Category: Judicial Watch
Trump pardons MLB legend and ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ cast member for 30-year-old tax fraud charges
President Trump has granted a pardon to a cast member from his hit show “Celebrity Apprentice” for the second time this term.
In February, Trump pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) after commuting the politician’s 14-year prison sentence in 2020.
The new pardon again extinguishes charges laid against a member of the Season 3 cast of Trump’s hit reality show, this time for a legendary baseball player.
‘Mr. Strawberry found faith in Christianity and has been sober for over a decade.’
“President Trump has approved a pardon for Darryl Strawberry, three-time World Series champion and eight-time MLB All-Star,” a White House official told the New York Post.
Strawberry had an iconic 17-year career in the majors, spending 13 seasons with teams in New York. He came into the league with the New York Mets and finished his career with the New York Yankees.
Back in 1995, Strawberry pleaded guilty to a single count of tax evasion over a failure to report nearly $500,000 in income from baseball card shows and autograph signings between 1986 and 1990.
As UPI reported at the time, Strawberry was sentenced to three years of probation in April 1995, along with six months of home confinement and $350,000 in restitution for tax evasion
At just 32 years old, Strawberry was also battling substance problems that cost him some opportunities in MLB.
RELATED: Pete Rose still might never get inducted into the Hall of Fame. Here’s why.
Photo by James Devaney/WireImage/Getty Images
Strawberry was beloved as a member of the Mets and was hilariously immortalized in the iconic episode of “The Simpsons” titled “Homer at the Bat.”
However, the trouble started after he moved back to his home state of California to play for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Following an All-Star campaign in 1991, the outfielder never played a full season again.
Just three days prior to appearing in front of a federal judge for the tax evasion charges in 1995, Strawberry was suspended by MLB and released from his new team, the San Francisco Giants, over his continued use of cocaine.
Months later, Strawberry signed with the Yankees and played well, but only appeared in 32 games. He retired from baseball after the 1999 season.
Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images
“Mr. Strawberry served time and paid back taxes after pleading guilty to one count of tax evasion,” the recent White House comment added.
“Following his career, Mr. Strawberry found faith in Christianity and has been sober for over a decade — he has become active in ministry and started a recovery center, which still operates today.”
Strawberry has been praised in recent years for overcoming his drug-abuse problems and turning to God, and he now preaches alongside his wife.
“There’s nothing too hard, there’s nothing too big for God,” Strawberry was recorded telling a group of prisoners in 2024.
“There’s nothing too hard, there’s nothing too big for God to fix in your life right here, right now,” he preached, as the men rejoiced. “God has not forgot about you. You’re not a mistake to God. We’ve all made mistakes. We have all fallen short. The Bible didn’t say some of us. The Bible says all of us have fallen short.”
Strawberry concluded, “So you gentlemen need to know that today I stand up here; there’s nothing great about me. I was a liar. I was a cheater. I was a womanizer. I was an alcoholic. I was a drug addict, and I was a sinner, saved by grace.”
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PATRIOTS STEP UP: More Than 200K Americans Apply for ICE Despite Death Threats: Report
Despite a staggering 8,000% spike in death threats, more than 200,000 Americans have stepped forward to join U.
California Congressman Who Campaigned on No Corporate PAC Money Pledge Takes Tens of Thousands of Dollars From Corporate PACs
As a fresh-faced political candidate, Rep. Derek Tran (D., Calif.) promised voters he wouldn’t accept donations from corporate PACs. But once elected, he broke his word and accepted tens of thousands of dollars from corporate benefactors, campaign finance records show.
The post California Congressman Who Campaigned on No Corporate PAC Money Pledge Takes Tens of Thousands of Dollars From Corporate PACs appeared first on .
Supreme Court Battle for PA Voter Rolls
Judicial Watch, AEF Ask Supreme Court for Access to Voter Records Judicial Watch Sues Pritzker for Records on Texas Democrat Lawmakers Judicial Watch Sues AZ Gov. Hobbs over Immigration Enforcement Non-Compliance Judicial Watch Sues Evanston Mayor for Breaking with Immigration Law Maine Lawmaker Defames Parents Protesting Trans Boys in Girls’ Sports Judicial Watch, AEF […]
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The Biggest Winner of This Year’s Elections: Gavin Newsom
Gavin Newsom has his eye on the prize — the American presidency — more than anyone else. His latest tactic…
Trump tech czar slams OpenAI scheme for federal ‘backstop’ on spending — forcing Sam Altman to backtrack
OpenAI is under the spotlight after seemingly asking for the federal government to provide guarantees and loans for its investments.
Now, as the company is walking back its statements, a recent OpenAI letter has resurfaced that may prove it is talking in circles.
‘We’re always being brought in by the White House …’
The artificial intelligence company is predominantly known for its free and paid versions of ChatGPT. Microsoft is its key investor, with over $13 billion sunk into the company, holding a 27% stake.
The recent controversy stems from an interview OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar gave to the Wall Street Journal. Friar said in the interview, published Wednesday, that OpenAI had goals of buying up the latest computer chips before its competition could, which would require sizeable investment.
“This is where we’re looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental … the way governments can come to bear,” Friar said, per Tom’s Hardware.
Reporter Sarah Krouse asked for clarification on the topic, which is when Friar expressed interest in federal guarantees.
“First of all, the backstop, the guarantee that allows the financing to happen, that can really drop the cost of the financing but also increase the loan to value, so the amount of debt you can take on top of an equity portion for —” Friar continued, before Krouse interrupted, seeking clarification.
“[A] federal backstop for chip investment?”
“Exactly,” Friar said.
Krouse further bored in on the point when she asked if Friar has been speaking to the White House about how to “formalize” the “backstop.”
“We’re always being brought in by the White House, to give our point of view as an expert on what’s happening in the sector,” Friar replied.
After these remarks were publicized, OpenAI immediately backtracked.
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On Wednesday night, Friar posted on LinkedIn that “OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop” for its investments.
“I used the word ‘backstop’ and it muddied the point,” she continued. She went on to claim that the full clip showcased her point that “American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part.”
On Thursday morning, David Sacks, President Trump’s special adviser on crypto and AI, stepped in to crush any of OpenAI’s hopes of government guarantees, even if they were only alleged.
“There will be no federal bailout for AI,” Sacks wrote on X. “The U.S. has at least 5 major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place.”
Sacks added that the White House does want to make power generation easier for AI companies, but without increasing residential electricity rates.
“Finally, to give benefit of the doubt, I don’t think anyone was actually asking for a bailout. (That would be ridiculous.) But company executives can clarify their own comments,” he concluded.
The saga was far from over, though, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemingly dug the hole even deeper.
RELATED: Artificial intelligence is not your friend
By Thursday afternoon, Altman had released a lengthy statement starting with his rejection of the idea of government guarantees.
“We do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters. We believe that governments should not pick winners or losers, and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions or otherwise lose in the market. If one company fails, other companies will do good work,” he wrote on X.
He went on to explain that it was an “unequivocal no” that the company should be bailed out. “If we screw up and can’t fix it, we should fail.”
It wasn’t long before the online community started claiming that OpenAI was indeed asking for government help as recently as a week prior.
As originally noted by the X account hilariously titled “@IamGingerTrash,” OpenAI has a letter posted on its own website that seems to directly ask for government guarantees. However, as Sacks noted, it does seem to relate to powering servers and providing electrical capacity.
Dated October 27, 2025, the letter was directed to the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Christopher Lehane. It asked the OSTP to “double down” and work with Congress to “further extend eligibility to the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain; grid components like transformers and specialized steel for their production; AI server production; and AI data centers.”
The letter then said, “To provide manufacturers with the certainty and capital they need to scale production quickly, the federal government should also deploy grants, cost-sharing agreements, loans, or loan guarantees to expand industrial base capacity and resilience.”
Altman has yet to address the letter.
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Video: Woman pulls male intruder out of her car, throws him to the ground with ease — while her amazed husband watches
Astonishing surveillance video from a Hollywood gas station shows the moment when a woman pulled a male intruder out of her car and threw him to the ground with ease.
The woman, Star Carter, was sitting in the driver’s seat of her red Alfa Romeo at the gas station Tuesday when a male stranger walked up and tried to open her passenger door, KCBS-TV reported.
‘It was just like that Kendrick Lamar verse [from “Peekaboo”] was playing in my head, you know like, “Bing bop boom bop boom bop bam!”‘
Her husband, Michael Carter, was pumping gas at the time and was on the other side of car.
“I stood up and was like ‘Get outta here!’ and then I walked around this way,” Michael told KCBS, motioning toward the passenger side of the car.
But after Michael got back in the passenger seat, the crook sneaked back and opened the driver-side rear door closest to the gas pump and actually got into the back seat, video shows.
“I’m wrestling with him inside the car,” Michael told the station, “and I’m kinda pushing him and pushing him, and all I know is he just disappeared.”
With that, Star’s husband smiled and told KCBS that “I’m looking over the back, and I said, ‘Oh … ohhh!'”
Michael’s, shall we say, starstruck reaction was due to the fact that his wife got out of her driver’s seat, got to the back door, ripped the intruder right out the car, and tossed him to the ground.
“I don’t condone violence, but I do condone self-defense,” Star told KCBS in the aftermath.
Star described what song was on her brain’s playlist in that moment, telling the station that “it was just like that Kendrick Lamar verse [from ‘Peekaboo’] was playing in my head, you know like, ‘Bing bop boom bop boom bop bam!'”
With a laugh, she added to KCBS, “That’s all I remember. I’m so embarrassed.”
Wisely, the intruder ran off after Star introduced him to the concrete.
But she also had some parting advice for him: “I just said, ‘Don’t you ever do no stupid [word redacted in KCBS video] like this again!'”
The station said the Carters actually continued their night out, going to a comedy show at the Hollywood Improv.
The couple’s unsurprised daughter later told KCBS that “my mommy, she was in like fight or flight — but she definitely fought, and he definitely took flight.”
Star added to the station that she believes the intruder was on drugs at the time of the incident: “I don’t know what this dude is capable of doing at all.”
In the end, her husband was grateful that Star stood up to the crook.
“She is indeed my hero,” Michael noted to KCBS with a laugh in the aftermath. “Thank you, Star!”
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‘Patently inequitable’: Ketanji Brown Jackson whines after SCOTUS stays Biden judge’s order in trans passport case
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered the Trump administration a victory on Thursday, prompting bitterness not only from trans activists but from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who suggested that the “regrettable” ruling might leave transgender-identifying individuals at risk of “harassment and bodily invasions.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 directing his secretaries of state and homeland security to ensure that government-issued identification documents, including passports and visas, “accurately reflect the holder’s sex.”
‘Today, the Court refuses to answer equity’s call.’
The Trump administration’s reversal of the Biden-era policy that enabled people to choose their own sex marker as well as a third marker, “X,” instead of an “M” or an “F” marker, was poorly received by some radicals.
Keen to have the government continue indulging their delusions, several transvestites joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and Covington & Burling LLP in a lawsuit over the passport policy in February.
In April, U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick, a Biden appointee, granted them a preliminary injunction preventing the State Department’s enforcement of Trump’s Executive Order 14168 while the lawsuit played out — but only as it applied to six of the plaintiffs. Months later, Kobick granted a class certification request and expanded the scope of her injunction.
After its appeal was rejected by the First Circuit Court of Appeals, the Trump administration filed an emergency stay request to the Supreme Court.
To the chagrin of non-straight activists, the high court granted the stay on Thursday, stating, “Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth — in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.”
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Photo by Hyoung Chang/Denver Post/Getty Images
The court noted further in its unsigned order, which was opposed by all three liberal justices, that the “respondents have failed to establish that the Government’s choice to display biological sex ‘lack[s] any purpose other than a bare … desire to harm a politically unpopular group.’ … Nor are respondents likely to prevail in arguing that the State Department acted arbitrarily and capriciously by declining to depart from Presidential rules that Congress expressly required it to follow.”
The high court concluded that absent a stay, the government would suffer a form of irreparable injury as the Biden judge’s injunction could lead to foreign affairs implications.
Justice Jackson noted in her dissenting opinion that “as is becoming routine, the Government seeks an emergency stay of a District Court’s preliminary injunction pending appeal. As is also becoming routine, this Court misunderstands the assignment.”
After casting doubt on her “obliging” colleagues’ comprehension skills, Jackson — whose past opinions have bewildered her conservative and liberal peers alike — characterized the reality-affirming passport policy as “new” and legally questionable. Then sentences later, she acknowledged that it was not new so much as a reversion to the government’s long-standing policy as it existed until at least the early 1990s.
Jackson argued that the cross-dressing plaintiffs face greater harm absent injunctive relief than the government would face absent a stay, and expressed doubt whether the government faces any irreparable harm at all.
“But the Court somehow sees fit to grant the Government’s stay request regardless, waving away its abject failure to show any irreparable harm and promoting a patently inequitable outcome to boot,” wrote Jackson.
Jackson suggested further that the indication of an individual’s actual sex on a passport amounts to a concrete injury and echoed the Biden-appointed district court judge, writing that “transgender people who encounter obstacles to obtaining gender-congruent identity documents are almost twice as likely to experience suicidal ideation, and report more severe psychological distress, than transgender people who do not face such barriers.”
In her conclusion, the leftist justice complained that “today, the Court refuses to answer equity’s call.”
Jon Davidson, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, joined Jackson in complaining about the court’s decision, stating, “This is a heartbreaking setback for the freedom of all people to be themselves and fuel on the fire the Trump administration is stoking against transgender people and their constitutional rights.”
“This decision will cause immediate, widespread, and irreparable harm to all those who are being denied accurate identity documents,” said Jessie Rossman, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. “The Trump administration’s policy is an unlawful attempt to dehumanize, humiliate, and endanger transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans, and we will continue to seek its ultimate reversal in the courts.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi referred to the court’s ruling as the administration’s “24th victory at the Supreme Court’s emergency docket” and noted, “Today’s stay allows the government to require citizens to list their biological sex on their passport. In other words: there are two sexes, and our attorneys will continue fighting for that simple truth.”
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Illegal alien pedophile allegedly ‘physically assaulted’ ICE agent during immigration operation: DHS
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent sustained serious injuries to his face on Monday during an immigration raid in Houston, the Department of Homeland Security reported on Thursday.
According to a DHS press release, Walter Leonel Perez Rodriguez, 33, was arrested during a Monday encounter with ICE agents in Houston.
‘This young officer’s life has forever been altered as a result of the continued hyper-politicization of routine law enforcement activities and spread of misinformation by the media, NGOs, and other groups opposed to immigration enforcement.’
During the encounter, Rodriguez is “alleged to have resisted arrest and physically assaulted an ICE officer with a metal coffee cup.”
The ICE officer sustained severe burns and a “deep gash” to his face that required 13 stitches.
RELATED: Illegal alien learns his fate after a Wisconsin judge allegedly helped him evade ICE
ice.gov
“This young officer’s life has forever been altered as a result of the continued hyper-politicization of routine law enforcement activities and spread of misinformation by the media, NGOs, and other groups opposed to immigration enforcement in this country,” ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Houston Field Office Director Bret Bradford said in a statement.
“By focusing on our officers and spreading false propaganda about how we accomplish our mission, they are emboldening dangerous illegal aliens like this child predator to physically resist arrest. This insanity has to stop before anyone else gets hurt,” Bradford added.
Rodriguez, a Salvadoran national, has a long criminal record prior to his recent arrest and charges.
The Department of Homeland Security stated Rodriguez illegally entered the U.S. “at least three times” and faced deportation in 2013 and 2020.
In addition to the immigration offenses, Rodriguez, a “pedophile and criminal illegal alien,” was convicted of sexually assaulting a child, child fondling, and “multiple” DUIs, according to the DHS.
“Anyone who lays a hand on our ICE officer will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” the Department of Homeland Security wrote on X.
Now in custody, Rodriguez was referred for prosecution on charges of illegal re-entry and assaulting a federal officer.
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Lawsuit Alleging Gavin Newsom ‘Facilitated’ Anti-Semitic Campaign Against National Guard Commander Headed to Trial, Judge Rules
A former commander of the California National Guard who says Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) “facilitated” an anti-Semitic campaign that resulted in his wrongful termination will have his day in court, a judge ruled Friday. The move could cause a major headache for Newsom ahead of his expected 2028 presidential campaign.
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