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President Donald Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to toss two verdicts against him resulting from civil litigation brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. In 2019, the famous advice columnist published a memoir describing an encounter in the 1990s when she says Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store. When Trump denied the account, Carroll sued him and won $5 million in damages, with a unanimous New York jury finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. After Trump made disparaging remarks about Carroll, she sued him again and won a second defamation judgment for $83.3 million. Federal courts have upheld both verdicts, but now Trump's attorneys are asking the Supreme Court to overturn them, asserting he has "absolute immunity" as president.
Carroll's life and her legal fight against Trump are the focus of a new documentary, Ask E. Jean, by award-winning filmmaker Ivy Meeropol. "This is an incredible opportunity for audiences to see what really goes on when a woman brings a case like this, especially against a powerful man," Meeropol says.
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Two teenage gunmen in California fatally shot three people on Monday at the Islamic Center of San Diego, the largest mosque in the city. Among the dead was a security guard — Amin Abdullah, a father of eight — whom police credit with preventing more casualties. The 17- and 19-year-old suspects were found dead from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds in a car near the scene. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime. The Council on American-Islamic Relations noted the attack comes as anti-Muslim bias complaints reached their highest level since they began tracking them in 1996, with 8,683 complaints filed nationwide.
"This is a mosque that has opened its doors to the community," says Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, co-founder of the Muslim rights and advocacy group MPower Change. "This is the epitome of a mosque that shows our true values as Muslims, in community and in solidarity. So, it's just devastating, and no house of worship should have to ever experience this."
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Donald Trump on Monday dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over a leak of his personal and business tax records, a bizarre case of a sitting president suing his own government and essentially acting as both plaintiff and defendant. This comes amid reports that Trump's Department of Justice was considering settling the case in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate victims of so-called weaponization of the DOJ under the Biden and Obama administrations. Trump allies who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol could file claims and be compensated.
"They want a $1.7 billion slush fund, which comes to a million dollars a head in terms of Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the insurrectionists, with $100 million left over of taxpayer money to spread around in different ways," says Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who spoke with Democracy Now! shortly before news broke of Trump dropping the IRS lawsuit.
Raskin last week introduced the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which is geared toward curbing the president's profiteering from public office. "Corruption is the whole purpose of the Trump administration," says Raskin. "It's not like some eccentric peripheral thing; it's a vast money-making operation."
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Across the states that have had their maps redrawn, partisan gerrymandering is eroding the number of competitive districts where elections are actually won and lost.
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