E. Jean Carroll finally gets some money from Trump

Trump was found guilty by a jury in 2023 of sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll. But he used every legal option to try and delay or prevent the release of the money, filing appeal after appeal even up to the US Supreme Court. But they all failed and today, the judge released $5.6 million in funds that had been held in escrow.

The disbursement, made public in a 14 July entry on Carroll’s case docket, indicates that the funds were released by a court-held account on 9 July – one day after judge Lewis Kaplan ordered the release of this money.

Trump, who has been fighting against the release of this money since June after the supreme court on 29 June denied his request to hear his appeal, has denied wrongdoing.
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The Supreme Court finally puts some limits on Trump’s excesses

In a long awaited ruling, the court affirmed by a 6-3 margin the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, that anyone born in the US is a citizen irrespective of the status of the parents. (There are small exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats.)

The US supreme court has upheld birthright citizenship, which provides nearly all people born in the country with citizenship, ruling against a central piece of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.

“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” the ruling says.
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The supreme court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 had ruled Black people were not US citizens, but “a separate class of persons”. But the 14th amendment which reversed the Dred Scott decision, was adopted in 1868 during the reconstruction era after the US civil war, to codify the rights of Black Americans – and confer citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.
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It may take the collapse of the AI bubble to save us from these sociopaths

There is a lot in the news these days that is depressing so it takes a lot for me to point to one article and say that it may be a top competitor to be the most depressing thing that I have read this year. It is a long profile of OpenAI head Sam Altman and it deals with him and all the other big players jockeying to be the biggest player in the AI world.

[T]he founding premise of OpenAI was that it would have to be different. The founders, who included Altman, Sutskever, Brockman, and Elon Musk, asserted that artificial intelligence could be the most powerful, and potentially dangerous, invention in human history, and that perhaps, given the existential risk, an unusual corporate structure would be required. The firm was established as a nonprofit, whose board had a duty to prioritize the safety of humanity over the company’s success, or even its survival. The C.E.O. had to be a person of uncommon integrity.

But Altman is portrayed in the article by many who have worked with him as utterly untrustworthy and a power-seeker, whose actions did not match the noble goals that it had set forth.
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The trial of Rodrigo Duterte

Rodrigo Duterte was president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022. A self-proclaimed tough guy, he encouraged the extra-judicial killings (i.e., murder without trial by government forces) of supposed drug dealers and criminals, claiming that he himself had carried out such killings when he had been mayor of the town of Davao. The victims were alleged drug users, alleged petty criminals, and street children. After leaving the office of the presidency, he was re-elected as mayor of Davao in 2025.

But he may not be able to serve out his term as mayor because a little over a year ago, he was arrested and taken to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to stand trial and is now the first former Asian head of state to stand trial in the ICC.

On March 11, 2025, Duterte touched down at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport after a flight from Hong Kong to find more than three hundred officers waiting for him. Under “Operation Pursuit,” Filipino police and Interpol executed an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant tying him to crimes against humanity committed during his self-proclaimed “war on drugs” and quickly put him on a plane to the Netherlands.

The ICC judges have now confirmed that Duterte will stand trial in November 2026. We should be happy that the once untouchable strongman has been in jail for over a year and will soon be held to account for his record in power.
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Judges fight Trump corruption

That Trump is a brazen grifter goes without saying. He has also used the justice department as his own personal law firm, using them to attack his enemies and reward his friends. But he may have outdone himself with his latest attempt to get money from the government to fund his grifts.

What happened was that Trump sued the government for $10 billion, charging that his rights had been violated when a private contractor leaked his tax returns back in 2019 and 2020. The idea of a president suing his own government was ridiculous enough and would likely have been thrown out. But he had appointed his own former personal lawyer Todd Blanche as attorney general and before the case went to trial, the ‘two sides’ (which are actually just one side) announced that a settlement had been reached in which the government would create a slush fund of $1.776 billion (how patriotic!) to compensate those people who had been charged in the January 6th insurrection and then pardoned by Trump. We do not know whether this was the original plan or a fall back position after the outrage that emerged at the thought of such blatant chicanery by Trump to enrich himself. If this was allowed to stand, then there was no end to how much a president could get out of the government to do with as he wished simply by suing and settling.

But this was too much for some judges and they have called for an investigation into what they see as the abuse of the judicial system.
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The grooming of Virginia Roberts Giuffre

The Guardian published an excerpt from the posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the young woman who started the process that took Andrew down as part of her expose of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

There is something so disgusting in her revelations about the smooth and practiced way in which Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell broke down the initial natural resistance that Roberts had to becoming a sexual toy, first to service them, and then to do so for his friends, that it makes you want to puke. I am not going to excerpt the salacious parts but just those where she gives her thoughts on why these things happen, starting with how a sociopath like Epstein is able to identify the vulnerabilities of people and knows how to exploit them, be they young girls or the wealthy, powerful, and intellectual people he wanted to surround himself with.
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Incompetence all the way down

As others have pointed out, one of the key differences between the first Trump administration and the current iteration is that in the first one, he was willing to appoint people who were acceptable to the Republican party establishment to key positions. Of course, he then got tired of those who were not totally supportive of his crackpot ideas and fired them or they left, but by and large he kept intact the senior-level professional cadres, the ones who have the institutional memories, are aware of the norms under which their institutions operate, and essentially keep the wheels of government rolling.

But after he lost the 2020 election, Trump began his paranoid delusions that the entire government was filled with people who opposed him and were the ones who brought him down, going so far as to postulate the existence of a ‘deep state’ that actually stole the election from him. He targeted in particular the department of justice, falsely claiming that Joe Biden had ‘weaponized’ the institution to target him and his supporters, by investigating him and prosecuting the members of the violent mob that attacked the Capital building on January 6th, 2021 at his instigation.

So this time around, Trump has forced out of office any career person whom he did not feel was sufficiently loyal to him to do his bidding and put in place stooges and sycophants even if they were not qualified and barely knew what their job entailed. While this happened everywhere, the department of justice has been the place where the incompetence has been revealed the most. While so much attention has been focused on the mess that Trump is creating at a high level, that can shield the fact of messes further down.
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Trump and pardons

Trump is using the power of presidential pardons not as they were intended to be used, to correct perceived miscarriages of justice or to reduce excessive sentences out of clemency, but as a reward for friends and those who serve his interests. To be sure, other presidents have also done this but Trump’s pardons blatantly violate norms, as he does in so many areas. The most egregious was the blanket pardoning of all his supporters involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol following his loss in the 2020 election.

Another such pardon is that of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, who had been convicted in the US less than two years ago for involvement in a massive drug trafficking operation that moved tons of cocaine to the US. He had been sentenced to 45 years in prison.

In that case, prosecutors maintained that Hernández accepted $1m from former Mexican cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in 2013 while successfully running for his first Honduran presidential term. They also said that Hernández’s government set up Honduras to serve as a pivotal waypoint – or “superhighway” – of cocaine coming from South American nations including Colombia and Venezuela.

Hernández was extradited to the US to face the drug and related weapons charges in April 2022, roughly three months after finishing his second presidential term. A jury convicted him on 8 March 2024 after a three-week trial.

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The weaponization of the justice system

The American justice system has hardly ever been something to boast about. It is heavily tilted to serve the interests of the rich and powerful and against ordinary people, not to mention often being racist and misogynistic to boot. But with Trump, it has opened up new areas of legal malpractice, violating some of the norms that used to exist.

When Joe Biden was president, whenever any person or group on the conservative end of the spectrum was investigated for anything, rightwingers would howl in indignation that Biden had ‘weaponized the Justice Department’ to attack them, even though there was scant evidence that this was the case. In fact, Biden seemed to go to great lengths to distance himself from his attorney general Merrick Garland and Garland himself seemed to be very conscious of his duty to be independent of Biden.

All that seems so quaint now. With Trump, the weaponization of the entire US government against his perceived political enemies is going full blast. His attorney general Pam Bondi acts as if she gets her instructions directly from Trump. The firing of career people and replacing them with ideologues who will do her bidding is her way of making sure that political vendettas can be carried out. As a result, Trump keeps losing case after case because they are overstepping the bounds.
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How the ‘Sandwich Guy’ jury deliberated

It is often interesting when, after a trial that garnered a lot of attention, the jurors talk about what went on in the jury room. That is what happened when a juror spoke to Ashley Parker, a reporter from The Atlantic magazine, about the case in which Sean Charles Dunn, aka the Sandwich Guy, was on trial for throwing a sandwich at a CBP agent. She said that she wished to be anonymous because of the reputation of the Trump people to be vindictive and seek to retaliate.

The juror I spoke with told me that the jury—three men and nine women (roughly an equal mix of Black and white)—included an architect, a professor, an analyst, and some retirees whom she described as probably “100 percent anti-Trump” and protective of their city. She went into the trial thinking it was “bullshit,” she told me, “but I did enter it trying to be objective.”
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The group was careful to avoid politics, she said, and instead focused on several key questions: Had the sandwich actually “exploded all over” CBP agent Gregory Lairmore, as he’d testified? (Specifically, they analyzed—and at times mocked—Lairmore’s claim that “I had mustard and condiments on my uniform, and an onion hanging from my radio antenna that night.”) What was Dunn’s intent in flinging the grinder? And what actually constitutes “bodily harm”?

On the first question, several jury members struggled to stifle laughter as Lairmore expanded on the hoagie’s alleged explosive properties. “It was like, Oh, you poor baby,” the juror told me.

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