Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of October 13

Supreme Court rejects Alex Jones' appeal of $1.4 billion defamation judgment in Sandy Hook case

The Supreme Court on Monday turned away an appeal by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones over a $1.4 billion defamation judgment against him for his false claims that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax.

In rejecting Jones' case, the Supreme Court leaves in place the record-breaking sum he was ordered to pay after he was found liable in 2021 for damages in lawsuits brought by the families of children who were killed in the massacre.

'I love Hitler': Leaked messages expose Young Republicans' racist chat

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

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The 2,900 pages of chats, shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans between early January and mid-August, chronicle their campaign to seize control of the national Young Republican organization on a hardline pro-Donald Trump platform. Many of the chat members already work inside government or party politics, and one serves as a state senator.

Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.

“The more the political atmosphere is open and liberating — like it has been with the emergence of Trump and a more right wing GOP even before him — it opens up young people and older people to telling racist jokes, making racist commentaries in private and public,” said Joe Feagin, a Texas A&M sociology professor who has studied racism for the last 60 years. He’s also concerned the words would be applied to public policy. “It’s chilling, of course, because they will act on these views.”

Virtually all news outlets reject restrictive Pentagon press policy

https://archive.is/m9P6I

An extraordinary new policy from the Defense Department that equates basic reporting methods to criminal activity has prompted a revolt among Pentagon journalists that could leave the nation’s largest agency and the world’s largest military without a press corps.

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The policy would force journalists and media organizations to refrain from publishing any material that is not approved by the military — a clear violation of 1st Amendment protections to free speech, lawyers for media outlets said.

Major news organizations including the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, as well as right-leaning outlets such as Newsmax and the Washington Times, have refused to sign the document, with only one far-right outlet — the cable channel One American News — agreeing to do so.

The Los Angeles Times also will not agree to the policy, said Terry Tang, the paper’s executive editor.

In a rare joint statement, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC said that the policy “is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections.”

“We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press,” the news outlets said.

Family Visit To Camp Pendleton Base Ended With ICE Deporting A Marine's Dad

Parents of a U.S. Marine were detained by federal immigration officials and one of them was later deported after visiting family members at a California military base, a case that has drawn attention to how the government’s immigration crackdown is touching military families.

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Marine Corps recruiters have long promoted enlistment as a path to stability for families without legal immigration status, but experts say those assurances have eroded as federal authorities have moved to enforce existing laws more strictly.

The Marine Corps previously told The Associated Press that recruiters have been informed they are “not the proper authority” to “imply that the Marine Corps can secure immigration relief for applicants or their families.”

Google email shows it ruled Israel’s ads claiming ‘There is food in Gaza’ aren’t misleading

Though the market footage was captured in Gaza City in July, a Post review found it was presented without important context. Several clips, which were originally published on Getty Images by a Palestinian photojournalist, show some of the first food that entered Gaza after months of restrictions by Israel, offered at high prices unaffordable to most Palestinians, according to the caption on the original footage.

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The online campaign has drawn a large number of complaints alleging the ads are spreading misinformation, including from multiple government authorities, according to the Sept. 4 email and an interview with a Google employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job.

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Despite the complaints filed against Israel’s videos about food access in Gaza, they remain online. According to the internal Google email, that’s where they will stay.

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Employees were advised that any future video ads from Israel’s government making similar claims about food, famine or humanitarian aid in Gaza are “not in scope” of those policies, and as such don’t constitute violations.

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A Google employee who works in Trust and Safety and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job said the tech industry has been pulling back from rigorous fact-checking this year, starting with Meta’s decision to fire fact-checkers in January. The changes coincided with corporate shifts in tech and other industries that appeared to see chief executives move to be more aligned with President Donald Trump.

“It’s more hands-off,” the employee said. “As long as you’re not doing anything really bad and you’re not calling for violence, you can have your ads running.” Misinformation is only considered a violation of Google’s policies if it falls under election interference or public health risks, he said.

We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents (ProPublica)

Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term.

We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. […]

US revokes visas for 6 foreigners over Charlie Kirk-related speech (AP News)

The six foreigners who had their visas revoked were from Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Paraguay and South Africa. They were not identified.

Santos Is Released After Trump Commutes His Sentence

George Santos’s lawyer said the disgraced former congressman was freed from a New Jersey prison around 10 p.m. on Friday. He served less than three months on his fraud conviction.

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“He lied like hell,” Mr. Trump said at the time. “And I didn’t know him, but he was 100 percent for Trump.”

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“This is far worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Mr. Trump wrote.

The Bolton Case Is Not Like the Others
(The Atlantic)

https://archive.is/nFaO1

This indictment tells a story about a seasoned diplomat and well-known conservative firebrand who, to the surprise of many at the time, went to work for one of the most unconventional presidents in recent memory. He intended to document the experience. The day before Bolton became national security adviser, prosecutors allege, a person identified as Individual 1 set up a group chat that would be used, as Bolton put it in a text, “For Diary in the future!!!” Bolton’s excessive use of exclamation points aside, this is not in and of itself a crime. But prosecutors allege that this group chat became a primary vehicle for Bolton to share more than 1,000 pages of material that they say contained classified information with two people the indictment calls Individual 1 and Individual 2, described as relatives. News reports have identified them, respectively, as Bolton’s wife and daughter. Both appear to have been working with Bolton to compile his notes and observations.

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Over the course of the next year, Bolton sent hundreds of pages of documents to his family members containing classified information, prosecutors allege. Lest there be any ambiguity about his motives, prosecutors say that five days after he left his White House position in September 2019, Bolton texted his family that he was transitioning from diary writing to “bookwriting” and that he was talking with a publisher. Simon & Schuster ultimately published Bolton’s White House memoir, The Room Where It Happened, in 2020.

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The government later sued Bolton over the book’s publication, and the parties reached a settlement in June 2021, when Joe Biden was in office. As a condition, Bolton agreed to turn over any classified information in his possession, the indictment states.

This is where the indictment makes things look really bad for Bolton. Less than a month after the settlement, Bolton notified the FBI that he believed one of his personal email accounts had been hacked by the government of Iran. Bolton had also used this account to send diary documents to his family members, prosecutors allege. A few weeks later, in late July, a representative for Bolton forwarded the FBI an email that appears to be a blackmail threat from whomever had gained access to his account: “I do not think you would be interested in the FBI being aware of the leaked content of John’s email… This could be the biggest scandal since Hillary’s emails were leaked, but this time on the GOP side! Contact me before it’s too late…”

Bolton’s representative told the FBI that the former White House adviser was going to delete the contents of the hacked account. The anonymous writer warned Bolton that they would “disseminate the expurgated sections of your book,” which suggests that the hacker had obtained the classified material that Bolton was told, during the prepublication review, he should take out.

At no point, prosecutors allege, did Bolton tell the FBI that he had used the hacked email account to send the diary documents to his family members, or that hackers now apparently had the information.

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Here we need to return to the Biden administration, and what officials had to take into account when they were deciding whether to bring charges. They knew that Iran had hacked Bolton’s account, and not just because Bolton told them. The intelligence community knew through its own sources, and officials were reluctant to divulge that information as part of a criminal proceeding, according to people I spoke with who are familiar with the situation.