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L. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge and leading conservative who advised Vice President Mike Pence ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, told CBS News on Tuesday that he is willing to publicly testify about that experience and his alarm over Republican attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. "If invited by the Congress, I would of course be glad to testify," Luttig said in a statement. Luttig played a pivotal role in helping Pence and his chief counsel in the vice president's office, Greg Jacob, and outside lawyer Richard Cullen, to forge a legal and...

A federal judge on Monday ruled that a group of Georgia voters can proceed with legal efforts seeking to disqualify U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for reelection to Congress, citing her role in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol. The challenge filed with the Georgia secretary of state’s office alleges Greene, a Republican, helped facilitate the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that disrupted Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. That violates a rarely cited provision of the 14th Amendment and makes her ineligible to run for reelection, according to the challenge. The amendment says no one...

US District Court Judge Reggie Walton said Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. Walton made the comments Thursday following the conviction of a January 6 defendant. Walton was appointed by former President George W. Bush. A federal judge on Thursday called Donald Trump a threat to democracy, accusing the former president of instigating a mob of "weak-minded" followers to attack the US Capitol on January 6, Politico reported. "I think our democracy is in trouble," US District Judge Reggie Walton said, "because, unfortunately, we have charlatans like our former president who doesn't, in my view, really care about democracy...

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., in a hearing in federal court on Friday, sought to quash a legal challenge that would bar her from running for another term in Congress. Federal Judge Amy Totenberg heard arguments from lawyers for Greene, a first-term member of Congress from northwest Georgia, and from voters in her district who want to block her from running for reelection. The lawsuit against Greene seeks to prevent her from appearing on future ballots because it alleges she violated the Constitution by encouraging and “facilitating” the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by supporters of former President...

In a landmark ruling, a federal district court has ordered the U.S. Department of Defense to end a longstanding Pentagon policy forbidding enlisted military service members from deploying in active duty outside the continental United States and being commissioned as officers if they have HIV. Supporters hailed it as overdue legal affirmation that people receiving effective antiretroviral treatment for HIV are essentially healthy and pose no risk to others. The judgment topples one of the nation’s last major pillars of HIV-related employment discrimination. Federal law has for decades barred employers from discriminating against people with HIV under the Americans with...

WASHINGTON — A Florida man who bragged he "broke the internet" when he was photographed carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's podium during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was sentenced to 75 days in prison on Friday. Adam Johnson, a stay-at-home father of five boys, traveled to D.C. in support of former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to President Joe Biden. U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton sentenced Johnson to prison on Friday, saying Johnson made "a mockery" of the events by grabbing Pelosi's lectern and...

Mariposa Castro, also known as Imelda Acosta, was sentenced Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton. She also received a $5,000 fine from the judge, who said the January 6 attack had "totally undermined" the peaceful transfer of presidential power, NBC News reported. Throughout the day, Castro posted videos on her Facebook account showing the riot from inside the building and outside on restricted grounds. One video shows her climbing through a broken window, using the platform located at the lower west terrace of the Capitol, according to court records. As she was entering the Capitol, she could be heard...

Gray wolves will regain federal protection across most of the lower 48 United States following a court ruling Thursday that struck down a Trump Administration decision to take the animals off the endangered species list. Senior District Judge Jeffrey S. White, of United States District Court for the Northern District of California, found that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, in declaring wolf conservation a success and removing the species from federal protection, did not adequately consider threats to wolves outside of the Great Lakes and Northern Rocky Mountains where they have rebounded most significantly. Although the decision to...

A judge is withholding the release of an audit report of Dominion voting machines in Georgia. Now the federal government and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has inserted itself into the case and is asking the judge to delay the report longer.We reported on this case previously. Per our report a week ago:A federal judge is being urged to release a report that, despite the secrecy surrounding it, appears to indicate there are potential flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment used in Georgia.“The public deserves to know the context of J. Alex Halderman’s claims and his testimony...

ATLANTA (AP) — A federal cybersecurity agency says a report by an expert who says he’s identified security vulnerabilities in voting machines used by Georgia and other states shouldn’t be made public until it has had time to assess and mitigate potential risks. The report has been under seal since July in federal court in Atlanta, part of a long-running lawsuit challenging Georgia’s voting machines. Its author, J. Alex Halderman, said in sworn declarations filed publicly with the court that he examined the Dominion Voting Systems machines for 12 weeks and identified “multiple severe security flaws” that would allow bad...

Washington – A South Carolina man who traveled to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021 and later assaulted officers outside the U.S. Capitol was sentenced to 44 months in jail on Wednesday. Nicholas Languerand, an avowed follower of the QAnon conspiracy, pleaded guilty in November to assaulting officers and faced a maximum of 20-years prison sentence. However, prosecutors asked the court to sentence Languerand to 51 months. While Languerand admitted he had participated in the assault on the Capitol, investigators say he showed little remorse and even indicated that he wanted to see more violence, alleging he had sent a...

Signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom last September, Assembly Bill 173 amended state firearms laws to allow California to turn over gun owners’ personal information to gun violence researchers. Finding there was no “emergency” to warrant restraining California from sharing millions of gun owners’ personal information with gun violence researchers, a federal judge Wednesday declined to block the state’s enactment of Assembly Bill 173.U.S. District Judge Larry Alan Burns heard from attorneys for Jane and John Does and Attorney General Rob Bonta regarding a constitutional challenge to Assembly Bill 173, a law which amended California firearms laws to authorize...

The Obama administration targeted sole proprietors and small businesses in the real estate industry after the crash of 2008, while letting the big banks off the hook with bailouts. One of most horrific cases involved Republican real estate broker Tony Viola, who served nine and a half years in prison as a juicy target of Ohio Democratic prosecutor Dan Kasaris. He was convicted of supposedly tricking banks into offering mortgages with no money down. But in reality, the banks were knowingly offering those loans — evidence the prosecution withheld from him. Viola only got out of prison due to an...

Click here to view the full articleOn the same day a jury convicted disgraced socialite Ghislaine Maxwell on five of six counts of sex trafficking related to her former lover Jeffrey Epstein, another Epstein associate received ominous legal news. According to Reuters, two New York judges ordered Wednesday that the 2009 settlement between Epstein and Virginia Giuffre, one of the financier’s numerous accusers, be made public. Giuffre, who said she was trafficked by Epstein, has accused Britain’s Prince Andrew of sexually abusing her when she was a teenager.

A 2009 settlement agreement between deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Virginia Giuffre, who alleges she was abused by Epstein and forced to have sex with Prince Andrew when she was under 18 years old, will be made public next week, Reuters reported. U.S. District Judges Lewis Kaplan and Loretta Preska on Wednesday ordered that the agreement be released on or around Jan. 3, saying they found no reason to keep it sealed, per the wire service. Giuffre has brought a lawsuit against Andrew, saying that she was forced to have sexual contact with the Duke of York when she...

Click here to view the full articleThe media has been on a non-stop attack against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell since he expressed doubts about the results of the 2020 presidential election and Mike took action against one outlet.But Lindell was defeated in his court case against the British tabloid The Daily Mail who he accused of defaming him, Newsweek reported.A federal judge sided with the news outlet, saying that the article that Lindell cited as defaming “cannot be reasonably construed as defamatory.”Lindell, a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, first sued the Daily Mail tabloid in January after it...

Afederal judge knocked former President Trump on Monday for his repeated claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, arguing that former Vice President Al Gore "was a man" and accepted his election loss in 2000. "Al Gore had a better case to argue than Mr. Trump and he was a man about what happened to him," Senior U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said, according to CNN. "He accepted it and walked away." Walton was referring to Gore's decision to concede the race to President George W. Bush after weeks of legal battles, which were triggered due to an extremely...

The man who stood behind former Vice President Mike Pence’s Senate dais in a horned, coyote-fur headdress, red, white and blue face paint and a shirtless display of his tattooed torso on Jan. 6 will spend the next 41 months in a federal prison. “He made himself the very image of the riot,” Senior U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in pronouncing the sentence. “What you did was terrible,” Lamberth added later, imposing the lower end of the federal guidelines. “You made yourself the epitome of the riot.”

DENVER (AP) — A federal judge issued a restraining order against a suburban Denver county’s policy allowing parents to opt their children out of a mask mandate at school, finding the rule violates the rights of students with disabilities who are vulnerable to COVID-19. U.S. District Judge John L. Kane on Tuesday called the Douglas County Board of Health order that allowed parents to opt their children out of mask-wearing a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which guarantees equal access to education for all. Kane’s order came after the Douglas County School District filed a federal lawsuit challenging...

Prince Andrew must be questioned under oath by Virginia Giuffre's lawyers in her civil sexual assault case by mid-July next year, a US judge has ruled. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan set the deadline of 14 July 2022 to complete depositions in a scheduling order agreed to by lawyers for Andrew and Ms Giuffre It means the questioning could clash with the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations, which will take place in June. Andrew has vehemently denied allegations he sexually assaulted Ms Giuffre when she was a teenager. Under something known as "Mutual Legal Assistance" (MLA), both prosecutors and the...