Tag: rejects

Court rejects Trump’s urgent bid to keep lawyer’s records from special counsel

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After setting middle-of-the-night deadlines for filings in the dispute, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday afternoon declined Trump’s request for a stay of Howell’s ruling, ordering attorney Evan Corcoran to provide records to a Washington-based grand jury assigned to the special counsel’s probe.
The appeals court’s full order was not released, so it was not immediately clear whether Corcoran would be required to testify in addition to providing documents. But a summary of the D.C. Circuit’s order indicated that prosecutors had prevailed and that stay requests from the Trump camp were denied.
It’s also unclear whether the panel provided any time for Trump to challenge the decision before the full bench of the appeals court or to seek relief from the Supreme Court.
Howell ruled on Friday that Trump’s attorney-client privilege had to yield to the grand jury’s need for Corcoran’s testimony and records, given evidence that the attorney had been used to advance a crime. Smith’s probe is exploring potential obstruction of justice of the classified-documents investigation, as well as illegal retention of classified information and theft of government records, according to court filings.
The appeals court’s order on Wednesday — from Judges Cornelia Pillard, J. Michelle Childs and Florence Pan — didn’t identify Corcoran or the case at issue but made clear that the government was on the winning side of the case in Howell’s court and in the appeals court’s new ruling.
Pillard is an appointee of President Barack Obama as is Howell, the District Court judge who ruled in the dispute. Childs and Pan are appointees of President Joe Biden.
Spokespeople for Trump, his campaign and Smith did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday on the appeals court’s decision.
“Prosecutors only attack lawyers when they have no case whatsoever,” Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign said in a statement on Tuesday night that also assailed what it called “illegal” leaks about the closed-door court fight. “These leaks are happening because there is no factual or legal basis or substance to any case against President Trump.”

In an order on Tuesday night, the three-judge appeals panel granted a short-term “administrative” stay and also asked Trump’s attorneys to specify the precise set of documents at issue by midnight and for Smith’s team to respond by 6 a.m. Wednesday to the Trump team’s demand for a longer stay of Howell’s ruling.
Howell’s secret order on Friday required Corcoran to testify about matters he and Trump had claimed were subject to attorney-client privilege. Her order relied on the “crime-fraud exception,” which permits investigators to pursue evidence that would ordinarily be privileged but contains evidence of likely criminal conduct.
As chief judge, Howell supervised all disputes arising from grand jury proceedings happening in Washington. That responsibility passed on Friday to U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, who succeeded Howell as chief, but only after Howell issued the potentially momentous privilege ruling in the Trump-related legal fight.
Proceedings related to the classified-documents grand jury, including efforts by prosecutors to compel Corcoran’s testimony, are occurring under seal — typical for nearly all grand jury proceedings.
However, the appeals court’s docket provides bare-bones details about the case, identifying when the lower-court battle began — Feb. 7 — and confirming that it stems from a grand-jury-related ruling Howell issued on Friday.
The grand jury probe of Trump, helmed by Smith, is an outgrowth of a monthslong battle between the National Archives and Trump to obtain hundreds of government records stashed at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving office. Trump’s aides returned 15 boxes of records in January 2022, including some that bore classification markings. As a result, the Archives brought in the Justice Department to pursue whether Trump had retained additional classified material.
In May 2022, the Justice Department subpoenaed Trump’s office, demanding the production of any other classified materials he might possess at Mar-a-Lago. Justice Department officials traveled in early June to Mar-a-Lago, where they briefly interacted with Trump and picked up a folder of records deemed classified. Trump’s team then certified that they had thoroughly searched the premises and turned over remaining classified documents.
But the department developed evidence suggesting that this wasn’t the case, leading to an Aug. 8, 2022, FBI search of the property, where dozens of additional documents with classification markings were discovered.
Corcoran, who was Trump’s primary point of contact with the Archives and the Justice Department, has faced scrutiny for his involvement in efforts to certify that Trump had returned all potentially classified materials.
The legal maneuvering in Washington comes as Trump’s lawyers are also awaiting a potential indictment of their client in an unrelated case in New York, an investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg into details of a hush money payment made in 2016 to the porn actress Stormy Daniels

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 23, 2023
Pak court rejects FIA’s plea to cancel Imran Khan’s bail in prohibited funding case

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Islamabad: A Pakistani court on Wednesday rejected the country’s top investigating agency’s plea to cancel former prime minister Imran Khan’s bail in the prohibited funding case, a media report said.
Khan, the chief of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party was granted bail by an Islamabad-based banking court in a prohibited funding case.
The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in October last year filed a case in the banking court against Khan, 70, and other members of his party for allegedly receiving prohibited funding.
The prohibited funding case was filed by PTI’s estranged founding member Akbar S Babar in the Election Commission of Pakistan in 2014.
A two-member bench comprising Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani and Justice Tariq Mehmood Jahangiri conducted the hearing on the plea in the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Wednesday, according to the Express Tribune newspaper.
The court also rejected the request to cancel the bail of co-accused Tariq Shafi, the report said.
The FIA filed an application in the IHC on February 28 against the banking court’s decision to grant bail to the PTI chief and appealed to the court to annul the decision as it was “against the law”.
In 2022, Pakistan’s Election Commission said the allegations of taking prohibited funds from overseas Pakistanis against Khan were proven.

It issued a new show-cause notice to PTI asking why these funds should not be confiscated.
During Wednesday’s hearing, FIA Special Prosecutor Rizwan Abbasi argued that Khan has not yet been interrogated by the agency in the case, and urged the court to cancel his bail, the report said.
IHC Chief Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani asked if the money laundering allegations in the FIR were against Arif Naqvi and Imran Khan or if PTI was the recipient of the funds.
The FIA counsel argued that Khan in a recent interview admitted that he received funds for charity purposes but used them for political activities, according to the report.
Justice Kayani inquired if the funds were used by a political party and then how they became personal belongings, it said.
Justice Kayani asked the FIA counsel to submit the letter from the State Bank of Pakistan that the investigation agency received during the investigation.
“You did not include the employee of the State Bank in the investigation. Changing the name of a bank account is not a crime. Has the State Bank taken any action to change the name or nature of the account?” the judge asked.
Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician, was granted interim bail by a special court in Islamabad after being shot during an assassination attempt in November last year.
He was ousted from power in April after losing a no-confidence vote in his leadership, which he alleged was part of a US-led conspiracy targeting him because of his independent foreign policy decisions on Russia, China, and Afghanistan.
Khan, who came to power in 2018, is the only Pakistani Prime Minister to be ousted in a no-confidence vote in Parliament.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 22, 2023
Telangana HC rejects BJP MP Arvind’s plea in SC/ST atrocities case

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Hyderabad: The bench of Telangana High Court headed by chief justice Ujjal Bhuyan quashed Nizamabad MP Dharmapuri Arvind’s plea, seeking directions to drop a complaint lodged against him under the SC/ST Atrocities Prevention Act at the Nizamabad Police Station.
The judge ordered him to face trial in a case registered against him in Madannapet police station, by vacating its earlier order dated January 5, 2022, while directing the police to avoid taking any action against the MP.
D Arvind visited the Chanchalguda Central Jail in Hyderabad on October 31, 2021, to meet C Naveen Kumar alias Teenmar Mallanna. Later, speaking to media, he claimed the issue to be useless (lottapeesulu) and the complaint being filed as bogus SC/ST cases.
On January 2 this year, a social worker filed a complaint at Madannapet Police Station, alleging that Arvind had denigrated the SCs and STs by using the pejorative term ‘lottapeesulu’ (useless).
Following the complaint, a case under Section 3(1)(7) of SC, ST (Prevention of Atrocities), Act was registered, which is a non-bailable offence.
During an earlier hearing, the CJ advised the MP to be more careful during public meetings and restrain from uttering such words.
However, Arvind spoke about the bogus SC, ST cases registered against many persons, at the press conference and filed a criminal petition in the court seeking the quashing of the FIR.
Upon the request of the counsel of MP, the CJ kept the day’s order in abeyance for 30 days to enable the petitioner to avail alternate remedy.

To give the petitioner time to seek an alternative remedy, CJ Ujjal Bhuyan suspended the ruling for 15 days at the request of MP Arvind’s attorney.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 18, 2023
2020 Delhi riots: Court rejects anticipatory bail of accused, probe ordered

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New Delhi: A court here has rejected the anticipatory bail of an accused in a case pertaining to the 2020 northeast Delhi riots and directed the Delhi Police to conduct a proper investigation into the case.
The court was hearing the pre-arrest bail plea of Sunder against whom Bhajanpura police station had registered a case for various offences, including for rioting and arson.
“The report (by the investigating officer) shows that till the time of moving this application, the applicant remained untraceable by the police. Moreover, his name has been taken by several eyewitnesses and he is also reported to be appearing in the video footage and in these circumstances, I do not find the applicant entitled to pre-arrest bail,” Additional Sessions Judge Pulastya Pramachala said in an order passed on Wednesday.
The court rejected the argument of Sunder’s advocate that the applicant was granted bail in two other cases registered at the same police station, saying it could not be a “guiding factor” to decide the bail application in the present case.
“At the same time, I am not very much satisfied with the kind of investigation done in the case, wherein no attempt has been made to recover any looted materials. Hence, the matter is referred to the station house officer (SHO) to ensure that a proper investigation is done in this case…IO shall hand over a copy of this order to SHO for compliance,” the court said.
The court noted the IO’s reply, according to which Sunder had joined the investigation on March 6 and allegedly in his disclosure statement, he confessed to having looted and vandalised several stores, including mobile phone shops.
“But surprisingly neither anything has been said about an attempt made to recover the looted articles, nor the requirement of further investigation or interrogation of the applicant and on the contrary, IO reports that custodial interrogation is not required,” the court said noting the reply.
The court also noted that the IO said nothing has been done to recover the looted articles.

(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by Siasat staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 16, 2023
2019 Gadchiroli blast: NIA court rejects pleas of 3 accused seeking discharge from MCOCA

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Mumbai: A special court here has rejected pleas of three accused in the May 2019 Gadchiroli IED blast case in Maharashtra wherein they had sought discharge from provisions of stringent anti-organised crime law MCOCA, saying ample material existed to show they played a “major role in the commission of the crime” and are members of a banned outfit.
Fifteen security personnel of the Quick Response Team (QRT) and one civilian were killed in an IED (improvised explosive device) blast on May 1, 2019, in Gadchiroli district in the Vidarbha region, carried out by Naxalites.
Special NIA (National Investigation Agency) court judge Rajesh Katariya rejected the pleas of the three accused — Somsay Madavi, Kisan Hidami and Parasram Tulavi — on March 6. A detailed order was made available on Thursday.
The trio and six others have been booked under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), Indian Penal Code (IPC) section for murder and provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, an anti-terror law.
If found guilty of offences covered under the MCOCA, the accused are liable to get the death sentence or life imprisonment, and a minimum fine of Rs 1,50,000.
In his application filed through advocate Shariff Shaikh, accused Tulavi claimed he has been falsely implicated in the crime.
During arguments, advocate Shaikh had submitted before the court that to prosecute his client under the MCOCA, the prosecution has to prove the ingredients of alleged offences under the Act.
There was no material against the applicant in that regard and the sanction granted to prosecute the accused under the MCOCA was invalid, the defence lawyer submitted.

Similar contentions were raised by the other two accused (Madavi and Hidami) through their advocate Wahab Khan.
However, special public prosecutor Jaysing Desai opposed the discharge applications, saying the accused are members of the banned organization Communist Party of India (Maoist).
They were involved in the killing of police personnel and were also part of the conspiracy behind the bomb blast. Many instances have been recorded in the past regarding illegal acts carried out by members of the said organisation (CPI-Maoist), Desai argued.
The court, after hearing both the sides, held that prima facie, there was ample material to show the applicants are members of the banned organization.
The perusal of the statement of the co-accused clearly shows the applicants had been part of a major conspiracy linked to the bomb attack and participated in a meeting before the strike, it said.
“It also shows that applicants had played a major role in the commission of the crime,” the court noted in its order, adding allegations made against them are “specific” in nature.
The material placed before the court disclosed grave suspicion against the trio and whether or not allegations levelled against them are true is a matter that cannot be determined at the stage of framing of charge, the judge said.
“Considering the factual matrix, I am of the view that mitigating circumstances are very less and to do the ultimate justice, trial needs to be held,” the NIA court judge added.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 9, 2023
McCarthy rejects Zelenskyy’s invitation to Ukraine

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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) speaks with reporters at the U.S. Capitol on March 7, 2023. | Francis Chung/POLITICO
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has invited House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to visit the embattled nation amid his hesitancy to greenlight aid, a request the California Republican quickly shut down.
“He has to come here to see how we work, what’s happening here, what war caused us, which people are fighting now, who are fighting now. And then after that, make your assumptions,” Zelenskyy told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an interview.
When informed about the Ukrainian invitation, the speaker told CNN that he would not take the trip and blamed the Biden administration for not acting quickly enough to aid Ukraine. Still, McCarthy (R-Calif.) held his position that the U.S. should not be sending a “blank check” to Kyiv, repeating a position he initially made last fall that sparked uproar from members of both parties.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 8, 2023
SEC’s Gensler rejects crypto’s threat to move overseas

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Now, as Europe moves ahead with rules for digital assets and U.S. lawmakers remain locked in a stalemate over the need for new regulations, crypto giants are threatening to move their businesses across the Atlantic.
Gensler brushed off concerns about the plight of the U.S. industry as he faces a barrage of criticism from digital asset executives and their allies in Congress over how he’s regulating the space. House Republicans are ramping up oversight of his crypto enforcement actions and plan to scrutinize his every move, but he’s also under pressure from progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren to continue clamping down.
Yet Gensler said the flurry of litigation and enforcement actions hasn’t done much to convince firms to follow the law.
He said crypto businesses have eschewed what typically happens when agencies come down on bad behavior in financial markets. Rather than coming into compliance with U.S. securities, “this is a field that seems to belie that in some circumstances,” he said.
“The path to compliance is clear. It’s [that] the firms, in some regard, have generally been operating outside of those parameters,” he said.
Gensler, a Democrat who led the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Obama administration, has long claimed that securities laws already apply to digital asset businesses and that the agency does not need new broad authority from Congress.
Top firms like Coinbase and Ripple have resisted those claims and have lobbied lawmakers and regulators to create new rules for their industry — an effort set to soon pay off in Europe with the Markets in Crypto-Assets law, or MiCA.
Gensler is skeptical of the European law’s effectiveness.

“Do you know that MiCA doesn’t even cover Bitcoin?” he said, before adding that while the SEC often consults and talks with its international counterparties, he has “to focus on how to best help the American public.”
U.S. lawmakers, meanwhile, are still debating how to regulate the market’s exchanges and brokerages.
Crypto lobbyists have framed Gensler’s push to force their industry to comply with 90-year-old securities laws as a war against financial innovation. Whatever changes brought by crypto markets will pale compared to what could come as brokerages and financial data aggregators move to incorporate artificial intelligence into their offerings, Gensler said.
“The much more transformative technology right now of our times is predictive data analytics and everything underlying artificial intelligence,” he said, adding that he looked forward to working with lawmakers on how those tools could be regulated.
Zachary Warmbrodt contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 8, 2023
Delhi HC rejects PIL against appointment of MP-IDSA chief

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New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Friday rejected a plea against Sujan R. Chinoy’s appointment as the Director General of Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA) in January 2019.
A division bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Subramonium Prasad was hearing lawyer petitioner Subhash Chandran K.R.’s Public Interest Litigation (PIL) contending that it concerns a prominent post in defence for which no advertisement was published.
The bench said that since it relates to a service matter, it cannot be maintained and no case for interference can be made out.
“In the considered opinion of this court, as the present PIL is in relation to a service matter, no case is made out for interference in the matter. Admission is declined,” it said.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta has said that this appointment is made by a committee consisting of the Cabinet Secretary, the Defence Secretary, and two persons of eminence and the “petitioner has no connection. He is a stranger”.
Noting that there is no advertisement for a lot of high offices, the bench dismissed the PIL.
The PIL claimed that the institute did not obey to the rules for a public appointment which was “an act of lawlessness cutting at the very root of the strict mandate of Articles 14 and 16 of the Constitution”.

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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 3, 2023
DOJ rejects Trump claim of ‘categorical’ immunity from Jan. 6 lawsuits

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Longstanding court precedents protect presidents from civil litigation related to actions they take in their “official” capacity. But determining when presidents toggle between their official duties and their political ones — which are often blended and unclear — is complicated, and courts have typically avoided drawing bright lines.
DOJ on Thursday similarly urged a three-judge appeals court panel to avoid drawing such distinctions, even as it asked the court to dismiss Trump’s sweeping interpretation of his own immunity.
“Those are sensitive questions of fundamental importance to the Executive Branch, and this unusual case would be a poor vehicle for resolving them,” Justice Department attorney Sean R. Janda wrote.
Notably, in a footnote, the department seemed to allude to an ongoing criminal special counsel investigation of Trump, emphasizing that the agency’s opinion about Trump’s potential civil liability had no bearing on pending criminal matters related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
“The United States does not express any view regarding the potential criminal liability of any person for the events of January 6, 2021, or acts connected with those events,” according to the department.
The department’s brief is a notable benchmark in the long-running lawsuits that arose from the Capitol attack. Several members of Congress and Capitol Police officers sued Trump and his allies for damages, contending that they helped incite Trump’s rally crowd to violence that day.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled last year that they had made a plausible case, permitting the suit to move forward. He noted that while presidents typically enjoy sweeping immunity from lawsuits for their public remarks, Trump’s speech arguably crossed a line into incitement of violence that would not be protected.
Trump, during his rally on Jan. 6, 2021, urged backers to “fight like hell” to prevent President Joe Biden from taking office in a speech laden with heated rhetoric. Though he urged supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol, Mehta noted that it was a swift aside in a speech otherwise loaded with apocalyptic language. Even as Trump spoke, members of the rally crowd marched on the Capitol — at Trump’s urging — to pressure Republican lawmakers to oppose certification of the election. Many members of that crowd eventually joined a mob that battered its way past police lines and into the Capitol, forcing lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety.

The U.S. government is not a party to the civil suits, but the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel weighing Trump’s effort to reverse Mehta’s ruling solicited DOJ’s views on the matter in December. That request from Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, and Judges Gregory Katsas and Judith Rogers, followed oral arguments in December between an attorney for Trump and a lawyer for lawmakers and police officers claiming damages from the riot and ransacking of the Capitol two years ago.
The appeals court’s request also put the department — which typically defends the broad scope of executive power — in a tricky spot, particularly as special counsel Jack Smith continues to probe whether Trump bears criminal responsibility for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. Many defendants charged for their actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6 have pointed to Trump’s conduct and remarks as a key influence and suggested that they took their cues from him.
Department lawyers stressed that they were not endorsing the legal theories or factual claims made in the various suits, but the government’s brief says that if a president issued an urgent call for private citizens to commit an attack that would or should be beyond the broad immunity traditionally afforded to occupants of the Oval Office.
“In the United States’ view, such incitement of imminent private violence would not be within the outer perimeter of the Office of the President of the United States,” the DOJ brief says.
The Justice Department said a president’s remarks of a purely personal or political nature might in theory be a potential trigger for civil liability, but that the courts need to take extraordinary care when trying to distinguish the official from the political.
“That principle … must be understood and applied with the greatest sensitivity to the complex and unremitting nature of the President’s Office and role, which are not amenable to neat dichotomies. The Supreme Court has emphasized, for example, that ‘there is not always a clear line’ between the President’s ‘personal and official affairs.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 3, 2023
HC rejects ‘love jihad’ claim, says interfaith relations can’t have religious angle by default

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Mumbai: A relationship cannot be dubbed as a form of ‘love jihad’ just because the boy and the girl belong to different religions, the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court has said while granting pre-arrest bail to a Muslim woman and her family.
A division bench of Justices Vibha Kankanwadi and Abhay Waghwase in the order passed on February 26 granted anticipatory bail to the accused who were denied relief by a local court in Aurangabad.
The woman’s former lover had alleged she and her family forced him to convert to Islam and undergo circumcision.
The man’s lawyer, while opposing the pre-arrest bail applications of the woman and her family members, also argued that it was a case of `love jihad’.
‘Love jihad’ is a term used by Hindu right-wing organisations to claim, without evidence, that there is a widespread conspiracy to lure Hindu women and convert them to Islam through marriage.
Here, though, the accuser was a man.
The high court rejected the love jihad argument, pointing out that the man, in the First Information Report (FIR), had admitted he was in a relationship with the woman and did not end the relationship despite having several opportunities.
“Merely because the boy and girl are from different religions, it cannot have a religious angle. It can be a case of pure love for each other,” the court said.

“It appears that now the colour has been tried to be given of love jihad, but when love is accepted then there is less possibility of the person being trapped just for converting him into the other’s religion,” it added.
As per the prosecution case, the man and the woman were in a relationship since March 2018. The man belonged to a Scheduled Caste community, but did not disclose this to the woman.
Later, the woman began insisting he should convert to Islam and marry her, after which the man disclosed his caste identity to her parents. They did not object to his caste identity and convinced their daughter to accept it.
But the relations later turned sour, following which the man lodged a case against the woman and her family in December 2022.
The HC, while granting pre-arrest bail to the woman and her family, said the probe into the case was almost over and hence their custody would not be necessary.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

March 2, 2023