While the firestorm over the Indiana Department of Child Services has died down, the Indiana General Assembly is preparing to begin its examination of the agency and possibly make recommendations for action during the 2019 legislative session. The Interim Study Committee on Courts and the Judiciary is scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Wednesday in Room 431 of the Statehouse to review a host of issues related to DCS.
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is set for a week of marathon hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Republicans are focusing on Kavanaugh’s 12-year career as an appellate court judge, while Democrats are expected to grill the 53-year-old conservative on hot-button issues that could swing the court’s majority rightward.
Indiana’s sheriffs say they need more state money to cover the costs of holding low-level nonviolent felons in county jails. Indiana’s county jails currently get a $35 per-day payment for every Level 6 felon they house. But it’s been at least 30 years since that amount changed, according to the Indiana Sheriffs’ Association.
Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission members, including three from Indiana, are preparing to vote on a proposal that would sunset the organization’s pollution control standards. That proposal has yielded thousands of pages of public comments from proponents who say ORSANCO’s standards are redundant and, more significantly, from opponents who fear water quality in Indiana would suffer.
Increasingly convinced that the West Wing is wholly unprepared to handle the expected assault from Democrats if they win the House in November, President Donald Trump’s aides and allies are privately raising alarm as his circle of legal and communications advisers continues to shrink.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has added former Solicitor General Theodore Olson and former White House counsel John Dean to the list of witnesses who will testify next week in the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh to serve on the Supreme Court.
White House Counsel Don McGahn, a consequential insider in President Donald Trump’s legal storms and successes and a key figure in the administration’s handling of the Russia investigation, will be leaving in the fall, the president announced Wednesday. Trump praised McGahn as “a really good guy” who has done “an excellent job.”
The U.S. Coast Guard has found probable cause that the sinking of a tourist boat on a Missouri lake last month that killed 17 people “resulted from the misconduct, negligence, or inattention to the duties” by the captain of the boat, according to a court motion filed Wednesday by federal prosecutors. The July 19 incident claimed the lives of nine members of one Indiana family.
Two former presidents are expected to speak at Sen. John McCain’s service and he will lie in state in both in the nation’s capital and Arizona as part of a cross-country funeral procession ending with his burial at the U.S. Naval Academy. McCain died Saturday after a year-long battle with brain cancer.
A retired West Virginia Supreme Court justice is now a convicted felon. Menis Ketchum pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court to a felony count of fraud related to his personal use of a state vehicle and gas fuel card in a scandal that has led to upcoming impeachment trials for the remaining justices.
Indiana’s top elections official is planning to use more than $7.5 million in federal funding to improve the state’s election security, but not to upgrade its voting machines. Indiana was among the states and territories to receive money from the $380 million approved by Congress amid ongoing threats from Russia and others.
As Indiana prepares to collect nearly $100 million from a multi-state lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act, Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill held a meeting Wednesday with ACA proponents who are urging him to drop a second lawsuit challenging a controversial portion of the health care law. Though both parties said they were pleased with the dialogue, Hill also reinforced his opposition to the Obamacare individual mandate.
Lawyers for Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, were pursuing negotiations with prosecutors that could result in a plea deal and a court hearing was set for Tuesday afternoon, according to two people familiar with the financial fraud investigation. If a deal is struck, Cohen would plead guilty in federal court in Manhattan and agree to cooperate with the government.
President Donald Trump’s personal attorney says he wasn’t trying to make an existential point about the meaning of veracity when he declared “truth isn’t truth.” Instead, he said he was trying to make the case that having Trump sit down for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team wouldn’t accomplish much because of the conflicting nature of witnesses’ recollections.
President Donald Trump is expressing concern that anything he tells special counsel Robert Mueller under oath could be used to charge him with perjury as part of Mueller’s ongoing investigation into coordination between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.
The judge in Paul Manafort’s financial fraud trial says he has received threats and he fears for the “peace and safety” of the jurors deciding the fate of the former Trump campaign chairman. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III revealed his concerns Friday when explaining why he doesn’t intend to make jurors’ names public at the end of the trial.
“Truth isn’t truth,” says President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, explaining why he’s wary about pushing the president into an interview he says could be a perjury trap. He was trying to make the case that having Trump sit down for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team wouldn’t accomplish much because of the he-said-she-said nature of witnesses’ recollections.
A federal judge will hold a two-day hearing this week on a Texas-based group’s appeal of Indiana officials’ rejection of its application to open an abortion clinic in South Bend. Indianapolis Administrative Law Judge Clare Deitchman will determine Wednesday and Thursday whether to grant Whole Woman’s Health Alliance’s appeal after the state Department of Health denied the group’s application for an abortion clinic license in January.
A taste for blue suede sofas, inlaid wooden floor maps and glass countertops has led to the retirement of two West Virginia Supreme Court justices and the impeachment of three others. It also has created a political firestorm, as Democrats accuse the Republican-led Legislature of using the impeachments to try to take control of the court, a separate branch of government.
The jury in the fraud trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort ended its first day of deliberations with a series of questions to the judge, including a request to “redefine” reasonable doubt. The questions came after roughly seven hours of deliberation, delivered in a handwritten note to U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III. Ellis read the questions aloud to lawyers for both sides as well as Manafort before he called the jury in to give his answers.