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Citizen Frank
January 19, 2025
Good morning. It’s Sunday, January 19.
Important note: cf.org is rebranding to thefrank.com. Soon you’ll find us under our new name.
Three hostages, including one who survived the brutal Nova music festival massacre during the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, have been freed after the Israel-Hamas cease-fire deal went into effect following hours of uncertainty.
Romi Gonen, 23, Emily Damari, 28, and Doron Steinbrecher, 30, were handed over to the Israel Defense Forces by the Red Cross on Sunday after 471 days in captivity.
Earlier, Hamas terrorists transferred the women to the aid group’s trucks during a chaotic scene in Gaza.
President-elect Donald Trump and his team have drafted a slate of pardons for people convicted for their role in the January 6 Capitol attack to be issued on Day 1, shortly after Trump is sworn in as president, two sources familiar with the plans told CNN.
Trump has repeatedly said he planned to swiftly pardon people who were convicted for their role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. During a December interview with Time Magazine, Trump said: “I’ll be looking at J6 early on, maybe the first nine minutes.”
The extent of the initial pardons is still unclear; however, one of the sources described them as enough to be seen as “delivering on his long-held promise.” About 1,270 people have been convicted of January 6-related crimes, and the vast majority of those defendants pleaded guilty. Only a couple hundred are currently behind bars.
The $TRUMP memecoin — a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon — now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.
The coin (technically a token that’s issued on the Solana blockchain) has massively enriched Trump personally, enabled a mechanism for the crypto industry to funnel cash to him, and created a volatile financial asset that allows anyone in the world to financially speculate on Trump’s political fortunes.
After another massive overnight rally, as of Sunday morning Trump’s crypto holdings were worth as much as $58 billion on paper, enough — with his other assets — to make him one of the world’s 25 richest people.
TikTok said Sunday that it would be restoring service to U.S. users after blocking it the evening before.
In a statement, TikTok said its video platform was coming back online after President-elect Donald Trump provided the necessary assurances to the company’s service providers.
“In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service,” TikTok said in a post on X. “We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.”
President Joe Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s. Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.
Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said of Garvey: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of Black people “a sense of dignity and destiny.”
A federal judge appeared highly skeptical Friday of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s plan to show lawmakers the volume of special counsel Jack Smith’s report pertaining to his now dismissed criminal case against President-elect Donald Trump for hoarding classified documents.
With the clock counting down towards Trump’s inauguration on Monday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon expressed serious doubts about nearly every argument a Justice Department attorney put forward for allowing the department to show four congressional leaders the portion of Smith’s report covering the classified-information probe.
Over the course of a 90-minute public hearing, Cannon — a Trump appointee— repeatedly questioned the urgency of showing the report to lawmakers in the coming days. The judge also challenged the safeguards the Justice Department says are in place to keep the report confidential and pressed for information on how prosecutors ensure that the report doesn’t contain information protected by grand jury secrecy.
Liberal talk show host Bill Maher argued that liberals who usually politicize tragedies are silent when Democratic leaders are to blame.
Many California residents, including celebrities, have lost their homes in the Pacific Palisades area as wildfires continue to rage there and elsewhere in Los Angeles County, burning more than 27,000 acres, destroying over 10,000 structures and killing at least 25 people, according to local officials.
While LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have taken some criticism for their management before and during the devastating fires, Maher argued in a TMZ interview that more critics need to speak out and hold liberal leaders responsible.
Tens of millions of residents along the East Coast are bracing for several inches of snow Sunday followed by dangerously cold temperatures that will grip much of the country from the Northern Plains to the tip of Maine.
Winter storm warnings issued by the National Weather Service have already gone into effect for parts of the Mid-Atlantic through Monday morning, with the forecast projecting up to a half foot (15 centimeters) of snow. Warnings will begin in New England on Sunday afternoon, with parts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Connecticut seeing as much as 10 inches (25 centimeters) of snow.
Marc Chenard, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in College Park Maryland, projected that as many as 70 million residents will be under some kind of winter storm warning in the coming days including in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Large cities such as Philadelphia, New York and Boston could see several inches of snow this evening with the highest totals accumulating outside of major cities.
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