Political Heat

Donald Trump's defenses against claims he did anything wrong, relating to his improperly holding classified documents — including being under investigation for potentially violating parts of the Espionage Act , per the search warrant of his Mar-a-Lago property that was made public Friday — are, to no surprise, not accurate. On his Truth Social account (where anything BUT the truth is ever uttered, it seems), Trump listed a couple of reasons why (in his mind) criticism of him harboring top secret, classified information at his Palm Beach resort (including potential info on nuclear weapons ) was fine.  Let's look at what he had to say. Number one, it was all declassified. Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Well, no, it most likely wasn't. There's a process for declassifying information as top secret as the documents Trump was harboring. Just saying "I declassified this" isn't how it works.   Additionally, according to The Wall Street Journal , the documents that wer...

A provision that's never been enforced since it was passed as part of a larger law in the way-back-times of former President Bill Clinton could land anyone talking online about abortion (in the U.S.) in prison for several years . Per The New Republic : [Q]uietly sitting on the books, where it’s been for nearly three decades, is a law that explicitly makes it a crime to discuss abortion online. TNR's Melissa Gira Grant elaborates on how this came to be, and what it could mean: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first major attempt by Congress to define what would be lawful on the internet. The act includes a provision that criminalizes discussing abortion, with potential punishment of up to five years in jail, $250,000 in fines, or both. Obviously, this law is  a violation of free speech protections that exist within the First Amendment . But with Republicans all-but-guaranteed to win Congress next year , the potential for a GOP president to win in 2024, and the Su...