Quote:CNN reports that in April, Pirro, a former Fox News host, failed to get a jury to convict Moises Rivera-Luna, who is accused of ordering murders on U.S. soil from a Salvadoran jail cell more than 10 years ago, or his co-defendant Tokiro Rodas Ramirez, who was reportedly a local MS-13 leader in D.C.

And it wasn’t the first time she struggled to secure a conviction: A jury failed to reach a verdict on the two men less than five months earlier.

Trump celebrated bringing Rivera-Luna to American soil in March 2025, making the failed conviction all the more embarrassing. Under Pirro’s leadership, D.C. federal prosecutors keep running into problems with jury trials, securing convictions in only four of eight federal cases in 2026 prior to Rivera-Luna’s mistrial in April.

It didn’t get better for the Justice Department after that, either. The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office has tried close to a dozen more criminal cases in federal court, only to have four trials end with deadlocked juries and two other defendants acquitted. It’s a highly unusual pattern, according to several investigators, unnamed former prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other legal experts who spoke to CNN. The conviction trial rate in federal criminal trials is around 90 percent.

(August 29, 2026 at 4:45 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:

(August 28, 2026 at 11:36 pm)Ravenshire Wrote: An inflatable darts board is useful once. I'm not sure that can be said of our current administration.

The analogy hold: an inflatable darts board fails at the very first dart.

Boru

Quote:The CDC has also stopped short of reporting deaths from measles in 2026.

The agency posted a note on Friday saying it was delaying its weekly update, keeping the number at zero. On Sunday, the measles landing page appears to have been updated twice, with the two deaths first reported and then replaced with an asterisk.

The CDC will not include the two deaths reported by Pennsylvania “while CDC reviews additional information regarding the circumstances and causes of death”, an explanatory note reads. The agency added that “available information does not establish whether measles caused or contributed to the deaths or whether the individuals died from other causes while infected with measles”.

This is not how deaths reported by states to the CDC are typically handled. The deaths in Texas and New Mexico last year, for instance, were reported by the two states and included in the CDC’s national tally.

Usually, “states notify CDC of reportable cases on things such as measles. CDC does not review or adjudicate these cases unless a state asked for additional assistance”, Houry said.

The unusual approach will probably affect the agency’s relationship with the states that report to it. “CDC and states usually work collaboratively together,” Houry said. “This will undermine that relationship.”

The CDC has not clarified what information it is seeking about these cases and why this data was not acceptable. The agency is “working to determine what actually occurred”, according to a post on X sent by an HHS spokesperson in response to the Guardian’s inquiries.

“The communication coming from CDC’s official channel on Friday was political and not focused on what should be done during an outbreak,” Houry said.

Quote:Protecting against "inappropriate influence" is no longer a "hallmark" of scientific integrity

The Commerce Department updated its policy for promoting a "culture of scientific integrity" in January 2025, days before Trump's second inauguration.

The 2025 version included bans on attempts to shape or interfere in data collection, statistical analysis and other scientific activities "against well-accepted scientific methods and theories or without scientific justification."

The department's policy, the 2025 version said, involves ensuring scientific findings at its agencies "are not suppressed, delayed, or altered for political purposes and are not subjected to inappropriate influence," as well as making sure there's "independent review of facilities, methodologies, and other scientific activities as appropriate to ensure scientific integrity."

That language is missing, however, in the Trump administration's revision of the policy, according to an NPR analysis of text posted on the Commerce Department's website.

And while the revision adopts a definition for "scientific integrity" that is similar to the previous version, it no longer says that "protection from inappropriate influence" is among the "hallmarks of scientific integrity."

Quote: “available information does not establish whether measles caused or contributed to the deaths or whether the individuals died from other causes while infected with measles”.

Quote:A federal judge on Friday declared that the Trump administration’s efforts to deport noncitizens for political speech run counter to the Constitution’s First and Fifth Amendments, the latest legal rebuke of the White House’s expansive immigration agenda.

Northern District of California Judge Noël Wise, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, sided with the Stanford Daily, which sued Secretary of State Marco Rubio, arguing that his use of the Immigration and Nationality Act to deport noncitizen students had foreign students refraining from writing opinion pieces critical of the administration.

”In the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people,” Wise wrote in her opinion. “It is not the government’s to take.”

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A State Department spokesperson, given anonymity to discuss internal thought processes within the agency, told POLITICO that the U.S. “is under no obligation to admit or suffer the presence of individuals who subvert our laws and deny our citizens their Constitutional rights.”

“More broadly, the Department of State is committed to protecting our nation and its citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process,” the spokesperson said. “A visa is a privilege, not a right.”

Quote: It took the US government two years to roll out HealthCare.gov, nine months to pilot a direct tax-filing tool…and just 11 weeks to build a new system for processing Americans’ absentee ballots.

Before you cheer this rare instance of bureaucratic efficiency, however, please allow the other shoe to drop: That figure comes from an alarming new whistleblower report that foretells potential chaos in this fall’s midterm elections.

According to the whistleblower, the US Postal Service has rushed out a janky, error-prone processing system in its mad dash to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots. That order, currently paused, would require states to comply with new rules for preparing, tracking, and mailing ballots. Several states have since sued to stop it.

If the order does go into effect, however, the Postal Service has to be prepared. So the agency scrambled to hack together its new system — forgoing standard testing procedures and adding requirements that are likely to hold up thousands of outbound ballots, the whistleblower says.

According to the report, multiple USPS officials have described the system as “a shit show” that, as of late August, was apt to “completely crash.” “Move fast and break things” is actually not a great look for governments.

Quote:And meanwhile, Democrats, for all of the haranguing and all of the supposed infighting, have got some phenomenal candidates who are exciting people. The so-called, you know, battle between the far left and the left really has not manifested itself post-primary. The party has come together. The so-called moderates are campaigning with the so-called more left-leaning candidates. They have exciting candidates. The candidates are knocking it out of the ballpark.

When you see Talarico, when you see Ossoff—when you see these people, they are talking in a language that is fun, that is funny, that is aggressive, that is biting. That is whipping up Democrats to a level we have not seen, frankly, I think, since Barack Obama was on the ticket.

So you have, on one hand, Democratic enthusiasm going up, and you have Republican enthusiasm going down. And if you are a moderate who is somewhere in the middle, or you’re an independent who is somewhere in the middle, are you excited to go out and vote for a Republican? I don’t think so. I really don’t.

Quote:The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency tasked with protecting workers from illegal discrimination, inked an unprecedented settlement with a conservative Christian employer association that could have long-term, wide-ranging consequences.

The lawsuit that led to the settlement was in reaction to EEOC guidance issued under the Biden administration and after a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that Title VII protects against gender identity discrimination.

In the settlement, reached on August 18, the EEOC pledged to not pursue any claims of gender identity-based discrimination against the Christian Employers Alliance — and made the pledge in perpetuity.

The EEOC provides free investigation into complaints of discrimination and, in some cases, will bring lawsuits on behalf of employees at no cost to the plaintiffs.

Now, however, anyone who works for a company with membership in the Christian Employers Alliance who believes they suffered gender identity-based discrimination won’t be able to avail themselves of the EEOC’s process.

The settlement also contains an unusual provision: It applies not just to the more than 20,000 employers that are already members in the Christian Employers Alliance, but also to any future members, so long as they are members at the time that any claimed discrimination occurred.

That means that any employer that decides to sign up for Christian Employers Alliance membership will get the benefit of blanket protection from the EEOC against all claims of gender identity discrimination, such as harassing someone for being nonbinary or firing them for coming out as trans.