Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Con't

Wednesday's hearing by Texas federal judge Andrew Kacsmaryk made it very clear he will attempt to overturn the FDA and two decades of medicine in order to end medical abortion for everyone, and the Biden administration has a momentous decision to make, as Rolling Stone's Tessa Stuart reports.

Under federal law, anyone can challenge FDA approval of a drug within the first six years — a window has long since closed for mifepristone, which the FDA approved in 2000. According to the Washington Post, when asked on Wednesday if there was precedent for a court intervening in an approval so many years after a drug had been on the market, a lawyer arguing on behalf of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine admitted there was none.

But Kacsmaryk nonetheless appeared poised to rule in the anti-abortion groups’ favor on Wednesday. If that happens, lawyers for the Biden Administration will seek a stay from the Fifth Circuit — one of the most conservative courts in the country — and if they can’t find relief there, they will appeal to the Supreme Court. It’s unclear how long that might take and whether mifepristone would be available in the meantime.

If Kacsmaryk orders the FDA to withdraw approval of the drug, Sen. Ron Wyden has called on the Biden Administration to ignore the order and maintain public access to the medication. (It’s not an idea without precedent, according to a Harvard Law Review article that examined federal agency compliance with court orders, and judges like Kacsmaryk have relatively few options to force an agency, like FDA, to comply with their orders if an agency chooses not to.)

Wyden’s position is simple: “The power of the judiciary begins and ends with its legitimacy in the eyes of the public,” he said last month. “A judge’s rulings stand because elected leaders and citizens have agreed that abiding by them is right and necessary to uphold the rule of law… But the judiciary must uphold its end of the social contract too. It must follow the rule of law and earn the confidence of the American people continually, every day, every month, every year.”

By “hot-wiring the system in order to produce an anti-abortion ruling,” Wyden says, Kacsmaryk is violating that contract and delegitimizing the court itself. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Wyden’s suggestion.) 

I don't know if the White House would go that far, because there is good news:

Health care providers, meanwhile, are making plans to continue offering abortions using misoprostol, the second pill in abortion pill regimen, alone. (Misoprostol, which is also used to treat ulcers, is available without the restrictions to which mifepristone is subject.)

Melissa Grant is the chief operations officer at Carafem, an organization that offers reproductive health care, including abortion care, online and in-person. “Carafem has provided thousands of doses of misoprostol-only as an option to our clients since the year 2020,” she tells Rolling Stone. “We did so because we recognized that the Trump administration was poised to remove the ability to mail mifepristone in 2021.”

What Carafem has found in the data it has collected over that period is that misoprostol-only abortions are extremely effective — 95 percent, compared to 99 percent effectiveness when taken together with mifepristone. Doses can be administered orally or vaginally, largely as a matter of personal preference, Grant says. (While taking the medication orally is slightly less effective, she says, but individuals in areas where abortion is illegal may choose that route out of abundance of caution since “fragments of tablets may be maybe seen on a pelvic exam and your vagina.”)

 

The bad news is that if Judge Kacsmaryk's decision is as odious as I think it will be, and that decision could come at any time now, that it will serve as a new bogus legal precedent to ban misoprostol as well.  We'll see what happens as this winds through the courts, but the fact is Republican fascists won't stop with just ending one abortion medication.

Totally Up For Grabs

A new survey finds that as America heads into 2024, non-affiliated and Independent Latinos are rapidly becoming the country's largest swing voter group, making up as much as 20% of all voters in states like California and Florida.

First-time Latino voters are outpacing first-time non-Latino voters in Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada, New York, and Texas, according to a report first obtained by Axios.

The big picture: Nonpartisan and unaffiliated Latino voters are on the verge of becoming one of the biggest swing voter groups in the U.S. — raising the stakes for early and regular engagement from both parties.The 2022 election showed the GOP making significant gains among Latinos in Florida but falling well below expectations in Texas, as predicted.

Details: The percentage of early Latino voters between ages 18 and 34 jumped in Arizona, Nevada, New York, and Texas, according to a TelevisaUnivision/L2 analysis reviewed by Axios.Unaffiliated Latino voters now represent the largest percentage of Latino voters in Florida.

Nonpartisan Hispanic registered voters represent a larger percentage than non-partisan non-Hispanic voters in states like Arizona and Nevada.

State of play: The number of Latinos, which includes people of any race, was 62.1 million in 2020 — a growth of 23% in a decade, according to the U.S. Census.Exit polls for U.S. House races in 2022 showed 60% of Latinos backed Democrats while 39% voted for Republicans.

John F. Kennedy won as much as 90% of the Latino vote in 1960, and Jimmy Carter took 82% in 1976.

Between the lines: Latino voting behavior is much more unpredictable and depends on the political dynamics of their local regions, L2 executive vice president Paul Westcott told Axios.California Latinos tend to lean more Democratic and Florida Hispanics more Republican, but that could change, Westcott said.

"This shows that candidates need to get their messages out early and need to go after younger Latino voters," Michele Day, TelevisaUnivision's senior vice president for its Political, Advocacy & Government Group, told Axios.

What's next: Westcott said the 2024 presidential election will likely see record Latino voter turnout and could offer more surprises if parties don't engage.

 

Whichever parties get the Latino vote in 2024 determine the presidency. Democrats are doing a better job of this, but Republicans already have machinery in Florida and Texas and are moving to pick up more House seats in New York, Arizona, Nevada, Illinois, and California. 

Latino voters don't trust either party at this point. We'll see if Dems can start winning them over.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Guardian's Hugo Lowell has been on the Trump crime beat for the UK for a while now, and his latest piece finds that Trump's media company and his failed social media platform are facing possible money laundering charges from the Feds, complete with ties to Russian mobsters.

 

Federal prosecutors in New York involved in the criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s social media company last year started examining whether it violated money laundering statutes in connection with the acceptance of $8m with suspected Russian ties, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The company – Trump Media, which owns Trump’s Truth Social platform – initially came under criminal investigation over its preparations for a potential merger with a blank check company called Digital World (DWAC) that was also the subject of an earlier probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Towards the end of last year, federal prosecutors started examining two loans totaling $8m wired to Trump Media, through the Caribbean, from two obscure entities that both appear to be controlled in part by the relation of an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, the sources said.

The expanded nature of the criminal investigation, which has not been previously reported, threatens to delay the completion of the merger between Trump Media and DWAC, which would provide the company and Truth Social with up to $1.3bn in capital, in addition to a stock market listing.

Even if Trump Media and its officers face no criminal exposure for the transactions, the optics of borrowing money from potentially unsavory sources through opaque conduits could cloud Trump’s image as he seeks to recapture the White House in 2024.

The extent of the exposure for Trump Media and its officers for money laundering remains unclear. The statutes broadly require prosecutors to show that defendants knew the money was the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity and the transaction was designed to conceal its source.

But money laundering prosecutions are typically based on circumstantial evidence and can be based on materials that show that the money in question was unlikely to have legitimate origins, legal experts said.

The first $2m payment to Trump Media came in December 2021 when the company was on the brink of collapse after the planned merger with DWAC – that would have unlocked millions for the company – was delayed when the SEC opened an inquiry into whether the arrangement broke regulatory rules.

Trump Media needed a bridge loan to keep the company afloat. But it struggled to get financing until DWAC’s chief executive Patrick Orlando sourced a $2m loan wired from Paxum Bank registered in Dominica, according to the wire transfer receipt reviewed by the Guardian.

The wire transfer identified Paxum Bank as the beneficial owner, although the promissory note identified an entity called ES Family Trust as the lender. Two months later, an unexpected second $6m payment arrived in Trump Media’s account from ES Family Trust, the transfer receipt showed.

In both instances, Orlando declined to provide details about the true identity of the lenders or the origin of the money to Trump Media executives, Trump Media’s since-ousted co-founder turned whistleblower Will Wilkerson recounted in an interview.

Though the two payments to Trump Media ostensibly came from two separate entities – first Paxum Bank and second ES Family Trust – the trustee of ES Family Trust, a person called Angel Pacheco, appears to have simultaneously been a director of Paxum Bank.

The Russian connection, as being examined by prosecutors in the US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York, centers on a part-owner of Paxum Bank – an individual named Anton Postolnikov, who appears to be a relation of Putin ally Aleksandr Smirnov.

So roughly $8 billion in Putin money to try to keep Truth Social afloat. Yeah, it's worth a look from the Feds.

In other words, this is the domain of US Attorney for SDNY, Damian Williams. It means Trump is now facing a possible fifth investigation into criminal activity, on top of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's payoff case to Stormy Daniels, Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis's election fraud case, NY Attorney General Tish James's civil tax fraud case, and Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigations into Trump's documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago.

In other words, it's a bad, bad time to be Trump.