Protesters tased, arrested at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Georgia town hall
Pool via ABC News
(COBB COUNTY, GA) — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of President Donald Trump’s most loyal allies in the House, faced several protesters who were removed by police for disrupting her town hall on Tuesday.
Police said at least six attendees were escorted out without incident, while three others were arrested — two of whom were stunned with a Taser during their removal.
The event was held at the Acworth Community Center in Greene’s home state of Georgia on Tuesday, with disruptions breaking out almost immediately after the congresswoman took the stage.
“Well, welcome everyone,” Greene said, kicking off the meeting as police removed at least three protesters. “Thank you, Thank you to our great police officers… This is not a political rally. This is not a protest. If you stand up and want to protest, if you want to shout and chant, we will have you removed, just like that man was thrown out.”
At one point, a man was tased for not cooperating with police as they tried to escort him out for interrupting the meeting.
“This is a peaceful town hall. Now this is a peaceful town hall, ladies and gentlemen, this should not have to happen,” the Greene said in response.
While speaking at the town hall, Greene accused the media of “trying to defend an illegal alien that is a member of MS-13 that was deported to his home country, El Salvador. That is shameful and that should never happen,” she said, referring to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who ICE officials have said was sent to El Salvador by error in March.
Following this, another protester was removed from Greene’s event.
“Bye,” Greene said. “Just like that illegal alien,” she said, despite Abrego Garcia’s legal status.
Outside of the disruptions, Rep. Greene did receive continuous support from the audience, which had about 80 people in attendance. Outside the venue, protesters lined up on the street.
Following the rally, Greene told reporters the protesters were “out of line,” saying there was a place designated outside of the venue for the protesters “because we support their First Amendment right.”
(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge on Wednesday entered an emergency order barring the Trump administration from implementing major parts of its executive order that sought to target the law firm Perkins Coie over its representation of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.
District Judge Beryl Howell, ruling from the bench, found that attorneys for Perkins Coie had met the bar for her to enter a temporary restraining order — determining they would suffer immediate and irreparable harm if provisions of the order targeting the law firm’s work with government contractors as well as restrictions on their attorney’s access to government buildings were implemented.
In an extraordinary hearing in which the Justice Department put forward Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, to present its arguments, Howell repeatedly questioned the logic and legality surrounding the order — which she said had extraordinary breadth and whose language was unlike any other order she’d ever read.
“Regardless of whether the President dislikes the firm’s clients … issuing an executive order targeting the firm based on the President’s dislike of the political positions of the firm’s clients, or the firm’s litigation positions is retaliatory and runs head on into the wall of First Amendment protection,” Howell said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — Steve Bannon, the confidant of President Donald Trump, pleaded guilty Tuesday to defrauding New Yorkers who donated to “We Build the Wall,” an online fundraiser for Trump’s signature project during his first term, in exchange for a sentence without prison time.
“The parties have worked out a plea agreement. Mr. Bannon will plead guilty to count 5 of the indictment, which is scheme to defraud in the indictment. He will receive a conditional discharge,” prosecutor Jeffrey Levinson said.
The guilty plea to the felony charge represents Bannon’s second criminal conviction after he served prison time for contempt of Congress.
Bannon showed up to court in a brown barn jacket, his brushed-back gray hair spilling over the upturned collar. He sat at the defense table signing papers before Judge April Newbauer affirmed that Bannon now wanted to plead guilty.
“Is that what you wish to do?” Newbauer asked.
“Yes, your honor,” Bannon replied, before acknowledging he acted to defraud multiple donors.
“Do you now plead guilty to count 5, scheme to defraud?” the court clerk asked. “Yes,” Bannon responded.
The judge imposed the agreed upon sentence of a three-year conditional discharge, during which time Bannon cannot serve as a director of a charity or fundraise for a nonprofit. He is also barred from using data gathered from “We Build the Wall” donors.
Bannon said after the hearing that he would call on new Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James and investigate Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, both of whom brought successful cases against Trump.
“Letitia James is the existential threat to the Trump administration,” Bannon said.
Defense attorney Arthur Aidala said he counseled Bannon to plead out because he did not think Bannon could get a fair shake from jurors in Manhattan.
“This is a spectacular disposition with him,” Aidala said, noting the conditional discharge puts no real limitations on Bannon other than charitable work.
Bragg released a statement after the plea agreement, saying, “This resolution achieves our primary goal: to protect New York’s charities and New Yorkers’ charitable giving from fraud. With this felony plea, the defendant will not be able to serve as an officer, director, or in any fiduciary position, or fundraise for, any charitable associations with assets in New York State, nor can he use or sell WBTW donors’ information. New York has an important interest in rooting out fraud in our markets, our corporations, and our charities, and we will continue to do just that.”
“We Build the Wall” promised 100% of donations would fund a wall along the U.S. southern border, but Bannon redirected money elsewhere.
Bannon, who served as a senior adviser to Trump during his first term, was indicted in September 2022. He previously pleaded not guilty and the trial was scheduled to begin on March 4.
Bannon was initially charged in federal court with three co-defendants. However, Trump pardoned Bannon, but not the co-defendants, whose asset forfeitures through prosecution recouped money for defrauded donors.
Bannon defrauded donors to the nonprofit by falsely promising that none of the money they donated would be used to pay the salary of “We Build the Wall” president Brian Kolfage, while secretly funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to him by laundering it through third-party entities, prosecutors said.
The campaign represented that “We Build the Wall” would use the money to privately construct the border wall, and prosecutors said a “central piece of the public messaging in support of this fundraising effort was that Kolfage was not taking a penny of compensation.” Financial records show Kolfage was paid, according to a secret salary arrangement, an upfront payment of $100,000 and monthly payments of approximately $20,000.
Fired CFPB employee, Elizabeth Aniskevich says they were ‘tossed on the streets’ with no info, haven’t been able to get forms for unemployment; ABC News
(WASHINGTON) — For many, a federal government job was a marker of stability or a way to serve the country, in some cases a “dream” job.
But a week after the Trump administration started to hack away at government agencies, many employees who were cut are left fearing for their future and in the dark about their next steps.
Days after they’d been let go, employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s hadn’t received the paperwork they needed to file for unemployment, said Elizabeth Aniskevich, who was a litigation counsel for the agency before she was told her job was eliminated.
“It’s really been a total roller coaster of emotions,” she said. “I will say the solidarity among those of us who have been terminated has been amazing, but we can barely get information.”
Aniskevich was fired with 70 other employees who were still in their probationary period. Many of them are keeping in touch through a group chat.
“We have not received forms that are requested to file for unemployment,” she said. “We have no real understanding of when our health insurance terminates,” she said. “We just have no information. We were just basically tossed out on the streets, and so that has been angering and heartbreaking, and our pay stopped the day we got the termination letter, so we’re all without a paycheck as of Tuesday.”
“I think the main question is, ‘What are we going to do?’” she said.
“I’m a single person in my house. I’m responsible for my insurance and for my mortgage, and I worked really hard to buy this house on my own after putting myself through law school, and I don’t know how I’m going to continue to make mortgage payments very far into the future,” she said.
Aniskevich said she chose to work for the CFPB because she was raised in a military family that believed in service.
“My dad was in the military for 27 years, and he really instilled in me a commitment to this country and to public service,” she said.
Katie Butler, a Department of Education lawyer, knew her days with the agency were numbered.
“Ever since the start of the Trump administration, we knew there would be a cut in federal employees,” she said.
She and her colleagues also knew that the first people to go would be probationary employees with less protection.
And while she expected to be terminated, certainty came with the “Fork in the Road” notice, an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that introduced a new program called “deferred resignation, that allowed them to continue to work until Sept. 30. Around 75,000 federal employees took the buyout, according to the White House.
Butler is also an adjunct professor at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, where she earned her law degree.
She says she was teaching a class when she got the Fork in the Road notice and didn’t see it immediately. The next day, she got a termination letter.
Her supervisors asked, “Did you get a termination notice, because we don’t know who got one.”
Butler doesn’t hold her abrupt termination against them.
“I don’t think this is coming from them, they are doing their best, but this is not the way you run the federal government system.”
Butler and her colleagues were told they could appeal through the Merit Systems Protection Board but she says she knows the decision would be hard to appeal.
The loss of her job has also hit her financially — she had just bought a house in June that she’s been remodeling and also has student debt of around $140,000.
Butler began working for the federal government “right out of college.”
She worked for the National Park Service and at the Bureau of Labor Statistics before getting into law school. In September 2024, she joined the Department of Education, where she had to complete a new probationary period despite having previously established career status.
She says the job she lost was “one of the exact jobs I went to law school for.”
“Career-wise, this is a big detour from what I expected,” she said. “I went to law school because I planned to work long-term as a public servant.”
Given what she calls “the somewhat disrespectful and unthoughtful way this is being handled,” Butler says she will take a detour away from the federal government.
“It’s honestly just really disappointing, from like a personal standpoint.”
Her plan is to go into general litigation at a mid-size to large law firm or a solicitor’s office. She has also considered local government work, given her experience.
She may go to work for a city. Even now, she is “still dedicated to doing good as a civil servant but not under the present circumstances.”
Victoria DeLano, who was an equal opportunity specialist in the education department’s Office for Civil Rights based in Birmingham, Alabama, said she was outraged when she received notice that she had lost her job last week.
“I think that the work that the Office for Civil Rights does is absolutely instrumental to children in my state,” she said.
“When you take out of the equation a fully staffed Office for Civil Rights, you’re taking away an avenue to resolution and an avenue to law enforcement, a really important avenue to law enforcement.”
“These students have no one else,” she said. They can still file complaints with OCR. Please understand OCR is understaffed at best, and OCR right now does not have external communication with you all. So I don’t know where they turn,” she added.
DeLano also called her position a “dream job.”
“It’s something that I’m extraordinarily passionate about because I believe with my history working with students with disabilities,” she said. “So I jumped at the chance to take this job, and absolutely loved it.”
She is concerned that the Trump administration has no clear plan to shrink the federal government, nor is it considering students with disabilities.
“This dismantling of our government right now is just being done with a sledgehammer without thought of what are the implications be to the individuals who are serviced by these agencies,” she said.
That sentiment is echoed by Butler.
“It takes a while to build a government system, but when [you] tear it down this quickly, it can cause a lot of damage,” she said. “The progress feels slow. This could take 100 years for us to rebuild.”
