Carrie Johnson
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a dispute about whether Donald Trump should be disqualified from the ballot after the Capitol riot three years ago.
The former president says he learned Sunday that he may be charged with a federal crime by a grand jury investigating the Capitol siege. A spokesman for special counsel Jack Smith declined to comment.
The former president is expected in the federal courthouse in Miami for processing on Tuesday afternoon. Trump faces 37 federal charges, including unlawfully retaining government secrets.
Advocates who want big changes to the criminal justice system are pressing the Biden administration. They want him to grant clemency for a few thousand people and make key personnel decisions.
A coalition of civil rights and criminal justice reform groups said a White House proposal for restricting synthetic drugs related to fentanyl will not curb the overdose epidemic.
Relatively few people in federal prison have been approved for compassionate release during the pandemic. Lawmakers are trying to make that option a reality for more sick and elderly people.
Prosecutors accuse the former officer and others of using excessive force and violating George Floyd’s rights. The rare federal charges follow state charges in a trial where Chauvin was convicted.
The former Supreme Court nominee will face the Senate this week as President Biden’s pick to lead the Justice Department. If confirmed, he’ll inherit a department reeling from political scandals.
The federal appeals judge was spurned when Democrats supported him as a Supreme Court justice. Now the incoming Biden administration wants him to lead what it calls reform at the Justice Department.
The Supreme Court has largely ducked Second Amendment cases for years. But if the Senate confirms Trump’s pick, Amy Coney Barrett, that could produce a big shift on gun regulations.
“I took more than my fair share of criticism,” Rosenstein said in February. “But I kept the faith; I followed the rules; and I left my office in good hands. Those are the things that matter.”
But the 448-page document, released after a nearly two-year long inquiry, depicts a president deeply worried about the investigation and aides stopping his attempts to influence it.
The Justice Department has been excising sensitive, classified and other material from the special counsel’s report about Russian interference in the 2016 election. That task is now complete.
Mueller’s investigation did not take a position on whether Trump obstructed justice in the ongoing investigation, writing that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
In May 2017, the special counsel’s office took over an FBI probe into Russian election interference that had been underway for nearly a year. The report about that work is now ready.
The former acting director of the bureau also tells NPR that he and Justice Department leaders were so rattled following the dismissal of James Comey they struggled with how to respond.
President Trump, the GOP-controlled Senate and the Federalist Society are putting their stamp on the federal judiciary for a generation with a corps of conservative appointments.
Sessions was an early Trump supporter, but he quickly lost the president’s favor after recusing himself from the Russia investigation. Democrats immediately expressed concern about the probe’s fate.