Dispatches

 APPEALS COURT UPHOLDS E. JEAN CARROLL’S $83 MILLION DEFAMATION WIN AGAINST TRUMP. A federal appeals court upheld a civil jury’s finding that Donald Trump must pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for his repeated social media attacks against the longtime advice columnist after she accused him of sexual assault, the Associated Press reported (9/8).

In a ruling issued Sept. 8, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Trump’s appeal of the defamation award, finding that the “jury’s damages awards are fair and reasonable.”

Trump had argued that he should not have to pay the sum as a result of a Supreme Court decision expanding presidential immunity. His lawyers had asked for a new trial.

A civil jury in Manhattan issued the $88.3 million award last year following a trial that centered on Trump’s repeated social media attacks against Carroll over her claims that he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store in 1996.

That award followed a separate trial, in which Trump was found liable for sexually abusing Carroll and ordered to pay $5 million. An appeals court upheld that award last December.

In a memoir, and again at a 2023 trial, Carroll described how a chance encounter with Trump at Bergdorf Goodman’s Fifth Avenue in 1996 started with the two flirting as they shopped, then ended with a violent struggle inside a dressing room.

Carroll said Trump slammed her against a dressing room wall, pulled down her tights and forced himself on her.

A jury found Trump liable for sexual assault, but concluded he hadn’t committed rape, as defined under New York law.

Trump repeatedly denied that the encounter took place and accused Carroll of making it up to help sell her book.

He also said that Carroll was “not my type.”

The 2023 jury awarded Carroll $5 million to compensate her for both the alleged attack and statements Trump made denying that it had happened.

After that first verdict, the court held a second trial with a new jury for deciding damages from additional statements Trump made attacking Carroll’s character and truthfulness.

Trump had skipped the first civil trial but he attended the second, which took place as he was running for president in 2024. Speaking to reporters throughout the trial, Trump portrayed the lawsuit as part of a broader effort to smear him and prevent him from regaining the White House.

His lawyers complained that the judge, in setting rules for the second, damages trial, had barred Trump and his defense team from claiming in front of the jury that he was innocent of the attack. The judge ruled that that issue had been settled by the first jury and didn’t need to be revisited.

SUPREME COURT LIFTS LOWER COURT BAN ON ‘BLATANT RACIAL PROFILING’ BY ICE AGENTS. The US Supreme Court on Sept. 8 gave its approval for federal immigration agents to stop and detain anyone in the Los Angeles area based on factors including “the type of work one does,” a person’s use of Spanish or accented English, or their “apparent race or ethnicity”—allowing what critics called “blatant racial profiling” to be used to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass detention and deportation plan, Julia Conley noted at Common Dreams (9/8).

The court’s three liberal justices dissented, but the right-wing majority sided with the Department of Homeland Security, whose agents in recent months have carried out sweeping raids across the Los Angeles area, including in incidents that have been caught on video and appear to be armed roundups of large randomized groups of Latino people—not operations targeted at arresting violent criminals, as the Trump administration has previously suggested.

The court did not provide an explanation of its reasoning, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a separate opinion expressing agreement with the ruling, saying the court was simply allowing immigration agents to use “commonsense” criteria for stopping and detaining people, including their English proficiency and the type of work they do.

In their dissenting opinion, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, “We should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job.”

“Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent,” wrote Sotomayor.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council (AIC) said the ruling by the right-wing majority has troubling implications. 

“Because a sizeable portion of Los Angeles’s low-income Latino community is undocumented,” he said, the court believes “it is inherently acceptable for [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to stop and question any Latino working a low-wage job that is seen seeking Spanish.”

Civil rights groups joined several individuals in filing a lawsuit against the administration earlier this year, arguing that thousands of people in Los Angeles have been wrongly arrested in unconstitutional, “indiscriminate immigration operations.”

“Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force,” the plaintiffs argued, “and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents have been violating the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, they said, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

In July, Judge Maame E. Frimpong in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, ordered agents not to stop or arrest people in the Los Angeles area based on factors including race and ethnicity, language spoken, or their involvement in particular kinds of work including at day-laborer or farming sites.

The Trump administration later appealed to the Supreme Court, saying the lower court’s order had unlawfully interfered with ICE operations and claiming agents use discretion to ensure they don’t wrongfully include people in immigration sweeps.

AS TRUMP CLAIMS TO CLEAN UP CRIME, HIS PARDONS HAUNT HIM. President Donald Trump claims to be cleaning up crime in Washington, after he sent the National Guard to police D,C.

However, Trump should be more concerned with the crime spree being carried out by some of the 1,500 Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists he pardoned, a number of whom have been re-arrested since Trump gave them clemency in one of the first actions he took when retaking office in January, Emily Singer noted at Daily Kos (9/8).

Robert Keith Packer, the Jan. 6 insurrectionist who infamously wore a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt, is the latest Trump pardon recipient to be arrested again since receiving Trump’s pardon.

Packer was taken into custody in Virginia on Sept. 4 after his dogs allegedly attacked four people, sending them to the hospital. One of the victims of the dog attack remains hospitalized and faces the possibility of losing her arm, according to a local media outlet in Newport News, Va, where the attack occurred.

According to a report from ABC News, Packer was charged with “one felony count of animal attack resulting from owner’s disregard for human life.” He was also charged with two misdemeanors of “attacking while at large and no city license.”

Packer had served 75 days in federal prison for his role in the Capitol insurrection, in which hordes of Trump supporters violently broke their way into the Capitol to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. Packer was to be arraigned on Sept. 12 for the alleged dog attack.

So far, at least six pardoned insurrectionists have been arrested for new crimes, including Packer. They include: Zachary J. Alam, who was arrested in May on burglary charges in Virginia; Andrew Taake, who in February was arrested on child sex crimes charges; Daniel Ball arrested on pending federal gun charges; and Matthew Huttle was shot and killed by police during a traffic stop. Another pardoned insurrectionist, Edward Kelley, was sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted on charges of plotting to assassinate law enforcement officers who were involved in the probe of his role in the insurrection.

What’s more, a former FBI agent who urged rioters to kill law enforcement officers defending the Capitol on Jan. 6, now works in Trump’s Department of Justice.

Ultimately, Trump isn’t cleaning up crime, as he claims. He instead unleashed it by pardoning unrepentant rioters, going as far as mulling whether to give them restitution even though they sought to overthrow the government. One of the rioters, Ashli Babbitt, a U.S. Air Force veteran, died after she was shot by a Capitol police officer as she tried to break into the House chamber. Her family filed a wrongful death lawsuit and Trump’s U.S. Department of Justice in May agreed to a payment of $4.975 million to the family and the Air Force in August offered a military funeral for Babbit.

TRUMP ACCUSES FOES WITH MULTIPLE MORTGAGES OF FRAUD, BUT RECORDS SHOW 3 CABINET MEMBERS ALSO HAVE THEM. The Trump administration vowed to go after anyone who got lower mortgage rates by claiming more than one primary residence on their loan papers.

President Trump has used the claiming of multiple primary residences as a justification to target political foes, including Lisa Cook, a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who pursued a civil fraud case against Trump,, his adult children and his company for misrepresenting his wealth to obtain favorable loan and insurance rates..

Real estate experts say claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.

But if administration officials continue the campaign, ProPublica reported Sept. 4, mortgage records show there’s another place they could look: Trump’s own Cabinet.

Underscoring how common the practice is, ProPublica found that at least three of Trump’s Cabinet members call multiple homes their primary residences on mortgages. We discovered the loans while examining financial disclosure forms, county real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer entered into two primary-residence mortgages in quick succession, including for a second home near a country club in Arizona, where she’s known to vacation. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has primary-residence mortgages in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has one primary-residence mortgage in Long Island and another in Washington, D.C., according to loan records. 

In a flurry of interviews and rapid-fire posts on X, Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, has led the charge in accusing Trump opponents of mortgage fraud. “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation,” Pulte said in August. 

A political donor to the president and heir to a housing company fortune, Pulte’s posts online tease big developments and criminal referrals, drawing reposts from Trump himself and promises of swift consequences. “Fraud will not be tolerated in President Trump’s housing market,” Pulte has warned.

Real estate experts told ProPublica that, in its bid to wrest control of the historically independent Fed and go after political enemies, the Trump administration has mischaracterized mortgage rules. Its justification for launching criminal investigations, they said, could also apply to the Trump Cabinet members.

All three Cabinet members denied wrongdoing. In a statement, a White House spokesperson said: “This is just another hit piece from a left-wing dark money group that constantly attempts to smear President Trump’s incredible Cabinet members. Unlike [Fed Gov.] Lisa ‘Corrupt’ Cook who blatantly and intentionally committed mortgage fraud, Secretary DeRemer, Secretary Duffy, and Administrator Zeldin own multiple residences, and they have followed the law and they are fully compliant with all ethical obligations.”

See the rest of the story, with links, at ProPublica.org.

HOUSE DEMS POUNCE ON RELEASE OF TRUMP PORNOGRAPHIC BIRTHDAY LETTER TO JEFFREY EPSTEIN THAT TRUMP DENIED EXISTED. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee on Sept. 8, released a photo showing a pornographic birthday card that Donald Trump allegedly sent to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (9/8).

The birthday card’s existence was originally reported by The Wall Street Journal in July, and it features an outline of a naked woman along with Trump’s squiggly signature in the area where the woman’s pubic hair would be.

Trump denied that he ever sent Epstein such a card for his 50th birthday in 2003 and Trump filed a libel lawsuit against the Journal that sought at least $20 billion in damages for what it described as “glaring failures in journalistic ethics and standards of accurate reporting.”

With the note’s existence seemingly confirmed, however, many Democrats rushed to charge the president with trying to cover up the full extent of his relationship with Epstein, who was accused by multiple women of sexually abusing them when they were teenagers.

“We got the Epstein note Trump says doesn’t exist,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.). “Time to end this White House cover-up.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called on the White House to release the full Epstein files.

“Trump said it didn’t exist, but here it is,” she said. “Thank you, Oversight Dems, for proving he is lying. And if he’s lying about this, what else is he lying about? Makes it clear why he is so opposed to releasing these files...”

Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) had a similar reaction to the card.

“No surprise the note does exist,” she said. “More proof this White House cover-up is to protect Trump, the powerful, and the wealthy. Release the full files now.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt took a defiant tone after the note’s publication and continued to insist that it was all a “hoax.”

“As I have said all along, it’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it,” she said. “President Trump’s legal team will continue to aggressively pursue litigation ... This is FAKE NEWS to perpetuate the Democrat Epstein Hoax!”

PROFESSORS WANT TO LEAVE TEXAS BECAUSE OF TENSE POLITICAL CLIMATE, SURVEY SAYS. Many Texas professors are looking for jobs in different states, citing a climate of fear and anxiety on their college campuses due to increased political interference, according to a recent survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors, Nicholas Gutteridge and Alex Ford reported at TexasTribune.org  (9/5).

The survey interviewed nearly 4,000 faculty across the southern U.S., including more than 1,100 from Texas. About a quarter of the Texas professors said they have applied for higher education jobs in other states in the last two years, and more than 25% said they soon intend to start searching for out-of-state positions. Of those who aren’t thinking of leaving, more than one-fifth said they don’t plan to stay in higher education in the long-term.

“Morale is down,” said one Texas faculty member at a public four-year university in a written response. “Friends have lost contracts for no discernable [sic] reason. We live in fear of using the wrong word. We self-censor. We do not have academic freedom.”

In Texas, faculty have criticized new state laws banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs in universities; requiring universities to establish policies limiting tenure; and limiting faculty’s role in crafting courses and hiring colleagues. Other reasons included salary and academic freedom concerns, the survey found.

“It is certainly a combination of factors of people wanting to leave Texas. But the ability to do your job without attacks from politicians and the ability to participate in your campus voices is always [at] the top of faculty minds,” said Matthew Boedy, president of Georgia’s AAUP chapter.

Texas had the highest percentage — more than 60% — of respondents who said they wouldn’t encourage graduate students or colleagues to seek employment in their state. The survey reached out to faculty from other southern states, including Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas.

“As the survey says, there’s a broad political climate in Texas that is seen as anti-higher education,” Boedy said. “And many faculty, if they can, they don’t want to put up with it.”

The AAUP’s state conferences conducted the study throughout August. Over half of the Texas respondents said they are tenured at their institution, and about 40% have been employed at their university for 16 or more years.

The results come as universities across the U.S. have faced increasing political pressure both at the state and national level.

About one in 10 Texas faculty said they had contracts cut by the Trump administration, according to the survey. Federal agencies have limited and cut funding to research at many universities, such as a policy change at the National Institutes of Health in February that threatened to cost Texas universities hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds. A federal judge blocked the change after a coalition of states sued the NIH.

Many public university systems have also disbanded their faculty senates, groups that advise leaders on curricula, hiring and other academic matters, after state lawmakers passed Senate Bill 37 earlier this year. The legislation gave more control over those decisions to Texas university systems’ regents, who are appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott.

In recent years, lawmakers passed laws banning DEI initiatives in higher education, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick spearheaded an effort two years ago to limit tenure at public universities, which opponents argued would cause a brain drain in Texas.

An analysis by PEN America in July found that state legislators have introduced more than 70 bills across 26 states that “censor” higher education in one form or another, whether through restrictions on what can be taught or policies that undermine academic freedom.