Author name: moderat ereport

A federal judge in Kentucky broke with the Trump administration on Monday, sentencing former Louisville police officer Brett Hankison to almost three years in prison for his role in a home raid that killed Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker. The Justice Department had recommended that Hankison serve just one day in jail.  Hankison, who fired 10 blind shots during the botched raid on her apartment in March 2020, was the only officer at the scene to face charges tied to Taylor’s death. He is the first person sentenced to prison in a case that rocked Louisville and helped fuel a national uprising over racial injustice and police brutality. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings, who was appointed by Donald Trump during his first presidency, said the Justice Department’s request for a one-day sentence “is not appropriate” and would have minimized the jury’s decision to convict Hankison last fall.  Breonna Taylor, shown in an undated photo. In November, jurors found Hankison guilty of violating Taylor’s civil rights by using excessive force when he fired several rounds through her covered window. The shots didn’t hit Taylor, but his bullets tore through the walls and entered a neighboring apartment, where a couple and a five-year-old child lived. Taylor was killed by another officer’s gunfire after her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a single warning shot, thinking the officers were intruders. Jennings, who presided over two of Hankison’s trials, said she was “startled” that more people weren’t injured during the raid, and she criticized the Justice Department’s request to downplay the seriousness of the crime. Some of its arguments, she said from the bench, were “incongruous and inappropriate.” Hankison was sentenced to 33 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. While Jennings imposed a sentence far shorter than the life term technically available under federal law, she made clear that the Justice Department’s sentencing memo troubled her. Submitted by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee who leads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, the memo argued Hankison should receive a one-day sentence (time served) and suggested he never should have faced civil rights charges at all. The filing marked a sharp break from the department’s previous approach. Under prior leadership, the Justice Department had aggressively pursued charges against Hankison and other officers involved in the fatal raid. But since Trump returned to the White House, federal prosecutors have weakened their stance.  In court, lead federal prosecutor Rob Keenan repeatedly sided with Hankison’s defense on points that would lower the sentence. Prosecutors even argued that Hankison was particularly vulnerable to abuse in prison and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, expressed frustration that the new team of federal prosecutors hadn’t fought for a harsher sentence. Attorney Ben Crump, left, stands beside Tamika Palmer, mother of Breonna Taylor, center; and Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend, center right, outside the federal courthouse in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 21. “There was no prosecution in there for us,” Palmer said after the verdict. “Brett had his own defense team, and I didn’t know he got a second one.” The Justice Department’s lax recommendation was also slammed by civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who helped Taylor’s family win a $12 million settlement from the city of Louisville. In a post on Facebook, he called it “an insult to the life of Breonna Taylor and a blatant betrayal of the jury’s decision.”  After the hearing, he told The Associated Press that while he had hoped for a longer sentence, he was “grateful” that Hankison is “at least going to prison and has to think for those 3 years about Breonna Taylor and that her life mattered.” Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was killed during a police raid conducted under a warrant based on flimsy and misleading evidence linking her to an ex-boyfriend suspected of drug trafficking. In 2022, three other former and current officers were charged with their roles in allegedly falsifying the warrant that led to the deadly raid. One has pleaded guilty, and trials are pending for the other two.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency chief in charge of Urban Search and Rescue has quit the agency following a lackluster response to the recent flooding in Texas that killed more than 100 people. Ken Pagurek resigned on Monday, reportedly in response to efforts by the Trump administration to hobble the agency, part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing policies against funding and properly staffing branches of the federal government. Previously, Pagurek worked for more than a decade at FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue branch and led multiple teams responding to natural disasters. CNN reported that “Pagurek told colleagues at FEMA that the delay was the tipping point that led to his voluntary departure after months of frustration with the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency, according to two sources familiar with his thinking.” First responders search along the banks of the Guadalupe River, as rescue efforts continue after extreme flooding in Ingram, Texas. At least 135 people died in the Texas floods on July 4. Among the most tragic cases was the flooding at Camp Mystic, where at least 27 campers and counselors were killed. Included in the deaths were several children as young as 8 years old. Families in the region affected by the flooding have said they did not receive warnings and alerts ahead of the flood giving them enough time to prepare and have attributed deaths to those delays. In some instances, there was a 90-minute delay before an alert was sent out and some residents said they didn’t get an alert until six hours later. Asked about the problems on July 11, Trump lashed out at reporters for questioning his team’s actions. “Only a bad person would ask a question like that, to be honest with you,” Trump told the press. “I don’t know who you are but only a very evil person would ask a question like that.” FEMA was a prime target for the cuts to government funding led by the Department of Government Efficiency, the team set up by Trump at the beginning of his term and led by donor and billionaire Elon Musk. DOGE actions authorized by Trump disrupted FEMA payments to states, local governments, and nonprofit groups. Related | Elon Musk’s mayhem is still being felt across the government Musk and DOGE similarly targeted a swath of agencies, undermining basic operations that have been in place for decades—across both parties. DOGE teams staffed with loyalists to Trump and Musk infiltrated government systems, while courts repeatedly ruled that their actions had broken the law. Additionally, Trump installed loyalist Kristi Noem as secretary of Homeland Security with aid from Senate Republicans who confirmed her. The department is the parent agency for FEMA. Noem has presided over layoffs and disruptions at FEMA as part of Trump’s actions to defund federal response programs. And in June, acting FEMA head David Richardson reportedly told staffers he wasn’t even aware that the U.S. had a hurricane season. Trump has sought to uproot FEMA’s abilities and now his plan is in place—the result is unqualified leadership, sluggish responses to disaster, and a rising death toll. 

While speaking with reporters Tuesday, President Donald Trump was asked if he thought anyone should be criminally investigated by the Department of Justice for the “treasonous conspiracy” that Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard recently claimed that President Barack Obama orchestrated a massive conspiracy during the 2016 election cycle to ruin Trump. “The leader of the gang was President Obama—Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?” Trump said, naming President Joe Biden and former FBI Director James Comey as co-conspirators.  He went on to say, “He’s guilty. It’s not a question. You know, I like to say, let’s give it time. It’s there. He’s guilty. This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined, even in other countries.” YouTube Video Trump’s latest rant seems to be another desperate attempt to distract from his ongoing and increasingly disturbing failure to release the long-promised “Epstein files.”  On Monday, in a similar bid to pander to the MAGA base, Attorney General Pam Bondi released unrelated documents tied to the assasination of Martin Luther King Jr., and, yes, once more, Hillary Clinton’s emails. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Trump’s efforts during a press conference on Monday, saying that he and the GOP are “running scared.” He reminded the public that invoking the names of Obama and Biden is merely a smokescreen.  The real issue remains: Trump’s broken promise to release the details about alleged sex trafficker and his buddy, Jeffrey Epstein. 

Another day, another breathless statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio about how he’s keeping us safe by forcibly deporting our friends and neighbors on the flimsiest of pretexts.  On Monday, the Trump administration moved to strip permanent lawful status from Haitians it alleges are collaborating with Viv Ansanm, the gang controlling most of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. If this sounds like a repeat of the administration’s antics with MS-13 and Tren de Aragua, that’s because it is. We just haven’t reached the “deporting people based on their tattoos” or the “Donald Trump believing photoshopped tattoos are real” stages of attacks on Haitians yet—but give the administration time.  Rubio’s announcement was likely inevitable after the administration designated Viv Ansanm and another Haitian gang, Gran Grif, as foreign terrorist groups in May. Once the administration issued that designation, it was free to start deporting lawful permanent residents—also known as green card holders—whom it alleges support Viv Ansanm.  Would you like to know how the administration plans to identify these individuals, or what exactly would constitute a deportable offense? Well, you can’t. While Rubio is big on bellicosity, he’s light on details so far.  Protesters shout slogans during a pro-migrant rally, demanding an end to deportations in New York, on Feb. 9. This is all part of a larger deportation push against lawful immigrants. Not only is the administration carrying out a massive, mistake-ridden deportation campaign against supposed gang members, it’s also mid-trial over its attacks on pro-Palestinian students. In that push, the administration has frequently detained people for such nefarious crimes as writing op-eds critical of Israel, with Trump’s team claiming that counts as some sort of material support for Hamas.  Unfortunately, it was inevitable that the deportation fervor would come for Haitians. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance spent the 2024 presidential campaign spewing horrifically racist lies about Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio, leading to dozens of bomb threats by Trump supporters. Vance even declared that Haitians with Temporary Protected Status, which gives legal status to immigrants from designated countries considered too dangerous to return to, were still not here legally. “If Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said in North Carolina last September, despite that vice presidents are not responsible for TPS designations. But facts would ruin his flow.  Earlier this year, Trump revoked a different program that granted temporary legal status, known as humanitarian parole, for Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. A lower court blocked the order, but no worries—the Supreme Court made sure to let Trump go ahead.  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers gather for a briefing before an enforcement operation on Jan. 27 in Silver Spring, Maryland. Rubio won’t say how many people the administration is planning on deporting under the rubric of this new gang panic. That lack of detail is no doubt deliberate since it gives the administration the flexibility to say that anyone it wants to deport are gang members, based on whatever things the administration declares signify gang membership. So expect some more photoshopped tattoos or something equally nonsensical.  The Trump administration’s decision to remove protections from Haitians is racist—and very dangerous for Haitians. Sending people back to Haiti poses a great risk, per Rubio’s own State Department, which advises Americans not to travel to Haiti because of the risks of kidnapping, terrorist activity, and civil unrest.  Given the humanitarian crisis in Haiti, the United Nations has even been begging the U.S. to stop deporting people to the nation. And speaking of the U.N., the U.S. in February also froze funding to the international security force combating armed gangs in Haiti, so it doesn’t seem like we care much about those gangs—save using them as a way to justify deportations.  Expect the administration to do exactly what we’ve seen with allegations of support for Hamas or MS-13 or Tren de Aragua—an ever-expanding rationale that not just allows swift deportation action but also requires it. The administration is telling us this will keep us safe, but it’s actually what is putting us all in peril.

A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Treasury secretary has some bonkers thoughts on Trump and Obama