BREATHING LESSONS:  A Justice Department review sparked by the police murder of George Floyd accuses the Minneapolis police of discriminating against Black and Native American citizens, killing people without reason, and violating the First Amendment rights of protesters and journalists. The result could be a court-ordered overhaul of the Minneapolis cops.

  The investigation and 89-page report go beyond the 2020 killing of Floyd, a black man, which led to outrage and protests across the country. Floyd had been stopped because a store clerk said he passed a counterfeit $20 bill. The Justice Department’s scathing report says the Minneapolis cops beat, shot, and detained people without justification, or accountability.

   Investigators found that officers used neck restraints even in incidents that did not lead to an arrest, and used their Tasers without warning on pedestrians and drivers who had committed minor offenses or no offense at all. 

  Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, speaking at a news conference in Minneapolis, said Floyd’s “death has had an irrevocable impact on the Minneapolis community, on our country and around the world,” and that “the patterns and practices we observed made what happened to George Floyd possible.”

  Floyd was the man whose last words “I can’t breathe” became a slogan for protest against police brutality along with “Defund the police.” The Justice Department investigators described “numerous incidents in which officers responded to a person’s statement that they could not breathe with a version of, ‘You can breathe; you’re talking right now.’”

CODE ORANGE:  Documents filed yesterday filed by the team prosecuting Donald Trump say the evidence they are prepared to give the defense as part of the normal process of discovery contains information about “ongoing investigations” that could “identify uncharged individuals.” They didn’t say who or what, but it’s the first on-the-record hint that more cases could be in the pipeline.

  Jim Trusty, one of Trump’s lawyers in his defamation suit against CNN, has bailed out, citing “irreconcilable differences between Counsel and Plaintiff.” Trusty had already resigned from representing Trump in the secret documents criminal case.

  But put one in the win column for Trump. The district attorney in Westchester County, NY has closed a long investigation into whether Trump and his companies undervalued the Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor to lower taxes. The investigation is being closed with no charges filed. 

THE WAR ROOM: Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin of Russia said that his military is so assured of beating back the Ukrainian counter offensive that there’s no need for him to use nuclear weapons. Putin told an audience of Russia’s business elite that Ukraine has “no chance” against Russian forces and western countries will get tired of supporting them. 

  “The use of nuclear weapons, of course, is possible, for Russia, it is possible if there is a threat to our territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty, the existence of the Russian state,” he said before adding, “We don’t have this need.”

THE OBIT PAGE: Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who in 1971 leaked to the NY Times the secret history of American lies and deceit about the failure of the Vietnam War in documents that became known as The Pentagon Papers, has died of pancreatic cancer at home in the Bay Area. He was 92.

  The 7,000 pages of documents revealed deception and cover-ups by a series of presidents and administrations.

  The publication of the papers set up a First Amendment collision between the Times and the Nixon administration, which claimed publication of the papers was an act of espionage. The Supreme Court ultimately held that it was an act of press freedom, protected by the Constitution.

  Ellsberg himself was tried in federal court for espionage and conspiracy. At the brink of jury deliberations, the judge threw out the case, citing illegal wiretapping by the government, a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist, and President Nixon’s offer to appoint the trial judge as director of the FBI.

  Ellsberg became a hero of the anti-war movement, his leak to the press a major factor in the US getting out of Vietnam. He later said, “There was at this time no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger. Thousands of young men were dying each year.”

THE SPIN RACK:  A jury has found Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018, guilty on all counts. The jury will consider life in prison or death starting June 26^th. — Greek authorities have arrested nine people in connection with the rollover of a small ship overloaded with migrants, resulting in hundreds of deaths. Many of the passengers were trapped below decks. The ship rolled and sank as its crew was refusing assistance from the Greek coast guard. — At least 37 people were killed and eight wounded when an extremist group from neighboring Congo attacked a high school in western Uganda. A dormitory was burned and food in a store was looted. — A 3-3 split decision by the Iowa Supreme Court over the state’s “fetal heartbeat” abortion cutoff leaves the legal limit at 20 weeks of pregnancy.

BELOW THE FOLD: While Arizona is pumping dry its groundwater to support a ballooning population, consider the following: A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters says that groundwater pumping all over the world has shifted the location of such a large mass of water that the Earth has tilted nearly 31.5 inches east between 1993 and 2010 alone. 

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