recently outlined in a confidential memo, which reportedly includes more attacks on the “deep state,” to convince donors that the Florida governor can still win this game. Now will his latest comments do the trick? Or is this simply more evidence of the governor’s infamous lack of social skills?

Whatever the case, it’s safe to say that these remarks fall in line with DeSantis’ authoritarian approach to governing, using the state to punish his perceived enemies, from Disney to whatever new item he’s declared as “woke.” As Harvard professor Steven Levitsky told my colleague Pema Levy, “That’s authoritarianism at its core. That’s what authoritarians do.”  

Donald Trump has been indicted three times in four months. He faces charges in New York, DC, and Florida, with Georgia expected to join the list soon. Those cases, in local and federal courts, include 78 separate counts for crimes he allegedly committed in 2016, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

The most likely explanation for this litany of alleged crimes is that the former president is a criminal—a guy who concluded that he was above the law, broke laws with abandon, and now, without the presidency to protect him, faces a backlog of criminal consequences. The courts—jurors and judges—will ultimately decide his guilt or innocence if the cases make it to trial.

But for Trump and many of his fans, the rising pile of charges against him seems to be reinforcing the view that he is the innocent victim of a conspiracy aimed at keeping him out of the White House.

Trump was hit Tuesday with a four-count indictment alleging that he mounted three criminal conspiracies to overturn his 2020 election defeat. Even before the indictment appeared, Trump claimed that Jack Smith—the special counsel overseeing both that case and the prosecution related to Trump’s hoarding of classified documents—timed the new charges “to put it right in the middle of my campaign.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was even more specific, tweeting Tuesday that Smith released the indictment to “distract from” supposedly new allegations about Hunter Biden. McCarthy suggested that the timing of the charges was connected to a Monday poll showing that “President Trump is without a doubt Biden’s leading political opponent.”  

More than 1,000 people have been arrested in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol. Now, the man who allegedly fueled the attack is one of them.

Former President Donald Trump was arraigned in a DC courthouse Thursday afternoon and charged with four felonies related to his actions in the lead-up to January 6. Trump’s third arrest in four months involves the most serious case against him, with prosecutors accusing him of three conspiracy counts, including defrauding the United States. Trump pleaded not guilty to all four counts.

Many have commented on the collective fatigue that news consumers might feel about the constant drumbeat of accusations against the former president. Even CNN, the poster child of the 24-hour news cycle, referred to Trump’s arrests as “routine” in a broadcast this afternoon.

But it’s important to remember that the federal government has not gone easy on the hundreds of people charged in relation to January 6. Anti-vax doctor turned insurrectionist Simone Gold faced 60 days in prison for her conduct on January 6, though she was released early. In June, an international underwear model who stormed the Capitol was sentenced to 32 months in prison. And in May, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years for seditious conspiracy. Now, the ringleader of the entire operation—the man whom each of the convicted insurrectionists worshipped—is having his day in court.

Trump’s favorability ratings remain impressively high for someone with so many pending criminal cases, and Trump opponents fear that the latest charges could ironically bolster his popularity by creating the illusion that Trump is the victim of politically motivated prosecutions. Trump echoed this point in a statement after his arraignment. “This is the persecution of the person that’s leading by very, very substantial numbers in the Republican primary, and leading Biden by a lot,” he said, “so if you can’t beat him, you persecute him or you prosecute him.” (While Trump is leading in Republican primary polls, he is neck and neck with Biden.)

In 2007, Dr. Jake Kleinmahon left Westchester, New York, to move to New Orleans and attend medical school at Tulane University. Drawn by the opportunity to help rebuild the city’s medical system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he eventually became medical director of Ochsner Hospital for Children’s pediatric heart transplant, heart failure and ventricular assist device programs. He met and married his husband, Tom, a Michigan-born chemical engineer for Shell. They have two children, a 4- and a 6-year-old. But after years of building a life in New Orleans, the family is leaving the state at the end of the month over discriminatory anti-LGBTQ laws coming out of the Republican-controlled legislature. 

In early June, state lawmakers passed a series of bills, including so-called “Don’t Say Gay” legislation barring public school teachers from discussing gender identity and sexuality in the classroom; a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors; and a measure prohibiting school employees from using a student’s preferred pronoun without parental permission. Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed the bills, but the Republican supermajority legislature has since moved to override the veto and enact the ban trans youth health care. The legislation, the governor said, “needlessly harms a very small population of vulnerable children, their families, and their health care professionals.” 

Mother Jones spoke with Dr. Kleinmahon on Wednesday about his decision to leave Louisiana and the potential impact of a “brain drain” on the state: 

On becoming a doctor: I knew I wanted to be a pediatrician since I was 4 years old. There are no doctors in my family, but I had an amazing pediatrician and he was such an inspiring and kind man. I admired the amount of knowledge he had and the way he treated me and the rest of my family with such compassion. When I was a teenager, I began volunteering at our local ambulance corps. I became an emergency medical technician. And then, after college, I went off to medical school at Tulane.

On practicing in Louisiana: During medical school, I had the opportunity to work in volunteer clinics where medical students saw the patients, and then they discussed the patients with an attending physician and came up with a plan for the patients. There were so many opportunities to do this throughout the city because of the lack of medical homes and primary care centers that were online at this point. So we were really able to make an impact in the medical system by having these volunteer clinics that patients only had to pay a very nominal fee for. The other part was that there still weren’t a ton of medical professionals who came back to the city after Katrina, so when I was rotating in the emergency room, I was doing things that medical students at other institutions sometimes don’t get to do, such as being involved in the trauma team, suturing up facial lacerations, and really inserting yourself as part of the team. Sometimes they were so short-staffed that they needed extra hands to help out.

Former President Trump’s prosecution for alleged conspiracy wasn’t the only election meddling case this week.

Two Michigan Republicans were arraigned Tuesday on felony charges related to tampering with voting equipment in an effort to prove that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Matt DePerno, a former Michigan Republican state attorney general candidate, was charged with conspiracy and undue possession of a voting machine, while former Michigan state representative Daire Rendon was charged with conspiracy to commit undue possession of a voting machine and false pretenses.

On Thursday, another Michigan attorney, Stefanie Lambert, was charged with improper possession of a voting machine, conspiracy to improperly possess a voting machine, conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer system and willfully damaging a voting machine.

Perpetrators of the scheme allegedly brought five voting tabulators to a hotel room and performed “tests” on them. Some of the defendants claim that local election clerks willingly offered up the voting machines for testing.

The case bears some similarities to the one against Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk who allegedly illegally obtained election information that wound up online. Peters unsuccessfully ran for Colorado secretary of state last year. DePerno’s Michigan attorney general campaign also failed, though not as spectacularly as Peters’. In Georgia, Trump attorney Sidney Powell—one of Trump’s alleged co-conspirators in the plot to overturn the 2020 election—reportedly oversaw a team that copied voter information from machines in Michigan and Georgia.

Late on Friday, a judge in Texas issued an pre-trial injunction limiting the reach of the state’s recent anti-abortion measures.

While Texas law technically allows ending a pregnancy in emergency, medically necessary situations, patients seeking care under that provision have been denied, as doctors fear fines, imprisonment, or the loss of their license for being involved in any kind of abortion. The judge clarified that a doctor can decide when their patient needs an emergency abortion, and held that the women who brought the suit with the assistance of the Center for Reproductive Rights had had a legal right to an abortion in Texas. Under the law, one plaintiff in the suit was denied an abortion and developed sepsis; another was forced to give birth to a non-viable fetus. Others opted to travel out of state for care.

Travis County district judge Jessica Mangrum also held that SB8, the state law that encourages Texas citizens to investigate and turn in people who seek or help enable an abortion, is unconstitutional because it violates a provision in the state’s bill of rights banning unreasonable fines and cruel and unusual punishment. Mother Jones‘s Pema Levy wrote about the law last year:

It allows vigilantes to piggyback on any cases brought under the bans and win civil suits with ample bounties. Vigilantes can also go after anyone involved in a suspected abortion without a prosecutor’s involvement, meaning that even in the state’s liberal enclaves where elected prosecutors have promised not to prosecute abortion cases, SB8 will allow individuals to become the enforcers… [U]nder SB8, scrutiny has been expanded and weaponized: When the law took effect, a Texas anti-abortion group set up a website for people to submit tips about abortions performed in violation of SB8 and promised to “do the rest.” The portal didn’t last, but it also wasn’t needed for the law to have its intended effect.

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, the case, Zurawski v. State of Texas, was the first brought on behalf of women denied abortions after the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision ending the federal constitutional right to abortion.

On Thursday, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to federal criminal charges that he orchestrated a conspiracy to overturn his 2020 election loss. During the arraignment, Trump agreed he would not try to influence or intimidate witnesses or do anything else that might obstruct justice in the case.

But then on Friday, he posted a threatening message on his social media platform, Truth Social: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” Trump wrote in all-caps. Minutes later, Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign posted a one-minute video that names and shows the images of four prosecutors who are pursuing legal cases against him, describing them as the “fraud squad.” 

Prosecutors soon responded, using his his social media habits—and specifically his recent Truth post—as ammo. In a filing from late Friday lodged in a DC federal court, the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith (one of the prosecutors named in the ad) asked US District Judge Tanya Chutkan to impose a protective order prohibiting Trump and his lawyers from sharing evidence in the case with unauthorized people.

While Smith’s team did not explicitly argue Trump’s post constituted a threat, they included an image of it it as evidence of his tendency to post about “witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him,” saying it raised the prospect that he might improperly post information or documents shared with his legal team ahead of the trial.

If he did so, it “could have a harmful chilling effect on witnesses or adversely affect the fair administration of justice in this case,” prosecutors warned.