Two lawyers that filed a federal lawsuit last December claiming to represent 160 million American voters in a dispute over the results of the 2020 election could face ramifications for filing a frivolous suit, the Washington Post reports. Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker, the two attorneys from Colorado, were chastised by Federal Magistrate Judge N Reid today, during a hearing to consider whether the pair should face sanctions. “Did that ever occur to you? That, possibly, [you’re] just repeating stuff the president is lying about?” Judge Neureiter asked, questioning whether they knowingly became a “propaganda tool” for the former president. Both argue that they acted in good-faith and believed the election had been stolen. The Biden Administration is standing by Tracy Stone-Manning, a conservationist nominated to head the Bureau of Land Management, as Republican lawmakers call for her withdraw, Reuters reports. Calling Stone-Manning “a dedicated public servant who has years of experience and a proven track record of finding solutions and common ground when it comes to our public lands and waters,” in a statement issued Friday, the White House said she was “exceptionally qualified. Stone-Manning was a senior adviser for conservation policy at the National Wildlife Federation who pushed back against the previous president’s public land use policies, including the expansion of fossil fuel production. The statement was issued a group of Republicans sent a letter calling on Biden to withdrawal his nomination, accusing Stone-Manning of misleading the committee on her ties to a tree-spiking incident — a tactic used by environmental activists that involves inserting metal or other materials into trees to stop them from being logged — that occurred decades ago. “We do not make this request lightly,” 10 members of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources wrote in the letter issued Wednesday, citing their belief that she made “false and misleading statements in a sworn statement to the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources regarding her activities associated with an eco-terrorist cell”. Noting that the BLM manages one in ten acres including roughly 65 million acres of forests in 12 states, and about 30% of the nation’s minerals, they said “any individual who leads this important agency must have the faith and trust of the American people. Ms. Stone-Manning has violated this trust”. From Reuters: The director position will be central to the Biden administration’s effort to address climate change through management of public lands, including a current review of the federal oil and gas leasing program.” A new report from Senate investigators found that an obscure security unit operating in the US Commerce Department spent a decade acting as a “rogue, unaccountable police force” and conducted unauthorized surveillance of the agency’s employees if Chinese and Middle Eastern descent. The report, released by Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, was based on the accounts of more than two-dozen whistle-blowers, according to the New York Times. “Combating national security threats posed by China should be a priority for any agency, but that does not give the federal government a license to disregard the law,” Wicker said in a statement. “Abuse of authority and race-based targeting is unacceptable, especially in law enforcement.” The investigators found that the unit searched employee email accounts, flagged “ethnic surnames” and even deployed masked-agents to raid offices. From the NYT: Senate investigators painted a picture of a unit that routinely engaged in unethical or unsafe activities that were beyond the scope of its mandate and that its employees were not trained to do. The report indicated that the bulk of those efforts were driven over the course of multiple administrations by one official: George Lee, the unit’s longtime director, who has since been placed on leave. Mr. Lee could not be reached for comment on Friday.” Arizona had less than 200 cases of possible voter fraud identified by election officials out of more than 3m votes cast during last year’s presidential election, “undercutting former President Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election as his allies continue a disputed ballot review in the state’s most populous county,” the Associated Press reports: An Associated Press investigation found 182 cases where problems were clear enough that officials referred them to investigators for further review. So far, only four cases have led to charges, including those identified in a separate state investigation. No one has been convicted. No person’s vote was counted twice. While it’s possible more cases could emerge, the numbers illustrate the implausibility of Trump’s claims that fraud and irregularities in Arizona cost him the state’s electorate votes. In final, certified and audited results, Biden won 10,400 more votes than Trump out of 3.4 million cast.” Numerous studies have shown that voter fraud is uncommon, but that hasn’t stopped Trump supporters from claiming the election was stolen and for Republican lawmakers to use the issue to push for legislation that will add new voting restrictions. US Judge rules Daca is unlawful Gabrielle Canon here, signing on from the west coast to take you through the rest of the afternoon. First up— Today a US federal judge in Texas has ordered the suspension of Daca program, which protects so-called “Dreamers” – immigrants who have been in the US since they were children – from deportation, arguing that it was illegally created by the Obama Administration. The US district judge Andrew Hanen wrote in his ruling that the order won’t yet impact the more than 616,000 people are already enrolled in the program until other courts weigh in, but the program is otherwise put on pause. “DHS violated the APA with the creation of Daca and its continued operation,” he wrote. “Nevertheless,” he added, “these rulings do not resolve the issue of the hundreds of thousands of Daca recipients and others who have relied upon this program for almost a decade. That reliance has not diminished and may, in fact, have increased over time.” The order will be temporarily stayed in its application to current recipients until “further order of this Court, the fifth circuit court of appeals, or the United States supreme court” the ruling says. Afternoon summary Here’s a quick summary of what happened today. Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that the country is currently in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” as 97% of people who are hospitalized with Covid-19 are unvaccinated. Every state has reported increases, and the federal government has been doubling down on messaging to get vaccinated, even though many Americans remain skeptical. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the state department has found that Russia and China have been spreading misinformation on social media that claims vaccines made in the West are ineffective. The White House has been calling out social media companies to do more to curb misinformation on their sites. An excerpt from an upcoming book by journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker revealed that Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, stopped Donald Trump from launching an attack on Iran. Anonymous sources have said that the ex-daughter-in-law of Allen Weisselberg, who has surrendered to Manhattan prosecutors in their investigation of the Trump Organization for tax fraud, has implicated Trump by telling prosecutors that she witnessed the former president offering to pay for her children’s tuition instead of giving her husband a raise. Stay tuned for more live updates. Caitlyn Jenner, who is campaigning to replace California governor Gavin Newsom in his recall race, is currently in Australia to be a contestant on a reality show two months before the election takes place on 14 September. On Twitter, Jenner said she is “honoring a work commitment that I had made prior to even deciding to run for governor” and said that she has not paused her campaign. Separate reports on Friday from Politico said that Jenner appears to be working on a documentary or series of sorts as a film crew has been following her on the campaign trail. Jenner is part of a long slate of Republican candidates who are trying to oust Newsom. She held her first press conference last week, months after she first announced her run. Vulnerable Senate Democrats have gotten a flood of cash over the last few months as they gear up for the 2022 elections. According to CQ Roll Call, four current Senator – Mark Kelly of Arizona, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire – raised a combined $19.2m between April and June of this year and ended the quarter with $31.3m in the bank. Warnock raised $7.2m in the second quarter of 2021, which he ended with $10.5m in the bank. Kelly meanwhile raised $6m and had $7.6m in the bank. The fundraising numbers suggest the candidates are out-raising Republicans who have started trickling into the Senate races. Over 1m people were arrested at the US-Mexico between October and June, according to US Border Patrol data released Friday. Over 178,000 people were arrested in June, a 20-year record for that month. A bulk of the arrests were of people who are trying to recross the border after being turned away. Migrants looking to cross can immediately be turned away when the government uses Title 42, an order from the Trump administration that allows Border Patrol to bar entry to those who pose a public health risk. About 455,000 unique individuals were arrested by US Border Patrol this past year, which is lower than the number of unique individuals who crossed in 2019. New Yorker: Milley stopped Trump attacking Iran Susan Glasser of the New Yorker and her husband, Peter Baker of the New York Times, have a Trump book coming out next year. Not to be left out this summer, as the bestseller lists are drenched in the things, Glasser has a piece of standardly startling reporting out on the subject today. In short, Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and star of many a Trump-related books story of late, reportedly did not only stop Trump from shooting protesters and muse to friends about “Reichstag moments” and “the gospel of the Führer”. He also did his best to stop Trump launching an attack on Iran. Here’s the key passage: In the months after the election, with Trump seemingly willing to do anything to stay in power, the subject of Iran was repeatedly raised in White House meetings with the president, and Milley repeatedly argued against a strike. Trump did not want a war, the chairman believed, but he kept pushing for a missile strike in response to various provocations against US interests in the region. Milley, by statute the senior military adviser to the president, was worried that Trump might set in motion a full-scale conflict that was not justified. Trump had a circle of Iran hawks around him and was close with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was also urging the administration to act against Iran after it was clear that Trump had lost the election. “If you do this, you’re gonna have a fucking war,” Milley would say. Trump did not do it. For what it’s worth, Trump returned to the offensive against Milley on Friday, issuing yet another intemperate statement about the contents of books with which, in the most part, he himself co-operated. The gist: “’General’ Milley (who [former defense secretary James] Mattis wanted to send to Europe in order to get rid of him), if he said what was reported, perhaps should be impeached, or court-martialed and tried.” Here, meanwhile, is Lloyd Green’s review of perhaps the biggest of the Trump books, I Alone Can Fix It by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post, which includes a lot of Milley’s musings about the possibility of a coup, which have really angered Trump. The book is out next week but is No1 on Amazon already: US representative Joyce Beatty said in an interview that the arrest of her and eight others yesterday during a voting rights protest was ironic given how quick the response to the protest was compared to the Capitol riot 6 January. “Here we are with the disparities of treatment with less than a hundred of people [compared to the] thousands and thousands of people who were not peacefully protesting,” she told SiriusXM Urban Vie’s The Joe Madison Show. The protest was “in the same spirit” as protests that took place during the Civil Rights Movement that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis and other marched, sang, protested and what happened? They got America’s attention,” she said. “We are in a critical point right now... voting rights is our power” Speaking to the press briefly before he left for Camp David for the weekend, Joe Biden doubled down on the White House’s message against vaccine misinformation. At the White House’s daily press briefing yesterday, press secretary Jen Psaki said that Facebook and other social media companies aren’t doing enough to combat misinformation spreading on their platforms. “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect medical experts who are popular with our audience with accurate information and boos trusted content,” she said. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed a new bill into law Thursday barring police from lying to underage kids during interrogations. Commonly used interrogation tactics, such as promising leniency or insinuating that incriminating evidence exists, are banned for suspects under 18 years old under the new law, which goes into effect January 1, NPR reported: According to the Innocence Project, an organization focused on exonerating wrongly convicted people, those types of interrogation methods have been shown to lead to false confessions. They’ve also played a role in about 30% of all wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA. Illinois once was called the “False Confession Capital of the United States,” the organization said, because of a number of high-profile exonerations of people who falsely confessed to crimes they didn’t commit. “In Illinois alone, there have been 100 wrongful convictions predicated on false confessions, including 31 involving people under 18 years of age,” said Lauren Kaeseberg, legal director at the Illinois Innocence Project. One notable case involved the Englewood Four. In March 1995, Chicago police brought in four Black teenagers from the Chicago neighborhood of Englewood and accused them of the rape and murder of a woman named Nina Glover. After hours of interrogation, police told one of the teenagers, Terrill Swift, that if he just confessed to being at the scene he could go home — so he did. All four teens would confess to the crimes, and were all still in prison 20 years when they were exonerated thanks to DNA evidence. A judge in DC has said that the federal government cannot share grand jury materials with a contractor who was hired to organize the huge collection of evidence from the 6 January Capitol riots, according to Politico. Over 500 defendants face federal prosecution for their role in the insurrection. Deloitte Financial Advisory Services was offered $6.1m to create a database of material from the riot collected by the FBI. The federal government has reportedly collected 16,000 hours of footage from the day and have issued 6,000 grand jury subpoenas. To move prosecutions forward for the hundreds of cases, the government would need to share its evidence with defense attorneys representing those facing charges. The ruling means that organizing the massive pile of evidence will be more of a headache for the federal government. In her decision, DC district court judge Beryl Howell said that prosecutors did not show there was a “particularized need” to provide Deloitte with access to grand jury materials given that it is a private firm.