Jury selection: Donald Trump’s hush money trial is back in session today in the Manhattan courthouse at 100 Centre St., after a day off yesterday. Jury selection is continuing, with seven jurors having been seated so far but one of them having been dismissed this morning. She said she could not guarantee her impartiality after friends and relatives started talking to her about the case. A total of 12 jurors and six alternates are due to be selected. If the process continues to go as fast as it did on Tuesday, jury selection could be completed in a few days with opening arguments in the criminal trial next week.
Barr’s endorsement: William Barr, the former attorney general during Donald Trump’s presidency, who broke from Trump after the Jan. 6 attempted coup, has now done an about face and endorsed Trump for a second term as president. Barr, who as attorney general interfered with investigations of Trump allies who had committed crimes, had said that a second Trump term would be chaos and horrible for America. Now, in a Fox News interview, Barr has called for Trump to be elected again.
Impeachment: A 51 to 46 vote along party lines in the Senate has killed a Republican effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The Republican majority in the House had voted to impeach Mayorkas without presenting any evidence that he had committed an impeachable act. The Republicans claimed he did not do enough to deal with immigration issues at U.S. borders. The last time the House had voted to impeach a member of a president’s cabinet was in 1876, but that effort failed in the Senate as did the Mayorkas impeachment.
Kennedy’s candidacy: About a dozen members of the family of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were scheduled to appear with President Biden at an event in Philadelphia today where they were to endorse Biden for president. Kennedy’s family has come out against the third-party candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying that it is likely he would draw more votes from Biden than from Trump, thus handing Trump the presidency. RFK Jr.’s sister Kerry was expected to remind people that Trump said he plans to become a dictator on day one and suspend the freedoms Americans enjoy under the Constitution.
911 outages: Investigations are underway to try to get to the bottom of outages that made 911 emergency call systems inoperative in Nevada, Nebraska, South Dakota and Texas. The 911 systems came back after a couple of hours. It was not immediately known if the outages were related or isolated incidents. The Federal Communications Commission said this morning it was aware of the outages and has launched its own investigation. The Department of Homeland Security had recently warned that 911 systems are vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
Theft: Police have arrested six people and have issued arrest warrants for three others in connection with the theft of $22 million worth of gold bars and paper currency from an Air Canada facility at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Two of the suspects are employees of Air Canada. The gold and currency had arrived on a flight from Zurich, Switzerland. The theft took place a year ago. It’s believed the gang would have used the gold and cash to buy weapons to be smuggled into Canada.
