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Wednesday, April 23, 2025

"The reason we're here is because the government of the United States wants you to leave the United States," Judge Ubaid ul-Haq, presiding from a courtroom on Varick Street, told a group of about a dozen children on a recent morning on Webex. "It's my job to figure out if you have to leave," ul-Haq continued. "It's also my job to figure out if you should stay." The parties included a 7-year-old boy, wearing a shirt emblazoned with a pizza cartoon, who spun a toy windmill while the judge spoke. There was an 8-year-old girl and her 4-year-old sister, in a tie-dye shirt, who squeezed a pink plushy toy and stuffed it into her sleeve. None of the children were accompanied by parents or attorneys, only shelter workers who helped them log on to the hearing.


President Donald Trump radically softened some of his most severe rhetoric after CEOs of the nation's biggest retail chains warned him of looming price rises and empty shelves. The CEOs of Walmart, Target, and Home Depot met privately with Trump on Monday and told him that although prices were steady at that moment, his trade policies could have devastating effects within just two weeks with supply chains disrupted, Axios reported.


Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem fell victim to a thief while eating dinner at a downtown Washington, DC, restaurant Sunday night, the secretary confirmed Monday. read more


A groundbreaking microscope at Harvard Medical School could lead to breakthroughs in cancer detection and research into longevity. read more


The president slammed the justices for halting his latest deportations while dismissing immigrants' due process rights as an inconvenience read more


Comments

More: The legal fig leaf Trump used to deport Kilmar brego Garca to a brutal Salvadoran prison is a law from 1798 called the Enemy Aliens Act, signed by President John Adams after being passed by a Congress controlled by a political party so old it no longer exists.

The Declaration of Independence was barely over 20 years old then. You'll remember that document from grade school, but you probably don't know that it accuses a British tyrant of misruling America in exactly the same way Trump is.

"The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."

The document goes on to list King George's many crimes that happen to exactly match Trump's depredations. Among them:

"Depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury" " Garcia was deported without even a hearing by a judge, let alone a jury.
"Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences" " Garcia was deported to a foreign nation based on a mere accusation never proved in court.
"Abolishing the free System of English Laws" " Trump could only do those things by ignoring common law.
Trump is as guilty as the tyrant King George of "abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments."
They both are guilty of "declaring themselves invested with power to legislate."

But Trump is not just the kind of lawless autocrat who inspired the American Revolution, the values of which formed the basis of our Constitution. He has ignored the very first civil right that is older than the Roman Empire, nearly as old as the Pyramids, as old as the idea of law itself. And that is the right to have the government's case against you taken before a magistrate who must agree before your life is destroyed. That idea is in the code of Hammurabi from 2,000 years before the birth of Christ.

If Donald Trump can deport a man " in a case which the administration admitted was an "administrative error" " without the case against that man being heard in court, there is nothing to prevent him from using the same process to deport and imprison U.S. citizens without trial. Trump has even said that he is thinking about deporting American convicts to this same Salvadoran prison hellhole.

More: Earlier on Tuesday, news broke that a relatively new NLRB staffer claimed that DOGE not only accessed data from his agency but also took a substantial amount of sensitive data with them, according to a disclosure shared with Congress that read, "around ten gigabytes of data are, quote, the equivalent of a full stack of encyclopedias worth if someone printed these files as hard copy documents."

Daniel Bertulis appeared on The Lead, joined by his attorney Andrew Bakaj, and explained the details of how he apparently uncovered a massive amount of missing data from the NLRB following DOGE's efforts. He ostensibly mocked a White House statement touting the transparency at play, noting that none of the code used by DOGE technicians has been shared publicly.

But the most shocking allegations came from Bakaj, who not only claimed that accounts based in Russia were using newly created DOGE usernames and passwords to access sensitive data, but also directly tied the effort to Elon Musk and his Starlink concerns, which has a relationship with the Kremlin.

"There are two data points that I wanna point out that should give everybody pause," Bakaj said. "The first thing, what Dan witnessed was that within 15 minutes of DOGE employees creating user accounts, i.e. Usernames and passwords, within 15 minutes of those accounts being created, somebody or something from Russia tried to log in with the right username and right passwords " that is to say " the right credentials. And that happened over 20 times."

"The second data point, which is really critical, is that DOGE has also been using Starlink as a means to exfiltrate data," he continued. "What that means is that, from our understanding, Russia has a direct pipeline of information through Starlink, which means that anything going through Starlink is going to Russia."

"We also know that this is not unique to the NLRB," he said. "This is happening government-wide. And then the other thing that I wanted to flag for everybody is that right now that, I don't want to say that this is intentional, it could very well have been a mistake, is that critical infrastructure databases and many government agencies, as we understand it, have been exposed to the open internet, which includes critical databases at the Department of Energy, which includes a lot of our nuclear regulatory agency material."

"So right now the real concern is that this not unlike Chernobyl," he concluded. "And all of the control panels lighting up after the meltdown. This is serious and I just wanna commend Dan for coming forward to bring this to everybody's attention because this really is the tip of the iceberg."

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