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Maggie Tamposi Goodlander, the wife of the national security adviser, is navigating a personal landscape with little precedent in her run for Congress in New Hampshire.
For Maggie Goodlander, the complications of giving birth to a stillborn son helped inspire her to run for a House seat in her native New Hampshire to help restore abortion rights.Credit…Al Drago/Bloomberg
Maggie Tamposi Goodlander gave birth to her stillborn son in a hotel bathtub on Easter.
Her fetus had been diagnosed with a fatal condition and had died in her womb. Doctors recommended a two-day procedure to remove him, with an overnight stay at a hotel near the hospital. If she went into labor, they feared, she could hemorrhage.
But getting an appointment took weeks. The procedure that Ms. Goodlander needed is also commonly used for abortions later in pregnancy. Doctors across the northeast were flooded with patients traveling north from states where abortion had been banned after the fall of Roe v. Wade.
Her surgery came just a day too late: Ms. Goodlander, 37, delivered the baby in 2023 at a hotel near the hospital, relying on her experience taking a hypnobirthing course on YouTube. The harrowing experience, she said, exposed her in a deeply personal way to the new reality of a post-Roe America and inspired her politically, helping fuel a desire to run for a House seat in her native New Hampshire to help fight for abortion rights.
But there was another remarkable element to her experience. The national security adviser to the president, Jake Sullivan, was there, too — in his unofficial capacity, as her husband.
As she enters the race for New Hampshire’s second district, Ms. Goodlander comes armed with a powerful story, an impeccable résumé and deep connections in Washington and New Hampshire. Yet as she campaigns across western New Hampshire, she will have to navigate a personal landscape with little precedent.
There are only a handful of examples of the spouse of a high-ranking official running for federal office, and none when that official has been at the center of one of the most divisive issues in global and domestic politics — the war in Gaza.
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Multidomain attacks are on the verge of becoming a digital epidemic as nation-states and nicely-funded cybercrime attack groups survey to cash in on large gaps in digital estates’ defenses. Enterprises are having to deal with widening – and usually unknown – gaps between enterprise sources, apps, systems, recordsdata, identities and endpoints.
The lickety-split-rising tempo of attacks is riding a graph database fingers bustle across leading cybersecurity companies. Microsoft‘s Security Publicity Administration Platform (MSEM) at Ignite 2024 displays how fleet the fingers bustle is maturing and why its containment requires more progressed platforms.
“Three years ago, we had been seeing 567 password-connected attacks per 2d. As of late, that number has skyrocketed to 7,000 per 2d. This represents a broad escalation in the scale, tempo and class of contemporary cyber threats, underscoring the urgency for proactive and unified security methods,” Vasu Sakkal, Microsoft’s company vp of security, compliance, identity, management and privacy, urged VentureBeat at some level of a latest interview.
Microsoft goes all-in on their security vision at Ignite 2024
With every group experiencing more multidomain intrusion makes an try and tormented by undiscovered breaches, Microsoft is doubling down on security, pivoting its technique to graph-basically based completely defense in MSEM. Sakkal urged VentureBeat, “The sophistication, scale, and tempo of contemporary attacks require a generational shift in security. Graph databases and generative AI provide defenders the tools to unify fragmented insights into actionable intelligence.”
Cristian Rodriguez, CrowdStrike’s Americas Field CTO, echoed the importance of graph expertise in a latest interview with VentureBeat. “Graph databases allow us to arrangement adversary behavior across domains, identifying the subtle connections and patterns attackers exploit. By visualizing these relationships, defenders attach the contextual perception wished to seem forward to and disrupt complex, inferior-domain attack methods,” Rodriguez talked about.
Key announcements from Ignite 2024 encompass:
Microsoft Security Publicity Administration Platform (MSEM). At the core of Microsoft’s technique, MSEM leverages graph expertise to dynamically arrangement relationships across digital estates, in conjunction with gadgets, identities and recordsdata. MSEM attend for graph databases permits security groups to identify excessive-agonize attack paths and prioritize proactive remediation efforts.
Zero Day Quest. Microsoft is offering $4M in rewards to tell vulnerabilities in AI and cloud platforms. This initiative aims to compile researchers, engineers and AI red groups to take care of serious dangers preemptively.
Dwelling windows Resiliency Initiative. Specializing in zero belief principles, this initiative appears to be like to be to enhance machine reliability and recovery by securing credentials, imposing Zero Belief DNS protocols and fortifying Dwelling windows 11 against rising threats.
Security Copilot Enhancements. Microsoft claims that Security Copilot’s generative AI capabilities increase SOC operations by automating risk detection, streamlining incident triage and decreasing indicate time to resolution by 30%. Built-in with Entra, Intune, Purview and Defender, these updates present actionable insights, helping security groups tackle threats with bigger effectivity and accuracy.
Updates in Microsoft Purview. Purview’s progressed Knowledge Security Posture Administration (DSPM) tools form out generative AI dangers by discovering, protecting and governing handsome recordsdata in exact-time. Parts encompass detecting prompt injections, mitigating recordsdata misuse and combating oversharing in AI apps. The applying also strengthens compliance with AI governance requirements, aligning enterprise security with evolving guidelines.
Why now? The feature of graph databases in cybersecurity
John Lambert, company vp for Microsoft Security Be taught, underscored the serious importance of graph-basically based completely making an allowance for in cybersecurity, explaining to VentureBeat, “Defenders mediate in lists, cyberattackers mediate in graphs. As lengthy as this is correct, attackers ranking.”
He added that Microsoft’s technique to publicity management involves creating a comprehensive graph of the digital property, covering vulnerabilities, risk intelligence and attack paths. “It’s about giving defenders a full arrangement of their atmosphere, allowing them to prioritize the most serious dangers whereas working out the aptitude blast radius of any compromise,” Lambert added.
Graph databases are gathering momentum as an architectural technique for cybersecurity platforms. They excel at visualizing and inspecting interconnected recordsdata, which is serious for identifying attack paths in exact time.
Key advantages of graph databases encompass:
Relational Context: Draw relationships between sources and vulnerabilities.
Mercurial Querying: Traverse billions of nodes in milliseconds.
Chance Detection: Name excessive-agonize attack paths, decreasing false positives.
Knowledge Discovery: Consume graph AI for insights into interconnected dangers.
Behavioral Diagnosis: Graphs detect subtle attack patterns across domains.
Scalability: Integrate contemporary recordsdata functions seamlessly into current risk units.
Multidimensional Diagnosis:
The Gartner warmth arrangement underscores how graph databases excel in cybersecurity exercise cases cherish anomaly detection, monitoring and decision-making, positioning them as wanted tools in contemporary defense methods.
“Emerging Tech: Optimize Chance Detection With Knowledge Graph Databases,” Also can honest 2024. Source: Gartner
What makes Microsoft’s MSEM platform outlandish
The Microsoft Security Publicity Administration Platform (MSEM) differentiates itself from varied graph database-pushed cybersecurity platforms by its exact-time visibility and agonize management, which helps security operations heart groups preserve it up high of dangers, threats, incidents and breaches.
Sakkal urged VentureBeat, “MSEM bridges the outlet between detection and movement, empowering defenders to seem forward to and mitigate threats effectively.” The platform exemplifies Microsoft’s vision of a unified, graph-pushed security approach, offering organizations the tools to preserve sooner than contemporary threats with precision and tempo.
Built on graph-powered insights, MSEM integrates three core capabilities wished to war support against multi-domain attacks and fragmented security recordsdata. They encompass:
Attack Floor Administration. MSEM is designed to create a dynamic glimpse of a company’s digital property, enabling the identification of sources, interdependencies and vulnerabilities. Parts cherish automatic discovery of IoT/OT gadgets and unprotected endpoints safe particular visibility whereas prioritizing excessive-agonize areas. The applying inventory dashboard categorizes sources by criticality, helping security groups level of curiosity on the most urgent threats with precision.
Source: Microsoft
Attack Course Diagnosis. MSEM uses graph databases to arrangement attack paths from an adversary’s level of view, pinpointing serious routes they’ll exploit. Enhanced with AI-pushed graph modeling, it identifies excessive-agonize pathways across hybrid environments, in conjunction with on-premises, cloud and IoT systems.
Unified Publicity Insights. Microsoft also designed MSEM to translate technical recordsdata into actionable intelligence for both security professionals and industry chief personas. It helps ransomware protection, SaaS security, and IoT agonize management, guaranteeing focused, insightful recordsdata is supplied to security analysts.
Microsoft also announced the following MSEM enhancements at Ignite 2024:
Third-Birthday party Integrations: MSEM connects with Rapid7, Tenable and Qualys, broadening its visibility and making it a extremely efficient application for hybrid environments.
AI-Powered Graph Modeling: Detects hidden vulnerabilities and performs progressed risk path prognosis for proactive agonize reduction.
Historical Traits and Metrics: This application tracks shifts in publicity over time, helping groups adapt to evolving threats confidently.
Graph databases’ growing feature in cybersecurity
Graph databases own proven handy in tracking and defeating multi-domain attacks. They excel at visualizing and inspecting interconnected recordsdata in exact time, enabling quicker and more factual risk detection, attack path prognosis and agonize prioritization. It’s no shock that graph database expertise dominates the roadmaps of leading cybersecurity platform companies.
Cisco’s SecureX Chance Response is one example. The Cisco platform extends the utility of graph databases into network-centric environments, connecting recordsdata across endpoints, IoT gadgets and hybrid networks. Key strengths encompass an integrated incident response that’s integrated across the Cisco suite of apps and tools and network-centric visibility.”What we want to build is safe particular that we exercise AI natively for defenses since you are going to now not scramble out and fight these AI weaponization attacks from adversaries at a human scale. Or now not it’s some distance extremely predominant build it at machine scale,” Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vp and CPO, urged VentureBeat in an interview earlier this one year.
CrowdStrike’s Chance Graph became as soon as presented at their annual buyer match, Fal.Con in 2022 and is mostly cited as an illustration of the vitality of graph databases in endpoint security. Processing over 2.5 trillion day-to-day events, Chance Graph excels in detecting dilapidated signals and mapping adversary behavior. Rodriguez emphasised to VentureBeat, “Our graph capabilities safe particular precision by specializing in endpoint telemetry, offering defenders with actionable insights quicker than ever.” CrowdStrike’s key differentiators encompass endpoint precision in tracking lateral movements and identifying anomalous behaviors. Chance Graph also helps behavioral prognosis dilapidated on AI to tell adversary tactics across workloads.
Palo Alto Networks (Cortex XDR), SentinelOne (Singularity) and Pattern Micro are among the many valuable gamers leveraging graph databases to enhance their risk detection and exact-time anomaly prognosis capabilities. Gartner predicted in the latest research demonstrate Emerging Tech: Optimize Chance Detection With Knowledge Graph Databases that their fashioned adoption will continue due to their ability to attend AI-pushed insights and decrease noise in security operations.
Graph databases will rework enterprise defense
Microsoft’s Lambert encapsulated the industry’s trajectory by stating, “Also can honest the most easy attack graph ranking. Graph databases are reworking how defenders mediate interconnected dangers,” underscoring their pivotal feature in contemporary cybersecurity methods.
Multi-domain attacks target the weaknesses between and inner complex digital estates. Discovering gaps in identity management is an net site nation-articulate attackers be unsleeping of and mine recordsdata to access the core enterprise systems of a company. Microsoft joins Cisco, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne and Pattern Micro, enabling and persevering with to pork up graph database expertise to identify and act on threats sooner than a breach occurs.
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A Kezi lady stumbled on herself being slapped with a 10 year penal advanced sentence after she blueprint her husband ablaze killing him over infidelity concerns.
The 42 year aged lady, Sindiaso Ndlovu who comes from Maphisa Kezi changed into arraigned earlier than Bulawayo Excessive Court accused of killing her husband. Ndlovu changed into convicted by the courtroom and sentenced to 10 years in penal advanced for assassinate as defined in Fragment 47 of the Criminal law Act Chapter 9:23.
Private investigator for cheating spouse: Circumstances That Led To Ndlovu’s Arrest
In step with a post made on X by the National Prosecution Authority of Zimbabwe, in 2019 on the nineteenth of October Sindiso blueprint her husband Busani Ncube on hearth with the plan of killing him. The married couple were acknowledged to relish had a misunderstanding and a fight in their bed room as a result of the husband’s infidelity.
Lady sets husband ablaze for cheating-Image Offer@iStock
Ndlovu changed into enraged and felt scorned as she asked her husband of his additional-marital affairs. The accused particular person then locked their bed room door with them internal and poured petrol on the now-deceased with the plan of burning him. Ndlovu then blueprint Busani Ncube alight whereas he changed into doused in petrol.
The police were referred to as and the topic changed into reported leading to the arrest of the accused particular person. Her husband sustained burns and accidents and changed into rushed to Maphisa District Clinic. They nonetheless later referred him to United Bulawayo Clinic for additional therapy however he succumbed to his accidents and died three months in a while the 8th of January 2020.
Private investigator for cheating spouse: Court’s ruling and verdict
Ndlovu who changed into in remand dealing with attempted assassinate charges had her charges changed to assassinate when her husband died. The case changed into in trial on the Excessive Court for four years and on the present time, Ndlovu changed into slapped with a 10 year penal advanced sentence for her crimes.
The police keeps urging the public to chorus from the usage of violence when they web into misunderstandings at home. Churches, society and assorted social organizations are being referred to as to coach the a lot on ways to take care of misunderstandings besides resorting to violence.
Donald Trump is now looping his baseless conspiracies into his fundraising emails.
On Monday, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee escalated his claims that President Joe Biden authorized the FBI to shoot and kill him during its 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago, this time promising to punish his two-time opponent for the alleged assassination attempt.
“Biden’s day of reckoning is coming,” the Trump campaign wrote in a fundraising email distributed Monday. “He tried to publicly torture and humiliate me … but he failed. He tried to raid my home and take me out with deadly force … but he failed.”
Trump’s blow-up accusation that the Biden administration had authorized the FBI to shoot him during its search and seizure of Mar-a-Lago is, in actuality, a wild misread of a standard policy statement regarding the agency’s use of deadly force during investigations.
But the ominous threat of revenge is a particularly odd attack from a man whose legal team argued that presidential immunity could cover political assassinations. In January, Trump’s legal team suggested that even a direct order for SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent could avoid prosecution under a former president’s broad immunity.
The former president faces 42 felony charges in the case related to willful retention of national security information, corruptly concealing documents, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. But the judge actually overseeing the former president’s classified documents case seems to have no motivation to move forward with the trial.
In May, Judge Aileen Cannon ordered a stay on Trump’s legal requirement to give the government advance notice of which classified materials will be discussed in his classified documents case—but offered no expiration date for the theoretically temporary reprieve.
Read about the conspiracy:
The Georgia Court of Appeals has set a date to hear the Trump legal team’s appeal to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the Georgia election interference case. Oral arguments are set to begin in October—all but guaranteeing to delay the election racketeering trial until past the election and well into 2025.
In mid-March, Judge Scott McAfee ruled that Willis could continue to prosecute the case, so long as she cut ties with her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, with whom she was accused of having an improper relationship. Two weeks later, Trump and eight of his 18 co-defendants in the case filed an application with the Georgia Court of Appeals asking it to reconsider McAfee’s decision, and last month, the court agreed to hear the case.
With Willis’s status on the fraud case pushed late in the year, the odds of the trial even beginning before the election in November have shrunk to zero. It’s a success for the convicted felon and Republican presidential candidate, whose legal strategy in the many cases against him has been to delay them so they can’t affect his chances of winning back the presidency.
Between this delay, Judge Aileen Cannon stalling Trump’s classified documents trial, and the Supreme Court’s examination of presidential immunity, Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges in his hush-money trial may be the only legal consequences he faces for a long time. Even though sentencing is set to be decided in July in that case, Trump still can appeal the conviction and push his sentence further down the road.
If he’s elected president, the convicted felon plans to recruit his Republican allies to make it illegal to prosecute him for the crimes he commits, forever. He also wants to go after everyone who has tried to hold him accountable before the law.
It seems that, except for his hush-money trial conviction, what started out as a perilous year for Trump is looking better and better as his other legal cases get delayed and he evades further consequences. The only avenue for accountability may be for Trump to be soundly defeated In five months.
Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, Republican Senator and Trump V.P.-hopeful Tom Cotton intently avoided answering whether he’d support the verdict if Trump loses the appeal in his hush-money trial—and weaseled away from his stance on other topics that went against Trump’s position too.
“Republicans are attacking the judge, the jury, the legal system here instead of letting the process play out,” Meet the Press anchor Peter Alexander asked. “If Donald Trump wins on appeal, is that valid?”
Cotton quickly answered the softball question, responding, “I think there’s no question Donald Trump should win on appeal.” On follow-up, Cotton was asked if he would find the verdict valid if Trump loses on appeal. Cotton blew off the question entirely, instead opting to speak straight through it to falsely assert, “He’s an innocent man who did nothing wrong.”
“This judge, again, violated New York rules by giving money to Joe Biden in 2020, specifically to stop Donald Trump,” Cotton continued. “I hope that the Court of Appeals in New York actually applies the law in an even-handed way as opposed to do what this judge did, what Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has done, which is bending the rules in return solely to stop Donald Trump. The only thing Donald Trump is guilty of is being a threat to Joe Biden’s reelection.”
Tom Cotton on Meet the Press: “I do believe the jury got it wrong.”
“If he loses on appeal, would that be valid?” host Peter Alexander follows up. (Cotton ignores the question.) pic.twitter.com/zfOo3pfOWc
Alexander noted to Cotton that “Joe Biden’s Department of Justice” is in the midst of prosecuting Robert Menendez, Henry Cuellar, and Hunter Biden. Alexander also noted to Cotton that the case against Trump began in 2018—well before Biden was the presidential nominee, and before he’d ever announced he was running for president.
In the same interview, Cotton revealed he would do Trump’s bidding elsewhere, adding a condition to whether he would accept the 2024 election results. Cotton was further grilled on his previous statements about the January 6 Capitol riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Notably, Trump has promised to pardon everyone convicted for the Capitol riot—including those who assaulted police—while Cotton has only gone so far as to call for pardoning people who did not assault anyone or vandalize anything. Cotton was also asked if he’d condemn extreme threats made against jurors, the judge, and prosecution in Trump’s hush-money trial that MSNBC pulled from Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social. Cotton initially dodged by deriding the comments as coming from an “obscure platform” and insinuating they must have come from “some obscure account” before admitting “I will always say that violence has no place in our politics.”
More on Republicans in Congress:
On Monday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene screamed at and berated Dr. Anthony Fauci in a petty fight that earned her a reprimand from the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Greene called Fauci’s medical credentials into question during a hearing on the U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“That is completely unacceptable to deny Dr. Fauci, who is here as a respected member of the medical community, his title, and that’s actually a personal attack on his character,” Representative Robert Garcia, a Democrat, said.
“He’s not respected,” Greene shot back. Others on the committee quickly moved to correct Greene and have her words stricken from the record when she refused to comply.
Representative Brad Wenstrup, the Republican chair of the subcommittee, eventually reprimanded Greene and ordered, “The gentlelady will suspend.”
Garcia: Dr. Fauci is here as a respected member of the medical community
Garcia later tore into Greene and other Republicans for their conduct in the hearing.
“I am so sorry that you are subjected to those level of attacks and insanity,” Garcia said, addressing Fauci. “Your quote-unquote ‘so-called science’ that the gentlewoman is referring to has saved millions of lives in this country and around the world.”
Garcia went on to praise Fauci and other medical officials for saving lives during and outside of the pandemic, pointing out that Greene introduced the Fire Fauci Act and that she accused the infectious diseases specialist of creating the Covid-19 virus. Garcia noted that he lost both of his parents to Covid-19.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and House Republicans spent our whole COVID hearing attacking Dr. Fauci. I lost two parents to the pandemic so this is personal. I had to remind her of her crazy COVID conspiracy theories. pic.twitter.com/WiISn3NWUg
— Congressman Robert Garcia (@RepRobertGarcia) June 3, 2024
It’s pretty clear that Greene’s attack is part of her and other far-right Republicans’ culture-war posturing on vaccination and the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather than achieve anything, their attacks on Fauci and other medical professionals, both on Monday and throughout the pandemic, only achieve attention for themselves and dangerous health outcomes for their supporters.
Greene hasn’t had a good spring. Last month, her attempt to insult Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett backfired and turned her into a bankable meme for Crockett, and she’s lost a lot of goodwill from her fellow Republicans over her failed effort to oust Speaker Mike Johnson.
Unfortunately More on MTG:
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is setting out on a new MAGA crusade: defunding the state of New York to avenge Donald Trump.
Greene* has proposed cutting the Empire State off from federal funding in a bid to punish residents after 12 jurors convicted Trump on Thursday. The extremely unlikely initiative would cut off access to federal resources for education, housing, law enforcement, veterans’ benefits, and other social needs.
But that’s not Greene’s only Trump-saving effort. The Georgia Republican also wants Congress to step in to prevent special counsel Jack Smith from prosecuting Trump in the federal election interference case and the classified documents trial.
The first step: pressure House Speaker Mike Johnson—whom Greene tried and failed to force out of Congress just last month—to lead the charge.
“The speaker of the House is one of the most powerful people in the country,” Greene said last week. “We control the budget, we control the power of the purse. If Speaker Johnson supports Trump like he claims, he should stop the special counsel, Jack Smith, and he should be using the power of the purse to hold New York accountable for the sham convictions against President Trump. The entire thing is political, it’s outrageous, and our country has completely turned a corner.”
While Johnson is unlikely to be on board with defunding an entire state, he has made clear he disagrees with the ruling. Johnson called on the Supreme Court to intervene, indicating that he thought some of the justices were “deeply concerned” about the trial outcome.
“I think that the justices on the court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are,” Johnson told Fox & Friends on Friday. “So I think they’ll set this straight.”
Trump has 30 days to appeal the conviction, according to New York penal law. Appealing the case would most likely turn into a referendum on the judge that oversaw it, Judge Juan Merchan, who endured Trump’s mud-slinging throughout the seven-week trial primarily over a gag order, which prevented Trump from attacking witnesses, jurors, and courtroom staff’s family—but did not prevent him from hurling vitriol at Merchan.
Trump could potentially push the state case to federal courts if he were reelected as president, but doing so would be incredibly unlikely unless he had already exhausted all other avenues via the appeals process, which could take years.
*This article originally misstated that Representative Mike Lawler supported Greene’s plan.
What Republicans are doing after Trump’s conviction:
If you want an honest opinion, ask a kid. That lesson was on wide display Monday as the young son of Republican Representative John Rose stole the spotlight from his MAGA dad and made a bunch of silly faces to CSPAN’s camera—which even the normally buttoned-up CSPAN couldn’t resist highlighting.
Rose spoke from prepared remarks to the House decrying the conviction of Donald Trump, calling it a “terrible precedent set by our country” and a “politically driven prosecution” before becoming background noise for his 6-year-old son’s devious performance.
“The charges brought against Donald Trump should gravely concern every member of this body as well as every American across our country,” said Rose as his 6-year-old son’s body became gravely concerned with the need to make silly faces.
The goof heard ’round the world quickly gained popularity, with gifs and jokes about getting lost rewatching the clip, feeling kinship to the youngster’s informality amid continued conservative outrage at Trump’s felony conviction, and cheeky jokes that the rambunctious sprog was flagging the Illuminati.
Guy’s performance even earned him a job offer from The Onion CEO Ben Collins.
“This is what I get for telling my son Guy to smile at the camera for his little brother,” said Rose with a shrug emoji on X (formerly Twitter), apparently also forgetting why he spoke on the House floor and reminding us all that no amount of performative outrage can outmatch a kid goofing off.
Dr. Anthony Fauci visited Capitol Hill on Monday to testify on the origins of Covid-19, but some Republican members on the House Oversight Committee had no intention of asking anything even remotely relevant to scientific inquiry.
The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was repeatedly grilled by GOP lawmakers who clearly had not done their homework before they tried to pin baseless allegations against him, in an apparent attempt to undermine his credibility as the medical leader of America’s pandemic response.
The hearing opened with committee Chair James Comer refusing to let Fauci actually answer any of his questions. The Kentucky Republican said it was because he had so many questions to get through.
In another embarrassing instance, New York Representative Nicole Malliotakis tried—and failed—to implicate the infectious diseases expert in a popular conspiracy theory, including that he had received royalties from pharmaceutical companies for coronavirus-related medications and vaccines.
“How much have you earned in royalties from pharmaceutical companies since the pandemic began in 2021?” asked Malliotakis.
“Zero,” replied Fauci.
The New York Republican then proceeded to read a headline in front of her, citing that an “NIH scientist had made $710 million from drugmakers.” “You’re saying that you did not receive any of the $710 million?” she pressed.
Fauci knew exactly how much he had made: just $122 for a somewhat unrelated monoclonal antibody that he had patented decades prior. But Malliotakis wasn’t satisfied with that. Instead, she attempted to corner Fauci on any royalties—not necessarily related to Covid—that he had received over the course of the pandemic, and whether any of the $710 million had gone to him.
“I think none,” Fauci said before fending off bubbling interruptions from the Trump ally. “No—I’m on the record, and I want to make sure that this is clear: that I developed a monoclonal antibody about 25 years ago that’s used as a diagnostic that has nothing to do with Covid, and I receive about $120 a year from that patent.”
Later, Arizona Representative Debbie Lesko attempted to frame Fauci for allegedly participating in a series of emails that discussed suppressing the “lab leak theory” for Covid without realizing that the emails don’t actually exist.
“You said about four or five things, Congressman, that were just not true,” Fauci responded after Lesko laid out her theory.
“Well, we have emails to prove it,” Lesko said.
“But you don’t,” he said, before Maryland Representative Kweisi Mfume interjected to correct Lesko that “no, we don’t have it.”
“I get tired of hearing ‘We got it,’ and then when we ask for it, it’s not there. We do not have it,” Mfume said. “That’s just incorrect.”
And another mind-boggling line of questioning by Ohio Representative Jim Jordan prompted the medical expert to ask, “What does that have to do with me?”
“What does that have to do with me?” — Fauci to Jim Jordan as Jordan fishes for something, anything to tar him with pic.twitter.com/ecrEfYmDQT
Judge Aileen Cannon seems to have handed Donald Trump another big favor in his classified documents trial—seriously entertaining a lie from the former president.
Trump made up a false claim that the FBI plotted to assassinate him during its search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents because it had weapons, despite the fact that this is generally standard procedure when law enforcement carries out a search warrant. Trump appointee Cannon has decided to grant this made-up conspiracy legitimacy by giving the presumptive Republican presidential nominee two weeks to prove it, further delaying the trial.
It’s the latest in a series of questionable moves from Cannon in the classified documents case. She has indefinitely delayed the case over “unresolved pretrial motions,” and last week she rejected a gag order request from special counsel Jack Smith because she claimed it was “wholly lacking in substance and professional courtesy.” Trump has made no secret of how much he appreciates Cannon’s efforts, and there have been calls for her to remove herself from the case. Even one of Trump’s former lawyers, Ty Cobb, thinks that she is incompetent.
Overall, the trial isn’t running smoothly. One hearing that gave a defendant’s lawyer a chance to allege vindictiveness from a prosecutor devolved into a shouting match. Cannon herself seems to be having trouble understanding basic legal proceedings and principles, leading to long explanations that she still doesn’t appear to grasp. Her conduct has disillusioned some of her clerks, two of whom decided to quit as a result of her conduct on the classified documents case as well as an allegedly hostile work environment.All of this fuels accusations that Cannon is deliberately slowing down the case to benefit Trump and his campaign for president.
Trump faces 42 felony charges in the case related to illegally retaining national security documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
More on how Trump’s othetrials are going:
Expect more crocodile tears from Alex Jones: Right-wing conspiracy theorist and Alex Jones underling Owen Shroyer lost his petition for the Supreme Court to overturn the conviction for his participation in the January 6 Capitol riot on Monday, according to Supreme Court documents reviewed by Politico reporter Kyle Cheney.
Shroyer, who hosts a show on far-right website Infowars, was originally sentenced to a mere 60 days in federal prison for misdemeanor charges of entering restricted grounds and leading the mob in chants outside the U.S. Capitol ahead of the January 6 Capitol riot—charges to which he pleaded guilty. Prior to January 6, Shroyer used the once-sizable Infowars platform to spew violent, inciting rhetoric and election-denialist propaganda to hundreds of thousands of people.
Shroyer’s gambit sought to grift on his misdemeanor, claiming in videos that his Supreme Court appeal was a test of whether the Supreme Court supports “free speech,” which in Shroyer’s case is more commonly known as “trespassing.”
Shroyer filed a writ of certiorari, a type of petition sent to the Supreme Court as a last-ditch effort to appeal a lower court’s ruling. As Shroyer was sentenced by a federal court and not a state court, his appeal request went directly to the highest court in the country. Technically, any guilty verdict of a criminal case can file an appeal—but pleading guilty, as Shroyer did, certainly doesn’t help.
The Supreme Court’s denial of Shroyer’s petition suggests other convicted Capitol rioters who may be inclined to attempt to submit gimmicky appeals to the Supreme Court will find themselves similarly rejected.
Now that he is facing the very real possibility of jail time, Donald Trump suddenly doesn’t seem to remember one of his major catchphrases against his 2016 presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton.
In a Fox & Friends exclusive interview that aired Sunday, Trump claimed he had never suggested the government should “lock her up” in reference to Clinton’s email scandal.
“You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘Lock her up.’ You declined to do that as president,” prompted Fox host Will Cain.
“I beat her. It’s easier when you win,” Trump said. “I could have done it, but I felt it would have been a terrible thing. And then this happened to me.”
“Hillary Clinton—I didn’t say, ‘Lock her up,’ but the people would all say, ‘Lock her up, lock her up,’ OK—then we won,” he said. “And I said, pretty openly, I said, ‘Alright, come on, just let’s relax, we’ve gotta make our country great.’”
“I didn’t say ‘lock her up'” — Trump, on Fox & Friends and facing possible jail time, tries to distance himself from the ubiquitous “lock her up” chants about Hillary Clinton at her rallies pic.twitter.com/r1YPIbOqkn
That is, however, completely false. Throughout his 2016 campaign, Trump used the phrase dozens of times while speaking at rallies around the country, going so far as to encourage his supporters to throw the phrase back at Clinton during her own public appearances and even telling her in person that he’d throw her in jail, during a debate just one month out from the election.
The phrase threatened Clinton with new legal repercussions for using a private email server while conducting business as secretary of state during the Obama administration. Clinton was investigated at the time but was not charged with any criminal wrongdoing. Once in office, Trump conceded that he had little interest in actually prosecuting Clinton—but only until 2020, when he dredged the phrase back up as leverage in his fight for reelection.
The wide-ranging interview also saw Trump suggest that Democrats wanted to lock him up for a $130,000 “accounting thing” (referring to his New York bank fraud trial), as well as reiterating his presidential agenda should he win in November, including proposals for gutting several government agencies and mass deportations of immigrants and asylum-seekers.
But aside from the content of the interview, audiences were caught off guard by a barrage of rough cuts and heavy edits that interrupted and disjointed Trump’s comments. Some viewers pinned the blame on the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s mental acuity, claiming that the “deranged rambling mess” could only sound coherent with the assistance of creative video editors.
