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Former New York GOP Rep. George Santos was sentenced to 87 months in federal court Friday in connection with his wire fraud and identity theft case. The 36-year-old former representative served in Congress for close to a year before being ousted in 2023 by his House colleagues. Santos had not yet been convicted of a crime at that point, but had been indicted on 23 counts related to wire fraud, identity theft, falsification of records, credit card fraud and other charges. Santos sobbed as he received his sentence, according to the Associated Press. U.S. District Court Judge Joanna Seybert asked...

This is a major constitutional ruling on one of the most abused provisions of FISA." FISA Backdoor Surveillance Unconstitutional The recent ruling in United States v. Hasbajrami has sent shockwaves through the legal and intelligence communities, marking a decisive moment in the fight against warrantless surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall’s decision that backdoor searches of FISA Section 702 databases violate the Fourth Amendment represents a significant milestone for privacy advocates and civil rights defenders. This ruling has profound implications for government surveillance practices, reaffirming constitutional protections in the digital age.

Suffolk County taxpayers could be on the hook for $60 million in a migrant class-action lawsuit for holding on to illegal immigrants until the feds could show up and ship them out of the country, officials said Wednesday. A federal judge ruled that the sheriff’s office in the Long Island county acted on its own when it held undocumented immigrants for deportation proceedings — because New York State law doesn’t allow local cops to do so. Adding insult to injury, the judge says the feds won’t have to chip in to pay off the hefty ruling — even though they’re...

Here’s a scoop from Long Island: A federal judge has ruled that a woman can sue an ice cream company after she found that her pistachio ice cream had no pistachios in it. Jenna Marie Duncan of Farmingdale said that when she ordered ice cream from the Cold Stone Creamery in Levittown, her taste buds were tricked. Now, a lawsuit she filed could bring a delicious payout for ice cream lovers nationwide. Duncan went home, looked up the ingredients and found that she was right, according to her civil suit: The ice cream's bright green color and pistachio flavor were...

A federal judge denied a motion Thursday from Nassau County to avoid a state lawsuit against its policy to prevent men from participating in women’s sporting events at county-run facilities. Republican Executive Bruce Blakeman of Nassau County on Feb. 22 signed an executive order that would deny the use of county parks and property for women’s sporting events unless they limit participation to one biological sex, based on participants’ birth certificates. After being threatened with a lawsuit by Democratic Attorney General Letitia James of New York over the policy, Blakeman sought an order from the U.S. District Court for the...

The 7-month prison sentence of Douglass Mackey has been stayed per a federal judge. He was convicted in March for circulating a satirical meme that encouraged Hillary Clinton voters to cast their votes via text in the lead up to the 2016 election. The Motion Order reads: "granting motion for release pending appeal, at docket entry 16 Mackey's surrender date is stated. The District Court is ordered to determine the appropriate terms of release, without prejudice to the government's making a future request for detention, on behalf of Appellant Douglass Mackey, It is further ordered that this appeal is expedited....

Chalk up another one to the very disintegrating system of justice that we seem to have now in this country and add another to the pile of the "two-tiered" application of the law. Douglass Mackey was sentenced to seven months in prison on Wednesday. He intends to appeal, and let's hope that's successful. His big crime? He got convicted for spreading a meme. This meme got Douglass Mackey 7 months in jail. https://t.co/kdswMU7S1B pic.twitter.com/r4LnjHXeLG— Ashley St. Clair (@stclairashley) October 18, 2023His conviction was ridiculous.Mackey was convicted on a single count of conspiring with others to interfere in the 2016 presidential...

Identities of indicted Republican Rep George Santos' bond suretors will be unsealed Thursday, judge rules Just 30 minutes to go!

A federal jury on Friday convicted pro-Trump troll Douglass Mackey of plotting to trick voters out of casting a ballot during the 2016 presidential election. The case, which sought to address if any of the toxic stew of Internet disinformation during the 2016 election rose to the level of a crime, has been closely watched by both anti-extremist groups and right-wing politicians and pundits. Mackey, 33, of West Palm Beach, Fla., who gained fame on the Internet as the Twitter user “Ricky Vaughn,” posted two images made to look like fake Hillary Clinton ads telling people they could vote by...

Douglass Mackey is alleged to be one of the many anonymous Twitter users who made the 2016 election so different, so memorable, and so important. Like other anonymous internet memesmiths (anons), Mackey had no external reason that anyone should care what he said. He held no office. He had no byline at an elite publication. He had no vast pool of wealth that conferred legitimacy, deserved or undeserved, on what he had to say. Mackey’s notability, like that of Bronze Age Pervert or Libs of TikTok, came exclusively from what he had to say, and that people found it funny...

Booking photos of Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman taken on May 30, 2020. In a dramatic hearing on Thursday, a federal judge sentenced a corporate attorney who firebombed a police car during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to a year in jail, arguing that his prestigious education — boarding school, Princeton, a law degree from New York University — should have rendered him a peacekeeper, not an instigator. “You’re not one of the oppressed. You’re one of the privileged,” senior Eastern District of New York Judge Brian Cogan told Colinford Mattis, even as he expressed admiration for what the...

A prominent pro-life priest known for his nonviolent attempts to hinder the operation of abortion clinics to save unborn children faces federal charges for padlocking closed the gate to a New York abortion clinic in July, blocking the entrance to the clinic in the hopes of counseling the women seeking an abortion that day to reconsider. Father Fidelis Moscinski, 52, a priest of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal (CFR), was charged last week under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a 1994 federal law that prohibits the blocking of access to abortion clinics. According to a...

Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Nusrat Jahan Choudhury, who is the nominee to serve as a U.S. district judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, during a hearing about a previous comment she made claiming police kill unarmed black men every single day while at Princeton. "This is a really simple question, counselor. Do you believe that cops kill unarmed black men in America every single day? You said it at Princeton," he asked. "Senator, I said it in my role as an advocate," said Choudhury. "Oh, okay. You didn’t mean it," Kennedy replied....

A federal judge has encouraged all of his colleagues to "carefully consider" whether the Yale Law School students who attempted to shout down a bipartisan panel on free speech "should be disqualified from potential clerkships." D.C. Circuit judge Laurence Silberman sent an email on Thursday to all federal judges in the United States, urging them to take the fracas at the nation's top law school seriously. "The latest events at Yale Law School," Silberman wrote, "prompt me to suggest that students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted. All federal judges—and all...

LINK ONLY: https://news.yahoo.com/biden-nominates-muslim-woman-federal-100125827.html

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks at the A.R. Bernard-led Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn on September 26, 2021 An attorney for a conservative group argued in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan Wednesday that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has unfairly used God to encourage people to take COVID-19 vaccines as she argues there are no legitimate religious reasons to avoid taking them.On Thursday, a three-judge panel partly granted a motion by We The Patriots USA attorney Cameron Lee Atkinson on behalf of three clients who stated religious objections to taking the COVID-19 vaccine to...

A federal appeals court ruled Monday a COVID vaccine mandate for New York City teachers and other public school workers can go into effect. A three-judge panel lifted a temporary ban on the mandate that was originally set to take effect Monday. “Federal appeals exhausted. Done. The mandate moves forward,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. The United Federation of Teachers said 3% of teachers (about 3,400) remain unvaccinated. School workers now have until 5 p.m. Friday to get their first dose, or risk losing their jobs, de Blasio said. “If you have not gotten that first dose by Friday 5:00,...

A federal appeals court has slammed the brakes on the city’s mandate that all teachers and other school workers be vaccinated by Monday - but a reprieve for the holdouts may be short-lived. On Friday evening, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit granted a temporary injunction against the mandate, and sent the case to a three-judge panel for an “expedited review.” A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday. “We’re confident our vaccine mandate will continue to be upheld once all the facts have been presented, because that is the level of protection our students and staff deserve,” said...

New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for teachers and other Department of Education staffers is on pause after a federal judge late Friday granted a request to temporarily block it. Plaintiffs, a group of teachers, asked for a temporary injunction pending review by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. U.S. Appeals Court Judge Joseph Bianco, a George W. Bush nominee, in a one-page order granted the request. The panel will now decide whether to impose an injunction pending appeal or allow the mandate to take effect. Rachel Maniscalco and three other New York...

"NEW YORK — New York City schools have been temporarily blocked from enforcing a vaccine mandate for its teachers and other workers by a federal appeals judge just days before it was to take effect. The worker mandate for the the nation’s largest school system was set to go into effect Monday. But late Friday, a judge for the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a temporary injunction and referred the case to a three-judge panel an an expedited basis."