A decade ago, when conservatives were attacking President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act as government encroachment in health care, they worked to amend state constitutions around the country to affirm a broad right for people to control their own medical decisions.

“Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions,” reads section 38(a) of the Wyoming constitution’s Declaration of Rights, under the header “Right of healthcare access.” The provision was placed on Wyoming’s ballot by state lawmakers and approved by voters in 2012; voters saw ballot language that described the measure as preserving this right “from undue governmental infringement.”

Now these anti-ACA provisions—and their broad affirmations of a right to decide—have turned into an unlikely weapon in progressives’ fight against restrictions on abortion.

Reproductive rights advocates in Wyoming have sued to strike down the state’s abortion ban, saying that this “right to make . . . health care decisions” protects abortion access. A lawsuit in Ohio has made the same case using a similar provision in Ohio’s constitution that was adopted by voters in 2011.

“If you have an amendment that says you have the freedom to choose your health care, then that’s going to apply to all health care: that’s the argument being made,” says David Cohen, a professor of law at Drexel University who studies constitutions and abortion. “It’s like, ‘you used broad words, and these broad words have certain meanings, and we’re just applying those meanings to this context.’”

In both Ohio and Wyoming, these claims have seen early success in courts.

A trial court in Ohio issued a preliminary injunction against the state’s abortion restrictions in October. The judge found that the Health Care Freedom Amendment “bolsters the Ohio Constitution’s protection of liberty and personal autonomy and reinforces that these protections extend to Ohioans… the right to make decisions about their own bodies—including the fundamental right to make a decision as private and as central to a person’s bodily integrity as the decision to have an abortion.”

We now know, of course, that the Republican’s projection wasn’t true. If Fox News’ new report is accurate, his prediction was, however, quite lucrative.

Former President Donald Trump is quickly capitalizing — and cashing in — on his escalating legal predicaments. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign confirmed to Fox News that they hauled in $1.5 million in grassroots fundraising in the three days following the former president’s warning on Saturday that he may face imminent indictment and potential arrest in connection with looming criminal charges from a district attorney in New York City.

None of these details have been independently confirmed, though The Washington Post had a related report, which wasn’t about fundraising, but which noted in passing that Team Trump raised “over $1.5 million since Saturday, a person familiar with the matter said.”

To put these numbers in context, in the six weeks following his 2024 campaign kickoff event, Trump raised roughly $9.5 million, for an average of roughly $224,000 per day. Since Saturday morning, if today’s reporting is accurate, the Republican has raised roughly $500,000 per day.

In other words, saying he’d be arrested gave Trump a significant boost — which might help explain why he made the false prediction in the first place.

In theory, it might seem impossible for a politician to turn the threat of indictment into a grift. In practice, the relationship between Trump and his followers is not normal.

Indeed, Trump is the first modern American politician to turn an election defeat into a lucrative opportunity.

On Saturday morning, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy referred to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — who would lead a potential Trump indictment in New York — as a “radical DA who lets violent criminals walk.”
https://twitter.com/SpeakerMcCarthy/status/1637108358208421888
That’s rich coming from McCarthy, whose Bakersfield-area district in California records more violent crime than many major U.S. cities. The issue of crime and corruption in Bakersfield is so bad that it was the subject of a Hulu docuseries produced by Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback turned activist. And as my colleague Hayes Brown explained well Saturday: McCarthy and federal officials barely have any power to influence local prosecutors. The House speaker would do well to read a handbook on his legislative powers. Maybe he missed orientation.

Nonetheless, McCarthy wasn’t alone in the attempted deflection.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana joined McCarthy, falsely claiming that Bragg “refuses to prosecute violent criminals” and whining that the DA is engaged in a “political vendetta” against Trump.,,,,

All of this tells you everything you need to know about the Republican Party’s pro-Trump protection racket. When they don’t like how the game is going, they attack the referees.

Communications between adult-film star Stormy Daniels and an attorney who is now representing former President Donald Trump have been turned over to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Daniels’ lawyer told CNN.

The exchanges – said to date back to 2018, when Daniels was seeking representation – raise the possibility that the Trump attorney, Joe Tacopina, could be sidelined from his defense of the former president in a case pertaining to Trump’s alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to Daniels.

Daniels’ communications with Tacopina and others at his firm include details relating to Daniels’ situation, according to her current attorney Clark Brewster, who believes the communications show a disclosure of confidential information from Daniels.

Tacopina denies that there is a conflict or that confidential information was shared with his office. He says he neither met nor spoke to Daniels.

CNN has not seen the records in question. But legal ethics experts CNN spoke with said they could lead to limits being placed on the role Tacopina can play at trial or even his disqualification. The impact that the disclosure will have on the case will depend on the circumstances and the substance of the communications, the ethics experts said.

A core crime that the Manhattan District Attorney will likely include in an indictment of former President Donald Trump is “falsifying business records in the first degree,” a felony under New York State law (N.Y. Penal Code § 175.10). Prosecutors and indeed all of us are compelled by the rule of law to consider how such a charge compares to past prosecutions. Are like cases being treated alike?

Here it appears they are. Prosecution of falsifying business records in the first degree is commonplace and has been used by New York district attorneys’ offices to hold to account a breadth of criminal behavior from the more petty and simple to the more serious and highly organized. We reach this conclusion after surveying the past decade and a half of criminal cases across all the New York district attorneys’ offices.
https://twitter.com/rgoodlaw/status/1638145615358992389

.....An individual is “guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with intent to defraud, he:

makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise; or
alters, erases, obliterates, deletes, removes or destroys a true entry in the business records of an enterprise; or
omits to make a true entry in the business records of an enterprise in violation of a duty to do so which he knows to be imposed upon him by law or by the nature of his position; or
prevents the making of a true entry or causes the omission thereof in the business records of an enterprise.” N.Y. Penal Code § 175.05

An individual “is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” N.Y. Penal Code § 175.10.