SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
national rifle association
Trump DOJ Slammed for 'Desperate' Attempt at Retribution After Subpoenas for NY AG James
"Attorney General James took on Trump's fraud... and won," said New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. "So it's little wonder that Trump's politicized DOJ is now coming after her."
Aug 08, 2025
A lawyer representing New York's top law enforcement official, Attorney General Letitia James, said Friday that the news of the Trump administration's investigation into James and her successful legal cases against President Donald Trump amounted to "the most blatant and desperate example" of the president's "political retribution campaign."
In recent days, The Washington Post reported Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a subpoena to James as part of an investigation into whether the attorney general, a longtime adversary of Trump, violated the president's civil rights when she successfully sued him and his real estate business for fraud.
A second subpoena was related to James' litigation against the National Rifle Association, in which a New York jury found last year that former NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre and other executives had engaged in rampant corruption.
The civil rights statute that the Trump administration is reportedly using to investigate James' case against the president is typically used in cases related to law enforcement officers discriminating against or mistreating people based on race, religion, sex, or ethnicity. According to The New York Times, the DOJ is arguing that James used her law enforcement authority to deprive Trump of his rights.
James filed a civil fraud case against Trump and the Trump Organization in 2022 and won a $450 million judgment against the president in penalties plus interest. The interest the president owes has grown to half a billion dollars as he has refused to pay and has appealed the ruling.
New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engeron said that Trump and his company's executives were "incapable of admitting the error of their ways" regarding the "blatantly false financial data" they used to misrepresent of the value of their properties, which allowed them to get better loan and insurance rates.
The Democratic candidate in the New York City mayoral race, state Rep. Zohran Mamdani (D-36), expressed little surprise that Trump was apparently retaliating against the attorney general who won against him in court.
"Attorney General James took on Trump's fraud and the NRA's rampant corruption—and won both cases," said Mamdani. "So it's little wonder that Trump's politicized DOJ is now coming after her. The people of New York stand with their lawyer and champion."
The subpoenas were issued months after the DOJ appeared to try another tactic to punish James when it opened a criminal investigation into alleged mortgage fraud, accusing the attorney general of lying on loan documents for a home that she purchased in Virginia and saying the home would be her primary residence. James' attorneys have said the error was an honest mistake.
Dana Nessel, the Democratic attorney general of Michigan, came to James' defense on Friday and condemned "the depths to which Trump and his cronies will go to exact vengeance upon anyone who has dared to hold him accountable."
But the subpoenas, said Nessel, are not just a concern for James.
"Americans should know and understand how deeply compromised our federal law enforcement agencies are," she said. "If this can happen to AG James, it can happen to anyone."
Geoff Burgan, a spokesperson for James, agreed that "any weaponization of the justice system should disturb every American."
"We stand strongly behind our successful litigation against the Trump Organization and the National Rifle Association, and we will continue to stand up for New Yorkers' rights," said Burgan.
Abbe Lowell, the attorney general's lawyer, said that "weaponizing the Department of Justice to try to punish an elected official for doing her job is an attack on the rule of law and a dangerous escalation by this administration."
"If prosecutors carry out this improper tactic and are genuinely interested in the truth," said Lowell, "we are ready and waiting with facts and the law."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'License to Kill': New Report Finds Higher Homicide Rates in 'Stand Your Ground' States
"These laws change the nature of self-defense, turning everyday disputes into deadly confrontations," the report, compiled by Everytown for Gun Safety, says.
Jul 21, 2025
A new report has found that "Stand Your Ground" laws have led to an increased rate of gun homicides in the United States.
These laws allow anyone who believes they are facing the threat of death or bodily harm to use deadly force without the requirement to first retreat to safety. But according to a report released Monday by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, they have become a "license to kill."
Data compiled by the group shows that these laws have led to around 700 additional gun deaths each year, increasing the number of gun deaths nationally by 8% to 11%. That estimate came from a 2022 study published by the medical journal JAMA Network Open, which looked at data from 1999 to 2017.
Following aggressive lobbying by the National Rifle Association and the firearms industry, the first Stand Your Ground laws were introduced in Florida in 2005. Since then, 29 states have adopted them.
Over that time, those states have seen especially high increases in violence, with Alabama, Missouri, and Florida all having 30% or greater increases to their homicide rates.
Everytown's report details one particularly harrowing story from Florida in which Stand Your Ground laws contributed to the shooting of two children:
In October 2022, William Hale and Frank Allison drove alongside each other on US Highway 1 in Hialeah, Florida. A traffic dispute grew more dangerous as both men began driving erratically. When Hale threw a water bottle at the other car, Allison retaliated with a gun, firing a shot that hit Hale's 5-year-old daughter. In response, Hale fired all of the bullets in his handgun, striking Allison's 14-year-old daughter.
Though both men were initially charged with attempted murder, prosecutors dropped the charges against the man who fired first. Under Florida's so-called "Stand Your Ground" legal defense law, the thrown water bottle justified responding with deadly force, leading to a child being shot. In the end, with two girls wounded in a road rage tragedy, the man who started the shootout was protected by a distortion of self-defense that allows people to shoot first and ask questions later.
"These laws change the nature of self-defense, turning everyday disputes into deadly confrontations," the report says. "Far from empowering victims, Shoot First laws lower the threshold for justifiable homicide, encouraging the escalation of petty arguments and armed vigilantism."
These laws attracted national scrutiny in 2012 following the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida by a neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, who was acquitted under the state's Stand Your Ground law.
The 2020 shooting of another young Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, in Georgia, is likewise believed to have been exacerbated by Georgia's Stand Your Ground law, though the three men who killed him were ultimately found guilty.
Stand Your Ground laws also contribute to heightened racial disparities for shooting victims, according to FBI data from 2019-23.
Justifiable homicide rates increased by 55% in states with Stand Your Ground laws, the report found. In those same states, the shootings of Black victims by white shooters are four times as likely to be deemed justified than they would be if the roles were reversed, a higher rate than in states without these laws.
In some Stand Your Ground states like Michigan, Indiana, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Kansas, the disparity was more than seven times greater for Black victims than white ones.
And contrary to claims that loose gun restrictions protect women, the report found multiple studies concluding that domestic violence cases in which a woman claimed self-defense were less likely to be deemed justifiable, while women convicted were more likely to serve longer sentences.
"In addition to increased risk of victimization in Shoot First states, convictions are unfairly skewed against people of color and women," the report concludes. "In the decades since the first Shoot First law was enacted, no research shows that these laws lead to better outcomes for anyone. Shoot First was created to solve a problem that does not exist—and Americans are paying the price."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Guns, the Supreme Court, and American Way of Death
How the nation's highest court supercharged the nation’s gun violence epidemic.
Sep 21, 2024
If you’re looking for someone to blame for the gun violence that has left our schools, streets, and communities soaked in blood, don’t point just at the National Rifle Association and their lackeys in the Republican Party. Raise another finger, ideally your middle one, toward a Supreme Court that has enabled the unceasing rise of gun-related carnage in all its ever-more-obscene forms.
The key decision came in 2008, when a 5-4 majority led by the late Justice Antonin Scalia ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms. Prior to Heller, the combined weight of academic scholarship and legal precedent had construed the Second Amendment as protecting civilian gun ownership only in connection with long-antiquated state militias. This view was long seen as reflecting the spirit of the actual debates held during the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
Scalia and the other members of the conservative Heller majority purported to base their radical reinterpretation of the Second Amendment on their “originalist” understanding of the Founding Fathers’ intentions. But their novel conclusion essentially ignored the first 13 words of the Second Amendment regarding the necessity of preserving the militias.
This amounted to a distortion of American history. State militias played a critical role in the American Revolution, and before that, in maintaining order in the 13 colonies. As the Second Amendment historian Noah Shusterman has written:
The men writing the Bill of Rights wanted every citizen to be in the militia, and they wanted everyone in the militia to be armed. If someone was prohibited from participating in the militia, the leaders of the founders’ generation would not have wanted them to have access to weapons… Read the debates about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the militia’s importance leaps off the page. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called a well-regulated militia “the most natural defense of a free country.” His anti-Federalist critics agreed with the need for a citizens’ militia, writing that “a well-regulated militia, composed of the Yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people.”
Few errors of constitutional interpretation have had such deadly real-world consequences as Heller. Justice John Paul Stevens, who authored the principal dissent in Heller, later condemned the ruling as “the worst self-inflicted wound in the court’s history.”
Since Heller, both guns and gun deaths have surged in tandem in what the American Enlightenment Project calls the “Heller Inflection.” In 2008, there were 305 million guns in circulation and 31,500 reported gun deaths; there are now 470 million guns in circulation and over 45,000 reported gun deaths per year. Mass shootings, defined as events involving four or more victims, have grown as well—from 272 in 2014 to 653 last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
But as bad as Heller was, it still recognized that certain gun control measures remained “presumptively lawful.” In the words of Scalia:
Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
In 2010, in McDonald v. Chicago, the court extended Heller’s Second Amendment analysis to cover state and local governments in addition to federal enclaves. But in 2022, with Clarence Thomas’ 6-3 majority opinion in New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court cast aside the limiting language of Heller about presumptively lawful gun-control restrictions.
Bruen struck down New York’s firearm permit system that had been on the books since 1909. To reach that result, the court rejected the traditional methods of judicial scrutiny used to determine the constitutionality of state and federal statutes that required judges to balance the governmental interests advanced by legislation against the competing rights of individuals. In place of interest balancing, Thomas and his cohorts substituted a specious “history and tradition” test based on the justices’ highly selective and subjective reading of history and their sense of tradition.
In fact, gun-control regulations like the New York permit system have been commonplace in the United States from colonial times to the present. The founders supported a variety of strict measures, including the registration of guns issued to militia members and prohibitions against carrying firearms in public. By the early 1900s, nearly every state had enacted laws requiring firearm licenses and banning concealed carry.
As a result of Bruen, however, that history has effectively been neutered. Judges now must regard gun-control measures as presumptively invalid. To overcome the presumption, the government must prove that even the most commonsense laws are firmly rooted, either explicitly or by analogy, in the “nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Together with Heller and McDonald, Bruen has led to a surge in Second Amendment challenges to gun laws since 2008. Pre-Heller, the lower federal courts decided an average of 26 gun cases per year; they now hear nearly 700 per year. The challengers are also winning a higher percentage of cases compared to the pre-Heller era, especially in cases decided by Donald Trump-appointed judges appointed. “Trump judges are close to casting 50% of their votes in favor of gun rights, when the average for other Republicans is 28%,” one study has found.
Last term, the Supreme Court surprised many by upholding a federal law that bars anyone subject to a domestic-violence restraining order from possessing a gun. However, it did so without signaling that it is prepared to modify the hard Second Amendment lines drawn in Heller and Bruen. As long as the court is controlled by right-wing activists beholden to the gun lobby and the Republican Party, those lines and their horrendous consequences are here to stay.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular