Day 1248: "Blatantly unconstitutional."

WTF Just Happened Today

Thursday, June 20, 2024

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1/ The judge overseeing convicted felon Trump’s trial involving “willful retention” of classified documents in violation of the Espionage Act refused to hand off the case to a more experienced judge despite two more senior colleagues on the federal bench in Florida urging her to do so. Two judges called Judge Aileen Cannon shortly after she took on the case. The first told her the case would be better handled by a jurist closer to Miami’s busiest courthouse, which had a secure facility approved to hold the sort of highly classified information that might be used in the case. The second call came from Cecilia Altonaga, the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, who told Cannon the optics of her overseeing the trial would be bad. Cannon presided over the legal battle between the Justice Department and Trump’s lawyers regarding the classified documents that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago. Although Cannon granted Trump’s request to temporarily block federal investigators from using documents with classified markings and appoint a “special master” to review all 11,000 documents, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals twice reversed her decisions. Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, has little trial experience and has indefinitely postponed the trial and declined to set a date for it to begin even though both the prosecution and the defense said they’re ready to start. Should Trump win the presidential election in November, he could order the Justice Department to drop the case. Trump faces 40 federal charges for keeping classified government documents at Mar-a-Lago and then obstructing government efforts to retrieve them. (New York Times / CNN / Daily Beast / Axios)

2/ The Supreme Court upheld a Trump-era tax on overseas investments. At issue was whether the government could levy a one-time tax on investment proceeds that had not been received, or realized, as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Charles and Kathleen Moore challenged their $15,000 tax bill related to an investment in an India-based company, arguing that there was no income to tax because they had received no payments or dividends from the company. They maintained that the tax was in violation the 16th Amendment, which authorizes Congress to collect taxes on income. The ruling ended a lawsuit that many experts feared could destabilize the nation’s tax system. By preserving the current income tax structure, it avoided the fiscal chaos that analysts and economists had warned about. (NPR / CNN / Associated Press / New York Times / Politico / Washington Post / NBC News)

3/ Louisiana’s Republican Governor signed legislation requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroomVisit WTF Just Happened Today? for more news and headlines, brought to you by Matt Kiser. The WTFJHT Podcast is narrated and produced by Joe Amditis.