Carleen Noreus, who owned two nursing schools in South Florida, has pleaded guilty to her role in a scheme that sold nearly 3,000 fraudulent nursing diplomas, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a June 18 statement.
The defendant, 52, from Plantation, Florida, was president of the Carleen Home Health School Inc. in Plantation and vice president of Carleen Home Health School II Inc. in West Palm Beach.
“Noreus conspired with others to sell fraudulent nursing diplomas and educational transcripts to individuals who had not completed the required coursework or clinical training to earn Registered Nurse (RN), Licensed Practical Nurse/Vocational Nurse (LPN/VN), or Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) credentials,” the DOJ said.
“The fraudulent diplomas and transcripts falsely represented that purchasers had successfully completed the academic and clinical requirements of the schools when, in reality, they had not.”
The documents allowed the buyers to take part in national nursing board examinations. Those who passed the exams obtained nursing licenses and employment in the healthcare sector.
In total, Noreus provided 2,956 fraudulent nursing diplomas through her two schools between April 17, 2018, and Oct. 8, 2025. Of the individuals who obtained fake credentials, roughly 2,274 passed the nursing exams, secured licenses, and gained employment in Florida and other parts of the United States. Both institutions have been shut down by state authorities.
The case is part of the second phase of Operation Nightingale, a multi-state law enforcement action launched in January 2023 to arrest individuals who sell fraudulent nursing degree diplomas and transcripts.
The operation led to 25 individuals being charged for the fraud scheme in January 2023. In a Jan. 25, 2023, statement, the DOJ said that more than 7,600 fake nursing diplomas were issued by three nursing schools in South Florida.
On Sept. 15, 2025, the DOJ said that 30 defendants were charged and convicted in 2023 as part of the operation. In addition, the department also announced charges against 12 people in phase two of Operation Nightingale.
Thirteen individuals have been charged in the second phase, including Noreus, the DOJ said in its latest statement. Noreus, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count.
“Nursing licenses must be earned through education, training, and demonstrated competence, not purchased through fraud,” said U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason A. Reding Quiñones.
“By selling thousands of fraudulent diplomas and transcripts, the defendant undermined the integrity of the nursing profession and our healthcare system. The Southern District of Florida remains committed to holding accountable those who profit by corrupting professional licensing processes and placing the public at risk.”
Earlier this year, a Maryland man was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison in another case of nursing credential fraud, according to a DOJ statement issued on April 24.
The person sold fake documents in the name of a Virginia nursing school, which falsely affirmed that buyers had completed the required courses and training at the institution to secure nursing degrees. The individual also sold fraudulent nursing degrees from a Florida-based nursing school.
Nursing Shortage
The country’s nursing workforce is projected to face a shortage in the coming years, according to a December 2025 report from the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis.
“At the national level, there are shortages projected until 2038. Specifically, there is a projected 8 percent shortage of registered nurses (RNs) in 2028. By 2038, the shortage is 3 percent (a shortage of 108,960 full-time equivalent [FTE] RNs),” the report stated.
“Nonmetro areas are projected to have a higher shortage of RNs than metro areas in each of the three interval years: 11 percent vs 2 percent in 2038, 18 percent vs 4 percent in 2033, and 24 percent vs 5 percent in 2028.”
However, National Nurses United (NNU), a professional association of registered nurses with over 225,000 members nationwide, dismissed claims of shortages in a May 26 statement.
An analysis conducted by the group found that almost 1.15 million registered nurses in the country with active licenses were not working as nurses, the statement said.
NNU president Jamie Brown said the U.S. nursing sector is facing a “retention crisis” rather than a shortage, blaming “unsafe and unsustainable” working conditions for driving many nurses away from their jobs.
U.S. President Donald Trump renewed his threat of legal action against The New York Times on June 21, accusing the newspaper of publishing “treasonous” coverage that downplayed the impact of the nearly four-month war with Iran.
“I will be adding all of their false and ridiculous reporting to my multi Billion Dollar lawsuit against them. They are Criminals,” Trump wrote in a June 21 post on Truth Social.
“The headline in the Corrupt and Failing New York Times: ‘What Changed After Almost 4 Months of War? Analysts Say Not Much.’ REALLY?” Trump wrote in a separate post.
“Their Military is DONE, their Navy is GONE, their Air Force is GONE, their Launching Pads, Missiles, Drones and Manufacturing of same, is almost GONE, their top two sets of Leaders are GONE, their Inflation is at 250%, their Economy is BROKEN, their Soldiers aren’t being paid, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN, THE OIL IS GUSHING, and the U.S. Stock Market and Jobs are at record HIGHS,” he added.
The Epoch Times contacted the NY Times for comment but did not hear back by publication time.
In another post, Trump included a screenshot of an X post from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who also criticized the NY Times.
“To say nothing has changed after Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury is an insult to our men and women in uniform.” Graham wrote in the post.
“To say nothing has changed denies the devastation to the Iranian economy created by the blockade and other economic pressures applied by President Trump.
“This analysis by the New York Times says more about their bias against President Trump than it does the undeniable facts about the state of play in Iran.”
The NY Times piece published on June 21 said that “roughly 100 days later, as the United States and Iran have reached a somewhat vague memorandum of understanding to end the war, skeptics are expressing bafflement over what exactly has transformed.”
“Neither the war nor the agreement ended what U.S. and Israeli officials regard as the main threats emanating from Iran. The country’s nuclear program, while heavily damaged, was not eliminated – its fate punted to future negotiation,” it added.
Prior Lawsuit
In September 2025, Trump filed the $15 billion lawsuit against the NY Times and its reporters, accusing the newspaper of defamation.
Trump filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Florida over articles and a book written by two NY Times reporters and published during the height of the 2024 election, alleging that they were crafted with “actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage” on him.
“Defendants maliciously published the book and the articles knowing that these publications were filled with repugnant distortions and fabrications about President Trump,” the lawsuit reads.
A spokesperson for the NY Times at the time said the lawsuit “has no merit,” calling it an attempt by the president to “stifle and discourage independent reporting.”
“The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics. We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email at the time.
Trump announced the lawsuit in a Truth Social post, saying that the NY Times had become “a virtual mouthpiece for the radical left Democrat Party” and cited its endorsement of then-Democratic presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Their Endorsement of Kamala Harris was actually put dead center on the front page of The New York Times, something heretofore UNHEARD OF,” he said.
As President Donald Trump’s lawyers tell it, there is “no evidence” that the May 18 “settlement” of his lawsuit against the IRS, which included huge favors for him, his family, and his supporters, was a product of collusion. That position is hard to take seriously, since both sides in the lawsuit were represented by attorneys who worked for Trump, and the president himself has described the cozy arrangement as “a settlement with myself.”
In a June 12 brief ordered by Kathleen Williams, the federal judge in Florida who oversaw Trump v. IRS, the president’s lawyers improbably maintained that the “settlement” was business as usual at the Department of Justice (DOJ). That brief “only underscores the need to investigate whether the parties have perpetrated a fraud on this Court and corrupted the integrity of the judicial process,” 35 former federal judges argue in a response filed on Friday.
Trump sued the IRS on January 29, claiming that an IRS contractor’s illegal disclosure of his tax returns had caused “at least” $10 billion in damages. In addition to offering a plainly preposterous estimate of the injury he had suffered, Trump missed the statutory deadline for filing such claims. And even if he had filed his lawsuit on time, he would have faced the challenge of arguing that the contractor qualified as an “officer or employee of the United States”—a point that the DOJ has disputed in other cases involving similar claims.
Despite those manifest legal weaknesses, the DOJ never contested Trump’s claims, in sharp contrast with the way it has handled lawsuits against the IRS by plaintiffs who were not the president. That failure underlined the blatant conflicts of interest created by the case, which pitted Trump against an agency he oversees, represented by DOJ lawyers who serve at his pleasure. Further compromising the DOJ’s ability to represent the IRS, an executive order that Trump issued in February 2025 bars the government’s lawyers from taking legal positions that contradict the president’s.
The situation was so bizarre that Williams questioned whether the case involved a genuine controversy between adverse parties, as required for the lawsuit to proceed. But two days before the deadline for briefing on that crucial issue, Trump dropped his lawsuit, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a “settlement agreement” that promised $1.8 billion in taxpayer money for an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” designed to benefit Trump’s friends and followers. The next day, Blanche revealed an addendum that purports to shield Trump and his family from liability for tax violations and any other federal offenses they might have committed prior to May 19.
Neither of those provisions was logically related to Trump’s complaint that the IRS had failed to properly supervise contractors entrusted with confidential tax information, and the benefits they offered were starkly different from the terms of prior settlements involving unauthorized disclosure of tax returns. The Anti-Weaponization Fund provoked an intense, bipartisan backlash, prompting Blanche to ditch the plan two weeks after announcing it. But Blanche said the sweeping immunity deal, which could save Trump more than $100 million in back taxes, interest, and penalties, remained in place.
The retired judges, who include former 4th Circuit Judge Michael Luttig and several other Republican appointees, note that the June 12 brief from Trump’s lawyers glides over “clear and convincing” evidence of collusion, which they say is “more than enough to warrant further investigation.” That evidence, they say, suggests “the parties used this suit and subsequent settlement to give cover for a give-away to the lead Plaintiff, who also controls the Defendants.”
As Luttig et al. see it, Trump’s case against the IRS features “an obviously collusive suit; an unprecedented, clearly unwarranted settlement premised on the supposed legitimacy of that suit; active steps to prevent the Court from scrutinizing the legitimacy of their invocation of the judicial process; and now, the Justice Department unilaterally walking away from the huge settlement slush fund, even as it keeps the Plaintiffs’ broad personal release.” The abandonment of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, they say, is itself striking evidence of collusion.
“That one ‘side’ of the purported dispute could unilaterally scrap a material term without even so much as a revised written agreement makes it crystal clear that these parties were never adverse,” the retired judges argue. “Instead, this suit was collusive from the start: the same person controlled it on both sides of the ‘v’: President Trump. DOJ’s failure to raise dispositive winning defenses while ‘settling’ the case for an astronomical sum of taxpayer dollars and extraordinarily broad releases to plaintiffs just days before having to answer this Court’s questions about collusiveness is further evidence of both collusion and fraud on the court.”
Trump’s lawyers argued that the DOJ would have been authorized to settle Trump’s claims even if he had never filed a lawsuit. Not so, Luttig et al. say: “No authority permits the Government to settle truly non-adverse cases. The statute permitting the Attorney General to settle ‘imminent litigation,’ for example, does not extend such authority to situations where there is no actual dispute to ‘compromise.’ The same is true for the statutes authorizing the compromise of tax liabilities and federal claims. For all these statutes, it beggars belief that Congress intended to open the Treasury to ‘settlements’ orchestrated by the same party controlling both sides of the collusive ‘dispute.'”
In an effort to show that Trump’s case involved a real legal dispute between adverse parties, his lawyers noted that three of the plaintiffs—Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization—were not the president of the United States or even “employees of the federal government.” When “private plaintiffs sue the United States for statutory violations,” they said, the case is “inherently adversarial.”
Please, Luttig et al. say. They note that the individual plaintiffs are “from the same family,” that they are “business partners with the same financial interests and counsel,” and that they “own or manage the corporate plaintiff.” In any event, “Plaintiffs have no answer for the fact that the lead Plaintiff, President Trump, directs and controls the Defendants. That alone renders this lawsuit non-adversarial, collusive, and jurisdictionally improper.”
Trump’s lawyers suggested he could have won the case on the merits. But as Luttig et al. note, they did not offer “any explanation of how they could overcome the statute of
limitations defense,” which “would eviscerate liability.”
Despite that fatal flaw, Trump’s lawyers claimed the DOJ reached “a fully proper government settlement” after weighing the merits of Trump’s claims and assessing the cost of defending against them. They noted that civil defendants routinely decide against litigating claims based on “the entirely rational conclusion that the cost of defense exceeds the cost of settlement.”
That suggestion, Luttig et al. say, “is laughable given the facts of this case: a settlement worth nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer funds plus a capacious and extraordinary general release that purports to forfeit claims for substantial sums in unpaid taxes and other potential damages and fines.” Such “monumental relief, they note, “dwarfs any conceivable ‘cost of defense.'”
Trump’s lawyers argued that the former federal judges did not have standing to file the May 27 motion in which they urged Williams to reopen the case. But that issue is “a red herring,” Luttig et al. say, because Williams has “inherent authority” to “investigate fraud.”
If Williams concludes that Trump used a phony lawsuit to obtain favors for himself, his relatives, and his supporters, Luttig et al. note, she can impose sanctions under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which covers “a range of bad faith conduct,” including submissions filed “for an improper purpose,” claims with “no reasonable
factual basis,” and filings “based on a legal theory that has no reasonable chance of success and that cannot be advanced as a reasonable argument to change existing law.” They add that “a bad faith or improper purpose might include collusively filing a lawsuit with claims subject to multiple dispositive defenses solely to provide cover for a collusive settlement.”
Luttig et al. say Williams also has “inherent power” to reopen the case under Rule 60, which applies to submissions that “defile the court itself” or constitute “a fraud perpetrated by officers of the court so that the judicial machinery cannot perform in the usual manner its impartial task of adjudging cases that are presented for adjudication.” They add that Rule 60 “also encompasses an ‘unconscionable plan or scheme’ perpetrated upon the court.”
Because “it addresses schemes that fall in the cracks between existing statutory
mechanisms, the Court’s inherent authority confers broad power to remedy fraudulent conduct and sanction litigants and attorneys,” Luttig et al. say. “A court’s power in such cases is expansive: ‘whatever form the relief has taken in particular cases, the net result in every case has been the same: where the situation has required [it] the court has, in some manner, devitalized the judgment.'”
When Williams ordered Trump’s lawyers to address Luttig et al.’s charges of collusion and fraud, she did not ask the DOJ for its take on the “settlement agreement.” But we can be confident that its response would be similar, since its lawyers also work for Trump—a basic reality that underlies the brazen corruption of his “settlement with myself.”
Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas) emphasized to Congress the importance of passing the election integrity SAVE America Act and rejected woke arguments against voter ID as racist and condescending.
Democrats’ idiotic arguments against requiring ID to vote include claiming that black Americans are somehow mysteriously unable to get IDs. Aside from the obvious elitism and racial prejudice of such a claim, it is practically impossible to live in America and not have identification. They are required at doctor’s offices, airports, bars, liquor stores, car rentals, welfare programs, and many more places. But somehow expecting IDs at polling places is unreasonable?
Democrats claim requiring proof of citizenship to vote is racist and discriminatory.
I’ve been Black my entire life, and that’s one of the most insulting arguments I’ve ever heard.
✅ Black Americans can get IDs.
✅ Hispanic Americans can get IDs.
✅ Asian Americans can get… pic.twitter.com/x4HefeGKFE
Hunt sarcastically said, “I’ve been black for my entire life. I had to bring up the most racist thing I’ve ever heard [which] is the insinuation by Democrats that black and brown Americans are too stupid to get an ID to vote, just like everybody else.”
The congressman continued, “I call this the soft bigotry of low expectations. Figuring out how to vote in this country is a very low bar, and we could all figure it out regard of your race, religion, color, or creed, and we should all want free and fair elections.”
Except Democrats know they cannot win so many elections as they do without fraud, nor can they expand their control to new areas. They have no positive results to run on, no record of making any city or state more prosperous and more free. They need fraud to survive.
Hunt told Congress, “With me today — I’m not gonna pull mine out this time, but I have six forms of government-issued ID. How did I acquire that? Personal responsibility in this country. I’ve also heard a lot about Jim Crow here today. I’m here to tell you, Jim Crow is over, and I know it because my parents grew up in it.”
Democrats were the party of Jim Crow, ironically. But now they scream “racism” whenever anyone points out that they are pushing an awful policy.
Democrats cheapen and exploit the suffering their predecessors caused for political reasons.
As Hunt said, “And I think it’s actually insulting to those that actually experienced the ills of Jim Crow” to compare getting an ID to that era.
“Having an ID to vote in our national election should be a requirement, which is why I stand [here] today, urging my colleagues on the left to support this bill. If you want secure elections, if you want your vote to count, vote for the Save Act.”
Unfortunately, that’s precisely what Democrats don’t want.
This debate was never about IDs, or about black Americans’ access to IDs, or about constitutionality.
It was always about one political party believing in our Republic’s system of elections, and the other party hating our Republic’s system of government and believing they should decide who our leaders are instead of We the People.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Sunday that Iranian officials attempted to bring multiple individuals with alleged ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps into the United States as part of the country’s World Cup soccer delegation.
Mullin made the remarks during an interview with Fox News as U.S.-Iran negotiations were
U.S. officials subjected members of Iran’s traveling delegation to heightened scrutiny after President Donald Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security to conduct extensive vetting of individuals seeking entry into the country.
Mullin said more than half of the additional representatives Iran sought to bring into the United States had connections to the IRGC, which U.S. officials view as a hostile military organization.
“When we started doing the research on him, he had only been put in place since 2022, and we didn’t allow him to board the plane,” Mullin told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, referring to the individual who had ties with the IRGC.
“The guy that tried to get on the plane yesterday had direct ties to the IRGC,” Mullin .
“We accepted 53 individuals coming in and the rest of the individuals that Iran had tried to bring in all also had direct ties to the IRGC and aren’t their normal traveling group,” he said.
Mullin said that the Iranian official who attempted to enter the United States was, according to Tehran, the president of the country’s soccer federation, noting that the Iranian soccer team playing World Cup games is based in Tijuana, Mexico. The team flies from Mexico into the United States when they need to play games.
The secretary said the administration anticipated that Iran could attempt to use the World Cup delegation to gain access to the United States and took additional precautions as a result.
According to Mullin, Trump authorized what he described as extreme vetting measures to screen members of the Iranian contingent.
“These games that Iran plays makes them an adversary that you can’t trust,” Mullin said.
Mullin did not provide additional details about the individuals who were denied entry or the nature of their alleged ties to the IRGC.
“The claim that an official representative of the Iranian football federation attempted to board a flight to enter the United States yesterday and was prevented from doing so is an outright and undeniable lie. This claim is so unfounded that those who made it are well aware that such an incident never occurred in the first place,” FFIRI said.
“DeepSeek Of The West” Reflection Inks Major Compute Deal With SpaceXAI
SpaceX shares tumbled for a third straight session, down around 9% late in the U.S. cash morning, after the Elon Musk-led company said it would sell investment-grade bonds for the first time.
However, a new headline crossed around 11:05 a.m. ET via Axios, reporting that Reflection, the Nvidia-backed open-source AI startup, had signed a major compute deal with SpaceXAI.
Under the deal, Reflection will pay SpaceXAI $150 million per month starting next Wednesday, July 1, through 2029, following an initial ramp period.
SpaceX $SPCX signed a compute deal with open-source AI startup Reflection AI for access to $NVDA GB300 chips at Colossus 2, per CNBC.
Reflection will pay SpaceX $150M per month starting July 1, 2026, totaling about $6.3B if the deal runs through 2029.
The deal gives the startup, founded by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, access to Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell Ultra AI computing chip, also known as GB300, which is necessary to train its models.
Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal described Reflection as the “DeepSeek of the West” because the AI lab aims to build open-weight, frontier-scale AI models as a direct alternative to China’s DeepSeek.
The deal highlights the circular flow of the AI boom, something we have noted countless times (see here and here). Nvidia invested $800 million in Reflection, which will now use Nvidia chips purchased by SpaceX. This allows the startup to avoid the multibillion-dollar burden of building out its own data centers and instead lease compute from hyperscalers.
With shares down 9% in late-morning trading, the Reflection-SpaceXAI deal was not enough to lift the stock, which is now down 25% from last Tuesday’s high of $225.
The Reflection-SpaceXAI deal also shows that SpaceX’s massive compute buildout is not just for internal AI chatbots, but is also becoming a revenue-generating business, catering specifically to external AI frontier labs seeking high-end training capacity.
It may suggest that internal compute demand has been lackluster…
Last week, Yann LeCun, founder of AMI Labs, called xAI a “failure,” adding that he expects it won’t be able to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.
The deal follows a similar deal that Anthropic made with SpaceX to expand cloud computing capacity.
When ChatGPT first hit the mainstream in 2022, I realized that law school assessments would need to change. At the time, I asked my ConLaw students what they thought about oral exams, like in ancient times. Their immediate reaction was one of absolute panic and dread. At the time, I didn’t pursue the matter further. My exams were proctored in class, and used locked-down laptops, so I didn’t think it was feasible for students to use AI during the proctoring.
Four years later, things have changed. I’ve watched many YouTube videos of how students expertly cheat on exams using AI. They place vaseline or some other agent in front of their webcam, take pictures of the question with their phones or smart glasses, and provide perfect answers. The situation is even worse with any sort of take-home work. The temptation for students to provide perfect answers every time is too high. Indeed, a student who doesn’t use AI is putting herself at a disadvantage.
Some professors have responded to this trend by embracing AI. They encourage their students to use it “responsibly” (whatever that means) and to show their prompts and other searches. I, for one, remain an AI luddite. I assure all of my readers that every word I write comes from my brain, without the use of generative AI. Generally, I write a post straight through without pauses, and then go back to clean it up. (My typos are proof that I don’t use AI.) Unfortunately, Google now pushes AI to the top of every query, though I always click through the links and check primary sources. I never trust the Gemini summary.
I would highly recommend a memo prepared by Dean Bobby Chesney at the University of Texas. Chesney relays a number of issues his faculty has considered concerning AI. In particular, Chesney writes that “we’ve also seen a surge of interest in assessments involving class participation and live presentations (even oral exams in some cases).”
I have come to much the same conclusion. My tentative plan for ConLaw in the spring is to switch to an oral, in-person midterm.
Taking a step back, I have long struggled with how to use midterms effectively. The most useful aspect of a midterm is to provide an early intervention–feedback for students who need help. But by the time the midterm is graded, it is often too late in the semester to correct course. (I do not give multiple choice questions in ConLaw, though that format would make it far easier to grade quickly.) When I started teaching, I would proctor the midterm right before spring break, and then spend the entire spring break grading midterms, and return them when we got back. Needless to say, with family commitments, that is no longer an option. The other problem with midterms is that some students have not yet hit their stride by the seventh week. Indeed, there was not always a clear correlation between grades on the midterm and grades on the final.
All of these concerns remain. Still, in light of the threat to assessments posed by AI, I will need to redouble my efforts. Here is my working approach: halfway through the semester, I will proctor an individualized, oral midterm in my office. Each session will last approximately five minutes. If I do ten sessions per hour, with breaks, I can wrap up the entire process in a single day. There is an advantage to doing everything in a short period of time to reduce the risk of students talking to each other. At my law school, 1Ls do not have classes on Friday, so that timing would work well. In the first instance, I would randomly assign students to slots throughout the day. If they have an actual, documented conflict, they can reschedule. And there will be two weeks of advance notice, which should help reduced potential conflicts.
I will need to give some more thought about how to handle timing for accommodated students. As most professors know, the number of students who have testing accommodations has skyrocketed in recent years. Often accommodations are provided for students who are not able to write with a pen or type with a keyboard–so-called “scribing.” But the oral exam eliminates that need. Students would only need to listen and speak.
Students would not be allowed any materials or devices during the sessions. I’ll leave a basket (maybe a Farraday box) outside my office to deposit all tech. Some smart glasses can be disguised as regular glasses. I hope this doesn’t become an issue.
I would also record and digitally transcribe the entire session, should any disputes arise later. The midterm would not be worth a large portion of the grade. I think all law schools permit professors to vary grades a small amount based on participation. I would make that participation score turn on the performance of the in-person midterm. (I’ve never figured out how to accurately and consistently record class participation over the course of a semester, so I don’t try.)
The substance of the midterm will simulate a final exam, but on a reduced scale. I will circulate five fact patterns to the student in advance. That way students can prepare and will not be surprised. The questions will not be a full-blown fact pattern like the final, but a single paragraph that has embedded a few related ConLaw issues. I will tell students that during the oral midterm, they will pick one of the questions at random, maybe by drawing an index card from a deck.
Students will then have to give a one minute prepared remark answering the prompt–basically the opening statement a lawyer would give during an oral argument. At that point, I can ask a series of follow-up questions to probe different aspects of the answer. I might ask them about a case they mentioned, or ask why they didn’t mention a particular case. This would be the sort of Socratic Dialogue I do in class every week. Indeed, I imagine I would use the same questions I pose in class, so there will be fewer surprises.
At the end of the session, I would provide feedback on the spot. I imagine the grade will be a number between 1 and 5, or 1 and 10. I can then point out where they gained and lost points. This feedback would be immediate and personalized. Students usually receive grades on midterms weeks or even a month later, long after they’ve forgotten what the question was.
Students would be instructed to not talk with their classmates about the exam. I am skeptical of how closely this instruction will be followed. The upshot of providing the questions in advance is that students can work together, or with their Chatbot, to prepare answers. But all of that preparation goes out the window once I start asking followup questions.
Using an oral midterm is sort of an interim solution. The ultimate move would be to make the final exam an in-person oral exam. A challenge is anonymity. While final exams require anonymity, it is less important for midterms. Professors are expected to go over a student’s midterm to provide one-on-one feedback. But perhaps as so much of the work students submit is no longer their own, but instead created by AI, eliminating the cloak of anonymity may be the final way to determine what a person actually knows.
As I said above this plan is tentative. (Then again, a blog post I wrote years ago concerning “tentative” thoughts is still being cited as my definitive view.) I welcome thoughts and comments from other professors who have considered these issues.
Let’s say a government agency pays for a study and is involved in the design, data collection, analysis, writing, and interpretation of that study. Would you find it plausible that the agency had zero influence on the results?
In 2025, the academic journal Tobacco Controlpublished just such a study. The paper investigated what happened when two California towns, Beverly Hills and Manhattan Beach, became the first U.S. cities to ban all tobacco products.
The study tried to determine prohibition’s impact on sales of both tobacco and non-tobacco products, both in the cities themselves and in surrounding neighborhoods. It was funded by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), and co-author Nita H. Mukand also received a National Institutes of Health grant.
The study’s dataset included only chain stores, which accounted for a mere 16 percent of California’s cigarette sales. The sample comprised just seven retailers in two of America’s wealthiest zip codes, with some of the lowest rates of tobacco use. The ban also went into effect on January 1, 2021, when California was still operating under some of the country’s strictest COVID-19 rules. Despite the unrepresentative nature of these towns and this time, the authors concluded that the “results suggest the viability of tobacco sales bans as an effective tobacco control strategy.”
At a seminar on the findings, Adam Leventhal of the University of Southern California told the authors, “This is kind of the logical end of the tobacco control policy spectrum. We have flavor bans, higher taxes, indoor smoking laws. But this is outright banning it.”
The study is one piece of a decadeslong effort to fully ban tobacco and nicotine products. Emails obtained by Reason through public records requests reveal the extent that CDPH funds and collaborates with campaigns for tobacco prohibition: sharing confidential data with favored activists, recruiting its own employees to design political messaging, and celebrating the passage of local tobacco bans as “victories,” all under the guise of public health “education.”
The Registered Lobbyist on California’s Public Health Payroll
“Endgame” is the anti-tobacco movement’s melodramatic term for prohibiting all commercial tobacco products: cigarettes, cigars, nicotine pouches, e-cigarettes, hookahs, pipe tobacco, and heated tobacco products. Some of these products are authorized for sale by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as “appropriate for the protection of public health” because they’re safer than cigarettes and help smokers quit. But CDPH’s ultimate goal isn’t just to reduce death and disease from smoking; it wants an almost completely nicotine-free California. (They do make an exception for Native Americans using tobacco for spiritual reasons, much in the same way sacramental wine was exempt from alcohol prohibition.)
CDPH awarded Tim Gibbs, a Sacramento-based consultant and registered lobbyist, a five-year contract running from July 2025 through June 2030 for “Training and Technical Assistance for Endgame Community Education.” The project is called the Endgame Messaging Hub. It is not the only endgame grantee. CDPH also funds the American Heart Association’s “California Tobacco Endgame Center for Organizing and Engagement” and the Northern California Center for Well-Being’s “Community and Youth Engagement for Tobacco Endgame.”
Gibbs worked for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN) throughout 2025, receiving $45,900 for the year, according to California lobbying disclosure filings. His highest quarterly payment, $18,600, came in July through September 2025, the exact quarter his CDPH contract began. For roughly six months, he was drawing a paycheck simultaneously from one of America’s largest anti-tobacco advocacy organizations and from California taxpayers for tobacco policy work.
In a training webinar in February 2026, Gibbs gave advocates a primer in prohibition campaigning. He described an effort to ban flavored tobacco in Sacramento, where advocates “developed a door knocker, flyer, put it on every single door in the neighborhood. So to give the illusion that there were, you know, that the public was demanding that the city council take action.” A council member, he noted approvingly, held the flyer up during a hearing. Gibbs ended by flatly stating his goal: making the ask “that is going to move the needle in our ultimate goal to end commercial tobacco in California.”
The Revolving Door Between California’s Health Agency and Anti-Tobacco Allies
Emails obtained by Reason show that the Endgame Messaging Hub does not operate at arm’s length from CDPH. Gibbs and his project coordinator, Debra Kelley, appear on CDPH’s internal project management system. They are copied on weekly CDPH communications, participate in Communities of Practice calls, and attend meetings of the Endgame Advisory Committee. In August 2025, as the project began, Kelley asked Amber Valenzuela, a senior program consultant at the California Tobacco Prevention Program, for a list of local agencies and grantees “working on policies to eliminate the sale of tobacco products,” which she described as “high priorities” for outreach. Valenzuela obliged, forwarding the target list and adding the Hub to the calendar of CDPH’s “Ending Tobacco Sales Workgroup.”
Personnel flow in both directions. In September 2025, Liz Hendrix, chief of the Strategic Planning and Policy Unit of the California Tobacco Prevention Program, housed within CDPH, announced she was leaving to become the government relations director for ACS CAN in Northern California—the same organization that contracted with Gibbs. Kelley congratulated her in an email and noted that the Endgame Messaging Hub would be “reaching out to ACS CAN, and the other voluntaries, for input as we identify, test, and promote effective messaging for various endgame policies.” Hendrix replied that she was “excited to be able to continue this great work with people who I love working with but now as a voluntary.“
In October 2025, Valenzuela, a senior program consultant at the California Tobacco Prevention Program, arranged a meeting. She connected Gibbs, Kelley, and two CDPH colleagues to discuss “an Endgame Factsheet that Elizabeth has been working on.”
Elizabeth Andersen-Rodgers, CDPH’s Evaluation Unit Chief and a co-author of the Beverly Hills study, titled the fact sheet “Ending Tobacco Sales for Healthier California Communities.” She used a draft for what she called “consumer testing with policymakers.” Essentially, she was workshopping its messages with elected officials to see what stuck.
Reason requested the fact sheet and related emails. CDPH denied the request under “deliberative process privilege,” claiming release could “be misleading to the public.” It’s hard to take seriously the idea that the public would be misled by the draft fact sheet and related emails. Voters might be irked, however, to see public employees freelancing controversial policy advocacy on taxpayers’ time.
Public records request
Through November 2025, the collaboration intensified. Kelley organized meetings with CDPH employees to discuss tobacco product waste messaging. Valenzuela set up another review of focus group results with Gibbs and Kelley, calling it “an action item from our last meeting.” CDPH employees and contractors worked side by side on messaging strategy, sharing documents and calendars.
‘For Your Eyes Only’
On November 18, 2025, Julie Lautsch, a CDPH employee, shared confidential polling data with Kelley. Lautsch sent a nicotine presentation and tobacco harm reduction message polling fielded in early 2023. Her instructions were: “Please don’t share the survey. It is confidential. Would love keep sharing information as long as we know that it’s meant for your eyes only.”
Public records request
Lautsch explained why the data were strategically useful, noting how effectively the tobacco industry’s “freedom of choice” message had performed in the polling. She pointed to content on CDPH’s anti-tobacco campaign website that had been inspired by the results, and she observed that messaging about freedom being taken away from children through nicotine addiction “was a bit stronger.”
So a government employee shared confidential polling data with a nongovernmental contractor under the condition of secrecy. The data told Gibbs’s team which counterarguments to prepare for and which emotional appeals to use. Through this back-channel relationship, a government agency gave strategic intelligence to allies while shielding the info from the public and from anyone who might take an opposing view.
Designing the Taxpayer-Funded Poll for Opposition Research
A few days later, Gibbs was assembling a working group to design a new survey.
On November 24, 2025, Gibbs emailed a “Statewide poll working group” inviting them to help “formulate a statewide voter poll on messaging around endgame policies.” The group included three CDPH employees: Lautsch, Valenzuela, and Tonia Hagaman, alongside American Heart Association staff and Rachael Record, a San Diego State University professor whose published research explicitly aimed to develop community-specific messaging strategies to build support for tobacco prohibition. Gibbs explained the poll would “help guide our project’s messaging aims” and that a follow-up call with “the polling firm” would be needed to “dial in the final messages we want to test.”
Public records request
This isn’t public health education or an effort to survey how many minors are using tobacco products and how they’re getting them. Through CDPH, California taxpayers are paying for public relations campaigns that attempt to convince them to give up their freedom to visit a cigar or hookah lounge, to vape, to smoke, or to pop a nicotine pouch.
Three employees from the state agency funding his contract helped design the poll. Gibbs’ November invoice included $10,000 for a polling firm.
The Tobacco Bans That Are ‘Not Actually Banning Anything at This Point’
On November 17, 2025, Kelley emailed Marin County health officials and copied Gibbs and CDPH’s Valenzuela to congratulate them on a new ban on tobacco sales in the small town of Ross, California. “Congratulations on your second victory!” she wrote, referring to the nearby town of Tiburon’s earlier ban. “I watched the Ross Town Council meeting last week and found council members’ perspectives on the ordinance very interesting. There was a moment when I wondered if the votes were there, but fortunately it passed, as you know.”
She asked if the Endgame Messaging Hub should send congratulatory letters to the town councils and the county health department. She also inquired about “work underway in any other towns in Marin County.” She noted they were “meeting with Ruth Malone this week to learn about her plans.” Malone is a prominent booster of prohibition or, as she has tastelessly and unsuccessfully tried to rebrand it, “abolition.”
Kelley thanked a county official for tipping them off about opposition arguments: “We are now developing counter-messaging to address that situation if it arises.”
Neither Tiburon nor Ross had any tobacco retailers at the time of the votes. (Ross has just over 2,000 residents, while Tiburon has under 9,000.) As Ross’s mayor pro tem, Elizabeth Robbins, acknowledged after voting for the ban, “Our tiny town doesn’t even have tobacco sales, so we’re not actually banning anything at this point.” The sole dissenting councilmember called it a “feel-good measure.” These bans had no practical effect on any resident, any business, or any smoker. Their value is in producing talking points to, in Gibbs’ words, “give the illusion” of public support and momentum.
Real Data Show Tobacco Bans Don’t Work
Contrary to the Beverly Hills study, punitive tobacco policies are not all upside.
Australia has punishing cigarette taxes and de facto e-cigarette prohibition, and this has created an illicit market that the government’s tobacco commissioner estimates is roughly half of all cigarettes purchased. The consequences are $2 billion (USD) in lost excise revenue in a single year and more than 200 arson attacks in recent years as criminal networks fight over territory.
California’s own flavored tobacco ban, enacted in 2023, costs the state between $300 million and $400 million in tax revenue per year, with no initial change in self-reported teen use of flavored e-cigarettes—and with most young people reporting no difficulty getting flavored products.
With limited and declining resources, would CDPH’s money not be better spent elsewhere, such as improving the state’s poor air quality or strengthening emergency preparedness? Instead, cash flows to manufactured evidence under conditions designed for success, to workshopped political messaging hidden behind privilege claims, and to funds for activists.
There’s nothing nefarious about private sector advocacy organizations raising money and engaging lawmakers on whatever issue they choose. But the public shouldn’t be forced to fund activists who mask a lobbying campaign behind the language of “education.”
Co-designing voter polls, sharing confidential data under conditions of secrecy, and embedding employees in working groups whose explicit purpose is to develop “compelling messaging” for prohibition is not typically what comes to mind when voters think of what they want public health officials to do. California’s laws banning agencies from lobbying, but permitting advocacy and education, are so permeable as to have become meaningless.
If CDPH employees want to ban nicotine, they’re free to leave their posts and join Malone, Gibbs, and Hendrix in the private sector. But the paternalist doublethink that says prohibition is liberation, choice is slavery, and coercion is freedom doesn’t need a subsidy from the taxpayer.
Today is the 85th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union, in 1941. Virtually all my then-living relatives were caught up in the war in one way or another. But none more immediately than my grandfather Nathan Firun, who was 17 at the time. This is a shortened version of his story of that time, which he recounted to me in 2011. He hated talking about his experiences in World War II, and only after much effort did I persuade him to tell this story:
Nathan was a graduate of a special military high school in Leningrad, trained as an artillerist. Soon after the fighting began, he enlisted in a “militia” unit of (mostly) untrained civilians. The men were issued Canadian-made rifles left over from World War I, with only five bullets per rifle. When they asked to use one bullet each to test-fire the rifles to make sure they worked, permission was denied, because there were too few bullets to go around. The unit was employed digging trenches behind the lines.
Sometime later, they were required to turn in their weapons, so they could be sent to a unit at the front, where there were men with no weapons at all. Nathan said this was the first moment when he realized the war must be going badly for the Soviet side.
In late August, they were informed their position had been flanked by the Germans, and the men were required to disperse and make their way back to Soviet lines in small groups. After some harrowing adventures, Nathan did indeed evade the Germans and found a Soviet unit. The other soldier with him was not so lucky. He entered a village they passed on their way, and was never seen again. Nathan never knew what happened to him. Perhaps he got killed or was captured by the Germans.
When he returned to Soviet lines, Nathan was detained by the NKVD (the secret police agency later known as the KGB) for the “crime” of “betraying” the USSR by being caught behind enemy lines. He and a large group of other soldiers in similar straits were herded into a barbed-wire enclosure, and would very likely have ended up in a special punishment battalion (or, worse, a Gulag).
Fortunately, an NKVD lieutenant noticed that Nathan had a shoulder patch indicating that he was an artillerist. He came up to Nathan and asked if he really was one and knew how to operate artillery. Nathan said “yes.” The NKVD officer then said that they had two antitank guns that had just been brought up and needed to be set up and used to counter an imminent German attack. He told Nathan to gather ten other men from among the “traitors” and undertake the task.
“Where are the shells for the guns?” Nathan asked.
“You’re asking me where the shells are?”, said the NKVD man, “Go find some yourself!”
Nathan did as he was told, and set up and operated the guns (with the help of several other men released from detention for that task). After some effort, they did indeed find the necessary shells.
The NKVD officer almost certainly knew that Nathan and the other soldiers who had been cut off behind enemy lines weren’t actually “traitors.” Else he wouldn’t have trusted them with artillery pieces. The NKVD was implementing Stalin’s awful orders, regardless of how insane and unjust they might be.
In the ensuing engagement, the Germans were repelled, and Nathan was wounded. He ended up in a hospital back in Leningrad, even as the city came under siege. At that point, it became clear that one else in the city knew he had been detained by the NKVD for being caught behind enemy lines. In the chaos of those days, Soviet record-keeping was even more shoddy than usual, and apparently no one had bothered to make any official record of my Nathan’s ‘crime’. Nathan’s father (my great-grandfather), Boris Firun, told him he should keep this story secret, and never tell anyone.
Boris had been detained by the NKVD himself several times in the 1930s, and knew whereof he spoke. One time, he had been arrested for attending a speech by Stalin’s rival Leon Trotsky. Even though, at the time of the speech, Trotsky was still a high-ranking Communist Party leader in good standing, the NKVD later pursued anyone who had gone to hear him. Boris managed to persuade them he had not actually gone to the event (though in fact he had).
My grandfather did indeed keep the story secret through almost four years of additional fighting. He eventually commanded an antitank gun battery and won numerous decorations. He did not reveal these events to anyone until he told me the story 70 years later.
There were about 100 men in Nathan’s class at the military high school. Only about five to ten survived the war.
Nathan Firun passed away in 2021, at the age of 97. We miss him greatly.
When ChatGPT first hit the mainstream in 2022, I realized that law school assessments would need to change. At the time, I asked my ConLaw students what they thought about oral exams, like in ancient times. Their immediate reaction was one of absolute panic and dread. At the time, I didn’t pursue the matter further. My exams were proctored in class, and used locked-down laptops, so I didn’t think it was feasible for students to use AI during the proctoring.
Four years later, things have changed. I’ve watched many YouTube videos of how students expertly cheat on exams using AI. They place vaseline or some other agent in front of their webcam, take pictures of the question with their phones or smart glasses, and provide perfect answers. The situation is even worse with any sort of take-home work. The temptation for students to provide perfect answers every time is too high. Indeed, a student who doesn’t use AI is putting herself at a disadvantage.
Some professors have responded to this trend by embracing AI. They encourage their students to use it “responsibly” (whatever that means) and to show their prompts and other searches. I, for one, remain an AI luddite. I assure all of my readers that every word I write comes from my brain, without the use of generative AI. Generally, I write a post straight through without pauses, and then go back to clean it up. (My typos are proof that I don’t use AI.) Unfortunately, Google now pushes AI to the top of every query, though I always click through the links and check primary sources. I never trust the Gemini summary.
I would highly recommend a memo prepared by Dean Bobby Chesney at the University of Texas. Chesney relays a number of issues his faculty has considered concerning AI. In particular, Chesney writes that “we’ve also seen a surge of interest in assessments involving class participation and live presentations (even oral exams in some cases).”
I have come to much the same conclusion. My tentative plan for ConLaw in the spring is to switch to an oral, in-person midterm.
Taking a step back, I have long struggled with how to use midterms effectively. The most useful aspect of a midterm is to provide an early intervention–feedback for students who need help. But by the time the midterm is graded, it is often too late in the semester to correct course. (I do not give multiple choice questions in ConLaw, though that format would make it far easier to grade quickly.) When I started teaching, I would proctor the midterm right before spring break, and then spend the entire spring break grading midterms, and return them when we got back. Needless to say, with family commitments, that is no longer an option. The other problem with midterms is that some students have not yet hit their stride by the seventh week. Indeed, there was not always a clear correlation between grades on the midterm and grades on the final.
All of these concerns remain. Still, in light of the threat to assessments posed by AI, I will need to redouble my efforts. Here is my working approach: halfway through the semester, I will proctor an individualized, oral midterm in my office. Each session will last approximately five minutes. If I do ten sessions per hour, with breaks, I can wrap up the entire process in a single day. There is an advantage to doing everything in a short period of time to reduce the risk of students talking to each other. At my law school, 1Ls do not have classes on Friday, so that timing would work well. In the first instance, I would randomly assign students to slots throughout the day. If they have an actual, documented conflict, they can reschedule. And there will be two weeks of advance notice, which should help reduced potential conflicts.
I will need to give some more thought about how to handle timing for accommodated students. As most professors know, the number of students who have testing accommodations has skyrocketed in recent years. Often accommodations are provided for students who are not able to write with a pen or type with a keyboard–so-called “scribing.” But the oral exam eliminates that need. Students would only need to listen and speak.
Students would not be allowed any materials or devices during the sessions. I’ll leave a basket (maybe a Farraday box) outside my office to deposit all tech. Some smart glasses can be disguised as regular glasses. I hope this doesn’t become an issue.
I would also record and digitally transcribe the entire session, should any disputes arise later. The midterm would not be worth a large portion of the grade. I think all law schools permit professors to vary grades a small amount based on participation. I would make that participation score turn on the performance of the in-person midterm. (I’ve never figured out how to accurately and consistently record class participation over the course of a semester, so I don’t try.)
The substance of the midterm will simulate a final exam, but on a reduced scale. I will circulate five fact patterns to the student in advance. That way students can prepare and will not be surprised. The questions will not be a full-blown fact pattern like the final, but a single paragraph that has embedded a few related ConLaw issues. I will tell students that during the oral midterm, they will pick one of the questions at random, maybe by drawing an index card from a deck.
Students will then have to give a one minute prepared remark answering the prompt–basically the opening statement a lawyer would give during an oral argument. At that point, I can ask a series of follow-up questions to probe different aspects of the answer. I might ask them about a case they mentioned, or ask why they didn’t mention a particular case. This would be the sort of Socratic Dialogue I do in class every week. Indeed, I imagine I would use the same questions I pose in class, so there will be fewer surprises.
At the end of the session, I would provide feedback on the spot. I imagine the grade will be a number between 1 and 5, or 1 and 10. I can then point out where they gained and lost points. This feedback would be immediate and personalized. Students usually receive grades on midterms weeks or even a month later, long after they’ve forgotten what the question was.
Students would be instructed to not talk with their classmates about the exam. I am skeptical of how closely this instruction will be followed. The upshot of providing the questions in advance is that students can work together, or with their Chatbot, to prepare answers. But all of that preparation goes out the window once I start asking followup questions.
Using an oral midterm is sort of an interim solution. The ultimate move would be to make the final exam an in-person oral exam. A challenge is anonymity. While final exams require anonymity, it is less important for midterms. Professors are expected to go over a student’s midterm to provide one-on-one feedback. But perhaps as so much of the work students submit is no longer their own, but instead created by AI, eliminating the cloak of anonymity may be the final way to determine what a person actually knows.
As I said above this plan is tentative. (Then again, a blog post I wrote years ago concerning “tentative” thoughts is still being cited as my definitive view.) I welcome thoughts and comments from other professors who have considered these issues.
