Mangino discusses trial of George Pino with Court TV's Ted Rowlands

 

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Concerns of the founding fathers not much different than concerns today

 Robert Parkinson, Professor of History, Binghamton University, State University of New York wrote in The Conversation:

The Declaration of Independence, with its block of cursive letters scrawled onto parchment, looks like a relic from the distant past. Likewise, you might think the 27 grievances against King George III, his government and the British people listed in the body of the document would have little relevance to our lives today.

After all, what could the specific complaints of colonists in 1776 have to do with 2026? The parts of the declaration worth knowing about are the soaring sentences in the opening paragraphs about self-evident truths, pursuing happiness and all men being created equal. Right?

I’m a professor of history, and I have been researching the Declaration of Independence for nearly a quarter-century. The document has been featured prominently in the four books I have written on the founding of the U.S., especially the recently published “Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence.”

In my assessment, the issues that most disturbed the Revolution’s leaders in 1776 are ones Americans are still concerned about today: a partisan judiciary, arbitrary power, officials not being responsible to their constituents, people lacking a voice in decisions that affect their families, and even policies about immigration and citizenship. Moreover, studying the grievances reveals how the Revolution depended on ordinary Americans. Without their political outrage and participation in the rebellion, American independence would have failed.

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Mangino discusses Pennsylvania child rape case on Law & Crime's Sidebar with Jesse Weber

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What? Trump makes $2.2 billion since taking office!!!

Since returning to office in 2024, President Donald Trump has brought in an estimated $2.2 billion, according to The New York Times.

In 2025, the president made over $1 billion from crypto-related endeavors, a federal report showed. Of this, $600 million was made by his crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, that sold “meme” coins with images of his face, reported Deseret News.

Speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on Wednesday, Trump said, “I don’t get involved in my personal ... We have funds that run my money.”

President Trump has repeatedly missed legal deadlines and omitted business deals required under federal ethics laws designed to expose conflicts of interest, his latest financial disclosure reveals—lapses that fall to his own appointees to police, reported JURISTnews.

The 927-page annual report, filed with the US Office of Government Ethics (OGE) and released Tuesday, states that Trump paid late-filing fees for transactions that had not previously been disclosed. It also acknowledges that licensing agreements involving Trump-branded watches, sneakers and fragrances were “inadvertently omitted” from his prior report.

The periodic transaction reports, required under the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 (STOCK Act), must be filed within 30 days of the filer receiving notification of a covered securities transaction exceeding $1,000, and no later than 45 days after the transaction itself, giving the public near-real-time visibility into a federal official’s financial dealings.

The 2025 filing discloses thousands of transactions, including large blocks of exchange-traded fund purchases executed in September 2025. Trump’s 2024 disclosure, by contrast, listed the transactions section as “N/A.”

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Mangino joins Nancy Grace to discuss the murder of a Penn State student

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CREATORS: Supreme Court Decision Grants Broad Power to the President

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
June 30, 2026

The U.S. Supreme Court handed supporters of the Unitary Executive Theory a huge victory. For decades, many conservative constitutional scholars have argued that the president should have complete control over the executive branch.

Those who advocated for the Unitary Executive Theory argued that the executive branch of government should have the unchecked ability to remove members of agencies like the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and undo laws that restrict the president's ability to make those moves.

The high court ruled that congressional restrictions on the president's power violated the separation of powers. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution says, "The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America."

The modern push for a unitary executive gained traction during the Reagan administration. Organizations like the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation began a decades-long effort to bring the theory into the mainstream.

The debate over executive power dates back to the Founding Fathers. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued for a strong executive leader. He asserted, "Energy in the executive is the leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks ... (and) to the security of liberty."

The facts at issue in the case before the Supreme Court related to a law that barred the president from firing members of the FTC except in cases of "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office."

According to SCOTUSblog, during his first term in office, President Donald Trump nominated Rebecca Slaughter to fill one of the Democratic seats on the FTC. She was renominated in 2023 to serve a second term. Last year, Slaughter was informed that she had been "removed from the Federal Trade Commission, effective immediately." The letter did not cite any of the legal grounds that would allow Trump to remove her. Slaughter went to court to stop her removal. The case made its way to the Supreme Court.

By a 6-3 margin, the justices overruled a 91-year-old decision that upheld the law restricting presidential control over executive agencies. According to SCOTUSblog, the Supreme Court gave President Donald Trump "sweeping new authority over approximately two dozen multi-member agencies that Congress intended to be independent."

This ruling brings more room for self-dealing, favoritism and corruption, whatever political party controls the presidency.

Cass R. Sunstein, who once headed the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote in The New York Times, "Now that the White House is in charge of the FCC for example, the president may reward his political friends and punish his political enemies in ways that threaten freedom of expression and that might not be visible to the public."

Chief Justice John Roberts penned the majority opinion. He wrote that "the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust ... (t)hen, and only then, can they remain accountable to the President, and the President to the people."

According to The Hill, Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered a sharp dissent. "Put simply, today the majority reshapes our Government," Sotomayor wrote in her 49-page dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

She added, "Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President's hands."

The Unitary Executive Theory lends itself to abuses of authority. As has been demonstrated in the last 18 months, the concentration of power in a single individual invites abuses of power, undermines legislative and judicial independence, and puts the nation at risk of impulsive or unconstitutional actions.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, "The Executioner's Toll," 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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SCOTUS requires search warrant for cellphone location history

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently ruled that law enforcement searches for the location history of cellphones near crime scenes are covered by the Fourth Amendment, requiring warrants to obtain the data, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

But the high court left unsettled when searches for the information are reasonable — likely meaning the justices will eventually weigh in again on the privacy rights of Americans in the electronic era.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers conducted a search for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment when they obtained cellphone location history data during an investigation into a bank robbery in Virginia. The amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.

“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information — even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion.

Kagan was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Kentanji Brown Jackson. Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred in the judgment but did not join the majority opinion.

Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett.

States ask warrants be upheld

Over the past two decades, geofence warrants have become a major tool of law enforcement. At a basic level, they allow police to identify phones within a geographic area for a certain period of time. The data can be tremendously valuable to investigators, offering a way to develop suspects in crimes where their identities aren’t otherwise known. 

Civil liberties advocates warned that geofence warrants ensnare people in digital dragnets, handing the government data on anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They argued that accessing data on anyone within a certain area — the geofence — amounts to a general warrant prohibited by the Constitution.

A broad bipartisan coalition of states urged the justices to uphold the warrants. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia filed a brief with the court arguing that geofence warrants can be more precise than many traditional investigative methods when supported by probable cause and appropriately tailored. In the brief, they urged the justices not to prohibit geofence warrants altogether.

Geofence warrants can generate critical leads when the perpetrators of crimes are otherwise unknown, they wrote. When suspects are unknown but the suspected wrongdoing is linked to a specific place and time, location data provides one of the narrowest available tools for finding leads, the brief argues.

Credit union robbery in Virginia

The case centered on a 2019 robbery of a federal credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Okello Chatrie was convicted of armed robbery after surveillance footage showed the robber using a cellphone. A detective then obtained a geofence warrant directed at Google for devices within 150 meters of the credit union within an hour of the robbery.

Google initially provided anonymized data in response to the warrant. The detective then requested and received additional location data on nine users. Finally, the detective received de-anonymized information on three users, without obtaining an additional warrant.

While Google has since changed the way it stores location history data to limit geofence warrants, other apps and tech firms collect the data. Lawyers for Chatrie argued that geofence warrants open the door to the authorities requesting information on everyone at a sensitive location — perhaps an abortion clinic or a political convention — at a particular time.

The records serve as a “personal journal of a user’s movements,” Kagan wrote. Location history resembles other private materials like emails, documents, photos and calendars that, even if stored on Google’s servers, users reasonably view as their own, she wrote. Users, in turn, expect the data to be shielded from the “inquisitive eyes” of the government, Kagan wrote.

‘Reasonable’ question unanswered

But Kagan and the court’s majority didn’t wade into whether the search of Chatrie was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. While the warrant in the case was an uncommon, multi-step warrant, Kagan wrote, the lower appeals court found that a search did not occur, so it did not decide whether the warrant was reasonable.

“We are, as we have said many times before, ‘a court of review, not of first view,’” Kagan wrote. “It is therefore now up to the Court of Appeals to decide whether, at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause.”

In his dissent, Alito wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision “further destabilizes” longstanding jurisprudence on the Fourth Amendment. He accused the majority of issuing an advisory opinion by not addressing whether the search of Chatrie’s data was reasonable.

“Indeed, by refusing to review the one question that could have at least theoretically given Chatrie some hope of relief, the Court carefully set the stage for its planned performance: striking a pose as a great champion of privacy in the digital age. I cannot support this irresponsible escapade,” Alito wrote.

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