Bugaluu :: News

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

House Democrats are pressing SpaceX and its CEO, Elon Musk, for answers on allegations coming from Ukrainian intelligence officials that Russian forces are using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service in their ongoing war with Ukraine.

The antenna of the Starlink satellite-based broadband system is seen in the snow in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Feb. 16, 2023. (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images)

On Wednesday, March 6, House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) sent a letter to SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell, calling for her to address how Russian forces may have obtained SpaceX terminals.

Starlink terminals connect to SpaceX’s constellation of thousands of satellites operating in low Earth orbit. SpaceX began supplying thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine after Russian invasion forces entered the country in February 2022, helping keep Ukraine online even as Russian attacks degraded their existing telecommunications and internet infrastructure.

Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) first raised concerns about Russian forces using the Starlink service on Feb. 11. GUR spokesman Andriy Yusov stated at the time that Ukrainian intelligence officials had intercepted radio transmissions in which Russian soldiers described widespread use of the satellite internet service around the contested Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.

“This is starting to become systemic,” Mr. Yusov said of Russia’s alleged use of the Starlink service.

Mr. Musk has denied the allegations, stating, “To the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia.”

But Mr. Raskin and Mr. Garcia are continuing to press the question. The two lawmakers noted a report last month by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which said “Russia routinely relies on evasive or deceptive tactics such as the use of third-party intermediaries or transshipment points” to evade U.S. export controls against the country.

The two lawmakers noted Mr. Musk’s denial, but reiterated Mr. Yusov’s characterization of Russia’s Starlink usage as “systemic.”

“We are concerned that you may not have appropriate guardrails and policies in place to ensure your technology is neither acquired directly or indirectly, nor used illegally by Russia,” their letter to Ms. Shotwell reads.

The Democrats called on SpaceX to reveal how many reports or complaints it has received alleging Russian use of the Starlink service, as well as how many of those complaints the company investigated. The lawmakers also pressed SpaceX to explain its review process for such complaints, detail its safeguards against illicit acquisitions of Starlink terminals, what measures SpaceX advises to take when it determines an actor has illicitly acquired a Starlink terminal, and what work SpaceX has taken on its own and with the U.S. federal government to prevent such illicit acquisition and use of Starlink services. The lawmakers called on Ms. Shotwell to provide SpaceX’s response by March 20.

How Russia May Have Obtained Starlink Terminals

Not cited in the Democrats’ March 6 letter is a Feb. 13 blog post in which Ukraine’s GUR service posits intermediaries in Arab countries may be facilitating the transfers of Starlink terminals to Russian forces. That blog post describes an audio recording in which a Russian “occupier” is quoted as saying “the Arabs bring everything: wires, Wi-Fi, router… .” According to the GUR blog post, this same Russian individual reportedly went on to say the cost to obtain a Starlink device is 200,000 Russian Rubles (about $2,200).

While the GUR shared an audio recording in their Feb. 11 blog post, they did not provide the audio recording described in the Feb. 13 blog post, which might provide further clarity about how Starlink terminals may be ending up in Russian hands.

NTD News reached out to Mr. Raskin and Mr. Garcia’s offices, seeking more details about what evidence is guiding their SpaceX probe. Neither lawmaker’s office responded by press time.

More than two years on, the war between Russia and Ukraine has seen territory repeatedly change hands. Defense materials, from combat vehicles to weapons systems and items like Starlink terminals, may also see changes in ownership throughout the course of the fighting.

Among NTD News’ list of questions for Mr. Garcia was whether he and Mr. Raskin had ruled out the possibility that Russian forces had acquired Starlink terminals from defeated Ukrainian troops.

NTD News also reached out to SpaceX for comment about the possibility of Starlink terminals being captured on the battlefield, as well as evidence it may have of illicit transfers of these terminals through intermediaries. Likewise, SpaceX did not respond by press time.

The Biden campaign has admitted to a “shift” among the electorate which has made it no “surprise” that the president is losing key voters to former President Donald Trump, based on a recent New York Times/Siena poll.

The poll, conducted Feb. 25 – Feb. 28, found that just one out of four registered voters believes “the country is moving in the right direction.” It also showed that Trump has been breaking the Democrat stronghold among women, which are now evenly split.

Speaking with CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer, campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu first questioned the accuracy of the poll, before seemingly explaining it away as “tectonic shifts.”

“Well, first of all, I‘m not sure that‘s accurate, but assuming that some of those things are occurring, it‘s not really a big surprise. As you know, because you‘re an expert in political science, there are tectonic shifts going on amongst the electorates.“

Robot mode: Engage

He then rattled off a talking point – suggesting that “women in this country understand that Trump has declared war on them by appointing three Supreme Court justices that have reversed Roe versus Wade, that has resulted in Alabama outlawing in vitro fertilization.”

“Or in Ohio, police officers [having] gone into a woman‘s house to look into a toilet because they’ve now criminalized miscarriages. So now you see a huge swing, as should be expected, of women basically saying, ‘Why is the government in the business of my reproductive health,'” he continued.

Watch (via the Daily Caller):

According to Landrieu, Biden will “fight for every vote,” adding “The president’s going to talk about his record, how when he came into office, what he had to deal with, what it is that he put together in a bipartisan way — really, that has been second to none — and then he‘s going to talk about the future. But the bigger point that Joe Biden wants to tell America is that America is worth fighting for, that democracy [is at] risk, and that when we do things together we can do big things.”

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Boiling tap water is good for more than just killing certain harmful pathogens. It can also destroy contaminants such as microplastics and chemicals, making drinking water safer to drink.

(Jenn Segal)

A new research letter published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters indicates that boiling tap water for just five minutes could reduce the amount of microplastics by up to 90 percent. Researchers from Guangzhou Medical University and the Center for Environmental Microplastics Studies in China recommend boiling water in nonplastic electric kettles on gas stoves to remove impurities such as polystyrene, polyethylene, and polypropylene.

According to the researchers, boiling water has been used since ancient times as a purification method in some Asian countries. “This simple boiling-water strategy can ‘decontaminate’ [nano- and microplastics] from household tap water and has the potential for harmlessly alleviating human intake of [nano- and microplastics] through water consumption,” they wrote.

Harder Water Captures More Microplastics

Water of a certain alkalinity and hardness typically produces incrustants—insoluble mineral remnants like calcium carbonate—upon boiling. For the study, the researchers hypothesized that calcium carbonate encounters nanoplastics as it crystallizes in hot water. The calcium carbonate then encapsulates the nanoplastics as it becomes the flaky crust you sometimes see at the bottom of your tea kettle.

The study showed that boiling hard tap water containing 300 milligrams per liter (mg/L-1) of calcium carbonate reduced nano- and microplastics by nearly 90 percent, while water containing 80 mg/L-1 reduced particles by 84 percent. In soft water samples containing less than 60 mg/L-1 of calcium carbonate, boiling still reduced plastics by over 25 percent.

The Problem With Millions of Tons of Plastic

Because of our heavy reliance on plastic, nanoplastics and microplastics are common in groundwater and surface water around the globe. Microplastics are truly everywhere, having been detected as far south as Antarctica and north as the Arctic. These insidious particles have even been detected at the peak of Mt. Everest and down in the Mariana Trench. In fact, plastic comprises the largest portion of marine garbage; according to a 2020 study published in Science of the Total Environment, more than 8 million tons of plastic entered the ocean in 2017. That number represented over 33 times more plastic than the amount that had entered the ocean in 2015, indicating a disturbingly worsening problem.

As plastic disintegrates, microscopic pieces are released into the environment. Microplastics are typically less than 5 millimeters in size but can break down into even smaller pieces called nanoplastics. Nanoplastics are nearly impossible to see at 1 micrometer in size. The micro and nano pieces have been found in water, air, soil, food, and table salt, according to some studies.

The health effects of nano- and microplastics haven’t been fully realized. Still, research has suggested that their accumulation in the human body can cause insulin resistance, liver metabolic disorder, DNA damage, organ dysfunction, immune response issues, neurotoxicity, and reproductive harm.

While the research team only focused on three types of nanoparticles, the discovery is a boon for public health. The team estimated that people who boil their water take in two to five times less nanoplastics than those who do not.

“Drinking boiled water apparently is a viable long-term strategy for reducing global exposure to [nano- and microplastics],” the research team wrote, adding that it is likely more effective than drinking bottled water, especially bottled in plastic. The average liter-sized bottle of water contains 240,000 pieces of nanoplastic, which is 10 to 100 times more particles than previously thought.

Two weeks after Rivian Automotive Inc. announced a disappointing production forecast and another round of job cuts, the company’s CEO revealed that the construction of a $5 billion factory in Georgia would be put on hold to reduce costs. 

CEO RJ Scaringe unveiled a crossover EV called the R3. The new model will be priced lower than the R2 to increase affordability and boost sales. 

Scaringe also surprised investors by announcing its new factory at the Georgia site east of Atlanta would be shelved.

“Rivian’s Georgia plant remains an extremely important part of its strategy to scale production of R2 and R3. The timing for resuming construction is expected to be later to focus its teams on the capital-efficient launch of R2 in Normal, Illinois,” the filing said. 

The filing noted that the decision reduced capital expenditures for the automaker by $2.25 billion and “improved cash visibility.”

“Our Georgia site remains really important to us,” Scaringe said, adding, “It’s core to the scaling across all these vehicles, between R2, R3 and R3X. And we’re so appreciative of all the partnerships we’ve had there.”

No timetable was provided to investors about restarting work on the Georgia plant. Local governments have offered Rivian $1.5 billion in incentives to create thousands of jobs at the new plant. 

Rivian’s shares jumped more than 13% on Thursday. In premarket trading in New York on Friday, shares are flat. Year-to-date performance has been awful, down 47%. 

Short interest has surged in Rivian over the past year. Current data from Bloomberg shows 112.4 million shares short, or about 14.5% of the float is short. 

Tom Narayan, an RBC Capital Markets analyst, warned in a note this week that Rivian’s financial implications of a lower-priced EV remain uncertain. 

“Currently, R1 is losing money,” Narayan said, adding, “The critical question is how will Rivian be able to produce R2 profitably at the $45,000 price point?”

Last month, analyst Adam Jonas at Morgan Stanley penned a note titled “Can EV Slowdown Trigger Auto M&A Wave?” 

“EV sentiment is extremely negative… and will eventually deteriorate further, in our view. Legacy OEMs must find a way to balance EV relevancy with capital discipline. Full OEM mergers are complex, politically sensitive and tough to execute. Could ‘merging’ EV projects be more reasonable?” Jonas said.

Consolidation is certainly a theme in the EV space this year. 

Victor Davis Hanson’s calm and reasoned response with Tucker Carlson to President Biden’s SOTU address is worth every second:

Victor Davis Hanson discusses with Tucker Carlson, Joe Biden’s SOTU address.
Never has he seen a more angry speech to our country.
Credit: these two awesome Americans. @TuckerCarlson @VDHanson pic.twitter.com/9xUKeuJ2cn

— Big Fish (@BigFish3000) March 8, 2024

But the professor put digital pen to paper in a post on X this afternoon, laying out all the details.

A demagogic fuming Biden gave another Phantom of the Opera speech blasting conservatives for all the destruction that he has caused and has resulted in his own historic unpopularity.

All too aware that he was confused and incoherent, his handlers felt that the antidote was to come out barking and bellowing at his imaginary enemies.

Any Never Trumper who would vote for such a screeching maniac is suicidal. The night’s nadir? Joe, of the Hunter-Biden family consortium, damned the money-grubbing “rich” who “don’t pay their fair share of taxes”—all of this when his own son is now facing multiple felony counts for not paying any income tax at all! And Joe himself has received lots of family money without paying tax on such “loan repayments”.

In truth, Biden gave the most livid state-of-the-union address in modern memory, a surreal teleprompted rant from a “get off my grass” old man. At points, he started howling at the seated opposition and even called out Supreme Court Justices. Determined not to reveal cognitive decline, Biden instead came late to the podium shouting nonstop, grimacing in reptilian style for over an hour.

If the planned Adderall-fueled screaming was to prove he was still alive, most would have preferred his drowsy incoherence.

But mostly the speech was one of abject lies as he either blamed all his disasters on others or claimed they were his greatest achievements.

Deficits? Why does he think we have high inflation and high interest rates after he took office? The debt was $28 trillion when he came in and now after just 3 years it is nearly $35—and is now growing by $1 trillion every 100 days. At the current rate a two-term Biden presidency would have in aggregate added $22 trillion more to national debt.

Ukraine? Biden started out with Ukraine, not inflation, not the border, not crime. Does he remember he suspended military aid to Ukraine upon taking office? Does he know that Putin did not invade a neighboring country in just one administration of the last four?  Does he know why? Does he recall his humiliation in Afghanistan that green lighted

Putin? There are now 700,000 combined casualties in Ukraine and so what is the plan to end our Verdun? Another 6-month-long “spring offensive” against fortified lines?

Abortion? Biden screamed that the Dobbs decision outlaws abortion and threatens women’s lives when it allows any state to let its own people determine their own laws. Is Trump’s plan to let the states decide and to favor a 16-week ban more sensible than Biden’s abortion on demand that would allow some 5,000-10,000 partial birth or post-21 weeks abortions?

The Border? Do we remember Mayorkas bragging in detail how Biden rescinded all of Trump executive orders (he listed them by name) to destroy the border and let in 8-10 million illegal aliens? Biden campaigned on just that, calling on illegal aliens  to “surge” the border.

Inflation? It is up 17% since he took office! Prices of the stuff of life have risen 30%—staple foods, fuel, appliances and care, shelter, mortgages. etc. January 6? In Bidenland a buffoonish afternoon riot now trumps Pearl Harbor—or the 120 days of looting, rioting, violence, death, and injury of summer 2020?

Gaza? Basically Hamas murders, rapes, tortures, and mutilates1,200 Jews, takes 250 hostages, rapes and murders untold numbers of them, is shielded by civilians beneath mosques, schools, and hospitals, and then the US blames Israel for retaliating. Biden cites bogus Hamas fatality figures, and promises to build a US port on the Gaza coast to pour in massive aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza.

This furious speech was a preview of the 2024 campaign. The Democratic nominee will run on abortion, January 6, and the ‘booming’ economy, hope leftwing prosecutors can bankrupt or incarcerate Trump, and ensure that in all the swing states 70 percent of the electorate do not vote in person on Election Day.

Part 1 – Billion dollar bungles

In February, The Sunday Times interviewed the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Antonio Neri. The story highlights that HPE, once a Silicon Valley pioneer, is now a fallen giant, completely eclipsed by the likes of Google, Amazon and Meta.

Hewlett Packard was one of the very first Palo Alto companies. Indeed, the garage in which Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began working together in the late 1930s is dubbed “the birthplace of Silicon Valley”. The two electrical engineering graduates from Stanford University initially produced sound equipment for Walt Disney Studios.

The HP garage, famous for being the epicenter of a technology revolution.

Fast forward to the end of the 1990s, Hewlett Packard was a global company, known primarily for its personal computers and printers. It employed over 80,000 people, generating $48bn in net revenues, and had a market capitalization in excess of $17 billion.

Yet in the first decade of the 21st century, things began to go badly wrong for HP. It went through four CEOs from 2005 – 2011. Its reputation and its share price took a battering to the extent that it has never recovered its standing.

In his interview, Mr Neri acknowledges that the company lost its direction and failed to capitalize on trends like cloud, IoT and infrastructure. Mr Neri’s first big move was to acquire a company called Juniper Networks, described by The Sunday Times as “audacious”. HPE’s stock has fallen 15 per cent in the weeks since the deal was announced. “It’s a defining moment for the company and for me as a leader,” says Mr Neri, HPE’s biggest deal since the Compaq merger of 2002.

The Juniper deal brings more than faint echoes of the ghosts of HP acquisitions past. A bullish leader keen to make a big strategic play coupled with investor skepticism has been a repeat story for the company.

HP’s track record in acquisitions over the last two decades makes for painful reading. From the early 2000s, the company’s history is pock-marked with bungled acquisitions. The purchases of Compaq, Electronic Data Systems, Palm and Autonomy completely failed, caused internal turmoil and provoked shareholder outrage.

It is worth revisiting these stories to show where HP went so badly wrong and to underline that Mr Neri would be wise not to gloss over the case history of his company’s failed M&A.

Let’s start with the Compaq deal in 2001.

At the time, Hewlett Packard under the leadership of Carly Fiorina, who had been in post since 1999. HP had entered a period of struggles, with stock in decline and failed attempts to grow its services business. In September 2001, it agreed to buy Compaq for US$24.2 billion. The aim was to create a giant capable of competing with IBM, Dell and Gateway.

The investment community did not react well, plainly unconvinced by Fiorina’s vision. In the two days after the announcement, HP’s share price dropped 21.5%. Analysts could not see the logic in a high-margin printer business purchasing a company that was barely eking out a profit in personal computers. The $24.2 billion price tag was thought to be far too high in any case.

Opposition spread to HP’s shareholders. Remarkably, the sons of the two founders personally fought against the deal. Walter Hewlett saw that personal computers were low-margin and posed a risk to HP. David W. Packard, meanwhile, voiced concern about the number of expected lay-offs – totalling 9,000. He thought such a move ran totally counter to HP’s long-established values and would have appalled his father and Bill Hewlett.

In the event, shareholders did agree to the deal, but only by a wafer-thin margin of 2.8%. Claims of vote-buying involving Deutsche Bank flew around immediately after the vote, which further sullied the Compaq purchase. The SEC later fined Deutsche Bank $750,000 for “failing to disclose a material conflict of interest in its voting of client proxies” during the deal.

The view in the aftermath was that HP did indeed pay far too much for Compaq. This article in the Inquirer from 2003 analyses the financial performance after the deal, summarising that the virtues of the deal that HP peddled had not, at that point, materialised in a meaningful way.

By 2005, a full three years after the deal, the promised profits and shareholder returns were still not there. HP’s stock was still lagging far behind IBM and Dell and so Carly Fiorina was ousted in February of that year. She herself admitted that “buying Compaq hasn’t paid off for HP’s investors. And there’s no easy way out.”

The acquisition of Palm in 2010 was another catastrophe.

HP’s then CEO, Mark Hurd, was hugely enthusiastic about the deal to buy Palm for $1.2 billion. At the time, Palm was already struggling to compete with emerging smartphone giants like Apple, which had released the iPhone in 2007.

HP’s press release about the deal stated it would make the company a player in a fast-growing segment “with Palm’s innovative webOS platform and family of smartphones”. Hurd saw it as a way to diversify from the printer business. However, CFO Cathie Lesjak didn’t share his view and HP never committed the amount of investment into Palm required to make its new products a success.

To make matters worse, in August 2010, mere months after the deal, Mark Hurd suddenly resigned amid misconduct allegations. Hurd was the primary advocate and driver for a thorough integration of Palm, in particular webOS, into the HP business. With him gone, the odds of the integration being carried out successfully were drastically cut.

The HP TouchPad – a tablet device that Hurd had wanted created with Palm’s technology – was released in 2011. It was a consumer flop of epic proportions. A review on The Verge said, “the stability and smoothness of the user experience is not up to par with the iPad… coupled with the minuscule number of quality apps available at launch make this a bit of a hard sell right now.”

It took only six weeks after the launch of the TouchPad for Hurd’s successor, Leo Apotheker, to kill it. The company discontinued the device and ripped up all plans for  similar consumer hardware products.  

In 2011, HP wrote down US$1.67bn following its decision to wind down the device business – $0.4bn more than it paid for Palm. As AllThingsDigital put it “that was $1.2 billion well spent…”

The story of the Electronic Data Systems (EDS) acquisition was primarily one of poor integration and bad management.

In May 2008, HP bought EDS for $13.9bn. The aim was to bolster HP’s IT services business.

HP’s major misstep was to lay off so many talented people who had worked at EDS. There was a culture clash, too. As one executive present during the integration told Computer Weekly years after the deal, “EDS had its problems… but their attitude was to deliver exceptional customer service. HP was of the attitude that ‘if we are big enough, we set the standard’.”

In the same piece, EDS’ former financial services division head said HP fixated on short-term revenues rather than building long-term customer relationships. The loss of EDS staff compounded this issue, as they held strong customer relationships built up over time. Another analyst told the FT that what happened to EDS was a “travesty”.

The conclusion of the EDS story was not a pretty one. In August 2012, HP announced it was taking an $8bn write-down of its services business, dominated by the former EDS. One analyst said: “the charge for EDS shows what a mess that acquisition was.”

EDS was a case of poor integration, but the acquisition of Autonomy was on another level. It highlights the violent lurches between hardware, software and services in HP’s strategy during the first few years of the 2000s. It underlines the weak position HP was in and the boardroom dramas that had become commonplace. And it proved to be the most controversial of all of HP’s ill-fated purchases, resulting in more than a decade of litigation.

*  *  *

In the next article in the series, we’ll look at the origin of the deal and how it unravelled, causing the downfall of Leo Apotheker.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal appeals court in the District of Columbia has issued an order allowing three Jan. 6 lawsuits to proceed against former President Donald Trump after a court rejected his assertion of presidential immunity.

Former President Donald Trump sits in New York State Supreme Court during the civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization, in New York City on Jan. 11, 2024. (Peter Foley/AFP via Getty Images)

A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an order on March 8, allowing the three consolidated appeals to be “removed from abeyance” and approving motions for summary affirmance, meaning removing a temporary hold on the cases and allowing them to proceed.

The lawsuits that are now allowed to proceed are Moore v. Trump, Kirkland v. Trump, and Tabron v. Trump.

In all three civil suits, law enforcement officers are seeking damages based on the premise that President Trump incited a mob to storm the Capitol, leading to a violent incident in which they sustained various injuries and suffered harm, including emotional distress.

President Trump has denied calling for violence on Jan. 6, pointing to remarks he made encouraging his supporters to demonstrate “peacefully and patriotically.”

‘Matters of Public Concern’

The judges noted in their March 8 order that the merits of the three parties’ positions “are so clear as to warrant summary action,” and that the cases can proceed based on a Dec. 1 appeals court decision in Blassingame v. Trump that President Trump is not immune to lawsuits over the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol.

In Blassingame v. Trump, the former president’s attorneys had argued that he should be granted immunity because his alleged actions around Jan. 6 amounted to official speech on “matters of public concern.”

The judges’ reasoning in that case was that the former president’s actions leading up to and on Jan. 6 were part of his campaign for a second term in the White House and not an official presidential act.

“In arguing that he is entitled to official-act immunity in the cases before us, President Trump does not dispute that he engaged in his alleged actions up to and on January 6 in his capacity as a candidate. But he thinks that does not matter,” U.S. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan, appointed under President Barack Obama, wrote in the Dec. 1 ruling.

“Rather, in his view, a president’s speech on matters of public concern is invariably an official function, and he was engaged in that function when he spoke at the January 6 rally and in the leadup to that day. We cannot accept that rationale.”

Later, a similar order denying presidential immunity in Jan. 6 cases was issued on Dec. 29, in a lawsuit filed in 2021 by Capitol Police veteran Conrad Smith and seven of his colleagues.

“On appeal, the only question is whether President Trump has demonstrated his entitlement to official-act immunity,” reads the Dec. 29 order, which was signed by a three-judge panel consisting of Judge Srinivasan and Judges Judith Rogers and Gregory Katsas.

The judges in that case laid out a similar rationale for denying President Trump’s argument that he should be protected from liability because his statements and actions on Jan. 6 amounted to making statements that are of concern to the public.

“That argument fails” because President Trump’s commentary and actions around Jan. 6 bear “no inherent connection to the essential distinction between official and unofficial acts” because they were not part of his official duties to share “matters of public concern,” the judges wrote, concluding he’s ineligible for presidential immunity.

In the Dec. 29 ruling, the judges also cited the Blassingame v. Trump judgment and said the case brought by Mr. Smith and his colleagues is “indistinguishable” in all relevant aspects, so they issued what amounts to an identical determination that President Trump is not immune from civil lawsuits related to Jan. 6.

A request for comment on the Dec. 29 judgment sent to the Trump campaign was not returned before press time.

The former president is entitled to request a rehearing before a full panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the immunity case. He could also appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

However, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear President Trump’s appeal in a separate federal criminal case alleging election interference, which was brought by special counsel Jack Smith.

President Trump’s appeal in this case also claims immunity, with the Supreme Court set to hear oral arguments during the week of April 22.

A determination on presidential immunity by the Supreme Court could have implications for the lawsuits that the District of Columbia appeals court just allowed to proceed.

‘Peacefully and Patriotically’

Even though President Trump said in his Jan. 6 speech that protesters should “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” his critics have seized on a portion of his remarks where he said “we fight like hell” and “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Critics claim this was a call for violence.

The former president has, on numerous occasions, denied calling for violent protests while insisting he meant his remarks about fighting like hell metaphorically.

Former President Donald Trump speaks to the media at a hotel after attending a hearing before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals at the federal courthouse in Washington on Jan. 9, 2024. (Susan Walsh/AP Photo)

In one of the Jan. 6 cases against the former president, Smith v. Trump, the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights filed the lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Smith and seven of his colleagues, arguing that President Trump deliberately incited violence against members of Congress and law enforcement officers whose duty was to protect them.

President Trump has rejected the claim that he in any way incited violence on Jan. 6, 2021, pointing to remarks he made that called for demonstrators to protest peacefully. In a bid to dismiss the lawsuit, his attorneys argued that the complaint should be tossed because he, as president, was eligible for immunity.

The court rejected President Trump’s bid to have the case dismissed, however, leading eventually to the Dec. 29 judgment that his remarks on Jan. 6 were not official acts as president, so the immunity shield doesn’t apply.