Donald Trump Becomes First Former President to Face Criminal Charges

Donald Trump has become the first former president to ever be criminally charged.

A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict Trump on Thursday, though the charges are not yet known, The New York Times and CNN have confirmed.

The grand jury has been investigating Trump for his connection to his lawyer Michael Cohen paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Cohen had admitted to paying Daniels $130,000 on behalf of Trump during the final weeks of the 2016 presidential election. Cohen was aiming to silence the actress from making public that she had shared a sexual encounter in 2006 with Trump, who was married to his current spouse, Melania, by then.

Cohen had paid Daniels through a shell company; he was then reimbursed by Trump, whose company subsequently filed the reimbursements as legal expenses. The Trump lawyer also coordinated former Playboy model Karen McDougal to be paid $150,000 by the National Enquirer tabloid magazine, in order to silence her own story about an alleged affair with Trump. The Trump organization shelled out $420,000 to Michael Cohen in 2018 after he finished his tasks as a good lackey.

Through a recording Cohen took of some of the conversations surrounding the payments, Trump can be heard asking how much will be needed for “the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend, David,” in reference to David Pecker, the executive of the Enquirer’s parent company.

“What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” he asked.

Trump has previously denied wrongdoing, and doubled down immediately after the indictment’s announcement.

Trump, who is the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination for president, still faces numerous other criminal investigations, including into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and whether he and his family lied to lenders and insurers by overvaluing their assets.

This post has been updated.

On Monday, Tennessee Republican Representative Tim Burchett said, “We’re not gonna fix” school shootings, in the aftermath of three children and three adults being shot dead at a school in Nashville, Tennessee.

And appearing on Fox on Thursday, Burchett doubled down on his appalling disinterest in doing even the barest minimum of his job. When asked why his initial comments somehow made people mad, the representative was incredulous.

“They come back to me and say, ‘Burchett, look what your prayers have done for us.’ The people doing the praying aren’t the ones doing the shooting, ma’am, and it’s just a very unfortunate situation,” Burchett said.

“And, and um, I don’t—there’s no easy answers,” he continued, as if he was interested in any answer whatsoever. “Um, I don’t know, I—I—, you know, repenting of your sins and um, and having some sort of um, reform in this country seems to me to be the way we’re going to have to turn this thing around because we have some very sick, evil people doing some very vile things, and um, and revival seems to be the way to go for me.

“But I realize their hatred toward me and my beliefs, and that’s—that’s fine,” Burchett finished.

What must be dispelled once and for all is the notion that there are “no easy answers.” There is a whole catalog of policies the government could be pursuing to confront gun violence—policies that Republicans have not only fought tooth and nail to oppose but countered by making it even easier for people to get death machines. The astoundingly lazy assertion of “Bah, there’s no easy fix” has enabled Republicans to instead do nothing to fix anything.

Republicans have long insisted that gun ownership is a “God-given right,” while also insisting that the cause of gun violence is anything but guns. But if it takes hate to become a mass shooter, Republicans have been on the front lines of fomenting it. If it takes social alienation to become a mass shooter, Republicans have done everything in their power to erode public life and solidarity in favor of individualism. If it takes compounded mental distress to become a mass shooter, Republicans have time and again opposed strengthening mental health care in this country.

And if it takes easy access to guns to become a mass shooter, well, you already know where Republicans stand on that.

The Kansas House of Representatives has passed a bill that would require doctors to tell patients it is possible to reverse the effects of the abortion pill, a claim that is not scientifically supported.

The bill, which passed by a vote of 85–39 on Wednesday, is the latest instance of state Republicans seeking to overturn the will of the people, as Kansans already voted last year to keep abortion protections in the state constitution.

Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes slammed the bill as “medically inaccurate, political propaganda.”

The measure would require health care providers to bombard patients with the false claim that they can reverse the effect of a medication abortion. Medication abortions make up more than half of all abortions in the United States and are conducted by having a patient take two medications: mifepristone and misoprostol.

Health care facilities would have to hang a sign saying mifepristone “alone is not always effective in ending a pregnancy. It may be possible to reverse its intended effect if the second pill or tablet has not been taken or administered.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says abortion reversal claims are “unproven and unethical,” and attempts to reverse a medication abortion could put a patient’s health at risk. But under the Kansas bill, any facility that does not hang an abortion reversal sign could face a $10,000 fine.

Doctors would not be able to provide a medication abortion without telling the patient at least 24 hours ahead of time that the procedure is reversible. They would also have to repeat the claim in between administering the mifepristone and the misoprostol. Health care providers who fail to do so can be sued by their patient, the person who impregnated the patient, or the patient’s parents if they were a minor.

Democratic Representative Lindsay Vaugh described the bill as “state-mandated deception.”

“We’re requiring doctors to lie to their patients, and we’re putting the lives of women at risk,” she said.

The measure is all the worse because last summer, Kansas residents voted overwhelmingly to keep abortion protections in the state constitution. Since the August referendum, state Republicans have done nothing but try to find new ways to circumvent that vote.

“The voters have made their choices,” Democratic Representative Brad Boyd said. “They have made their voices loud. This body would be wise to listen to them. They were loud, they were clear, they were bold. They do not want government in the room with them and their doctor.”

Democratic Governor Laura Kelly is likely to veto the bill, having already rejected a similar one in 2019. But the measure passed the House by a veto-proof majority. If the Senate, which is held by a Republican supermajority, shows similar support, the legislature could force the measure into law.

On Thursday, a Texas judge struck down a crucial feature of the Affordable Care Act that requires insurance companies to cover preventative health care services for free.

Judge Reed O’Connor, who was nominated by President George W. Bush and has been described as the “go-to judge” for conservatives looking to erode health care and nondiscrimination precedents, made the ruling in response to a case brought by Christian-owned businesses in Texas that argued they should not be required to cover birth control and PrEP services.

The successful plaintiffs’ lawyer is Jonathan Mitchell—the same lawyer representing a man who sued three women for helping his ex-wife get an abortion, and the same lawyer who engineered Texas’s restrictive abortion bounty law.

His new ruling will harm an estimated 150 million people on employer-sponsored health care plans, as well as approximately 20 million Medicaid-expansion enrollees and 61 million Medicare beneficiaries, who can receive preventative care under the measure.

Here’s a list of just some of the services O’Connor has now stopped from being guaranteed free:

• Breast cancer screenings for women aged 50 to 74
• Cervical cancer screenings for women aged 21 to 65 years
• An array of recommended pregnancy procedures—including infection testing, pre- and postpartum depression screening, and recommended medication regimens
• PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) treatment to reduce HIV risks
• Screenings for sexually transmitted infections
• Anxiety screenings for children and adolescents
• Vision screenings for children aged 3 to 5 years
• Diabetes screenings
• Osteoporosis screenings
• Comprehensive and holistic interventions for obese children and adolescents
• Lung cancer screenings
• Tuberculosis screenings
• Screenings for women of reproductive age who may be suffering from intimate partner violence
• Screenings for major depressive disorders that could lead to heightened suicide risks in adolescents aged 12 to 18 years old

And that’s just a sampling of what O’Connor has now taken away as a guaranteed health service. Here’s a list of other services now deemed invalid by the ruling.

Thousands of people rallied Thursday morning at the Tennessee state Capitol building to demand stronger gun control laws, as Nashville still reels from a school shooting earlier in the week.

A shooter opened fire at the Covenant School on Monday, killing at least three children and three adults and wounding several others. State Republicans have insisted that there is nothing they could have done or could do differently to prevent such a tragedy.

Protesters gathered at the Capitol and marched inside ahead of the House and Senate regular floor sessions. People called for gun control and for lawmakers to “protect our kids!”

Inside, demonstrators were packed so tightly that highway patrol officers had to clear a path for lawmakers to enter the gallery.

Protesters continued to call for gun control and began singing songs they had adapted into protest anthems.

Lawmakers, however, appeared to stick to their preset agenda. When Democratic Representative Justin Pearson tried to bring up gun reform while discussing an unrelated bill, Republican Speaker Cameron Sexton told him to keep to the measure at hand.

Republicans hold a supermajority in the Tennessee legislature as well as the governor’s office. Governor Bill Lee and other Republicans have skated around the fact that they are directly responsible for helping create the circumstances that allowed Monday’s shooting to occur.

Lawmakers failed two years ago to pass a red flag law that would have prevented Monday’s shooter from legally acquiring seven guns, three of which were used in the attack. In the past few years, they also loosened gun restrictions and focused their energy instead on attacking LGBTQ rights.

While evading criminal offenses and campaigning for the third presidential cycle in a row, the twice-impeached former president has been asking advisers for ideas about how to attack Mexican drug cartels, with or without Mexico’s permission, reports Rolling Stone.

And Trump appears to have a menu of options.

One such idea, Rolling Stone notes, comes from a policy paper titled “It’s Time to Wage War on Transnational Drug Cartels,” which outlines strategies for America to “fundamentally [reorient] its posture” and wage “war against the cartels.” The paper says that such a war should “invoke the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine” and that the U.S. would not tolerate “narcoterrorists” infringing upon its sphere of influence.

The paper seemed to downplay the reciprocity inherent to the Monroe Doctrine—that the U.S. would aim to avoid interfering in other spheres too. Because while the paper encourages the U.S. to request collaboration from Mexico, it also notes that “it is vital that Mexico not be led to believe that they have veto power to prevent the US from taking the actions necessary to secure its borders and people.”

“‘Attacking Mexico,’ or whatever you’d like to call it, is something that President Trump has said he wants ‘battle plans’ drawn for,” a source told Rolling Stone. “He’s complained about missed opportunities of his first term, and there are a lot of people around him who want fewer missed opportunities in a second Trump presidency.”

Among these missed opportunities? Well, according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s memoir, Trump had asked him if the U.S. could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” then lie and pretend it was not behind the attack. Just weeks ago, House Oversight Committee chairman and Fox mainstay James Comer said it was a “mistake” that Trump didn’t go ahead and send out those bombs.

Is such a wild notion limited to Trump? Surprise: As with most radical policies, the whole Republican Party is implicated. After all, the policy paper was written by former Trump official and now Ron DeSantis endorser Ken Cuccinelli.

Wheels are turning in the halls of Congress too. In January, Congressmen Dan Drenshaw and Michael Waltz introduced a bill to approve an Authorization for Use of Military Force that would approve military action in Mexico to target cartels (months before the Senate finally voted to sunset the 1991 and 2002 Iraq AUMFs). And on Wednesday, Senator Lindsey Graham introduced a bill to designate the cartels and other organizations as foreign terrorist organizations, laying the groundwork for such war authorizations.

So while bombing Mexico—without its permission, or even lying about doing it at all—may have earlier been a more Trump-specific craze, the entire Republican apparatus is now full speed ahead in looking to keep the military machine’s cogs slicked up and spinning.

Heck, even 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has declared he would use “military force to decimate the cartels, Osama bin Laden–style.”

Russia’s main security agency announced Thursday it has detained an American journalist, whom it has accused of espionage.

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was detained by the Federal Security Service in the eastern city of Yekaterinburg. He is the first American journalist detained on spying accusations since the Cold War.

The FSB said it had “stopped the illegal activities” Gershkovich was conducting and that an espionage case had been opened against him. The agency alleged that Gershkovich, “acting on the instructions of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.”

The Journal “vehemently” denied the accusations and said it “seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter.”

“We stand in solidarity with Evan and his family.”

Gershkovich has worked as a reporter in Russia since 2017. International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, said he was investigating the Russian military company Wagner, a mercenary group that has played a prominent role in several of Moscow’s foreign operations, including the war in Ukraine.

RSF warned that Gershkovich’s arrest “looks like a retaliation measure of Russia against the United States.”

Russia has also cracked down on information about and dissent against the Ukraine war. The government passed a law last March that makes it illegal to publish information that authorities deem false about the invasion of Ukraine.

Many domestic news outlets stopped publishing or left the country to avoid legal troubles, while multiple foreign outlets withdrew much of their staff and cut back on reporting inside Russia’s borders.

This post has been updated.

Economists told a California state task force Wednesday they estimate that Black residents are owed more than $800 billion in reparations for harm caused by centuries of slavery and systemic racism.

The case for reparations has been made many times in recent years, particularly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. California was the first state to establish a task force to determine how to compensate for the legacy of slavery and racist policies made after the practice of enslaving people was abolished, both of which have crippled Black people’s economic mobility.

Economists presented the task force with a preliminary estimate Wednesday that does not include either a recommended $1 million lump sum to each older Black resident for health disparities or compensation to people who had property unjustly taken by the government or a business devalued.

The reparations committee is due to give a final report on July 1. Until then, it can accept or reject proposals, including the economists’ budget.

“We’ve got to go in with an open mind and come up with some creative ways to deal with this,” Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who sits on the task force, told the Associated Press.

The task force can make suggestions in its July report, but the final call rests with the state legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom. It’s unclear when—or if at all—Black Californians will start receiving payments, because the preliminary estimate is 2.5 times more than California’s annual budget.

“How do you compensate for hundreds of years of harm, even 150 years post-slavery?” Senator Steven Bradford asked.

Critics of reparations in California argue that it’s unreasonable to pay in a city or state that never enslaved Black people. But advocates note that the majority of data and historical evidence shows that after slavery ended in 1865, policies and practices across the nation helped curb the rights of Black Americans.

San Francisco was the first major city to propose a reparations plan, putting forth a sweeping draft in December that includes eliminating personal debt and tax burdens, a guaranteed annual income for 250 years, and family housing for just $1. The city’s reparations committee has until June to produce a final report.

The Chicago suburb of Evanston was the first city to begin paying reparations, while Boston and Asheville, North Carolina, are also considering compensation measures.

Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee introduced a bill in 2021 to develop a reparations study task force. President Joe Biden has expressed support for studying reparations, but he has yet to back Lee’s bill, and the issue has yet to be seriously discussed at the federal level.

On Wednesday, President Biden kicked off his “Summit for Democracy” with a panel of explicitly undemocratic world leaders. Panel members included India’s Narendra Modi, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

While the summit overall hosted leaders from all over the world, this specific panel was focused on “Democracy Delivering Economic Growth and Shared Prosperity.” All three far-right leaders pretended to care about democracy, while ignoring their own records.

During the summit, Indian Prime Minister Modi sermonized on how India was “the mother” of democracy. “Democracy is not just a structure; it is also a spirit. It is based on the belief that the needs and aspirations of every human being are equally important,” Modi said. “That is why, in India, our guiding philosophy is ‘Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas,’ meaning ‘striving together for inclusive growth.’”

Modi, of course, has been at the helm of an extremist rise in Hindu nationalism in India. As chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat in 2001, Modi oversaw a massive riot rumored to have been spurred by government and police officials who sought to target Muslims. The riot left more than 1,000 people dead—some 75 percent of whom were Muslim.

His authoritarian tendencies have only increased since he rose to power as prime minister in 2014. In recent months, Modi has blocked the airing of a BBC documentary questioning his leadership during the Gujarat riots; conspired with Twitter CEO and billionaire Elon Musk to conduct a mass censorship campaign against dissidents, including imposing a mass internet shutdown across the state of Punjab; and overseen the arrest of an opposition leader for “defamation.” This doesn’t even include basic features of Modi’s reign, like being the first Indian leader to not take questions at press conferences, or the ongoing Hindutva nationalist campaign that targets Muslims and other religious minorities.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, on Wednesday proudly assured that “Israel was, is, and always will remain a proud democracy at the heart of the Middle East.” He went on to dismiss the massive protests against his judicial overhaul plan, which would help cement power for his own government and potentially help him avoid corruption investigations, as “a very intensive public debate.”

Israel, of course, is not a thriving democracy, as it operates on a system of apartheid that targets millions of Palestinians. It would be laborious to summarize all the cruelties of this occupation here, or Netanyahu’s role in furthering them, but so far this year, Israeli forces have killed at least 90 Palestinians, 17 of whom were children (that’s an average of at least one Palestinian a day).

Italian Prime Minister Meloni spoke glowingly of how “only a democratic system” can guarantee “growth, justice, equality, [and] legality.” But she opposes abortion rights and same-sex marriage and has said she wants to make it unconstitutional for gay people to adopt a child. She has opposed a 1993 law that punished people involved in racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination or the incitement of hate crimes. She holds rampant anti-immigrant and nationalist views and has stoked antisemitic and racist conspiracies related to George Soros and the “great replacement” white nationalist theory.

Meloni has also attended the Conservative Political Action Conference—a bastion of the most radical figures in American society—twice, once in 2019 and again 2022. She peddled more of her fearmongering around immigrants and “globalism” while there.

Almost too spot-on, Meloni has called Modi the “most loved leader in the world,” and she tried to assuage fears of her extremism during her 2022 campaign by likening herself to Netanyahu’s Likud Party in Israel and America’s Republican Party.

Other world leaders who spoke on Wednesday’s panel carry their own baggage. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s administration, in Modi-like fashion, has carried out a surveillance campaign against members of the press and politicians. Kenyan President William Ruto was previously charged by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity after he allegedly orchestrated postelection violence that killed more than 1,300 people.

That these leaders were deemed appropriate to speak on democracy is an indictment not just of the White House but of international political conventions. Such traditions allow anti-democratic states and leaders (including America) to posture as beacons of democracy anyhow, and they desensitize the rest of us from clear-as-day authoritarianism.

Kentucky’s Republican-led legislature on Wednesday overrode a gubernatorial veto of a massive bill targeting transgender rights, one of the most extreme anti-trans measures in the country.

Governor Andy Beshear vetoed Senate Bill 150 last week, warning it would cause an “increase in suicide among Kentucky’s youth” if it became law. But the measure had already passed both the House and Senate, mainly along party lines. A veto override requires only a simple majority vote from both chambers.

On Wednesday, the General Assembly re-passed the bill by a vote of 76–23 in the House and 28–9 in the Senate, meaning that the measure will now become law.

S.B. 150 will ban all gender-affirming care for trans minors in Kentucky and would force doctors to detransition any minors in their care. It would prohibit discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in public schools at any level, prevent trans students from using the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, and would allow teachers to refuse to use a student’s preferred pronouns.

“Good people will die because of what we’ve done here today,” Representative Daniel Grossberg said during the voting.

“To the LGBTQ children listening: You are not broken, your government is.”

Hundreds of people had gathered outside the state Capitol building earlier in the day to protest the measure, which the ACLU of Kentucky has described as “the worst anti-trans bill in the country.” Courier Journal reporter Olivia Krauth said the crowd may be the largest she has seen during the current legislative session.

Security had forcibly removed protesters from the gallery during voting. They stayed in the Capitol Rotunda, chanting, “Trans rights!”

Republicans had rushed the measure through the House and Senate in a record daylong sprint. A different omnibus anti-trans measure had looked dead in the water last Wednesday night. But the next morning, Republicans resurrected and expanded the text, forcing it through despite long and often emotional arguments against it from Democrats and trans rights activists.

Kentucky is one of many states, particularly Republican-led ones, trying to reduce LGBTQ rights. Just last week, Florida advanced an anti-trans bill so broad and extreme it could also prevent people from getting treated for breast cancer. In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp signed a law banning gender-affirming care for minors and criminalizing medical workers who provide that care.