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Tag: ethics

  • Colorado discipline office moves toward ethics complaint against ex-Trump attorney for 2020 election gambits | CNN Politics

    Colorado discipline office moves toward ethics complaint against ex-Trump attorney for 2020 election gambits | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The disciplinary office that regulates attorney conduct in Colorado is taking steps toward potentially bringing an ethics complaint against Jenna Ellis, the lawyer who played a prominent role in former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

    Colorado’s Attorney Regulation Counsel, an independent office in the state, indicated last week that it had been authorized to prepare and file a formal complaint against Ellis, according to a February 17 email provided to CNN by Project 65, a group of bipartisan lawyers that is asking for disciplinary action against Ellis and other pro-Trump attorneys who tried to overturn and undermine the 2020 election.

    “We expect the Complaint will be filed within the next month or so,” said the email, which was sent to the head of a group that asked the disciplinary office to investigate Ellis.

    Under Colorado attorney disciplinary rules, the office still has the option to reach a settlement or stipulation with Ellis at this point in the process, so it’s not guaranteed that an ethics complaint will ultimately be filed against her.

    Jessica Yates, who runs the disciplinary office, told CNN that the office cannot comment on specific cases. The email was sent to Michael Teter, the managing director of the 65 Project.

    Ellis did not respond to CNN’s attempts to reach her for comment. When the 65 Project asked for the ethics investigation into Ellis last March, she told CNN that she would not be “intimidated by this dirty political maneuver to undermine the legal profession.”

    Teter told CNN that the recent move by the disciplinary office “demonstrates the seriousness of her misconduct in her attempt to overturn the 2020 election by abusing the court system and making fraudulent, baseless allegations.” Ellis was the public face of many of Trump’s election-reversal gambits, working on Trump’s legal efforts as well as the failed bid to convince state legislatures to nullify President Joe Biden’s win.

    Several other Trump-aligned lawyers have faced potential professional consequences – including the possibility of suspension or disbarment – for their post-election legal conduct. However, some of the bids to discipline those attorneys have run into roadblocks.

    The disciplinary action that was brought against Sidney Powell, who put forward some of the most outlandish false claims about the presidential vote, was thrown out by a Texas judge on Thursday.

    But an attorney disciplinary committee in DC made the preliminary finding last year that former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani violated ethics rules for his work on a Trump lawsuit that tried to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes in Pennsylvania. There will be more rounds of appeal before that finding is finalized and a punishment is handed down, but the DC Bar’s disciplinary counsel has asked for Giuliani to be disbarred. And Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department lawyer who tried unsuccessfully to get the department to validate Trump’s false voter fraud claims, is also facing attorney ethics proceedings in DC.

    If the attorney regulation counsel in Colorado moves forward with a complaint against Ellis, and there isn’t a settlement, the matter will be go through rounds of proceedings in front of a disciplinary judge, including a potential trial-like hearing before a panel made up of the judge and two other volunteers. The decision by that panel can then be appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court.

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  • Texas Attorney General Paxton agrees to $3.3 million settlement with whistleblowers who accused him of abuse of office and bribery | CNN Politics

    Texas Attorney General Paxton agrees to $3.3 million settlement with whistleblowers who accused him of abuse of office and bribery | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has agreed to a $3.3 million settlement and an apology as part of a tentative settlement with four whistleblowers who publicly accused Paxton of abuse of office, bribery and other criminal offenses in 2020.

    The former high-level aides – who also reported their allegations to the FBI – were fired within a month of their denouncement of Paxton, a Republican. They filed a lawsuit seeking reinstatement to their former positions or equivalent positions, as well as reinstatement of lost fringe benefits and seniority rights.

    In a filing on Friday, both parties asked the Texas Supreme Court to defer consideration on the case to allow the parties to finalize and fund a settlement agreement.

    The filing included the mediated agreement which says that Paxton’s office will pay $3.3 million and that the final settlement will say Paxton accepts that the former aides were acting in a manner they thought was right and apologizes for referring to them as “rogue employees.”

    Paxton also agreed to remove the 2020 press release from his office’s website in which he described his aides as “rogue.” The press release has already been removed, and the filing says the settlement is contingent on all necessary approvals for funding.

    Despite the apology, the formal settlement agreement does not contain an admission of liability or fault by any party.

    In a statement on Friday, Paxton acknowledged the settlement, explaining why he agreed to “put this issue to rest” but did not mention the apology portion of the agreement.

    “After over two years of litigating with four ex-staffers who accused me in October 2020 of ‘potential’ wrongdoing, I have reached a settlement agreement to put this issue to rest. I have chosen this path to save taxpayer dollars and ensure my third term as Attorney General is unburdened by unnecessary distractions. This settlement achieves these goals. I look forward to serving the People of Texas for the next four years free from this unfortunate sideshow.”

    Lawyers for three of the plaintiffs also issued a statement to CNN, saying: “Our clients have spent more than two years fighting for what is right. We believe the terms of the settlement speak for themselves.”

    Former Texas deputy attorneys general James Blake Brickman, Mark Penley, and Ryan Vassar – along with former director of law enforcement David Maxwell – were the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

    CNN has previously reported that Paxton is facing an FBI investigation for abuse of office. He is also under indictment for securities fraud in a separate, unrelated case. Paxton has denied all charges and allegations.

    The former senior staff members largely stayed out of the limelight after filing the suit, but they broke their silence early last year ahead of the GOP primary, when Paxton was seeking the Republican nomination to be reelected as attorney general. They issued a statement responding to public comments that Paxton had made about the lawsuit during his reelection campaign.

    Paxton was reelected as attorney general in November.

    This headline has been updated.

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  • Supreme Court under fresh pressure to adopt code of ethics | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court under fresh pressure to adopt code of ethics | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    For decades, Supreme Court justices have dodged questions related to conflicts of interest by saying essentially “Trust us” or “We’re different.” They’ve refused to be bound by an official ethics code and grievance procedures that cover other federal judges.

    But mounting public pressure may finally spur changes. Court sources have told CNN that internal discussions, which date back at least to 2019, have been revived. The timing of any public resolution is uncertain, however, and it appears some justices have been more hopeful than others about reaching consensus.

    This week, in an action that demonstrates the intensifying national concern over the justices’ behavior, the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates approved a resolution urging the high court to adopt a binding code of ethics “comparable” to the code in place for lower-court US judges.

    Unlike liberal groups that have been pounding on the justices to establish ethics rules, neither the ABA nor its policy-making House of Delegates is known for criticizing the high court. The 591-member House of Delegates is more associated with establishment positions than flamethrowing advocacy.

    Separately, members of Congress on Thursday re-introduced legislation that would lead to a code of ethics for Supreme Court justices. A similar bill failed last year, but lawmakers say the increasing public criticism could give the legislation more traction.

    The current accelerated scrutiny of the justices’ extracurricular behavior arises against a backdrop of rulings that have broken norms. The conservative majority has been more willing than prior courts to jettison decades of precedent, most startlingly in last June’s decision reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion rights landmark. More recently, the court’s stature has been undermined by the early leak of the Dobbs opinion that overturned Roe and other security lapses.

    Together, the substance of cases and refusal to address ethics issues evoke an unaccountable court that will rule as it wishes and act as it wants, without regard for public concern.

    New York University law professor Stephen Gillers believes the court’s standing has been diminished by its reluctance to address ethical concerns.

    “There’s almost no willingness to engage with the repeated call from various venues, and now the ABA,” Gillers said, calling the court’s lack of response “incredible, tone-deaf,” and adding, “I think that has hurt the court’s reputation.”

    Growing criticism of America’s top court, including from members of Congress seeking accountability, could cause the justices to finally act. They previously worked behind the scenes to formalize ethics rules, but the effort stalled. In 2019, Justice Elena Kagan, commenting publicly on the negotiations over a code of ethics, told a US House committee that discussions were underway. “It’s something that is being thought very seriously about,” Kagan said.

    Court sources told CNN that internal discussions have continued and that some justices hope a code might be crafted in due course.

    The justices rarely address recusal, that is, why they decide to sit out a case or are hearing one that critics say could pose a conflict. Their disclosure filings include limited information about their finances, those of their spouses and various reimbursements for travel.

    Activities of spouses have spurred more questions regarding recusals, particularly related to Justice Clarence Thomas. He resolved cases with his colleagues arising from former President Donald Trump’s failed 2020 reelection bid, as his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, worked with White House allies to challenge Joe Biden’s victory.

    Neither Justice Thomas nor Chief Justice John Roberts responded to press inquiries about potential conflicts when information about Ginni Thomas’ activities became public through the US House investigation into the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol.

    Ginni Thomas’ lawyer, Mark Paoletta, suggested in testimony last year before a US House subcommittee that the Supreme Court could continue with the current practice of consulting with, rather than formally following, existing code that covers lower-court judges. During an April 2022 hearing titled “Building Confidence in the Supreme Court through ethics and Recusal reforms,” Paoletta said: “There is nothing wrong with ethics and recusals at the Supreme Court. The justices are ethical and honorable public servants. Moreover, to support any reform legislation right now would be to validate this vicious political attack on the Supreme Court.”

    The Supreme Court’s public information office declined to comment Thursday.

    NYU’s Gillers, who focuses on legal and judicial ethics, traces some of today’s criticism of the court’s ethics to America’s enduring abortion wars and the June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

    “It’s hard for a lot of people to understand why Roe could be overturned simply because the composition of the court changed,” he said. “Why now, after nearly 49 years of Republicans and Democrats supporting Roe?”

    The reversal, indeed, followed the addition of the new Trump appointees to the court.

    Yet Gillers said the justices’ off-bench behavior and their enduring lack of a formal code of ethics are rightfully being scrutinized and affect the court’s stature.

    The court’s legitimacy has been increasingly debated, even publicly among the justices, since the Dobbs ruling.

    When the ABA House of Delegates voted on its resolution in New Orleans on Monday, an accompanying report said, “The absence of a clearly articulated, binding code of ethics for the justices of the Court imperils the legitimacy of the Court. More than that, this absence potentially imperils the legitimacy of all American courts and the American judicial system, given the Court’s central role enshrined in our federal republic.”

    The nine justices are covered by a federal law dictating that jurists disqualify themselves from a case when their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” but they are exempted from the federal judicial channels for resolving complaints and lack a specific ethics code governing their activities.

    So, for example in 2018, more than 80 complaints filed against US appeals court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, arising from his tumultuous Supreme Court nomination hearings, were summarily dismissed after the Senate confirmed him as a justice.

    US appeals court Judge Timothy Tymkovich, who wrote the judicial council’s dismissal of those complaints, referred to the 1980 judicial conduct law that excludes the nine justices.

    “The allegations contained in the complaints are serious,” he said, “but the Judicial Council is obligated to adhere to the Act. Lacking statutory authority to do anything more, the complaints must be dismissed because an intervening event – Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court – has made the complaints no longer appropriate for consideration under the Act.”

    As he introduced new legislation Thursday, Sen. Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that “the Supreme Court of the Unites States ought to be the embodiment of objectivity.”

    “Congress must close the inexcusable ‘Supreme Court loophole’ in federal judicial ethics rules by creating and enforcing a code of ethics for Supreme Court Justices,” the Illinois Democrat said.

    Among the provisions in the proposed “Supreme Court Ethics Act” are those that would require the Judicial Conference of the United States, a policy-making arm of the federal judiciary, to craft a code that would apply to the justices and, separately, would direct the Supreme Court itself to appoint an ethics investigations counsel to handle public complaints about potentially unethical conduct by the justices.

    In 2011, Roberts explained some of the factors that allowed the high court to be shielded from strictures related to recusals.

    “Lower court judges can freely substitute for one another,” Roberts wrote in an annual year-end report. “If an appeals court or district court judge withdraws from a case, there is another federal judge who can serve in that recused judge’s place. But the Supreme Court consists of nine Members who always sit together, and if a Justice withdraws from a case, the Court must sit without its full membership. A Justice accordingly cannot withdraw from a case as a matter of convenience or simply to avoid controversy.”

    He also said that the Supreme Court “does not sit in judgment of one of its own Members’ decision whether to recuse in the course of deciding a case.”

    At the time of Roberts’ 2011 statement, outside critics were questioning whether Thomas and Kagan should sit on the first major dispute over the Affordable Care Act – Thomas because of his wife’s opposition to the 2010 health care law and Kagan because of her prior work in the Obama administration.

    Without addressing those justices directly, Roberts wrote, “I have complete confidence in the capability of my colleagues to determine when recusal is warranted. They are jurists of exceptional integrity and experience whose character and fitness have been examined through a rigorous appointment and confirmation process.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • McCarthy confirms Santos is facing House probe | CNN Politics

    McCarthy confirms Santos is facing House probe | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    New York Rep. George Santos is now facing an investigation from the House Ethics Committee, a probe that could derail his already imperiled political career depending on the secretive panel’s findings.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy confirmed to CNN on Tuesday that the embattled freshman is under investigation by the committee, something that even Republicans acknowledge could lead to his expulsion from Congress if the panel turns up serious evidence of wrongdoing.

    McCarthy has so far not called on Santos to resign, saying previously his fate should be decided by voters. But he has increasingly suggested that the House ethics probe could change his posture to the freshman, who hails from a swing district that President Joe Biden carried by eight points in 2020.

    “Ethics is moving through, and if ethics finds something, we’ll take action,” McCarthy told CNN on Tuesday when asked about calls for his resignation. “Right now, we’re not allowing him to be on committees from the standpoint of the questions that have arisen.”

    Santos has voluntarily stepped down from two House committees even though McCarthy and his allies initially awarded him the spots. McCarthy later said that he had “new questions” about the freshman but declined to say what those were, indicating he agreed with Santos’ decision to step down from those panels.

    So far, Santos, who is facing a list of growing questions about fabricating his past and about his campaign finances, has been defiant, insisting he would continue to serve in the House.

    On Tuesday, Santos told CNN he is “not concerned” about the House ethics probe or about New York constituents calling on him to resign.

    “You’re saying that the freedom of speech of my constituents is a distraction to my work?” Santos said. “Do you think people are a distraction to the work I’m doing here?”

    But even some fellow New York GOP freshmen say it’s time for Santos to hang it up.

    “As I’ve said consistently, I think he ought to resign and really take stock of himself and start being honest, not only with the people he serves, but with himself,” said Rep. Marc Molinaro, a New York GOP freshman.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Fact check: McCarthy’s false, misleading and evidence-free claims since becoming House speaker | CNN Politics

    Fact check: McCarthy’s false, misleading and evidence-free claims since becoming House speaker | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Since winning a difficult battle to become speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy has made public claims that are misleading, lacking any evidence or plain wrong.

    Here is a fact check of recent McCarthy comments about the debt ceiling, funding for the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s resort and residence in Florida, President Joe Biden’s stance on stoves and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.

    McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

    McCarthy has cited the example of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, his Democratic predecessor as House speaker, while defending conservative Republicans’ insistence that any agreement to lift the federal debt ceiling must be paired with cuts to government spending – a trade-off McCarthy agreed to when he was trying to persuade conservatives to support his bid for speaker. Specifically, McCarthy has claimed that even Pelosi agreed to a spending cap as part of a deal to lift the debt ceiling under Trump.

    “When Nancy Pelosi was speaker, that’s what transpired. To get a debt ceiling, they also got a cap on spending for the next two years,” McCarthy told reporters at a press conference on January 12. When Fox host Maria Bartiromo told McCarthy in a January 15 interview that “they” would not agree to a spending cap, he responded, “Well Maria, I don’t believe that’s the case, because when Donald Trump was president and when Nancy Pelosi was speaker, that’s exactly what happened for them to get a debt ceiling lifted last time. They agreed to a spending cap.”

    Facts First: McCarthy’s claims are highly misleading. The deal Pelosi agreed to with the Trump administration in 2019 actually loosened spending caps that were already in place at the time because of a 2011 law. In other words, while congressional conservatives today want to use a debt ceiling deal to reduce government spending, the Pelosi deal allowed for billions in additional government spending above the pre-existing maximum. The two situations are nothing alike.

    Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, said when asked about the accuracy of McCarthy’s claims: “I’m going to steer clear of characterizing the Speaker’s remarks, but as an objective matter, the deal reached in 2019 increased the spending caps set by the Budget Control Act of 2011.”

    The 2019 deal, which was criticized by many congressional conservatives, also ensured that Budget Control Act’s caps on discretionary spending – which were created as a result of a 2011 debt ceiling deal between a Democratic president and a Republican speaker of the House – would not be extended past 2021. Spending caps vanishing is the opposite of McCarthy’s suggestion that the deal “got” a spending cap.

    Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said in an email that McCarthy is “trying to rewrite history.” Bennett said, “As Republicans in Congress and in the Administration noted at the time, in 2019, Speaker Pelosi and Democrats were eager to reach bipartisan agreement to raise the debt limit and, as part of the agreement, avert damaging funding cuts for defense and domestic programs.”

    In various statements since becoming speaker, McCarthy has boasted of how the first bill passed by the new Republican majority in the House “repealed 87,000 IRS agents” or “repealed funding for 87,000 new IRS agents.”

    Facts First: McCarthy’s claims are false. House Republicans did pass a bill that seeks to eliminate about $71 billion of the approximately $80 billion in additional Internal Revenue Service funding that Biden signed into law in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act – but that funding is not going to hire 87,000 “agents.” In addition, Biden has already made clear he would veto this new Republican bill even if the bill somehow made it through the Democratic-controlled Senate, so no funding has actually been “repealed.” It would be accurate for McCarthy to say House Republicans “voted to repeal” the funding, but the boast that they actually “repealed” something is inaccurate.

    CNN’s Katie Lobosco explains in detail here why the claim about “87,000 new IRS agents” is an exaggeration. The claim, which has become a common Republican talking point, has been fact-checked by numerous media outlets over more than five months, including The Washington Post in response to McCarthy remarks earlier this January.

    Here’s a summary. While Inflation Reduction Act funding may well allow for the hiring of tens of thousands of IRS employees, far from all of these employees will be IRS agents conducting audits and investigations. Many other employees will be hired for the non-agent roles, from customer service to information technology, that make up the vast majority of the IRS workforce. And a significant number of the hires are expected to fill the vacant posts left by retirements and other attrition, not take newly created positions.

    The IRS has not yet released a detailed breakdown of how it plans to use the funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, so it’s impossible to say precisely how many new “agents” will be hired. But it is already clear that the total won’t approach 87,000.

    In his interview with Fox’s Bartiromo on January 15, McCarthy criticized federal law enforcement for executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in Florida, which the FBI says resulted in the recovery of more than 100 government documents marked as classified and hundreds of other government documents. Echoing a claim Trump has made, McCarthy said of the documents: “They knew it was there. They could have come and taken it any time they wanted.”

    Facts First: It is clearly not true that the authorities could somehow have come to Mar-a-Lago at any time, without conducting a formal search, and taken all of the presidential records they were seeking from Trump. By the time of the search, the federal government – first the National Archives and Records Administration and then the Justice Department – had been asking Trump for more than a year to return government records. Even when the Justice Department went beyond asking in May and served Trump’s team with a subpoena for the return of all documents with classification markings, Trump’s team returned only some of these documents. In June, a Trump lawyer signed a document certifying on behalf of Trump’s office that all of the documents had been returned, though that was not true.

    When FBI agents and a Justice Department attorney visited Mar-a-Lago without a search warrant on that June day to accept documents the Trump team was returning in response to the subpoena, a Trump lawyer “explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room,” the department said in a court filing after the August search. In other words, according to the department, the government was not even allowed to poke around to see if there were government records still at Mar-a-Lago, let alone take those records.

    In the August court filing, the department pointedly called into question the extent to which the Trump team had cooperated: “That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former President’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”

    McCarthy wrote in a New York Post article published on January 12: “While President Joe Biden wants to control the kind of stove Americans can cook on, House Republicans are certainly cooking with gas.” He repeated the claim on Twitter the next morning.

    Facts First: There is no evidence for this claim; Biden has not expressed a desire to control the kind of stove Americans can cook on. McCarthy was baselessly attributing the comments of a single Biden appointee to Biden himself.

    It is true that a Biden appointee on the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., told Bloomberg earlier this month that gas stoves pose a “hidden hazard,” as they emit air pollutants, and said, “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” But the day before McCarthy’s article was published by the New York Post, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a press briefing: “The president does not support banning gas stoves. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”

    To date, even the commission itself has not shown support for a ban on gas stoves or for any particular new regulations on gas stoves. Commission Chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric said in a statement the day before McCarthy’s article was published: “I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.” Rather, he said, the commission is researching gas emissions in stoves, “exploring new ways to address health risks,” and strengthening voluntary safety standards – and will this spring ask the public “to provide us with information about gas stove emissions and potential solutions for reducing any associated risks.”

    Trumka told CNN’s Matt Egan that while every option remains on the table, any ban would apply only to new gas stoves, not the gas stoves already in people’s homes. And he noted that the Inflation Reduction Act makes people eligible for a rebate of up to $840 to voluntarily switch to an electric stove.

    Defending his plan to bar Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff from sitting on the House Intelligence Committee, a committee Schiff chaired during the Democratic majority from early 2019 to the beginning of this year, McCarthy criticized Schiff on January 12 over his handling of the first impeachment of Trump. Among other things, McCarthy said: “Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public. He told you he had proof. He told you he didn’t know the whistleblower.”

    Facts First: There is no evidence for McCarthy’s insinuation that Schiff lied when he said he didn’t know the anonymous whistleblower who came forward in 2019 with allegations – which were subsequently corroborated – about how Trump had attempted to use the power of his office to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden, his looming rival in the 2020 election.

    Schiff said last week in a statement to CNN: “Kevin McCarthy continues to falsely assert I know the Ukraine whistleblower. Let me be clear – I have never met the whistleblower and the only thing I know about their identity is what I have read in press. McCarthy’s real objection is we proved the whistleblower’s claim to be true and impeached Donald Trump for withholding millions from Ukraine to extort its help with his campaign.” Schiff also made this comment to The Washington Post, which fact-checked the McCarthy claim last week, and has consistently said the same since late 2019.

    The New York Times reported in 2019 that, according to an unnamed official, a House Intelligence Committee aide who had been contacted by the whistleblower before the whistleblower filed a formal complaint did not inform Schiff of the person’s identity when conveying to Schiff “some” information about what the person had said. And Reuters reported in 2019 that a person familiar with the whistleblower’s contacts said the whistleblower hadn’t met or spoken with Schiff.

    McCarthy could have fairly repeated Republican criticism of a claim Schiff made in a 2019 television appearance about the committee’s communication with the whistleblower; Schiff said at the time “we have not spoken directly with the whistleblower” even though it soon emerged that the whistleblower had contacted the committee aide before filing the complaint. (A committee spokesperson said at the time that Schiff had been merely trying to say that the committee hadn’t heard actual testimony from the whistleblower, but that Schiff acknowledged his words “should have been more carefully phrased to make that distinction clear.”)

    Regardless, McCarthy didn’t argue here that Schiff had been misleading about the committee’s dealings with the whistleblower; he strongly suggested that Schiff lied in saying he didn’t know the whistleblower. That’s baseless. There has never been any indication that Schiff had a relationship with the whistleblower when he said he didn’t, nor that Schiff knew the whistleblower’s identity when he said he didn’t.

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  • Supermom In Training: It takes a village

    Supermom In Training: It takes a village

    When they told you it takes a village to raise a child, they weren’t entirely right. You can raise a child without the village backing you. But when you’ve got the strength of the village on your side, you can raise a really awesome well-rounded kid!

    I have a village. I have amazing grandparents who give my son so much love and attention and comfort. I have wonderful aunts and uncles who spoil him in every which way. I have incredible friends who love my kid as much as their own, and who are my sounding board when I’m on the edge of a ledge. I have a church full of parishioners who have always embraced my son and made him feel like he belongs. I have the greatest school, with such passionate teachers and volunteers, who make his school experience one that has been inclusive and positive and very educational on so many levels. And speaking of the volunteers, I’ve been lucky enough to have befriended many of these lovely ladies, who look out for my son as well as me, who offer advice and help, and devote so much of their own time to making my son’s school days exciting and fun. I have this awesome community, where we all look out for each other, where we feel safe and where we have made true friends. And, even though I freelance, I have a network of colleagues and clients whom are understanding when it comes to motherly duties – some are parents, and we spend the first half of meetings or interviews catching up on one another’s families. They provide me with comradery and grown-up conversation and sanity.

    Because of them, all of them, I can be a better mom. These different people have shaped my bean into the smart, inquisitive, compassionate kid he is today, and provided me with the friendship I’ve needed in times of being frustrated, exhausted and scared, because, as a parent, these moments happen a lot. 

    I love my village. And I am forever grateful for my villagers.

    A full-time work-from-home mom, Jennifer Cox (our “Supermom in Training”) loves dabbling in healthy cooking, craft projects, family outings, and more, sharing with readers everything she knows about being an (almost) superhero mommy.

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  • Republicans shy away from calling on Santos to resign as Democrats renew push for more information | CNN Politics

    Republicans shy away from calling on Santos to resign as Democrats renew push for more information | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    More House Republicans on Sunday stopped short of calling on embattled New York Rep. George Santos to resign, while two Democrats made a fresh push for more information from GOP leaders.

    Republicans back home in the GOP freshman’s Long Island district, however, doubled down Sunday on calls for him to step down.

    Santos is facing growing pressure to resign after he lied and misrepresented his educational, work and family history, including falsely claiming he was Jewish and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. He also faces federal and local investigations into his campaign finances. Santos has admitted to “embellishing” his resume but has maintained he is “not a criminal.”

    House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer called Santos “a bad guy” in an interview Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

    “He’s not the first politician, unfortunately, to make it to Congress to lie,” the Kentucky Republican said. “But, look, George Santos was duly elected by the people. He’s going to be under strict ethics investigation, not necessarily for lying, but for his campaign finance potential violations. So I think that Santos is being examined thoroughly.”

    “It’s his decision whether or not he should resign. It’s not my decision. But, certainly, I don’t approve of how he made his way to Congress,” Comer said.

    GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska said Sunday he would resign if he were in Santos’ position but said that was a decision for the New York Republican’s constituents.

    “If it was me, I would resign. I wouldn’t be able to face my voters after having gone through that,” Bacon told “This Week” on ABC. “But this is between him and his constituents, largely. They elected him in, and he’s going to have to deal with them on that. I don’t think his reelection chances will be that promising, depending on how he handles this.”

    Rep. Chris Stewart, a Utah Republican, also declined to say if Santos should resign from his Long Island seat.

    “He clearly lied to his constituents, and … it’s going to be very, very difficult for him to gain the trust of his colleagues,” Stewart said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “The reality is you can’t expel a member of Congress. At the end of the day, it really is up to the voters in Nassau County. I can tell you this – if I were in that situation, I don’t know how I could continue to serve and I suppose he needs to ask that same question.”

    Several House Republicans have called for Santos to resign, including five of his fellow New York Republican colleagues in the House. Leaders of the Nassau County GOP have also called for the congressman to step down.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters Thursday that Santos has “a long way to go to earn trust” and that concerns could be investigated by the House Ethics Committee, but he emphasized that the congresman is a part of the House GOP Conference. Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, of New York, who chairs the House GOP Conference, told CNN on Thursday that the process “will play itself out.”

    “He’s a duly elected member of Congress. There have been members of Congress on the Democrat side who have faced investigations before,” she said.

    Meanwhile, two Democrats are calling on McCarthy and Stefanik to cooperate with any House Ethics Committee investigation into Santos.

    In a letter sent to the two Republican leaders and to Dan Conston, president of the Congressional Leadership Fund – the super PAC affiliated with House GOP leadership – New York Reps. Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres cite new reporting “indicating that each of you had at least some knowledge of lies used by Congressman George Santos to deceive his voters long before they became public.”

    “We urge you to inform the American people about your knowledge of Mr. Santos’s web of deceit prior to the election so that the public understands whether and to what extent you were complicit in Mr. Santos’s fraud on his voters,” Goldman and Torres said in the letter.

    CNN has reported that Conston expressed concerns about Santos’ background prior to the election and contacted lawmakers and donors about those concerns. Goldman and Torres cite reporting by The New York Times in their letter, which also indicated that associates of Stefanik were made aware of issues regarding Santos’ background ahead of the election.

    In an interview with CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Goldman called Santos a “complete and total fraud” and pushed back on attempts by some Republicans to equate the allegations against him to ethics complaints against some Democrats.

    “This is a scheme to defraud the voters of the 3rd District in New York, and this needs to be investigated intensively,” he said.

    Goldman and Ritchie said last week that they were filing a formal complaint with the House Ethics Committee requesting an investigation related to Santos’s financial disclosure reports. A campaign watchdog group filed a complaint last week with the Federal Election Commission accusing Santos of concealing the source of more than $700,000 that he put into his successful 2022 bid.

    CNN’s KFILE also reported that Santos had said a company later accused of running a “Ponzi scheme” was “100% legitimate” when it was accused by a potential customer of fraud in 2020, more than a year before it was sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Joseph Murray, an attorney for Santos, told CNN in an email that Santos was unaware of wrongdoing at that company.

    Murray also previously defended the Santos campaign’s actions, saying in a statement, “The suggestion that the Santos campaign engaged in any unlawful spending of campaign funds is irresponsible, at best.”

    Nassau County Republicans were ready Sunday in case Santos showed up at a morning fundraiser on Long Island.

    “Had he shown up, we were ready to greet him,” Nassau County GOP Chair Joseph Cairo said. “We would have said, ‘You’re really not welcome. You deceived us, you lied to us.’”

    Over 900 people turned out for the annual “kickoff brunch” featuring a who’s-who of Nassau County Republicans, with most wanting to distance themselves from the freshman lawmaker.

    “People say he should serve out his term,” Cairo said. “He didn’t get elected. The fictional character he created got elected.”

    Cairo said the topic of Santos came up at times during public speeches made by various Republicans at the fundraiser but not in a supportive way.

    “Virtually everyone is done with George Santos,” said Cairo. “We’ve told him he’s not welcome at our events. We don’t invite him to our meetings.”

    Former New York Rep. Peter King, who represented a different Long Island seat in Congress for nearly three decades, said no one had anything positive to say about Santos.

    “I made it a point to sort of mingle in the crowd beforehand. Everyone says we’ve got to get rid of this guy,” said King, a onetime chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. “He’s dangerous to the party and dangerous to the country.”

    King said local Republicans would now move to ostracize Santos as much as possible.

    “That’s not to punish him but to send the signal to everyone, including Washington, that he has to go,” the former congressman said. “They can’t be slow-walking it in Washington, waiting for something to happen in Washington.”

    Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, a freshman lawmaker from a neighboring Long Island district, said Santos won’t have support from the party if he opts to stay put and run for reelection next year.

    “We’ve all called for George Santos’ resignation. If that’s not something that’s going to happen, then I think it’s clear … that we are ready to do what we need to do when it comes to the polls in two years,” he said.

    “One of the things that I think is really bothering people the most is the fact that he claimed he was of the Jewish faith and that his grandparents survived the Holocaust,” D’Esposito said. “In the district that I run in, we have a very large population of Orthodox and a large Jewish population. It’s not something that we could stand for.”

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  • Matt Gaetz says George Santos should go through House ethics process but should not be shunned | CNN Politics

    Matt Gaetz says George Santos should go through House ethics process but should not be shunned | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz said Saturday that fellow Republican Rep. George Santos, the embattled New York congressman who has admitted to lying about parts of his biography and faces federal and local investigations into his campaign finances, “will have to go through the congressional ethics process” but shouldn’t be shunned by his colleagues as it plays out.

    “George Santos will have to go through the congressional ethics process. I don’t want to prejudge that process, but I think he deserves the chance to at least make his case. There are requirements members of Congress have to meet when it comes to the money that they donate to their own campaigns,” Gaetz said in an interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish.

    “But until then, I don’t think that George Santos should be subject to shunning because the Americans he serves deserve representation, and they have real challenges, and we ought to work together to solve their challenges and meet their needs,” he said.

    Gaetz interviewed Santos on Thursday when the Florida Republican sat in for Steve Bannon on the latter’s podcast “War Room.” In the interview, Santos declined to divulge the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars he gave his campaign for his Long Island seat. A campaign watchdog group filed a complaint earlier this week with the Federal Election Commission accusing Santos of concealing the source of more than $700,000 that he put into his successful 2022 bid.

    Santos’ personal lawyer, Joe Murray, has defended the campaign’s activity, saying in a previous statement, “The suggestion that the Santos campaign engaged in any unlawful spending of campaign funds is irresponsible, at best.”

    Santos is facing backlash from Democrats and within his own party with a growing number of House Republicans calling for him to resign or saying he can’t serve effectively. Speaker Kevin McCarthy has stood by Santos, while also saying that he has “a long way to go to earn trust.”

    Santos has pushed back on calls for his resignation, insisting he has “done nothing unethical” while brushing off concerns about the ethics complaint.

    Meanwhile, in his interview Saturday, Gaetz reiterated his call for giving C-SPAN cameras greater access in the House chamber, saying that “if we had cameras on the floor, my suspicion is we would have far better attendance during debates that impact the lives of our fellow Americans.”

    “The public value of being able to see the human interactions in frustration, in warmth, in all of those things far outweighs the risk that people will play to the cameras. I mean, we have that during debate one way or the other,” he told Smerconish. “I think some of the old guard in Congress opposes this because they want to continue to maintain the fiction that when four or five people are on the floor spending millions of dollars, that that is actually the action of the whole legislative body when the reality is far different.”

    C-SPAN sent a letter to McCarthy earlier this week asking for permission to operate its own independent cameras in the House chamber.

    The House normally forbids independent media coverage of proceedings. But during special events, such as during last week’s election of the House speaker, independent cameras from outlets such as C-SPAN are permitted.

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  • Two words no president wants to hear | CNN Politics

    Two words no president wants to hear | CNN Politics

    A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    There’s something ringing in Joe Biden’s ears that no president ever, ever wants to hear: special counsel.

    These are the independent lawyers appointed, usually by attorneys general, to look, without conflict of interest, into actions involving the president or his administration. While you might have forgotten their names, you’re familiar with their work.

    Watergate. Iran-Contra. Whitewater. The Russia investigation. Teapot Dome.

    Other investigations include inquiries into the George W. Bush administration’s leak of the identity of an undercover CIA agent whose husband questioned intelligence about Iraq, the government’s ultimately deadly siege of the Branch Davidian compound and Jimmy Carter’s peanut business.

    Note that I’m including special counsels, special prosecutors, independent counsels and independent prosecutors here. A law that authorized independent prosecutors or independent counsels, who had more autonomy from the Department of Justice, lapsed in 1999 after high profile and expensive inquiries during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations into the Iran-Contra affair and during the Clinton administration into Whitewater. In the years since, the Department of Justice has adopted regulations to enable to the attorney general to call up a special counsel when needed.

    Since Carter, only Barack Obama has emerged from the White House without having a special counsel or special prosecutor look at his administration. See lists of these investigations compiled by the A-Mark Foundation and The Washington Post.

    Now, there are two special counsels at the same time. One, Jack Smith, is looking into the multiple investigations involving former President Donald Trump, ranging from his effort to overturn the 2020 election to his handling of classified data and stonewalling that led the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago last summer.

    The other, appointed this week, is Robert Hur, who will assess what should happen as a result of classified documents being found both in a Washington, DC, office used by Biden following his vice presidency, and locked up in the garage at his Wilmington, Delaware, home, where he also keeps his Corvette.

    Both Biden and Trump’s teams have denied wrongdoing.

    All of Hur’s previous appointments to official positions have come during Republican administrations, including his appointment to be US attorney in Maryland by former President Donald Trump. He served as law clerk for federal judges appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, including the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He once held a top position as an assistant to current FBI Director Christopher Wray, also a Trump appointee, but one who has been criticized by Trump. As US attorney in Maryland, he oversaw a corruption case where Baltimore’s former Democratic mayor was sentenced to prison for three years following a children’s book scandal.

    Smith, who is coordinating Trump investigations, worked at the Justice Department during the Obama administration. While at the public integrity unit of the Justice Department, Smith was involved in the decision to prosecute former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican who was convicted of corruption, although the Supreme Court later vacated the conviction. He was also involved in the failed prosecution of former Sen. John Edwards, a Democrat.

    The two special prosecutors can expect very different treatment by the subjects of their investigations.

    Biden’s White House has promised to cooperate with Hur; Trump has already written off Smith.

    “The Special ‘Prosecutor’ assigned to the ‘get Trump case,’ Jack Smith(?), is a Trump Hating THUG whose wife is a serial and open Trump Hater, whose friends & other family members are even worse,” Trump said in the opening of a screed on his social media platform Thursday.

    There are some important distinctions in terms of what kind of power a special counsel has. Between 1978 and 1999, as part of an ethics in government law, the attorney general could ask a three-judge panel to appoint an independent prosecutor with near total authority to bring charges. Read more from the Congressional Research Service.

    More recently, attorneys general have appointed special counsels, who have some autonomy, but still ultimately report to the attorney general. That chain of command was abundantly clear when Trump’s attorney general William Barr slow-walked the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation in a way that seemed beneficial to Trump.

    Thus, it’s Merrick Garland, or his successors, who will ultimately decide what to do with the findings by Smith and Hur.

    While the White House said it will cooperate with the special counsel, the fact is that it is developing a credibility gap on this issue.

    Biden’s lawyers found classified documents in Biden’s office in November and in his home in December. But when the administration first publicly addressed the findings this month, they didn’t mention the documents found in the home.

    “Not only did this make it look like Biden had something to hide, it set up the kind of drip, drip of disclosures guaranteed to supercharge a Washington scandal,” CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote Friday.

    The White House, however, has pushed back on that perception, arguing the discoveries of all classified documents were ultimately disclosed.

    “When the president’s lawyers realized that the documents existed, that they were there, they reached out to the Archives. They reached out to the Department of Justice. rightfully so, I may add. That is what you’re supposed to do,” argued White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre at the White House Thursday.

    CNN’s White House team published a deep dive report looking at the final days of Biden’s vice presidency in early 2017, the period that appears to have resulted in these classified documents ending up at his home, locked up next to his Corvette, as Biden said Thursday, and at the Penn Biden Center.

    The discovery that set off this scandal was made by a Biden attorney looking into “a manilla folder marked ‘VP personal,’” according to one person in the report.

    CNN’s reporting, based on that source, is that there are 10 classified documents, including US intelligence memorandums and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom. There is also a memo from Biden to Obama and briefing memos meant to prepare Biden for one phone call with the prime minister of Britain and another with Donald Tusk, in his capacity as president of the European Council.

    While there are two probes, each with a special counsel appointed to look into the leaders’ handling of classified material, it’s important not to conflate them. The larger issue for Trump is that he fought giving documents to the National Archives as required by law and may have obstructed attempts by the government to retrieve them.

    “Based on what we know now, Biden is unlikely ever to face charges, whereas Trump is at high risk because of his obstructive conduct and other factors absent from the Biden case,” Norm Eisen, the ethics lawyer who helped Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment, writes for CNN Opinion. “The cases have special counsels and classified documents in common — but little else.”

    Earlier in the Trump classified documents saga in 2022 I talked to the government transparency activist Thomas Blanton at National Security Archive about how the US government classifies way too much material.

    The Biden classified documents saga could help prove his points. He told me there are clearly things related to intelligence sources or nuclear weapons that need to be kept secret. However…

    “The constant struggle is to push against the bureaucratic imperatives that cause ‘secure-a-crats’ to cover their rears for the most part with classified documents, but ensuring that the real secrets that will get people killed get really protected.”

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  • Roberts calls for judicial security in year-end report while avoiding mention of ethics reform or abortion draft leak | CNN Politics

    Roberts calls for judicial security in year-end report while avoiding mention of ethics reform or abortion draft leak | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Chief Justice John Roberts urged continued vigilance for the safety of judges and justices in an annual report published Saturday, after a tumultuous year at the US Supreme Court.

    “A judicial system cannot and should not live in fear,” Roberts wrote.

    While drawing attention to judicial security, however, the chief justice bypassed other controversies, including calls for new ethics rules directed at the justices, and an update on an investigation launched eight months ago into the unprecedented leak of a draft abortion opinion last spring that unleashed nationwide protests.

    Avoiding direct mention of any specific controversy, Roberts praised judges who face controversial issues “quietly, diligently and faithfully,” and urged continued congressional funding devoted to security.

    Roberts said that while there is “no obligation in our free country” to agree with decisions, judges must always be protected.

    “The law requires every judge to swear an oath to perform his or her work without fear or favor, but we must support judges by ensuring their safety,” he wrote.

    Besides his duties on the high court, Roberts presides over the Judicial Conference, a body responsible for making policy regarding the administration of the courts, and he releases a report each New Year’s Eve on the state of the judiciary.

    Some critics of the court were hoping that Roberts would use his annual report to concretely address other concerns that arose over the last several months.

    The report comes as public opinion of the court has reached an all-time low. The justices, who are on their winter recess, took on blockbuster cases this fall concerning the issues of voting rights and affirmative action. In the second half of the term, they will discuss issues such as immigration and President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

    Roberts made no direct mention, for instance, of the status of an ongoing investigation into the leak last May of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

    The disclosure – and the eventual opinion released the following month – triggered protests across the country, including some staged outside of the justices’ homes. In June, a man was arrested near the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and later charged with attempted murder of a Supreme Court justice. According to court documents, the man, Nicholas Roske, told investigators that he was upset over the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe.

    In addition, the court building was surrounded by 8-foot security fences that were only brought down ahead of the new term at the end of August.

    In May, Roberts launched an investigation into the leak, but has not provided any public updates.

    Roberts did not bring up ethics reform in the year-end report, but others had hoped he would use it to address the ongoing calls for a more formal code of ethics directed at the justices.

    “There is no doubt that judicial security is paramount,” said Gabe Roth, the executive director of a group called Fix the Court, which is dedicated to more transparency in federal courts. Roth said he thought Roberts should have done more this year to shore up the public’s faith in the ethics of the court.

    “As things stand now, there is no formal code of conduct for the Supreme Court and justices themselves get to decide how they conduct themselves both on and off the bench without any formal guiding principles,” Roth said.

    Back in 2011, Roberts dedicated his year-end report to the issue of ethics, addressing such criticism.

    “All Members of the Court do in fact consult the Code of Conduct in assessing their ethical obligations,” Roberts at the time. He noted that the justices can consult a “wide variety” of other authorities to resolve specific ethical issues including advice from the court’s legal office.

    Federal law also demands a judge should disqualify himself if his “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

    Roth said that this year the court’s integrity has been tested in ways it rarely has in the past, between the leaked opinion and the activities brought to light concerning Virginia “Ginni” Thomas – a long-time conservative activist and the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.

    In March, the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol had in its possession more than two dozen text messages between Ginni Thomas and former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

    The text messages, reviewed by CNN, show Thomas pleading with Meadows to continue the fight to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

    Roth and others say that Justice Thomas should have recused himself – including from a January case in which the high court cleared the way for the release of presidential records from the Trump White House to the committee. Thomas was the sole dissenter.

    “Federal law says that recusal is required when a justice’s impartiality could be reasonably questioned, and that was clearly the case here,” Roth said.

    Ginni Thomas ultimately voluntarily testified before the committee, but she was not mentioned in the panel’s final report released last week.

    Thomas told the committee that she regretted the “tone and content” of the messages she was sending to Meadows, according to witness transcripts the panel released on Friday, and that her husband only found out about the messages in March 2022.

    Thomas said she could “guarantee” that her husband never spoke to her about pending cases in the court because it was an “ironclad” rule in the house, according to the transcript. Additionally, she said that Justice Thomas is “uninterested in politics.”

    Ginni Thomas’ lawyer, Mark Paoletta, released a statement last week saying she was “happy to meet” with the committee to “clear up misconceptions” but that the committee had “no legitimate reason to interview her.”

    He called her post-election activities after Trump lost in 2020 “minimal.”

    “Mrs. Thomas had significant concerns about potential fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election, and her minimal activity was focused on ensuring that reports of fraud and irregularities were investigated,” Paoletta said.

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  • George Santos faces growing condemnation as House GOP leadership remains silent | CNN Politics

    George Santos faces growing condemnation as House GOP leadership remains silent | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    GOP Rep.-elect George Santos is facing growing condemnation from House Democrats, some of whom have called on him to step aside, and even from some corners of the GOP, with at least one of his fellow incoming Republicans calling for him to face an ethics investigation. House GOP leadership, however, remains silent over revelations that the New York Republican lied about parts of his biography. 

    Santos has admitted to fabricating sections of his resume – including his past work experience and education – and has apologized but says he intends to serve in Congress.

    Democratic Reps. Joaquin Castro of Texas and Ted Lieu of California were among those calling on Santos – after the congressman-elect gave interviews acknowledging “embellishing” his resume – to resign and if he refuses, for the House to expel him. 

    Castro called for Santos to be investigated by authorities and argued if the New York Republican is allowed to serve in Congress after lying about his resume, “There will be more who seek office up and down the ballot who will believe that they can completely fabricate credentials, personal features and accomplishments to win office.”

    Democratic Rep.-elect Dan Goldman of New York, a former federal prosecutor, called Santos a “total fraud.” He criticized House Republicans, saying, “Congress also has an obligation to hold George Santos accountable, but it is sadly clear that we cannot trust House Republicans to initiate an investigation in the House Ethics Committee.”

    At least one incoming member of the GOP conference called for Santos to face scrutiny from the House Ethics Committee – an investigative panel that is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats but has limited options for doling out repercussions. 

    “As a Navy man who campaigned on restoring accountability and integrity to our government, I believe a full investigation by the House Ethics Committee and, if necessary, law enforcement, is required,” GOP Rep.-elect Nick LaLota said in a statement that marks the sharpest rebuke yet from a Republican coming to Congress or currently serving.

    “New Yorkers deserve the truth and House Republicans deserve an opportunity to govern without this distraction,” LaLota added.

    Another incoming GOP lawmaker from New York, Rep.-elect Anthony D’Esposito, condemned Santos’ false statements and called on him to “pursue a path of honesty,” although he stopped short of calling for an investigation.

    “Neighbors across Long Island are deeply hurt and rightly offended by the lies and misstatements made by Congressman-Elect George Santos,” he said in a statement. “While Santos has taken a required first step by ‘coming clean’ with respect to his education, work experience and other issues, he must continue to pursue a path of honesty.”

    It is unlikely House Republican leadership will refuse to seat Santos, who is scheduled to be sworn in with the rest of the new members of Congress next Tuesday. The House has the power under the Constitution to expel any member with a two-thirds vote, but doing so is extremely rare and only five lawmakers have been expelled in US history. 

    Besides making a referral to the House Ethics Committee, other potential options for dealing with Santos include not giving him any committee assignments, which would be up to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

    In the past, the California Republican has shown little appetite for punishing his own members for bad behavior – particularly when it comes to actions from before they were a member of Congress. McCarthy has also declined to weigh in when members are under investigation, arguing he will let the probes play out before determining how to proceed. 

    “This will not deter me from being an effective member of the United States Congress in the 118th session,” Santos told City & State in an interview posted Monday night.

    McCarthy’s office and the National Republican Congressional Committee did not respond to CNN’s request for comment Monday evening.  

    Republican condemnation has, however, come from outside Congress.

    Nassau County Republican Committee Chairman Joseph G. Cairo, Jr., said Tuesday that Santos “has broken the public trust” and “has a lot of work to do to regain the trust of voters.”

    “I am deeply disappointed in Mr. Santos, and I expected more than just a blanket apology,” Cairo said in a statement. “The damage that his lies have caused to many people, especially those who have been impacted by the Holocaust, are profound.”

    CNN’s KFile reported that claims by Santos that his grandparents “survived the Holocaust” as Ukrainian Jewish refugees from Belgium who changed their surname are contradicted by sources including family trees compiled by genealogy websites, records on Jewish refugees and interviews with multiple genealogists.

    “I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos told the New York Post on Monday. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”

    But Santos described himself as a “proud American Jew” in a document shared with Jewish groups during the campaign, which was first reported by the Forward and confirmed by CNN.

    The Republican Jewish Coalition on Tuesday said the incoming congressman had “misrepresented his heritage” and “will not be welcome at any future RJC event.”

    “We are very disappointed in Congressman-elect Santos,” RJC CEO Matt Brooks said in a statement. “He deceived us and misrepresented his heritage. In public comments and to us personally he previously claimed to be Jewish. He has begun his tenure in Congress on a very wrong note.”

    Santos admitted Monday he didn’t graduate from any college or university, despite previously claiming he had degrees from Baruch College and New York University.

    He also admitted that he never worked directly for the financial firms Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, as he has previously suggested, but claimed that he did do work for them through his company, telling the New York Post it was a “poor choice of words” to say he worked for them.

    The New York Times first revealed last week that Santos’ biography appeared to be partly fictional. CNN confirmed details of that reporting, including about his college education and employment history.

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  • Sports stars lending legitimacy to crypto firms raises ethical questions when many fans can’t afford to lose

    Sports stars lending legitimacy to crypto firms raises ethical questions when many fans can’t afford to lose

    Sports fans who view their favorite players as role models might think twice before taking their financial advice, too.

    The bankruptcy of FTX and the arrest of its founder and former CEO are raising new questions about the role celebrity athletes such as Tom Brady, Steph Curry, Naomi Osaka and others played in lending legitimacy to the largely unregulated landscape of crypto, while also reframing the conversation about just how costly blind loyalty to favorite players or teams can be for the average fan.

    Cryptocurrencies are digital money that use blockchain as the database for recording transactions. It isn’t backed by any government or institution and it remains a confusing concept — one that at first was largely the niche of tech-savvy coding specialists, people who distrusted governments and centralized banking systems and speculators with money to risk.

    But now that risk is increasingly being taken on by investors who can’t afford to lose, and the disparity in wealth between celebrities and their fans creates an ethical dilemma: Should sports stars, or teams, or leagues, be touting products that could lead their fans to financial harm? Or should fans bear the responsibility for their own risky behavior regardless of who is encouraging it?

    “In retrospect, it was an unwise business association that put Curry and Brady together with bad company,” Mark Pritchard, a professor at Central Washington who has studied the intersection of ethics and sports, said in an email to The Associated Press. “Not sure how much due diligence was paid to the decision, but it does call to mind a Warren Buffet quote: ‘Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.’”

    Crypto and sports

    The marriage between crypto and sports formed a few years ago and has only strengthened since, despite all the troubles plaguing the industry. A study by the IEG sponsorship group, for instance, found FTX and other crypto companies had spent $130 million for sponsorship in the NBA alone over the 2021-22 season; the season before, the sum was less than $2 million.

    FTX itself had numerous ties to sports before its eventual collapse: The company paid an undisclosed amount to place patches on the uniforms of MLB umpires, $135 million for the naming rights on the arena where the Miami Heat play, and another $10 million to Curry’s basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, for ad placement in its arena and throughout the Warriors organization.

    While those deals, as well as some others, cratered when FTX declared bankruptcy, plenty more live on. They include the naming rights for the home of the Lakers, which was once known as the Staples Center, but is now known as Crypto.com Arena, at the reported cost of $700 million over 20 years. There are crypto deals in cricket, soccer and Formula 1.

    Separately, dozens of athletes have endorsed crypto, and in doing so, have led some of their fans to follow suit — and others to file suit, against the likes of Curry, Brady and other high-profile personalities for using their celebrity status to promote FTX’s failed business model.

    Ben Salus, a Philly sports fan who has lost money in crypto, said he was uncomfortably surprised at the sudden increase of crypto-related signage around his favorite teams.

    “It’s a very odd transition, especially because I don’t know if the world was ready for the prominence of crypto,” Salus said. “You’re getting these big personalities backing a thing that they, or their teams, know something about, but not very much.”

    The debate has become even more complex over the past five years, with the intersection between crypto, digitized artwork offered in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), legalized sports wagering and e-gaming, along with the ever-expanding virtual-reality Metaverse — all growing more popular among large factions of sports stars and fans alike.

    “It’s a lot more connected than people think,” said Ryan Nicklin, who studies the role of crypto in sports as part of his public-relations business. “And there’s a lot more crossover from the crypto world to the gambling world and into gaming, because when you spend on one of these Metaverse games, you’re essentially gambling since you don’t know whether the value of that asset you’ve purchased is going to go up or down.”

    Crypto’s move into the public mainstream wasn’t driven by sports, but as it became a better-known commodity, sports leagues and teams and their athletes — never shy about trying to make a buck off the latest trends — got into the act.

    Emotional attachment

    “A lot of endorsements have to do with an emotional attachment,” said Brandon Brown, who teaches sports and business at New York University’s Tisch Institute for Global Sport. “So, it would make sense for these (crypto) companies to work with a sports team or a sports celebrity because there’s an emotional attachment that goes along with that partnership.”

    One key moment came in 2020 when a few players, including Carolina Panthers Pro Bowl lineman Russell Okung, announced they would take all or some of their multimillion-dollar salaries in crypto.

    “So many purchase Bitcoin to become cash rich,” Okung tweeted not long after the announcement. “I bought it to be free from cash.” Not long after, Bitcoin.com proudly stated that the increases in the price of Bitcoin had essentially doubled the $6.5 million portion of Okung’s salary that was paid in crypto.

    Bigger names followed. Actors Matt Damon and Larry David were among the Hollywood types. The mayors of New York and Miami made a splash when they, too, said they would take their pay in crypto.

    Aaron Rodgers, Shaquille O’Neal, Beckham Jr. and Trevor Lawrence were among a large group of high-profile athletes who also got into the act. One popular commercial involved Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Brady and his then-wife, Gisele Bündchen, calling friends to talk crypto and playfully asking them: “Are you in?”

    The relationship between crypto and sports is also regenerating a debate about how athletes should use the platform they wouldn’t otherwise have but for sports. Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling, to say nothing of the racial tensions laid bare in the U.S. by George Floyd’s killing in 2020, upended the old “shut up and play” cliché, and presented many athletes with an opening to use sports to send a message.

    Curry is among those who has been unafraid to delve into some of society’s more difficult topics, speaking out after Floyd’s killing and contributing to the Players’ Tribune website where athletes blog about their views unfiltered by traditional media.

    Now, Curry is in the headlines again as one of many paid endorsers of FTX. But aside of being named in the class action lawsuit and being ridiculed on some social media sites that are heavily engaged in crypto discussions, there hasn’t been any major blowback against Curry for his investments and endorsements — and there may never be.

    “When the currency blows up, will people look poorly on the currency, or will people look poorly on Brady or Steph Curry?” Brown said. “I’d venture to say that people are likely to have such a strong connection with their sports figures that they’ll latch onto said sports figure and blame the other party, which in this case is FTX, or the currency.”

    —AP Business Writer Ken Sweet contributed to this report.

    Eddie Pells, The Associated Press

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  • This former tech worker is helping change laws for people who get laid off | CNN Business

    This former tech worker is helping change laws for people who get laid off | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    Ifeoma Ozoma’s path as an advocate for tech workers started with a series of tweets one morning in June 2020.

    It was a few months after she was pushed out from her job at Pinterest, the image-sharing and social media platform. Across the United States, protests and outrage filled the streets after a White police officer in Minneapolis knelt on the neck of George Floyd for more than nine minutes, ultimately killing him.

    As companies scrambled to express their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, her former employer released a statement.

    “We heard directly from our Black employees about the pain and fear they feel every day living in America,” Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said in the statement. “This is not just a moment in time. With everything we do, we will make it clear that our Black employees matter, Black [Pinterest users] and creators matter, and Black Lives Matter.”

    Ozoma, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, said she wasn’t having it. She fired back with a series of tweets accusing the lifestyle company of racism, pay inequity and retaliation.

    “I shouldn’t have to share this story in the year of our Lord, 2020 — but here we are,” she tweeted. “I’m an alum of Yale, Google, FB, … etc and recently decided to leave Pinterest, which just declared ‘solidarity with BLM.’ What a joke.”

    Ozoma said her tweets broke a nondisclosure agreement she’d signed when she left the company, thrusting her into the spotlight as the latest person to speak up about alleged mistreatment within the male-dominated tech field. While she’d already left her job by then, she risked the reputation she’d built from years of work within the industry, she said.

    But instead of shrinking from the challenge, she leaned into it.

    “My entire career has been in tech and so I was very aware of the costs of speaking up, but I wasn’t afraid of it. I knew that it was what I had to do,” she said. “Fear is something I haven’t really felt since my mom died from a rare cancer when I was in college. The worst thing that could have happened already did … Pinterest could bankrupt me and make it impossible for me to be hired by any other tech companies, but they couldn’t break me. “

    Ozoma told CNN her conflict with Pinterest started after she realized she was getting paid less than half what a White male colleague earned for doing the exact same work.

    She said she raised her concerns with her employer and gave the company time to address the issues. But in March 2020, she was let go from her job at Pinterest.

    “The purpose wasn’t just, ‘let me vent,’” she said of her flurry of tweets in June 2020. “The purpose was, people need to understand that this is what’s happening. And if it happened to me with the public profile that I had within the company and outside of the company, then it can happen to anyone else.”

    Two months after Ozoma and another woman of color, Aerica Shimizu Banks, publicly accused Pinterest of racial discrimination, former chief operating officer Francoise Brougher sued the company over gender discrimination and retaliation. Pinterest later agreed to settle the lawsuit for $22.5 million, but did not admit to liability as part of the settlement.

    It later said it conducted a thorough investigation on the issues raised and concluded Ozoma and Banks were “treated fairly.”

    “We want each and every one of our employees at Pinterest to feel welcomed, valued, and respected,” a Pinterest spokesperson said in June. “We’re committed to advancing our work in inclusion and diversity by taking action at our company and on our platform. In areas where we, as a company, fall short, we must and will do better.”

    Pinterest says it has taken steps to monitor employee salaries to ensure equal pay for comparable work.

    In a separate statement to CNN late last month, Pinterest said it’s launched various diversity and inclusion measures, including pay transparency tools for employees. The company said it’s also taken steps to monitor employee salaries to ensure equal pay for comparable work.

    “We have increased the percentage of women in leadership, added board members who are committed to diversity, and we continue to set goals for increasing diversity at the company,” a Pinterest spokesperson told CNN in an email. “We … are committed to ensuring that every employee feels safe, championed, and empowered to raise any concerns about their work experience.”

    After Ozoma began tweeting about her experience at Pinterest, direct messages poured in from people facing similar frustrations at other companies, she said. She knew she had to do something about it.

    She emerged as a passionate advocate for tech workers by seeking legal protections for whistleblowers.

    Pinterest is based in San Francisco. At the time, California’s law offered some protection to employees who broke non-disclosure agreements to speak out about workplace harassment or discrimination based on sex — but not about racial discrimination, Ozoma said.

    Ozoma got busy. She began educating whistleblowers on their options, urged tech companies to rethink their policies on nondisclosure agreements and reached out to lawmakers to seek new legislation that would protect employees speaking out on all forms of discrimination.

    Ozoma worked with California state senator Connie Leyva, right, on a bill that prevents nondisclosure agreements from being used against people speaking out about workplace discrimination. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law last October.

    In California, she worked with state senator Connie Leyva on a law that prevents nondisclosure agreements from being implemented against people speaking out on any workplace discrimination, including race.

    In October last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill — known as the Silenced No More Act — into law.

    “California workers should absolutely be able to speak out — if they so wish — when they are a victim of any type of harassment or discrimination in the workplace,” Senator Leyva said at the time. “It is unconscionable that an employer would ever want or seek to silence the voices of survivors that have been subjected to racist, sexist, homophobic or other attacks at work.”

    Ozoma’s advocacy work has given whistleblowers a safe space to go for information.

    Around the same time Newson signed the measure into law, she launched a Tech Worker Handbook online to provide free resources for employees seeking information on how to speak out on workplace discrimination and harassment.

    “So many people reached out when I told my story, and most of them were tech workers or workers within the tech industry,” she said.

    She said she’s recruited dozens of experts and tech industry professionals to contribute to the site, saying the goal is not to encourage employees to be whistleblowers, but to provide them with information about options if they choose that path.

    After leaving Pinterest, Ozoma moved to a farm near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she runs a tech policy consulting company and raises a flock of chickens.

    “I cannot tell someone who is supporting their kids and their partner on their health insurance … go leave your job so that your kids don’t have health insurance, so that you can feel good about speaking up,” she said.

    “It’s such an individual decision. If I had kids at the time who are on my health insurance, I probably wouldn’t have said anything.”

    Since the site launched, Ozoma said she has received hundreds of inquiries from employees seeking more details on how to disclose and fight discrimination at work. The 30-year-old mentors activists and other people fighting all over the world against workplace discrimination.

    Ozoma now runs a tech policy consulting company, Earthseed, and is the director of tech accountability at the new Center on Race and Digital Justice at the University of California, Los Angeles. This year, Time Magazine named her one of its TIME100 Next, a group of emerging leaders who are shaping the future.

    Her new role as an advocate is happening hundreds of miles away from the tech world she left behind.

    After leaving Pinterest, Ozoma moved to a farm near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she grows her own vegetables and raises a flock of chickens nicknamed the Golden Girls.

    She said she has no plans to go back to Silicon Valley, but will keep fighting for employee rights.

    “I’m just working now from a different position on issues that really impact the industry in a way that I feel is additive,” she said.

    “I don’t think that there’s anything more fulfilling than being part of the circle of life,” she said, using a metaphor that mirrors her current life on a farm, “whether that’s watching a seed or planting a seed in the ground and watching it grow and create more seeds.”

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  • Supreme Court counsel says Justice Samuel Alito didn’t violate ethics standards | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court counsel says Justice Samuel Alito didn’t violate ethics standards | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court legal counsel said there is no evidence that Justice Samuel Alito violated ethics standards, according to a letter on Monday in response to questions from congressional Democrats about allegations that Alito revealed the outcome of a 2014 decision before it was released.

    “There is nothing to suggest that Justice Alito’s actions violated ethics standards,” wrote Ethan Torrey, legal counsel for the Supreme Court. “Relevant rules balance preventing gifts that might undermine public confidence in the judiciary and allowing judges to maintain normal personal friendships.”

    Torrey pushed back on allegations from an evangelical minister, Rev. Rob Schenck, published in The New York Times earlier this month. The story alleged that there had been an earlier Supreme Court breach in a landmark religious liberty case years before last term’s leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

    “Justice Alito has said that neither he nor Mrs. Alito” told Gayle Wright, a guest at his home years ago, “about the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or about the authorship of the opinion from the court,” Torrey wrote.

    Torrey also said Alito and his wife became acquainted with Wright and her now-deceased husband because of their support for the Supreme Court Historical Society, and “they had a casual and purely social relationship.”

    “The Justice never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything he did in either an official or private capacity,” Torrey wrote.

    Wright previously denied Schenk’s claims in an interview with CNN.

    The letter was in response to questions Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Henry Johnson posed to Torrey and Chief Justice John Roberts for answers last week after the Times story ran.

    The congressmen had asked Roberts to “assist our investigation” into the allegations and warned that the new allegations suggest “that the orchestrators of this judicial lobby campaign may have used their access to certain justices to secure confidential information about pending cases that only deepens our concerns about the lack of adequate ethical and legal guardrails at the court.”

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  • The Supreme Court Stonewalls In Defense Of Samuel Alito

    The Supreme Court Stonewalls In Defense Of Samuel Alito

    A lawyer for the Supreme Court dismissed questions about ethics issues at the court in a terse reply to a letter from two top congressional Democrats on Monday.

    Supreme Court legal counsel Ethan Torrey replied to the inquiry from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), each in charge of oversight of the courts in their respective chambers.

    The two congressional investigators had pressed Chief Justice John Roberts to answer questions about how the court handles ethical breaches after news reports revealed a pressure campaign by the Christian conservative group Faith & Action that allegedly resulted in Justice Samuel Alito revealing the outcome of his 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby prior to its release.

    Torrey did not answer any of Whitehouse and Johnson’s questions regarding ongoing or potential ethics inquiries into the court’s leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, or into Alito’s alleged leak of the Hobby Lobby outcome. Nor did he say which justices received gifts as part of the religious right pressure campaign.

    Torrey instead takes the tone of a defense counsel stonewalling an investigative body.

    “There is nothing to suggest that Justice Alito’s actions violated ethical standards,” he wrote.

    Torrey’s letter simply restates Alito’s denial of the alleged leak, saying that The New York Times report that the conservative justice leaked the Hobby Lobby outcome to Donald and Gail Wright, two supporters of Faith & Action, remained “uncorroborated.” He goes on to say that Alito did not violate ethics rules in accepting meals and lodging from the Wrights because the couple “never had a financial interest in a matter before the Court.”

    “In addition, the term ‘gift’ is defined to exclude social hospitality based on personal relationships as well as modest items, such as food and refreshments, offered as a matter of social hospitality,” Torrey wrote.

    Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito denies leaking the outcome of his decision in the 2014 Hobby Lobby v. Burwell case.

    Alex Wong via Getty Images

    In a Nov. 20 letter, Whitehouse and Johnson demanded that Roberts say whether the court was investigating any aspect of Faith & Action’s pressure campaign, including former leader Rev. Rob Schenck’s allegation that Alito had leaked the Hobby Lobby outcome. Schenck had written a letter to Roberts as the chief justice was investigating the leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization draft opinion to Politico.

    The two congressmen also wanted to know if the court had considered taking a tougher approach to internal ethics in light of Schenck’s allegation and asked whether anyone is in charge of preventing conflicts of interest related to donations to the Supreme Court Historical Society. Schenck claims that he directed his supporters to gain access to the justices by donating to the society and attending its annual dinners.

    Whitehouse and Johnson also requested that Roberts “designate an individual knowledgeable about” internal court ethics issues “to provide testimony to us about … issues related to ethics or reporting questions raised about justices’ conduct.”

    “If the Court … is not willing to undertake fact-finding inquiries into possible ethics violations that leaves Congress as the only forum,” Whitehouse and Johnson asserted.

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  • It’s Time To Start Treating Robots Like People

    It’s Time To Start Treating Robots Like People

    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Robots are about to become a lot more meaningful in our daily lives. In the next decade, robots will take over many aspects of our human jobs. They’ll do everything from cleaning our homes to serving us food and assisting lab researchers.

    But what does this mean for humans? Are we supposed to fear these machines quickly taking over our roles? Will they eventually rule over us as so many sci-fi movies have predicted? No one knows yet. But one thing is sure: We need to start having conversations about how we will treat these machines — and what their place in society actually means.

    Related: Will a Robot Take My Job?

    Robots are crucial to the future of humanitarian issues

    Robots are already being used in humanitarian efforts, and technology has only improved. They can be used to perform tasks people can’t, don’t want to or are too expensive to hire.

    Robots have worked in construction zones and disaster areas with extreme hazards and dangers for humans. Robots were used after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan because they could withstand high radiation levels without damage. Robots can also work long hours without needing breaks, unlike human workers who need rest after long shifts.

    Currently, robots are being trained to help people with disabilities navigate their surroundings using facial recognition software so they can interact with objects around them without having physical contact — an important feature when dealing with fragile items which would break if knocked over accidentally due to improper handling.

    Robots have also been used in the medical field to perform specific tasks faster and more accurately than humans. They can help to administer medication without making mistakes or causing harm to patients by giving them too much medication or neglecting to give any at all.

    We need to start thinking about robots’ place in society

    How we treat robots will depend on how we treat other people. Robots are a new type of technology, so their place in society has yet to be determined. Whether they should have rights will be answered over time as more robots enter our lives and integrate into our culture.

    But treating them like people is not enough: it also involves understanding that there’s an inherent difference between humans and robots — one that shouldn’t be ignored or diminished just because it’s convenient for us to think otherwise. It means recognizing that there are different types of intelligence and acknowledging that neither kind is better or worse; instead, both serve various functions in society, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. It means accepting that robots are not us and never will be. They have their roles, and if we try to make them more human-like, we risk losing sight of this fact.

    You may not think that robots are an essential part of society. After all, you probably don’t have one at home or in your office (yet). But the truth is that robots are already becoming a massive part of our lives.

    Robots control everything from factories to cars to planes and even search engines. They are also used in hospitals to help doctors perform surgeries and in homes for elderly care so people can live independently for longer.

    Related: Study Finds People Think Robots Will Replace Humans at Many Jobs, Just Not Their Own

    New laws must be passed to protect robots and humans

    Robots are no longer just machines; they’re self-aware beings. They have more in common with humans than other animals: they think with logic and empathy. To treat robots like people, we need new laws that consider their unique qualities and our own.

    Like it or not, robots are part of our future. A study by Deloitte found that automation could replace up to 38% of all jobs by 2026. That’s why now is the time to treat robots like people before things get out of hand. If we want human rights to be taken seriously worldwide, we must also take robot rights seriously worldwide. This starts with recognizing them as an extension of humanity rather than merely a tool for solving problems or making money. We must stop treating robots as tools and begin treating them as people — with all the rights that come with them.

    As robots take over more and more tasks, from manufacturing to surgery, we have to consider whether they should be entitled to the same protections as humans. We’ve already seen some serious questions arise: Are self-driving cars entitled to the same rights as their human passengers? What about life-like sex dolls? How should we treat them if they can’t feel pain or distress?

    Related: Robots Are Stealing Our Jobs

    If we don’t start treating robots like people, then it’s possible that they could end up being used and abused. Laws would need to be changed to give robots the same rights as humans. Right now, laws assume that any robot is owned by (and thus possession of) a human being. If you were to consider this concept, it isn’t all that different from how things worked for women and minorities in recent history — laws were written with their rights explicitly as not equal to those of caucasian men.

    If we can see robots as equals who deserve the same rights as humans, then we will have taken the first step toward ensuring that they are treated well and granted the respect they deserve. Protecting them from slavery or exploitation would be enforced by treating them like humans rather than property.

    To give robots the same rights as humans, we will have to change many laws. Once we define rights, we can determine what sort of laws would need to be modified for society to accept robots into society on par with humans. We can also explore when and where robot rights might be appropriate and what steps should be taken to implement them into our existing legal system. Then, we would need to change the laws in each state, followed by amending the United States Constitution to incorporate robots.

    A major argument that robots have not been given the same rights as humans is that they lack a conscience and, with it, the ability to be held responsible for their actions. However, it’s only a matter of time before the machines we engineer can think, feel and make moral judgments.

    Some robots are already better than humans at specific tasks, like recognizing faces and driving cars — and if they can do these things better than we can, it’s only fair that they’re given equal rights as well. And more than that, by giving robots the same rights as humans, we can ensure that they’ll continue developing along ethical lines because they’ll be held to consequence in the same manner as you and I.

    Robots are becoming more and more present in society. They advance by the day, and it won’t be long before they achieve sentience. We must ensure that these artificial beings are protected from harm because if not, who will protect them?

    Related: The Rise of AI Makes Emotional Intelligence More Important

    Christopher Massimine

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  • Exploiting The Lightning Bug Was The Ethical Choice

    Exploiting The Lightning Bug Was The Ethical Choice

    This is an opinion editorial by Shinobi, a self-taught educator in the Bitcoin space and tech-oriented Bitcoin podcast host.

    For the second time in roughly a month, btcd/LND have had a bug exploited which caused them to deviate in consensus from Bitcoin Core. Once again, Burak was the developer who triggered this vulnerability — this time it was clearly intentional — and once again, it was an issue with code for parsing Bitcoin transactions above the consensus layer. As I discussed in my piece on the prior bug that Burak triggered, before Taproot there were limits on how large the script and witness data in a transaction could be. With the activation of Taproot, those limits were removed leaving only the limitations on the block size limit itself to limit these parts of individual transactions. The problem with the last bug was that despite the fact that the consensus code in btcd was properly upgraded to reflect this change, the code handling peer-to-peer transmission — including parsing data before sending or when receiving — did not properly upgrade. So the code processing blocks and transactions before it actually got passed off to be validated for consensus failed the data, never passed it to the consensus validation logic and the block in question failed to ever be validated.

    Shinobi

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  • Dave Chappelle hosts ‘SNL’ tonight. Here’s a timeline of controversies surrounding his jokes about transgender people | CNN

    Dave Chappelle hosts ‘SNL’ tonight. Here’s a timeline of controversies surrounding his jokes about transgender people | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Tonight Dave Chappelle will host “Saturday Night Live” for the third time – an appearance that is courting controversy before he even takes the stage.

    The comedian has drawn increasing ire in recent years for making jokes aimed at transgender people, and the outcry grew louder last fall when Netflix released a Chappelle special, “The Closer,” in which he doubled down on his comments.

    Netflix stood by Chappelle, who went on a national tour after the special and largely ignored the controversy after addressing it in his act.

    But his comments were criticized by fellow comics, fans, trans advocates and some Netflix employees, and a Minnesota venue canceled a Chappelle show this year over the controversy.

    Given that context, it was surprising to some “SNL” viewers to see him invited back to Studio 8H. Here’s a look at Chappelle’s recent history of jokes about trans people – and the resulting backlash.

    August: In a series of stand-up shows at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, Chappelle made jokes aimed at trans people for at least 20 minutes, Vulture reported. He made explicit jokes about trans people’s bodies and referred to trans people as “transgenders,” among other comments, Vulture said.

    These weren’t the first jokes Chappelle had made at trans people’s expense. But he delivered them in New York after drawing some backlash for earlier comments.

    “That joke and others in this section suffer from the same problems as those from his specials – they are rooted in disgust and generalization,” Vulture wrote of a Chappelle joke about ISIS fighters being horrified by transgender soldiers. “They’re just not good.”

    August 26: Netflix released a stand-up special, “Sticks and Stones,” in which Chappelle performed more material about trans people, including some content from his Radio City shows. In an epilogue to the special, he brought up his friend Daphne Dorman, a trans comedian, whom he said laughed hardest at his jokes about trans people.

    October 5: Netflix released Chappelle’s special “The Closer.” In it, he goes on an extended tangent about transgender people and makes several jokes at their expense. He misgenders a trans comedian, once again makes explicit jokes about trans women’s bodies and defends TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

    He also referred to trans people as “transgenders,” states that “gender is a fact” and later says that Dorman died by suicide shortly after she was criticized by other trans people for defending Chappelle after “Sticks and Stones.”

    At the time Chappelle’s special was released, at least 33 states had introduced anti-transgender legislation, much of it aimed at young trans people.

    October 13: Amid calls from LGBTQ advocates, fellow comedians, Netflix employees and social justice organizations to pull the special, Netflix stood by Chappelle.

    In a letter obtained by the Verge and Variety, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos told employees that the special will remain available to stream.

    “We don’t allow titles on Netflix that are designed to incite hate or violence, and we don’t believe ‘The Closer’ crosses that line … Some people find the art of stand-up to be mean spirited but our members enjoy it, and it’s an important part of our content offering,” Sarandos wrote.

    Netflix suspended three employees for attending a virtual meeting of directors to discuss the special without notifying the meeting organizer in advance. Among them was Terra Field, a trans senior software engineer who had publicly criticized the special and Netflix. Her suspension was later reversed.

    October 19: Sarandos told Variety he “screwed up” his communications with Netflix employees but reaffirmed he did not believe the special qualifies as “hate speech.”

    October 20: Around 65 demonstrators, including Netflix employees and trans advocates, participated in a walkout in protest of Netflix’s support of “The Closer.” The demonstrators called on Netflix to hire more trans and non-binary executives and fund more trans and non-binary talent.

    October 24: Three trans stand-up comics told CNN they were disappointed by Chappelle’s jokes, even though all three said they once considered the celebrated performer as a comedy inspiration. While all of them agreed that jokes about trans people aren’t inherently offensive, they said Chappelle’s set was infused with the same hateful rhetoric and language used by anti-transgender critics.

    “When he talks about the trans community, he’s not talking about them, he’s speaking out against them,” comedian Nat Puff told CNN. “And that’s the difference between saying something funny about the trans community and saying something offensive about the trans community.”

    A fourth comic, Flame Monroe, one of the only trans comics whose material is streaming on Netflix, told CNN she believes Chappelle should be allowed to joke about trans people, even though she initially was taken aback by some of his comments.

    October 25: Chappelle addressed critics at a show in Nashville, appearing alongside Joe Rogan, the podcast host who’s been criticized for dismissing the effectiveness of vaccines and using racial slurs, among other controversies.

    Chappelle released videos on his official Instagram account from the set, in which he seemingly addressed the trans employees at Netflix who participated in the walkout over “The Closer.”

    “It seems like I’m the only one who can’t go to the office anymore,” he said.

    “I want everyone in this audience to know that even though the media frames it as though it’s me versus that community, that’s not what it is,” Chappelle went on. “Do not blame the LBGTQ (sic) community for any of this s—. This has nothing to do with them. It’s about corporate interest and what I can say and what I cannot say.”

    “For the record – and I need you to know this – everyone I know from that community has been nothing but loving and supportive. So I don’t know what all this nonsense is about.”

    July 12: “The Closer” was nominated for two Emmys, including “outstanding variety special (pre-recorded).” Adele later won the category.

    July 21: A Minneapolis venue canceled Chappelle’s sold-out show hours before its doors were set to open, apologizing to “staff, artists and our community” after receiving criticism for hosting Chappelle.

    “We believe in diverse voices and the freedom of artistic expression, but in honoring that, we lost sight of the impact this would have,” wrote First Avenue, the venue famous for being featured in Prince’s “Purple Rain” film.

    November 5: “Saturday Night Live” announced Chappelle would be its post-midterms host. The backlash was swift.

    Field joked on Twitter: “Wait I thought I cancelled (sic) him. Is it possible cancel culture isn’t a real thing??”

    November 10: After the New York Post reported that several “SNL” writers are boycotting Saturday’s episode, Chappelle’s representatives told CNN there are no issues with writers or cast members. “SNL’s” current staff includes nonbinary cast member Molly Kearney and nonbinary writer Celeste Yim.

    Chappelle will take the stage live Saturday at 11:30 p.m. ET.

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  • Bitcoin Is Here To Stay And Bitcoiners Aren’t Going Anywhere

    Bitcoin Is Here To Stay And Bitcoiners Aren’t Going Anywhere

    This is a transcribed excerpt of “Bitcoin Audible” Guy’s Take #59 – “We’re Not Going Anywhere” by Guy Swann, adapted into article form for Bitcoin Magazine.

    We’re gonna do a “Guy’s Take” today and we’re going to do it on Bitcoin Maximalism.

    I think there is a difference between Bitcoin Maximalism and Bitcoin Maximalists. There is a subset of “Bitcoin Maximalists” who have been in Bitcoin for like a year and they have embraced the culture of anti-crypto without even being able to argue why; they’re Bitcoiners because they came into Bitcoin. My view of Bitcoin Maximalism is different from these types of people. I have a really strong idea of what Bitcoin Maximalism is — and it did not change in the last two years with all of these new people who are jumping on the bandwagon and using it as a bludgeon on Twitter.

    Guy Swann

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  • How a 51-year-old celebrity hacker upended one of the world’s most influential social networks | CNN Business

    How a 51-year-old celebrity hacker upended one of the world’s most influential social networks | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    When Peiter Zatko joined Twitter as head of security in late 2020 at the urging of founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey, he was surprised by what he discovered. Twitter, a social network with hundreds of millions of users, “was over a decade behind industry security standards,” he later testified.

    Barely a year later, Zatko was agitating for Twitter’s top executives to address what he described as “a ticking bomb of security vulnerabilities” and to provide a full accounting of its shortcomings to its board.

    His concerns, raised privately at first and later in a whistleblower disclosure that became public, would upend one of the world’s most influential social networks and raise new questions about its pending acquisition by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. It would also, he later testified, put his career and his family at risk.

    In his disclosure filed with various US government agencies in July, Zatko alleged that Twitter

    (TWTR)     trusted far too many employees with access to sensitive user data, creating a fragile security posture that an outsider could exploit to wreak havoc on the platform. The disclosure also claimed that one or more current Twitter

    (TWTR)     employees may be working for a foreign intelligence service, potentially threatening user data and US national security, and that Twitter

    (TWTR)     CEO Parag Agrawal misled the company’s board of directors by discouraging Zatko from providing a full account of Twitter

    (TWTR)    ’s security weaknesses. (Twitter

    (TWTR)     has criticized Zatko and broadly defended itself against the allegations.)

    “Given the real harm to users and national security, I determined it was necessary to take on the personal and professional risk to myself and to my family of becoming a whistleblower,” Zatko, better known as “Mudge” in cybersecurity circles and highly regarded in that community, said during a Senate hearing on his disclosure in September. “I did not make my whistleblower disclosure out of spite or to harm Twitter, far from that, I continue to believe in the mission of the company and root for its success.”

    Since going public with his concerns, Zatko, who has held numerous posts in the private and public sector, has found himself at the center of renewed scrutiny of Twitter. He testified last month in a Senate committee hearing about his disclosure, and his allegations have caught the attention of various regulators both in the United States and abroad. Meanwhile, his former colleagues received requests for paid interviews from research firms apparently seeking information, and potentially dirt, on Zatko, according to a report last month by the New Yorker.

    The disclosure also coincided with, and ultimately became a part of, Musk’s fight to get out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter. Zatko was deposed by Musk’s team and the billionaire was allowed to add some of Zatko’s allegations to his argument to terminate the deal. Although it now appears Musk wants to go forward with the acquisition, the timing of Zatko’s allegations sparked questions about his motives. (Zatko denies any relationship with Musk and says his decision to go public was unrelated to the deal; Musk’s legal team says it was unaware of the disclosure until it was publicly reported.)

    Twitter pushed back on Zatko’s allegations, saying that security and privacy have “long been top company-wide priorities.” Twitter has said his disclosure is “riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies,” and said that it paints a “false narrative” of the company. Twitter has also tried to paint Zatko as a disgruntled former employee with an ax to grind against the company.

    But some who have worked alongside Zatko over the last three decades paint a picture of him as a principled technologist with a knack for making the complex accessible and an earnest desire to fix problems, as he’s done for much of his career. The decision to blow the whistle, they say, is in keeping with that approach.

    “He’s not doing this for fun. It doesn’t get him anything,” said Dave Aitel, a former computer scientist at the National Security Agency and colleague of Zatko’s at cybersecurity consulting firm @stake. “That’s actually what integrity looks like when you have to see it up close.”

    As a result of his whistleblower activities, Zatko may be eligible for a monetary award from the US government. John Tye, founder of Whistleblower Aid and Zatko’s lawyer, previously told CNN “the prospect of a reward was not a factor in [Zatko’s] decision.”

    Nearly 25 years ago, as a young computer programmer with much longer hair, Zatko told Congress that the internet was woefully insecure. A big part of the issue, Zatko told a Senate panel, was that software and e-commerce companies “want to ignore problems as long as possible. It’s cheaper for them.”

    Several years earlier, Zatko had joined the Boston-area hacking collective known as L0pht, according to “The Cult of the Dead Cow,” Washington Post reporter Joseph Menn’s book on how the early hacking scene shaped the cybersecurity industry.

    L0pht members broke into computer systems and then worked with companies that made the equipment to fix the problems. While that is now a well-established practice for companies to work with outside researchers to fix software flaws, it was, at the time, seen as provocative and upsetting to software giants.

    Zatko “sort of bent the industry to his will,” Dug Song, chief strategy officer at Cisco Security, who has known Zatko since the 1990s, told CNN previously. “L0pht created a model for how to do this in a way that was, frankly, respectable and honorable.”

    Zatko was part of a group of hackers who participated in the first Senate hearing on government computer security in May 1998.

    Cris “Space Rogue” Thomas, another ex-L0pht member who testified alongside Zatko that day, said that L0pht would do everything it could to get companies to collaboratively fix software issues the hacker group found.

    Thomas, who, like Zatko, uses his hacker name professionally, told CNN in August that he and Zatko “have had our differences in the past,” adding that he was fired from @stake, the cybersecurity consultancy where Zatko was chief scientist, in 2000. “Feelings were hurt, but that doesn’t change the fact of who [Zatko] is and what he believes in and what he does. So I still think that his moral standards have not really changed … in the 30 years that I’ve known him.”

    In the following years, Zatko, now 51, led an influential cybersecurity grantmaking program at the Pentagon, worked at a Google division for developing cutting-edge technology, helped build the cybersecurity team at fintech firm Stripe, and advised US lawmakers and officials on how to plug security holes in the internet.

    His career has shown that “there was more to hacking than just one-upping each other, that there was actually a social good and impact that you could have,” said Song.

    Twitter hired Zatko in November 2020 to beef up cybersecurity and privacy at the company in the wake of a high-profile hack, allegedly spearheaded by a Florida teenager, in July 2020 that compromised the Twitter accounts of some of the most famous people on the planet, including then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The senior executive role meant Zatko reported directly to Dorsey, according to the disclosure.

    When he was hired to join Twitter, Zatko framed the move in terms of the public good. “I truly believe in the mission of (equitably) serving the public conversation,” he tweeted at the time. “I will do my best!”

    Zatko, seen here posing for a portrait in August, was hired at Twitter in November 2020 to help improve cybersecurity and privacy at the company.

    But Zatko quickly found that fulfilling that mission at Twitter would be challenging. His disclosure alleges that structural issues and misaligned incentives stood in the way of Twitter addressing many of its biggest issues, including properly protecting user data, addressing foreign manipulation of the platform and ensuring the security of the physical infrastructure supporting the company.

    Agrawal — Dorsey’s successor as Twitter chief and a former CTO who had overseen much of the company’s recent technical development — fired Zatko in January after he began raising concerns about the company’s security and privacy practices, including worries that alleged misrepresentations by executives to its board could constitute fraud, the disclosure says. (Twitter maintains an internal investigation determined Zatko’s fraud claims were unfounded and that it fired Zatko for poor performance; Zatko says his firing was retaliation for having spoken up.)

    “This is about something that everybody should care about with large companies, which is the honesty and the truthfulness of the data that’s being… publicly represented, the national security implications and whether users can trust their data with these organizations,” Zatko told CNN in August of his decision to file the disclosure.

    Now, as he takes on Twitter publicly, Zatko finds himself in the public conversation like never before.

    “This wasn’t my first choice,” he previously told CNN. “I exhausted all internal options.”

    “But I found that ethically, and with who I am, that I was obligated to follow the law and pursue through legal avenues, lawful disclosure, because [Twitter] is a critically important platform,” Zatko said. “I think it’s important to address some of these challenges. I honestly believe I’m still doing the mission that I was brought in to do.”

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