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GOP bill would criminalize Supreme Court leaks

Republicans are responding to the bombshell leak of a draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade abortion rights protections by aiming to criminalize leaks of non-public Supreme Court information.

A group of 12 House Republicans introduced the Leaker Accountability Act on Tuesday, which would bar any officer or employee of the Supreme Court from “knowingly publishing, divulging, disclosing, or making known in any manner” confidential information such as internal notes, draft opinions, or final opinions before publication learned through the course of employment at the Court. The crime would be punishable by up to five years in prison.

House GOP Conference Vice Chair Mike Johnson (La.) led the bill, joined by 11 cosponsors, including GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.).

“The unauthorized leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health constitutes a grave breach of judicial ethics and a deliberate attack on the independence of the Supreme Court,” Johnson said in a statement. 

“This legislation is now, unfortunately, a necessary step to discourage future such attempts to intimidate justices during their deliberative process and restore independence to the Court so that it can ensure the American people are afforded equal and impartial justice under the law.”

The leak of the Dobbs decision, which would eliminate a federal constitutional right to abortion and allow Congress and the states to strictly regulate or outright ban abortion, sent shockwaves through Washington not just due of the impact of the potential decision, but because of the leak itself. 

The Supreme Court is notoriously secretive, and until Politico published the draft, no draft opinion in the court’s modern history had leaked to the public before official release.

Chief Justice John Roberts ordered an internal investigation into the source of the leak, which is ongoing. Some Republicans called on the Department of Justice to probe the issue.

Some legal experts argue that the Supreme Court leaker may have committed a federal crime that is already on the books, such as embezzlement of government records or obstruction of justice, by leaking the draft decision. Others, though, say that while the leak is unethical and could result in consequences for the leaker like firing or disbarment, it is doubtful any leak was criminal.

The Leaker Accountability Act would plainly make such leaks from the Supreme Court a crime, though it could not apply retroactively to the source of the leaked Dobbs draft opinion.

“In response to the leaked Dobbs draft opinion, there has been widespread agreement on one thing — it is entirely unclear whether the leaker can face any legal liability. Representative Mike Johnson’s Leaker Accountability Act fixes that problem,” Adam Brandon, president of the conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks, said in a statement. “This bill is a commonsense response to a horrible situation to ensure it never happens again.”

It is unlikely that the bill comes up for a vote in the Democratic-controlled House before the end of the year.

Source: TEST FEED1

America is drowning in a rising tide of mass gun violence

The black matte menace of military-style or assault-style rifles, the iconic tool of destruction in countless “first-person shooter” video games, are such seductive symbols of power that some American teenagers post photos of them on their social media accounts.  

So it was with 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, who is accused of purchasing not one but two AR-15 style rifles days after his birthday made it legal — and then using one of them to slaughter 19 young children and two teachers and wounding 15 others at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.  

Similarly, 18-year-old Paton Gendron, an avowed white supremacist, is accused of using an AR-15 style weapon to kill 10 people and wound three others two weeks ago at a supermarket in a predominately Black community in Buffalo, N.Y. 

These are just two of the troubled citizens united by hatred and grievance and empowered by the uniquely American freedom to acquire weapons of mass murder, granted even to the criminally inclined and mentally disturbed. Their fever dreams of retribution and infamy have become our national nightmare. 

The Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice has a database of public mass shootings. Their 2022 report on mass shootings in the United States going back a half-century indicates that nearly 98 percent of mass shooters are male. Many have experienced childhood trauma and nurse an identifiable grievance; they often study and find inspiration in past mass shooters, and they increasingly are radicalized online. They also tend to leak their plans for mass murder before acting. 

Yet, the United States does not have a monopoly on troubled young men, mental illness or internet radicalization. What it does have is a unique combination of those social ills and a civilian population awash in guns like no other developed country (120.5 firearms per 100 residents, more than double the next most-gun-owning country Yemen, a poor and tribal country in the midst of a years-long civil war.)     

As a result of that toxic combination of easy access to guns and rising societal tensions, many exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, America confronts an epidemic of gun violence not seen in a generation. In 2020, 19,384 of our fellow citizens were murdered by guns, the most in more than a half-century. That total represents a 34 percent increase just over the previous year, a nearly 50 percent increase over the past five years, and a 75 percent increase over the past 10 years. Our nation is floundering in a rising tide of gun violence 

While handguns are by far the weapon of choice in most homicides, the number and lethality of mass shootings using military-style weapons that have so shocked the nation in the past month are also on the rise. Though definitions of what constitutes a “mass shooting” and “assault weapon” differ, making data analysis of the trend line tricky, the FBI has tracked an alarming increase in what it calls “active shooter” incidents (involving an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area). There were only three such incidents in 2000, compared to 40 in 2020 and 61 last year. 

Nor is there any doubt that AR-15 military-style “assault weapons,” based on the original design of the U.S. military’s M-16 rifle, are overwhelmingly the choice of mass murderers. These light, semi-automatic rifles with high-capacity magazines and high muzzle velocity were specifically designed to enable soldiers to kill the maximum number of enemies in close combat as quickly as possible. They are very efficient at that task. 

Military-style “assault weapons” have been used in 12 of the most notorious mass murders of the past decade. The familiar place names read like a shorthand for a profound national trauma, including attacks at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in July 2012 (12 lives lost); at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012 (27 killed); at a holiday office party in San Bernardino, Calif., in December 2015 (14 killed); at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in June 2016 (49 killed); at a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nev., in October 2017 (58 killed); at a rural church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in November 2017 (26 killed); at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018 (17 killed); at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa., in October 2018 (11 killed); at a cinema in Odessa (7 killed) and at a Walmart in El Paso (23 killed) in Texas in August 2019; and at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., in March 2021 (10 killed).  

Now mass murders at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., (10 killed) and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, (21 killed) in May 2022 have been added to that rollcall of infamy. 

The problem is not that we as a nation are confused about what needs to be done to check gun violence. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Norway and Great Britain all had a culture of gun ownership, for instance, and all of them reacted to mass shooting incidents by restricting military-style “assault weapons,” initiating gun buybacks and tightening gun control laws. Each saw their levels of gun homicide drop precipitously. In response to the mass shootings in Texas and New York in the past month, the Canadian government introduced new gun-control legislation that would freeze the sale of handguns. In 2020, the country introduced laws banning 1,500 models and variants of assault-style firearms.

After an earlier spate of mass shootings in the United States that included a 1989 attack on a school in which a teacher and 32 children were shot by a gunman wielding an assault weapon, and five students were killed, President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994 an assault weapons ban that had bipartisan support from former presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Then, as now, a majority of Americans supported banning assault weapons. 

According to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll, 63 percent of the public now back such a ban, and 64 percent support banning high-capacity magazines. Nearly 9 in 10 Americans favor preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns, while an overwhelming majority of 81 percent favor subjecting private gun sales and sales at gun shows to robust background checks. 

As with so many critical issues, however, progress on gun violence has been stymied by hyper-partisanship and a politics awash in special interest money — and the 1994 assault weapons ban was allowed to sunset in 2004. 

In the decade and a half since then, the drumbeat of mass shootings has elicited virtually no response from Washington, D.C. Far too often our political leaders play to the cameras, voice platitudes about “thoughts and prayers” for the victims, and stall for time so the emotions of the moment pass. And the American public is repeatedly subjected to the kind of soul-crushing massacre of children and innocents that we witnessed this month in Texas and New York, with more such trauma surely to come. 

At what point do voters decide that we are not going to take it anymore? 

James Kitfield is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress.

Source: TEST FEED1

Pentagon chief, Chinese counterpart planning first face-to-face meeting: report

The U.S. and Chinese governments are working to set up the first face-to-face meeting between their current top defense officials during a conference in Singapore in June, The Wall Street Journal reported.   

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is set to travel June 10 to the annual Shangri-La Dialogue and Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe is also expected to attend, people familiar with the situation told the outlet.  

Austin earlier this month appeared to confirm the planned meeting to the Senate Appropriations Committee, telling lawmakers that he hoped the expected encounter with Wei would “promote security and stability in the region.” 

“We both recognize the importance of a dialogue and maintaining open channels,” Austin said at the time. “I look forward to again engaging him in the future, in the not-too-distant future.” 

The people noted to the Journal that the meeting is not set in stone. 

The National Security Council referred The Hill’s questions about the planned meeting to the Defense Department, which did not immediately respond to request for comment.  

If conducted, such meetings between top officials are typically done in private on the sidelines of an international conference.  

A conversation between Austin and Wei would carry all the more weight considering the recent increased tensions between the Washington and Beijing over Taiwan. 

Under the “One China” policy, the U.S. does not recognize Taiwan as a separate state from China. But Washington does provide Taiwan with weapons and equipment for its defense as part of its policy of “strategic ambiguity” should China invade the island to bring it under its control. 

During President Biden’s first trip to Asia as president earlier this month, however, he stoked tensions when he said the U.S. would defend Taiwan militarily if China invaded. The White House quickly walked back Biden’s comments, saying that he wasn’t announcing a policy change. 

Two days later, China announced that it conducted military drills near Taiwan, which it views as its territory.  

U.S. and Chinese defense officials have met face-to-face in recent years past. Wei woke with then-Defense Secretary James Mattis in Beijing in 2018; then-acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan during the Shangri-La Dialogue in spring 2019; and to then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper in Bangkok, Thailand, in November 2019. 

Since then, chances to meet in person have been limited thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. 

In April, Austin and Wei spoke by phone — the first such conversation between the two — to discuss “defense relations, regional security issues, and Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” according to the Pentagon. 

China, meanwhile, said Wei told Austin that the two countries should “avoid confrontation” and that the U.S. should not support Taiwan’s independence or “underestimate China’s determination and capability.” 

“If the Taiwan question is not handled properly, it will have a subversive effect on the China-US relations,” according to a readout of the conversation from Beijing.  

Source: TEST FEED1

7 in 10 public schools report increase in children seeking mental health services since pandemic’s start: survey

Seven out of 10 public schools say they have seen an increase in children seeking mental health services since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a study from an independent government agency has revealed. 

The Institute of Education Sciences found requests increased across all demographics accounting for region, school size and level and percentages of minority students and students in poverty. A slight majority of public schools surveyed reported that they moderately or strongly agree they can effectively provide mental health services to their students. 

The institute, which is under the purview of the Education Department, launched the study, called School Pulse Panel, to investigate the impact of the pandemic on a sample of elementary, middle, high and combined schools throughout the country. The researchers are conducting their study from January to June and are tracking schools’ teaching formats and health policies throughout the study’s entirety. They are additionally probing different topics related to the pandemic’s impact on education each month. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found last month that more than 40 percent of teenagers reported being “persistently sad” amid the pandemic.

In April’s evaluation of mental health and well-being, the study found 85 percent of the schools have encouraged their staff to address students’ emotional and mental well-being 56 percent have offered assistance to teachers on helping students improve their mental health. 

More than 40 percent have created or expanded a mental health program for students or hired new staff to specifically focus on students’ well-being. 

While a 56 percent majority of public schools said they at least moderately agree that they can effectively support students who need mental health assistance, about a third said they at least moderately disagree. 

Schools cited inadequate access to licensed professionals and limited staff coverage of caseloads as factors that limit their abilities to provide mental health services. 

Researchers conducted the survey from April 12 to 25 from about 830 public schools.

Source: TEST FEED1

Justice Democrats-backed candidate drops NY primary bid after redistricting

Rana Abdelhamid, a Justice Democrats-backed candidate, suspended her bid for New York’s 12th Congressional District, citing the state’s newly drawn House map.

“Today, I am formally ending my bid for Congress after the court’s undemocratic map removed me and my community from #NY12,” Abdelhamid wrote in a statement. 

Abdelhamid, a millennial Muslim activist, was challenging Rep. Carolyn Maloney (N.Y.), the latest in a series of Democratic primaries by progressives seeking to oust moderates from their House seats.

After a messy redistricting process that concluded last week, the 12th District does not count Queens, where Abdelhamid resides, within its borders and now represents only Manhattan. At the same time, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) also announced he would run in the district.

“The new NY-12, which was drawn through an undemocratic process, no longer includes Queens or Brooklyn,” she wrote. “That means that my home and my community, which includes working class, Black and brown, Muslim and Arab immigrant communities of interest in Queens, were all divided into two districts, NY-07 and NY-17, diluting our opportunity for representation and political power.”

While Abdelhamid’s candidacy will not notch a win for the left in Congress this cycle, she vowed her path in politics is not finished.

“This is not the end,” she wrote. “See you soon NYC.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Will new evidence force Biden to admit that the Iran nuclear deal is dead?

The Biden administration remains unable or unwilling to admit failure in its humiliating pursuit of America rejoining the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Nonetheless, dramatic news coverage may force its hand. The Wall Street Journal reported exclusively last week that:

“Iran secured access to secret United Nations atomic agency reports almost two decades ago and circulated the documents among top officials who prepared cover stories and falsified a record to conceal suspected past work on nuclear weapons…”

The Journal described how it had reviewed copies of these International Atomic Energy Agency (“IAEA”) documents and others seized by Israel in a daring 2018 intelligence raid against a Tehran warehouse. The full extent of Israel’s haul in that dramatic operation is still not public, but everything revealed to date has proven accurate.

The news story emerged simultaneously with Senate testimony by Biden’s special representative for Iran, Robert Malley, so questioning at the hearing was inevitably limited. This latest revelation about Iran’s denial and deception efforts, however, undoubtedly presages more to come. 

Until the ramifications of the Journal’s story are further researched and thoroughly considered, the administration has no warrant to proceed any further in attempting to rejoin the nuclear deal. We still need to ascertain, for example, what else Tehran may have seen, and how long it benefitted from this unprecedented access, perhaps even to the present day.

Despite understandable gaps in the Journal story, the implications are volcanic. Iran has long invested considerable time and effort to deceive IAEA officials and inspectors, conceal or destroy critical information and generally obstruct the agency’s investigations. Thus, having any sensitive internal IAEA information would be of incalculable value to Tehran. As the article made clear, Iran would obviously benefit greatly by having advance notice of the lines of inquiry the IAEA was pursuing and the questions it wished to ask.

Early warning would have provided Iran sufficient, perhaps ample, opportunity to concoct a cover story and specific responses, get all relevant nuclear personnel prepared in line with the denial strategy and orchestrate a determined deception effort against the agency. In particular, Iran has consistently denied it ever had a nuclear-weapons program, and its concealment efforts could be greatly enhanced just knowing what the IAEA suspected. 

The evident success of Iran’s disinformation campaign underscores another critical point: The IAEA is simply not capable of verifying compliance with agreements such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or other arms-control arrangements without full and unqualified cooperation by all parties involved.

Notwithstanding the agency’s inability to fulfill the responsibilities the 2015 nuclear deal entrusts to it, the Biden administration still argues that the IAEA is able to detect Iranian violations. The Journal report proves the precise opposite. The deal’s already weak verification provisions were always doomed to fail, but this new evidence puts the case beyond reasonable doubt. For the White House to continue asserting the contrary borders on perjury.

The IAEA does good and important work, but assigning it tasks it is inherently unable to accomplish gravely impairs its credibility. It is not an intelligence agency. Intelligence flows to the IAEA, not the reverse. Its “breakthroughs” typically come when member governments provide information which the agency uses to confront rogue states. America’s real insurance is not international monitoring of would-be proliferators but its own intelligence capabilities.

Even so, IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi should immediately launch a wide-ranging forensic investigation into what happened, who was responsible, how much damage was done and what the IAEA can do to prevent a re-occurrence. One person with much to account for is Mohammed ElBaradei, Grossi’s predecessor in the early 2000s, when these breaches of IAEA security apparently began. ElBaradei’s tilt toward Iran was fully evident throughout his tenure at the IAEA. Given the stakes involved for America and its closest Middle East allies, Congress should also conduct its own bipartisan investigation. 

Meanwhile, Iran’s dogged pursuit of deliverable nuclear weapons continues. Since his inauguration, Biden has ignored increasingly significant Iranian violations of U.S. sanctions, particularly trading in oil and related products with China and Venezuela. There is no longer a “maximum pressure” campaign, although indeed even that effort couldn’t stop Iran’s program. Weakening sanctions enforcement, however, especially under the guise of alleviating global oil shortages caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, make it harder for other nations to maintain strict compliance.

The White House should reverse course immediately before more damage is done. We must also acknowledge that current U.S. sanctions-enforcement machinery is inadequate. Considerable improvement is required before we can honestly speak of “maximum pressure” campaigns. Having a tough-sounding slogan does not equal an effective policy.

Most importantly, Biden must admit that the Iran nuclear deal is dead and cannot be resurrected. Only by acknowledging reality can we and our European allies begin developing a new policy with some chance of achieving our common goal of stopping Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons. 

In fact, Tehran’s Islamic revolutionary government will never give up the goal of achieving nuclear weapons, which is one more reason among many why it needs to be replaced, sooner rather than later. Either that, or we and others will have to increase the military actions needed to reduce Iran’s nuclear and related efforts to ashes. Israel, in fact, created a few more ashes last week.

Surveying the rubble of the 2015 deal, and the damage it has inflicted on every nation threatened by Iran and other aspiring proliferators, we have much more to learn and improve. Unless a nation makes a strategic decision to abandon the pursuit of nuclear weapons, no acceptable deal exists.

The Iran nuclear agreement or the prospect of one with North Korea is worth nothing unless Tehran and Pyongyang truly believe they are better off ceasing their nuclear-weapons programs than continuing them. Once that is understood, the U.S. path is clear. As Winston Churchill said in 1934 in an analogous context, “[i]t is the greatest possible mistake to mix up disarmament with peace. When you have peace, you will have disarmament.”

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Trump from 2018 to 2019, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and held senior State Department posts in 2001-2005 and 1985-1989. His most recent book is “The Room Where It Happened” (2020). He is the founder of John Bolton Super PAC, a political action committee supporting candidates who believe in a strong U.S. foreign policy.

Source: TEST FEED1

Whoopi Goldberg tells NRA that AR-15s have 'got to go'

“The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg argued on Tuesday that the AR-15 should be banned nationwide following a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, earlier this month that left more than a dozen children and two adults dead.

“Listen, this AR-15’s got to go,” Goldberg said during a discussion on gun control during Tuesday’s show. “I don’t care, NRA. You’ve got to give that gun up. You can have your other yeehaw guns, whatever you want. But the AR-15 is not a hunting gun. It is not a gun where you’re going to go out and shoot your dinner.”

Goldberg suggested that the AR-15, a semi-automatic weapon, has an explicit purpose that should disqualify it from Second Amendment protections.

“This gun is meant to kill people,” she said. “That’s what it’s for and you can’t have it anymore.”

Police and several news outlets have noted that variations of the AR-15 have served as the weapon of choice for attackers who carry out mass shootings in recent years. The shooters involved in Buffalo, N.Y., Parkland, Fla., and last week’s tragedy in Texas all used the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. The weapon allows users to fire a large amount of bullets in a short amount of time.

The shooting at the elementary school in Texas has prompted new calls from victims’ families and Democrats for stricter gun control measures. Leading Republicans, meanwhile, have said the shooting in Uvalde highlights concerns about school safety measures and have dismissed calls for gun control as political.

“I don’t know what it’s gonna take. Maybe it’s just going to take us voting the right people in,” Goldberg said. “Because this is some BS. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of seeing little kids die because people are not paying attention.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Lia Thomas: ‘Trans women are not a threat to women’s sports’

Lia Thomas, the former University of Pennsylvania swimmer at the center of a heated national debate over whether transgender women should compete against cisgender athletes, has addressed her critics in a pair of rare interviews.

Thomas, who swam on the university’s women’s team for the first time this year, has been the subject of protests regarding “fairness” in women’s sports and has been used on more than one occasion as a talking point by conservative lawmakers seeking to advance legislation to bar transgender women and girls from playing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

“I knew there would be scrutiny against me if I competed as a woman. I was prepared for that,” Thomas told ABC News correspondent Juju Chang in an interview that aired Tuesday morning. “But I also don’t need anybody’s permission to be myself and to do the sport that I love.”

Thomas explained that despite being able to attend her Ivy League dream school and compete on its men’s swim team, by her sophomore year, the gender dysphoria she had felt since her early childhood had taken over her life, leaving her depressed and suicidal.

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She told ABC News she had been prepared to give up her swimming career in order to transition. But that didn’t happen.

Thomas in 2019 began hormone-replacement therapy and, under NCAA guidelines, was able to change gender categories the following year. The 2020 Ivy League season was later canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interview in early March with Sports Illustrated, Thomas said she had the full backing of her family when she made the decision to transition. Other collegiate and professional athletes have voiced their support for Thomas as well, while others have accused the swimmer of transitioning to climb higher in national rankings.

“Trans people don’t transition for athletics, we transition to be happy and authentic and our true selves,” Thomas said Tuesday. “Transitioning to get an advantage is not something that ever factors into our decisions.”

“You can’t go halfway and be like, ‘I support trans women and trans people, but only to a certain point,’” Thomas added, referring to an anonymous letter reportedly written by 16 of her teammates in early February.

“We fully support Lia Thomas in her decision to affirm her gender identity and to transition from a man to a woman. Lia has every right to live her life authentically,” the athletes wrote in the letter, addressed to Penn and Ivy League officials. “However, we also recognize that when it comes to sports competition, that the biology of sex is a separate issue from someone’s gender identity.”

“If she were to be eligible to compete against us, she could now break Penn, Ivy, and NCAA Women’s Swimming records; feats she could never have done as a male athlete,” Thomas’ teammates wrote in the letter, first reported by The Washington Post.

The following month, Thomas became the first openly transgender woman to win a national champsionship in Division I athletics, placing first in the 500-yard freestyle finals. But Thomas’ final time – a personal best of 4:33.82 – still didn’t come close to breaking the meet, NCAA or American record of 4:24.06 that was set by Olympian Katie Ledecky in 2017, when she swam for Stanford University.

“Trans women are not a threat to women’s sports,” Thomas said Tuesday. The swimmer later added that biological diversity exists everywhere, and some cisgender women have more testosterone or greater muscle mass than others.

“I’m not a medical expert, but there is a lot of variation among cis female athletes or cis women who are very tall and very muscular and have more testosterone than another cis women,” Thomas said. “Should that then disqualify them?”

It’s a point that’s been raised by other transgender athletes. In April, the NCAA’s first openly transgender Division I athlete, Schuyler Bailar, questioned why biological differences between women are often scrutinized, while biological diversity in men is celebrated.

Thomas has frequently been criticized for her stature, with her critics claiming that she “towers” over her competitors. But five-time Olympic gold medalist Missy Franklin, a cisgender woman, stands taller than Thomas at 6 foot 2 inches.

“At what point is a girl too strong? Or her hands too big? Or her look too masculine?,” Bailar said last month in a video released by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group. “Policing girls’ bodies is what will destroy the women’s category, not the inclusion of transgender girls.”

For Thomas, who graduated from Penn this year with a bachelor’s degree in economics, her collegiate swimming career may be over, but she doesn’t intend to stop competing in the sport she loves anytime soon.

“It’s been a goal of mine to swim at Olympic trials for a very long time,” Thomas said. “I would love to see that through.”

In the meantime, Thomas is getting ready to attend law school. She told ABC News she’d like to become a civil rights lawyer down the road, advocating for the advancement of transgender rights.

In a separate interview with ESPN on Tuesday, Thomas said her journey, albeit difficult, has been worth it.

“I’ve been able to do the sport that I love as my authentic self,” she said.

Source: TEST FEED1