Biden Slammed After Commuting Sentence of “Kids for Cash” Judge

Buried in the massive list of nearly 1,500 people whose criminal sentences were commuted by President Joe Biden Thursday is the name of a Pennsylvania judge who took kickbacks for wrongfully sentencing minors to juvenile detention.

Former Luzerne County Judge Michael T. Conahan, along with another former judge, was accused of shutting down the county’s juvenile detention center and then receiving more than $2 million from for-profit detention facilities as part of a “kids for cash” scheme, according to The Citizens’ Voice.

In 2010, Conahan pleaded guilty to a federal racketeering charge and was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison, according to WNEP. Conahan’s prison time was cut short during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he petitioned for a compassionate release, and he was released to home confinement in 2020.

His stint in home confinement appears to be what qualified him for a commuted sentence.

People online were really not impressed by Conahan’s inclusion in Biden’s massive list.

“Wow. I think Biden’s commuting the sentence of this disgraced Pa judge is a big mistake. I covered this in my Pa media days. He was one of 2 judges receiving $$ to sentence kids to lengthy sentences in a for-profit juvenile prison,” wrote The Washington Post’s Heather Long in a post on X. “He ruined a lot of kids’ lives.”

The Nation’s Joshua A. Cohen couldn’t make sense of Biden’s decision. “What is his problem,” he wrote in a post on X.

“I remember this case. It was a shocking scandal, caused immeasurable harm, and seriously tainted an entire community’s faith in the justice system,” wrote Jose Pagliery of NOTUS in a post on X. “The conviction sought to rebuild that trust. How will these families feel now?”

“These commutation recipients, who were placed on home confinement during the COVID pandemic, have successfully reintegrated into their families and communities and have shown that they deserve a second chance,” Biden said in his prepared statement Thursday.

The statement added that Biden had also commuted the sentences of individuals who “would receive lower sentences if charged under today’s laws, policies, and practices.”

Biden executed the largest act of clemency in a single day in modern presidential history, including 39 presidential pardons and 1,499 commuted sentences. Clemency advocates are still pushing for him to extend pardons to some of those facing the death penalty—a group Trump is plotting to execute en masse upon entering office.

Elon Musk’s efforts ingratiating himself into Trumpworld are about to pay off.

Donald Trump’s presidential transition team has recommended that the president-elect quash a crash reporting requirement for self-driving vehicles. In an internal document obtained by Reuters, the team described the safety reporting condition as a mandate for “excessive” data collection, advising that the president-elect abolish the requirement entirely.

Doing so would radically alter the playing field for the burgeoning automated vehicle industry, decreasing transparency and making it more difficult for federal regulators to spark inquiries into dangerous practices. And Tesla would be the new policy’s biggest benefactor.

The electric vehicle company, which Musk heads, has reported the majority of automated vehicle crashes, more than 1,500, to federal safety regulators. And a Reuters analysis of data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, found that Tesla’s crash data accounted for 40 out of 45 of the fatal crashes reported through October 15.

Critics and law enforcement groups, including the Justice Department, have torched the company’s “autopilot” and “full self-driving” claims, arguing that the branding has misled investors and consumers into believing that the cars are fully autonomous when they still require an active driver behind the wheel.

In a statement to Reuters, the NHTSA noted that the crash reporting data is “crucial” to evaluating the safety of these emerging technologies. Former agency employees noted to the outlet that such data was essential to investigations that led to a 2023 recall of some 125,000 Tesla vehicles over a seat belt defect.

“NHTSA said it has received and analyzed data on more than 2,700 crashes since the agency established the rule in 2021. The data has influenced 10 investigations into six companies, NHTSA said, as well as nine safety recalls involving four different companies,” according to Reuters.

Musk’s involvement in crafting the transition team’s policy could not be determined, and it’s still unclear if Trump actually intends to strip the requirement.

Jeff Bezos is planning to donate $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee, in the latest installment of tech billionaires sucking up to the president-elect.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Bezos, who just last month chose to spike The Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the name of so-called neutrality, is plotting to pour cash into the group planning Trump’s victory parties.

Bezos and his company decided to make the contribution earlier this week and notified Trump’s team that the money was coming, according to one person familiar with the matter. “Bezos is donating through Amazon,” one person close to Bezos told the Journal.

Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg, another tech billionaire who has taken to fawning over Trump (only after the president-elect publicly threatened him with imprisonment) also donated $1 million to the inauguration committee. For that reason alone, it’s difficult to imagine these donations as anything other than “obeying in advance.”

Amazon is also slated to stream the inauguration on Prime Video, which will be a separate in-kind donation valued at $1 million, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, gushed over Elon Musk Thursday, calling the technocrat billionaire who helped elect Donald Trump “the foremost champion of free speech in the tech industry.”

Blumenthal’s compliment for the far-right troll king came less than a week after he and Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn released a statement announcing that they had collaborated with X, Musk’s social media company, on changes to their new bill, the Kids Online Safety Act. That bill, by their own admission, featured a number of changes that had been spearheaded by the increasingly toxic social media platform.

“Led by X, the new changes made to the Kids Online Safety Act strengthen the bill while safeguarding free speech online and ensuring it is not used to stifle expression,” Blumentahl and Blackburn wrote in a statement. “These changes should eliminate once and for all the false narrative that this bill would be weaponized by unelected bureaucrats to censor Americans.

“We thank Elon and Linda for their bold leadership and commitment to protecting children online and for helping us get this bill across the finish line this Congress,” the pair added, implying that Musk and X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino had been directly involved in the process.

X has been supporting the KSOA, which has already passed the Senate, since the summer, so Blumenthal’s obvious posturing raises some concerns and questions. It is possible, of course, that this is all just politics: The Democratic senator is simply making nice with a powerful player with a sizable platform who could easily become a huge problem for both him and his currently bipartisan bill. It is possible, however, that Blumenthal is trying to play a longer game, hoping to influence the man who both stands to influence everything in the incoming Trump administration and who currently influences everyone (or at least everyone on X) via the endless stream of pro-Trump, right-wing propaganda he posts. That, however, is a losing battle for obvious reasons: Musk has little affinity—to put it mildly—for progressives like Blumenthal, Democrats in general, or the policy goals of any left-leaning group or politician. Attempting to influence Musk, moreover, is a mug’s game. For every Democrat in his ear, there are a hundred (likely more) arch MAGA loyalists. 

Democrats like Blumenthal might better spend their time warning their constituents of the creeping power of technocrats like Musk, who are plotting to dismantle essential features of the federal government via draconian cuts to public services and welfare programs, while pushing legislation that would effectively allow them to regulate their own industries and policies that would make them vastly richer than they already are.  

Donald Trump’s sudden appointment of one of his staunchest allies, two-time failed MAGA candidate and former news anchor Kari Lake, to run the federally funded international broadcasting service Voice of America has resulted in widespread concern and outrage, amid fears that she could transform it into a reactionary propaganda arm of the Trump presidency. Lake, for her part, has done little to assuage those fears.

“I am honored that President Trump has asked me to lead the Voice of America,” Lake wrote in a statement on social media. “@VOANews is a vital international media outlet dedicated to advancing the interests of the United States by engaging directly with people across the globe and promoting democracy and truth.

“Under my leadership, the VOA will excel in its mission: chronicling America’s achievements worldwide,” she continued.

But rules passed in 2020 could get in the way of her plans. Recent regulations prevent the head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media from hiring or firing Voice of America’s network leadership without the express approval of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, a seven-person panel composed of presidential appointees, reported former Washington Post journalist Paul Farhi.

Of course, Trump has also not yet appointed anyone to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, further stretching the possibility of Lake’s appointment to the public network.

Meanwhile, Trump’s appointees to the not-yet-existent Department of Government Efficiency have promised to leverage recent Supreme Court decisions to slash and burn spending on beloved domestic public broadcasters. In a joint op-ed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy published in The Wall Street Journal last month, the duo said they would cut $500 million a year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, among other seismic blows to national programs.