
Maryland NAACP leader blasts Gov. Larry Hogan's posthumous pardons of lynching victims as 'political posturing'
CNN
The head of Maryland's NAACP on Sunday lambasted Gov. Larry Hogan's posthumous pardon of lynching victims as "political posturing," criticizing the Republican governor for issuing a blanket pardon of dozens of the state's Black victims even though many were never convicted of any crimes, but merely charged or accused of wrongdoing before they were killed.
The scathing criticism comes after Hogan on Saturday issued the blanket pardons for Howard Cooper, a 15-year-old Black child who was hanged from a sycamore tree after he was convicted of raping and assaulting a White woman, and 33 other victims of racial lynching in Maryland between 1854 and 1933. According to a historical marker erected during Saturday's news conference, Cooper faced an all-White jury, which reached a guilty verdict in under a minute despite the fact the victim did not testify she was raped. Cooper was killed before his attorneys had an opportunity to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The Justice Department’s leadership asked career prosecutors in Florida Tuesday to volunteer over the “next several days” to help to redact the Epstein files, in the latest internal Trump administrationpush toward releasing the hundreds of thousands of photos, internal memos and other evidence around the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The US State Department on Tuesday imposed visa sanctions on a former top European Union official and employees of organizations that combat disinformation for alleged censorship – sharply ratcheting up the Trump administration’s fight against European regulations that have impacted digital platforms, far-right politicians and Trump allies, including Elon Musk.











