Special counsel Jack Smith said he believed there was sufficient evidence to convict Trump over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
Report by Jack Smith says evidence ‘was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction’ had Trump not won re-election in 2024
Donald Trump would have been convicted of crimes over his failed attempt to cling to power in 2020 but for his victory in last year’s US presidential election, according to the special counsel who investigated him.
Jack Smith’s report detailing his team’s findings about Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy was released by the justice department early on Tuesday.
After the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, Smith was appointed as special counsel to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His investigation culminated in a detailed report submitted to the attorney general, Merrick Garland.
In it, Smith asserts that he believes the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump in a trial if his success in the 2024 election had not made it impossible for the prosecution to continue.
Then-U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on wildfires with local and federal fire and emergency officials in Sacramento, California on September 14, 2020. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
One observer blasted MAGA’s “conflagration of lies and disinformation.”
Progressive critics were left shaking their heads this week as Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA allies absurdly blamed the Los Angeles County wildfires on everything from an ichthyophile governor to diversity policies—while ignoring what experts say is the true cause of the deadly infernos.
On Wednesday, Trump took to his Truth social media platform to falsely accuse Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—whom he repeatedly called “Newscum”—of refusing “to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water… to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”
Newsom’s office responded to Trump’s accusation by correctly noting that “there is no such document as the water restoration declaration.”
Trump also accused Newsom of wanting “to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water,” a red herring and false statement given that the state’s plan to protect the endangered delta smelt actually involved increasing the amount of fresh water flowing into its habitat.
Jeffrey Mount, a water policy expert at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, toldMSNBC newsletter editor Ryan Teague Beckwith on Thursday that Trump got “nothing right” in his post.
Summarizing his interview with Mount, Teague Beckwith wrote:
Without getting into too much detail, here’s what did happen… During Trump’s first term, his administration sought to divert some of the water coming into a river delta near San Francisco to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, among others. They came up with a plan for the water, which Newsom challenged in court. The Biden administration later negotiated a new plan with California on how to divvy up the water.
This is basic stuff, so the fact that Trump describes this as Newsom refusing to sign some kind of document that never existed should give you a sense of how disengaged he is with his own policy.
Meanwhile, MAGA acolyte and soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency co-leader Elon Musk used his X social media network—formerly Twitter—to amplify racist posts disparaging Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, an antisemitic diatribe by defamatory conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, implicitly sexist and homophobic attacks on Los Angeles’ fire chief, and his own frequent aspersions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Slate web editor Nitish Pahwa condemned MAGA’s “conflagration of lies and disinformation.”
“Just one day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be fact-checking informational posts, and mere months after nonstop online hoaxes obstructed federal efforts to assist North Carolinians in the recovery from Hurricane Helene, we’re getting an early-year preview of how the United States is going to experience and respond to these rampaging climate disasters throughout the near future,” Pahwa said.
“In the vacuum left by mainstream TV networks that did not at all mention climate change in their fire coverage, bad-faith digital actors swooped in with their own takes,” Pahwa added. “Climate change doesn’t just boost record weather events—it boosts the snake-oil salesmen, too.”
Climate experts and defenders weighed in with science-based explanations for the increase in extreme weather events like the Los Angeles County wildfires.
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Thursday, Aaron Regunberg, Public Citizen’s Climate Program senior policy counsel, noted that “a recent study found that nearly all of the observed increase in wildfire-burned area in California over the past half-century is attributable to anthropogenic climate change.”
“This devastation is the direct result of Big Oil’s conduct,” Regunberg asserted.
As Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, “This is exactly the sort of disaster that Exxon’s own scientists predicted more than 50 years ago, but they spent billions to keep us hooked on fossil fuels.”
According to the U.S. National Park Service, the area burned annually by California wildfires has increased fivefold since the 1970s.
Original article by Jasper Jackson republished from TBIJ under This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
With tech titans openly disregarding the truth ahead of Trump’s second term, 2025 is likely to herald a new era of disinformation
The online information ecosystem has been in critical condition for some years now, but the prognosis for 2025 is looking more dire than ever.
Already this year two of the world’s richest men, who between them control a huge chunk of our communications infrastructure, have made it clear that they are not interested in our access to the truth.
On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company Meta – which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – would be scrapping its fact checking programme. The only exception to this for now will be in the EU, where strong regulations require it to police its platform.
The core purpose of this programme was to check content that had been flagged as containing potentially harmful misinformation, such as false claims about vaccines or military conflicts. These checks were carried out by third-party organisations, which had to follow rules around process and transparency – and which received significant funding from Meta.
In their place, Meta will now adopt a “community notes-style” system, which enables users themselves to weigh in on content that might be false. A similar set-up has already been adopted by X, where it has proven open to manipulation and failed abysmally to curb misinformation on the platform.
To be clear, Meta’s fact checking programme was not without its problems. For a start, there was no way it could catch every falsehood on the platforms. Meta’s financial arrangements with these organisations also raised questions. And ultimately, there is no definitive proof that showing people fact checks has any real impact on whether they believe the false claims.
But the programme did provide vital financial support to newsrooms that did hugely valuable work, from uncovering Russian propaganda campaigns to exposing online scam artists. And while it was only ever a partial solution at best, Meta’s programme was a sign that the company at least wanted to be seen to care about the accuracy of the information spreading across its platforms.
Zuckerberg’s about-turn came after a week in which another tech tycoon, Elon Musk, had been weighing in on UK politics, most notably with twisted falsehoods about the handling of child grooming cases and messages of support for Tommy Robinson, the far-right figure currently in prison for contempt of court after targeting a Syrian refugee with lies. On Monday, Musk suggested in a poll posted on X that “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”.
The recent behaviour of Zuckerberg and Musk can only be seen in light of the impending second term of Donald Trump, whose propensity for lying is legendary. Musk was already all in on Trump’s presidency. But since the election, much of the rest of the tech world has sought to curry favour with the incoming president, with many prominent figures making big donations to his inauguration.
Like the Trump presidency itself, Musk and Zuckerberg’s dismantling of systems that help protect the truth are logical consequences of the digital structures we have built. An online economy that rewards attention above all else has given new power to false claims. Outlandish lies spread quicker than boring truths. Telling people what they want to hear is more engaging than telling them what they need to hear.
And all the signs suggest that the problem will only be worsened by the tech world’s latest obsession: generative AI. Systems such as ChatGPT, which can come up with content that seems human and accurate but is often simply a convincing lie, are rapidly being incorporated into all our major channels of information and communication. Apple is putting inaccurate headlines on curated news articles. Meta is planning to flood its social networks with AI bots mimicking humans. Google is pushing AI-driven search that regularly throws up false results.
A huge amount of money has been poured into generative AI, and much of the tech industry is banking on it to deliver another lucrative boom. But it has turned out to be even worse than humans at telling fact from fiction – and even more willing to make things up. Dealing with this problem is vital for democracy, but it also threatens the industry’s next big payout. As Zuckerberg proved this week, it’s a lot easier to simply give up on accurate information altogether.
Big Tech is no longer even keeping up the pretence that it is committed to the truth. Keeping our information ecosystem healthy is going to be up to the rest of us.
Reporter: Jasper Jackson Deputy editor: Katie Mark Editor: Franz Wild Production editor: Alex Hess Fact checker: Frankie Goodway
TBIJ has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.
Original article by Jasper Jackson republished from TBIJ under This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
This image added 11/1/25
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Donald Trump has voiced plans to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, and possibly from the entire UNFCCC, after assuming the US presidency this year (Credit: Getty Images)
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Yearlong: Extreme weather continues
As these global opportunities to make a difference on climate roll around, there is another certainty running through the calendar year: climate-driven extreme weather.
As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, headlines in 2025 and beyond will continue to be dominated by large death tolls, suffering and destruction due to ever more extreme weather events – Friederike Otto
What’s harder to know is exactly when disasters will hit. But 2025 is also expected to be a scorcher: it will be one of the three hottest years on record globally, according to an outlook from the UK’s Met Office, falling just behind 2024 and 2023. Warm temperatures are forecast in 2025 despite the Pacific Ocean moving into a La Niña phase, in which sea surface temperatures are lower than usual and conditions overall are cooler.
“Years such as 2025, which aren’t dominated by the warming influence of El Niño, should be cooler,” Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at the Met Office, stated in the outlook.
Still, the Met Office expects average global temperature in 2025 to be 1.29C to 1.53C above pre-industrial temperatures.
Friederike Otto, who leads World Weather Attribution group, says the La Niña predictions mean 2025 “might be cooler than 2024” but argues “this is really irrelevant” if natural climate variability is masking the overall warming trend.
