Nightly Brief

Your Friday night briefing from the staff of Courthouse News

Top CNS stories for today including President Donald Trump announcing he has answered questions from Special Counsel Robert Mueller but has not yet turned in those responses; the Supreme Court agrees to decide whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross must testify about a change he OK’d for the 2020 census; a federal judge rules the Trump administration wrongly denied CNN Jim Acosta due process in revoking his White House press pass and must give it back; the list of missing people in the Camp Fire raging through Northern California climbs to more than 600 people and the death toll rises to 63; faced with no clear statutory procedure in Tennessee to exhume the body of a priest it hopes to canonize, the Roman Catholic Church in Tennessee asks a court in Chattanooga to cut through ambiguous law; the majority of Americans are happy with the results of the midterm elections, but more pessimistic about the future of partisan relations, and more.

Sign up * for CNS Nightly Brief, a roundup of the day’s top stories delivered directly to your email Monday through Friday.*

National

President Donald Trump answers a reporters question about the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller during a signing ceremony of the "Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act," in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, Nov. 16, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

1.) President Donald Trump said Friday he has answered questions from Special Counsel Robert Mueller but has not yet turned in those responses.

In this Oct. 9, 2018 photo, police office guards the main entrance to the Supreme Court in Washington. The Supreme Court will hear an appeal by Virginia Republicans who are trying to preserve state legislative districts that have been struck down by a lower court as racially discriminatory. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

2.) The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross must testify about a change he OK’d for the 2010 census that could hurt Democratic voting power for the next decade.

CNN's Jim Acosta gestures as he leaves federal court in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2018, following a hearing on a legal challenge against President Donald Trump's administration over the revocation of his White House "hard pass." (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

3.) A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration wrongly denied CNN Jim Acosta due process in revoking his White House press pass and must give it back.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange greets supporters from a balcony of the Ecuadorean embassy in London on May 19, 2017. The Justice Department inadvertently named Assange in a court filing in an unrelated case that raised immediate questions about whether the WikiLeaks founder had been charged under seal. Assange’s name appears twice in an August 2018 filing from a prosecutor in Virginia in a separate case involving a man accused of coercing a minor. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)

4.) Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been criminally charged under seal, according to multiple media reports. If true, the charge – revealed by mistake in a court filing – could have significant implications for the Robert Mueller investigation and press freedoms.

Regional

Volunteer rescue workers search for human remains in the rubble of homes burned in the Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., Thursday, Nov. 15, 2018. Dozens of people died and perhaps several hundred are unaccounted for in the nation's deadliest wildfire in a century. (AP Photo/Terry Chea)

6.) The list of missing people in the Camp Fire raging through Northern California climbed to more than 600 people and the death toll rose to 63, law enforcement officials said late Thursday.

In this Friday, April 27, 2018 photo, trees in a cutback sit between an existing pipeline channel, left, and a new pipeline channel, on Bayou Sorrel in the Atchafalaya River Basin in Louisiana. A company building a crude oil pipeline in Louisiana is asking a federal appeals court to throw out a judge's order that had suspended construction work in an environmentally fragile swamp. A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments Monday, April 30, by attorneys for Bayou Bridge Pipeline LLC, federal regulators and environmental groups opposed to the project. In February, a judge temporarily stopped all pipeline construction work in the Atchafalaya Basin. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

7.) Attorneys representing landowners in the Atchafalaya Basin will meet in a pretrial hearing Friday with attorneys for Bayou Bridge Pipeline LLC, the corporation they say trespassed on their land, cut down hardwood trees, dug trenches and buried a crude oil pipeline without their permission. At issue, attorneys say, is the larger issue of why Louisiana allows corporations to expropriate private property through eminent domain in the first place.

**8.) ** Faced with no clear statutory procedure in Tennessee to exhume the body of a priest it hopes to canonize, the Roman Catholic Church in Tennessee asked a court in Chattanooga to cut through ambiguous law.

Research & Polls

Volunteers check under and over votes during an elections manual recount for three undecided races Friday, Nov. 16, 2018, in Tampa, Fla. Florida's bitter U.S. Senate contest is headed to a legally required hand recount after an initial review by ballot-counting machines showed Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson separated by less than 13,000 votes. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)

9.) The majority of Americans are happy with the results of the midterm elections, but more pessimistic about the future of partisan relations than they were after the last three midterms, a poll released Thursday shows.

10.) Cold and calculating though algorithms may be, most Americans lack confidence they can be unbiased when used to make life-affecting decisions, a Pew survey released Friday found.

No longer interested in emails from Courthouse News? Please click here to unsubscribe.

Categories / Uncategorized

Subscribe to our free newsletters

Our weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.