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Joe Arpaio, the controversial former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, has filed a libel suit against The New York Times and a member of its editorial board. In a complaint filed Tuesday evening with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the ex-lawman takes issue with a Times opinion piece published just after Arpaio’s loss in the state’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate. The article — “Well, at Least Sheriff Joe Isn’t Going to Congress: Arpaio’s loss in Arizona’s Senate Republican primary is a fitting end to the public life of a truly sadistic man" — was written by Michelle Cottle. Arpaio argues in the court filing that “[w]hile the Defamatory Article is strategically titled as an opinion piece, it contains several false, defamatory factual assertions.” The claims made in the article, Arpaio says, were “carefully and maliciously calculated to damage and injure” his reputation among the law enforcement community, as well as among GOP donors who could help bankroll his intended run for the late Sen. John McCain’s seat in 2020, currently held by Sen. Jon Kyl.
Politico
Dark-money political groups are continuing to shield their anonymous donors from public view, despite a recent court order that called for an unprecedented look at their funders. A major disclosure deadline passed Monday with few political nonprofits unveiling any donors, and even some of those that did offer a peek at their backers still left the original source of the donations murky. That means that, as in other recent years, voters will head into the midterm elections with little insight into the anonymous donors who have been free to pour unlimited sums into ads and other mobilization efforts that could help determine control of Congress.
Politico
Ecommerce leader Amazon says it will announce its second headquarters by the end of the year. With less than three months to go, the big reveal could come any day now. As 2018 enters its final quarter, only eight of the 20 finalist cities have released their proposals publicly, and of those, three were heavily redacted or incomplete. Most finalist cities cited the same two reasons they couldn’t share: that the city had to maintain privacy to keep a competitive advantage, or that outside, often non-public organizations were the actual entities handling the bid process. Those “non-public” groups were usually a local Economic Development Corporation or Chamber of Commerce. A quarter of Amazon HQ2 finalist cities denied requests for their Amazon HQ2 proposals on claims that proposals are being handled by these offices: Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Indianapolis, and Los Angeles. Denver’s proposal is the only one of these to become publicly available so far.
MuckRock
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a coalition of 13 media organizations are urging a New York intermediate appellate court to affirm a trial court ruling that the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association can't sue to stop New York City from releasing body camera footage. In a friend-of-the-court brief, filed Oct. 5, the coalition argues that bodycams won’t increase public trust or accountability of police departments unless the public has access to the resulting footage. The New York police officers' union is arguing the city and police department’s release of bodycam videos is improper because they fall within Section 50-a of a New York’s Civil Rights law — an argument the coalition contends is a misreading of the statute, and, even if correct, would not prevent the discretionary release of footage.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
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