Політика

«Протягом 6 років сторонами укладались додаткові угоди, якими збільшувався строк виконання договору та його ціна»
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A bipartisan effort to protect children from the harms of social media is running out of time in this session of the U.S. Congress. If passed, the Kids Online Safety Act would institute safeguards for minors’ personal data online. But free speech advocates and some Republicans are concerned the bill could lead to censorship. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson has more. Kim Lewis contributed to this story.
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MADISON, Wis. — Community members in Wisconsin continued to wrestle with grief and called for change in the aftermath of a school shooting that killed a teacher and a student and wounded six others. 

Several hundred people gathered outside the Wisconsin State Capitol for a vigil Tuesday night to honor those slain at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison the day before, with some passing candles to each other and standing close against the winter chill. 

Among those in attendance was Naomi Allen, 16, who was in a nearby classroom Monday when a 15-year-old girl attacked people in a study hall before fatally shooting herself. 

“It’s doesn’t matter who you are or where you are, something like this could happen. There’s nothing that is going to exempt someone,” Allen said at the vigil. 

Allen’s father, Jay Allen, reflected on the dangers students face these days. 

“When I was in school these things never happened,” he said. “This country at some point needs to take mental health seriously and we need to pour resources into it. We really need some changes in the way we handle that issue.” 

The motive for the shooting appears to be a “combination of factors,” Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said Tuesday as he appealed to the public to call in to a tip line and share what they might know about the shooter. 

He offered no details about what that motive might be, though he said bullying at Abundant Life Christian School would be investigated. He also said police are investigating writings that may have been penned by the shooter, Natalie Rupnow, and could shed light on her actions. 

“Identifying a motive is our top priority, but at this time it appears that the motive is a combination of factors,” Barnes told reporters. 

Two students among the six people wounded Monday remain in critical condition. Officials have declined to disclose the names of the victims. 

“Leave them alone,” Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said. 

The school shooting was the latest among dozens across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. 

The shootings have set off fervent debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to doing active shooter drills in their classrooms. But school shootings have done little to move the needle on national gun laws. 

School shootings by teenage females have been extremely rare in U.S. history, with males in their teens and 20s carrying out the majority of them, said David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database. 

Abundant Life is a nondenominational Christian school — prekindergarten through high school — with approximately 420 students. Barbara Wiers, the school’s director of elementary and school relations, said the school does not have metal detectors but uses cameras and other security measures. 

Barnes said police were talking with the shooter’s father and other family members, who were cooperating, and searching the shooter’s home. 

The shooter’s parents, who are divorced, jointly shared custody of their child, but the shooter primarily lived with her 42-year-old father, according to court documents. 

Investigators believe the shooter used a 9mm pistol, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation. 

Madison resident Cristian Cuahutepitzi said he attended Tuesday’s vigil to let the families of the victims know “we’re thinking of them.” He said his uncle’s two daughters go to the school. 

“They’re still a little bit shook,” he said. 

Joe Gothard, the superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District, said at the vigil that the tragedy happened less than two blocks away from his childhood home. He said it wasn’t enough to say the district would work on safety. 

“We need to connect like we are tonight, each and every day and make a commitment that we know we’re there for one another, hopefully to avoid preventable tragedies like yesterday,” he said. 

A prayer service was also held Tuesday night at City Church Madison, which is affiliated with the school. 

Several teachers from the school prayed aloud one by one during the service, speaking into a microphone and standing in a line. One middle school teacher asked for courage, while another sought help quieting her own soul. 

“God, this isn’t a Abundant Life Christian School tragedy,” said Derrick Wright, the youth pastor at the church. “This is a community tragedy. This is a nation tragedy.”
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CAPE CANAVERAL, florida — NASA’s two stuck astronauts just got their space mission extended again. That means they won’t be back on Earth until spring, 10 months after rocketing into orbit on Boeing’s Starliner capsule. 

NASA on Tuesday announced the latest delay in the homecoming for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. 

The two test pilots planned on being away just a week or so when they blasted off June 5 on Boeing’s first astronaut flight to the International Space Station. Their mission grew from eight days to eight months after NASA decided to send the company’s problem-plagued Starliner capsule back empty in September. 

Now the pair won’t return until the end of March or even April because of a delay in launching their replacements, according to NASA. 

A fresh crew needs to launch before Wilmore and Williams can return, and the next mission has been bumped more than a month, according to the space agency. 

NASA’s next crew of four was supposed to launch in February, followed by Wilmore’s and Williams’ return home by the end of that month alongside two other astronauts. But SpaceX needs more time to prepare the new capsule for liftoff. That launch is now scheduled for no earlier than late March. 

NASA said it considered using a different SpaceX capsule to fly up the replacement crew in order to keep the flights on schedule. But it decided the best option was to wait for the new capsule to transport the next crew. 

NASA prefers to have overlapping crews at the space station for a smoother transition, according to officials. 

Most space station missions last six months, with a few reaching a full year.
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Police in Madison, Wisconsin, said Tuesday that they were working to establish a motive for the shooting at a small, private Christian school that killed a teacher and a student and wounded six other people.

“Identifying a motive is our top priority,” Police Chief Shon Barnes said of the shooting Monday that he called a “hurting and haunting situation.”

Police were trying to verify a document posted online by the 15-year-old shooter, who apparently died of a self-inflicted wound. 

Authorities said the shooter, Natalie Rupnow, was a student at the Abundant Life Christian School, which has an enrollment of just over 400 students from kindergarten to high school. She opened fire in a study hall late Monday morning.  

“We don’t know nearly enough yet,” Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway told reporters Tuesday about the shooting.  

Rhodes-Conway also said it was too early to determine whether the shooter’s parents, who were cooperating with the police investigation, would face criminal charges. 

“We have to allow law enforcement the time and space for a careful and methodical examination,” she said. 

Barnes said Tuesday that several schools across the Madison metropolitan area “were targeted by false threats, often known as swatting.” He said police and the school district were working together to determine who initiated the scheme. 

The mayor lashed out at reporters’ requests Tuesday for more information about the victims. 

“I’m going to say this and then we’re done,” she said. “It is absolutely none of y’all’s business who was harmed in this incident. Please have some human decency and respect for the people who have lost loved ones or were injured themselves or whose children were injured. Just have some human decency, folks.” 

Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking in Maryland, said, “Our nation mourns for those who were killed, and we pray for the recovery of those who were injured.” 

The vice president said stronger gun controls were needed.  

“Solutions are in hand,” she said, “but we need elected leaders to have the courage to step up and do the right thing.” 

President Joe Biden said in a statement Monday that the shooting was “shocking and unconscionable.” 

“Every child deserves to feel safe in their classroom,” he said. “Students across our country should be learning how to read and write, not having to learn how to duck and cover.” 

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers ordered flags to be flown at half-staff to honor the shooting victims.  

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
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За даними правоохоронців, війська РФ здійснили обстріл, ймовірно, з артилерії
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WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday proposed three bills aimed at cracking down on China’s role in the U.S. fentanyl crisis, with measures that would set up a U.S. task force to disrupt narcotics trafficking and pave the way for sanctions on Chinese entities.

China is the dominant source of chemical precursors used by Mexican cartels to produce fentanyl, while Chinese money launderers have become key players in the international drug trade, U.S. authorities say.

The proposed legislation would help hold China’s ruling Communist Party (CCP) accountable for “directly fueling the fentanyl crisis through its state subsidies of precursors,” said the House of Representatives’ Select Committee on China, on which all of the sponsors of the bills sit.

One bill, The CCP Fentanyl Sanctions Act, introduced by Democratic Representative Jake Auchincloss, would codify authorities for the U.S. to cut off Chinese companies from the U.S. banking system, including vessels, ports and online marketplaces that “knowingly or recklessly” facilitate shipment of illicit synthetic narcotics.

“This is state-sponsored poisoning of the American people,” Auchincloss said at an event introducing the legislation. “The genesis of this is squarely on the mainland of the People’s Republic of China.”

Two other bills would create a task force of U.S. agencies to conduct joint operations to disrupt trafficking networks and allow for the imposition of civil penalties on Chinese entities that fail to properly manifest or follow formal entry channels when shipping precursors to the U.S., the committee said.

There is growing consensus in Republican circles close to President-elect Donald Trump that Beijing has exploited, even engineered, the synthetic opioid epidemic to harm Americans, something Beijing denies.

China says it has some of the strictest drug laws in the world, and that the U.S. needs to curb narcotics demand at home.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the bills.

With little time remaining in the current congressional term, the bills would likely need to be reintroduced next year after the new Congress is sworn in on January 3.

Raja Krishnamoorthi, the top Democrat on the committee, wrote in an article this month that it was “time to get tough” on Beijing over fentanyl.
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President-elect Donald Trump sued the Des Moines Register and its pollster for “brazen election interference” in publishing a survey the weekend before the election that showed Democrat Kamala Harris with a surprising lead of 3 percentage points in the state.

The Register’s parent Gannett Co. on Tuesday dismissed the lawsuit as meritless and said it would vigorously defend its First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit continues the president-elect’s campaign against media outlets he feels have wronged him. ABC this past weekend agreed to pay $15 million toward a Trump presidential library in order to settle a defamation lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos for inaccurately saying Trump had been found civilly liable for rape.

The Des Moines survey, done by since-retired pollster J. Ann Selzer, was considered shocking for indicating that an earlier Trump lead in the Republican-leaning Midwestern state had been erased. In the actual election, Trump won Iowa by more than 13 percentage points.

“There was a perfectly good reason nobody saw this coming: because a three-point lead for Harris in deep-red Iowa was not reality,” the lawsuit said. “It was election-interfering fiction.”

The poll increased enthusiasm among Democrats, compelled Republicans to divert campaign time and money to areas in which they were ahead, and deceived the public into thinking Democrats were doing better than they actually were, Trump charged.

The lawsuit was filed late Monday in Polk County district court in Iowa. It cites Iowa consumer fraud law, and doesn’t ask for specific monetary damages, but rather wants a trial jury to award triple the amount of what it determines actual damages to be.

Whatever happens legally, the case could have a chilling effect beyond Iowa. Trump said in legal papers that he wanted it to deter “radicals from continuing to act with corrupt intent in releasing polls manufactured for the purpose of skewing election results in favor of Democrats.”

Lark-Marie Anton, Des Moines Register spokeswoman, said the newspaper acknowledged the pre-election poll did not reflect actual results and released technical information to explain the data and what went wrong.

“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit,” she said.

Selzer did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. But she told PBS in Iowa last week that “it’s not my ethic” to set up a poll to deliver a specific response. She said she was mystified about what motivation people would think she had.

“To suggest without a single shred of evidence that I was in cahoots with somebody, I was being paid by somebody, it’s all just kind of, it’s hard to pay too much attention to it except that they are accusing me of a crime,” she said.
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Серед евакуйованих дітей – брат і сестра шести та 10 років, вони три роки не ходили ані в школу, ані в дитсадок, каже Дарія Зарівна
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SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — A San Francisco jury on Tuesday found a tech consultant guilty of second-degree murder in the stabbing death of Cash App founder Bob Lee, which carries a sentence of 16 years to life.

Jurors took seven days to deliver their verdict against Nima Momeni in the April 4, 2023, death of Lee, a beloved tech mogul who was found staggering on a deserted downtown street, dripping a trail of blood and calling for help. Lee, 43, later died at a hospital.

“We think justice was done here today,” the victim’s brother, Tim Oliver Lee, told reporters. “What matters today is that we had a guilty verdict and Nima Momeni is going away for a very long time.”

Prosecutors said Momeni planned the attack on Lee, driving him to an isolated spot under the Bay Bridge and stabbing him three times with a knife he took from his sister’s kitchen. They say Momeni was angry with Lee for introducing his younger sister to a drug dealer she says gave her GHB and other drugs and then sexually assaulted her.

But Momeni testified on the stand that Lee was the one who attacked him with a knife, angry after the tech consultant chided him about spending more time with his family instead of searching for a strip club that night. Momeni, who studies martial arts, claimed self-defense and said he didn’t realize he had fatally wounded Lee or that Lee was even hurt.

The case has drawn national attention, partly given Lee’s status in the tech world.

Momeni, 40, has been in custody since his arrest in April 2023, when he was charged with murder in the first degree. Jurors received the case, which started Oct. 14, on Dec. 4.

Lee had created mobile payment service Cash App and was the chief product officer of the cryptocurrency MobileCoin when he died. He had moved to Miami from the San Francisco Bay Area, where his ex-wife Krista Lee lives with their two children.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a strong push to project Turkey’s influence internationally in 2024. He scored foreign policy successes with the ouster of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Turkey’s growing ties to nations in Africa. Still, tensions remain between his country and the West over Israel and his strong relations with Russia. As Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul, Erdogan has positioned himself for a bigger role internationally in 2025 and for a good working relationship with the incoming U.S. administration.
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Понад 40 кримських політв’язнів незаконно етапували, а фактично депортували до Росії, заявив заступник Постійного представника президента в АРК
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«Всього мають бути евакуювані до більш безпечних регіонів України 146 дітей з їх батьками або іншими законними представниками»
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«Викрито 12 російських агентів та їхніх інформаторів. Частина із них – дезертири, які самовільно залишили підрозділи ЗСУ», заявили в СБУ
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Washington — The United States hit North Korea and Russia on Monday with new sanctions targeting Pyongyang’s financial and military support to Moscow as well as its ballistic missile program.

The sanctions, which list North Korean banks, generals and other officials, as well as Russian oil shipping companies, are the latest U.S. measure aimed at disrupting North Korea’s support to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The North Korean banks targeted include Golden Triangle Bank, one of the biggest banks in the northeastern Rason Special Economic Zone, and Pyongyang-based Korea Mandal Credit Bank, which has representatives throughout China, the Treasury Department said in a statement.

South Korea’s foreign ministry separately said on Tuesday that it has blacklisted 11 individuals and 15 entities linked to illicit military cooperation between North Korea and Russia.

The responses came as 10 countries, including the U.S., South Korea, Australia, Britain, France and Japan, as well as the European Union, issued a joint statement on Tuesday condemning Pyongyang and Moscow’s military ties “in the strongest possible terms.”

The statement said North Korea’s support for Russia’s war against Ukraine was a “dangerous expansion of the conflict” and a “flagrant violation” of United Nations’ sanctions. It urged the country to withdraw its troops from Russia.

Pyongyang and Moscow have ramped up diplomatic and economic ties in recent years, culminating in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to North Korea in June when the countries’ leaders agreed a mutual defense pact.

Military cooperation between the two countries has been met by international alarm, with Washington, Kyiv and Seoul condemning North Korea for sending military equipment and more than 10,000 troops to support Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.

North Korea’s actions, including its most recent test of a long-range ballistic missile and its deepening military support to Russia, undermine the stability of the region and sustain Putin’s war in Ukraine, said Bradley Smith, acting Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence.

“The United States remains committed to disrupting the illicit procurement and facilitation networks that enable these destabilizing activities,” he said.

The officials sanctioned by both Washington and Seoul include North Korean generals leading tens of thousands of North Korean troops in Russia, including Kim Yong Bok, who has appeared at seven events with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this year, including special forces exercises.

South Korea separately blacklisted the North’s special forces unit known as the Storm Corps, also in Russia fighting against Ukraine, and its chief, Ri Pong Chun.

Ukraine said on Monday that at least 30 North Korean soldiers had been killed or injured in combat in Russia’s Kursk region over the weekend.

It said that Moscow began deploying them in the southern region in significant numbers last week to conduct assaults on Ukrainian forces.

Ukraine launched a cross-border incursion into Kursk in August.

Kyiv estimates there are 11,000 North Koreans in total, adding to a force of tens of thousands of Russians.

Russia has neither confirmed nor denied the presence of North Koreans on its side.

Oil and gas to the North 

The Treasury sanctions freeze the U.S. assets of the designated entities, ban their trade with Americans, and block them from transactions with the U.S. financial system.

The Treasury blacklisted Russia-based foreign trade companies that it said were shipping oil and gas to North Korea. The companies include Vostok Trading, DV Ink, and Novosibirskoblgaz. Treasury said they began shipping “thousands of tons of oil and gas” to North Korea beginning in 2022 and continuing through at least April 2024.

North Korea has likely received more than 1 million barrels of oil from Russia over an eight-month period this year in breach of U.N. sanctions, according to an analysis of satellite imagery published in November by the British-based Open Source Centre and the BBC.

North Korean oil tankers have made more than 40 visits to Russia’s Far Eastern port of Vostochny since March, the report on the research group Open Source Centre’s website said.

The sanctions also targeted Sibregiongaz, AO, the Russia-based parent company and 100% owner of Novosibirskoblgaz. They also hit Okryu Trading Company, or Okryu, a North Korea-based foreign trade company that Treasury said has received thousands of tons of oil shipments from Russia.

 
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In a joint appearance Monday morning, President-elect Donald Trump and Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of the Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank Group, announced that the company would invest $100 billion in U.S. companies over the coming four years, saying that the infusion of cash would create 100,000 jobs in fields such as artificial intelligence.

Son attributed the decision to make the investment directly to Trump’s win in last month’s presidential election.

“I would really like to celebrate the great victory of President Trump,” Son said. “My confidence level [in] the economy of the United States has tremendously increased with his victory. So, because of that, I’m now excited to commit this 100 billion dollars and 100,000 jobs into the United States.”

In introducing Son, Trump pointed out that eight years ago, after Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, SoftBank had made a similar pledge, promising $50 billion in U.S. investments and 50,000 new jobs.

“And they did,” Trump said. “They kept that promise in every way, shape and form.”

The president-elect then went on to press Son to double his pledge, saying “I’m going to ask him right now. Would you make it $200 billion?”

Son reiterated his promise of $100 billion, but said he would “try” to get to $200 billion.

“All right. $200 billion,” Trump said.

Son burst into laughter, telling the crowd Trump is “a great negotiator.”

‘Trump effect’

After the announcement Monday, Trump’s rapid response director, Jake Schneider, sent media outlets an email attributing the announcement to what he called the “Trump Effect.”

“President Trump is already delivering on his commitment to re-make America into the world’s manufacturing superpower once again — and he hasn’t even taken office yet,” Schneider wrote. “It’s all centered around his Made in America agenda, which incentivizes companies that make their products in America with American workers.”

He added, “In January, President Trump will immediately begin implementing bold reforms to restore the nation to full prosperity and make sure AI, emerging technologies, and the other industries of tomorrow are created, built, and grown in the United States.”

Hits and misses

Since founding SoftBank in 1981 at age 24, Son has become one of the most storied — and controversial — technology investors in the world. The company has several investment funds and owns significant shares of hundreds of companies across multiple fields, including telecommunication, robotics, internet services, e-commerce, artificial intelligence and much more.

Throughout his decades-long career, Son has made headlines for spectacular victories as well as disastrous failures. For a time, at the beginning of 2000, he claimed to be the world’s richest man, with a fortune worth an estimated $78 billion amassed by buying up internet startups. However, the collapse of the dotcom bubble just months later wiped out more than 90% of his wealth.

Son started rebuilding his business that same year, and a $20 million investment that bought SoftBank a 34% ownership share in a little-known Chinese e-commerce startup known as Alibaba would prove key to his fortunes. In 2014, Alibaba went public at a price that valued SoftBank’s shares at $58 billion, some 2,900 times its initial investment.

Along the way, Son successfully managed to merge mobile telecommunications firms T-Mobile and Sprint, creating one of the largest U.S. service providers in 2020. Just two years later, though, SoftBank suffered disastrous losses with the collapse of the office-sharing startup WeWork, in which it had invested heavily, as well as other failed investments by in-house venture and hedge funds.

At the time, Son announced that he was retiring from public life. However, by 2023, he was back in the headlines when ARM Holdings, a British computer chip design firm that SoftBank bought at a valuation of $30.8 billion in 2016, went public in the U.S. at a valuation of $54.5 billion.

Choosing the West over China

Lionel Barber, the former editor-in-chief of the Financial Times, told VOA that he believes Son’s appearance at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort Monday signals more than just an international investor seeking to get on the good side of an incoming U.S. president.

Barber is the author of Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Masayoshi Son, the first biography of the investor by a Western author, which will be published in the U.S. next month. He said that when Son made his pledge of $50 billion in 2016, he and Trump had clearly aligned interests.

“Trump wanted a big signal about business confidence in the Trump agenda and Masayoshi Son and SoftBank wanted to get in with the new Republican administration with an eye to getting [a] blessing for his big project, which was Sprint merging with T-Mobile,” Barber told VOA by phone.

Now, though, he sees something larger at play.

“Obviously, the world looks very different. Eight years on, we’ve got wars around the world, and we’ve also got de-risking and decoupling between China and the West,” Barber said.

In his last interview with him, Barber told VOA, Son said that he had realized that it was necessary for SoftBank to make a choice between China and the West.

Paraphrasing Son, Barber said, “He basically said, ‘We understand the world’s changed. We’ve been a global investor. We’ve been the biggest investor in China and the biggest investor in America. But now we have to choose. We’ve chosen the West.’”

“So, I see his getting into Mar-a-Lago as [saying], ‘I’ve chosen the West. I’ve chosen America, and I’m going with Trump.’”

Investment details unclear

The announcement at Mar-a-Lago did not include any details about specific investments that SoftBank intends to make, and not all foreign investments touted by Trump over the years have come to pass.

Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn in 2017 promised a $10 billion investment in a manufacturing facility in Wisconsin that was later dramatically scaled back.

Even SoftBank’s 2016 pledge is difficult to consider truly fulfilled unless the more than $20 billion the company poured into Sprint in 2013 — three years before making the pledge — is included in the total.

Barber, Son’s biographer, said he has some doubts about SoftBank’s ability to identify $100 billion in U.S. investments over the course of four years.

“I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I haven’t figured out how he gets to 100 billion, yet,” Barber said.

However, he said, it’s also important not to underestimate Son’s ability to achieve unexpected successes.

“You can’t write him off,” Barber said. “That’s what he does. He’s a bloody genius in that respect.”
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NEW YORK — A judge Monday rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s bid to have his hush money conviction dismissed because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity. But the case’s overall future remains unclear.

Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan’s decision eliminates one potential off-ramp from the case ahead of Trump’s return to office next month. His lawyers have raised other arguments for dismissal, however.

Prosecutors have said there should be some accommodation for his upcoming presidency, but they insist the conviction should stand.

Trump’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A jury convicted Trump in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels in 2016. Trump denies wrongdoing.

The allegations involved a scheme to hide the payout to Daniels during the final days of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to keep her from publicizing — and keep voters from hearing — her claim of a sexual encounter with the married then-businessman years earlier. He says nothing sexual happened between them.

A month after the verdict, the Supreme Court ruled that ex-presidents can’t be prosecuted for official acts — things they did in the course of running the country — and that prosecutors can’t cite those actions to bolster a case centered on purely personal, unofficial conduct.

Trump’s lawyers then cited the Supreme Court opinion to argue that the hush money jury got some improper evidence, such as Trump’s presidential financial disclosure form, testimony from some White House aides and social media posts made while he was in office.

In Monday’s ruling, Merchan denied the bulk of Trump’s claims that some of prosecutors’ evidence related to official acts and implicated immunity protections.

The judge said that even if he found that some evidence related to official conduct, he’d still find that prosecutors’ decision to use “these acts as evidence of the decidedly personal acts of falsifying business records poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch.”

Even if prosecutors had erroneously introduced evidence that could be challenged under an immunity claim, Merchan continued, “such error was harmless in light of the overwhelming evidence of guilt.”

Prosecutors had said the evidence in question was only “a sliver” of their case.

Trump communications director Steven Cheung on Monday called Merchan’s decision a “direct violation of the Supreme Court’s decision on immunity, and other longstanding jurisprudence.”

“This lawless case should have never been brought, and the Constitution demands that it be immediately dismissed,” Cheung said in a statement.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case, declined to comment.

Trump takes office January 20.
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