Ahead of Kennedy confirmation vote, Senate Democrats demand more details on his finances
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(WASHINGTON) — With a committee vote scheduled Tuesday for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Senate Democrats are demanding more details on the nominee’s connections to vaccine lawsuits and are saying Kennedy should promise to recuse himself from any vaccine-related decisions if confirmed health secretary.
The demands came in letter released Monday by Sens. Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren, after Kennedy told the lawmakers that he planned to divest his financial stake in one ongoing vaccine lawsuit to his adult son who practices law in California.
The description matches that of his son, Connor Kennedy, who is an attorney at Wisner Baum, a California-based law firm that is representing plaintiffs in a civil lawsuit against Gardasil, a vaccine intended to protect against HPV and deemed safe by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Warren and Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, called the arrangement of allowing his son to collect future referral fees in the lawsuit “troubling” and “plainly inadequate.”
“The arrangement outlined in your Ethics Agreement Amendment is plainly inadequate, as it would appear to allow an immediate family member to benefit financially from your position as Secretary,” wrote Wyden, D-Ore., and Warren, D-Mass.
It’s not clear whether the letter released Monday by the Democrats would impact Kennedy’s confirmation as health secretary, which could still be pushed through by the Republican majority. It is possible, however, that Republican senators with concerns about Kennedy’s nomination — including Sen. Bill Cassidy — could use the Democrats’ request to slow the confirmation process.
“Your past of undermining confidence in vaccines with unfounded or misleading arguments concerns me,” Cassidy, R.-La., a medical doctor, said in his opening remarks during a hearing last week on Kennedy’s nomination.
He added, “Can I trust that that is now in the past? Can data and information change your opinion? Or will you only look for data supporting a predetermined conclusion? This is imperative.”
The Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Cassidy, is scheduled to vote Tuesday on Kennedy’s nomination.
Warren and Wyden said they couldn’t trust Kennedy’s financial disclosures were “accurate and complete” because they don’t lay out how many cases Kennedy referred to Wisner Baum and whether vaccines were involved.
Wisner Baum has said it has not paid the nominee for any vaccine-related cases, as the current Gardasil case is ongoing.
Wyden and Warren said any involvement is a direct conflict of interest if he were to become health secretary because of his oversight of vaccines.
“By using your authority and bully pulpit as Secretary to sway the outcome of the litigation and secure a big judgment or settlement, you would increase the chances of a large payout for yourself,” they wrote.
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(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department on Monday filed a highly unusual motion stating its intent to review a state-level conviction of a Trump ally who was sentenced to nine years in prison for leading a security breach of her county’s elections computer system following the 2020 presidential election.
Former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters was sentenced last October for giving an individual affiliated with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an ally of President Donald Trump who amplified false election claims, access to election software she used for her county. Screenshots of the software later appeared on right-wing websites that in turn used it to further promote baseless claims of voter fraud.
Early last month, Peters filed a motion with the federal district court in Colorado seeking to challenge her guilty verdict.
On Monday, the senior acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, Yaakov Roth, filed a statement of interest with the court, urging a judge to give “prompt and careful consideration” to concerns Peters’ counsel has raised about her case.
“Reasonable concerns have been raised about various aspects of Ms. Peters’ case,” Roth said in the filing. “Accordingly, the United States respectfully submits that the concerns raised in the Application warrant – at the very least – prompt and careful consideration by this Court (and, at the appropriate time, the Colorado appellate courts).”
The Justice Department does not have the legal authority to unilaterally overturn state-level convictions. However, some critics have expressed concerns that such intervention highlights a troubling willingness by Trump-appointed officials at the Department of Justice to aid allies of the president, while also raising the prospect of retribution against his political opponents.
Roth’s filing further states that Peters’ case fits into a broader review underway at the Justice Department of “cases across the nation” that the filing argues may be “abuses of the criminal justice process.”
“This review will include an evaluation of the State of Colorado’s prosecution of Ms. Peters and, in particular, whether the case was ‘oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives,’” the filing stated.
An ABC News request for comment about the filing submitted to the Mesa County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately receive a response.
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the Justice Department — former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi — faces questions before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
Democrats want to ask her about her vow to “prosecute the prosecutors — the bad ones” — referring to special counsel Jack Smith and other DOJ lawyers who investigated Trump.
Durbin raises concerns Bondi’s connections to Trump cases Durbin said he had concerns about Bondi’s work for Trump in his attempts to cast doubt on his 2020 election loss.
“You repeatedly described investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Trump, Trump as a witch hunt, and you have echoed his calls for investigating and prosecuting his political opponents. This flies in the face of evidence,” he said.
Durbin also as said he had concerns about Bondi’s controversial move to not investigate fraud claims against Trump University in 2016 when she was Florida’s attorney general.
“I also have questions whether you will focus on the needs of the American people rather than the wealthy special interests,” he said.
Durbin to challenge Bondi as hearing gets underway
In his prepared opening statement, top committee Democrat Dick Durbin will tell Bondi, “Ms. Bondi, you have many years of experience in law enforcement, including nearly a decade of service as attorney general in one of the largest states in the nation. But I need to know you would tell President Trump ‘No’ if you are faced with a choice between your oath to the Constitution and your loyalty to Mr. Trump.”
Trump says Bondi will end alleged ‘weaponization’ of DOJ
“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans – Not anymore,” Trump wrote in his announcement of Bondi for attorney general.
Bondi boosted Trump’s false claims of 2020 election fraud
Pam Bondi has developed a reputation as one of President-elect Donald Trump’s most loyal defenders — a vocal political and legal advocate who represented Trump during his first impeachment, boosted his efforts to sow doubts about his 2020 election loss, and stood by him during his New York criminal trial. Read more about her background here.
Democrats to grill Pam Bondi over loyalty to Trump Bondi – Trump’s pick to head the Justice Department – has vowed, in a 2023 interview on Fox News, to ‘’prosecute the prosecutors – the bad ones’’ who investigated Donald Trump.
Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee — whose members will question Florida’s former attorney general – has said ‘’she has echoed the President[-elect]’s calls for prosecuting his political opponents, and she has a troubling history of unflinching loyalty to the President-elect.”
(WASHINGTON) — Executive orders signed recently by President Donald Trump state that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs prioritize diversity over merit in hiring, claiming DEI efforts are an “immense public waste and shameful discrimination.”
Some experts in the DEI field disagree, and several tell ABC News that diversity, equity and inclusion programs are aimed at creating a true merit-based system, where hiring, salaries, retention and promotions are decided without bias or discrimination toward employees.
Before the anti-discrimination legislative movement of the 1960s — including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 — discrimination against certain groups was widespread, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“If you were from a dominant group — generally white people, generally men, straight, cisgender, fully-abled — you had a huge leg up in terms of getting employment recommendations, higher pay promotions,” Erica Foldy, a professor at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, told ABC News.
She continued, “So, Trump and his allies are harking back to this time that they say was more merit-based, but that’s not at all how these organizations operated.”
DEI initiatives — like implementing accessibility measures for people with disabilities, addressing gender pay inequity, diversifying recruitment outreach, or holding anti-discrimination trainings — are intended to correct discriminatory organizational practices, experts say.
DEI experts argue that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are “on the path of creating more merit-based companies, more merit-based firms,” Foldy said, aiming to ensure that qualified people of all backgrounds have an “equal chance of being hired; you’re going to be paid the same as employees at comparable levels.”
“Business as usual, without attention to discrimination, is deeply, deeply inequitable,” Foldy said.
Amri Johnson, a DEI expert and author, told ABC News that the ideal of meritocracy operates under the assumption “that opportunities are fair.” Today, studies across industries continue to show that discrimination against a person’s race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, military background, or other factors continues to permeate the job market.
“If organizations truly want the best talent, companies need to be intentional about how they source and engage with talent,” said Johnson.
Each year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission plays a role in hundreds of legal cases concerning ongoing discrimination against protected classes in the workplace.
The EEOC’s 2023 performance report offers a long list of lawsuits it settled or won that year. One lawsuit noted blatant racist graffiti or comments made by fellow employees, paired with the discriminatory designation of hard physical labor solely for Black employees; others noted the failures of several employers to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant or disabled workers that led to the employee’s termination or job offers rescinded.
One study found that racial and ethnic discrimination in hiring continues to be a problem globally.
“Relative to white applicants, applicants of color from all backgrounds in the study had to submit about 50% more applications per callback on average,” according to research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that analyzed 90 studies involving 174,000 total fake job applications tweaked to include racial indicators but with otherwise similar professional credentials.
“Diversity doesn’t go away because DEI goes away. It is an inevitable part of any human community (business or otherwise),” said Johnson. “Not learning how to deal with its tensions and complexity is leaving value on the table.”
Some DEI experts point to research from management consulting firm McKinsey & Company that found that companies with more diversity financially and socially outperform those that are less diverse.
“The most successful companies understand that DEI isn’t just a ‘”nice-to-have,'” said Christie Smith, the former vice president for inclusion and diversity at Apple, in a written statement. “It’s a driver of innovation, talent attraction, and competitive advantage. The question is whether leaders will have the courage to stay the course and hold firm against political headwinds.”
On Thursday, Trump claimed, without citing evidence, that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration were partly to blame for the tragic plane and helicopter collision in Washington on Wednesday night.
The accusation comes after Trump signed sweeping orders aiming to terminate “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” programs in or sponsored by the federal government and its contractors.
The White House argues that DEI programs “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”
“Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great,” reads Trump’s executive order.
The order revokes several decades-old or years-old executive actions, including the 1965 Equal Employment Opportunity order prohibiting hiring discrimination by federal contractors and its amendments expanding professional development, data collection and retention opportunities.
The order also explicitly revokes a 1994 order to develop environmental justice strategies that address disproportionately high health and environmental impacts faced by low-income or minority communities.
Among the list of orders that are now revoked is a 2011 order requiring federal agencies to develop strategies “to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity.”
Those in favor of axing DEI programs argue that these initiatives could lead to lawsuits claiming discrimination following the Supreme Court’s ruling on SFFA v. Harvard that disallows race to be taken into consideration in college applications.
The National Center for Public Policy Research has been a strong advocate against DEI, submitting shareholder proposals to reverse the DEI policies at major companies like Costco, John Deere, and others. Ethan Peck, deputy director for the NCPPR’s Free Enterprise Project, told ABC News that such companies should be “colorblind.”
“We’re saying that companies have an obligation, a legal obligation, and an obligation to their shareholders, and an obligation to their employees to treat everybody the same, regardless of their race and sex, and we’d submit any proposal to keep that that way,” Peck said.
