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Former President Donald Trump speaks after returning from a break during his civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court on Oct. 18 in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images hide caption

Former President Donald Trump speaks after returning from a break during his civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court on Oct. 18 in New York City.

The Justice Department urged a judge Thursday to reject Donald Trump's bid to dismiss the federal election interference case against him, arguing for the bedrock principle that "no one is above the law."

"He is subject to the federal criminal laws like more than 330 million other Americans, including Members of Congress, federal judges, and everyday citizens," wrote assistant special counsel James Pearce.

Earlier this month, Trump's legal team moved to dismiss four felony charges against him in Washington, D.C., on the ground that he should enjoy presidential "immunity." The Supreme Court has not ruled on such a claim of absolute immunity from a current or former president.

Trump's legal team has suggested that they may seek review of the issue before the nation's highest court, which could also help him win a delay of the trial scheduled for March 4, 2024.

But in their new filing, prosecutors wrote that the legal issue is not a close or complicated one. Rather, they said, Trump mischaracterized the allegations against him and vastly overstated the historical and constitutional support for his claims.

Under Justice Department interpretations, sitting presidents enjoy only temporary immunity from prosecution that ends after they depart the White House, the special counsel team said. To extend such protections to a former president would "effectively preclude any form of accountability for a president who commits crimes at the end of his term of office."

If the court accepts Trump's sweeping arguments, the Justice Department said, it would shield presidents who take bribes in exchange for lucrative federal contracts for their family members; presidents who instruct the FBI to plant evidence on political adversaries; and presidents who sell nuclear secrets to foreign rivals. The logic is particularly troubling in a president's second term, the special counsel team wrote, when a president no longer needs to face voters in another election, removing yet another check on his behavior.

"Immunity from criminal prosecution would be particularly inappropriate where, as here, the former president is alleged to have engaged in criminal conduct aimed at overturning the results of a presidential election in order to remain in office," assistant special counsel Pearce wrote in the filing late Thursday.

The indictment handed up by a federal grand jury placed Trump at the center of a conspiracy to overturn the election results and exploit an atmosphere that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, injuring more than 140 law enforcement officers. Trump stands accused of conspiring against the government he once led and of violating the civil rights of millions of American voters. He has pleaded not guilty.

"Breaking 234 years of precedent, the incumbent administration has charged President Trump for acts that lie not just within the 'outer perimeter,' but at the heart of his official responsibilities as President," wrote Trump attorneys John Lauro and Todd Blanche in their Oct. 5 motion to dismiss the election interference case. "In doing so, the prosecution does not, and cannot, argue that President Trump's efforts to ensure election integrity, and to advocate for the same, were outside the scope of his duties."

In his bid to dismiss the case, Trump's lawyers argued that no other American president had faced federal criminal prosecution, putting history and tradition on the side of presidential immunity. But prosecutors said it may be that Trump's unprecedented legal problems could simply reflect his unprecedented behavior. In all, he faces criminal charges in four separate jurisdictions: Florida; Fulton County, Georgia; New York; and Washington, D.C.

Lawyers working for special counsel Jack Smith cited the words of prominent conservative legal thinkers and Republican lawmakers during Trump's impeachment, including Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who said only weeks after the Capitol siege: "We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation, and former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one."

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Trump is not 'above the law' and should not receive blanket immunity, DOJ says - NPR

Donald Trump just became his own hypeman in the trials he faces for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The ex-president promised yet again on Friday to produce irrefutable evidence in court that he got robbed of a victory after lying about his election loss for three years.

Massive information and 100% evidence will be made available during the Corrupt Trials started by our Political Opponent, he wrote on Truth Social. We will never let 2020 happen again. Look at the result, OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED. MAGA!!!

Trump even threw in what many people identified as thinly veiled racism.

Does anyone notice that the Election Rigging Biden Administration never goes after the Riggers, but only after those that want to catch and expose the Rigging dogs, he said.

Following a similar statement about riggers in August, critics, including his former communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, accused the ex-president of using a racist dogwhistle to appeal to bigots. Riggers, of course, is just a letter away from a heinous slur.

Weve been here before with Trump and his promises to verify his baseless claims of a stolen election. He recently announced a press conference to present a CONCLUSIVE report that would lead to a complete EXONERATION. But he canceled it.

Trump cant really cancel a trial, so maybe well see that purported evidence after all. Promises, promises.

In the meantime, potential legal jeopardy mounted for the autocratic ex-president and current Republican presidential front-runner. Trumps co-defendants Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro both pleaded guilty in the Georgia election conspiracy case and agreed to testify against their alleged accomplices, which would include Trump.

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Donald Trump Promises 100% Evidence Of 2020 Fraud With A ... - Yahoo News

Mr. Trumps adversaries often look to the courts for relief, but theres no remedy there for his tirades. The First Amendment protects all but the most explicit incitements to violence, so Mr. Trump has little reason to fear that prosecutors will bring charges against him for those remarks.

The most notorious moment of Mr. Trumps presidency also demonstrated the limits of relying on the courts as a meaningful check on his provocations. In his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, he urged his supporters to fight like hell, and many did just that at the Capitol. But they paid a price, and he didnt. In yet another example of his life without consequences, more than 1,000 people have been charged for their conduct on Jan. 6, and many if not most of them broke the law because they thought thats what the president at the time wanted. Still, the special counsel Jack Smith refrained from charging Mr. Trump with inciting the violence, undoubtedly because of the Constitutions broad protection for freedom of speech. Incitements like Mr. Trumps, even if they are not crimes in themselves, can have dangerous consequences, as they did on Jan. 6.

Angry people, especially those predisposed to violence, can be set off by encouragement that falls well short of the legal standard for criminal incitement. To see the consequences of such constitutionally protected provocation, one need only look to the case of Timothy McVeigh, who set off the bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people on April 19, 1995. More than a decade before the attack, when Mr. McVeigh was still in high school, he first read The Turner Diaries, a novel about a right-wing rebellion against the federal government. Earl Turner, the hero and narrator of the novel, ignites a civil war by setting off a truck bomb next to the F.B.I. building in Washington which planted the idea for what Mr. McVeigh later did in Oklahoma City. After Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Mr. McVeighs revulsion at the new president prompted him to move the idea from the back of his mind to a definite plan of attack.

Mr. McVeigh was specifically outraged by the F.B.I.s raid on the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Texas, which led to the death of 82 Branch Davidians and four federal agents and ended on April 19, 1993, and by Mr. Clintons signing of a ban on assault weapons, which took place the following year.

Mr. McVeighs anger was boiling at a time of incendiary political language in the mid-1990s, when, for example, Newt Gingrich, who would go on to become speaker of the House in 1995, said: People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day. In particular, on his long drives across the country, Mr. McVeigh became a dedicated listener to Rush Limbaugh, whose radio talk show was in its heyday. Mr. Limbaugh was saying things like, The second violent American revolution is just about I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart is just about that far away. Of course, all of this rhetoric, from the words of the novel to those of Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Limbaugh, was protected by the First Amendment.

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Opinion | Donald Trump Is Going to Get Someone Killed - The New York Times

A new cybersecurity guidance from the National Security Agency is calling on network defenders of the Department of Defense, Defense Industrial Base and National Security System to implement zero trust security on their information technology devices.

NSA on Thursday published an information sheet recommending device security assessment and enhancement through zero trust principles including real-time inspection, remote access protection and patch management.

The cybersecurity information sheet, or CSI, discusses the device pillar of the ZT framework, which ensures that hardware that is within an environment or connecting to resources undergoes strict location, enumeration, authentication and assessment.

An organizations registered IT hardware and software should be inventoried along with their versions and patch levels. They should also be part of acceptance testing and deprovisioning before retirement.

Agencies must regularly check their devices compliance to internal policies and general standards, and update their configuration and firmware versions if necessary, NSA said. Obsolete encryption could lead to easy accessibility and subsequently data breach.

The CSI is also applicable to non-government organizations that could face threats from sophisticated malicious actors, according to NSA.

Read more here:
NSA Cybersecurity Information Sheet Pushes for Zero Trust Security in DOD Devices - Executive Gov

A new advisory from signals intelligence and cybersecurity experts at the National Security Agency (NSA) highlights the top 10 most common cybersecurity misconfigurations in large organisations including regular exposure of insecure Active Directory Certificate Services.

It comes as the NSAs Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce warned that if your infrastructure cant survive a user clicking a link, you are doomed.

"Im the director of cybersecurity at NSA and you can definitely craft an email link I will click he added on X writing as generative AI models make it far easier for non-native speakers to craft convincing phishing emails and as such campaigns remain highly effective for threat actors.

The list is a useful guidebook to those seeking to secure IT estates and is no doubt based in part on the NSAs extensive experience of breaching services, as well as support defending CNI. To The Stack, it is also a crisp reminder that strict organisational discipline is critical for cyber hygiene.

Too many network devices with user access via apps or web portals still hide default credentials for built-in administrative accounts. (Cisco, were looking at you, you, you. (Others are also regularly guilty.) The problem extends to printers and scanners with hard coded default credentials on them but are set up with privileged domain accounts loaded so that users can scan and send documents to a shared drive).

NSA says: Modify the default configuration of applications and appliances before deployment in a production environment . Refer to hardening guidelines provided by the vendor and related cybersecurity guidance (e.g., DISA's Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) and configuration guides)

More specifically on default permissions risks, NSA says it regularly says issues with configuration of Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS); a Microsoft feature used to manage Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificates, keys, and encryption inside of AD environments.

Malicious actors can exploit ADCS and/or ADCS template misconfigurations to manipulate the certificate infrastructure into issuing fraudulent certificates and/or escalate user privileges to domain administrator privileges it warns, pointing to ADCS servers running with web-enrollment enabled; ADCS templates where low-privileged users have enrollment rights and other associated issues with external guidance on a handful of known escalation paths here, here and here.

Ensure the secure configuration of ADCS implementations. Regularly update and patch the controlling infrastructure (e.g., for CVE-2021-36942), employ monitoring and auditing mechanisms, and implement strong access controls to protect the infrastructure. Disable NTLM on all ADCS servers. Disable SAN for UPN Mapping. If not required, disable LLMNR and NetBIOS in local computer security settings or by group policy.

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Top 10 misconfigurations: An NSA checklist for CISOs - The Stack