An escaped inmate in Pennsylvania has been accused of sending anthrax threats to President Joe Biden and the chairman of the Jan. 6 committee.
Robert Maverick Vargo, who ran off from a cleanup detail in July while awaiting trial on burglary, weapons and other counts, was charged with making threats against the president and a federal official from Luzerne County Correctional Center in Wilkes-Barre, where he's being held after he was recaptured, reported NBC News.
Federal prosecutors said Vargo sent letters "alluding to 'anthrax'" to the president, Scranton-based U.S. District Court judge Robert Mariani and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) with a reference to the lawmaker's role heading the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Capitol police said the letter alluding to anthrax contained a white powder, but they determined it posed no public health threat.
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The 25-year-old Vargo and his girlfriend were picked up near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, a few days after he took off from the work detail, and he pleaded guilty Friday to an escape charge and will be sentenced on that count Dec. 27.
Donald Trump's lawyers motioned for a summary judgment in the E. Jean Carroll case. If approved, it would mean that the judge would look at nothing more than the evidence presented and the statements given and make a ruling based on that.
In a new filing on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan denied Trump's motion.
"The contrasts between Mr. Trump’s assertions in his Carroll I answer and his October 12 statement show that a reasonable juror could find that his statement had a different effect on a reader than his denials and affirmative defense in his answer," the judge wrote. "For one, 'a reasonable juror could find that [Mr.] Trump was complaining of a far broader and more corrosive conspiracy than anything that was at issue in Carroll I in October 2022,' including based on his statements that Ms. Carroll 'completely made up a story' that is a 'Hoax' and 'changed her story from beginning to end [(in an interview where she was promoting her book)]. .. to suit the purposes of CNN and And [erson] Cooper,' along with his comments about the judiciary and Ms. Carroll's counsel."
The judge explained that the court doesn't decide whether Trump's statement is or isn't "fair and true."
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The Court need not and does not now decide the ultimate issue of whether Mr. Trump's statement is or is not a "fair and true."
"It suffices for the purpose of denying summary judgment that a reasonable jury could find so as a matter of fact. For the foregoing reasons, Mr. Trump's motion for partial summary judgment is denied," the 22-page document closes.
Former President Donald Trump has developed a favorite new joke on the campaign trail: that his followers hate their kids. And while it's largely tongue-in-cheek, it's coming from a real place, and an understanding Trump has about the tension in his supporters' families, wrote Philip Bump for The Washington Post on Tuesday.
One of the most recent instances of Trump dropping this joke was during a video in which he was touting his 2017 tax bill's provision doubling the exemption for the estate tax.
“Some day, it’ll become time for [farmers] to leave this beautiful earth, and they’ll be able to leave their farm, without taxes, to their children. I got rid of the ‘death tax’ on farms so that when you do pass away, on the assumption that you love your children, you can leave it to them and they won’t have to pay tax," said Trump in the clip. “But if you don’t love your children so much,” he continued, “and there are some people that don’t — and maybe deservedly so — it won’t matter, because, frankly, you don’t have to leave them anything. Thank you very much. Have fun.”
"On the surface, the explanation is simple," wrote Bump. "Trump is trying to make a joke that doesn’t land when offered emotionlessly into a camera. But there’s something deeper here, too: Trump understands, if only intuitively, how much anxiety his base feels about younger Americans, including those to whom they happen to be related."
A generation gap has been growing for years in American politics. Generation Z and Millennial voters both lean firmly Democratic, with no indication of this trend weakening, while Baby Boomer and particularly Generation X voters are just as firmly Republican. "A lot of Trump supporters really are wary of their own kids and grandchildren," wrote Bump. "The roots of Trumpism extend back to the election of Barack Obama in 2008." The gap between younger and older voters was 42 points in that election. Further, these older voters were aghast at their kids' and grandkids' support for a president whom Fox News told them was a "socialist" — an anxiety Trump seized on to get elected himself.
"Trump’s comments about unloved kids was mostly a bad joke. But it did get at something deeper, too, a sense that younger Americans might 'deservedly' be unloved by their parents. Maybe your kids are Democrats who voted for Joe Biden. Do you want to give them your farm?" concluded Bump. "The response here is simple: Those kids probably don’t want the farm anyway."
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A congressman seeking a classified diplomatic message in connection with the messy 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan subpoenaed Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the cable on Tuesday, Axios reports.
House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas) is leading a House Republican in a dispute with the State Department over the cable, which warned of Kabul’s potential collapse if American troops withdrew, the report said. The State Department cites protecting the sanctity of its secret “dissent channel” as the reason for its refusal to provide the cable.
Although the pursuit of the cable is being led by Republicans, Democrats consider the inquiry to be a serious endeavor, the report said.
Concerned diplomats in Kabul sent the cable to Washington three months after the Biden administration announced withdrawal plans and less than a month before Kabul’s collapse, the report said.
“We have made multiple good faith attempts to find common ground," McCaul said, according to the report.
"Unfortunately, Secretary Blinken has refused to provide the dissent cable and his response to the cable, forcing me to issue my first subpoena as chairman of this committee."
A State Department spokesperson said in a statement the department “followed up with the committee to reiterate its willingness to provide a briefing about the concerns raised and the challenges identified by Embassy Kabul, including in the dissent channel," the report said.
“The committee chose instead to issue a subpoena.”
If the State Department fails to comply with the subpoena, the House panel could request a full House vote requesting a federal court order to enforce it, the report said.
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