Pass the Popcorn

The BBC is now pursuing subpoenas to depose Trump's children and Jared Kushner.

Good.

Hopefully, the questions will involve the Trump Org's business practices as well as his statements on January 6.

The BBC is trying to subpoena Donald Trump’s children as it builds its defense against the president’s defamation lawsuit centered on a documentary on the January 6 insurrection.

In a motion filed on Friday, the BBC sought authorization to serve Trump’s two eldest children, Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, with subpoenas for testimony and their records on the events of 6 January 2021.

The BBC, its lawyers wrote in court documents, is entitled to discover Trump’s “intention behind the speech and anything that bears on the impression his audience could have reasonably obtained in listening to the speech”, which includes whether Trump “gave it intentionally or otherwise; the breadth of the audience of the message and impression; and the extent of any resulting injury or harm”.

This is how a real news organization responds to bogus defamation claims.

The Good Guy Wins

Said good guy being Chuck Redd, who was just awarded $252,480 under an anti-SLAPP provision of DC law after the Kennedy Center sued him for canceling his Christmas concert.

They changed the name, and Redd canceled, so Trump's stooges sued him.

A superior court judge in Washington DC has ordered the Kennedy Center to pay more than $250,000 to a musician who canceled a performance at the arts center after the White House announced that Donald Trump’s name would be added to the venue.

Judge Tanya Jones Bosier ordered the Kennedy Center on Monday to pay $252,479.70 in legal fees and costs to attorneys for musician Chuck Redd within 45 days.

The Kennedy Center had sued Redd after he canceled a Christmas Eve concert at the venue. In June, the judge dismissed the Kennedy Center’s lawsuit and ruled in Redd’s favor under the district’s anti-Slapp statute, which is designed to protect people from lawsuits seeking to silence protected speech. Redd then requested that the court make the Kennedy Center reimburse him for the legal costs he incurred defending himself.

………

Redd’s decision to cancel came after the Kennedy Center’s Trump-controlled board voted to rename the institution “The Donald J Trump and The John F Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” Trump’s name was then added to the building’s facade and the center’s digital materials.

 

Well, That Was Quick

Less than 24 hours after being sworn in as US Attorney General, Todd Blanche  is already making a mockery of the law in order to shield Donald Trump.

Gee, hoocoodanode? 

It’s been less than 24 hours, and freshly sworn-in Attorney General Todd Blanche has already issued entirely new legal protections for President Donald Trump.

In a memo published Monday evening, just hours after Blanche’s swearing-in ceremony, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel argued that the president could claim executive privilege over communication between him and his “private advisers,” provided that the communications were confidential and related to his presidential “decisionmaking.”

The memo also seemed to expand executive privilege to apply to communications between the president’s “direct advisers” and civilians.

If the Democrats take back the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterm elections, this memo could have major implications for any investigation into the president and other top administration officials. Clearly, the Trump administration is preparing to stonewall Congress.

 This is a feature, not a bug.

A Fortunate Failure

The Trump administration has done its best to hamstring wind power.  Its primary tool for this is stopping required reviews of new wind farms by the Pentagon.

The courts are having none of it.

On Thursday, a US District Court in Oregon ordered the US government to restart the process of approving wind projects. All new wind development in the US has been on hold since August 2025, when the Department of Defense (DoD) stopped participating in a process that allows it to compel developers to alter projects in order to limit their interference with radar equipment. The court ruled, however, that the DoD’s national security claims did not allow it to opt out of a process that is legally mandated.

The Trump administration has made many attempts to block wind development, both offshore and land based. Its attempts to stop offshore wind included the same approach at issue in this case: Claim that drone developments mean that radar interference by wind turbines creates a national security risk. The courts were not sympathetic to this claim, including in cases where judges examined a classified report that the DoD was using to justify blocking offshore wind construction. As a result, the administration has turned to paying companies not to pursue wind development.

In parallel, the government was pursuing a similar approach for onshore wind. Here, a law lays out a process for the DoD to evaluate any problems posed by wind turbines and negotiate changes to planned wind farms with the developers. As laid out in the new decision, the government simply stopped participating in this process in August 2025, first by refusing to sign off on previously negotiated agreements, and later by refusing to draft agreements entirely. Eventually, it simply refused to participate in negotiations at all. This has brought a halt to all wind development in the US.

………

Nothing in that framework allows the DoD to simply stop participating in the process. “If DoD wishes to alter the statutory scheme, it can ask Congress to do so,” Immergut wrote. In the absence of congressional action, the DoD can’t simply ignore the law.

The ruling orders the DoD to resume the process of approving wind projects using the congressionally mandated schedule and to report back every 30 days on its progress.

 

Good 4th Amendment News

Following the Supreme Court ruling in Chatrie v. United States, which said that a geofence search  required a judicial warrant, a judge has ruled that tower dumps warrants are unconstitutional.

Five weeks after the Supreme Court struck down so-called geofence searches in its landmark Fourth Amendment decision in Chatrie v. United States, the ramifications for other broad law enforcement investigative techniques are coming into focus. On Wednesday, August 5, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves reaffirmed a magistrate judge’s ruling quashing federal law enforcement’s ability to obtain “tower dump” warrants.

Judge Reeves’ decision in the Southern District of Mississippi may signal a turning point in the post-Chatrie era against non individualized electronic searches. Both state and federal law enforcement authorities have commonly used tower dumps to pull large amounts of data from cell towers located near crime scenes. The data, which reveals the cell phones connected to a cell tower during a set time block, has historically allowed investigators to examine recurring cell numbers at multiple crime scenes.

Last year, investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives successfully used a tower dump to identify a man accused of a string of gun store robberies in Pennsylvania. This year, investigators asked a federal judge for approval to perform a tower dump while investigating vandalism at a Federal Aviation Administration facility in Vermont.

In the Mississippi case, FBI agents investigating a series of violent crimes committed in the Jackson area submitted four warrants for a magistrate judge’s approval in February 2025. The magistrate judge, however, denied the warrants, citing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision in United States v. Smith, pre-dating Chatrie, striking down geofence warrants. In March 2025, the government appealed the magistrate judge’s order to Judge Reeves.

This is the sort of search that the founders specifically opposed.  

These were called, "General Warrants," or, "Writs of Assistance."

Rat-F%$#er in Chief

Todd Blanch has been confirmed as US Attorney General by the Senate.

I'm pretty sure that he is going to be a lot worse than John Mitchell or William Barr.

One hopes that he suffers the fate of the former, jail time and disbarment, and not of the latter, no consequences and lucrative gigs.

Ha Ha!

The DC Court of Appeals has ruled that a lower court ruling blocking the construction of a White House ballroom will remain in effect.

Good.

President Trump cannot continue building the ballroom he planned as a replacement to the East Wing of the White House without explicit approval from Congress, a federal appeals court panel ruled on Friday.

The ruling, by judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, dealt a blow to Mr. Trump’s efforts to press ahead with the project and drew an angry rebuke from the president, who vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court. It upheld a lower court’s findings that no law or authority gave the president the power to raze and replace sections of the White House without congressional authorization.

The decision does not mean construction will halt immediately. The judges paused their ruling for 14 days to give the administration a chance to appeal. The lower court judge had similarly suspended his ruling to allow time for an appeal, and Mr. Trump has continued building uninterrupted, inviting reporters to tour the site and showcasing progress toward completion of the ballroom despite the court order.

………

“Each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence,” Judge Millett and Judge Garcia wrote. 

Indeed. 

 

I'm Calling Bullsh%$

So, Todd Blanche has announced that he will be canceling the Trump slush fund in order to get Republican votes for his nomination as US Attorney General, he also issued a related memo saying that the IRS amnesty will only apply to Trump, his businesses, and his immediate family.

Unsurprisingly, the Republicans have declared that this is enough.

Equally unsurprisingly, even though the one of the memos is signed by Todd Blanche. they mean nothing, because the "settlement" requires signatures from all parties to modify.

It's all bad legal theater. 

Texas Senator John Cornyn and North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis just caved to Donald Trump’s demands, paving the way for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to move toward a full Senate confirmation.

The two Republican holdouts announced Monday that they had reached a deal with the Justice Department that they claimed satisfied their aims to end Trump’s $1.8 “anti-weaponization” fund.

“We are pleased that the Department of Justice has issued a formal order terminating the anti-weaponization fund,” the outgoing lawmakers said in a joint statement. “Additionally, the Department has acknowledged in a binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury, addressing concerns that multiple of our Republican colleagues share.”

………

On its face, Blanche’s note appeared to terminate the fund, specifying that the order was “rescinded and shall have no force or effect.” However, journalists were quick to comment that the language employed in the rest of Blanche’s memo not only suggested that the honey pot fund would be preserved in some form, but also failed to terminate Trump’s underlying IRS immunity arrangement.

This makes Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper after selling out Czechoslovakia look like a profile in courage.

DoJ F%$#s Up Again

Their felony charge against David Hearn for touching the Washington, DC Reflecting Pool has been dropped, because it is obvious that the failure of the pool renovation, algae blooms and the coating peeling off, was as a result of piss poor execution by the by the Trump aligned contractor selected for the job.

Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.

In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining two feet square.

In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.” 

Imagine that? 

Where Can I Rent the World's Smallest Violin?

Because it looks like Todd Blanch's nomination to be US Attorney General likely not going to make it through the Judiciary Committee.

You have two Republican Senators demanding a written promise not to use the, "Weaponization fund,"
 nor preemptively pardon Trump and his family for Tax fraud.

As one of them is John Cornyn, and he lost the primary to Ken Paxton in large part because Trump endorsed the latter, and so has nothing to lose, I rather think that the nomination is as dead as the parrot in Monty Python's sketch. 

The Senate committee weighing Todd Blanche’s bid to become the next attorney general postponed a key vote on his nomination Wednesday, amid a standoff between the Trump administration and two Republican senators who have threatened to withhold their support.

The postponement was a high-profile setback for President Donald Trump, and a further indication that congressional Republicans are becoming more willing to stand up to him on key matters. It also leaves the fate of Blanche’s nomination uncertain after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced the vote’s deferral just hours before it was set to take place at a 9 a.m. Thursday hearing.

Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) had insisted that the Trump administration limit — in writing — central provisions of a controversial deal struck this spring between the Justice Department and the president to resolve a lawsuit he filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. DOJ was not able to provide the senators sufficient assurances to win their agreement to support Blanche.

The senators have said their votes for Blanche’s nomination hinge on their requested changes to the deal. A “no” vote from either one of them would be enough to sink Blanche’s nomination at the committee stage, given the expectation that all Judiciary Committee Democrats will oppose Blanche’s confirmation.

Hopefully, soon I will be able to say, "This nomination is no more, it has ceased to be." 

Googly-Eyed Chud Loses

In what is extremely unsurprising news, Kash Patel defamation lawsuit against Jim Stewartson for the latter calling him a "Googly Eyed Chud" has been thrown out of court.

And yes, the judge who issued the ruling used the phrase in the footnotes.

A federal judge Tuesday tossed FBI Director Kash Patel’s $10 million lawsuit against a blogger who called him a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch.”

In his final order, Nevada Chief District Judge Andrew Gordon dismissed Patel’s lawsuit against Jim Stewartson, finding that he did not have “personal jurisdiction” over the internet commentator.

………

In June 2023, Patel filed a complaint that Stewartson was smearing him online by calling him a “blatantly incompetent chud” and a “Kremlin asset” who plotted to “overthrow the government” on January 6, 2021.

Initially, Stewartson didn’t respond to the lawsuit, which led to Patel winning a $250,000 default judgment in August 2025. Stewartson challenged the default judgment on the grounds that he had no meaningful ties to Nevada, where the case was filed, and declared that Patel was a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” and, again, a “chud.”

Stewartson celebrated the final order, which referenced his comment in a footnote. “I’d like to commend the judge for including ‘googly-eyed Kremlin bitch’ in his ruling,” Stewartson wrote on X Tuesday.

 No sanctions against Patel or his legal team, which is a bit of a bummer though.

Bummer

A federal judge has stayed the Minnesota law banning predictions markets.

This is temporary, so Minnesoto might still prevail, but the injunction is disappointing.

The bookies Kalshi and Polymarket, along with the Trump DoJ claimed that these were swaps, not betting.

It's not a surprise that Trump is a big supporter of this sort of gambling.  He and his family are deep into the so-called "Prediction Markets",  Also, there is compelling evidence that members of his administration are using the markets to insider trade.

Corruption is as corruption does.

As I have noted for well over a decade, swaps are basically just betting, not insurance, which should have been banned via a legal framework dating back to the Marine Insurance Act of 1746, which prevented people from doing the equivalent of getting paid for burning down their neighbors house.

A federal judge on Monday blocked a Minnesota state law that would ban prediction markets days before it was set to go into effect, siding with a federal financial regulator and two companies that had sued to stop it.

In May, Minnesota became the first state to pass a law making it a felony for most prediction markets to locally operate and advertise. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency that oversees prediction markets, and the markets Kalshi and Polymarket sued, arguing that the platforms can be regulated only at the federal level.

On Monday, Judge Kate M. Menendez of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota granted a preliminary injunction to halt the law from going into effect on Saturday, finding that the companies faced a threat of irreparable harm. The law will remain on hold until a final ruling is made in the case.

………

The agency has faced criticism for making what appear to be favorable decisions for prediction markets with ties to the Trump family. Donald Trump Jr. advises Kalshi and Polymarket, and he backs Polymarket financially.

President Trump has posted on Truth Social that the agency, not states, must have “exclusive authority” over prediction markets.

 

Good News Everyone!

It looks like the Ellison nepo-baby will have to delay the takeover of Warner Brothers, because it was clear that if they were not to do so voluntarily, then the judge would have made it mandatory.

I'm not sure whether the State Attorneys General suing to stop the deal will prevail, it would have been a long shot a decade ago, but antitrust law has shifted a lot in the past 10 years,

Paramount said on Friday that it had agreed to halt its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery until next June at the latest while a judge considers a lawsuit from state attorneys general who sued to block the deal. The delay is the latest curveball in a deal that would remake Hollywood.

In a legal filing, Paramount and the state attorneys general said that they had reached an agreement to freeze the $111 billion merger while the case works its way through court, extending a shorter pause imposed this week by a federal judge in California. The merger agreement expires on June 4, 2027, if the deal has not closed by that date.

The delay could be costly for Paramount. The company, run by the tech scion David Ellison, has agreed to pay Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders a fee of $650 million for every quarter that the deal does not close, beginning in October.

(Emphasis mine)

Given that Oracle corporation, the source of his family's wealth via his father is now approaching junk bond status, this may end up being more than just a delay.

………

The coalition of 12 states led by California includes New York, Connecticut, Oregon and Arizona. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led the states, said in a statement that the delay was “great news for audiences.” Letitia James, the New York attorney general, called the freeze “a crucial victory” in a statement.

The deal would unite under one roof two major movie studios, the streaming services HBO Max and Paramount+ and networks including CBS and CNN. Mr. Ellison has aggressively pushed to acquire Warner Bros., ultimately outbidding Netflix after proposing a handful of escalating offers.

The deal was already a big bet for David Ellison, his partners at RedBird Capital and his father, Larry Ellison, who personally guaranteed the acquisition. The combined company is expected to carry about $80 billion in debt, a daunting burden for the younger Mr. Ellison. Now, with the delay potentially triggering hundreds of millions of dollars in additional fees, the deal could become even less attractive.

I dunno, the deal is pretty f%$#ing ugly right now.

The merits of the deal are monopoly rents and currying political favor with Trump and his Evil Minions™.

This deal is pretty horrible for the rest of us.

Here is hoping that Oracle ends up in receivership before the deal goes through. 

Headline of the Day

Penis Costume Protester Prevails in Court

—Courthouse News Service

Yeah, I know this is from April, I was doing some bloggy house cleaning, and came across it again.

One could call it a, ahem, hard case. But ultimately, an Alabama judge found, not hard enough.

Fairhope Municipal Judge Haymes Snedeker acquitted Renea Gamble Wednesday of all remaining misdemeanor charges stemming from her decision to wear a inflatable 7-foot penis costume at an anti-Trump “No Kings” protest in October 2025.

Gamble walked out of the courtroom after three hours of testimony cleared of any wrongdoing, but her attorney said her arrest was traumatizing and she may consider legal recourse.

Seriously, in a nation of truck nuts, how is this an arrestable offense? 

Speaking of Defamation Lawsuits

The Guardian has just had the defamation suit filed against it by United Healthcare dismissed.

The judge determined that the story that the paper reported, that UHC was bribing nursing homes to decrease transfers to hospitals, was true, and truth is always a defense against defamation. 

A state judge in Delaware has dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought against the Guardian by the UnitedHealth Group.

Delaware superior court judge Calvin Scott’s ruling stemmed from a lawsuit that the US’s largest health insurance conglomerate pursued against the Guardian in May 2025 over an investigation by the outlet which reported that UnitedHealth secretly made payments to nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers for residents.

………

In a ruling issued on Monday, Scott granted the Guardian’s motion to dismiss. And he dismissed all six defamation claims in the lawsuit.

“The article’s reporting of the bonuses as ‘secret’ or made ‘secretly’ or ‘quietly,’ is substantially true,” Scott wrote in one part of the ruling.

In another part, he added that the Guardian “is not required to publish facts just because United would have preferred more favorable facts”.

Yeah, there's a reason that UHC is the most widely loathed health insurance company in America.

Pass the Popcorn

The BBC has secured an order requiring that Donald Trump provide detailed information about his businesses for his defamation lawsuit.

This is a no-brainer from a legal perspective.  In addition to the requirement that the statements be false (absence of malice for public figures), but it also requires a showing of harm.

In this case, in addition demonstrating harm to the delicate feelings of snowflake Trump, this means that Trump has to demonstrate real and measurable financial harms.

Donald Trump must divulge detailed financial information from his many businesses as part of his $10bn defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation, a federal judge ruled during a discovery hearing on Tuesday, according to news reports.

The ruling by US magistrate judge Enjoliqué Lett could open a unique window into the hundreds of businesses owned by Trump’s family trust. It also highlights a potential drawback for Trump’s strategy of bludgeoning critical media with multibillion-dollar lawsuits.

Trump filed a defamation lawsuit late last year seeking $10bn in damages over a 2024 documentary called “Trump, A Second Chance,” which features a scene of the speech he made before his supporters attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. The scene splices lines together to make it appear that Trump directly urged his supporters to attack. The BBC apologized to Trump last year for the misleading edit, but has argued the president’s defamation claims have no merit.

………

Trump’s lawyers are also trying to dodge the forced release of his financial records by limiting the scope of the lawsuit. Alejandro Brito, a Trump lawyer, told Lett on Tuesday that he intends to amend the current complaint, according to Politico. The amended complaint will say the documentary only caused reputational damage, rather than undermining his businesses, making the financial disclosures unnecessary.

But for now, the BBC can move forward with requests for Trump’s financial records. The BBC aims to argue that Trump’s wealth skyrocketed since the documentary aired, contradicting the claim that the documentary undermined his businesses.

I am thinking that if the BBC gets this data and looks into it thoroughly, they should find some convincing data of self-dealing and bribery.

If they find such evidence, they should report on it. 

How About Adding a Few Zeros?

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch has been threatened with $1,000.00/day in fines for refusing to comply with an order for him to produce document for Journalist and Lawyer Katie Phang's lawsuit for a more complete release of the Epstein files.

Good.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is begging a federal judge to let him off the hook for a $1,000-a-day fine.

This fine is Blanche’s latest setback in a series of back-and-forths surrounding a lawsuit brought against him by journalist Katie Phang, who has accused the Department of Justice of failing to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Phang sued the DOJ in April for a “brazen, shocking, and ongoing violation” of the law, which President Donald Trump reluctantly signed in November.

Despite the Justice Department’s repeated assertions that the investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and subsequent release of files has been conducted with “an unprecedented commitment to transparency,” millions of files are still either missing or redacted.

In June, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ordered Blanche to produce previously redacted materials from the Epstein files, including FBI notes from interviews with a woman alleging that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when she was 13 years old, as well as email exchanges with Epstein regarding a “torture video” and the identities of Epstein’s potential co-conspirators.

Sullivan gave Blanche until July 2 to produce the materials. When the acting attorney general failed to do so, Phang suggested a daily $1,000 fine until he complied.

Fine him, and then go in and take the gold from his teeth. 

It's Only 14 Days, But

I am heartened that federal district judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín has issued a 2 week injunction against the Paramont-Warner merger.

The only way this deal makes sense is through the extraction of monopoly rents, and they need those rents sooner rather than later.

With nepo-baby David Ellison's Paramount Skydance Corporation being largely dependent on his dad's Oracle wealth, and given that Oracle bonds are rapidly approaching junk bond status, any delay in the deal could both kill the deal and Paramount Skydance.

A federal judge on Monday ordered Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery to halt their $81bn merger for at least two weeks, allowing states that are challenging the deal more time to see their case through in court.

Twelve states, led by California, sued to block Paramount’s pending buyout of Warner last week – alleging that such a combination would “extinguish competition” in Hollywood and lead to fewer choices for consumers, particularly moviegoers and cable customers across the US.

The states’ top prosecutors called on Warner and Paramount to not close the transaction until after a court had time to “fully evaluate” their claims. And when the companies refused, they filed for a temporary restraining order – which is what district judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted on Monday. That opens the door to a potential preliminary injunction that the states are also seeking to effectively block the deal.

………

The temporary restraining order granted on Monday halts the deal from progressing for at least 14 days, although the pause could be extended for up to 28 days. The court has set 3 August as a date for a hearing on the states’ preliminary injunction motion, although that schedule could also be pushed back.

This does not appear to be anything more than a delay to allow for evidence to be presented and evaluated, but 14 days is better than no days.

They Will Never See the Inside of a British Jail

Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate were arrested in Florida in response to an extradition request from the U.K. for rape and human trafficking.

I do not think that they will be extradited, at least not while Donald Trump in office.

Not only are they friends of the Trump friendly, particularly Barron Trump, but rape friendly obnoxious white dudes is Trump's base.

Andrew and Tristan Tate, prominent influencers in the so-called manosphere, were arrested by federal marshals in Miami on Saturday in connection with new criminal charges of rape and sex trafficking in England, U.S. and British law enforcement officials said.

Prosecutors in Britain said that they were seeking the brothers’ extradition.

The Tates, who have British and American citizenship, were detained “pending ongoing legal proceedings,” according to a statement from the police in Bedfordshire, a county north of London.

British prosecutors had previously charged the brothers with rape, human trafficking and sexual assault. The new charges stem from alleged offenses involving four women that took place between July 2010 and August 2017, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said in a statement on Sunday after the arrests.

British prosecutors said the new charges against Andrew Tate, 39, include seven counts of rape; three counts of sex trafficking; three counts of assault; and 19 more charges relating to sexual images of children and “extreme pornography.”

………

The brothers, who have cultivated a large following of young men by preaching brazen masculinity and have made a fortune from online pornography, have faced criminal investigations in three countries.

In Romania, where the Tates previously lived, prosecutors have been investigating allegations that they coerced dozens of women, including a 17-year-old girl, into pornography. They have also investigated Andrew Tate over allegations that he raped one of the women and had sex with a 15-year-old.

Romanian prosecutors had barred the brothers from leaving the country while investigations there continue, but last year they agreed to lift the travel restrictions. The move was the culmination of a yearslong effort by Andrew Tate to forge alliances with President Trump’s advisers and family members, a Times investigation found.

………

Since the travel restrictions against them in Romania were lifted, the brothers have resumed their jet-setting lifestyle, though they have not returned to Britain. Andrew Tate had been advertised as a co-host for a bare-knuckle boxing event on Saturday night in downtown Miami.

Their arrest on Saturday signaled active efforts by British authorities to extradite the brothers, even without a clear resolution to the cases in Romania.

The whole MAGA-sphere is made up of the worst people in the world.

Now Indict Them

Federal law enforcement is finally sharing data from the Good and Pretti murders with Minnesota law enforcement.

Good.  No go forth and indict the bastards. 

Months of effort between Minnesota’s state and federal law enforcement agencies led the Justice Department to turn over a substantial amount of evidence from the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during Operation Metro Surge, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said Monday.

The evidence, which was exchanged with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) over the last two weeks without public acknowledgment by the federal government or Minnesota law enforcement officials, includes the SUV that Good was driving when she was shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross. It also includes hard drives of federal evidence like body camera footage and statements from immigration enforcement agents about the killings.

At a news conference, Moriarty said the new information will allow state investigators to be more thorough in determining whether or not to charge federal agents with crimes in connection with the killings.