University of Pittsburgh named in lawsuit briefing supporting Harvard
The briefing of amici curiae, or friends of the court, discusses the history behind the relationship between research universities and the U.S. government, as well as the accomplishments that have been borne out of federal funding being put toward research.
'The partnership (between research universities and the U.S. government) dates back to World War II, and it has fueled progress and underwritten America's position in the world ever since,' the briefing states. 'This research enterprise is one of the nation's greatest assets in the fight to maintain global competitiveness, and amici submit this brief to illustrate the magnitude of the harm that will result if it is compromised.'
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The Hill
an hour ago
- The Hill
Trump turns against right-wing media and his own supporters over Epstein
President Trump is a 79-year-old lame-duck president, approaching a difficult midterm in which he is likely to lose his Republican House majority. To add to that is the hardball political reality behind his failing effort to hush the scandal surrounding the decased sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein: The right-wing talking heads with the biggest audiences are starting to turn on him. Perhaps they are having pangs of conscience. Perhaps they are starting to think about their paychecks, their influence and their future livelihoods once Trump exits the stage. Whatever their motives, those top voices in the Trump media echo chamber deserve credit for keeping their spotlight on the Epstein case. And it is a good-faith effort, because the central truth is that countless young women were abused. It is deeply troubling that the justice system failed those young women. The plea deal given to Epstein in 2008, which allowed him to plead guilty to prostitution and not more serious charges of sex-trafficking, can only be politely described as 'suspicious.' Even Epstein's death by suicide prompted reasonable doubt and questions about possible foul play. Huge payments to Epstein by several of the nation's richest men remain unexplained to this day. And both Trump and former President Bill Clinton had close personal ties to Epstein. Since World War II, the U.S. media has had to fight the government to learn the truth about the Kennedy assassination, President Nixon's role in the Watergate scandal and bogus claims that weapons of mass destruction were secretly held in Iraq. Americans searching for hidden truths kept digging while most big newspapers and broadcast networks played the whole thing down as a kooky preoccupation for weirdos. Without strong investigative reporting, a hothouse culture of conspiracy theories grew on supermarket scandal sheets and extremist radio shows. With the rise of the internet, the conspiracy culture also took root on websites and podcasts. Beyond new technology, the rise of conservative media is tied to its 'free-for-all' embrace of conspiracy theories that generated click-bait and created cults of true believers. Today, the biggest papers and networks are in the background. They follow stories from conservative media as the authentic voice of the right-wing base that allows Trump to dominate the Republican Party. Even if those stories are false, they are now news. They gained in strength when Trump's supporters believed the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen and some attacked police officers as they stormed the U.S. Capitol. The Epstein case is an earthquake for Trump and his base because the man now keeping secrets is the one who was previously advertised by conservative media as their dragon-slayer. He was elevated as a counterforce to the big newspapers and the elite, highly educated people who dismissed the common man's search for truth. Now Trump is busy attacking his own followers as foolish for buying 'into this 'bulls—', hook, line and sinker' and called them 'weaklings.' He is also trying to distract his fans by releasing new files on Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination and sending out minions to make baseless, long-dismissed charges of treason against former President Barack Obama. Trump has also filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and its owner Rupert Murdoch for reporting that Trump once sent a 'bawdy birthday card' to Epstein. (Full disclosure: Murdoch's News Corp also owns the New York Post and Fox News Media, where I have served as a political analyst for nearly three decades.) Trump's strategy of distraction is nothing new. Fifty-five years ago, Republican Vice President Spiro Agnew tried to deflect attention from his own corruption scandal by attacking the media, calling them 'the nattering nabobs of negativism.' It didn't work. Agnew ultimately resigned the vice presidency in disgrace rather than face prosecution for his crimes. Thirty-three years ago, Republican President George H.W. Bush attempted to revive his reelection campaign in the face of indictments tied to the Iran-Contra scandal. He handed out bumper stickers at rallies with the slogan, ' Annoy the Media, Re-Elect Bush.' The conservative-slanted media was still in its infancy when Agnew and Bush made their feeble attempts at distraction. Now, Trump is aiming his fire and fury at a full-grown conservative media ecosystem. These are the very loud voices that elevated him, elected him and re-elected him. One of the MAGA media universe's core narratives is that Epstein ran an underage sex trafficking ring for the richest and most powerful people in the country — and that the government was covering it up. Two of the loudest voices promoting this theory were Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, now serving as director and deputy director of the FBI, respectively. 'I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain,' former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) famously said during hearings on the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. She is looking like a prophet. In a striking exchange last week, MAGA-friendly podcast host Tim Dillon revealed that Vice President JD Vance invited him to a private dinner to spin him on the Epstein story. When the vice president is deployed to sway a podcaster, it only reinforces the perception that the Trump administration is involved in a cover-up. Right-wing voices are right to keep the Epstein story alive. Even if it is only to keep the clicks coming, it must also be said that they are heeding Cheney's warning about 'dishonor.'
Time Magazine
4 hours ago
- Time Magazine
How Trump's Release of MLK Files May Backfire
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME's politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. More than a half-century after his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. continues to stoke suspicion—both of his death and of the United States' professed moral footing. With zero warning, President Donald Trump's administration last Monday released almost a quarter-million pages of documents related to the civil rights icon's 1968 assassination over the objections of most of the King family. The effort was a nakedly crass attempt at orchestrating a distraction to the President's own political troubles surrounding convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It was also, sadly, continuing a craven tradition that began during King's life of political figures exploiting his moral authority—and ambiguities—for their own means. Scholars so far have found little new in the just-released documents. Much of them appear inscrutable—as they seemed to be written in a code only FBI insiders could decipher. Notably absent from the trove were FBI wiretaps of King. Those are under seal until 2027. Yet the fear among those who follow in King's footsteps is that the files include potentially embarrassing or unseemly details of King's private life. Such revelations stand to do more than possibly diminish King's legacy. They have implications for the U.S. on the foreign stage. In life and now in death, King is an unrivaled symbol of U.S. hypocrisy. Americans' uneven history with civil rights has long been a drag on their government's power to cajole allies and rivals alike to a shared goal. It's why President Harry Trump in 1947 became the first President to speak to the NAACP. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on a humid June Sunday, he made clear he understood the early Cold War would be shaped by how Americans' treated their neighbors. 'It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country's efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens. Recent events in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever before to insure that all Americans enjoy these rights,' Truman said. He then made clear, wrapping his 12-minute speech, that he was speaking with purpose: 'When I say all Americans, I mean all Americans.' For the stretch between the end of World War II and the time Vietnam became the dominant story around the world, civil rights in the United States was a popular talking point that foreign diplomats would turn to as a rejoinder. The State Department archives from that era are packed with briefing memos advising how to respond to the one-liner popularized by Moscow and its satellite states: 'But you lynch Negros.' One April 1950 discussion outline for the State Department recognized the challenge bluntly: 'No American problem receives more wide-spread attention, especially in dependent areas, than our treatment of racial minorities, particularly the Negro. Discussion of this problem cannot be evaded, and only by full publicity to improvements in this field can the United States position be put in fair perspective before the bar of world opinion and communist propaganda be discredited.' So potent were the foreign policy worries over race that the Truman administration specifically cited America's 'image problem' in an amicus curiae brief on behalf of the NAACP's Brown v. Board of Education. The best propaganda doesn't require fudging. Few know this better than Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long sought to repurpose Cold War tropes. During a 2018 interview with Fox News, when asked about human rights issues in Russia, Putin responded with a tour of 20th Century U.S. history. 'Haven't Presidents been killed in the United States? Have you forgotten about—well, has Kennedy been killed in Russia or in the United States? Or Mr. King?' he said, adding, 'All of us have our own set of domestic problems.' Efforts to undermine King's platform are not new, and are often aimed at sanitizing his message, which in his later years included an economic- and social-justice agenda that drew the ire of the U.S. government. But the prospect of generating scandalous headlines around King in 2025 would do more than distract—it stands to provide new and useful propaganda to America's enemies. Perhaps the bigger lesson from Trump's latest gambit is this: King remains a global giant that stops the world in its tracks when he speaks, even if against his wishes or without his consent. It was this way when he pushed for civil rights and voting rights, and later against the war in Vietnam and against systemic inequalities. It was this way at the time of his assassination in Memphis, where he was offering support to striking sanitation workers. And it continues to be that way, as the Trump administration, backed into a corner, has little qualms with potentially undermining King's legacy. Indeed, even King's daughter noted the mismatch of releasing hundreds of thousands of potentially embarrassing files on her father in this charged moment. Bernice King posted a black-and-white photo of her father, looking peeved, with the taunting caption: 'Now, do the Epstein files.' Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.
Chicago Tribune
20 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
East Chicago honors Hispanic political pioneers Jesse and Rosemarie Gomez
The 3800 block of Grand Boulevard in East Chicago now honors Jesse and Rosemarie Gomez, both Hispanic pioneers in politics. Jesse was the first Hispanic elected official in Indiana, Councilman Robert Garcia said. Rosemarie became the first Hispanic woman to serve on the East Chicago City Council after her husband died in 1979. Garcia represents the district that the Gomezes once did. The City Council approved the resolution last year, but getting everyone together for Friday's dedication of the new sign for Jesse & Rosemarie Gomez Way took time. 'We stand on the back of those elected officials,' Garcia said. 'I stand on the shoulders of their leadership and their legacy.' Their son, also named Jesse Gomez but with a different middle name, followed in his parents' footsteps, serving on both the city council and now on the school board. Gomez told his parents' story. 'My father's family arrived here in East Chicago from Mexico as trailblazers in 1916, and he was born here on April 14, 1920,' Gomez said. At age 12, Gomez's father and his family returned to Zacatecas, Mexico, later attending the University of Mexico, where he focused on political science. With the impending start of World War II, he returned to East Chicago to register for the draft and work at Inland Steel. After he left the mill, he worked as an insurance agent, an editorial writer for two Spanish-language newspapers, a radio announcer for WJOB's Spanish-language 'Hora Mexicana' program, and as a health inspector for the city. In 1963, he was elected 6th District councilman, the first Hispanic elected to political office in the state's history. He was re-elected to three additional consecutive terms, Gomez said, eventually becoming the 5th District councilman. 'Time with an elected official is interesting,' Gomez said. 'As a youngster, I remember that we often had a table set for eight at dinner – two for my parents, four for the children and one for the live-in family friend, Joe. The eighth seat was reserved for someone else, usually an immigrant who was first making their way here to East Chicago from Mexico, Puerto Rico or somewhere across the Atlantic.' 'My father was a good dancer, a great sketch artist, a fantastic chess player, a horrible joke teller and, in his mind, the greatest soccer player in the world,' Gomez said. Gomez rattled off a long list of achievements during his father's career, including serving as a Spanish language volunteer for the Pan-American Games and project coordinator for the East Chicago Vietnam Veterans Memorial, not to mention service twice as City Council president. 'That's a lot for one person to do in a lifetime. My father achieved that during his short time here on Earth,' Gomez said. The elder Jesse died Aug. 31, 1979, at age 59. Rosemarie was born Jan. 14, 1926, in Saltillo, Mexico. While she was young, her family moved back and forth between the United States and Mexico. She attended East Chicago public schools but left early to work at Inland Steel to help her family financially, Gomez said. She later returned to school and graduated from Washington High School. In 1939, Rosemarie portrayed the Statue of Liberty during the Mexican Independence Day Parade. The next year, she served as queen of that parade. Rosemarie, 99, has her own long list of accomplishments and involvement in the community. 'My mother was a great cook, a fantastic gardener, and she is one of the most loving, kind and considerate people that you ever will meet,' Gomez said. One day, Gomez said, his father told Rosemarie she needed to become an American citizen, which she did. 'My mother later found out that the reason he asked her to do that was so that years later she could vote for him when he first ran for the City Council, a race he won,' Gomez said. 'Together, my parents were trailblazers, in similar fashion to the way their parents were,' Gomez said. 'They were kind of the Hispanic version of John and Jackie Kennedy.'
