Tag: judges

Federal Judge Orders Epstein Grand Jury Transcripts Unsealed

A federal judge issued an order that transcripts from grand jury proceedings in Florida that took place 20 years ago, relating to a criminal investigation into deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, be unsealed.

In his order on Friday, U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith explained that the “specific language” of the Epstein Files Transparency Act “trumps Rule 6’s prohibition on disclosure,” according to ABC News.

President Donald Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November. In a post on Truth Social, Trump predicted that “perhaps the truth” would come out about Democrats such as former President Bill Clinton, Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman, and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and their associations with Epstein.

“The Act applies to unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials that relate to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell,” Smith said. “Consequently, the later-enacted and specific language of the Act trumps Rule 6’s prohibition on disclosure. Accordingly, it is ORDERED that United States’ Expedited Motion to Unseal Grand Jury Transcripts and Modify Protective Order … is GRANTED.”

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N.Y.: ‘Level 2’ sex offender with 16 prior arrests charged with assaulting 20-year-old NYU student

A 45-year-old homeless man with a lengthy history of sex crimes and violence against women was arrested on Tuesday after a brazen daylight assault on a 20-year-old New York University student just steps from the school’s Manhattan campus.

James Rizzo, 45, obtained his 17th arrest on Tuesday after attacking NYU sophomore student Amelia Lewis, 20.

According to the report, Rizzo quickly approached the NYU sophomore as she walked to class, slapped her forcefully on the buttocks, then struck her head, knocking her to the ground.

“I just really want to emphasize how not OK this is. I am a student at NYU. I should not be scared to be walking the street to go to my 9:30 a.m. class. These people are disgusting, and they should not be able to be walking around the street freely targeting girls and doing this. Cause I heard that this guy did this a month ago,” Lewis said on a TikTok video, where she further discussed the incident with her friends, family, and online followers.

Police say Rizzo is listed on New York’s Sex Offender Registry as a Level 2 offender, with two publicly accessible mugshots. According to the registry, he was convicted in March 2023 for forcing himself onto another person’s intimate parts during an assault that occurred the month before.

“The University is pleased that a suspect has been apprehended in the attack on one of its students that took place Monday morning on a Broadway sidewalk,” NYU spokesperson John Beckman exclaimed. “We take this incident very seriously. We are continuing to offer support to the student, and our Campus Safety Department assisted the victim and worked with the police investigating the incident.”

Following the most recent incident, Rizzo was later arrested and charged with persistent sexual abuse, forcible touching, and assault. 16 prior arrests of his similarly involved sex offenses or sexual misconduct, a law enforcement source reported.

Just days before the attack on the NYU student, Rizzo also purportedly shoved a 68-year-old woman as she walked along Fifth Avenue at around 8:45 p.m. on Thanksgiving. In what investigators described as an unprovoked assault, he reportedly struck her with his elbow so forcefully that she fell to the ground and suffered a deep cut.

He was also charged with burglary in connection with a separate incident in a nearby building, with some reports indicating multiple counts. New York authorities stated that they found Rizzo “in the act” as he was burglarizing an apartment near Washing Square Park on Tuesday. Police connected Rizzo to four other burglaries committed at the same location, all around 1 a.m. on Tuesday.

Victims of the theft include a 28-year-old man who woke up to find his suitcase and backpack gone. Another unnamed man, 29, had three laptops, headphones, and his backpack stolen. Lastly, a 58-year-old woman had $3,150 in items taken, police added.

“I just feel very lucky,” the unidentified woman attacked on Thanksgiving said on Wednesday. “[I’m] very lucky that he didn’t have a weapon or that it didn’t happen in the subway station and throw me on the tracks.”

In addition to the burglary charges, police have since announced that he faces assault counts for both attacks, as well as sexual abuse and forcible touching stemming from the assault on Lewis.

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Minnesota Immigrant Rapist Who Walked Free on “Sweetheart” Plea Deals Strikes Again — Rapes Third Victim After Dodging Jail for Kidnapping and Raping a Woman He Met Online

In a horrifying testament to the utter collapse of law and order under radical left-wing policies, a vicious repeat sex offender named Abdimahat Bille Mohamed, 28, of Minneapolis, has been charged with the brutal kidnapping and repeated rape of yet another terrified woman, just months after dodging real prison time for two prior rape convictions.

Prosecutors allege that Mohamed met the victim via Snapchat at her home in Mankato in September 2025, then drove her to a hotel in Bloomington.

Once the victim got in the vehicle, Mohamed reportedly told her, “You’re not going home,” according to Fox News.

The woman told investigators that Mohamed confiscated her phone and indicated she would not be allowed to leave while she was held captive and sexually assaulted over several days.

Nearly a week after the kidnapping, she escaped, jumping out of Mohamed’s car near Aldrich Avenue South in Minneapolis, at which point a resident called the police.

Authorities have charged Mohamed with kidnapping, felony third-degree criminal sexual conduct, and other related offenses. He is currently held in the county jail on a $300,000 bond.

Mohamed was previously convicted in two separate sexual-assault cases, but under plea deals, he avoided traditional prison time.

In a 2017 case, he was linked via DNA and other evidence to the kidnapping and rape of a 15-year-old girl who had communicated with him on Snapchat.

The court accepted a plea agreement: a 36-month prison sentence was stayed, he was given 364 days in a workhouse (credit for time served) and placed on probation for five years.

In a separate 2024 case, prosecutors said he had threatened a woman and her sister with a gun if she refused sex in his Minneapolis apartment.

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Minnesota Judge Arrested For DUI… No Charges Yet

A Minnesota judge was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol over the weekend.

According to Crime Watch Minneapolis, Minnesota Court of Appeals Judge Renee Lee Worke was arrested in Steele County and released after only 4 hours in the drunk tank.

No charges have been filed yet.

Crime Watch Minneapolis was told the arrest was probable cause Driving While Intoxicated.

No other details about the arrest were immediately available.

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OUTRAGE ON CAPITOL HILL: Rogue Judges Boasberg and Boardman Now Refuse to Testify Before the Senate

Two activist judges with a track record of sabotaging President Trump’s America First agenda have just ghosted a critical Senate hearing aimed at exposing judicial overreach.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg and U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman have both turned down invitations to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week at the explosive hearing titled “Impeachment: Holding Rogue Judges Accountable.

Their absence should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention. These are not neutral judges, they are political operatives wielding federal robes as weapons against the will of the American people.

Judge Boasberg, a Barack Obama appointee, has drawn fierce ire from conservatives for his ruling that blocked the administration’s attempt to deport Venezuelan nationals under the wartime Alien Enemies Act (AEA).

His decision came even as the White House sought to remove terrorist members linked to the Venezuelan group Tren de Aragua.

Boasberg’s ruling described the mass deportation attempt as lacking due process, since there was no precedent for using the AEA against illegal immigrants in peacetime.

Republicans who view expedited deportation as vital to national security and border integrity see Boasberg’s ruling as judicial overreach.

Boasberg’s fingerprints are also all over the shadowy Arctic Frost FBI operation.

The Biden-era witch hunt that spied on the private communications and cell phones of at least eight Republican senators and nearly a dozen GOP lawmakers probing 2020 election irregularities.

We’re talking secret subpoenas for toll records, intercepted calls, and a full-on surveillance dragnet approved under the radar by none other than Boasberg himself.

In a statement shared on X, investigative commentator Mike Benz laid out three specific criminal charges that Attorney General Pam Bondi could immediately bring against Judge Boasberg in connection to the Arctic Frost scandal.

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Wisconsin’s Lib-Led Supreme Court Stacks The Congressional Map Deck

While milquetoast Republicans experience a collective tummy ache over the “fairness” of mid-decade redistricting, Democrats nationally are feasting on power-grabbing gerrymanders.  

The latest outflanking comes — not surprisingly — from Wisconsin’s liberal-controlled Supreme Court. 

‘Forum Shopping’

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the Badger State’s court of last resort ordered the creation of judicial panels to hear two lawsuits seeking to undo Wisconsin’s existing  congressional maps, in which six of eight House seats are held by Republicans. Interestingly, the district lines were drawn by a committee whose members were appointed by Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a far-left Democrat. The Evers maps benefitted Democrats, but didn’t go far enough for a Democratic Party salivating over a potential congressional power grab with the help of the liberal-led Supreme Court. 

In a move oozing with partisanship, the court’s liberal justices selected some of the more far-left lower court judges in the state to serve on the two panels.

Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler, one of three conservatives on the seven-member court, argued that the majority’s orders disregard the U.S. and Wisconsin constitutions and ignore fundamental legal principles. 

“The majority not only undermines our constitutional authority and circumvents established redistricting precedent but also, again, usurps the legislature’s constitutional power,” Ziegler chided. “In allowing this litigation to proceed, the majority abdicates its constitutional superintending authority to Wisconsin’s circuit courts.”

The Republican-controlled state legislature and Wisconsin’s six GOP congressmen argue that the lawsuits confuse political representation concepts. But the Supreme Court’s majority said the argument is merely a matter of semantics, that “apportionment” and “redistricting” are used interchangeably in drawing up — or in this case, redrawing — political boundaries. And the law, the majority assert, requires the court “appoint a panel consisting of 3 circuit court judges to hear” a redistricting lawsuit. 

Conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn, who has at times sided with the liberals on the court, takes no issue with the creation of the panels. In his dissenting opinion, however, Hagedorn disagrees with the process. He argued the law is “transparently designed to prevent forum shopping in disputes over where congressional lines should be drawn.” But that’s exactly what the majority did. 

“Given the nature of this case and the statute’s implicit call for geographic diversity and neutrality, a randomly-selected panel and venue would be a better way to fulfill the statutory mandate,” the justice wrote. “Instead, my colleagues have chosen to keep this case in Dane County and leave the originally assigned Dane County judge on the panel.”  Dane County’s circuit court, located in state capital and far-left enclave Madison, is one the more left-leaning courts in the country. 

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Will Trump’s autopen executive order de-bench 237 leftist federal judges (including Ketanji Brown Jackson)?

On Thursday, I wrote that leftist judges on the bench are creating a form of tyranny, for they have arrogated to themselves the constitutional power of the Executive branch of government. There is no more balance. According to the Democrat appointees on the bench, none of Trump’s actions are solely within the discretion of the democratically elected chief executive. Instead, all are subject to judicial review and approval.

The day after I wrote that essay, Trump issued a statement via Truth Social voiding every document that was signed with an Autopen during Joe Biden’s presidency and threatening Biden along the way:

Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect. The Autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the United

States. The Radical Left Lunatics circling Biden around the beautiful Resolute Desk in the Oval Office took the Presidency away from him. I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally. Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Some have pointed out that this order is merely performative, since one president can always undo another’s executive orders.

As an aside, that line of argument is untrue. As we’ve seen, district courts have repeatedly held that Donald Trump cannot reverse the executive orders of previous presidents. That’s the special unwritten Donald Trump rule. Their rulings are always dressed up in fancy language and erroneous legal arguments, but the net result has been that what other presidents do, Trump cannot undo. (ChatGPT struggles with this concept, but you can get the idea of what’s going on here.)

More important than that argument’s inaccuracy is a practical reality: Voiding all of Biden’s Autopen signatures doesn’t just end policy Executive Orders. In theory, it also ends every judicial nomination Biden made, from Ketanji Brown Jackson on down.

This matters a great deal, not just because of Jackson, but because Biden was able to nominate the largest number of federal judges in a single term since the Carter administration, 235 in all. Most of them have proven to be distinguished only by their “diversity,” not their intelligence, legal acumen, or fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law.

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MINNESOTA MADNESS: Radical Democrat Judge Sarah West OVERTURNS Jury’s Guilty Verdict — Frees Somali Immigrant Who Stole $7.2 MILLION in Medicaid Fraud Scheme

Radical Democrat judge Sarah West, appointed by former Democrat Governor Mark Dayton, has tossed out a jury’s unanimous guilty verdict, setting free Abdifatah Yusuf, a Somali immigrant convicted of masterminding a massive Medicaid fraud ring that siphoned off $7.2 million from taxpayers.

A jury had found Yusuf guilty in August on six counts of aiding and abetting theft by swindle, following evidence that his home-healthcare company billed Medicaid for hundreds of thousands dollars in “phantom” care, padding bills for services never delivered.

Prosecutors documented that many of those funds were funneled into luxury cars, high-end clothing, and other extravagant personal purchases.

But Judge West, rather than upholding the jury’s verdict, claimed the case hinged on circumstantial evidence and offered “other reasonable inferences” for the billing irregularities, arguing prosecutors failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Yusuf was personally responsible for the fraud. She issued a judgment of acquittal.

Jurors, prosecutors, and state lawmakers were stunned. One juror told reporters he believed the evidence demonstrated “obvious guilt.” The state’s Attorney General has already filed an appeal, warning the decision undermines public trust.

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Federal judge rules ICE agents in Colorado may only arrest illegal immigrants likely to flee

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Colorado may only arrest illegal immigrants without a warrant if the targets are likely to flee.

U.S. District Senior Judge R. Brooke Jackson’s order comes after a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and other lawyers on behalf of four people, including asylum-seekers, who were arrested by ICE without warrants earlier this year as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration.

The lawsuit accuses immigration agents of indiscriminately arresting Latinos to meet the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement goals without evaluating the requirements to legally detain them.

The judge said each of the plaintiffs had long-standing ties to their communities and no reasonable agent could have believed they were likely to flee before obtaining a warrant.

Under federal law, immigration agents must have probable cause to believe someone is in the country illegally and likely to flee before a warrant can be obtained, in order to arrest them without one, Jackson said.

Immigration agents are also required to document the reasons for arresting someone.

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Judge throws out Comey and James cases as Trump’s beauty queen prosecutor is humiliated

Donald Trump‘s cases against his political foes James Comey and Letitia James have been thrown out.

Judge Cameron Currie accused the President’s hand-picked attorney, Lindsey Halligan, of ‘prosecutorial misconduct’ after she secured indictments against the former FBI director and the New York Attorney General.

She added that Halligan is ‘a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience’ who was never eligible to serve.

A 120-day deadline on interim appointments expired during the previous prosecutor’s tenure, meaning Pam Bondi did not have the authority to appoint Halligan – this was up to the district’s federal judges.

‘I conclude that all actions flowing from Ms Halligan’s defective appointment, including securing and signing Mr Comey’s indictment, constitute unlawful exercises of executive power and must be set aside,’ wrote Currie, a Bill Clinton-appointed judge.

Both Comey and James asked that their cases be dismissed and that the prosecutor be disqualified because of the manner of her appointment. 

The defendants in the two separate cases asked for the indictments to be dismissed with prejudice, which means the Justice Department would not be able to bring the same charges against them. But the judge dismissed with prejudice. 

Comey was charged with making a false statement and obstruction of a congressional proceeding relating to his 2020 Senate testimony, where he denied authorizing FBI officials to leak information to the press. 

James was indicted on charges including bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution concerning information on mortgage applications that prosecutors alleged was falsified.

Halligan, a former beauty queen, was named to the job of interim US Attorney for Virginia in September.

Before her appointment, Erik Siebert, a different interim attorney, was forced out amid pressure from Trump to file charges against his political enemies. 

Comey’s lawyers argued that after Siebert was forced out, the judges should have had exclusive say over who would fill the vacancy.

But it was ultimately Trump who moved forward and nominated Halligan as he publicly pressed Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against Comey and James.

‘JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!’ the President wrote on Truth Social at the time.

Comey was indicted days later on charges of making a false statement and obstructing Congress, and James was charged soon after that in a mortgage fraud investigation.

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