BBC host Steve Coogan, like much of the United Kingdom, was not pleased to learn that the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World newspaper had been hacking into cellphone voice mail systems for years and exploiting what they found there for news material.
"You're morally bankrupt!" Coogan told former News deputy features editor Paul McMullan on "Newsnight." Watch below.
Originally aired July 8 on BBC. Embedded via Mediaite.
Sworn testimony given by Donald Trump two decades ago could undermine his defense if he's hit with charges related to the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.
Trump submitted a sworn affidavit in 2000 to the Federal Election Commission demonstrating a complex understanding of the campaign finance laws that Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. seems to believe he broke, after he was asked to testify about contributions made to failed U.S. Senate candidate William Gormley, reported The Daily Beast.
“I neither reimbursed, nor caused any other person to reimburse, any employee of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, Inc. or its subsidiaries for his or her contribution to Gormley for Senate,” Trump wrote at the time.
The FEC was at the time investigating a fundraising event Trump hosted for the Republican candidate, and Trump made a sworn statement that he had acted “solely in my individual capacity," and not as a corporate official, and “took no action, of any nature, kind or description, to compel or pressure any employee” to make a donation.
READ MORE: Fox News producer's 'explosive' new lawsuit upends its Dominion defense
That case forced Trump to express a fairly sophisticated understanding of campaign finance laws, and showed he was quite familiar with the boundaries that constrain corporations and third parties from making in-kind contributions to candidates for federal office.
More than 20 years later, the ex-president is accused of directing his former attorney Michael Cohen to pay the adult film actress $130,000 to keep her claims about an affair out of the press before the 2016 election and reimbursing him through the Trump Organization in monthly payments falsely recorded as "legal expenses."
Trump, ironically enough, could have given as much as he wanted to his own campaign, but personally paying off Daniels would have revealed the alleged affair to the public in the days after he "Access Hollywood" recording nearly sunk his campaign at the finish line.
“Initially Michael Cohen paid Daniels, then the Trump Org reimbursed him. At that point, the Trump Org became a contributor to the Trump campaign, which corporations are prohibited from doing,” said election law expert Paul S. Ryan, who filed an FEC complaint in 2018 about the arrangement. “These payments would not have been made but for the election, and were only made as the election drew near, right on the heels of the leaked 'Access Hollywood' audio."
At the end of her Monday night show, Rachel Maddow welcomed Georgia lawyer Michael Moore to address the way in which Republicans in his state have been willing to change the laws just to protect Donald Trump from being indicted.
Fulton County has been at work for a year over those that attempted to overthrow the 2020 election in the state. While the grand jury operated for quite a while, only recently did Republicans figure out a way to act. The law hasn't been signed by Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) yet, but the GOP legislators are already demanding that the Fulton County D.A. be fired.
"I really think they picked a boxing match with a ghost," said Moore. "There is not much that can be said about special grand jury reports. Remember, we don't use special grand juries very often in this state. We have to use criminal garages. The special grand jury allowed the district attorney to use subpoena power to bring reluctant witnesses in to talk to them to find out what was going on. But she didn't have to do it. And so, essentially, the motion today says, well, let's make her throw that report in the trash can. She can throw it in the trash can. She is not bound by it. It is no more a recommendation any more than it was written on a sticky note and stuck on her office door. She doesn't have to do anything that the special grand jury recommended. In fact, she has complete discretion to look at the facts, to look at the law, to make decisions about which individuals she may want to bring charges against. And on what offenses."
He said that there would be a lot more coming out of the case, including more pre-trial motions.
"Again, they sort of filed something meaningless," said Moore. "And when they fall back and want to talk about vagueness and the constitutional provisions and that the law is not very clear, and maybe it was abused, they're really taking a shot hoping that maybe they'll catch some appellate judge's ear somewhere. I don't see much to come from it."
At the hand-off from Maddow to Lawrence O'Donnell, the former said that Moore "goes off like a flame thrower" about the new Georgia law. When Maddow asked Moore about it, he called it "shameful."
"But think about the history of what the Republican legislature has done," said Moore. "I mean, when the lines for voting got too long, what did they do? hey passed a law that said people waiting in line couldn't be given a drink of water. When the ballots got swept away that let them win the election, they passed a law that maybe we're going to appoint our own special elections, which is ironic given Republicans are typically for local control. They decide where they would be able to take over the boards of election. So, now when there is a prosecution, and they lost an election, there is a prosecution and investigation into the possible theft of that election, they're passing a law that says we don't like the outcome of that, so we may want to take that over too with another prosecutor."
He called it "racist," but not because a Black female prosecutor is the one being targeted with it. He called it racist because it's minimizing and decreasing the influence of minority voters in the state and refusing to allow them any power through their votes.
"And so I guess they're making the decision somehow that those voters can't select their own prosecutors. The district attorneys are constitutionally elected officers. They have discretion in what they're going to do. I do notice that it's interesting that the legislature has yet to pass a law that I'm aware of that says if we think some legislature is not doing what they should do, that we can remove them quite as easily as they want."
Meanwhile, there are people in Georgia with actual problems that the legislature is ignoring, he said.
See the video below or at the link here.
Georgia lawyer 'goes off like a flame thrower' on new law to remove prosecutors the GOP doesn't like www.youtube.com
France's top administrative court on Monday ordered the government to ban fishing in parts of the Atlantic to protect dolphins which have washed up dead in their hundreds.
The move by the State Council, the highest court in government matters, comes days after an oceanographic institute reported that at least 910 dolphins had washed up on France's Atlantic coast since the start of the winter.
Over a single week, more than 400 of the marine mammals were found stranded along the coast, an "unprecedented" number, the Pelagis oceanographic observatory based in the western city of La Rochelle said in a report on Friday.
Several environmental NGOs, including Sea Shepherd, had filed a legal complaint against the government over the dolphin and porpoise deaths. They said it was not doing enough to protect the species, which are in danger of disappearing from parts of the Bay of Biscay along the Atlantic coast.
The marine conservation organization Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) displays Six dead dolphins during a demonstration
Most of the dolphins found showed injuries consistent with being caught in nets, other fishing equipment or boat engines.
Many died in February and March, when dolphins usually move closer to the coast looking for food and are more likely to come in contact with fishing operations.
The French government has so far held back from imposing fishing bans, opting instead for solutions mitigating the impact of industrial fishing on dolphins, such as onboard cameras or loud sound equipment to drive the dolphins away.
But the State Council ruled on Monday that instruments of "acoustic deterrence" on fishing boats "do not guarantee a favourable state of conservation for small cetacean species" including dolphins and porpoises.
Both species were threatened with extinction, "at least regionally", it said.
The court gave the government six months to establish the no-fishing zones, and also told it to boost the monitoring of accidental capture of dolphins which it said was still too approximate.
(AFP)
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