VP JD Vance announced the referral of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison to the DOJ for criminal investigation over alleged fraud.
Vice President Vance said Monday that the recent result of the Los Angeles mayoral election primary appeared “pretty shady to me,” with two Democrats set to face off in November. “The problem here with this whole thing is, how is it that you had, you know, Karen Bass was in first place, Spencer Pratt was…
The president is using the slow count of mail ballots in California to renew his effort to cast doubt on election outcomes he doesn’t like, despite a lack of evidence of any widespread fraud.
President Trump’s favored candidate to become Los Angeles mayor looks like he won’t even make the runoff — a reality that has provoked a barrage of unsubstantiated claims of fraud from the commander in chief. Votes are still being counted in the nation’s second-largest city, where a high proportion of ballots are customarily cast by…
Trump administration officials earlier this year killed a federal criminal investigation into the coal empire owned by Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia and a close ally of the president’s.The investigation examined potential criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by the multistate mining operations largely run by Justice’s son, Jay, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.The criminal probe was a significant escalation in the yearslong effort to police serial pollution offenses by Virginia-based Southern Coal and dozens of affiliated mining operations controlled by the family. In the past decade, Southern Coal and other Justice corporations have racked up tens of thousands of alleged violations of the Clean Water Act and have been sued repeatedly by state and federal prosecutors over their failure to properly follow environmental laws at their mining sites.The investigation shuttered by the Trump administration was a joint effort by prosecutors and investigators with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Virginia to probe whether the incessant violations of antipollution laws had risen to the level of criminal behavior, people familiar with the matter said.People familiar with the investigation told ProPublica that prosecutors believed they had a strong case. They initially had the blessing of Robert Tracci, President Donald Trump’s top official in the Western District of Virginia, to move forward.But in recent months, as prosecutors battled the Justice companies in court over subpoenas for records, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General shut down the probe. At the time, Todd Blanche still headed the office, before assuming the role of acting attorney general in April.“They were told ‘pencils down,’” a person familiar with the investigation said.That prosecutors were even conducting a criminal investigation is noteworthy, people said, because the DOJ only charges a dozen or so criminal Clean Water Act cases each year. It is rare for top DOJ officials to derail a criminal investigation initiated by career officials at such an early stage, people familiar with the case said.“I’ve never heard of that happening before,” said former federal prosecutor Rick Mountcastle, speaking generally about DOJ protocols. Mountcastle spent 24 years as a prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia. “There shouldn’t be some sort of untouchables list of people who are immune from enforcement.”The move is part of a pattern of behavior at the top echelons of the DOJ to push cases against Trump’s political adversaries and ease up on allies.Environmental enforcement against large polluters has plunged under the second Trump administration. Just days after inauguration, the administration reassigned top career environmental lawyers at the DOJ, including those overseeing the Southern Coal case, to work on the president’s immigration crackdown. At the beginning of the year, Blanche personally ordered prosecutors to stand down from cases against diesel emissions cheating.Steven Ruby, an attorney for the Justice companies, said they became aware of the criminal investigation earlier this year.“Ultimately the finding of the inquiry by the government was that there wasn’t any evidence to pursue criminal charges,” Ruby said. “There’s never been any intentional wrongdoing by the companies.”While objecting to the subpoenas in court, the company simultaneously convinced the DOJ to drop the case, he said.“The Justice companies — because Sen. Justice has been governor and because he’s now a senator — are singled out and put under a microscope, and there’s news coverage of violations and consent decrees and compliance actions,” Ruby said. “But the fact of the matter is that those kinds of issues exist throughout the industry.”Current and former government officials familiar with the companies’ environmental record called them routine bad actors. Spokespeople for the EPA and the Western District of Virginia referred questions to the DOJ. Justice’s senate office did not respond to questions.“There is no case to be made here for a criminal investigation,” Emily Covington, a DOJ spokeswoman, said in an email. “Any career prosecutor who would paint a criminal case as strong is simply a deep state prosecutor continuing to push the priorities of the Biden administration.”The deputy attorney general’s office is routinely involved with reviewing cases, she added. The office determined that this case was not consistent with the Trump administration’s priorities, she continued, and it was more appropriate to resolve it through the less punitive civil process. “The bottom line is that this was a politically motivated prosecution for a case that can and should be resolved civilly,” she wrote.The Justice family runs a sprawling coal mining enterprise that extends across the South.
Trump administration officials earlier this year killed a federal criminal investigation into the coal empire owned by Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia and a close ally of the president’s.The investigation examined potential criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by the multistate mining operations largely run by Justice’s son, Jay, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.The criminal probe was a significant escalation in the yearslong effort to police serial pollution offenses by Virginia-based Southern Coal and dozens of affiliated mining operations controlled by the family. In the past decade, Southern Coal and other Justice corporations have racked up tens of thousands of alleged violations of the Clean Water Act and have been sued repeatedly by state and federal prosecutors over their failure to properly follow environmental laws at their mining sites.The investigation shuttered by the Trump administration was a joint effort by prosecutors and investigators with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Virginia to probe whether the incessant violations of antipollution laws had risen to the level of criminal behavior, people familiar with the matter said.People familiar with the investigation told ProPublica that prosecutors believed they had a strong case. They initially had the blessing of Robert Tracci, President Donald Trump’s top official in the Western District of Virginia, to move forward.But in recent months, as prosecutors battled the Justice companies in court over subpoenas for records, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General shut down the probe. At the time, Todd Blanche still headed the office, before assuming the role of acting attorney general in April.“They were told ‘pencils down,’” a person familiar with the investigation said.That prosecutors were even conducting a criminal investigation is noteworthy, people said, because the DOJ only charges a dozen or so criminal Clean Water Act cases each year. It is rare for top DOJ officials to derail a criminal investigation initiated by career officials at such an early stage, people familiar with the case said.“I’ve never heard of that happening before,” said former federal prosecutor Rick Mountcastle, speaking generally about DOJ protocols. Mountcastle spent 24 years as a prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia. “There shouldn’t be some sort of untouchables list of people who are immune from enforcement.”The move is part of a pattern of behavior at the top echelons of the DOJ to push cases against Trump’s political adversaries and ease up on allies.Environmental enforcement against large polluters has plunged under the second Trump administration. Just days after inauguration, the administration reassigned top career environmental lawyers at the DOJ, including those overseeing the Southern Coal case, to work on the president’s immigration crackdown. At the beginning of the year, Blanche personally ordered prosecutors to stand down from cases against diesel emissions cheating.Steven Ruby, an attorney for the Justice companies, said they became aware of the criminal investigation earlier this year.“Ultimately the finding of the inquiry by the government was that there wasn’t any evidence to pursue criminal charges,” Ruby said. “There’s never been any intentional wrongdoing by the companies.”While objecting to the subpoenas in court, the company simultaneously convinced the DOJ to drop the case, he said.“The Justice companies — because Sen. Justice has been governor and because he’s now a senator — are singled out and put under a microscope, and there’s news coverage of violations and consent decrees and compliance actions,” Ruby said. “But the fact of the matter is that those kinds of issues exist throughout the industry.”Current and former government officials familiar with the companies’ environmental record called them routine bad actors.Spokespeople for the EPA and the Western District of Virginia referred questions to the DOJ. Justice’s senate office did not respond to questions.“There is no case to be made here for a criminal investigation,” Emily Covington, a DOJ spokeswoman, said in an email. “Any career prosecutor who would paint a criminal case as strong is simply a deep state prosecutor continuing to push the priorities of the Biden administration.”The deputy attorney general’s office is routinely involved with reviewing cases, she added. The office determined that this case was not consistent with the Trump administration’s priorities, she continued, and it was more appropriate to resolve it through the less punitive civil process. “The bottom line is that this was a politically motivated prosecution for a case that can and should be resolved civilly,” she wrote.The Justice family runs a sprawling coal mining enterprise that extends across the South.
An examination of voter rolls from every county in New Jersey has revealed that many noncitizens had been registered as Democrats despite not being allowed to vote […]
A former New Mexico attorney general is speaking out about how federal prosecutors shut down his state investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's sprawling New Mexico ranch — a property where survivors allege rape, sex trafficking, forced births, and possibly worse.Hector Balderas, a Democrat who served as New Mexico's attorney general from 2015 to 2023, told Scripps News he was deep into building a state case against Epstein in 2019 — and had just returned from interviewing a survivor — when the Southern District of New York called."They were concerned that we were getting parallel interviews from the same survivors they were going to use in an aggressive prosecution as well," Balderas said.He paused the state probe, he said, after then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey promised the DOJ would share evidence and allow New Mexico to pursue state charges later. Neither happened. Federal investigators never executed a search warrant on the property."I think that they absolutely impacted our case, and I don't think that they were forthright, and I don't [think] they were operating in good faith," Balderas said.Now he wishes he'd pressed on alone."We would have absolutely gone alone and bet on the case that we currently had at the time," he said.The stakes couldn't be higher. At least 10 girls and young women have alleged they were groomed or assaulted at Zorro Ranch, Epstein's remote compound about 40 miles south of Santa Fe. Allegations tied to the property include rape, sexual assault of minors, forced births, and eugenics. An anonymous 2019 tip — which the FBI didn't enter into its system until 2021 — claimed the bodies of two foreign girls were buried on the grounds on orders from Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. That tip never reached Balderas' office."I'm very angry," Balderas said. "They didn't meet the standard of what a good prosecution team should be working and collaborating with other partners."The ranch has never been searched by federal authorities, though New Mexico state investigators conducted their own search of the property in March. New Mexico reopened its criminal investigation this year after the DOJ released millions of Epstein-related files. A bipartisan legislative Truth Commission announced last week it is issuing 14 subpoenas targeting the Epstein estate, banks, and other entities tied to the late sex offender.Balderas says the answers aren't in what's already been made public."I'm convinced that those answers are not in the documents that have been released," he said. "But they're in the millions of documents that are currently being withheld."
President Donald Trump officially nominated Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to the Attorney General position on Monday, a move that many political analysts expected yet were outraged by anyway. Blanche, Trump's former defense attorney, has been at the center of several scandals in the Trump administration. For instance, he interviewed convicted sex criminal Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of Jeffrey Epstein, for nine hours before approving her transfer to a minimum security facility. Blanche has also been combative with lawmakers during hearings about the Department of Justice's release of the Epstein files. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, confirmed in a statement to Punchbowl News that he received Blanche's nomination. He also described Blanche as "well-qualified."Blanche's nomination sparked a firestorm on social media. "Todd Blanche botched the release of the Epstein Files," Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC) posted on X. "Of course Trump wants to give him a promotion. Blanche - Trump's former personal attorney - helped create Trump's slush fund, prosecuted his enemies, and turned a blind eye to blatant corruption. He is Trump’s lawyer - not the people’s lawyer. He's wholly unfit to be AG.""Great. Someone else who has no regard for the law," Steve Andrews, a retired investigative reporter, posted on X. "Todd Blanche doesn't work for the American people," Xavier Becerra, a Democratic candidate for California Governor, posted on X. "He works for one man. He weaponized the DOJ to go after Trump's enemies. He created a slush fund for Trump's allies. He botched the Epstein files. He turned the nation's top law enforcement office into a personal favor factory. The Senate must reject this nomination.""For as long as he’s been at the DOJ, Todd Blanche has proven that he’s more than happy to corrupt our justice system on behalf of one man - and cover up the crimes of many in the Epstein files," Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) posted on X. "It’s no surprise that Trump wants his 'former' personal attorney as OUR attorney general."