Washington
Supreme Court says man who lost leg can sue major logistics company over trucker crash
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed a man to sue a major logistics company after he lost part of his leg in a semi tractor-trailer crash, a decision that could have ripple effects across the trucking industry.
The high court ruled unanimously in favor of Shawn Montgomery, whose parked vehicle was hit by a speeding truck driver on an Illinois highway in 2017. He says C.H. Robinson, the country’s largest freight broker, should be liable for their role in putting the driver on the road despite “serious red flags.”
The company disputes that, and the high court’s decision doesn’t guarantee an eventual win.
Montgomery’s appeal was backed by more than two dozen U.S states who said the case would help bolster safety in the industry that moves billions of tons of goods across billions of miles every year. On the other side was the Trump administration and companies like Amazon, who argued against exposing logistics companies to liability under a “patchwork” of state laws.
Montgomery’s attorneys say the trucker had been cited for careless driving in another crash months earlier, and the carrier that he worked for had been involved with at least three crashes in a span of about five months. His lawsuit said C.H. Robinson should share liability because it hired the carrier despite those problems.
The company argued that Montgomery’s suit filed under state law has to be tossed out because brokers rely on the federal government to regulate carriers, and federal law trumps state law.
But in an opinion authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court disagreed. The justices found that Montgomery’s claims fall under an exception for safety regulations, so they can move forward.
The decision could increase litigation and insurance costs for freight brokers that eventually “cascade through the economy” and result in higher prices for consumers, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurrence joined by Justice Samuel Alito.
Still, “truck safety is a matter of life and death,” Kavanaugh wrote.
The opinion overturned a ruling from a Chicago-based appeals court in favor of C.H. Robinson, which is based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
Washington
In lawsuit, DOJ challenges efforts to sanction Trump administration lawyers
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is challenging efforts to sanction attorneys from the first and second Trump administrations, asserting in a lawsuit that the District of Columbia Bar is unfairly playing politics with the legal disciplinary process.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, represents a direct challenge to the authority of the office that enforces ethics standards for attorneys in the nation’s capital where several high-profile investigations of Trump-allied lawyers are playing out.
“The D.C. Bar will no longer be permitted to probe sensitive executive branch deliberations and target executive branch officials with whom they happen to politically disagree, and federal attorneys will once again be free to share their candid legal advice with their bosses and colleagues,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, a top Justice Department official, said in a statement.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Washington. An email seeking comment to the D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility did not receive an immediate response.
The complaint chiefly concerns the ethics case against Jeffrey Clark, a senior lawyer in the first Trump administration Justice Department who was deeply engaged in legal efforts to undo the results of the 2020 election that President Donald Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
A disciplinary panel last year recommended that Clark be stripped of his law license, but the lawsuit seeks to end those proceedings, calling them “unlawful” and tainted by politicization.
Clark, who has denied any wrongdoing, applauded the lawsuit on X on Wednesday evening, saying, “This is an important step to vindicate the separation of powers.”
In an attempt to bolster its claims of bias in the disciplinary process, the Justice Department asserted that bar authorities had treated more leniently than Clark a former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to doctoring an email during the investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The lawsuit also backs Ed Martin, an ardent Trump loyalist who now serves as the Justice Department’s pardon attorney. The Office of Disciplinary Counsel accused Martin in March of professional misconduct for a threatening letter that he sent to Georgetown Law School’s dean last year, when Martin was the top federal prosecutor for Washington.
Martin was the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia when he warned the Georgetown dean that his office wouldn’t hire the private school’s students if it didn’t eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
The Justice Department last week filed what’s known as a statement of interest in support of Martin, who had earlier complained about “uneven behavior” in the disciplinary process.
Florida
Trump and DeSantis sued over donation of Miami land for presidential library
Miami residents sued President Donald Trump, Miami Dade College and Florida state officials on Wednesday, alleging that the decision to donate an iconic stretch of downtown Miami property for Trump’s future presidential library — which might also house a hotel — is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit argues that the president, his presidential library foundation and state officials — including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — violated the Domestic Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits states from giving a financial benefit to a sitting president.
The White House didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment on Wednesday night.
DeSantis moved last September to transfer a 2.63-acre (1.06-hectare) parcel of land to Trump’s presidential library foundation. Since then, the president and his son Eric Trump shared extravagant plans for a skyscraper to house the library. An artificial intelligence video unveiled in March includes panning shots of the tower’s exterior and interior, with a presidential jet parked in the lobby alongside a gold escalator like the one Trump rode while launching his presidential campaign in 2015. Other shots show a giant ballroom like the one he’s planning for the White House, a replica Oval Office, rooftop gardens and a large, gold statue of Trump.
The president also suggested that there could be for-profit entities in the building.
“This concept could be an office, but it’s most likely going to be a hotel with a beautiful building underneath,” Trump said to reporters in March.
The complaint argued that means the land “is no longer available to serve MDC’s student community and Downtown Miami. Instead, the land will house a Trump hotel that brings riches to the President.”
The property that was donated to Trump’s foundation is owned by Miami Dade College and sits next to the Freedom Tower, a historic building that rises alongside the glitzy condos facing palm tree-lined Biscayne Bay. The Spanish Revival skyscraper once housed one of the city’s first newspapers, but later served as a resource center for hundreds of thousands of Cubans seeking asylum in the United States, according to Miami Dade College, which now operates the site as a museum.
The site is valued at roughly $67 million, according to a 2025 assessment by the Miami-Dade County property appraiser. Other real estate experts, including appraisers cited in the lawsuit, have wagered that the parcel could sell for hundreds of millions of dollars more.
Lawyers with the Constitutional Accountability Center in Washington, D.C., and Miami-based law firm Gelber Schachter & Greenberg filed the lawsuit on behalf of a student at Miami Dade College, two people who live near the donated parcel of land and a local nonprofit organization that had hoped to use the parcel as the site of an urban farm.
New York
Neo-Nazi leader gets 15 years for recruiting violent attacks, including Santa poison plot
NEW YORK (AP) — The leader of an Eastern European neo-Nazi group has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for trying to recruit others to commit violent attacks against Jews and racial minorities, including one plot that would have involved dressing as Santa Claus to hand out poisoned candy to children.
Michail Chkhikvishvili, a 22-year-old from the country of Georgia who goes by the nickname “Commander Butcher,” was sentenced by a federal judge in Brooklyn on Wednesday. He pleaded guilty in November to soliciting hate crimes and distributing information about making bombs and ricin.
“I acknowledge that my actions have brought harm by spreading hatred and violence and I’m truly sorry for that,” Chkhikvishvili wrote in a letter to the judge last month.
His lawyer, Zachary Taylor, asked for a five-year sentence, citing Chkhikvishvili’s mental health struggles since he was a teenager who “fell under the spell of the violent extremist content” on social media, but has since reformed. Taylor also mentioned harsh conditions during Chkhikvishvili’s nearly yearlong confinement in Moldova, where he was arrested in 2024 on an international warrant, according to his letter to the judge.
Prosecutors described Chkhikvishvili as the leader of the Maniac Murder Cult, an international extremist group that adheres to a neo-Nazi ideology promoting violence intended to trigger a racial and religious war.
They said the group’s violent solicitations — promoted through Telegram channels and outlined in the “Hater’s Handbook” — appear to have inspired multiple real-life killings, including a school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, last year that left a 16-year-old student dead.
Chkhikvishvili “repeatedly called for the murder of innocent civilians, including children, and schemed to attack and terrorize Jewish communities and racial minorities in the United States,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg said in a statement. “Chkhikvishvili, for example, tried to recruit a supposed associate to dress up as Santa Claus and pass out poisoned candy to minority children.”
Since 2021, prosecutors said Chkhikvishvili distributed the “Hater’s Handbook” to members and others.
“I’m very ashamed authoring Haters Handbook, hoping one day it will disappear, I wish I never wrote it,” Chkhikvishvili wrote to the judge.
Prosecutors said Chkhikvishvili traveled to Brooklyn in 2022 and began repeatedly encouraging others to commit hate crimes and other acts of violence. They said in 2023, he solicited an undercover FBI employee to commit bombings and arsons “for the purpose of harming racial minorities, Jewish individuals and others.”
In 2024, the undercover worker was directed “to target the Jewish community, Jewish schools, and Jewish children in Brooklyn with poison,” prosecutors said in a statement.
“Chkhikvishvili sent detailed manuals about creating and mixing lethal poisons and gases, including ricin.”
Supreme Court says man who lost leg can sue major logistics company over trucker crash
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed a man to sue a major logistics company after he lost part of his leg in a semi tractor-trailer crash, a decision that could have ripple effects across the trucking industry.
The high court ruled unanimously in favor of Shawn Montgomery, whose parked vehicle was hit by a speeding truck driver on an Illinois highway in 2017. He says C.H. Robinson, the country’s largest freight broker, should be liable for their role in putting the driver on the road despite “serious red flags.”
The company disputes that, and the high court’s decision doesn’t guarantee an eventual win.
Montgomery’s appeal was backed by more than two dozen U.S states who said the case would help bolster safety in the industry that moves billions of tons of goods across billions of miles every year. On the other side was the Trump administration and companies like Amazon, who argued against exposing logistics companies to liability under a “patchwork” of state laws.
Montgomery’s attorneys say the trucker had been cited for careless driving in another crash months earlier, and the carrier that he worked for had been involved with at least three crashes in a span of about five months. His lawsuit said C.H. Robinson should share liability because it hired the carrier despite those problems.
The company argued that Montgomery’s suit filed under state law has to be tossed out because brokers rely on the federal government to regulate carriers, and federal law trumps state law.
But in an opinion authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court disagreed. The justices found that Montgomery’s claims fall under an exception for safety regulations, so they can move forward.
The decision could increase litigation and insurance costs for freight brokers that eventually “cascade through the economy” and result in higher prices for consumers, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurrence joined by Justice Samuel Alito.
Still, “truck safety is a matter of life and death,” Kavanaugh wrote.
The opinion overturned a ruling from a Chicago-based appeals court in favor of C.H. Robinson, which is based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
Washington
In lawsuit, DOJ challenges efforts to sanction Trump administration lawyers
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is challenging efforts to sanction attorneys from the first and second Trump administrations, asserting in a lawsuit that the District of Columbia Bar is unfairly playing politics with the legal disciplinary process.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, represents a direct challenge to the authority of the office that enforces ethics standards for attorneys in the nation’s capital where several high-profile investigations of Trump-allied lawyers are playing out.
“The D.C. Bar will no longer be permitted to probe sensitive executive branch deliberations and target executive branch officials with whom they happen to politically disagree, and federal attorneys will once again be free to share their candid legal advice with their bosses and colleagues,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, a top Justice Department official, said in a statement.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Washington. An email seeking comment to the D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility did not receive an immediate response.
The complaint chiefly concerns the ethics case against Jeffrey Clark, a senior lawyer in the first Trump administration Justice Department who was deeply engaged in legal efforts to undo the results of the 2020 election that President Donald Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
A disciplinary panel last year recommended that Clark be stripped of his law license, but the lawsuit seeks to end those proceedings, calling them “unlawful” and tainted by politicization.
Clark, who has denied any wrongdoing, applauded the lawsuit on X on Wednesday evening, saying, “This is an important step to vindicate the separation of powers.”
In an attempt to bolster its claims of bias in the disciplinary process, the Justice Department asserted that bar authorities had treated more leniently than Clark a former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to doctoring an email during the investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The lawsuit also backs Ed Martin, an ardent Trump loyalist who now serves as the Justice Department’s pardon attorney. The Office of Disciplinary Counsel accused Martin in March of professional misconduct for a threatening letter that he sent to Georgetown Law School’s dean last year, when Martin was the top federal prosecutor for Washington.
Martin was the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia when he warned the Georgetown dean that his office wouldn’t hire the private school’s students if it didn’t eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
The Justice Department last week filed what’s known as a statement of interest in support of Martin, who had earlier complained about “uneven behavior” in the disciplinary process.
Florida
Trump and DeSantis sued over donation of Miami land for presidential library
Miami residents sued President Donald Trump, Miami Dade College and Florida state officials on Wednesday, alleging that the decision to donate an iconic stretch of downtown Miami property for Trump’s future presidential library — which might also house a hotel — is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit argues that the president, his presidential library foundation and state officials — including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — violated the Domestic Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits states from giving a financial benefit to a sitting president.
The White House didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment on Wednesday night.
DeSantis moved last September to transfer a 2.63-acre (1.06-hectare) parcel of land to Trump’s presidential library foundation. Since then, the president and his son Eric Trump shared extravagant plans for a skyscraper to house the library. An artificial intelligence video unveiled in March includes panning shots of the tower’s exterior and interior, with a presidential jet parked in the lobby alongside a gold escalator like the one Trump rode while launching his presidential campaign in 2015. Other shots show a giant ballroom like the one he’s planning for the White House, a replica Oval Office, rooftop gardens and a large, gold statue of Trump.
The president also suggested that there could be for-profit entities in the building.
“This concept could be an office, but it’s most likely going to be a hotel with a beautiful building underneath,” Trump said to reporters in March.
The complaint argued that means the land “is no longer available to serve MDC’s student community and Downtown Miami. Instead, the land will house a Trump hotel that brings riches to the President.”
The property that was donated to Trump’s foundation is owned by Miami Dade College and sits next to the Freedom Tower, a historic building that rises alongside the glitzy condos facing palm tree-lined Biscayne Bay. The Spanish Revival skyscraper once housed one of the city’s first newspapers, but later served as a resource center for hundreds of thousands of Cubans seeking asylum in the United States, according to Miami Dade College, which now operates the site as a museum.
The site is valued at roughly $67 million, according to a 2025 assessment by the Miami-Dade County property appraiser. Other real estate experts, including appraisers cited in the lawsuit, have wagered that the parcel could sell for hundreds of millions of dollars more.
Lawyers with the Constitutional Accountability Center in Washington, D.C., and Miami-based law firm Gelber Schachter & Greenberg filed the lawsuit on behalf of a student at Miami Dade College, two people who live near the donated parcel of land and a local nonprofit organization that had hoped to use the parcel as the site of an urban farm.
New York
Neo-Nazi leader gets 15 years for recruiting violent attacks, including Santa poison plot
NEW YORK (AP) — The leader of an Eastern European neo-Nazi group has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for trying to recruit others to commit violent attacks against Jews and racial minorities, including one plot that would have involved dressing as Santa Claus to hand out poisoned candy to children.
Michail Chkhikvishvili, a 22-year-old from the country of Georgia who goes by the nickname “Commander Butcher,” was sentenced by a federal judge in Brooklyn on Wednesday. He pleaded guilty in November to soliciting hate crimes and distributing information about making bombs and ricin.
“I acknowledge that my actions have brought harm by spreading hatred and violence and I’m truly sorry for that,” Chkhikvishvili wrote in a letter to the judge last month.
His lawyer, Zachary Taylor, asked for a five-year sentence, citing Chkhikvishvili’s mental health struggles since he was a teenager who “fell under the spell of the violent extremist content” on social media, but has since reformed. Taylor also mentioned harsh conditions during Chkhikvishvili’s nearly yearlong confinement in Moldova, where he was arrested in 2024 on an international warrant, according to his letter to the judge.
Prosecutors described Chkhikvishvili as the leader of the Maniac Murder Cult, an international extremist group that adheres to a neo-Nazi ideology promoting violence intended to trigger a racial and religious war.
They said the group’s violent solicitations — promoted through Telegram channels and outlined in the “Hater’s Handbook” — appear to have inspired multiple real-life killings, including a school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, last year that left a 16-year-old student dead.
Chkhikvishvili “repeatedly called for the murder of innocent civilians, including children, and schemed to attack and terrorize Jewish communities and racial minorities in the United States,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg said in a statement. “Chkhikvishvili, for example, tried to recruit a supposed associate to dress up as Santa Claus and pass out poisoned candy to minority children.”
Since 2021, prosecutors said Chkhikvishvili distributed the “Hater’s Handbook” to members and others.
“I’m very ashamed authoring Haters Handbook, hoping one day it will disappear, I wish I never wrote it,” Chkhikvishvili wrote to the judge.
Prosecutors said Chkhikvishvili traveled to Brooklyn in 2022 and began repeatedly encouraging others to commit hate crimes and other acts of violence. They said in 2023, he solicited an undercover FBI employee to commit bombings and arsons “for the purpose of harming racial minorities, Jewish individuals and others.”
In 2024, the undercover worker was directed “to target the Jewish community, Jewish schools, and Jewish children in Brooklyn with poison,” prosecutors said in a statement.
“Chkhikvishvili sent detailed manuals about creating and mixing lethal poisons and gases, including ricin.”
