Latest news with #Feinstein
New York Post
a day ago
- Politics
- New York Post
DOJ staffer claims she was fired over husband's controversial anti-ICE app that warns users when feds are nearby
A Department of Justice staffer claims she was abruptly fired after it emerged her husband was the brains behind a controversial anti-ICE app that warns users when the feds are closing in. Carolyn Feinstein, who worked as a DOJ forensic accountant in Austin, Texas, alleges she was terminated last Friday as 'retribution' over her spouse's radical alert system, which she has minority shares in. 'This was retribution. I was fired because of the actions, or activism, of my husband,' Feinstein told the Daily Beast on Monday. 3 Carolyn Feinstein claims she was unfairly fired over her husband's anti-ICE app. Joshua Aaron / Facebook Feinstein's tech husband, Joshua Aaron, recently sparked outrage after it emerged he'd created the ICEBlock app, which alerts users if Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been spotted within a five-mile radius of them. President Trump's border czar Tom Homan and ICE Acting Director Tom Lyon quickly called on the DOJ to investigate after Feinstein's hubby went on CNN last month to advertise the app — sparking immediate backlash. Feinstein claims she informed the DOJ of her ties to the app creator after he allegedly started receiving death threats. 3 Feinstein was a forensic accountant in Austin, Texas for the DOJ under Attorney General Pam Bondi. REUTERS 'Since we live in the same house, I thought it was pertinent to contact my employer, the DOJ, to notify them of death threats that were coming in and just in case I needed to be out of the office, so they would be prepared,' she said. A week later, Feinstein said the Office of the US Trustee started asking questions about the app. Feinstein admitted she has minority shares in All U Chart, Inc., which hold the IP address for the app. 3 The ICEBlock app alerts users if Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been spotted within a five-mile radius of them. ICEBlock She insisted, though, that it was only in case her husband were to become 'incapacitated' so she could then shut it down. A DOJ spokesperson said it had be probing Feinstein's connection to the app for 'several weeks' after it emerged she had interests in the company. 'ICEBlock is an app that illegal aliens use to evade capture while endangering the lives of ICE officers,' the spokesperson said, adding that the department 'will not tolerate threats against law enforcement or law enforcement officers.' Feinstein, for her part, insisted that her role at the DOJ was 'unbiased.' 'It is insulting to me because I dedicated myself and my career to serving the people of the United States, and now the DOJ is claiming I was attempting to harm some of them. And that's not true,' she said.
New Statesman
12-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
A day out with Jeremy Corbyn's new party
The last time I visited Ilford, east London, was in the run-up to the 2017 general election, hoping to help make Wes Streeting the local MP and Jeremy Corbyn the prime minister. It feels like a long time ago. I went campaigning with a group that included a man who worked for Vice and told us he made more than £80k and wanted to pay higher tax. I had the clipboard, dispatching canvassers to knock on doors. Labour's data showed a reasonable number of those doors, at one point, had had BNP supporters behind them. It feels like a long time ago because it was. Vice doesn't exist any more. Corbyn has been booted from Labour. But Ilford remains a great place to observe both the hopes and contradictions of the British left – including its latest iteration, which in typical fashion has been marred by miscommunication and infighting. I made my return trip last weekend to see Corbyn, now the independent MP for Islington North, speak alongside Andrew Feinstein and Leanne Mohamad at an event called Breaking the Two-Party Nightmare. The organisers described it as a 500-person event, which sounded generous: the room was respectably full, but it was far from standing room only. The people around me chatted eagerly about the campaigns they'd been involved in, how they'd come across the event (TikTok), and their appreciation for the works of the Israeli politician and writer Ilan Pappé. The audience was mostly British Asian, with a smattering of the kind of badge-laden older white people who can always be found at such events (a man in the row across from me was wearing a T-shirt styled after the poster for Goodfellas, only with Corbyn's face superimposed on it, and the legend 'For the many not the few' at the bottom). It was a special occasion. Last Friday marked a year since Labour's sweeping election victory; more pertinently, it was a year since Leanne Mohamad fell just 528 votes short of unseating the now Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Feinstein took a very respectable number of votes running against Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras, and Corbyn retained his Islington North seat. They all ran as independents, attacking Labour from the left, and gathered in Ilford to talk about it. But, between them, their status begs larger questions about the possibilities of life beyond Labour. How much damage can the political forces stirring on the left do to the party they believe has betrayed them? Mohamad, a 24-year-old British Palestinian, wearing a purple suit that matches the event's branding, was first to speak and acted as host for the evening. She was warm and earnest; Corbyn offered his usual irascible moralism; but of the three it was Feinstein who was the most natural speaker, the one whose years in politics show (Feinstein was previously an ANC MP in South Africa). His speech is weighted with pregnant pauses, and the theme he works to is that our politics, and particularly Keir Starmer himself, is corrupt. He described the Prime Minister as having 'one redeeming feature, and that is that we don't have to figure out when he is lying, because we know every single time his lips move, the man is lying'. If the freebiegate-populist message of Feinstein seems distinctly modern, Corbyn offered something different. Part of his appeal has always been as a man out of time, a traveller from a pre-neoliberal world. He was wearing what I can only describe as a very Jeremy Corbyn pair of semi-open brown shoes, and talked about nuclear disarmament and 'issues of world peace'. He described the two-child limit as the product of Iain Duncan Smith having a fit of '19th-century moralism'. Corbyn remained every inch the man first elected on Michael Foot's 1983 pledge to end 'the long Victorian night' of Conservative rule. The binding cause for both speakers and audience was Gaza, just as it was a central part of their campaigns last year. Mohamad was frank about this, saying that the war is intrinsic to the rest of her politics, which is 'focused on what truly matters to our community – health, crime, housing, education, youth services, the cost-of-living crisis, and, yes, foreign policy, because what happens abroad is not separate from our values here at home'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It has been accurately observed that these outsider performances at last year's election owed much to Labour's 'quietist line' over Gaza. In these conversations, however, it's hard not to feel that the independents are guilty of a quietism of their own when it comes to the war in Ukraine. ('I don't support what Russia is doing in Ukraine,' Corbyn said, but for an evening so dominated by foreign policy, it is striking how little it comes up.) Beyond the allegation that Labour is spending on 'welfare, not warfare', the discussions also don't present much in the way of political economy – a worked-out theory of what government should be responsible for, how it should pay for things, and what the consequences of not paying for them are. Perhaps it is more remarkable that they don't have to. Corbyn talked about the popular vote totals Labour racked up in 2017 and 2019 (when he led the party) being higher than Labour's in 2024. This is, of course, a pretty silly argument when talking about trying to form a majority government under a first-past-the-post electoral system. It's like saying you're really good at football after being smashed at tennis. However, if you want to have an assertive left-opposition party that will never be in government but will bag 10 per cent of the vote (which polling suggests a Corbyn-led party could snag now) and 25 seats, you don't have to care about Stevenage woman. In fact, you don't want your support to be too thinly spread. The ability to stack up votes in London or Bristol is what will get you where you need to go. And what kind of left opposition does Corbyn even want? This event took place 24 hours after Zarah Sultana announced that she had resigned from Labour and that she would 'co-lead the founding of a new party' with Jeremy Corbyn. It has since been reported that Corbyn was far from delighted with the speed and style of this announcement. His next move remains hard to discern: on stage in Ilford, he did not discuss Sultana's statement, though Mohamad did say that her resignation from Labour was one of the things that gave her hope (along with Zohran Mamdani's Democrat primary victory in New York). While Corbyn talked about having 'some time now to organise' up to elections next year, he didn't claim to be doing so as part of any particular group. If I'd known nothing about Sultana's announcement, I'd have assumed he was talking about independent bids of the kind he, Mohamad and Feinstein made last year; he talked warmly about drinking tea and working with the other independent MPs elected last July. But otherwise, he was reticent. Instead of a Q&A with a roving mic, we got an unwieldy QR code system by which the audience could submit their questions, which were then read out by Mohamad. They were all unthreatingly soft-ball (what inspires you? What do you like to eat in Ilford?). None mentioned the – or a – new party. [See also: Are we entering a new era of left-wing infighting?] Feinstein called Mohamad 'the people's member of parliament for Ilford' and said that at the next election she will send Streeting 'into his political retirement and a very well-paid job in the private healthcare sector'. Somewhat less plausibly, he also referred to Corbyn – 76 now and likely 80 at the time of the next general election – as the future prime minister. We also got a foretaste of the lines that will be used against Streeting when Mohamad runs at the next election: she claimed he is 'currently using his post as Health Secretary to give our health data to Palantir, the same company that powers Israel's AI warfare'. Wes Streeting's potential defeat at the next election is an under-discussed reality of British politics. He was lucky not to lose his seat last year; I understand there is some discontent at the lack of resources Mohamad's campaign received, something she alluded to on stage. Perhaps a cabinet secretary's seat being under threat is less remarkable in a world where all that's solid melts into Reform poll leads, but it is nonetheless something our politics hasn't really digested. Streeting has said he is 'definitely not' tempted to scarper to a safer seat. Saying it now and saying it in three and a half years' time, however, are two different things. I left as Mohamad was offering the audience the chance to go home with a jar of Corbyn's jam (two jars are ultimately auctioned for an astonishing £1,500). On a table in the lobby are cans of Labbaik cola, in the colours of the Palestinian flag, for thirsty attendees who've just taken in a solid two hours of political discourse. On the street outside is a souped-up car. Painted on its bonnet are a Palestinian flag, the words 'Nakba 1948: resistance is justified when people are occupied', and what appears to be a cartoon of Harley Quinn in a keffiyeh. The event was a success; there will be more like it in Ilford and around the country. Britain has become a multi-party system and there is an appetite for a party (or perhaps just candidates) that talks about peace, Palestine and poverty. The launch of Sultana's new party has been messy and the left beyond Labour is fragmented, with some elements filtering into the Greens and some likely preferring the more decentralised independent model. These people do not have to play the same games the major parties do; whatever Feinstein says, I do not believe Jeremy Corbyn wants to be, much less will be, prime minister in four years' time. They want an audience, representation for their views, to hear people saying what they think from the green benches, to stick it to Labour. It is clear from my evening in Ilford that there is an audience ready to buy what they are selling. Whether they exist outside of these urban enclaves, however, is another question. [See also: Inside Robert Jenrick's New Right revolution] Related
San Francisco Chronicle
30-06-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
Exclusive: Dianne Feinstein's lavish S.F. mansion has sold. Here is what we know
The longtime home of late Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her late husband, financier Richard Blum, in a stretch of San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighborhood known as 'Billionaire's Row,' has a new owner. The three-story, 1917 Italianate mansion at 2460 Lyon St. sits on the famed Lyon Street steps, at the foot of Vallejo Street. Among its distinguishing features are meticulously manicured gardens, stunning views of the bay and proximity to San Francisco's national park site, the Presidio. The 9,500-square-foot property traded hands on June 24 for $19 million, public records show. It served as Feinstein and Blum's home since 2006, when the couple purchased it for just over $16 million. Feinstein died in September 2023 at age 90, and Blum died in 2022. The price tag for the property's recent sale places its price-per-square-foot value at $2,000. It's not clear what the value of the Lyon Street mansion was expected to be, but according to reports in 2023, it was previously valued at roughly $21 million. The identity of its new owner is unknown, but signs point to a high-net worth buyer with ties to New York. The property was purchased with a limited liability company formed in that state this month, public records show. The home was paid for using 'all cash,' according to Charlie McCabe of San Francisco Capital Advisors, who viewed the sale documents. McCabe was not directly involved in the deal, but represented Feinstein and Blum in multiple past commercial transactions. Public records link the entity that was used to purchase the couple's former home to New York resident Nicole Maultasch. The Chronicle attempted to contact Maultasch, but could neither confirm nor rule her out as a buyer. The mansion represented one of the more significant assets among Feinstein and Blum's real estate holdings, which included vacation homes like the 36-acre Bear Paw Ranch in Aspen, Colo., and a seven-bedroom Lake Tahoe compound as well as homes in Washington, D.C., and on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The Aspen Ranch sold in 2023 for $25.2 million, which, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal, was several millions dollars below asking price. The Lake Tahoe home sold in 2021, reportedly for $36 million. Blum's vast business empire included investments in the real estate, energy, tech and education sectors. He was also a philanthropist and UC Berkeley benefactor. As Feinstein's health declined shortly before her death in 2023, the two factions of her family — with her daughter Katherine Feinstein on one side and Blum's three daughters on the other — became embroiled in legal conflicts over Blum's trust and the former senator's desire to sell her Marin County home. That property, located at Stinson Beach, was eventually sold in late 2023 for $9.1 million. The Lyon Street mansion appears to have been inherited by Katherine Feinstein and Blum's daughters. Both Katherine Feinstein, a former San Francisco judge, and Michael Klein, a longtime business associate of Blum, signed the sale documents as co-trustees, records show. Katherine Feinstein could not immediately be reached by the Chronicle.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump Bill Advances as Team Owner and College Tax Breaks in Peril
The omnibus 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act' passed by the House of Representatives Thursday morning takes aim at team owners' coveted ability to write off most of the purchase price of a sports team, with a clause that would remove billions of dollars from being deducted on taxes. 'The bill itself, vis-a-vis sports teams ownership, isn't really a great thing,' Irwin Kishner, a partner at the law firm of Herrick, Feinstein, said on a phone call. 'You could argue the valuations of sports teams would be less than they were prior to that tax treatment.' More from Baseball America the Latest to Be Target of 'Bork Bill' Congress May Have to Settle NCAA Athlete Eligibility Issue Coffey Talk: Donn Davis on PFL's Rise and Sports 'Ego Money' The bill, now numbered H.R. 1, covers a multitude of spending priorities including border security, defense and taxation, among others. The legislation also takes a hatchet to amortization, which is the depreciation of non-tangible assets often termed goodwill. Typically, 90% or more of a team's purchase price is goodwill, which excludes physical assets a team might possess, such as its stadium and weight room equipment. 'Team owners were allowed to deduct 100% of the purchase price over 15 years, and now they're only allowed to deduct 50% over 15 years, if it comes to law,' Robert Raiola, director of the sports and entertainment group at PKF O'Connor Davies accounting firm, said on a phone call. Amortization is an accounting principle meant to assess a decline in value over time, like its cousin depreciation, which is meant to account for physical assets wearing out, such as machinery. In sports, values don't typically decline. The 1973 New York Yankees sale to George Steinbrenner is believed to be the last time a franchise from the big four U.S. leagues traded hands at a loss. The amortization of team values is an under-the-radar tax benefit that is a key part of the calculus used in the decision to buy a U.S. sports franchise—and it plays a role in the skyrocketing prices paid for franchises in recent years. For example, under existing law, a team owner paying $1.6 billion for a franchise where $1.5 billion is intangible goodwill could deduct that $1.5 billion over 15 years. That $100 million annual deduction of taxable income probably saves the average team owner $40 million in actual taxes, assuming a 40% blended federal and state tax rate. Those deductions do raise the taxable income if and when the team is sold—all $1.5 billion would be a gain to be taxed—but not paying taxes today is preferable to paying them in the distant future. The proposed law, which now moves to the Senate, means team owners would still get a $20 million annual tax savings under the example above. As drafted, it would cover all professional sports teams, and specifies football, hockey, soccer, baseball and basketball as examples. The amortization reduction applies only to new purchases after the bill becomes law, so any revenue bump to the federal government would be muted by the fact current team owners will be exempt under the proposal. 'The general public doesn't really feel sorry for these people either way, but for the owners themselves, it has a huge impact,' Kevin Thorne, managing partner of tax-focused Thorne Law Group, said on a phone call. 'I think it's going to be changed by the time it goes fully through [the Senate and reconciliation process]. A lot of people are going to be getting phone calls on The Hill.' Two years ago Congress eliminated the ability of team owners to immediately depreciate the value of tangible assets of their franchises. Tax benefits 'are a big part of the calculus' of buying a team, Kishner said. 'But it's still a regulated asset in that supply is less than demand and people have historically done very well owning these franchises.' H.R. 1 also seeks to tax college athletic department licensing revenue. Typically, all nonprofits must pay income tax on revenue from activities not central to their tax-exempt status to avoid giving charities a competitive advantage over for-profit businesses. Yet under current law, income from the sale or licensing by a college of its name and logo is exempt from unrelated business income taxation. This money can be significant: Ohio State University's athletic department for example, made $34.1 million in licensing and advertising revenue in the latest reported year, according to the Sportico College Sports Finances Database. Athletic department logos of seemingly every college in the U.S. are widely licensed for apparel and other goods. That money would now be subject to the 21% corporate tax rate—at the same time the NCAA is proposing expanded scholarship limits and direct payments to athletes. Another clause in the budget as passed would allow health savings account money to be used to pay for gym membership, capped at $500 a year per person and $1,000 per family. Publicly traded gym operators Planet Fitness (PLNT) and Life Time Group Holdings (LTH) were up modestly in trading today, outpacing the broader market. H.R. 1 passed the full House by a vote of 215-214 with one abstention, and it will likely see changes in the Senate, despite the Republicans' six-seat advantage. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has set a July 4 target date to pass the legislation. The bill, weighing in at more than 1,100 pages, will now be referred to the Senate finance and budget committees, which may propose amendments that will need to be reconciled with the House version. Both bodies will need to approve by majority vote a final version before it can be sent to President Trump to be signed into law. With assistance from Michael McCann Best of Most Expensive Sports Memorabilia and Collectibles in History The 100 Most Valuable Sports Teams in the World NFL Private Equity Ownership Rules: PE Can Now Own Stakes in Teams
San Francisco Chronicle
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Trump canceled his Pride concert, but Michael Feinstein found his spotlight in San Francisco
The Great American Songbook has a unique way of bridging gaps between musicians and listeners from all different backgrounds. Singer, pianist and standards ambassador Michael Feinstein and acclaimed classical soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet serve as a perfect example. As a duo, they've found common ground in this popular repertoire by the likes of Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin and especially the Gershwin brothers. An enthusiastic audience at Davies Symphony Hall on Tuesday, May 20, discovered just how well these two superstars in their respective genres can mesh. Feinstein and Thibaudet co-headlined a special one-night-only concert with the San Francisco Symphony under the baton of longtime Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart, and the performance was by turns entertaining, educational and moving. Feinstein has recently made headlines for decidedly non-celebratory reasons. His Kennedy Center engagement with the National Symphony Orchestra, 'A Peacock Among Pigeons: Celebrating 50 Years of Pride,' scheduled for this week, was canceled by the Trump administration. So Tuesday's program was triumphant in contrast, commencing with an energetic orchestral overture before Feinstein and Thibaudet walked onto the stage flashing winning smiles and sporting matching sparkly tuxedo jackets with satin shawl collars. Seated at interlocking Steinway grand pianos, the pair faced one another as they started into a rendition of Berlin's 'I Love a Piano,' featuring Feinstein's impassioned singing. Given Feinstein's impeccable credentials, including as host of the onetime public radio series 'Song Travels,' it seemed safe to assume that he'd do all of the talking. But both musicians spoke with welcoming rapport for a show that felt like a natural extension of their 'Gershwin Rhapsody' album, released last year to celebrate the 100th anniversary of 'Rhapsody in Blue.' As founder of the Great American Songbook Foundation, Feinstein shared stories of his musical acquaintances going back decades, from conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein to lyricist Irving Caesar, whose popular song 'Tea for Two' concluded the first set of the evening. Feinstein also spoke about his six years as personal assistant to lyricist Ira Gershwin, older brother and primary songwriting partner of composer George. Thibaudet reflected on his upbringing as a French conservatory student. Sharing an anecdote about George Gershwin and Maurice Ravel, the pianist served as something of an audience surrogate — someone with an appreciation of American Songbook standards if not Feinstein's comprehensive knowledge. In a way, it was not unlike an evening at Feinstein's San Francisco nightclub at Hotel Nikko. But the orchestra, with Lockhart at the helm, really made it an event. Thibaudet performed the third movement from Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F with proper symphonic accompaniment. (He mentioned that he first played the piece at age 14.) And the second-half 'Gershwin Fantasy' was a tour de force, stuffed with favorites like 'Someone to Watch Over Me,' 'I Got Rhythm' and 'Embraceable You' and bookended by the original two-piano arrangement of 'Rhapsody.' An encore of the Gershwins' 'Love Is Here to Stay' ended the program on a poignant note. It was George's last composition, and Ira completed the lyrics posthumously, Feinstein pointed out. He posited that the song is about the brothers' relationship. But when he crooned the opening lines — 'It's very clear / Our love is here to stay / Not for a year / But ever and a day' — it was hard not to think about the power of timeless standards too.
