Washington
Federal judge: Trump must restore grants for school counselors
The Trump administration must release millions of dollars in grants meant to address the shortage of mental health workers in schools, a federal judge ruled Monday.
Congress funded the mental health program after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The grants were intended to help schools hire more counselors, psychologists and social workers, with a focus on rural and underserved areas of the country. But President Donald Trump’s administration opposed diversity considerations used to award the grants and told recipients they wouldn’t receive funding past December 2025.
The preliminary ruling by Kymberly K. Evanson, a U.S. District Court judge in Seattle, applies only to some grantees in the sixteen Democratic-led states that challenged the Education Department’s decision. In Madera County, California, for example, the ruling restores roughly $3.8 million. In Marin County, California, it restores $8 million. The ruling will remain in effect while the case proceeds.
The Education Department under Democratic President Joe Biden first awarded the grants. Biden’s administration prioritized giving the money to applicants who showed how they would increase the number of counselors from diverse backgrounds or from communities directly served by the school district.
When Trump took office, his administration opposed aspects of the grant programs that touched on race, saying they were harmful to students. In April, his administration said the grants were canceled because they conflicted with the department’s priority of “merit, fairness, and excellence in education” and weren’t in the federal government’s best interest.
In her ruling, Evanson called that decision arbitrary and capricious and said the states had made a case for real harm from the grant cuts. In Maine, for example, the grants enabled nine rural school districts to hire 10 new school mental health workers and retain four more — jobs the state said would be lost if the funding ended.
“Congress created these programs to address the states’ need for school-based mental health services in their schools, and has repeatedly reaffirmed the need for those services over the years by reauthorizing and increasing appropriations to these programs,” Evanson wrote.
“There is no evidence the Department considered any relevant data pertaining to the Grants at issue,” she wrote, and the department did not tell grantees why their work didn’t meet the “best interest” criteria.
An Education Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
California
ExxonMobil sues state over climate disclosure laws
Exxon Mobil Corporation is suing the state of California over a pair of 2023 climate disclosure laws that the company says infringe upon its free speech rights, namely by forcing it to embrace the message that large companies are uniquely to blame for climate change.
The oil and gas corporation based in Texas filed its complaint Friday in the U.S. Eastern District Court for California. It asks the court to prevent the laws from going into effect next year.
In its complaint, ExxonMobil says it has for years publicly disclosed its greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related business risks, but it fundamentally disagrees with the state’s new reporting requirements.
The company would have to use “frameworks that place disproportionate blame on large companies like ExxonMobil” for the purpose of shaming such companies, the complaint states.
Under Senate Bill 253, large businesses will have to disclose a wide range of planet-warming emissions, including both direct and indirect emissions such as the costs of employee business travel and product transport.
ExxonMobil takes issue with the methodology required by the state, which would focus on a company’s emissions worldwide and therefore fault businesses just for being large as opposed to being efficient, the complaint states.
The second law, Senate Bill 261, requires companies making more than $500 million annually to disclose the financial risks that climate change poses to their businesses and how they plan to address them.
The company said in its complaint that the law would require it to speculate “about unknowable future developments” and post such speculations on its website.
A spokesperson for the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in an email that it was “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency.”
New York
Trump’s lawyers ask appeals court to toss out his hush money criminal conviction
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked a New York state appeals court to toss out his hush money criminal conviction, saying federal law preempts state law and there was no intent to commit a crime.
The lawyers filed their written arguments with the state’s mid-level appeals court just before midnight Monday.
In June, the lawyers asked a federal appeals court to move the case to federal court, where the Republican president can challenge the conviction on presidential immunity grounds. The appeals court has not yet ruled.
Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denies her claim and said he did nothing wrong. It was the only one of the four criminal cases against him to go to trial.
Trump was sentenced in January to what’s known as an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction on the books but sparing him jail, probation, a fine or other punishment.
Appearing by video at his sentencing, Trump called the case a “political witch hunt,” “a weaponization of government” and “an embarrassment to New York.”
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case, will have a chance to respond to the appeals arguments in court papers. A message seeking comment was left with the office on Tuesday.
At trial, prosecutors said Trump mislabeled payments to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen as legal fees to conceal that he was actually reimbursing the $130,000 that Cohen paid Daniels to keep her quiet in the final weeks of Trump’s successful 2016 presidential run.
At the time, Daniels was considering going public with a claim that she and the married Trump had a 2006 sexual encounter that Trump has consistently denied.
In their arguments to the New York state appeals court, Trump’s lawyers wrote that the prosecution of Trump was “the most politically charged prosecution in our Nation’s history.”
They said Trump was the victim of a Democrat district attorney in Manhattan who “concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory” during a contentious presidential election in which Trump was the leading Republican candidate.
They wrote that federal law preempts the “misdemeanor-turned-felony charges” because the charges rely on an alleged violation of federal campaign regulations that states cannot and have never enforced.
They said the trial was also spoiled when prosecutors introduced official presidential acts that the Supreme Court has made clear cannot be used as evidence against a U.S. president.
“Beyond these fatal flaws, the evidence was clearly insufficient to convict,” the lawyers wrote.
The lawyers also attacked the conviction on the grounds that “pure, evidence-free speculation” was behind the effort by prosecutors to persuade jurors that Trump was thinking about the 2020 election when he allegedly decided to reimburse Cohen.
New York
Fashion designer Kenneth Cole’s brother claims vindication after criminal charges dismissed
NEW YORK (AP) — The brother of designer Kenneth Cole says he was vindicated on Monday by a federal appeals court’s decision to overturn his criminal fraud conviction.
Neil Cole said he’s been fighting over a decade to clear his name after federal authorities claimed that he committed securities fraud while running Iconix Brand Group Inc., the company he founded that partnered with some big names in the entertainment world, including Madonna, Jay-Z and Pharrell Williams.
“It’s wonderful,” Cole said in a telephone interview about the written decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan.
Cole said one of the first people he spoke with after the appeals court ruled was New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, whose sister is married to Kenneth Cole.
“I was really hoping to work with Andrew on the mayoral campaign,” Cole said, though he kept his distance from the former governor, a Democrat, before the appeals court tossed his conviction.
Cole described what the government had put him through and the pressure on his friends over the last 11 years as “really horrible.”
“I lost so many friends. It was kind of me also just pulling back. I got divorced,” he said. “Everyone was basically uncomfortable talking to me.”
But he said his world was already brightening, with 100 text messages sent his way, many from “people I haven’t heard from in years.”
He said he expected to announce within weeks plans to start a new business that might be a variation of the kind of company he started before.
“I kind of see a new way to do it,” he said.
Cole said he wasn’t surprised by the legal outcome because all three judges on the appeals panel seemed to agree that the government was wrong when they heard oral arguments earlier this year.
The 2nd Circuit agreed with Cole that his 2021 exoneration on a conspiracy charge meant his 2022 conviction on related charges had to be tossed out on double jeopardy grounds. The Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy provision bans being tried twice for the same crime.
“The record shows the second trial to have been largely a repeat of the first,” the appeals court wrote, saying the government again sought to prove that Cole engaged in an illicit scheme in which he inflated and falsely reported Iconix’s revenue.
Cole did not have to serve any of an 18-month prison sentence because it was suspended during his appeal. He had also been ordered to forfeit $790,200.
Iconix Brand, founded in 2005, was once a high-flying company valued at over $3 billion and had established itself as the second-largest U.S. licensing company behind Walt Disney Co. before the Securities and Exchange Commission and later federal prosecutors went after it.
The share price of Iconix collapsed from $40 per share to less than a dollar. It was sold in 2021 to a private equity firm for $585 million.
A message sent to the U.S. Justice Department for comment was not immediately returned.
Federal judge: Trump must restore grants for school counselors
The Trump administration must release millions of dollars in grants meant to address the shortage of mental health workers in schools, a federal judge ruled Monday.
Congress funded the mental health program after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The grants were intended to help schools hire more counselors, psychologists and social workers, with a focus on rural and underserved areas of the country. But President Donald Trump’s administration opposed diversity considerations used to award the grants and told recipients they wouldn’t receive funding past December 2025.
The preliminary ruling by Kymberly K. Evanson, a U.S. District Court judge in Seattle, applies only to some grantees in the sixteen Democratic-led states that challenged the Education Department’s decision. In Madera County, California, for example, the ruling restores roughly $3.8 million. In Marin County, California, it restores $8 million. The ruling will remain in effect while the case proceeds.
The Education Department under Democratic President Joe Biden first awarded the grants. Biden’s administration prioritized giving the money to applicants who showed how they would increase the number of counselors from diverse backgrounds or from communities directly served by the school district.
When Trump took office, his administration opposed aspects of the grant programs that touched on race, saying they were harmful to students. In April, his administration said the grants were canceled because they conflicted with the department’s priority of “merit, fairness, and excellence in education” and weren’t in the federal government’s best interest.
In her ruling, Evanson called that decision arbitrary and capricious and said the states had made a case for real harm from the grant cuts. In Maine, for example, the grants enabled nine rural school districts to hire 10 new school mental health workers and retain four more — jobs the state said would be lost if the funding ended.
“Congress created these programs to address the states’ need for school-based mental health services in their schools, and has repeatedly reaffirmed the need for those services over the years by reauthorizing and increasing appropriations to these programs,” Evanson wrote.
“There is no evidence the Department considered any relevant data pertaining to the Grants at issue,” she wrote, and the department did not tell grantees why their work didn’t meet the “best interest” criteria.
An Education Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
California
ExxonMobil sues state over climate disclosure laws
Exxon Mobil Corporation is suing the state of California over a pair of 2023 climate disclosure laws that the company says infringe upon its free speech rights, namely by forcing it to embrace the message that large companies are uniquely to blame for climate change.
The oil and gas corporation based in Texas filed its complaint Friday in the U.S. Eastern District Court for California. It asks the court to prevent the laws from going into effect next year.
In its complaint, ExxonMobil says it has for years publicly disclosed its greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related business risks, but it fundamentally disagrees with the state’s new reporting requirements.
The company would have to use “frameworks that place disproportionate blame on large companies like ExxonMobil” for the purpose of shaming such companies, the complaint states.
Under Senate Bill 253, large businesses will have to disclose a wide range of planet-warming emissions, including both direct and indirect emissions such as the costs of employee business travel and product transport.
ExxonMobil takes issue with the methodology required by the state, which would focus on a company’s emissions worldwide and therefore fault businesses just for being large as opposed to being efficient, the complaint states.
The second law, Senate Bill 261, requires companies making more than $500 million annually to disclose the financial risks that climate change poses to their businesses and how they plan to address them.
The company said in its complaint that the law would require it to speculate “about unknowable future developments” and post such speculations on its website.
A spokesperson for the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in an email that it was “truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency.”
New York
Trump’s lawyers ask appeals court to toss out his hush money criminal conviction
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked a New York state appeals court to toss out his hush money criminal conviction, saying federal law preempts state law and there was no intent to commit a crime.
The lawyers filed their written arguments with the state’s mid-level appeals court just before midnight Monday.
In June, the lawyers asked a federal appeals court to move the case to federal court, where the Republican president can challenge the conviction on presidential immunity grounds. The appeals court has not yet ruled.
Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denies her claim and said he did nothing wrong. It was the only one of the four criminal cases against him to go to trial.
Trump was sentenced in January to what’s known as an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction on the books but sparing him jail, probation, a fine or other punishment.
Appearing by video at his sentencing, Trump called the case a “political witch hunt,” “a weaponization of government” and “an embarrassment to New York.”
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case, will have a chance to respond to the appeals arguments in court papers. A message seeking comment was left with the office on Tuesday.
At trial, prosecutors said Trump mislabeled payments to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen as legal fees to conceal that he was actually reimbursing the $130,000 that Cohen paid Daniels to keep her quiet in the final weeks of Trump’s successful 2016 presidential run.
At the time, Daniels was considering going public with a claim that she and the married Trump had a 2006 sexual encounter that Trump has consistently denied.
In their arguments to the New York state appeals court, Trump’s lawyers wrote that the prosecution of Trump was “the most politically charged prosecution in our Nation’s history.”
They said Trump was the victim of a Democrat district attorney in Manhattan who “concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory” during a contentious presidential election in which Trump was the leading Republican candidate.
They wrote that federal law preempts the “misdemeanor-turned-felony charges” because the charges rely on an alleged violation of federal campaign regulations that states cannot and have never enforced.
They said the trial was also spoiled when prosecutors introduced official presidential acts that the Supreme Court has made clear cannot be used as evidence against a U.S. president.
“Beyond these fatal flaws, the evidence was clearly insufficient to convict,” the lawyers wrote.
The lawyers also attacked the conviction on the grounds that “pure, evidence-free speculation” was behind the effort by prosecutors to persuade jurors that Trump was thinking about the 2020 election when he allegedly decided to reimburse Cohen.
New York
Fashion designer Kenneth Cole’s brother claims vindication after criminal charges dismissed
NEW YORK (AP) — The brother of designer Kenneth Cole says he was vindicated on Monday by a federal appeals court’s decision to overturn his criminal fraud conviction.
Neil Cole said he’s been fighting over a decade to clear his name after federal authorities claimed that he committed securities fraud while running Iconix Brand Group Inc., the company he founded that partnered with some big names in the entertainment world, including Madonna, Jay-Z and Pharrell Williams.
“It’s wonderful,” Cole said in a telephone interview about the written decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan.
Cole said one of the first people he spoke with after the appeals court ruled was New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, whose sister is married to Kenneth Cole.
“I was really hoping to work with Andrew on the mayoral campaign,” Cole said, though he kept his distance from the former governor, a Democrat, before the appeals court tossed his conviction.
Cole described what the government had put him through and the pressure on his friends over the last 11 years as “really horrible.”
“I lost so many friends. It was kind of me also just pulling back. I got divorced,” he said. “Everyone was basically uncomfortable talking to me.”
But he said his world was already brightening, with 100 text messages sent his way, many from “people I haven’t heard from in years.”
He said he expected to announce within weeks plans to start a new business that might be a variation of the kind of company he started before.
“I kind of see a new way to do it,” he said.
Cole said he wasn’t surprised by the legal outcome because all three judges on the appeals panel seemed to agree that the government was wrong when they heard oral arguments earlier this year.
The 2nd Circuit agreed with Cole that his 2021 exoneration on a conspiracy charge meant his 2022 conviction on related charges had to be tossed out on double jeopardy grounds. The Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy provision bans being tried twice for the same crime.
“The record shows the second trial to have been largely a repeat of the first,” the appeals court wrote, saying the government again sought to prove that Cole engaged in an illicit scheme in which he inflated and falsely reported Iconix’s revenue.
Cole did not have to serve any of an 18-month prison sentence because it was suspended during his appeal. He had also been ordered to forfeit $790,200.
Iconix Brand, founded in 2005, was once a high-flying company valued at over $3 billion and had established itself as the second-largest U.S. licensing company behind Walt Disney Co. before the Securities and Exchange Commission and later federal prosecutors went after it.
The share price of Iconix collapsed from $40 per share to less than a dollar. It was sold in 2021 to a private equity firm for $585 million.
A message sent to the U.S. Justice Department for comment was not immediately returned.
