ReportWire

Tag: roberts

  • Former Iowa Superintendent To Plead Guilty For Citizenship Fraud

    [ad_1]

    DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The former superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district is expected to plead guilty Thursday in federal court to charges that he falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen and illegally possessed firearms, a plea agreement shows.

    Ian Roberts had a two-decade long career as an educator and school administrator in districts across the U.S. before becoming superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools, a district of 30,000 kids where he was beloved for his charismatic and exuberant leadership style.

    Just weeks into the school year, Roberts’ Sep. 26 arrest in a targeted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation stunned community members and attracted national attention.

    A native of Guyana in South America, Roberts initially pleaded not guilty to the two charges, which together carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Roberts is expected to plead guilty to both charges, according to a plea agreement signed by Roberts and released Wednesday.

    The plea agreement also indicates that Roberts is aware he could face deportation after he serves his sentence.

    Roberts was pulled over in his school-issued Jeep Cherokee and allegedly fled from federal agents, who found the car abandoned near a wooded area and located Roberts with the help of state troopers. Authorities said they found a loaded handgun wrapped in a towel under the seat and $3,000 in cash in the car.

    A federal grand jury in October returned a two-count indictment. According to the agreement, Roberts made a “false attestation” on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Employment Eligibility Verification form, known as an I-9, that he submitted in Des Moines, claiming he was a U.S. citizen even though authorities say he knew he lacked authorization. That carries a punishment of up to five years in prison and a fine.

    Roberts completed the I-9 form when he was hired in 2023 and submitted a Social Security card and driver’s license as verifying documents, according to the district. He also stated he was a U.S. citizen in his application to the state board of educational examiners, which issued Roberts a professional administrator license in 2023.

    Federal officials said Roberts first entered the U.S. in 1994 on a nonimmigrant visa. They said he returned in 1999 on an F-1 student visa, which was set to expire in March 2004. He was denied a green card application in 2003, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

    His next listed interaction with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was in 2018, when he ultimately obtained work authorization. Authorities said his second application for work authorization was approved, expiring in December 2020, and that he has not had work authorization since then.

    Roberts was subject to a notice to appear before an immigration judge in October 2020 and a final removal order in 2024, authorities said. District officials said they were not aware of the immigration issues.

    Alfredo Parrish, one of Roberts’ attorneys, has said his client was under the impression from a prior attorney that his immigration case was “resolved successfully.”

    Parrish did not return phone and email messages Wednesday about the change-of-plea hearing.

    Roberts also faces a federal weapons charge, punishable by up to 15 years in prison and a fine. The indictment describes two pistols, a rifle and a shotgun found in Roberts’ possession. In addition to the one in his vehicle when he was arrested, three firearms were found during a search of Roberts’ home, authorities said.

    Roberts will agree to forfeit the weapons, according to the agreement.

    The hearing was scheduled after Roberts’ lawyers said in a court filing that they had been negotiating with federal prosecutors to reach a resolution ahead of a Jan. 28 deadline. As part of Roberts’ plea agreement, federal prosecutors said they would recommend some leniency but that the sentence is ultimately up to the judge.

    Roberts waived his right to be present at his arraignment in October, when he pleaded not guilty. A trial had been scheduled to begin in early March.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Tariffs and birthright citizenship will test whether Trump’s power has limits

    [ad_1]

    WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices like to talk about the Constitution’s separation of powers and how it limits the exercise of official authority.

    But Chief Justice John G. Roberts and his conservative colleagues have given no sign so far they will check President Trump’s one-man governance by executive order.

    To the contrary, the conservative justices have repeatedly ruled for Trump on fast-track appeals and overturned federal judges who said the president had exceeded his authority.

    The court’s new term opens on Monday, and the justices will begin hearing arguments.

    But those regularly scheduled cases have been overshadowed by Trump’s relentless drive to remake the government, to punish his political enemies, including universities, law firms, TV networks and prominent Democrats, and to send troops to patrol U.S. cities.

    The overriding question has become: Are there any legal limits on the president’s power? The Supreme Court itself has raised the doubts.

    A year ago, as Trump ran to reclaim the White House, the justices blocked a felony criminal indictment against him related to his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the Capitol as Congress met to certify Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, for which Trump was impeached.

    Led by Roberts, the court ruled for Trump and declared for the first time that presidents were immune from being prosecuted for their official actions in the White House.

    Not surprisingly, Trump saw this as a “BIG WIN” and proof there is no legal check on his power.

    This year, Trump’s lawyers have confidently gone to Supreme Court with emergency appeals when lower-court judges have stood in their way. With few exceptions, they have won, often over dissents from the court’s three liberal Democrats.

    Many court scholars say they are disappointed but not surprised by the court’s response so far to Trump’s aggressive use of executive power.

    The Supreme Court “has been a rubber stamp approving Trump’s actions,” said UC Berkeley law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “I hope very much that the court will be a check on Trump. There isn’t any other. But so far, it has not played that role.”

    Roberts “had been seen as a Republican but not a Trump Republican. But he doesn’t seem interested or willing to put any limits on him,” said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler. “Maybe they think they’re saving their credibility for when it really counts.”

    Acting on his own, Trump moved quickly to reshape the federal government. He ordered cuts in spending and staffing at federal agencies and fired inspectors general and officials of independent agencies who had fixed terms set by Congress. He stepped up arrests and deportations of immigrants who are here illegally.

    But the court’s decisions on those fronts are in keeping with the long-standing views of the conservatives on the bench.

    Long before Trump ran for office, Roberts had argued that the Constitution gives the president broad executive authority to control federal agencies, including the power to fire officials who disagree with him.

    The court’s conservatives also think the president has the authority to enforce — or not enforce — immigration laws.

    That’s also why many legal experts think the year ahead will provide a better test of the Supreme Court and Trump’s challenge to the constitutional order.

    “Overall, my reaction is that it’s too soon to tell,” said William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor and a former clerk for Roberts. “In the next year, we will likely see decisions about tariffs, birthright citizenship, alien enemies and perhaps more, and we’ll know a lot more.”

    In early September, Trump administration lawyers rushed the tariffs case to the Supreme Court because they believed it was better to lose sooner rather than later.

    Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the government could face up to a $1-trillion problem if the court delayed a decision until next summer and then ruled the tariffs were illegal.

    “Unwinding them could cause significant disruption,” he told the court.

    The Constitution says tariffs, taxes and raising revenue are matters for Congress to decide. Through most of American history, tariffs funded much of the federal government. That began to change after 1913 when the 16th Amendment was adopted to authorize “taxes on incomes.”

    Trump has said he would like to return to an earlier era when import taxes funded the government.

    “I always say ‘tariffs’ is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” he said at a rally after his inauguration in January. “Because tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”

    While he could have gone to the Republican-controlled Congress to get approval, he imposed several rounds of large and worldwide tariffs acting on his own.

    Several small businesses sued and described the tariffs as “the largest peacetime tax increase in American history.”

    As for legal justification, the president’s lawyers pointed to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. It authorizes the president to “deal with any unusual or extraordinary threat … to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.”

    The law did not mention tariffs, taxes or duties but said the president could “regulate” the “importation” of products.

    Trump administration lawyers argue that the “power to ‘regulate importation’ plainly encompasses the power to impose tariffs.” They also say the court should defer to the president because tariffs involve foreign affairs and national security.

    They said the president invoked the tariffs not to raise revenue but to “rectify America’s country-killing trade deficits and to stem the flood of fentanyl and other lethal drugs across our borders.”

    In response to lawsuits from small businesses and several states, judges who handle international trade cases ruled the tariffs were illegal. However, they agreed to keep them in place to allow for appeals.

    Their opinion relied in part on recent Supreme Court’s decisions which struck down potentially far-reaching regulations from Democratic presidents on climate change, student loan debt and COVID-19 vaccine requirements. In each of the decisions, Roberts said Congress had not clearly authorized the disputed regulations.

    Citing that principle, the federal circuit court said it “seems unlikely that Congress intended to … grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.”

    Trump said that decision, if allowed to stand, “could literally destroy the United States of America.” The court agreed to hear arguments in the tariffs case on Nov. 5.

    A victory for Trump would be “viewed as a dramatic expansion of presidential power,” said Washington attorney Stephanie Connor, who works on tariff cases. Trump and future presidents could sidestep Congress to impose tariffs simply by citing an emergency, she said.

    But the decision itself may have a limited impact because the administration has announced new tariffs last week that were based on other national security laws.

    Last month, Trump administration lawyers asked the Supreme Court to rule during the upcoming term on the birthright citizenship promised by the 14th Amendment of 1868.

    They did not seek a fast-track ruling, however. Instead, they said the court should grant review and hear arguments on the regular schedule early next year. If so, a decision would be handed down by late June.

    The amendment says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.”

    And in the past, both Congress and the Supreme Court have agreed that rule applies broadly to all children who are born here, except if their parents are foreign ambassadors or diplomats who are not subject to U.S. laws.

    But Trump Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said that interpretation is mistaken. He said the post-Civil War amendment was “adopted to grant citizenship to freed slaves and their children, not to the children of illegal aliens, birth tourists and temporary visitors.”

    Judges in three regions of the country have rejected Trump’s limits on the citizenship rule and blocked it from taking effect nationwide while the litigation continues.

    [ad_2]

    David G. Savage

    Source link

  • Project 2025, GOP platform blast California, teeing up critiques of Biden stand-ins

    Project 2025, GOP platform blast California, teeing up critiques of Biden stand-ins

    [ad_1]

    At the start of Project 2025’s conservative playbook for a second Trump presidency, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts took aim at leaders who he said wield power to “serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second.”

    He mentioned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un comfortably ruling over an impoverished nation, “billionaire climate activists” flying on private jets while criticizing carbon-emitting cars, and two “COVID-19 shutdown politicians” in California who were seen out and about — at a hair salon and a fancy restaurant — while calling on their constituents to stay home.

    Name-dropping U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Gavin Newsom in the conservative right’s blueprint for the White House was a way for Roberts to tie them, and California, to the idea that out-of-touch coastal elites are ruining the country.

    That notion — well worn in American politics — appears throughout the Project 2025 plan, a wonky, 900-plus-page manifesto released last year by conservative thought leaders and Trump acolytes.

    The idea is also evoked more subtly in the much snappier, 16-page Republican Party platform spearheaded by Trump and adopted by party officials last week, which criticizes American politicians who “insulated themselves from criticism and the consequences of their own bad actions” while average Americans suffered.

    Roberts and other Heritage Foundation officials were not available for comment. A Heritage Foundation spokesperson said Project 2025 is a product of more than 100 conservative organizations and “does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”

    According to political experts, the conservative strategy of criticizing “woke” liberal ideas, many of which got traction in California, has become particularly useful in the current election cycle, as Trump’s base has proved especially receptive to conservative virtue signaling on issues such as abortion, climate change, guns, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights.

    That strategy will only grow, the experts said, if President Biden comes off the Democratic ticket and is replaced with a California politician such as Newsom or Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator.

    “This is a vital angle to be hitting,” said Jon Michaels, a constitutional law professor at UCLA with a forthcoming book on right-wing authoritarianism. “California becomes a convenient foil, and the excesses of California are what Republicans can run against.”

    Issues at play

    Conservatives have long cast California — sometimes fairly, other times not — as a failing state crumbling under the weight of out-of-control regulation, crime and homelessness, and the 2024 race has intensified those lines of attack.

    “Instances of California really going in a different direction from what the Republican Party wants is all over the [Project 2025] report — everything from diversity, equity and inclusion, to connections to China, to high tech [companies] to homelessness,” said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at Stanford University. The aim is to portray a state in disorder, an “undemocratic, patronizing state controlled by the high-tech elites completely out of touch with where the rest of America is.”

    Both Project 2025 and the GOP platform envision a second Trump presidency where federal bureaucrats use the powers of the executive branch to beat back an array of California policies — including protections for undocumented immigrants, the environment, unionized workers, those seeking abortions and transgender youth.

    In its phrasing, the GOP platform is at times bombastic — just like Trump, who helped draft it — and lays out a relatively clear framework for how he intends to govern in sharp contrast to California leaders.

    “California becomes a convenient foil, and the excesses of California are what Republicans can run against.”

    — Jon Michaels, constitutional law professor at UCLA

    For example, Los Angeles and other major California cities decline to use their police forces or city personnel to enforce immigration laws. Trump’s platform promises to “cut federal funding” to such jurisdictions.

    California is in the process of reining in oil drilling in the state, with leaders raising concerns about the environmental and health impacts. The platform calls on the nation to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”

    California requires LGBTQ+-inclusive curricula in schools and the Democrat-controlled state Legislature just passed a law barring school officials from informing parents of kids who identify as transgender at school if the kids don’t want that information shared. The platform says Republicans support “parental rights” and will “defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children” or push “radical gender ideology.”

    The Project 2025 plan is even more ardent in its rebuke of California policies.

    Roberts, in his foreword of Project 2025, speaks much of American liberty, but defines it squarely within a Christian nationalist framework, saying the Constitution gives each American the liberty to “live as his Creator ordained” — to “do not what we want, but what we ought.”

    The plan calls on Trump, if elected, to “make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors” — a process that it says should start with deleting all references to queer identities, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” abortion or “reproductive health” from federal legislation and rules.

    Calling California and other liberal states “sanctuaries for abortion tourism,” the plan says the Trump administration should “push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America,” work with Congress to enact antiabortion laws, and mandate state reporting of abortion data to the federal government — including patients’ state of residence and “reason” for receiving a procedure.

    Critics say such actions would empower conservative states that ban abortions to identify and punish women who go to liberal states such as California to have those procedures.

    The party platform does not call for a national abortion ban, which rankled some on the right, but does back state policies restricting it and says Republicans “proudly stand for families and Life.”

    Both plans criticize the nation’s shift to electric vehicles, and Project 2025 says the federal government should rescind a waiver allowing California to set its own clean air standards around fuel economy, which underpins the state’s goal of shifting exclusively to zero-emissions vehicles by 2035.

    The fight ahead

    Although Project 2025 is authored in large part by prominent advisors and former appointees of Trump, he has recently sought to distance himself from the plan.

    In an online post July 5, Trump wrote that he knew “nothing about it,” but also that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” Even so, he wished those behind the plan “luck.”

    “This isn’t Alabama or Mississippi. You are taking on a very powerful state with a lot of resources — and a will to resist.”

    — Bruce Cain, political science professor at Stanford University

    Trump’s campaign referred questions about Project 2025 and the GOP platform, and their relation to California policies, to the Republican National Committee.

    Anna Kelly, a committee spokesperson, said the party platform “contains commonsense policies like cutting taxes, securing the border, ending absurd [electric vehicle] mandates, securing our elections, defending our constitutional rights, and keeping men out of women’s sports” — with the last being an apparent reference to transgender women.

    “If reporters find those principles contradictory to values pushed by California leaders,” Kelly wrote, “maybe it’s time for Democrats to evaluate how their state is run.”

    Democrats, including Biden, have repeatedly tied Trump to Project 2025, saying his claims of distance from it are absurd given how many people in his orbit are leading it. On Tuesday, Harris called out Project 2025 at a campaign event in Las Vegas, noting that it calls for the dissolution of the U.S. Department of Education, cuts to Social Security and a nationwide abortion ban.

    “If implemented, this plan would be the latest attack in Donald Trump’s full-on assault on reproductive freedom,” she said.

    Experts said that if Biden is replaced by Harris or Newsom — who are considered leading candidates amid a swirl of doubt about Biden’s age and ability to defeat Trump — conservative derision about California and its liberal policies will increase, and find a receptive audience in many parts of the country.

    A Times survey earlier this year found that 50% of U.S. adults believe California is in decline, with 48% of Republicans saying it is “not really American.”

    If Trump wins, California is expected to lead the liberal resistance to Trump’s agenda, just as it did during his first term, experts said. Such efforts will be hampered by California’s budget woes and the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, they said, but not undone completely.

    “California will fight back, and it has the means to fight back,” Cain said. “This isn’t Alabama or Mississippi. You are taking on a very powerful state with a lot of resources — and a will to resist.”

    [ad_2]

    Kevin Rector

    Source link

  • ‘The Pelican Brief’ | Denzel and Julia Roberts’s Legal Thriller

    ‘The Pelican Brief’ | Denzel and Julia Roberts’s Legal Thriller

    [ad_1]

    Filed under:

    Bill is joined by Chris, Sean, and Amanda to rewatch the 1993 American legal thriller starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington

    By

    Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey, and Amanda Dobbins




    [ad_2]

    Bill Simmons

    Source link

  • Court orders reporter to hand over jailhouse interview notes — a threat to free press, critics say

    Court orders reporter to hand over jailhouse interview notes — a threat to free press, critics say

    [ad_1]

    Ishani Desai was just doing her job. As a reporter on a murder case, she needed information she felt she could get from only one person: the man who was behind bars.

    “I went to the source,” said Desai, a former reporter for the Bakersfield Californian.

    She couldn’t have known at the time that the notes from her jailhouse interview would spur a court order that, legal experts say, could threaten freedom of the press in California.

    The suspect, Sebastian Parra, was in custody on suspicion of his alleged role in the Aug. 24, 2022, death of 43-year-old Benny Alcala Jr., a counselor for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

    Alcala was fatally shot at an electric vehicle charging station outside a Target store in Bakersfield. Witnesses reported seeing two men flee the area of the shooting. One was identified as Robert Pernell Roberts, who was arrested on suspicion of murder, and the second was Parra, who denied involvement in the shooting and, initially, was not arrested.

    Parra testified at Roberts’ preliminary hearing, as did law enforcement. Roberts’ attorney, Lexi Blythe of the Kern County Public Defender’s Office, pointed out inconsistencies between Parra’s testimony and that of law enforcement.

    Parra was subsequently indicted by a grand jury. Like Roberts, he has pleaded not guilty to murder.

    Blythe then filed a subpoena for Parra’s February jailhouse interview with Desai — which consisted solely of Desai’s handwritten notes — saying it was necessary for her defense of Roberts.

    The Californian challenged Blythe’s subpoena, citing the 1st Amendment as well as California’s shield law, a section of the state constitution that protects news organizations from being held in contempt of court for withholding sources and unpublished information, including interview notes.

    The Kern County Superior Court ruled the newspaper was in contempt of court and ordered the notes be turned over, as they were “reasonably necessary” for Roberts’ defense and his constitutional right to a fair trial.

    The Californian appealed the decision to the California 5th Circuit Court of Appeal, which upheld the lower court’s decision but reversed the contempt-of-court ruling.

    As a result, the Californian handed over the unpublished notes to the Kern County Public Defender’s Office on Nov. 15. The news outlet also published the notes online.

    Desai, now a reporter at the Sacramento Bee, said in an emailed statement to The Times that she had decided to interview Parra to answer a question she faced while covering the murder case.

    “No one would tell me why the man who was once the prosecution’s star witness now faced an egregious murder charge,” Desai, 25, said. “So, I went to the source.”

    Desai said, however, that there was nothing significant that she wrote down that day at the jail that wasn’t also included in her Feb. 26 story in the Californian.

    The Californian’s own story on the appellate decision states the newspaper will not pursue an appeal at the California Supreme Court because the case would be unlikely to be reviewed and because of the outsize expense. The news outlet cited legal expenditures “exceeding $100,000” in the case so far.

    The paper, however, does seek to make the ruling unpublished, a legal process that would make the opinion unusable in future cases. Though the opinion remains public record, unpublishing it would render the case unusable as a citation and limit the precedent it sets in similar cases for California news organizations.

    Even if the decision is unpublished, the ruling is viewed as a worrying setback by advocates of press freedom, who fear it could affect the ability of journalists to do their job in the Golden State.

    David Loy, the legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, worries this decision could be chilling for journalists reporting on criminal cases.

    “It, in effect, makes the bar lower than it should be to pierce the reporter’s shield,” said Loy, whose organization filed an amicus brief in the case. He called the appellate court decision disappointing.

    Although California’s shield law remains strong, he said the ruling makes it easier for attorneys to use the only exception under which journalists must turn over unpublished material: when a criminal defendant seeks such information. In such cases, the California Supreme Court has established a balancing test to weigh the rights of a reporter against those of the defendant.

    Loy said this test has for decades found that only in an “extraordinarily compelling situation” would a journalist have to turn over their notes, something he didn’t see in this case.

    “The function of the court is to balance the interests,” Loy said. “It seems like that balance has been somewhat skewed by this opinion.”

    Loy said he’s worried the ruling could make reporters and editors hesitate when considering whether to interview someone in jail or a witness to a crime — interviews that he called a cornerstone of good journalism.

    “If that cost and risk is too high, that’s going to be a deterrent to report that story in that way,” Loy said, noting the potential legal fees. “It’s going to make reporters, and, I assume, editors and publishers, risk-averse.”

    Another organization that filed an amicus brief in the case was the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Lisa Zycherman, the organization’s deputy legal director and policy counsel, said the chilling effect of the ruling would affect not just journalists but also potential sources.

    “Forcing a journalist to betray a promise of confidentiality could make sources think twice, or they might just not come forward,” Zycherman said. “That chills the free flow of information to the public, and it compromises the ability of journalists to do their jobs.”

    Christine Peterson, the Californian’s executive editor, said that since the legal battle over the notes began, she had already had a colleague walk away from an interview with an incarcerated source.

    “He decided that, for the kind of story it was, that it wasn’t critical,” Peterson said. “That’s not to say we won’t continue to interview criminal defendants who agree to it and are in custody, but I think it’s fair to say this gave him pause.”

    Desai, however, said her determination had only grown after the ruling.

    “Many reporters — including myself — wonder if our work and sources are safe,” she wrote in her statement to The Times. “But the alternative is to shirk my duty, letting our community go uninformed and unaware of the powerful criminal justice system. That option is untenable for me and I refuse to back down when encountering threats to my work’s sanctity.”

    [ad_2]

    Jeremy Childs, Grace Toohey

    Source link