Prosecutors in Daniel Penny trial to rest their case Monday
ABC
(NEW YORK) — Prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office are expected to rest their case Monday against Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who is charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the chokehold death of a homeless man aboard a New York City subway car.
Defense attorneys will finish their cross-examination of the medical examiner, Dr. Cynthia Harris, who concluded “there are no alternative reasonable explanations” for Jordan Neely’s death other than Penny’s chokehold.
She is expected to be the last witness for the prosecution, which argued Penny’s chokehold became reckless when he held on too long, beyond the point when Neely represented any kind of threat to subway riders.
Jurors saw a video of Penny demonstrating the chokehold during an interview inside a police precinct.
“He had his back turned to me and I got him in a hold, got him to the ground, and he’s still squirming around and going crazy,” Penny is heard saying.
The defense is expected to shift the focus of the case from Penny to Neely, who had prior arrests, a history of mental illness and drugs in his system.
(LOS ANGELES) — Less than 24 hours after President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden and criticized his prosecution as a “miscarriage of justice,” prosecutors in special counsel David Weiss’ office defended the integrity of their work in a court filing and fiercely rebutted the president’s allegation that their charges were motivated by politics.
“In total, eleven different [federal] judges appointed by six different presidents, including his father, considered and rejected the defendant’s claims, including his claims for selective and vindictive prosecution,” wrote prosecutor Leo Wise in a ten-page filing Monday.
President Biden on Sunday issued a blanket pardoned to his son, who earlier this year was convicted earlier on federal gun charges and pleaded guilty to tax-related charges, and was due to be sentenced in both cases later this month.
In Monday’s filing, prosecutors urged the federal judge overseeing Hunter Biden’s tax case in California not to dismiss his indictment, and instead close the docket — which would allow the record to continue to exist.
“The government does not challenge that the defendant has been the recipient of an act of mercy. But that does not mean the grand jury’s decision to charge him, based on a finding of probable cause, should be wiped away as if it never occurred,” Wise wrote. “It also does not mean that his charges should be wiped away because the defendant falsely claimed that the charges were the result of some improper motive.”
Mark Osler, an expert in presidential pardons at the University of St. Thomas, said Weiss’ overture raises “a technical issue — either way, the case goes away — but an important one.”
“[Prosecutors] want the indictment to remain on the record,” he told ABC News.
Without directly addressing President Biden’s criticism of the case as selective and unfair, the filing highlighted how Hunter Biden’s lawyers made “every conceivable argument” to dismiss the case and failed to provide evidence that prosecution was vindictive.
“The court similarly found his vindictive prosecution claims unmoored from any evidence or even a coherent theory as to vindictiveness,” the filing said. “And there was none and never has been any evidence of vindictive or selective prosecution in this case. The defendant made similar baseless accusations in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware. Those claims were also rejected.”
(NEW YORK) — The “Trump Trade” was in overdrive Wednesday, making it one for the history books on Wall Street with record finishes for all three major stock indices.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rocketed 3.6%, its biggest one day jump since November 2022. The S&P 500 shot up 2.5% while the Nasdaq climbed nearly 3%.
The biggest winners were companies and sectors that investors are betting will benefit from President-elect Trump’s policies.
Bank stocks, including JP Morgan Chase (JPM), Wells Fargo (WFC), and Bank of America (BAC) rallied on the promise of lower taxes and less regulation. The small-cap Russell 2000 Index (RUT), which includes some regional banks, soared nearly 6%.
It was the biggest surge for the U.S. dollar since 2020, and Carl Icahn, the activist investor and billionaire, said it will lead to less regulation and more mergers and acquisition.
Elon Musk was perhaps the day’s biggest winner. Shares of his Tesla Corporation (TSLA) rocketed nearly 15%. The world’s wealthiest person has been a staunch Trump proponent, donating more than $130 million toward Trump’s election efforts. In his victory speech, the president-elect referred to Musk as a “super genius” and has promised him a role in his administration.
“The biggest positive from a Trump win would be for Tesla and Musk,” wrote Dan Ives, Senior Equity Research Analyst at Wedbush. “We believe a Trump presidency would be an overall negative for the EV industry as likely the EV rebates/tax incentives get pulled. However, for Tesla we see this as a huge positive. Tesla has the scale and scope that is unmatched in the EV industry and this dynamic could give Musk and Tesla a clear competitive advantage in a non-EV subsidy environment, coupled by likely higher China tariffs that would continue to push away cheaper Chinese EV players from flooding the US market,” Ives wrote in a research note.
The cryptocurrency market also cheered Trump’s return to the White House. Bitcoin (BTCUSD) notched a record close, climbing above $75,000. Trump has said he wants the U.S. to be the “crypto capital of the planet” and plans to create a “strategic reserve of bitcoin.”
In September, he even launched his own crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, a new venture with family members to trade cryptocurrencies.
Donald Trump saw his personal wealth balloon during Wednesday’s stock market rally, at least on paper. Shares of his Trump Media and Technology Group (DJT), the parent company of his social media platform Truth Social, soared more than 30% at the market’s open but pulled back considerably to finish just 6% higher. Still, that gave the company a market cap of about $7.2 billion, with Trump’s majority stake worth about $4.1 billion.
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump has ambitious plans to utilize U.S. federal lands for the extraction of natural resources.
But Trump – who promised at the Republican National Convention in July to “drill, baby, drill” if he were to be reelected – may not be able to accomplish the vast majority of his plans due to existing protections and the way federal lands are defined, environmental law experts told ABC News.
Trump won’t be able to “just turn on the spigot” for new oil and gas drilling on day one of his administration, Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, told ABC News.
“Every administration gets to the place where they have to differentiate between the rhetoric that they use in the campaign and the actual challenges when it comes to actually governing,” Stan Meiburg, executive director of Wake Forest University’s Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability, told ABC News.
National parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, military reservations and public-domain lands are owned and managed by the federal government.
Public land is intended to be used for public benefit, but for the last century or so, that definition has sometimes been conflated to also include the extraction of natural resources, such as oil, gas, minerals and timber, according to Peter Colohan, director of federal strategies at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a nonpartisan think tank.
Federal lands are “for the benefit and enjoyment of all people,” Colohan told ABC News, evoking the famous phrase by former President Teddy Roosevelt that’s inscribed on the arch at north entrance of Yellowstone National Park.
Trump carried out what environmentalists widely regarded as an anti-environmental policy regime during his first term, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement to address climate change upon taking office in 2016 – which he has said he plans to do again, reversing President Biden’s Jan. 20, 2021 action to rejoin the agreement – removing clean water and air pollution protections, and fast-tracking environmental reviews of dozens of major energy and infrastructure projects, such as drilling and fuel pipelines, which Trump has said would help boost American energy production and the economy.
During his next term, Trump also has promised to drastically increase fossil fuels production in the U.S., despite the U.S. already producing and exporting a record amount of crude oil under the Biden administration.
“I think it’s an absolute certainty that Trump is going to push to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 19.3 million acres in northeastern Alaska that provides critical habitat to several species, to unfettered oil drilling, as well as areas outside of the refuge along the Alaska coast,” Kierán Suckling, executive director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told ABC News. “He’s been gunning for that for years.”
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to an ABC News request for comment on this story.
Regulatory challenges
The president and the executive branch may have a “great deal of discretion” over control of public lands and monuments, but existing laws to protect lands like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will be difficult to overturn, Suckling said.
Since the 1970s, a slew of environment regulations have been put in place to protect the U.S. landscape, such as the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, followed by the Clean Water Act in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The Clean Air Act was established in 1963 and has been amended several times since, the first time in 1970.
Because of this legal environmental infrastructure, it would be virtually impossible for Trump to easily or unilaterally change these protections, the experts said. In order for the Trump administration to overturn regulations against use of protected lands for energy production, he would have to present evidence to demonstrate that the proposed actions would not violate existing environmental laws, Suckling said.
“You have to use the best science available and if the science does not support your policy, the law is not going to permit you to do it,” Suckling said.
The day after Trump won reelection, President Joe Biden moved to narrow the scope of the lease in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, signed by Trump in 2017, to limit oil drilling. The Biden administration found “legal deficiencies” in the leases that would have made it possible for the Trump administration to expand fossil fuel production, Colohan said.
The biggest roadblock to Trump’s plans to drill on federally protected lands is whether or not those areas are actually economically competitive, compared to places where people are drilling on private land using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, Meiburg said.
However, most federal lands are not protected, Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation at Earthjustice, told ABC News. For such unprotected lands, it’s possible for Trump to issue an executive order to lease them for energy production. Even so, whenever a decision is being made to lease public land, “there will be a legal battle for sure,” Colohan said, adding that executive orders are “more reversible” than an existing statutory regulation.
Environmental activist resistance
In order for Trump to open federal land for leasing, his administration is required by law to notify the public, with environmental lawyers certain to be ready to challenge him.
“Environmental laws are carefully designed to produce a stable, democratic, scientific outcome,” Suckling said. “You can’t just get in and jump around and do whatever you want, and that’s why the United States has one of the best-protected environments – one of the cleanest, healthiest environments of any nation on earth,”
During Trump’s first term, the Biological Center for Diversity sued his administration 266 times and won about 90% of those actions, Suckling said. Earthjustice filed about 200 lawsuits against the Trump administration and won about 85% of them, according to Caputo.
“We’re going to have to sue their pants off every chance we get,” the Sierra Club’s Manuel said.
The Trump administration will likely face opposition from other stakeholders as well, such as Native American tribes, which could be impacted should federal land be leased for energy extraction, Meiburg said.
Trump’s loss in the 2020 election may have been the speed bump needed to thwart his agenda for federal lands, some experts also said. Now that he’s been reelected four years later, he’s essentially a one-term president and many of his proposed actions could be tied up in litigation for years, Suckling said.
Conversely, had Trump had eight consecutive years in office, it may have afforded him the continuity to enact more sweeping changes regarding use of federal lands, Caputo said. Should the House or Senate flip to Democratic control after the midterm elections, Trump’s agenda would likely be blunted even more, Manuel said.
However, it’s also challenging for land managers and environmental agencies when there’s constant turnover in the regulatory environment because it can slow progress for environmental protections, Colohan said.
All land is under pressure – whether for development, extraction of resources, agricultural use, climate change or biodiversity loss, Colohan said. But federal lands carry the ideal of conservation for the public benefit, recreation, cultural purposes, and for climate mitigation and resilience, he added.
“Those things are the better, the longer-term benefits that come from conservation,” Colohan said. “And so that’s really a choice that’s made by every administration.”
