Month: March 2024

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday morning that Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley is ending her campaign, ceding the nomination to Donald Trump and setting up a rematch of the 2020 election against President Joe Biden.

The move comes after Haley’s disappointing results in Super Tuesday’s primary contests, after former President Donald Trump won across nearly all the states holding Republican nominating contests. Haley was victorious in Vermont’s Republican primary, just her second win of the primary season.  Trump is on track to reach the necessary 1,215 delegates to clinch the Republican nomination.

Sources close to Haley say she will officially announce to the press she’s ending her campaign in remarks at 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning in Charleston, in her home state of South Carolina.. She is not expected to announce an endorsement Wednesday.

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Meta restored access to Facebook and Instagram early Tuesday afternoon after more than half a million users reported widespread issues beginning @10 a.m. ET, with many saying they were booted out of the social media platforms and unable to log back in. WhatsApp, another Meta product, seemed to be largely unaffected by the outage, while users of Threads reported a lesser degrees of users issues. There were also reports that some Meta Quest headset users were also experiencing issues logging in.

NetBlocks, a global internet monitor, posted on X : “Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads are currently experiencing outages related to login sessions in multiple countries; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”

A Meta Spokesman said in a statement on Tuesday: “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” The specific cause of the outage is not publicly known, though Meta said it was a “technical issue.”

According to crowdsourced data collected by DownDetector (a site that monitors internet service outages) more than 500,000 reports of problems by U.S. Facebook users and more than 70,000 reported problems with Instagram as of about 10:30 a.m. ET. The most frequently reported problems were with logging into the Facebook app and issues with the Instagram app.  Facebook Messenger also received thousands of reports, according to Downdetector. Some users on social media expressed concern that their accounts had been hacked because they had been booted out of the service and were unable to get back in with their passwords.

The outage occurred the same day as Super Tuesday, when voters in 15 states and one territory are set to head to the polls for GOP primary contests.

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On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of former President Donald Trump in a historic case challenging his eligibility to seek the Republican presidential nomination under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment due to his actions around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The High Court reversed the unprecedented decision by the Colorado Supreme Court that would remove Trump from the ballot under the provision after a state trial court found he participated in “insurrection” on Jan. 6 through incitement. The majority opinion is that the role of disqualifying a presidential candidate belongs to Congress:  “Permitting state enforcement of Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates would raise serious questions about the scope of that power,” it stated.

The unsigned Supreme Court opinion read: “For the reasons given, responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States.  The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand. All nine Members of the Court agree with that result.”

In holding that only Congress had the power to enforce the provisions under Section 5 of the amendment, the court said its decision would apply to federal offices nationwide: “This case raises the question whether the States, in addition to Congress, may also enforce Section 3. We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.”

The decision came one day before voters in Colorado go to the polls on Super Tuesday, where Trump is on the GOP primary ballot. The decision also ensures that Trump will remain on the ballot as Republican presidential nominee in all 50 states.  Trump quickly celebrated the ruling, writing on his social media platform it was a “BIG WIN” for the country.

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Former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg has pleaded guilty to two counts of perjury Monday in connection with testimony he gave during former President Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial.

The charges accuse Weisselberg of committing perjury in a deposition as well as in testimony in Trump’s civil fraud trial. Bragg’s office alleged Weisselberg lied in July of 2020 in claiming he only learned Trump’s triplex apartment had been dramatically overvalued after Forbes published an article detailing the issue, when in fact he had known about the overvaluation before then.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg recommended Weisselberg, 76, be sentenced to five months in jail after entering the plea, and agreed to his release before sentencing, scheduled for April 10. Bragg’s office also said that as part of the plea, Weisselberg admitted that he committed conduct underlying other instances of perjury.

In a statement Monday, a spokesperson for the district attorney said, “It is a crime to lie in depositions and at trial — plain and simple. Allen Weisselberg took an oath to be truthful, and then committed perjury both at depositions during the New York State Attorney General’s Investigation and Proceeding, as well as at their recent trial  Today, Allen Weisselberg is pleading guilty to this felony and being held responsible for his conduct.”

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung slammed Bragg in response to Weisselberg’s plea, alleging the Manhattan district attorney “committed repeated prosecutorial misconduct in his illegal, desperate pursuit of Mr. Trump that violated federal and state constitutions and Bragg’s ethical obligations.”  Cheung added that Bragg “has been on a crusade of vindictive and oppressive pressure leading, today, to a forced plea by Allen H. Weisselberg. These are corrupt, election interference persecution tactics ripped from the playbook of Joseph Stalin, which cannot be allowed in America.”

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