Unruly travelers face criminal charges and penalties, TSA warns
Federal officials are warning travelers to behave or face potential criminal penalties for unruly behavior.
The Transportation Security Administration stressed its “zero tolerance” policy in a release Thursday and said it may seek the maximum allowable criminal charges and civil penalties against violent passengers.
“Passengers do not arrive at an airport or board a plane with the intent of becoming unruly or violent,” Darby LaJoye, who is temporarily leading the agency, said in a statement. “However, what is an exciting return to travel for some may be a more difficult experience for others, which can lead to unexpected, and unacceptable, behaviors.”
The warning comes before the July 4 holiday weekend and amid a broader surge, with U.S. travel statistics moving toward pre-pandemic levels. On June 23, for example, TSA recorded 1.8 million travelers through checkpoints, compared with less than half a million on the same day last year and 2.6 million in 2019.
The agency said it plans to restart flight crew self-defense training next month to deter assaults — a program that had been paused due to COVID-19 restrictions.
The Federal Aviation Administration, too, has faced rising levels of “unruly behavior,” with some 3,100 reported incidents this year, the agency said in a recent release. It’s proposed a total of $563,800 in fines against at least 60 people. Some confrontations stemmed from the federal face mask mandate in place for public transportation, the FAA said.
—Bloomberg News
Anti-Trump Republicans launch new group to impact midterms
A group of Republicans unhappy with the course of the GOP is forming the Renew America Movement organization to recruit and support candidates in the most competitive 2022 House and Senate races.
The group plans to raise “tens of millions” of dollars to support or oppose candidates, regardless of party, to defeat “radical Republicans” who support former President Donald Trump in four to five Senate races and about two dozen House races in next year’s midterm elections. It will also recruit candidates to run in GOP primaries or as independents under the Renew America Movement banner.
Evan McMullin, who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2016 as an independent and is a leader of the effort, said the group wants to push the GOP back to its traditional principles and create a new party if necessary for those conservatives who believe the Republican Party has become too extreme.
“We are a growing minority of the political electorate but sufficient to decide the outcomes of the closest races in the Senate and the House,” said McMullin, a former chief policy director for the House Republican Conference.
—Bloomberg News
Judge throws out most of case alleging counterfeit ballots in Georgia's Fulton County
ATLANTA — A judge dismissed most of a lawsuit Thursday seeking a deep inspection of Fulton County absentee ballots from last year’s presidential election, a review pursued by voters trying to find fraud.
Superior Court Judge Brian Amero’s ruling jeopardizes the prospects for the ballot inspection to continue, though a plaintiff in the lawsuit said he believes it will soon move forward.
The case is an attempt to scrutinize 147,000 absentee ballots based on claims by Republican election observers who said they witnessed signs of counterfeit ballots or ballot stuffing during a manual recount of November’s election results. Election officials have said there’s no indication of fraud after multiple recounts and investigations.
An attorney for the Fulton elections board said the ruling prevents the possibility for an in-person review of absentee ballots using high-powered microscopes in the Georgia World Congress Center, as sought by those who believe fraud resulted in Democrat Joe Biden’s 12,000-vote win over Republican Donald Trump.
“That litigation is finished,” said Don Samuel, a prominent Atlanta attorney hired by the Fulton elections board. “Is there going to be an audit? Not right now ... There’s no discovery permitted. There’s no lawsuit pending anymore.”
Amero dismissed most claims against the county elections board, the county clerk and the county itself, deciding they couldn’t be sued under Georgia’s sovereign immunity laws, which limit when plaintiffs can turn to the courts for relief.
The judge left in place a previous order requiring the county to produce digital images of absentee ballots and other election records that are public documents under the Georgia Open Records Act.
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In Berlin, Blinken stresses the importance of learning from the Holocaust
BERLIN – Margot Friedlander survived the Nazis' labor camps in Germany, and then the pain of widowhood. In her 80s, she finally began to write down her memories so that no one would forget what happened in her native land nearly a century ago.
On Thursday, hours after she told her story in a ceremony marking a new U.S.-German initiative to educate people about the Holocaust, a visibly moved Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken asked for, and received, a copy of Friedlander's memoirs to read on the flight back to Washington, an aide said.
Blinken is in Berlin as part of a swing through Western Europe aimed at shoring up the United States' trans-Atlantic relationships after the rocky years of the Trump administration. The visit follows President Joe Biden's own trip to Europe last week, during which he assured NATO nations of Washington's support and solidarity.
In Berlin, Blinken added a stop at the city's striking Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a 200,000-square-foot landscape of 2,711 concrete blocks of various sizes commemorating the millions of Jews killed during the Nazis' reign of terror. Scholars say Germany has led the way in accepting responsibility for the Holocaust while other countries, such as Austria and Poland,remain more evasive about their roles in the Nazi-ordered genocide.
"We are helping to ensure that current and future generations learn about the Holocaust and learn from it," Blinken said of the new U.S.-German initiative.
Noting the rise in antisemitic rhetoric and social media posts during the COVID-19 pandemic, Blinken warned that the descent into something as ugly as Nazism is "not a sharp fall" but a "gradual descent into darkness."
He recalled the plight of Jews in Bialystok, Poland, where bigoted residents burned the beards of rabbis and torched synagogues long before World War II and the Holocaust. Then he recalled his own stepfather's family, who were rounded up in Bialystok and dispatched to death camps.
Only the boy who later married Blinken's mother survived.
—Los Angeles Times
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