Sarah Jeong

Earlier this summer, SCOTUS ruled that Trump is “absolutely immune” for any official acts on January 6. In an October Non-Surprise, prosecutors are arguing that Trump is being charged for unofficial acts.

A partly-unsealed brief asserts, among other things, that Trump used his Twitter in a personal capacity while attempting to overturn the 2020 election, by tweeting and retweeting conspiracy theories and attacks on public officials. Although Trump sometimes tweeted about official White House business,

... he also regularly used the account to post on unambiguously private matters — for example, when he posted a picture of himself golfing with Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods at the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, and re-tweeted a Trump Organization post about the Trump New York hotel being “named the # 1 ‘Best Hotel in the World!’”

It is not the Supreme Court test. The SCOTUS case the quote is from was overturned in 1969, when the court replaced the “clear and present danger” test with the Brandenburg test.

Perhaps most incredibly, Yale Law School graduate JD Vance followed up and uncritically repeated the “fire in a crowded theater” phrase.

Meanwhile, Trump claims that under a Harris presidency, “Oil will be dead. Fossil fuel will be dead. We’ll go back to windmills and we’ll go back to solar.”

I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States and in fact I was the tie breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act which opened new leases on fracking.

Climate advocates previously hoped Harris would take a tougher stance against fracking. This statement in tonight’s debate repeats a promise she made in her CNN interview last month.

In tonight’s debate, she describes her China policy as making sure the US “wins the competition for the 21st century” through investments in “American-based technology,” claiming that under Trump, American chips were sold to China and used to modernize its military.

Trump counters, “They bought their chips from Taiwan. We hardly make chips anymore because of philosophies like they have.” He then winds himself up into a tirade on Marxism?

404 Media reached out to purported clients of Jacob Wohl’s AI lobbying firm. Six of them — including Microsoft, Palantir, and Pfizer — said they’d never heard of it. The other six didn’t respond.

Wohl, who pleaded guilty to fraud in 2022, is perhaps best known for a series of “spectacularly failed smear attempts” directed at figures like Robert Mueller, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren.

In today’s issue of Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick argues that the lively Brazilian community of X users may find a home on Bluesky, but not so much on Threads, whose heavy-handed algorithmically sorted user interface doesn’t click with Brazilian internet culture.

A caveat from The Verge: we still don’t have official numbers on Brazilian sign-ups for Threads over the weekend.

The Guardian reports that HP, embroiled in a legal saga with Mike Lynch for over a decade, will continue pressing for damages even after the tech tycoon’s confirmed death-by-superyacht.

Lynch previously lost to HP in a UK civil suit, though he was acquitted of related fraud charges in a US criminal proceeding earlier this year. The Guardian writes:

Lynch’s widow, Angela Bacares, was onboard the Bayesian when it sank but was among 15 people who were rescued. According to the Sunday Times rich list, Lynch and Bacares’s combined wealth was £500m.

After announcing last week that it would have to “temporarily cease operations” due to the ban of X in Brazil, popular celebrity-watching account @21metgala — which is apparently run entirely by Brazilian admins — is back, with the caveat that its connection is “unstable.”

Brazilian fans play an outsized role in online fandoms for actors, musicians, and other celebrities.

Tigran Gambaryan, a compliance officer at crypto giant Binance, has been detained in Nigeria since February on charges of tax evasion and money laundering. In March, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison in the US.

Reuters reports that Gambaryan, a US citizen, has once again applied for bail, saying he is suffering from a herniated disc and “bouts of malaria and pneumonia.”