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The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents case chided special counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday, denying a gag order request to block Trump from falsely claiming FBI agents were prepared to kill him during the search of his Mar-a-Lago property for classified documents in 2022.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing Trump’s trial in Florida on allegations he mishandled classified documents, cited a “lack of meaningful conferral” with the defense after the special counsel asked her to modify Trump’s conditions of release by ordering Trump to stop publicly lashing out.
Trump has claimed, including in recent fundraising appeals, that President Joe Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out” and that agents were authorized to shoot him during the raid at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach; Trump was not in Florida at the time of the raid, and the FBI has said the authorization he has seized on is typical language limiting the use of force.
Trump’s statements, prosecutors said, could pose “a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement” involved in the case.
Cannon did not dismiss the gag order request on the merits but said the special counsel’s effort to confer with the defense was “wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy” after it was filed Friday leading up to Memorial Day weekend, the timing of which drew pushback from Trump’s lawyers.
“[M]eaningful conferral is not a perfunctory exercise,” Cannon said Tuesday. “Sufficient time needs to be afforded to permit reasonable evaluation of the requested relief by opposing counsel and to allow for adequate follow-up discussion as necessary about the specific factual and legal basis underlying the motion.”
Cannon also criticized what she said were prosecutors’ “editorialized footnotes” used to relay the response from Trump’s defense team.
On Monday, Trump’s lawyers asked Cannon to strike the government’s motion from the court record and sanction the prosecutors who prepared it, saying they violated procedure by filing it without consulting the defense.
Cannon did not impose sanctions on Smith’s office but warned that failure to comply with her requirements going forward could lead her to impose them.
The ruling followed a flurry of back-and-forth filings over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, with prosecutors in Smith’s office urging the court to restrict Trump’s claims about the government’s handling of the raid.
Prosecutors said Trump’s claims posed a threat to law enforcement agents who had acted “in an appropriate and professional manner, subject to the Department of Justice’s standard use-of-force policy.” The FBI said it followed standard protocol during the search.
“Trump’s repeated mischaracterization of these facts in widely distributed messages as an attempt to kill him, his family, and Secret Service agents has endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case and threatened the integrity of these proceedings,” Smith’s office said. “A restriction prohibiting future similar statements should therefore be modified to prohibit similar communications going forward.”
Smith’s team asked Cannon to modify Trump’s conditions of release so he would face higher penalties for statements that the court determined would endanger law enforcement.
Trump has made the deadly force claims in reference to recently unsealed court filings in the Florida case.
In a Truth Social post, Trump said the Biden administration “AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE” in its search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents and charged in a fundraising email that Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out.”
Trump’s campaign issued a new fundraising appeal over the weekend with the headline “BREAKING FROM TRUMP: BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!”
Trump was in New Jersey when the raid occurred.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has called Trump’s claim “false” and “extremely dangerous” and said the same form outlining the FBI’s use of force policy was included in the preparations for when it searched Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, for classified documents. The FBI has so far declined to release the Biden form.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges that he willfully retained national defense information in connection with classified documents that were discovered at Mar-a-Lago after he left office and ordered security video at the property to be deleted. He faces dozens of felony counts, including making false statements and representations, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record and corruptly concealing a document. The case had been scheduled to go to trial in federal court in Florida, but it was indefinitely postponed because of what Cannon said were ongoing legal issues.
Katherine Doyle is a White House reporter for NBC News.
Ken Dilanian
and
Daniel Barnes
contributed
.
Www.oeisdigitalinvestigator.com:
The European Union has launched a fresh investigation against Meta (Facebook and Instagram) over concerns that it’s not doing enough to protect minor users on its platforms. If these concerns are found to be true, the company will be slapped with a heavy fine.
In a statement released on Thursday, the EU said that it’s worried Facebook and Instagram “may exploit the weaknesses and inexperience of minors and cause addictive behavior.”
The EU is also concerned that these platforms are not doing enough to keep underage users off them. Apparently, the age-verification methods put in place are not as effective as they should be.
Meta has responded to EU’s concerns and said that ensuring young people have a safe experience on its platforms is one of its top priorities. The company has invested decades in research and has created around 50 safety tools to protect children online.
It’s worth noting that Meta isn’t lying when it says it has created child safety tools. For instance, it released two major updates in January this year to address mounting regulatory pressure.
First, it reinforced safety measures for teens including shielding them from sensitive content on the ‘Search’ and ‘Explore’ features of Instagram. Second, Meta blocked under-18 users from receiving DMs from strangers on Instagram and Facebook.
However, the EU is right in saying that the platforms aren’t doing anything to keep young users off it—Meta is just promising safety. This is not enough because a 12-year-old’s brain can still get fried seeing useless reels all day long, even if it’s not ‘sensitive content.’
I’m talking about low attention spans, ADHD, teen mental health concerns, etc. Young users should undoubtedly be kept off these platforms with the help of stronger age verification tools.
Nevertheless, Meta acknowledged the points EU raised and said that it’s looking forward to explaining its work to the bloc and doing everything in its power to make its platforms a better place for young users.
The EU has always been a tad bit stricter when it came to apps that deal with minors. However, after the recently introduced Digital Services Act (a set of laws that handle everything related to digital platforms), things have gone up a whole new level—and that’s a good thing for us consumers.
Under the DSA, companies that are labeled as ‘very large online platforms‘ have to do more to protect children. For instance, they need to have more protective features in place so that underage users don’t stumble upon inappropriate content.
Failure to comply with the rules would invite a hefty fine of 6% of the company’s annual global revenue—this is the fine I mentioned earlier.
Note: Very large online platforms are apps/websites that have more than 45 million users per month in the European Union.
Interestingly, this is not the first time Meta has been under fire by the EU. In September 2023, it had to submit a risk assessment report to the commission detailing what it’s doing to protect minors on its platform.
However, the EU did not find the report satisfactory. In a statement, it said that it’s not convinced that Meta is doing enough to comply with the Digital Services Act (DSA).
On the point of probes, the EU is also investigating Meta for allegedly violating DSA regulations for election disinformation. A separate probe addressing this was launched against Meta in April 2024, which found that the company is not doing enough to curb the spread of election-related misinformation on its platform ahead of the upcoming European Parliament elections.
Furthermore, the EU isn’t the only one scrutinizing core Meta apps and operations. The company has received loads of criticism and investigations from other agencies and law enforcement officials around the world, too.
In December 2023, a New Mexico attorney general sued the company stating that it enables child exploitation, spread of child abuse material, solicitation, and trafficking. Similarly, in October 2023, Meta was sued by 33 US states for being too addictive for young users.
Meta has addressed both these incidents and said the same thing—that protecting young users is its priority and it will look into the matter and take necessary steps. If and when it will do that is the bigger question, in my humble opinion.
Perhaps the EU can impose strict deadlines on the implementation of remedial measures, which could also be verified first-hand by officials?
Read more: Ex-Meta employee accuses company of ignoring his warnings on how Instagram was harming teens
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Www.oeisdigitalinvestigator.com:
by
Kristina Fiore
,
Director of Enterprise & Investigative Reporting, MedPage Today
May 16, 2024
While the CDC’s recently launched wastewater dashboard reports levels of influenza A, a team in Texas is getting far more granular in its wastewater monitoring.
The team at the Texas Epidemic Public Health Institute (TEPHI) in Houston can detect H5N1 specifically — and it can even pick up potentially concerning genetic changes that could provide an early warning about adaptation to humans.
That kind of surveillance could sound an alarm well before standard symptomatic surveillance like emergency department visits or hospitalizations, which would only pick up an H5N1 outbreak after it’s already spreading in people.
“This allows us to monitor over time for the emergence of new mutations or strains” of H5N1, said Eric Boerwinkle, PhD, director of TEPHI and dean of UTHealth Houston School of Public Health. “We can look for mutations that could increase virulence or increase transmission, even transmission to and among humans.”
For instance, the team can look for the hallmark E627K mutation in H5N1’s polymerase basic protein 2 (PB2) gene, which has been identified in human cases of the disease — including the dairy cattle worker in Texas whose only symptom of infection was conjunctivitis.
“Going forward, a major concern will be looking at the different alleles and seeing if there’s this hallmark mutation or potentially others,” said Michael Tisza, PhD, of TEPHI and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “This technology would allow us to do that.”
The E627K mutation hasn’t turned up in their surveillance yet, but the team is keeping an eye out for it, they said.
Detecting an early signal like that would enable TEPHI to work with its public health partners who can then “direct other resources to look at things like syndromic surveillance to better assess what’s going on in those locations as far as the sources go,” said Blake Hanson, PhD, of TEPHI and UTHealth in Houston.
Hanson described wastewater monitoring as having varying levels of resolution. The widest resolution is detecting influenza A, which covers a wide range of viruses including H2N3, H1N1, and H5N1. That’s what the CDC’s dashboard monitors.
While the CDC’s wastewater monitoring efforts may be helpful right now — during the late spring and the summer when it would be unusual to have high levels of influenza A circulating — it won’t work as well during the regular flu season in fall and winter.
“When symptoms and our seasonal influenza levels are low, it’s a reasonable proxy for other strains of influenza A circulating in wastewater,” Hanson said.
The next level would be detecting the H5 gene using polymerase chain reaction (PCR). That’s what a team from Verily Life Sciences, Emory University, and Stanford University recently did, as reported in a medRxiv preprint. They detected influenza A at 59 wastewater treatment plants in the U.S. this spring. They then searched for — and found — the H5 gene using PCR at three wastewater treatment plants with a positive flu A signal. All three plants were in a state with confirmed outbreaks of H5N1 in dairy cattle, they reported.
“They can only confidently say that’s H5, where our method has a third level of resolution where we can represent the entirety of the genome for the H5N1 strains,” Hanson said.
TEPHI’s virome sequencing would provide the most granular look, detecting H5N1 specifically, along with any potential mutations in its genome.
Tisza said they only need about a 50-mL sample of wastewater to detect sequences from any given viruses, as long as they’re present at about 100 or more genome copies per mL.
The team captures viral genetic material from the sample, then runs it through a sequencer — the Illumina NovaSeq machine in this case — which generates a readout of those sequences.
They then use bioinformatics software to identify viruses from those genomes and genome fragments, also scanning for interesting mutations. With COVID, for instance, they’re able to see new strains as they come to dominate, Tisza said.
The team recently detected H5N1 in wastewater in nine Texas cities during a sampling period of March 4 through April 25, and they published their findings as a preprint in medRxiv. For that paper, Tisza and Hanson both separately confirmed the sequences manually to be sure they were dealing with H5N1.
TEPHI has been conducting wastewater surveillance since May 2022, testing samples from plants across Texas on a weekly basis, and has detected more than 400 human and animal viruses to date.
The group’s methodology is public, published in Nature Communications in October 2023.
“All our methods are published, and we welcome others to adopt these techniques because we think they’re incredibly powerful,” Hanson said, particularly for H5N1 surveillance.
The team continues to observe H5N1 sequences in their wastewater sampling, Boerwinkle said. The point of the surveillance is to help keep public health prepared for a potential outbreak: “If we’re prepared, we can keep the economy strong,” he added.
Andrew Pekosz, PhD, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who isn’t involved in TEPHI, said the team’s work is “an important part of the ‘pyramid’ of analysis that we need to do with wastewater.”
“First, you need easy rapid tests to identify the small percentage of systems that might have a signal for influenza,” Pekosz told MedPage Today in an email. “You then need to take those samples and do an in-depth analysis by sequencing to clearly identify what kind of influenza … is driving that positivity. If your sequencing is good enough, you can even identify the proportion of the sample that has important mutations like the PB2 mutation.”
“It’s all about using the various virus surveillance tools to maximize efficiency and minimize cost,” he said.
Kristina Fiore leads MedPage’s enterprise & investigative reporting team. She’s been a medical journalist for more than a decade and her work has been recognized by Barlett & Steele, AHCJ, SABEW, and others. Send story tips to k.fiore@medpagetoday.com. Follow
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