Category: US

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema signed off on sweeping Democratic legislation Thursday addressing climate change, health care and taxes, all but ensuring passage of the bill in the Senate.

The Arizona Democrat said her support came after Democrats removed a provision on closing the so-called carried interest tax loophole that helps wealthy private equity and hedge fund managers pay lower taxes.

“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” Sinema said in a statement Thursday. “Subject to the Parliamentarian’s review, I’ll move forward. “

Sinema’s comments on the bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, come after it won the approval of Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, another moderate Democrat. She was viewed as the last hurdle to move forward on the legislation.

Sinema had long been opposed to a provision in the deal Manchin cut with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that sought to change carried interest.

In her Thursday statement, Sinema said she hoped “to enact carried interest tax reforms, protecting investments in America’s economy and encouraging continued growth while closing the most egregious loopholes that some abuse to avoid paying taxes.”

Democrats are aiming to pass the legislation ahead of the August recess in an effort to revive elements of President Joe Biden’s agenda before the midterm elections.

“I am pleased to report that we have reached an agreement on the Inflation Reduction Act that I believe will receive the support of the entire Senate Democratic conference,” Schumer said in a statement Thursday. “The final version of the Reconciliation bill, to be introduced on Saturday, will reflect this work and put us one step closer to enacting this historic legislation into law.”

The Mall of America was briefly on lockdown Thursday after several gunshots were fired inside the Bloomington shopping destination.

Bloomington Police Chief Booker Hodges said the shooting was an “isolated incident” involving a dispute between two groups of people. He said police believe only one individual fired the shots and that there were no indications anyone was injured.

Hours later, police were still looking for the suspect, who fled on foot. Hodges said that officers believed for a time that he was holed up in a hotel near the mall, but that they didn’t pan out.

The gunshots rang out just after 4 pm near or inside a Nike store in the northwest section of the three-level mall, frightening nearby shoppers and creating a chaotic scene captured on cellphone videos that quickly spread on social media. Mall security instituted a lockdown, and large groups of shoppers crowded into back rooms of stores.

“We cannot continue to have this disregard for human life,” Hodges said at a news conference Thursday night at the mall. To the suspect, he said: “Please turn yourself in.”

Kate Rutledge, who had driven from Des Moines, Iowa, to shop at the mall with her husband and four children Thursday morning, said she heard three or four shots.

She, her husband and two sons “ran like hell,” Rutledge said as they waited outside the Nordstrom department store. The lockdown had just lifted, and they were waiting for their two daughters, who had been elsewhere in the mall and were locked down inside another store.

Rutledge said she kept in touch with her daughters by text throughout the lockdown.

Hodges said investigators believe it all started with a dispute between two groups of people inside the Nike store. One of the groups left, he said, but then one of its members returned and fired several shots into the store.

“They decided to fire multiple rounds into a store with people in it,” Hodges said.

After the lockdown was lifted, the mall closed for the evening. Spokesman Dan Jasper said it would reopen to customers Friday with an increased security presence.

Hodges said he still considers the mall safe enough to bring his own children there.

A short video posted for a time on Twitter showed a man walking toward the Nike store, then shouts and the sound of three apparent gunshots can be heard. According to emergency dispatch audio, witnesses said the incident involved juvenile males. (The video was later removed.)

Danny Reinan, 22, a Minneapolis student, was at the mall with friends when the lockdown was announced about 4:20 pm

“We were at the Barnes and Noble, and suddenly there was an announcement over the loudspeaker that the mall is on lockdown and it’s not a drill,” Reinan said. “The staff rushed us into the back room, where we are waiting right now. Everybody’s trying to stay calm but you can really feel the tension and anxiety in the air.”

Reinan said about 75 people were in the small room. He said they did not hear any gunshots fired but he saw people running away.

Video (03:15): A TV news director from WFFT in Texas was inside the Mall of America while an ‘active incident’ caused the mall to lock down.

Nate Nelson of Bloomington said he rushed to the mall after hearing from his 18-year-old daughter that she had been locked down inside. He said she quickly indicated she was safe and kept him updated with constant texts.

“Thank goodness for smartphones,” Nelson said.

As the lockdown was being lifted, parents, relatives and friends waited outside the mall as people who’d been stuck inside began streaming out.

The mall marks the 30^th anniversary of its opening Aug. 11. It was placed on lockdown on New Year’s Eve last year when two people were shot during a fight.

In a statement Thursday night, Gov. Tim Walz decried the violence at the popular destination. “These brazen incidents will not be tolerated,” he said.

Rutledge, whose family planned to stay in a hotel overnight and shop again at the mall Friday, said her 13-year-old son — who also heard the gunshots — had already announced he wanted to go return to buy an Anthony Edwards’ Timberwolves jersey .

“We’ll have to think about that,” Rutledge said. “I want to go home. But we’ll talk about it.”

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) is not yet on board with the sweeping tax reform and climate package that Senate Democrats hope to vote on this weekend and wants to make changes to the bill to soften the tax hit on manufacturers, according to familiar sources with the negotiations.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (DN.Y.) is gambling that he can win Sinema over to support the bill by the time senators vote on proceeding to the budget reconciliation package sometime Saturday afternoon.

Sinema wants to exempt US manufacturing companies from the 15 percent corporate minimum tax that Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin (DW.Va.) agreed to ahead of unveiling the Inflation Reduction Act last week, according to multiple people familiar with issue.

That’s a tough problem to solve because the 15 percent corporate minimum tax is the biggest revenue generating proposal in the package, raising an estimated $313 billion over ten years.

Exempting manufacturing companies from the book minimum tax would cost about $45 billion over ten years, according to one of the lower Senate estimates being floated. Book is a tax accounting term that in effect would make it harder for companies to avoid declaring profit and therefore increase what they would pay in taxes.

Sinema also opposes closing the so-called carried interest loophole that allows asset managers to pay a 20 percent capital gains tax rate on income earned from advising on profitable investments.

And she wants $5 billion in drought resilience funding for her home state, according to a Democratic senator. Politico first reported Sinema’s demand for drought resilience money.

“She’s not there yet,” said one person familiar with the negotiations, who cited her objections to the corporate minimum tax and carried interest closing the loophole.

Sinema declined to answer reporters’ questions when she emerged from her Capitol basement hideaway Thursday afternoon.

A spokeswoman for Sinema declined to comment on any of the details of the negotiations, saying that her boss would wait for the Senate parliamentarian to completely review the legislation.

Schumer told colleagues they will vote on a motion to proceed to the budget reconciliation package Saturday, a sign that he feels optimistic about working out a deal with Sinema.

Other Senate Democrats also feel optimistic. But they’re also anxious the talks could fall apart at the last minute.

The corporate minimum tax that’s emerging as the biggest obstacle is also a big revenue generator in the bill. Establishing a carveout for manufacturers would substantially reduce how much money from the bill would go toward reducing the federal deficit, which is a major priority of Manchin’s.

Sinema is coming under heavy pressure from business leaders in Arizona to oppose the corporate minimum tax.

“In the face of record-high inflation, supply chain backlogs and a major labor crunch, now is not the time to hammer manufacturers with new taxes,” said Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Danny Seiden.

“Arizona job creators will continue to urge lawmakers to reject this manufacturers tax and instead focus on policies that encourage job growth and strengthen our state and economic competitiveness,” he said.

The Schumer-Manchin deal would establish a 15 percent minimum tax for corporations with more than $1 billion in annual profits, though it would exempt green-energy and microchip manufacturing tax credits from getting wiped out by that minimum tax threshold.

Republicans say the Democrats’ proposal would hit manufacturing companies especially hard by superseding former President Trump’s 2017 Tax Credits and Jobs Act, which allows a company to fully expense capital expenditures for a given year.

Full spending under the Tax Credits and Jobs Act is due to phase out over the next four years.

Sinema told the Arizona Chamber of Commerce in April that she would be “unwilling to support any tax policies that would put a break on … economic growth, or stall business and personal growth for America’s industries.”

She made clear to senior White House officials and Senate Democratic colleagues early during the negotiations over the budget reconciliation bill that she would not support increasing the 21 percent corporate tax rate, a key achievement of the 2017 tax reform law.

“The entire country knows that I am opposed to raising the corporate income tax. That was true yesterday and it is true today,” Sinema told the Arizona Chamber of Commerce earlier this year.

Republican critics of the Schumer-Manchin deal say that implementing a minimum tax rate that prevented full and immediate expensing of capital expenditures will effectively increase taxes on many corporations.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who worked closely with Sinema in drafting last year’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, warned in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that it would “essentially” place a “tax on manufacturing.”

He pointed out that the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that nearly 50 percent of the new tax would hit manufacturers.

“Imposing this new tax on US companies, and restricting certain US manufacturers from writing off investment costs immediately, would make America less competitive and drive investments and jobs overseas,” he warned.

Sinema’s request for $5 billion in drought resilience funding could also imperil passage of the bill depending on how it’s structured, especially if it means Arizona will get more water from the Colorado River.

Guaranteeing access to more water to lower-basin states such as Arizona, Nevada and California would come at the expense of upper-basin states such as Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico.

“We are facing historic drought in Colorado. The state has had the worst wildfires in our state’s history. There is very little water in the Colorado River. And I think it would be great if we could do something on drought but it has to be something that meaningfully improves the situation in Colorado and in the upper basin of the Colorado River,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), who is up for reelection in November.

He said any drought resilience language must be provide an “enduring solution to the problem, otherwise it’s not worth doing,”

Senate Democratic senators are hopeful that Schumer can work the same magic he did with Manchin and persuade Sinema to support the bill. But they aren’t making any predictions about how she’ll vote Saturday afternoon when the Senate considers whether to begin debate.

“You’ll have to ask her. I have a very optimistic feeling about it but that’s her call from her, ”said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.).

Gov. Ron DeSantis shocked Tampa Bay on Thursday when he removed Andrew Warren from his office as state attorney for Hillsborough County.

DeSantis said Warren, a Democrat and rising star in progressive law enforcement circles, had put himself “above the law” by promising not to enforce laws limiting abortion or the ability of children to seek certain gender dysphoria treatments. DeSantis used a suspension clause in the Florida Constitution that means Warren essentially has been fired.

Let’s take a closer look at Warren’s record, examining where he came from and how we got to Thursday’s decision.

1. Warren scored the most upset in 2016.

Andrew Warren was a relatively anonymous Democratic attorney until election night 2016, when he unseated Mark Ober, the Republican incumbent, in the race for Hillsborough County prosecutor. At the time, the Times called Warren’s victory a “stunning election-night upset.”

Warren, a former federal prosecutor, ran an aggressive campaign attacking his opponent for alleged absenteeism and a lack of sensitivity toward crime victims. (At the time, Ober said both characterizations were misleading.) Warren also pledged to rehabilitate those convicted of crimes, and enact policies that would stop criminals from becoming repeat offenders.

2. His office helped exonerate a wrongfully convicted man imprisoned for nearly four decades.

In 2018, Warren established a conviction review unit in the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office. Not long after, evidence submitted to the unit by the Innocence Project led a judge to throw out the conviction of Robert DuBoise, a man who had been wrongfully imprisoned for 37 years. DuBoise was convicted in the 1980s of murdering Barbara Grams.

The unit was one of many progressive initiatives by Warren. He has seldom sought the death penalty in capital murder cases. And he had steered his office away from charging people for driving with a suspended license if the suspension was due to a financial obligation, like an unpaid speeding ticket.

3. Warren has been a thorn on the side of conservatives.

Perhaps the highest profile flap of Warren’s tenure as prosecutor came during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. In April 2020, the prosecutor supported the arrest of a megachurch pastor who had held church services in person. Then DeSantis signed an executive order allowing the in-person services to continue.

Get insights into Florida politics

Subscribe to our free Buzz newsletter

Political editor Emily L. Mahoney will send you a rundown on local, state and national politics coverage every Thursday.

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Explore all your options

In response, Warren called DeSantis’ move “weak” and “spineless.” The charges against the pastor were later dropped.

Warren also criticized some of DeSantis’ legislative priorities. He said 2021′s HB 1, the so-called “anti-riot” bill, was tantamount to “criminalizing peaceful protests.”

He declined to prosecute 67 people arrested during the 2020 summer of protests over police brutality, enraging some conservatives.

And following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the abortion precedent set by Roe v. Wade, Warren said he would not press charges against abortion patients. In a tweetI reasoned that Florida’s Constitution has a clause protecting the right to privacy.

That proclamation was one of DeSantis’ justifications for suspending the prosecutor.

4. Warren has been accused of being funded by liberal out-of-state billionaires.

On Thursday, in response to a question about whether it was appropriate to remove an elected official, DeSantis alluded to Warren’s campaign support from wealthy progressives hoping to remake the criminal justice system.

“We can go back and look at some of these elections and all the money that’s coming in from people that do not live in Florida and are really trying to push an agenda on the people of Florida,” DeSantis said. (The governor has received tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from out-of-state billionaires.)

Rumors of support for Warren from financiers such as George Soros date back to 2016.

According to a profile of Warren the Times published in 2020, Soros likely did help Warren’s campaign.

“We understand that he gave money to the state (Democratic) party,” Warren said then. “And the state party money… went to support different candidates. And I have very little insight into the amount of money he gave, who it went to, etc.”

5. Tampa has seen more murders in recent years.

Tampa’s violent crime rate has spiked in recent years, with the city in 2021 recording the most murders it had seen since 1994, according to statistics from the Tampa Police Department compiled by the Times editorial board.

Although such crimes are up around the state and around the country, Tampa has seen somewhat more killings than most other cities in Florida, the editorial board said in April.

In the midst of cross-examination, a lawyer for the parents, Mark Bankston, sprung a surprise: Twelve days earlier, lawyers for Mr. Jones had sent data from his iPhone, including two years’ worth of text messages, to the plaintiffs.

The revelation prompted Mr. Bankston to suggest Mr. Jones had committed perjury in previous depositions. It also raised questions about how, exactly, the phone data had been shared.

Here is what legal experts thought of the moment when Mr. Jones was confronted with his phone data.

Alex Jones did seem surprised, but was this actually unusual?

And it is.

“It’s wild,” said Ellen Yaroshefsky, a distinguished professor in legal ethics at Hofstra University. “It’s really wild. It’s a wild situation in a wild case with a wild person.”

The exchange was eye-opening for several reasons. Information pertinent to such litigation is typically handed over before trial, in a process called discovery.

Bruce Green, a law professor at Fordham, where he directs a center for law and ethics, said that Mr. Bankston, as part of that process, had almost certainly requested texts and emails Mr. Jones had sent pertaining to Sandy Hook.

Even if Mr. Jones’s lawyers wanted to withhold certain of his communications as privileged, they would have had to supply a list of those documents to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, who could then have tried to gain access to the documents by appealing to the judge.

Steven Goode, a professor at the University of Texas law school who specializes in trial and appellate law, said in an interview that if what Mr. Bankston said on Wednesday was accurate and that Mr. Jones’s lawyers had failed to take action after they learned what they had done, “I would find that stunning.”

Why should we believe what the parents’ lawyer said?

Mr. Green said Mr. Bankston was almost certainly telling the truth about how he had come into possession of the phone records, for two reasons. First, lawyers for Mr. Jones did not contest his presentation of him in court, which allowed the records to be admitted as evidence. Second, it would be a disciplinary violation for Mr. Bankston to lie to the judge.

In most states, ethics rules require plaintiffs’ lawyers to notify their defense counterparts of inadvertent disclosure. Texas, however, does not have such a rule. Still, Mr. Bankston said in court on Wednesday that he had informed Mr. Jones’s team of the disclosure, saying, that “when informed,” the lawyers “did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protect it in any way. ”

Professor Goode said that if Mr. Bankston’s description was accurate, he had given a lawyer for Mr. Jones the opportunity to assert privilege over the material in a more generous way than was required.

On Thursday, a lawyer for Mr. Jones, F. Andino Reynal, filed an emergency motion requesting that a judge order Mr. Bankston to return all hard copies of the documents produced from the cellphone records, to seal those already entered into evidence and to give his team a chance to provide replacement copies of relevant evidence.

At a hearing on the motion, Mr. Reynal also called for a mistrial, based on Mr. Bankston’s use of the cellphone records. He said that after the documents had been inadvertently turned over, he had asked Mr. Bankston to disregard the link he had been sent and had expected the request to be honored.

Mr. Bankston, in response, said that the words “please disregard” had created “no legal duty on me whatsoever,” adding that he had been under no obligation not to look at the documents. He called the motion “frivolous.” (He also clarified that the link to the records had been sent by Mr. Reynal’s legal assistant.)

The judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, denied the mistrial request and the motion.

Did Mr. Jones commit perjury? If so, is he likely to face consequences?

Experts said it was unclear whether Mr. Jones would face perjury charges. Under Texas law, a person can be charged with perjury, a misdemeanor, if he makes a false statement under oath, or if, while under oath, he swears to the truth of a statement previously made, with a clear understanding of the statement and the attempt to deceive. The person can be charged with aggravated perjury, a felony, if the false statement is made in connection with an official proceeding and could have affected the outcome of the case.

If investigators with the Travis County district attorney’s office investigate the case and find that Mr. Jones committed perjury, he could be charged with a crime. The office did not respond to a request for comment.

“At one point the judge actually said to Jones, you believe anything that comes out of your mouth at the time you say it,” Professor Goode said. “I don’t know what he believes or doesn’t believe, so I have no idea whether the Travis County prosecutors would be in any way interested in prosecuting or whether or not they’d actually be able to make out a case.”