分类： politics

The high-profile legal saga of disgraced South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh has entered a new chapter, days after the state’s Supreme Court threw out his 2023 convictions for the murders of his wife Maggie and son Paul. On Wednesday, Murdaugh filed a civil lawsuit against Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca Hill, the court official at the center of the judicial misconduct that invalidated his original guilty verdict.

Last week, the South Carolina Supreme Court issued a unanimous 5-0 ruling ordering a new trial for Murdaugh, concluding that Hill had deliberately undermined his constitutional right to a fair trial by an impartial jury. The high court documented multiple inappropriate interactions between Hill and seated jurors during the six-week 2023 trial, including statements where she urged jurors not to be swayed by evidence presented by the defense.

Within months of the guilty verdict, Hill released a commercially published tell-all book about the high-profile proceedings, which drew international media attention and drew crowds of true crime observers to the televised trial. In his new civil filing, Murdaugh’s legal team argues that Hill’s improper jury interference was driven entirely by personal financial gain. Court documents allege Hill sought a guilty verdict specifically to boost book sales, with the end goal of purchasing a lake house. The suit quotes the Supreme Court’s own finding that Hill believed a conviction would maximize profits from her planned publication.

Murdaugh is seeking monetary damages to cover the hundreds of thousands of dollars he spent on his criminal defense during the first trial, totaling $600,000 in claimed compensation for the harms he suffered as a result of Hill’s actions. This is not Hill’s first run-in with legal consequences: Last December, she pleaded guilty to multiple felony charges including misconduct in public office, obstruction of justice, and perjury connected to unrelated allegations that she misappropriated public funds during her tenure as clerk and leaked sealed court records to a journalist.

Murdaugh, once a prominent member of a powerful local legal family, has maintained his complete innocence in the 2021 killings of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. Prosecutors have announced plans to retry the double murder case, though no new trial date has been scheduled. He is currently serving consecutive 27-year and 40-year sentences for separate state and federal convictions for financial crimes, including years of stealing millions of dollars from his law firm and clients to fund an opioid addiction and extravagant lifestyle. Prosecutors argued at the original trial that the killings were an attempt to cover up this years-long pattern of financial corruption. The case has drawn global public interest, spawning multiple documentaries, podcasts, and book deals long before Hill entered the publishing space.

In a surprising legal development that has ignited fierce partisan controversy across Washington, former president and current U.S. President Donald Trump has agreed to dismiss his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the 2020 leak of his personal tax returns. The settlement paves the way for the creation of a $1.776 billion federal fund to compensate individuals who claim they were improperly targeted by government law enforcement actions.

Trump first launched the legal action in January, arguing that the IRS failed to intervene to stop a former agency contractor, Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn, from leaking years of confidential tax documents to national media outlets during his first term in office. The dismissal came just 48 hours before a critical May 20 court deadline, where both sides were scheduled to argue over whether a valid legal standing for the case even existed — a question raised given Trump now leads the executive branch that oversees the IRS.

Almost immediately after Trump’s legal team filed the motion to dismiss, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the terms of the broader settlement agreement. Under the deal, a new “anti-weaponisation fund” will be established to create a formal process for reviewing and resolving claims from people who say they were harmed when government law enforcement was improperly politicized. Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, all named plaintiffs in the original suit, will receive a formal apology from the department but no financial compensation, officials confirmed.

The fund will be managed by a five-member commission, four of which will be appointed directly by the U.S. Attorney General, and is allocated nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer funding to resolve eligible claims. Quarterly public reports on all disbursements from the fund will be submitted to the Attorney General, per the agreement. “The machinery of government should never be weaponised against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement announcing the deal.

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team framed the president’s decision to settle as a move driven by public interest, saying “the president is entering into this settlement squarely for the benefit of the American people. He will continue his fight to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable,” the spokesperson added.

However, congressional Democrats have decried the agreement as an unconstitutional abuse of power, labeling the new fund an unaccountable “slush fund” that will be used to reward Trump’s political allies. More than 90 House Democrats have already filed a legislative motion to block the settlement from taking effect. Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin issued a blistering statement calling the deal a corrupt racket, arguing it would divert $1.7 billion in public funds to pay allies of Trump, including people convicted for their role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot and supporters of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Legal experts consulted by the judge overseeing the original suit last week had already described Trump’s legal action as historically unusual. “This case is unprecedented: A sitting president seeks monetary damages for alleged harm to his personal interests from an executive agency that he controls,” the experts wrote in their analysis, noting that Trump has publicly acknowledged he exercises control over both the IRS and the Department of Justice attorneys handling the litigation.

The controversy traces back to the 2020 leak of Trump’s tax records, which formed the basis of a landmark New York Times investigation published weeks before that year’s presidential election. The investigation confirmed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he won the presidency, and paid no federal income tax at all in 10 of the 15 years prior to that election. Trump voluntarily released his tax records publicly in 2022, two years after the leak. Littlejohn, the contractor responsible for the leak, pleaded guilty in 2023 to stealing confidential tax data from Trump and thousands of other high-income Americans, and was sentenced to five years in federal prison in 2024.

In a landmark pre-trial ruling released Monday, New York State Supreme Court Judge Gregory Carro has carved out a narrow middle ground in the high-profile murder case against Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in late 2024. The judge approved the admission of a handgun and handwritten writings found in Mangione’s backpack during a post-arrest search at a Pennsylvania police station, but barred prosecutors from using multiple other pieces of evidence collected during an initial warrantless search at a local Altoona McDonald’s, citing constitutional violations.

The 26-year-old suspect stands accused of fatally shooting Thompson on a busy Manhattan street in December 2024, just days before law enforcement tracked him to the western Pennsylvania McDonald’s following a multi-state nationwide manhunt. When officers responded to a tip from a member of the public who recognized Mangione from publicly released suspect photos, they approached the suspect to question his identity. Roughly 48 minutes after the initial interaction began, officers read Mangione his Miranda rights, the standard U.S. criminal procedure warning that informs suspects of their right to remain silent and avoid self-incrimination.

During the pre-Miranda interaction at the restaurant, an officer conducted an unwarranted search of Mangione’s backpack, uncovering a loaded gun magazine, a passport, a cellphone, a wallet, a computer chip, and a Faraday bag designed to shield electronic devices from external signal monitoring. After Mangione was taken into custody, law enforcement conducted a second, more comprehensive inventory search of his belongings at the Altoona police station, where they found the handgun that prosecutors intend to present as the murder weapon, along with a red journal containing Mangione’s writings.

Mangione’s defense team launched an aggressive pre-trial motion to suppress all evidence collected from the McDonald’s encounter, as well as all statements Mangione made to officers during the initial questioning. They argued that the warrantless search of the defendant’s personal property violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures, and that the pre-Miranda questioning violated his due process rights. Prosecutors countered that all police actions followed lawful protocol and that the evidence should be admissible at trial.

After hearing several days of pre-trial arguments in late 2024, Judge Carro ruled in favor of the defense on multiple key points. All evidence recovered during the initial McDonald’s search—including the loaded magazine, cellphone, passport, wallet, and computer chip—must be suppressed, he ruled, because the search was deemed improper and conducted without a valid warrant. In addition, all statements Mangione made to officers before he was read his Miranda rights, including answers to questions about lying about his identity and whether he carried fake identification, are also excluded from the state trial.

However, the ruling handed prosecutors a critical victory by clearing the way for them to present the handgun and red journal found during the police station inventory search—two of the most high-stakes pieces of evidence in the case. While the suppression of multiple pieces of evidence marks a significant win for the defense, the ability to introduce the murder weapon and the defendant’s own writings leaves prosecutors with core evidence to present to the jury.

Mangione has pleaded not guilty to all state charges, which include second-degree murder, multiple firearms offenses, and stalking. He also faces separate federal charges in connection with Thompson’s killing, and has entered a not guilty plea in that case as well. During Monday’s brief hearing, Mangione appeared in court dressed in a navy blue suit, whispering to one member of his legal team as lead defense attorneys Karen Friedman Agnifilo and Marc Agnifilo conferred with the judge and prosecution at the front of the courtroom. The back of the courtroom was filled with multiple rows of spectators and supporters of Mangione, several of whom wore printed shirts calling for his exoneration.

The state murder trial is scheduled to begin in September 2025, and the ruling has now cleared up the major pre-trial evidence dispute that had dominated procedural proceedings in the case for months.