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President Biden appears to freeze at White House Juneteenth event

President Biden appears to freeze at White House Juneteenth event

President Biden appeared to freeze during a Juneteenth celebration at the White House on Monday. Biden, 81, was filmed standing still as stone while those around him, including Vice President Kamala Harris, clapped and danced to a concert featuring gospel singer Kirk Franklin.  Video shows Biden staring blankly and not moving an inch for about 30 seconds before Philonise Floyd — the brother of George Floyd, whose murder triggered nationwide riots in 2020 — noticed the president and put his arm around him. Biden then smiles as Floyd leans in to say something, and they bump fists after exchanging a few words. “Why isn’t Biden moving?” the Republican National Committee’s rapid response account questioned on X.  “Lights are on but no one’s home,” the Trump campaign posted. This is a developing story and will be updated. 

Civil liberty, whistleblower protection groups urge Congress to allow vote on Espionage Act reform amendment

Civil liberty, whistleblower protection groups urge Congress to allow vote on Espionage Act reform amendment

A group of 19 civil liberty, press freedom, human rights and whistleblower protection groups are calling on the House Rules Committee to allow a Floor vote on an amendment to reform the Espionage Act. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., offered amendment 759 to the Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025 in an effort to reform the Espionage Act and protect journalists and whistleblowers from the government’s abuse of power. The groups wrote a letter to Rules Committee Chair Michael Burgess, R-Texas, and Ranking Member Jim McGovern, D-Mass., according to a post on X by Defending Rights & Dissent, which led the letter to the committee. “We urge you to find the amendment in order and send it to the floor for a full vote,” the groups wrote. “Introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, amendment 759 reforms the Espionage Act to rein in the government’s abuse of the law to target journalists and whistleblowers. Such an amendment is urgently needed.” HILL AID INTERFERES WITH FOX NEWS CAMERA CREW DURING TLAIB INTERVIEW “As the amendment deals with provisions of the Espionage Act regulating the disclosure of national defense information, it is germane to the NDAA,” the letter continued. “Further, the amendment addresses core First Amendment rights undermined by the Espionage Act that deserve a meaningful debate.” Other groups that signed onto the letter include the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Government Accountability Project, Government Information Watch, Project on Government Oversight, National Security Counselors, Reporters Without Borders, Veterans for Peace and Whistleblowers of America. “The Espionage Act may sound like a law dealing with spies and saboteurs, but this overly broad World War I-era law threatens press freedom by serving as a tool to prosecute publishers, journalists, their sources, and whistleblowers,” the groups wrote. “The Espionage Act, which predates both the classification system and modern First Amendment jurisprudence, criminalizes the unauthorized disclosure of ‘national defense information,’ a term the statute leaves undefined. This law has been used to threaten and prosecute both media outlets that publish government secrets, as well as their sources.” The letter adds that the law is “so broadly written that on its face it could apply not only to whistleblowers who alert the media to government misconduct and journalists who publish the story, but even just members of the general public who discuss what they read in the newspaper.” Amendment 759 would align the Espionage Act with “contemporary First Amendment jurisprudence” and would correct “grotesque violations” of due process that Espionage Act whistleblower defendants have faced, according to the letter. The letter argues that sections §793 and §798 of the Espionage Act have repeatedly been used to threaten press freedom. The groups said Amendment 759 would tighten the language of the two sections by limiting these provisions to government employees with a responsibility to protect classified information or foreign agents, mandating that national defense information be properly classified, requiring the government to prove the defendant acted with the specific intent to harm the U.S. or help a foreign adversary, allowing a defendant to testify about the reason behind their disclosures and establishing an affirmative public interest defense. ‘SQUAD’ MEMBER REP. TLAIB CALLS FOR NETANYAHU’S ARREST; GOP SENATORS WARN ICC OF SERIOUS REPERCUSSIONS The amendment, according to the letter, is narrow enough that it would impact sections of the Espionage Act that “have been used against actual spies.” “§793 and §798 of the Espionage Act have grave implications for the First Amendment’s protections for news gathering, as well as the public’s right to know,” the groups wrote. “The American people deserve a meaningful debate on this issue.” This comes as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is in prison in the U.K. fighting against extradition to the U.S. on espionage charges for publishing classified U.S. military documents in 2010 leaked to him by a whistleblower, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, whose 35-year sentence for violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses was commuted to seven years in January 2017 by then-President Obama. HOUSE MEMBERS URGED IN BIPARTISAN LETTER TO JOIN DEMANDS FOR BIDEN TO DROP JULIAN ASSANGE’S CASE Tlaib has previously called for the release of Assange, including in a congressional letter she led a year ago that urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to drop the charges against Assange. There have been previous attempts on Capitol Hill to reform the Espionage Act, including when Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., reintroduced the Espionage Act Reform Act in 2022. Massie and McGovern also led a congressional letter to President Biden last fall calling on him to drop the prosecution of Assange.

New docs show Bragg spent $1M on attorneys to address House probe of Trump case amid city budget cuts

New docs show Bragg spent M on attorneys to address House probe of Trump case amid city budget cuts

EXCLUSIVE: Findings from more than 100 pages of documents gleaned through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed that the prosecutor in NY v. Trump spent $1 million to respond to congressional oversight of his prosecution at a time New York City officials were demanding across-the-board budget cuts. Documents procured through litigation by the Oversight Project, a good-government transparency arm of the Heritage Foundation, showed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office sent an April 2023 interoffice memo announcing a $1 million appropriation for outside counsel. According to the memo, the funds came from a 2019 settlement with a financial institution that was accused of illegally transacting with nations subject to U.S. sanctions. “Due to this unanticipated need, $1,000,000 will be made available for this matter from the DANY Deficit Project under the UniCredit subfund,” the memo read. BRAGG VIOLATED TRUMP’S 6TH AMENDMENT RIGHTS: LEGAL EXPERT The document also referenced an attached “engagement letter” signed with the high-powered Los Angeles-based Gibson Dunn law firm, and the packet also included an approved waiver from the New York City Conflict of Interest Board to permit a Bragg counsel to participate in the case despite a familial connection to a Gibson Dunn attorney. Another piece of the document tranche said Bragg indicated it would be in the best interests of the office to hire outside counsel to respond to congressional inquiry from Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and others at the time.  Of five law firms that were apparently solicited, only Gibson Dunn was immediately available, according to the findings. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has approved the use of funds received as part of the 2019 UniCredit settlement to be used toward retaining outside counsel tied to a congressional inquiry into the investigation and prosecution of a confidential investigation division case. The email then references an attached engagement letter signed by Bragg with Gibson Dunn and documents referenced Bragg’s office’s awareness of the trio of House committees looking into his investigation of former President Trump. BILL CLINTON’S EX-POLLSTER BLASTS TRUMP INDICTMENT On April 4, 2023, around the time of the actions indicated in the trove of documents, New York City Mayor Eric Adams issued a citywide directive to cut $1 billion over the following four years. New York did then and continues to face dueling crises of crime, slowing economic growth and a migrant influx. All agencies were to enact plans to cut 4% from their budgets, according to a memo obtained by the New York Post at the time. By November, the budget cuts had affected school and library programs and somewhat lowered the rolls of the NYPD, according to the New York Times. The findings of the FOIA request suggest Bragg should, instead of prosecuting Trump, be “arresting himself,” said attorney Mike Howell, the Oversight Project’s executive director, in an interview with Fox News Digital. “It speaks to the fact that Bragg had to go outside [the district attorney’s office] for this sort of work; very similar to how he had to have [prosecutor Matthew] Colangelo come down from DOJ.” In an exchange with Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., during a House hearing last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland repeatedly denied he or the Justice Department dispatched Colangelo to New York or had anything to do with the latter taking a prominent role in Trump’s prosecution. Howell further criticized the timing of Bragg’s $1 million allocation, saying it was done at a time when his city was “deteriorating into a third-world urban area.” “It shows the highest focus of this unique kind of ‘all-hands-on-deck’ approach as applied to President Trump, while they have just degeneracy, deviancy and crime in their streets,” he said. Howell said the documents his organization obtained are, however, only the first shoe likely to drop in the Oversight Project’s focus on Bragg’s office’s behavior and that future FOIA hearings are on the docket in coming days and weeks. His one focus will be on alleged “voluminous communications” between Bragg’s office and “Washington, D.C., political operatives” about which a hearing was held last Tuesday. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP “You have [Adams] telling folks to cut back and focus on crime problems, and then you have a DA spending more and focusing on political persecution as New York City goes to hell,” he said. The documents also depict an environment where the political left is expending much more resources to prosecute Trump than the right is to defend the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Howell said. “I mean, they were willing to cut that check immediately to a high-priced law firm to dispense with the inquiries from Chairman Jordan, which they did. Chairman Jordan’s office didn’t really lay a glove on him.” However, as of Saturday, the Associated Press reported Bragg appeared to agree to testify before what the outlet predicted to be a “hostile” subcommittee hearing. The AP reported Jordan requested Bragg’s presence at a June 13 hearing, but the prosecutor’s office needed a new date and asked for more information on the “scope and purpose” of the hearing.  The outlet further predicted any hearing would take place beyond Trump’s scheduled July sentencing. One of Howell’s hopes in his organization procuring the documents is that it will lead Congress to double its efforts to fight ongoing “lawfare” on the left and offered one reported example that House Republicans could access “reserve funds” from the now-defunct House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack to appropriately resource such efforts. Attorney Mike Davis, a former chief nominations counsel for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who oversaw floor votes for such key nominations as Justice Brett Kavanaugh, called the findings a true “scandal.” “Instead of spending money fighting real crime in New York City, Alvin Bragg and Matthew Colangelo weaponized and politicized the DA’s office to get Trump and line the pockets of their allies,” said Davis, now president of the Article III Project, an organization coined from Article III of the Constitution that aims to forward originalism in