donal brown

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger met with President Donald Trump and failed to convince Trump to curtail his anti-press rhetoric which Sulzberger said was damaging the public’s commitment to free speech and press. After the meeting Trump resumed his attacks on the New York Times and Washington Post calling them “anti-Trump haters” intent on writing “bad stories even on very positive achievements.” (CNBC, July 30, 2018, by Javier E. David with contributions from The

A federal district judge ruled against Florida’s move to end early voting at state college and university campuses, saying the ban violated the First, Fourteenth and Twenty-Sixth Amendments. (Tampa Bay Times, July 24, 2018, by Steve Bousquet) The judge ruled the ban violated the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights to vote by ending early voting on campuses which “lopsidedly impacts Florida’s youngest voters.” The ban could not be justified by any state interests. (Constitutional Law

ICE recently released a Mexican reporter and son after seven months in detention. Emilio Gutiérrez-Soto and his son Oscar were seeking asylum in face of death threats made during the father’s reporting on government and military corruption. The two had been in the U.S. for ten years before they were detained last December after the father criticized the asylum process. (The Texas Tribune, July 26, 2018, by Julián Aguilar) A judge ruled last year that

A California appeals court denied the Sacramento Bee’s bid for attorney fees in a public records tiff with Mayor Kevin Johnson over e-mails concerning his use of public time and resources with the National Conference of Black Mayors. Some of the e-mails sought were between the mayor and legal counsel, and although the mayor released some of those e-mails, the judge ruled that Johnson had a right to attorney-client privilege and was not compelled to

Dark money just got darker as the Treasury Department announced they were ending the requirement for nonprofits to disclose the identities of their donors in political campaigns to the Internal Revenue Service. It will now be more difficult for the IRS to unmask illegal spending of foreign money in U.S. elections. “The wider context of these changes” writes Public Citizen’s Emily Peterson Cassin for The Hill, July 21, 2018, “makes enforcement of any rules surrounding