Senate confirms former Fox News host Pirro as top federal prosecutor for the nation's capital
Pirro, a former county prosecutor and elected judge, was confirmed 50-45. Before becoming the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia in May, she co-hosted the Fox News show 'The Five' on weekday evenings, where she frequently interviewed Trump.
Trump yanked Martin's nomination after a key Republican senator said he could not support him due to Martin's outspoken support for rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Martin now serves as the Justice Department's pardon attorney.
In 2021, voting technology company Smartmatic USA sued Fox News, Pirro and others for spreading false claims that the company helped 'steal' the 2020 presidential election from Trump. The company's libel suit, filed in a New York state court, sought $2.7 billion from the defendants.
Last month, Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to send Pirro's nomination to the Senate floor after Democrats walked out to protest Emil Bove's nomination to become a federal appeals court judge.
Pirro, a 1975 graduate of Albany Law School, has significantly more courtroom experience than Martin, who had never served as a prosecutor or tried a case before taking office in January. She was elected as a judge in New York's Westchester County Court in 1990 before serving three terms as the county's elected district attorney.
In the final minutes of his first term as president, Trump issued a pardon to Pirro's ex-husband, Albert Pirro, who was convicted in 2000 on conspiracy and tax evasion charges.
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Boston Globe
10 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Trump fired America's economic data collector. History shows the perils.
There is the case of China, where earlier this century local authorities manipulated data to hit growth targets mandated by Beijing, forcing analysts and policymakers to turn to alternative measures to gauge the state of the country's economy. Advertisement Perhaps most famously, there is the case of Argentina, which in the 2000s and 2010s systematically understated inflation figures to such a degree that the international community eventually stopped relying on the government's data. That loss of faith drove up the country's borrowing costs, worsening a debt crisis that ultimately led to it defaulting on its international obligations. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up It is too soon to know whether the United States is on a similar path. But economists and other experts said that Trump's decision Friday to fire Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was a troubling step in that direction. Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and chair of the Federal Reserve, said the firing was not what is expected from the most advanced economy in the world. Advertisement 'This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic,' Yellen said. Essential data The Bureau of Labor Statistics is officially part of the Labor Department, whose secretary is a member of the president's Cabinet. But the agency operates independently, producing detailed, nonpartisan data on employment, prices, wages and other topics. Economists say that reliable, independently produced statistics are critical to good decision making in both the public and private sector. Officials at the Federal Reserve rely on government-collected data on inflation and unemployment to decide how to set interest rates, which affect how much Americans must pay to get a mortgage or a car loan. 'Good data helps not just the Fed, it helps the government, but it also helps the private sector,' Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, said at a recent news conference. 'The United States has been a leader in that for 100 years,' he added, 'and we really need to continue that in my view.' Experts on government statistics say data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other agencies is unlikely to deteriorate dramatically overnight. The acting commissioner named to replace McEntarfer on a temporary basis, William J. Wiatrowski, is a longtime employee of the agency who is widely respected by experts inside and outside government. The career employees who collect and analyze the data remain in place, using the same methods and procedures they used before McEntarfer was pushed out. But experts who just days ago were defending the integrity of the statistical agencies now find themselves asking uncomfortable questions about the trajectory of economic data in the United States. Advertisement 'If the poverty numbers come in and look great, is the director of the Census going to get a raise?' said Amy O'Hara, a former Census Bureau official who is now a professor at Georgetown University. 'If the household income numbers don't look great what happens then? What about GDP? What about CPI?' Andreas Georgiou knows the challenges of standing up to such political pressure. After he took over Greece's statistical agency in 2010, he found that the country has been severely understating its budget deficits. Those findings ran afoul of Greek authorities, who spent years trying to prosecute him on a variety of charges related to his work, despite independent reviews that supported his conclusions. (He fared better, though, than Olimpiy Kvitkin, a Soviet census official who was arrested and executed when his population count came in lower than Josef Stalin had announced.) Georgiou refused to bend. Reliable statistics are important for policymaking, he said. But they are also essential to democracy. 'Official statistics, government statistics are a mirror that society holds up to itself,' he said. If that mirror is distorted, or broken entirely, then the accountability that is central to a democratic system cannot work. 'If society cannot see itself clearly, then it cannot identify its problems,' he said. 'If it cannot identify its problems, then it cannot find the right solutions. It cannot find the right persons to solve these problems.' Data integrity at risk Trump said he fired McEntarfer because the numbers produced by her agency were 'rigged' to hurt him politically. Experts on the government statistics, including former commissioners in both Democratic and Republican administrations, have called foul on that accusation. The commissioner, who is the bureau's sole political appointee, does not control the numbers that the agency publishes, or even see them until they have been finalized by a staff of career technocrats whose careers typically span multiple presidential administrations. Advertisement Erica Groshen, who led the bureau under President Barack Obama, recalled getting resistance from the agency's staff when she tried to liven up the language of the monthly jobs reports. The bureau's staff insisted that the agency's job wasn't to say whether the glass was half-full or half-empty, only to report that, 'It is an eight-ounce container with four ounces of liquid.' Groshen relented. That is not to say political interference would be impossible. Government statistics rely on hundreds of methodological decisions, many of them judgment calls with no obviously correct answer. A sufficiently sophisticated agency head might, over time, be able to nudge the data in a politically advantageous direction, without any single decision being so egregious that it led to a mass resignation of career employees. 'I could imagine a new commissioner coming in and trying to make changes to those methods and procedures that try to move those numbers one way or the other,' said Katharine G. Abraham, who led the bureau during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. 'They would have to know a lot in terms of where to put the finger on the scale.' Private alternatives There are also blunter approaches. In Argentina in 2007, the government of then-President Néstor Kirchner pushed out the mathematician in charge of the country's consumer price data, then released an inflation figure that was dramatically lower than the one the mathematician had calculated. The public wasn't fooled. Nor were international bond investors, who ultimately turned to alternative sources of inflation data, calculated by researchers outside the government. Advertisement But such alternative sources are inherently limited, said Alberto Cavallo, a Harvard University economist who developed one of the most widely used private inflation indexes in Argentina. 'Private alternatives can complement official statistics, but they are not a substitute,' Cavallo wrote in an email. 'Government agencies have the resources and scale to conduct nationwide surveys -- something no private initiative can fully replicate.' Recently, Cavallo has been publishing data on consumer prices in the United States, which has shown the impact of Trump's tariffs more quickly than the government's data. But while such real-time sources are valuable, they don't carry the 'institutional credibility' of government data. The trouble is that once that credibility is eroded, it is hard to repair -- particularly at a time when partisans on both sides of the political aisle are skeptical of numbers put out by members of the opposing party. Nancy Potok, a former Census official who served as chief statistician of the United States during the first Trump administration, said that in the past there had been strong bipartisan support for the statistical system in Congress and the business community. But partisanship seems to have eroded that support at a moment when a combination of political pressures and long-standing budget challenges are making it most necessary. 'There were some people who really understood the value of the economic data, and now that's not the conversation and those champions aren't there that were there in the past,' she said. 'There's no one leading the charge to make these kind of investments.' This article originally appeared in Advertisement
Boston Globe
10 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Breaking from his father, Josh Kraft criticizes Trump as having ‘stoked hatred and division'
Kraft, son of New England Patriots Owner Robert Kraft, has been tied to his father's connections to Trump during his campaign. Robert Kraft and Trump have a long history. In 2017, Kraft told the Globe that the two have 'been friends for years' and that during 'the worst time in my dad's life, [Trump] was there for him.' Advertisement Scrutiny over Robert Kraft's friendship with Trump increased after the Globe reported the After the meeting, Josh Kraft received campaign donations from four of the top attorneys at the firm, including its chairman, Brad Karp. At the time, a spokesperson for The Kraft Group denied any coordination between parties for the donation to the campaign. Advertisement Kraft said he is ready to deal with the consequences of the Trump presidency if he is elected mayor, amid 'a mountain of federal budget cuts along with a billion dollar tax credit shortfall.' He also spoke about Mayor Michelle Wu's criticism of his family's relationship with Trump. 'Michelle Wu wants to talk about me, I want to talk about all of you,' Kraft said. Wu could not be immediately reached for comment. Kraft also spoke out against Wu's handling of the Boston housing crisis, the White Stadium renovation, and the city's homelessness problem, saying, 'addiction does not discriminate.' Regarding housing, Kraft said his campaign promises to jump-start construction, implement ' 'Boston is going to be a place where families and young people have to leave the city, and only the wealthy can afford to live here,' Kraft said. Kraft also criticized Wu's comments about 'She's desperate to distract the voters from a record of broken and failed campaign promises and the failures of her policy plans, especially making it easier for the middle class to afford to live in the city of Boston,' Kraft said. Kraft said he proposes a plan to place White Stadium, located in Franklin Park, back in the hands of Boston Public Schools students and athletes. He previously criticized Mayor Wu for not disclosing the Advertisement The renovations, which were subject to lawsuits over alleged During the press conference, Kraft dismissed comments about Super PAC tax exemptions. Super PACs are not limited in their campaign contributions, and can donate more than the $1,000 limit. The Your City Your Future Super PAC that supports Kraft has donated more than $3 million to his campaign. He also did not discuss his tax returns, which his campaign promised to release before the preliminary vote on Sept. 9. His campaign revealed last week he earned $6.3 million in 2024 but declined to break down the sources of Kraft's income. Wu and others have criticized Kraft for his lack of income transparency and the possibility of conflicts of interest in his mayoral campaign. Kraft has already personally contributed $2 million to his campaign. Mayoral candidates are not required to release their tax returns, but it has become common practice to do so. Wu said she has disclosed her finances for the last 12 years. If elected, Kraft said he would not be involved with his family business to avoid conflicts of interest. Critics, including Wu, flagged The Kraft Group's proposed soccer stadium in Everett, to which The Kraft Group proposed mitigation payments of $750,000. Kraft served as the head of the family charity, the New England Patriot Charitable Foundation. The nonprofit reported that Kraft was not paid a salary for his role, but a spokesperson from the campaign said Advertisement Kraft was also the head of the Boston Boys and Girls Club for more than a decade, where he earned $350,000 in 2020, the year he stepped down from his leadership role. Maria Probert can be reached at
12 minutes ago
Cameroon's election board bars main opposition candidate from presidential race
YAOUNDE, Cameroon -- YAOUNDE, Cameroon (AP) — Cameroon 's electoral commission on Saturday rejected the candidacy of Maurice Kamto in the upcoming presidential election, fueling fears of unrest and increasing the likelihood of another Biya victory. Kamto, a former government minister, is seen as the main challenger to long-serving President Paul Biya. The electoral commission, ELECAM, said it approved 13 presidential candidates, excluding Kamto. No reason was given. Biya is included. Kamto, who has two days to appeal, was considered Biya's strongest rival in past elections. He came second during the last presidential election in 2018 with 14% of the vote, while Biya cruised to victory with over 70% in an election marred by irregularities and a low turnout. Biya, 92, the world's oldest serving head of state, said last month he would seek reelection on Oct. 12 despite rumors that his health is failing. He has been in power since 1982, nearly half his lifetime. Biya's rule has left a lasting impact on Cameroon. His government has faced various challenges, including allegations of corruption and a deadly secessionist conflict in the nation's English-speaking provinces that has forced thousands out of school. Fears of protests and unrest surged around Saturday's release of the list of approved candidates. Security forces were deployed around the ELECAM headquarters and along major roads in Yaoundé, the capital, and in Douala, the economic hub. The United Nations Department of Safety and Security had warned Friday that the announcement could trigger protests in the capital.
