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• The Trump administration continues to use the Justice Department to go after perceived enemies. First, The New York Times reports (gift link): “The Justice Department is investigating whether the major television networks—ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News—violated federal antitrust laws when the group briefly suspended their pooled coverage of President Trump, according to six people with knowledge of the department’s action. Officials from the Justice Department contacted networks on Friday and demanded communications and materials related to the White House TV pool, the people said. The pool is a longstanding system where the networks share the responsibility of providing footage of the president and distributing it to other news outlets. … In a statement on Saturday, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Emily Covington, described the five networks as having ‘proudly boycotted covering White House events.’ … The inquiry by the Justice Department is a profound escalation of the Trump administration’s ongoing battles with the White House press corps. It also follows a pattern of the Trump administration using the levers of government against its perceived foes in the media. The Justice Department has subpoenaed reporters from The New York Times and seized a laptop from a Washington Post journalist.”
• Next, The Washington Post (gift link) reports: “Federal authorities searched the D.C. home of Rep. Ilhan Omar on Monday morning, three people familiar with the matter said, intensifying long-standing immigration-related accusations from Republicans regarding the nation’s first Somali American lawmaker. Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, executed the search. The Justice Department confirmed that it secured a court-authorized warrant for a law enforcement action Monday morning, but the agency did not name Omar or confirm what investigation the search was connected to. … The search of Omar’s home appears to be the type of action that law enforcement officials have typically avoided so close to an election in the past. Omar is up for reelection in November after winning the Democratic primary in her district. In the 60 days before an election, the Justice Department enters a ‘blackout’ period, during which the agency typically refrains from taking public steps in politically related cases—such as executing a search warrant or indicting someone—that could be perceived as politically motivated and potentially affect the results of the election.”
• Related: The Trump administration is doing all it can to destroy the International Criminal Court. The Associated Press says: “The Trump administration has imposed sweeping new sanctions on the International Criminal Court as part of its campaign to dismantle the tribunal over investigations into the United States and its allies, including Israel. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions Friday, after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to South African jurist Navi Pillay, a former judge at the ICC and other international courts. Trump has coveted that prize for himself. ‘We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us,’ Rubio said in a video address posted to social media. ‘The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.’ The sanctions cut the court off from U.S.-based financial services, technology companies and even using U.S. dollars. They set a six-month timeline for U.S. companies and individuals that have business with the court to wind that business down.” Isn’t this exactly the type of thing a criminal organization would do?!
• The Guardian (U.K.) is reporting that the Food and Drug Administration is making it easier to put dangerous chemicals in and around food: “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is proposing to expand a controversial loophole to allow some of the world’s most toxic chemicals to be added directly to food without a safety review. The ‘threshold of regulation’ (TOR) exemption currently allows dangerous compounds to be used without review in food contact materials, such as packaging or processing equipment, if they are not carcinogenic, and are added at levels below 0.5 parts per billion (ppb). But campaigners say many chemicals, especially hormone disruptors linked to brain damage and reproductive harm in children, are considered dangerous at levels far below 0.5ppb. Even in its limited form, the loophole has already raised alarm. One TOR exemption that allows the rocket fuel chemical perchlorate to be used in grain bags dramatically increased the amount of the compound found in kids’ cereal, which advocates say could cause brain damage. The new proposed TOR expansion would allow companies to use the chemicals as an ingredient added directly to food, as flavorings, preservatives, emulsifiers, processing aids, enzymes, stabilizers and binders, and for myriad other uses, in ultra-processing.”
• ProPublica reports that the feds are not showing respect for tribal sovereignty along the U.S. border: “At 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 25, Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southern Arizona, received an email from the head of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. Government contractors were en route to conduct soil tests for construction of a 62-mile wall along the Nation’s southern boundary, wrote acting chief patrol agent Henry N. Laxdal. If the tribe wished to have cultural monitors observe the work, they were welcome to, but they could not interfere with the government’s operations. The work would begin in exactly one minute. … For months, the O’odham had maneuvered to avoid such a scene, taking their case to federal court. Their homeland straddles the border, and thousands of tribal members live in Mexico. A wall would disrupt routine border crossings for ceremonies and family visits and destroy landscapes they consider their duty to protect, members and leaders say. Their lawsuit argued that the Trump administration’s efforts to build it despite their opposition constituted an historic attack on tribal sovereignty.“
• And finally … today is a holiday, Indigenous Peoples’ Day—although some still call it Columbus Day. A historian, writing for The Conversation, details how full of himself Christopher Columbus was. A snippet: “Like a magpie on a spiritual quest, Columbus transcribed portions from the Bible and scholars into a kind of commonplace book—a journal where he recorded parts of scripture and other writings, including his own notes. Columbus told a powerful tale in its pages. He believed that God had endowed him with remarkable intelligence, despite enemies’ allegations that he was ‘an uneducated man, an uninformed sailor, an ordinary person.’ Columbus compared his struggles with those of biblical prophets, saying he was like Isaiah, who ‘was not just a prophet, but also an evangelist’ who called ‘all people to our holy Catholic faith.’ He wrote about the discovery of islands and converting ‘all peoples and nations.’ He reported that the Roman historian Seneca had prophesied that ‘a large landmass’ would appear during ‘the last years of the world,’ adding that a ‘new sailor’ would ‘discover a new world.’ In this book, which was not published in his lifetime, Columbus recast the renaming and charting of Caribbean islands as a religious pursuit.”
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