Category Archives: First Amendment

A federal judge has ruled that a local anti-police-brutality activist has a legitimate free-speech argument to present to a jury about why a former top cop barred her from a weekly CompStat data-sharing meeting.

U.S. District Court Judge Stefan R. Underhill, a Clinton appointee, agreed in a decision released last week that activist Barbara Fairs First Amendment rights might have been infringed and the case should proceed. The city had sought to have the case dismissed.

Underhill ruled that Fair may proceed to seek changes in policy through her suit, but not any money.

The alleged violation stems from a spat two years ago, when the former police chief, Dean Esserman, temporarily shut community members out of the weekly CompStat meetings, after cops complained that Fair used them as a venue to protest the departments treatment of minority communities. Fair contended that Esserman was trying to bar her from meetings until controversy blew over. The day Esserman barred the public from the meeting spurred on by discomfort of some of his officers with the presence of a vocal anti-police-brutality activist he also allowed another member of the community, preacher pal Rev. Boise Kimber, to come upstairs and attend.

In his ruling, Underhill squelched Fairs pursuit of damages, but he agreed to hear her case on injunctive relief. To win the case, the longtime activist must prove that Esserman disliked the content of her speech, rather than the manner in which she gave it, and that he intended to cut off public participation until activists lost interest in using the meeting to speak out.

Fair has continued to speak out publicly against police misbehavior and clash with the department. The police arrested her July 8 for allegedly refusing an order to keep her distance when they were arresting her nephew at a counterdemonstration against a white nationalist recruiting event on the Green. (She denied the allegation.)

And Compstat meetings, less elaborate affairs since Esserman departed the department, are open to the public again.

Fairs attorney, Norm Pattis, called the judges green-lighting of a trial an early win.

Any time that a jury can can [evaluate the conduct of a police officer], thats good to do for the republic, he said. We hope that never again will [the police] decide that some members of the public arent entitled to attend a meeting, when they have invited the public in general. When the community is given a chance to speak, the police department cant put stoppers on it based on the content of what its hearing.

As part of his community policing push, Esserman had opened up these weekly reviews of crime statistics and major cases, known as CompStat, to the public. (The name comes from comparative statistics.) The meetings revolve around reports from policing districts about crimes over the past week and plans for the upcoming week. Under Esserman, they expanded to include reports to and sometimes from the community, with dozens of local people joining the cops at headquarters on Thursday mornings to listen in on the departments crime-fighting strategies. (The department brass review pending investigations in greater detail at daily intelligence briefings, which are closed to the public.)

It was not, however, a forum for discussion, Esserman stated in his deposition. It was to let people see how the police department worked in a transparent way, and if people had presentations they wanted to make we would try to schedule them in.

Fair sought to make it a forum. In March 2015, after video of a black 15-year-olds takedown during an arrest emerged, Fair joined a protest in front of City Hall. There, she allegedly overheard cops and counter-protestors making racially charged remarks. Shortly after, Fair went to a CompStat meeting to speak up.

At the meetings end, she asked the assistant chief for permission to speak. (Esserman was absent.) Unrelated to any of the discussion that morning, she proceeded to criticize the department and called out the foul-mouthed officers. Fair said that one cop looked upset by her comments, but another officer told him to let Fair voice her concerns. I know I ruffled some feathers, she admitted in a follow-up email to the assistant chief. Still, no one present reprimanded her, asked her to sit down or escorted her out of the room.

News later reached Esserman, though, that Fair had been disruptive, loud, and argumentative. When she returned to Union Avenue for Compstat the following week, Esserman asked Fair to leave, saying she had made people very uncomfortable. After an exchange, Fair said, As long as its a public meeting, Im going to sit here. Esserman decided to close it all off.

Same thing the following week: Fair and State Sen. Gary Winfield couldnt even get past the front desk to the meeting. (Rev. Kimber, on the other hand, a friend of the chief, was buzzed in and went upstairs to attend the meeting.) Esserman maintained in his response to the suit there was no ban on Fairs attendance; she didnt subsequently try to go back.

In his initial analysis of the evidence, in which he tried to give Fairs arguments the best light possible, as a jury might similarly do, Judge Underhill explained that, to prove a First Amendment violation, the plaintiff must show (1) that her speech was protected by the Constitution, (2) that the forum was public and (3) that the justifications for excluding her speech werent up to snuff.

Fairs speech, addressing racist strains in the police department, is clearly protected speech, Underhill wrote, referencing an established right to complain to public officials.

Likewise, Essermans admittedly deliberate choice to open prior CompStat meetings made them limited public forums, Underhill added. Thats true even though observers generally didnt speak, he said. The judge cited a 1991 ruling about ACT UPs intent to hold a silent protest in a state legislatures gallery: [T]he elected officials receive the message, by the very presence of citizens in the gallery, that they are being watched, that their decisions are being scrutinized, and that they may not act with impunity outside the watchful eyes of their constituents, that precedent said.

Esserman argued that, since he opened the meetings, he could have closed them at any time.

Sure, Underhill wrote, thats true of any public forum. [H]owever, as long as the forum remains open, government regulations of speech within it must meet the standards of a public forum.

What are those standards? Underhill said speech may be limited only by content-neutral regulations time, manner, place unless theres a compelling state interest. In fact, he noted, Esserman might have been on surer footing if he had shut down the public participation entirely. But because the break was only temporary, it implied that the chief didnt like what Fair had to say on a current event, the judge noted. He referenced several rulings that arbitrariness and unpredictability about when a forum is open to the public can easily cover up censorship, as in choosing to shut down a park on the day a particular person is scheduled to speak.

It seems clear that a temporary shutdown intended to stifle discussion on a particular topic, with plans to reopen the forum after controversy surrounding that topic had been suppressed constitutes impermissible censorship under any First Amendment analysis, Underhill wrote.

Esserman argued that the case is mooted, to some extent, because hes no longer on the job. Indeed, at this past Thursdays CompStat meeting, the new chief, Anthony Campbell, said the meetings are open to the public. The only restriction might be if journalists are asked not to publish information about an imminent apprehension, he said.

Pattis responded that the First Amendment rights at issue could crop up with any police chief, not just the last one. Whats important is that the department realize that it has enduring obligations to the community, and that those do have the force of law behind them, he said. This will make sure Campbell isnt tempted to do the same.

A trial will likely be scheduled for sometime in the fall, Pattis said.

The NHPD should have NEVER allowed CompStat (and TASCA before it) to be a fully open public meeting. There is far too much need to know information being shared with people in the room who should not be privy to it. As a compromise, if the NHPD wanted to keep the doors open to the public and the press, they should have instituted a 2 part meeting. The first would be open to the public, the second to Law Enforcement only. By not doing this, they created this problem. And, Esserman, who always knows he is the smartest person in the room (just ask him, or he would tell you without asking) failed miserably in dealing with Fair. She set him up and he took the bait.

The NHPD should also do some type of vetting of those who attend.

NHI article, July 8, 2016, posted at 9:31PM about a non-permitted rally on the green of 700 people, after many of them had taken to the streets and blocked traffic. It was a rally against police brutality. The following is taken from that article, without editing:

I have seven sons activist Barbara Fair said. We say we dont know when the hour comes. The hour comes for me when one of them pigs do something to my child. I salute those mothers who can somehow carry onyou take my child, and I want you to hear it around the world. You take mine and you will not sit around the station and tell your story. Because Im gonna go completely off. You want to take my childs life? Your life is gone too. You better believe me. I mean it to the bottom of my heart, to my toes and my soul. And when I say my sons I mean my grandsons too. Dont even try it.

In response to this law suit, the NHPD would be wise to restructure CompStat into a 2 part meeting (public and non-public) and outline the new structure and rules of order for those meetings in an NHPD Document.

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Judge Allows First Amendment Trial - New Haven Independent

HAMBURG, N.Y. -- Aspiring journalists are telling their own stories this week at Hilbert College. While they're learning everything from writing a catchy headline to how to frame an interview, there's a deeper truth here that these 12- to 18-year-olds are uncovering.

With President Donald Trump accusing the media of reporting fake news and making up sources, the students are getting an important lesson on the foundation of journalism. The hope is the junior high and high-schoolers understand the meaning behind the First Amendment and the duty they could one day have to protect the freedoms that go along with it.

"It's about wanting to do it, to be passion it about doing it, and also about defending our rights as citizens; freedom of speech, freedom of the press, it's really only the job that's protected in the constitution," Chris Gallant, associate professor of Digital Media and Communication said.

Camp may be fun and filled with field trips to the federal courthouse for example, but just two days in and Hope Artis and the others have already grasped something we strive to prove in the stories we share with you every day.

"We need to know and understand people," Artis said. "That's what news in its heart is all about."

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Campers take up defending our First Amendment rights - TWC News

The Knight First Amendment Institute July 11 filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and his communication teams, claiming they are violating the Constitutions First Amendment by blocking people on Twitter.

The lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York on behalf of seven people who were blocked by the presidents @realdonaldtrump account because they criticized the president or his policies on the social media, the institute said in a news release.

The suit hopes to have the court determine that Trump and his teams actions constitute viewpoint-based blocking and is unconstitutional.

President Trumps Twitter account has become an important source of news and information about the government, and an important forum for speech by, to, or about the president, Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institutes executive director, said in a statement. The First Amendment applies to this digital forum in the same way it applies to town halls and open school board meetings. The White House acts unlawfully when it excludes people from this forum simply because theyve disagreed with the president.

About a month prior to the lawsuit being filed, the institute wrote a letter to the White House suggesting it would file suit if the president didnt unblock the individuals.

The institute, which never received a response from the White House, said that the Trump administration has promoted the @realdonaldtrump account as a primary communication channel between the president and the public including making formal announcements thus constituting it as a public forum protected by the First Amendment.

The blocking prevents or impedes these people from reading the presidents tweets, responding directly, or participating in the discussions that take place in the comment threads generated by the presidents tweets, the institutes release said. The complaint argues that the @realDonaldTrump account is a public forum under the First Amendment, meaning that the government cannot exclude people from it simply because of their views, it added.

The lawsuit also contends that the White House is violating the seven individual plaintiffs First Amendment right to petition their government for redress of grievances.

The White House is transforming a public forum into an echo chamber, said Katie Fallow, a senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute, in a statement. Its actions violate the rights of the people whove been blocked and the rights of those who havent been blocked but who now participate in a forum thats being sanitized of dissent.

Prior to joining the Knight Institute as executive director in June 2016, Jaffer was deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the ACLUs Center for Democracy.

Born in Canada to Ismaili Muslim parents originally from Tanzania, he is a graduate of Williams College, Cambridge University, and Harvard Law School.

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Knight First Amendment Institute Files Lawsuit Against Trump for Blocking Twitter Users - India West

The National Rifle Association targeted the Washington Post in a new video Monday, accusing the newspaper of "doing damage to the country" and promoting the "violent left."

The release of the video comes after the Post wrote a story last week about recent NRA videos that criticize Democratic politicians and the media, but do not focus on gun policy.

"They tell us to not have an opinion unless it's about guns," says conservative talk show host Grant Stinchfield, who narrates the new video attacking the Post. "Listen to me Washington Post. We talk about more than guns because every freedom is connected. If one is threatened, they all are threatened, and the organized anarchy that you, our politicians and you're activists are pushing is destroying our country."

Stinchfield went on to condemn the Post's slogan, "Democracy Dies in Darkness," and said the newspaper "should say, "Journalism Dies at the Washington Post.'"

The Post wrote a story July 11 that mentions a recent NRA video released in late June featuring commentator Dana Loesch that received widespread criticism because it did not emphasize Second Amendment Rights.

In the video, Loesch described liberal demonstrators who "smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports bully and terrorize the law-abiding." A petition to have the Loesch video removed from Facebook argued that "the video tries to create an us-vs-them' narrative and pit Americans against one another."

Critics said the video exploited the congressional baseball shooting that had just happened prior to the video's release, in which five people were wounded, including House Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., by an outspoken supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

The NRA is brushing off the criticism. In the new video, Stinchfield says the NRA "will never stop fighting the violent left on the battlefield of truth."

"Here's a suggestion for the Washington Post: don't worry about how many guns are in our videos, worry about how many facts are in your articles," Stinchfield said. "Because if gun owners abused our Second Amendment the way you abuse your paper and the First Amendment, our rights would have been taken away long ago. You people do more to damage our country with a keyboard than any NRA member has ever done combined with a firearm."

See the article here:
NRA: Washington Post abuses First Amendment - Washington Examiner

Cloudflare and Credo Mobile today lost their fight to speak publicly about the National Security Letters they and other tech companies receive, which demand user data and frequently forbid companies from ever disclosing the demands to their users.

The two companies received NSLs from the FBI in 2011 and 2013, requiring them to secretly disclose account information.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing web performance company Cloudflare and mobile network Credo, said the gag orders accompanying the NSLs violated the companies rights to free speech. But the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that this nondisclosure requirement does not run afoul of the First Amendment.

The ruling is a major upset for Cloudflare and Credo, as well as for larger tech companies that have begun disclosing NSLs over the past year. Companies that receive NSLs are usually restricted from discussing them for yearssometimes foreverand, if they disclose them in transparency reports, they may only do so in ranges of 500.

The EFF argued that companies with millions of users should be allowed to disclose the specific number of NSLs they receive and to mention their experiences receiving NSLs when communicating with customers or lobbying the government. (While lobbying against NSLs in 2014, Cloudflares in-house counsel was told by a dismissive Capitol Hill staffer that it was impossible for Cloudflare to receive an NSL, and because of the gag order, he was unable to point out that Cloudflare had already received several of the letters.)

Id be lying if I didnt say this is a real setback, EFF staff attorney Andrew Crocker told Gizmodo. But the trend is going the other way. Ive seen a lot of courts questioning these blanket indefinite gag orders.

Twitter, which is also challenging NSL gag orders in court, recently secured a promising ruling from a district court judge that suggests Twitters reporting of NSLs in narrower ranges than 500 could be protected under the First Amendment.

The 9th Circuit, however, was more dismissive of the reporting bands: We decline the recipients invitation to quibble with the particular ranges selected by Congress, the court wrote.

In 2017, its really unsupportable to not give internet companies like my clients a full First Amendment set of rights that they would give to any other speaker, Crocker said, likening internet service providers like Cloudflare to traditional publishers like newspapers. The implicit assumption in this ruling is that they dont have this set of rights.

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Companies Don't Have a First Amendment Right to Talk About National Security Letters, Court Rules - Gizmodo

OneNewsNow

Recording police is protected under the First Amendment - Buffalo ... Buffalo Business First The Third District Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled in favor of the right to record police activities, affirming the activity is protected under the First ... Whitehead: First Amendment won in court - One News NowOneNewsNow all 2 news articles »

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Recording police is protected under the First Amendment - Buffalo ... - Buffalo Business First

On Tuesday, July 11, the Knight First Amendment Institute filed a lawsuit in federal court against President Donald Trump over blocking individuals on his Twitter account.

The institute, a nonprofit affiliated with Columbia University, argues that Trumps Twitter account is a public forum under the First Amendment because the president and his staff use it to communicate.

According to Bloomberg Politics, the institute requested that the court deem viewpoint-based blocking by the presidents account unconstitutional, unblock the plaintiffs and pay the plaintiffs attorneys fees.

Regardless of your opinions on Trumps online behavior, the Tuesday lawsuit could have many social, corporate and journalistic implications.

Harassment vs. Freedom of Speech

According to a Pew Research Center survey, 41 percent of Americans have been personally subjected to online harassment, with as many as 18 percent of respondents claiming that they have been subject to more severe treatment, like sexual harassment, stalking or physical threats.

At a time when so many Americans claim to be so negatively affected by cyberbullying, it may be counterintuitive to set legal precedents that could take away users abilities to block harassers online in the future.

Although the lawsuit specifies that Trump should be penalized for viewpoint-based blocking as opposed to blocking in general, if these platforms are deemed as public forums, the precedent could easily be interpreted to protect users hateful speech in the future.

On the other hand, trying to curb viewpoint-based blocking may force users to interact with more diverse perspectives than usual, which could cultivate more interesting, productive discourse on the platform. Forcing opposing opinions to coexist in the same place could also help the general public better understand different political ideas.

Preventing people from censoring the opinions they do not want to see on their timeline could break ideological echo chambers that are currently prevalent on all social media platforms.

Impact on Private Companies

The decision could also affect how social media platforms monitor their users behavior and are allowed to conduct business in general.

Currently, social media applications are considered private institutions. Unlike public institutions, private institutions are not expected to uphold First Amendment protections.

However, if courts can treat Twitter as a public forum, social media companies could be forced to overhaul their terms of service to comply with government policy at the expense of their autonomy.

Is Social Media News?

In the lawsuit, the Knight First Amendment Institute considers Trumps personal Twitter account a public forum because of how the administration uses the social media site to spread news directly to followers.

In an interview with Fox and Friends, Trump defended his decision not to attend the White House Correspondents Dinner and said that he used Twitter so frequently because he feels that the media purposefully misrepresents him.

It allows me to give a message without necessarily having to go through people where Im giving them a message and theyre putting it down differently from what I mean, he said.

Despite this defense, Trumps Twitter use at times serves more as an excuse to take jabs at the media establishment rather than the president relaying substantive, unbiased policy accomplishments to the American people.

And although many famous political pundits and networks cited this in their defense of negative Trump coverage, the presidents comments on news networks reflect how many American conservatives feel.

It seems like common knowledge that the publics trust in media is at an all-time low, but according to a new Politico poll, people only marginally trust CNN (54 percent) more than the White House (52 percent) and Trump (46 percent).

The survey claims that significant percentages of voters mostly Republicans think many outlets are either not too credible or not credible at all, whereas left-leaning voters are more skeptical of the Trump administration and Congress.

Because of the tendency for right-leaning Americans to distrust them, many journalists publicly acknowledge that they should be trying to appeal more to conservatives. But reporting patterns speak louder than words.

Many conservatives cite what they perceive as abnormally critical coverage of the current administration when dismissing mainstream media coverage. According to a Shorenstein survey, 80 percent of Trump coverage was negative during his first 100 days of office.

This extreme amount of negative coverage may explain why many Americans are skeptical of the mainstream media, rendering the press intent meaningless. It also provides a rationalization for why many Americans are willing to accept the presidents social media statements as more legitimate than mainstream news coverage.

If a politicians posts on social media can legitimately be considered news, should the platform monitor content for accuracy, just like a news publication would? And if this is the case, it seems that social medias potential responsibility to purge false information falsifies the lawsuits assertion that social media sites ought not to allow viewpoint-based blocking.

No matter your opinions on the validity of the lawsuit, it most certainly brings up important debates central to the journalistic and social media communities in the Trump administration.

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Trump's Twitter vs. The First Amendment - MediaFile

Don Jr. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

As shoe after shoe after shoe keeps dropping about the Trump Tower meeting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort had with a Russian lawyer and other questionable intermediaries, there has been a quiet but significant effort by prominent legal minds to defend, or at least be skeptical of, the whole affair. The thrust of these counterarguments is that the main characters did nothing wrong because the law simply doesnt penalize anything that happened at the meeting.

The defenses run the gamut: The Trump team couldnt have broken campaign-finance laws because seeking and receiving damning materials on a political adversary is what campaigns do all the time, so federal law doesnt apply. Or, if the law does reach what transpired at the meeting, the promised dirt on Hillary Clinton isnt the type of in-kind contribution or thing of value that federal law forbids foreign nationals from making. Or, if the damaging information does count as an illegal campaign contribution from a foreign national, the penalties would only be civil in nature which means Robert Mueller, the Russia special counsel, cant just prosecute Trump Jr. or his associates over what happened at that fateful June 2016 gathering.

By far the most intriguing of all these defenses is the suggestion, advanced by First Amendment expert and UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, that Trump Jr. and crew were merely exercising their constitutional right to solicit and receive a campaign boost from Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked attorney who requested the meeting. And that she may also have been acting within her rights to share the Clinton dirt with Trumps inner circle. As if theres somehow a free-standing, free-speech right to exchange opposition research, no matter the nationality of the source. And the Constitution would suffer if we criminalize these acts.

Volokhs arguments and hypotheticals are thoughtful, compelling even: If the Clinton campaign heard that Mar-a-Lago was employing illegal immigrants in Florida and staffers went down to interview the workers, that would be a crime, he writes as one of his examples. A Slovakian student temporarily in the U.S., he writes in another, would similarly be forbidden from sharing potentially explosive information about Trumps dealings in her home country. These and other scenarios are meant to illustrate how the federal ban on foreign nationals making election-related contributions including anything of value to a campaign, which would encompass the Clinton dirt would sweep far too broadly. And when a ban lends itself to such a substantially broad reading, Volokh explains, that means the ban itself is unconstitutional on its face.

But Adav Noti, an attorney with Campaign Legal Center, isnt convinced. His organization filed a complaint on Thursday with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice alleging that the Trump campaign effectively solicited an illegal campaign contribution by procuring the incriminating Clinton evidence from Veselnitskaya. Noti told me in an interview that most of the hypos Volokh laid out in his article arent covered by the statute because the law already contains an exception for volunteer services to a campaign information that is offered voluntarily and that you otherwise cant ascribe value to.

But opposition research by a person flying in from Moscow at no cost to the campaign that the campaign actively sought can indeed be very valuable. And, if its part of a larger, coordinated effort by a foreign power to sway an American election, a scheme to obtain it would be largely distinguishable from, say, undocumented workers dishing to the Clinton camp for free on shoddy working conditions at a Trump property.

Bob Bauer, an election-law expert who has written extensively on the campaign-finance implications of Trumps flirtations with Russia, acknowledged in a Friday post on the blog Just Security how the federal ban on foreign-national contributions might run into First Amendment problems if the right facts come along. But were not dealing with those facts right now. In his view, everything that has come out from the Trump campaign vis--vis Russia is an entirely different animal. A court would likely go out of its way to uphold the law in a case where, as alleged against the Trump campaign, a candidate and his organization enters into a systematic understanding with a foreign government to assist its bid to win the presidency, Bauer wrote.

In other words, what weve seen so far in the recent onslaught of revelations about Trump Jr. and his wish to get an assist from Russia is analogous to the kind of conduct that courts have already said falls outside the scope of the First Amendment. In Bluman v. FEC, a case Noti litigated and won, a three-judge district court reaffirmed the principle that prohibiting foreign nationals from spending money in the electoral process is perfectly consistent with our constitutional ideals. The court said:

It is fundamental to the definition of our national political community that foreign citizens do not have a constitutional right to participate in, and thus may be excluded from, activities of democratic self-government. It follows, therefore, that the United States has a compelling interest for purposes of First Amendment analysis in limiting the participation of foreign citizens in activities of American democratic self-government, and in thereby preventing foreign influence over the U.S. political process.

That was written by U.S. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative the Trump administration has been eyeing for a promotion to the Supreme Court. The high court, for its part, didnt even bother hearing an appeal over the case; it just affirmed the ruling summarily with no dissenting opinions. All of which suggests that other judges would follow suit if presented with the Trump Tower scenario: a meeting where no actual money may have changed hands, but where something more nefarious, coordinated, and potentially criminal may have taken place. Theres yet more to come.

Courts have a way of salvaging perfectly constitutional laws if they have to, limiting their analysis to the specific fact patterns before them. Since the documented Russian connections to the Trump campaign is unlike anything this country has seen, its easy to see how the First Amendment wouldnt stand as an obstacle if it were shown that there was a coordinated attempt to strike at the core of American self-government.

Made in America week is already shifting the conversation to the Trump familys fondness for overseas manufacturing.

A scorecard on how Trump has advanced Russian interests (whether knowingly or unknowingly), from easing Russian sanctions to the Syrian cease-fire.

The rise and meaning of an ubiquitous term of abuse.

The Trump administration gets Orwellian in its efforts to repeal Obamacare.

The agency wasnt even protecting the presidents son at the time.

Its unusual for a new president to be this widely disliked.

The courts have already been pretty consistent on this issue of foreign citizens not being able to participate in Americas self-government.

McCain is expected to recover, but the same cant be said for the GOPs haphazard efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare.

And, yes, hes going to write about his experience dealing with Trump.

Looks like the Trump campaign thought there was something in that nothingburger.

And yet, it still might pass in the next few days.

The new plan would dramatically expand where and when the government could target immigrants for deportations which bypass immigration courts.

Voters are worried about his voter-fraud commissions attempt to gather information on them.

Shes totally open, the future president clearly says to the young pop singer in 2013. But what else?

Most of Trumps Christian right allies dont bother to take his own slight religious pretensions very seriously. A new book apparently will.

Trump may be pushed by a lawsuit to keep his 2016 promise to kill DACA and deport Dreamers or they could become a pawn for nativists in Congress.

One golfer said his attendance would be a debacle, but Trump doesnt care.

At this point it would take a strange coincidence for hacking not to have been discussed.

He ordered the government not to enforce the seemingly arbitrary restrictions on which relatives can enter the country.

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Knocking Down the Best Argument in Defense of Trump Jr. - NYMag - New York Magazine

Acosta's reminder: Journalists must advocate for First Amendment San Antonio Express-News (subscription) One of the first lessons journalists learn is that the story any story isn't about us. It shouldn't be. It's ingrained in us, and we carry it in every notebook, on every laptop. The gravest of sins is to put yourself in the story. Except when we ... and more »

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Acosta's reminder: Journalists must advocate for First Amendment - San Antonio Express-News (subscription)

When Rowan County commissioners opened their meeting with a prayer specific to one religion, and a call that those in attendance join them in that prayer, said Meno, that violates the First Amendment to the Constitution. (Photo credit: WLOS staff)

County commissioners across western North Carolina are reviewing an appeals court decision that ruled that Rowan County Commissioners are in violation of the Constitution for opening their commission meetings with Christian prayer and a request for those attending the meeting to participate in the invocation.

The court ruling stated that the commissioners delivered only Christian prayer, and veered from time to time into overt proselytization."

Mike Meno, spokesman for the ACLU of North Carolina, spoke on behalf of the organization that played a role in the lawsuit brought to the court.

When Rowan County commissioners opened their meeting with a prayer specific to one religion, and a call that those in attendance join them in that prayer, said Meno, that violates the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Continued here:
Court decision: Rowan County Commissioners violated First Amendment with Christian prayer - WLOS