Politics
Long before he took on Trump, Adam Schiff's pursuit of tough justice defined his career
When Rep. Adam B. Schiff stood before the U.S. Senate on the final day of President Trump’s first impeachment trial, he reprised a familiar role: prosecutor.
The former assistant U.S. attorney hadn’t tried a case in more than a decade, but he was surprised how quickly the muscle memory came back. Wearing a crisp blue suit, the Burbank Democrat launched into a lacerating closing argument, trying to convince senators that Trump lacked the integrity, morality and temperament to remain in the White House.
“He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again,” Schiff said. “You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less. And decency matters not at all.”
The Senate ultimately voted to acquit Trump. But Schiff’s leading role in the historic proceeding has become etched in the nation’s political psyche, lionizing him among fellow Democrats, demonizing him among Republicans and seeding his 2024 campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Schiff, a federal prosecutor, campaigned in the 1990s as a law-and-order Democrat, eventually winning a seat in the state Senate.
(David Bohrer / For The Times)
The roots of Schiff’s tough-on-Trump persona go back to the 1990s, when the former federal prosecutor won a seat in the California Legislature as a law enforcement Democrat. In his earliest days in Sacramento, he pushed to increase some penalties, including for young offenders — an approach to criminal justice that is anathema to many progressives today.
Though the pursuit of justice has always been a driving force for Schiff, his attitude toward how justice should be applied, and to whom, has changed. In Congress, he has worked on gun control, police misconduct and investigations into Russia’s support for Trump’s 2016 campaign and into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
His time as a federal prosecutor, the 63-year-old Schiff said this week, taught him “the importance of upholding the rule of law.”
“That’s been a core conviction for me,” he told The Times in a phone interview. “And that training came in much more handy than I would have ever imagined during the era of Trump.”
After the 1993 murder of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old from Petaluma who was kidnapped by a man with a long criminal history, California enacted harsher sentencing requirements. In 1994, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson signed the so-called three-strikes law, which doubled the normal sentence for an offender’s second felony conviction and raised the penalty for a third conviction to 25 years to life. More than 70% of California voters supported the three-strikes law at the ballot box that fall.
Back then, Schiff was working as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles. He handled several high-profile cases, including the third trial of Richard Miller, a former FBI agent who was convicted of passing classified documents to the Soviet Union.
Schiff talks with members of Long Beach Firefighters Assn. Local 372 in Signal Hill last weekend.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
The experience taught Schiff how to conduct a complicated investigation into a white-collar crime. In a not-too-subtle jab at Trump, Schiff said he also learned the ways of Russian tradecraft, including “how they target people who are of poor moral character, who are philanderers, who are obsessed with money.”
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During his race for the state Senate in 1996, Schiff fought his well-funded Republican opponent’s attempts to paint him as soft on crime. He campaigned on his support for the three-strikes law and the death penalty. His election was a victory for California Democrats, who increased their majority in the Legislature, as well as a personal victory: Schiff had run for office, and lost, three times before.
He arrived in Sacramento in 1997 as the youngest member of the Senate — determined, he said, to deter crime rather than just prosecute crimes that had already been committed.
Nearly 40% of the 142 bills Schiff introduced during his four-year term were related to policing, criminal procedure and public safety, including efforts to stiffen penalties for some offenses by children, to build and renovate juvenile halls, and to expand crime-prevention services for at-risk teenagers, a review of his legislative history shows.
Schiff in 1999, two years after joining the state Senate with the aim of deterring rather than just prosecuting crimes.
(Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)
“Like many Democrats, including President Biden, we wouldn’t strike the same balance today,” Schiff said. “My priority then, and my priority now, has always been to keep Californians safe and keep our communities safe. … Some of the sentencing policies of the ’90s didn’t do much to reduce crime, but they did a lot to increase incarceration. I don’t think that’s the right balance.”
Schiff’s long legislative history is both an advantage and a liability as he vies for an open U.S. Senate seat following the death of Dianne Feinstein. His evolution on criminal justice issues hews with the leftward swing of California Democrats, who have signaled through statewide ballot initiatives and the election of progressive prosecutors that the state’s “tough on crime” era is over.
But after decades of public opinion steadily shifting away from the policies of the ’90s, the pendulum “seems to be swinging slightly back,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican strategist who teaches political communication at USC and UC Berkeley. He pointed to recent debates over changes to Proposition 47, the 10-year-old law that reduced some felonies to misdemeanors — discussions that he said “would not have taken place several years ago.”
If the Senate race had occurred in 2020, amid the nationwide upheaval and demands for criminal justice reform that followed the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, Schiff’s background as a prosecutor and a self-described law enforcement Democrat “might end up being much bigger issues,” Schnur said.
Progressive criminal justice advocates have accused Schiff of pushing policies that were overly punitive, even by the standards of the ’90s.
In early 2021, Schiff supporters began floating his name as a possibility for California attorney general after then-Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra was tapped to become Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services. When criminal justice activists caught wind of the effort, they sent a searing open letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom decrying Schiff’s track record and describing him as “not only supportive of, but deeply invested in, creating our current system of incarceration.” Newsom instead picked state Assemblymember Rob Bonta, an advocate for abolishing the death penalty and eliminating cash bail.
Schiff speaks with community activists in August as he tours Inland Empire neighborhoods affected by giant warehouses.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
But Schiff was far from being out of step with his party, said former San Fernando Valley lawmaker Bob Hertzberg, who chaired the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee at the time. He said Schiff was “middle of the road” among the Democrats of the late ’90s.
“Everybody was doing tough-on-crime stuff. It was a different world,” Hertzberg said. Their constituents were worried about surging crime, fueled in part by the crack cocaine epidemic. In the early ’90s, the city of Los Angeles alone saw more than 1,000 homicides a year.
Some of Schiff’s earliest and most punitive bills didn’t become law, including one that sought to try children as young as 14 as adults in criminal court in murder and rape cases. Nor did a bill that would have required that children who committed serious offenses at school be sent to juvenile detention or military-run “boot camps.”
“He wasn’t just a bystander in the ’90s, getting swept along in the punitive approach to public safety,” said USC law professor Jody Armour. “He was really at the vanguard — one of the leading voices in promoting those kinds of policies.”
Schiff also introduced bills to clarify and expand the state’s three-strikes policy and lift the five-year limit on sentencing enhancements for nonviolent crimes, opening the door to longer prison sentences. Both became law.
In 2000, Schiff’s last year in Sacramento, Democratic Gov. Gray Davis signedthe Schiff-Cárdenas Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act. The bill, which set aside $121.3 million annually for local policing and another $121.3 million for programs aimed at curbing youth crime and delinquency, was believed to be the country’s largest source of funding at the time for youth crime prevention and intervention.
Democrats in Sacramento had decided that juvenile justice reform was “an area where the voters would be with us,” even if the state didn’t support overhauling the three-strikes law, said then-Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa. Efforts to pay for anything other than incarceration were “progressive stuff,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Tony Cárdenas, then a member of the state Assembly representing the San Fernando Valley, said that when he backed juvenile justice reform, some of his colleagues ribbed him for supporting what they called “hug-a-thug” programs. Cárdenas, who has endorsed Schiff in the Senate race, said he wanted Schiff to co-sponsor the bill because his background as a prosecutor would help deflect criticisms that alternatives to incarceration were soft on crime.
Counties used the funding for gang-intervention efforts, drug counseling, mental health screenings and a wide array of other services, including after-school and nonprofit programs. Studies later found that children in those programs were less likely to be arrested or incarcerated and more likely to complete any court-ordered community service.
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As lead manager in former President Trump’s first impeachment trial, Schiff urged senators to convict Trump, saying he “has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again.”
(Senate Television via AP)
Since he arrived in Washington in 2001, after what was then the most expensive House race in history, Schiff has mostly left behind courtroom issues in favor of bills focused on broader law enforcement and criminal justice policies, including police accountability.
In 2011, he pushed the FBI to widen its use of familial DNA — in which investigators trying to identify crime suspects through their genetic material search for potential relatives in government databases. And after a national scandal erupted over a years-long backlog of more than 13,000 rape kits at the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Schiff secured funding to help process them.
As grainy cellphone videos of police shootings began to appear, shocking “the conscience of the country,” Schiff said, he became convinced that the U.S. needed police reform. After Michael Brown was shot to death by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer in 2014, Schiff led members of Congress in pushing for a federal grant program to equip police departments with body-worn cameras.
In the summer of 2020, amid the mass protests calling for criminal justice reform after Floyd was killed by police, Schiff made the rare move of withdrawing his endorsement of then-L.A. County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey in her contentious reelection fight against progressive challenger George Gascón. Since his election, Gascón has faced two failed recall attempts. Schiff has not endorsed Gascón’s bid for reelection.
Schiff voted for bills that would have decriminalized marijuana nationally and ended the federal sentencing disparity between drug offenses involving crack and powder cocaine. He was also one of 190 original co-sponsors of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would ban no-knock warrants in federal drug cases and create a national database of complaints and records of police misconduct.
Schiff’s view on the death penalty is among his biggest changes since his days as a federal prosecutor. He said he wrestled with the issue for years and no longer supports capital punishment.
“There was certainly a time when I supported the death penalty for those who killed cops and those who killed kids,” Schiff said this week. But over time, he said, he “came to lose confidence” in how the law was applied, in part because DNA evidence showed that “too many people on death row were innocent,” and because executions disproportionately affected people of color.
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Those difficult issues, however, were not what launched Schiff into national prominence.
Schiff, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, earned both admiration and animosity for his role in Trump’s first impeachment.
(Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
After Democrats took back the House in 2018, he became chairman of the Intelligence Committee. He developed a national profile through his clashes with Trump and regular appearances on cable news shows.
Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Schiff as lead manager of Trump’s first impeachment trial. Democrats had accused Trump of abusing his office when he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden and his son Hunter while Trump was withholding crucial military aid. A second article of impeachment accused Trump of obstructing Congress’ investigation into the alleged scheme by refusing to release subpoenaed documents or to allow current and former aides to testify.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), who worked as an impeachment manager alongside Schiff, said he was thorough and professional, and had a “tremendous command of the facts.” Trump’s animosity and the death threats that the team received, she said, “steeled [Schiff] to stand up for the truth.”
Not visible during the televised hearings, Lofgren said, was that Schiff was in excruciating pain due to a dental emergency. Schiff said he alternated between Tylenol and Advil every four hours until he could make it to the dentist for a root canal the weekend before closing arguments. At one point, he recalled, fellow impeachment manager Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) gave him a pep talk: “Hey, this is like an NBA championship. You got to play through the pain.”
Republicans reclaimed the House majority in 2020, and in 2023 removed Schiff from the Intelligence Committee.
He had said publicly that there was “significant” and “compelling” evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin in the 2016 election.
Robert S. Mueller III, the Justice Department’s special counsel in that case, found that Russia had intervened on the Trump campaign’s behalf, and that the campaign had welcomed the help. But Mueller did not recommend that the Justice Department charge any Americans.
Reporters question Schiff in June about Republicans’ move to censure him. “I wear this partisan vote as a badge of honor,” he said after the resolution passed on a party-line vote.
(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)
Last year, the GOP-led House voted to censure Schiff, approving a resolution that said he had “misled the American people and brought disrepute upon the House of Representatives.” As then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy read out the vote count — 213 to 209, along party lines — Democrats crowded the House floor, chanting: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
Republicans continue to accuse Schiff of being unfit to hold public office. During Senate candidates’ first debate last month, GOP hopeful Steve Garvey told Schiff: “Sir, you lied to 300 million people. You can’t take that back.”
But to Schiff, the censure is proof of a job done right.
After its passage, he rose before his colleagues and said:
“Today, I wear this partisan vote as a badge of honor, knowing that I have lived my oath, knowing that I have done my duty to hold a dangerous and out-of-control president accountable, and knowing that I would do so again, in a heartbeat, if the circumstances should ever require it.”
Anthropic teamed up with California to get more state workers to use its artificial intelligence assistant Claude as part of an effort to leverage technology to make the government more efficient.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who announced the partnership on Monday, said state agencies will be able to access Claude at a 50% discount. Free training and other assistance will also be available to the workers. California’s local governments will also get the same discount under the agreement.
Government workers can use Claude to draft and summarize documents, analyze information and do other tasks.
Anthropic, an AI company based in San Francisco, has a version of its AI assistant for government clients that provides more security than what it provides other consumers.
The new partnership shows how AI is playing a bigger role at work as tech companies market their tools as ways to complete tasks more quickly. Last year, San Francisco made Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, which is powered by OpenAI’s model, available to nearly 30,000 city employees.
Still, the rise of automation at work has heightened concerns that people will lose their jobs. There are also worries that there are not yet adequate guardrails in place to mitigate data privacy and security risks.
Anthropic and the governor said that they’re focused on the responsible use of AI.
“AI should not replace the human work of government; it should help our workers move faster, solve problems more effectively, and deliver better results for Californians,” Newsom said in a statement.
The remarks didn’t appear to comfort union leaders.
“Wow. Look local government, the Gov is giving you a 50% off coupon to give up your residents’ private data, outsource your jobs to big tech. Isn’t that cool? Because California basically invented AI slop!” said Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO, in a post on X.
Anthropic has faced political hurdles as it pushes to get more companies and government agencies to use its products.
Most notable, it’s sparred publicly with the Trump administration, which ordered the company to cut off foreign access to its most powerful AI systems this month.
The Trump administration cited potential national security risks, but Anthropic disagreed with the findings. Last week, tensions decreased after the U.S. government gave Anthropic permission to restore access to its AI model Mythos to certain clients.
Valued at nearly $1 trillion, Anthropic has also signaled it plans to become a publicly traded company.
California has already started using Claude more in state government to develop tools to get the public to engage more in AI policy discussions and assist state workers, the governor’s office said in its news release.
State agencies, including the Department of Motor Vehicles, are also using AI to reduce wait times and improve customer service.
“As state employees, our goal is to provide our fellow Californians with the best possible service,” Government Operations Agency Secretary Nick Maduros said in a statement. “To do that, we need to make sure our teams have access to the best modern tools, including Claude and other emerging technologies.”
Politics
DOJ launches grand jury probe into Marxist mogul Neville Roy Singham’s funding of leftist groups
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FIRST ON FOX: A federal grand jury is investigating alleged financial crimes by Neville Roy Singham, the China-based tech tycoon whose fortune has funded a sprawling network of socialist, communist and Marxist organizations across the U.S. over the last decade.
According to sources familiar with the matter, the grand jury in Manhattan has issued subpoenas as part of a probe launched by U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York, one of the country’s most powerful districts for federal prosecutions. Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche authorized the investigation as the Trump administration seeks to crack down on fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes in the multibillion-dollar nonprofit industry.
The grand jury action follows a Fox News Digital investigation published in mid-March, documenting how Singham pumped $285 million from his base in Shanghai into a Goldman Sachs philanthropy fund and two shell corporations that then fed the money into a constellation of nonprofit organizations, media operations and activist groups pushing sectarian division, identity politics and support for socialist politicians.
The investigation is examining the movement of the money in Singham’s financial network and attempting to determine if Singham, the organizations he funded or their leaders committed wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering or other financial crimes, according to sources familiar with the matter.
HOUSE OF SINGHAM: READ FOX NEWS DIGITAL’S 5-PART INVESTIGATION
On Feb. 14, 2018, Jodie Evans, co-founder founder of CodePink, and Neville Roy Singham, founder of Thoughtworks, attend V20: The Red Party, a 20th anniversary celebration of V-Day and The Vagina Monologues, featuring a performance by playwright Eve Ensler and an after-party at Carnegie Hall in New York City. (Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images)
Prosecutors have presented evidence to the grand jury, which has issued subpoenas seeking bank records and other financial documents from organizations in Singham’s network. Federal prosecutors use grand jury subpoenas as an investigative tool to compel the production of documents and testimony as they determine whether sufficient evidence exists to pursue criminal charges.
Nicholas Biase, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, declined to comment.
Showdown with Goldman Sachs
According to sources, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent traveled to New York City earlier this year for a meeting with Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon. The men discussed the role of a Goldman Sachs philanthropic arm — GS Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund For Wealth Management Inc. — that facilitated the movement by Singham of millions of dollars into a network of U.S. nonprofits.
A Treasury Department spokesman declined to comment. A person familiar with the meeting confirmed that it occurred, saying that Bessent has regular meetings with business leaders, and declined to comment further on the substance of the meeting.
At that meeting, sources said, Bessent delivered a blunt ultimatum: Goldman Sachs could face scrutiny for alleged conspiracy in the funneling of the Singham money and urged Solomon to cooperate with federal investigators.
Like many U.S. companies, Goldman Sachs has had a long business relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, with Solomon participating in a meeting, for example, on Nov. 4, 2025, with He Lifeng, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and director of the Office of the Central Commission for Financial and Economic Affairs.
Solomon pledged his cooperation, according to sources.
WALL STREET BANKS HELPED CHINESE MILITARY-LINKED FIRM RAISE BILLIONS DESPITE RED FLAGS, LAWMAKERS FIND
By mid-May, with the Southern District of New York investigation in full throttle, Solomon joined a delegation of powerful American business leaders who accompanied President Donald Trump, Bessent and other administration officials to China to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.
On Nov. 4, 2025, He Lifeng, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and director of the Office of the Central Commission for Financial and Economic Affairs, meets in Beijing with David Solomon, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs Group. (Cai Yang/Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images)
In a five-part investigative series published earlier this year, Fox News Digital unearthed a four-minute-13-second speech in which Singham stood on a stage at the Golden Tulip Hotel on Nov. 13, 2025, for a conference of the “Global South Academic Forum,” coincidentally just days after the Goldman Sachs’ chief was in Beijing. Tricontinental Ltd., a Singham-funded nonprofit, co-sponsored the event with academic institutions administered by the Chinese Communist Party.
On stage, Singham openly supported a “new world order” promoted by Chinese President Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. During the speech, he called the United States a “fascist” nation, echoing the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party now also parroted on the streets by communist, socialist and Democratic Party activists.
WATCH THE NOVEMBER 2025 SINGHAM SPEECH:
The series revealed a 172-page report in which Singham outlined his theory of change, invoking 20th century Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong’s battle plan to wage a “people’s war” to spread communism. Mao was inspired by communist leaders Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
LAWMAKERS RAISE ALARM OVER NEVILLE ROY SINGHAM’S $278M NETWORK SPREADING CCP PROPAGANDA IN THE U.S.
Singham’s rise as a global political financier accelerated after his February 2017 marriage to Jodie Evans, the co-founder of Code Pink, a far-left activist group that has aligned itself with authoritarian regimes including the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Communist Party of Cuba and the Chinese Communist Party. According to sources, Evans is also a target of the investigation, emerging as a board member in the U.S. on many of the organizations that Singham funded.
That same year, Singham sold his company, ThoughtWorks, for an estimated $785 million to a London-based private equity firm, Apax Partners. A spokeswoman for Apax Partners said the company wouldn’t disclose the names of the investors who pumped money into that sale, but sources told Fox News Digital that federal investigators are looking for potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
After that sale, Fox News Digital found, Singham began directing large sums of money into a network of organizations that now form part of a broader activist infrastructure in the United States and abroad.
In its investigation, Fox News Digital mapped 223 transactions from 2017 through 2025 that moved $591 million across five continents through 67 core groups in the Singham network. They partner with hundreds of groups worldwide, resulting in a network of about 2,000 groups, amplifying anti-U.S., pro-China messages.
Of that money, Fox News Digital established a documented $278 million flowed directly from Singham into organizations that “sow discord” in the U.S., as House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith put it earlier this year at a hearing a dynamics called “foreign malign influence.”
Following the Money
In money-laundering investigations, prosecutors typically examine three stages of alleged impropriety called “placement,” “layering” and “integration.” Placement refers to the introduction of funds into the financial system. Layering involves moving money through multiple entities or transactions to allegedly obscure its origin. Integration is the point at which the money reemerges as apparently legitimate funding, grants, payments or organizational support.
Step 1: Alleged Placement
Singham allegedly funneled $278 million from Shanghai into the United States through three key channels — the philanthropic arm of Goldman Sachs and two shell corporations that have since gone defunct.
- $164,040,000 to Mutod LLC, a now-defunct shell corporation established in 2017, based in Chicago.
- $110,376,701 to GS Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund For Wealth Management Inc., a philanthropy arm of Goldman Sachs, based in New York City.
- $3,500,000 to Likewise Conceptions LLC, a now-defunct shell corporation established in 2017, based in Crystal Lake, Ill.
Step. 2: Alleged Layering
The three entities then pumped the $278 million into six nonprofits:
- $167,540,000 to People’s Support Foundation Ltd., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established with a hotel address in 2017 in Chicago and Singham’s wife, Evans, on the board.
- $68,748,701 to Justice and Education Fund Inc., a 501(c)(3) established with a UPS Store address in 2018 in New York City with self-avowed communists, including Manola De Los Santos, on the board.
- $22,440,000 to People’s Forum Inc., a 501(c)(3) established in 2017 on W. 37th Street in New York City with Evans and De Los Santos on the board.
- $16,760,000 to Tricontinental Ltd., a 501(c)(3) established in North Hampton, Mass., in 2017 by Singham friend and fellow Marxist ideologue Vijay Prashad.
- $1,330,000 to CodePink Women For Peace, a 501(c)(3) established in 2009 in Marina Del Ray, Calif., by Singham’s wife, Evans, and her friend, Susan Medea Benjamin.
- $1,098,000 to Breakthrough BT Media Inc., a 501(c)(3) established in New York City in 2020 at the People’s Forum headquarters with longtime American communist leader Brian Becker’s son, Ben Becker, as editor-in-chief of its pro-communist propaganda outlet, Breakthrough News.
Step 3: Alleged Integration
The six nonprofits then funneled at least $223 million and other forms of support into a global network of organizations including:
- People’s Welfare Association, a 501(c)(4) established in 2019 with the address of a UPS store in Madison, Wisc., today reporting about $12 million in revenues transformed into grants to undisclosed groups around the world.
- Countless unidentified organizations in six regions around the world, including Subsaharan Africa, Central America and even North America, receiving tens of millions of dollars.
- The ANSWER Coalition, a communist organization whose Chicago address has been listed as the location of the Green Mill Restaurant, a regular haunt for 20th century gangster Al Capone, whom federal prosecutor Elliott Ness prosecuted and convicted for tax evasion.
- The Party for Socialism and Liberation, a loosely-structured organization with shared leadership from the House of Singham, like the Becker father-son duo.
FLASHBACK: INSIDE THE POLITICAL MOVEMENT THAT PUT A SOCIALIST IN CHARGE OF NEW YORK CITY
Socialist New York congressional nominees Darializa Avila Chevalier (L), Claire Valdez (C) and Brad Lander. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images; Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Singham and Evans haven’t responded to repeated requests for comment from Fox News Digital. In January, Becker and De Los Santos refused to respond to questions by Fox News Digital outside the People’s Forum headquarters. Benjamin refused to respond to questions during a protest in May.
The ANSWER Coalition, Breakthrough BT Media Inc., CodePink Women for Peace, Justice and Education Fund Inc., Party for Socialism and Liberation, People’s Forum Inc., People’s Welfare Association and Tricontinental Ltd. also haven’t responded to repeated requests for comment. Representatives for Mutod Ltd. and Likewise Conceptions LLC couldn’t be located.
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WASHINGTON — Licensed gun owners have a right to carry a concealed firearm into stores and other private places unless the owner objects, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
The 6-3 decision extends gun rights and strikes down laws in Hawaii, California, New York, New Jersey and Maryland.
Those measures would prohibit carrying guns onto private property that is open to the public unless the owner has expressly authorized them.
“This regime hobbles what the 2nd Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives. We hold that the law is unconstitutional,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said for the court.
The new laws, if upheld, would “impose severe restrictions on the daily activities of residents who have satisfied the state’s rigorous requirements for the issuance of a carry permit. When these permit holders leave home in the morning, … they may also be barred from entering many places that people routinely visit in the course of their daily routines, such as gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, coffee shops, drug stores, grocery stores, ‘big box’ stores, home improvement stores, barber shops or hair salons, dry cleaners, and laundromats.”
The three liberals dissented, saying the law would protect property owners who don’t want guns in their stores.
“There is no constitutional right to enter private property without the owner’s permission, let alone with a firearm,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Trump administration lawyers had joined a coalition of Hawaii gun owners in urging the court to strike down these blue state laws in the case of Wolford vs. Lopez.
They said the laws, if enforced, would mean “a person carrying a handgun for self-defense commits a crime by entering a mall, a gas station, a convenience store, a supermarket, a restaurant or a coffee shop.”
This litigation is part of much broader debate over where guns may be permitted or prohibited.
Four years ago, the justices ruled that law-abiding persons had a right to obtain a permit to carry a concealed gun when they left home. They also agreed there are “sensitive places” where guns may be prohibited, such as schools, courts and other government buildings.
In response, lawmakers in California and Hawaii adopted their own lists of “sensitive places.” They imposed restrictions on concealed weapons at parks, beaches, playgrounds, places of worship and public transit as well as bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.
Gun owners sued but the 9th Circuit Court refused to block most of those restrictions in a single 83-page opinion covering Hawaii and California. Both states would prohibit carrying guns onto private property open to the public without the owner’s consent.
The 9th Circuit upheld that measure in principle but said California went too far by requiring the owner to post a prominent sign expressly authorizing guns.
“While today’s ruling in Wolford is disappointing, owners still have every right to decide whether firearms are allowed in their stores and businesses,” said Janet Carter, managing director of Second Amendment Litigation at Everytown Law. “The Supreme Court may have changed the default rule, but it cannot take away a private property owner’s authority over their own land.”
The Firearms Policy Coalition said the court had properly protected gun rights and barred states from carving out their “own regional version of the 2nd Amendment.”
“The historical record does not support forcing peaceable people to obtain advance permission before carrying for self-defense in places held open to them,” the group said.
Last week, the court upheld gun rights in a Texas case and said the government may not make it a crime for an “unlawful user” of a drug such as marijuana to own a gun.
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