The Justice Department is investigating whether Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and violated federal laws against sex trafficking in the process, The New York Times reported Tuesday. Gaetz confirmed the existence of the investigation to Axios, adding, "The allegations against me are as searing as they are false. I believe that there are people at the Department of Justice who are trying to criminalize my sexual conduct, you know, when I was a single guy." read more
Eric Nelson, the defense attorney for Derek Chauvin, blamed bystanders for distracting officers from properly caring for George Floyd as Chauvin pinned Floyd to the ground and knelt on his neck, as Chauvin's trial got underway Monday. read more
The Navy can't explain the bizarre encounters that took place across four nights in 2019. read more
Former President Donald Trump says he didn't heed the advice of Dr. Anthony Fauci in his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has left more than 500,000 Americans dead and nearly 30 million infected, including Trump himself. "I listened to him, but I didn't do what he said," Trump told Fox News personality Lisa Boothe on the premiere episode of her podcast, which went live Monday. read more
A late undercover cop left behind a letter in which he said he participated in the New York Police Department's and Federal Bureau of Investigation's conspiracy to undermine civil rights leaders and Black nationalists in the 1960, and to kill them, said attorney Ben Crump in a press conference Saturday, joined by three daughters of Malcolm X. Notably, the former officer, Ray Wood, said he was involved in the arrest of two men from Malcolm X's security team shortly before the assassination. He said Thomas Johnson, one of the men convicted in the murder, was innocent.
And police, especially the unions, are against decriminalization and legalization in general simply because it's one less tool they have in their toolbox to use against the public. It truly is the exact sentiment shared with Nixon:
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."www.vox.com
The air freshener excuse is a common one that police use once they've profiled someone (racially or otherwise), pulled them over, and determined that they had not committed any OTHER offense.
Not many people know that it's illegal to hang anything from your rear view mirror. Police use this ignorance to their advantage when profiling.