Axios sells majority to Cox Enterprises - August 9, 2022

The FBI searched the Mar-a-Lago home of former President Donald Trump Monday as a months-long probe intensifies to find how classified documents ended up in boxes of White House documents recovered earlier this year. Top Republicans criticized the raid, calling it a political attack intended to impede the former President’s chances of running again. The case is one of several that Trump and his associates are currently embroiled in. Doug Mastriano will testify to the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection as Alex Jones’ texts were also turned over to the committee. Several Trump allies are resisting testifying in a criminal probe looking at alleged election interference in Georgia. Axios agreed to a deal to sell a majority of the company to Cox Enterprises. Though the companies didn’t announce the amount Cox paid, Cox will own 70% of Axios which is valued at $525 million. Axios never hired a banker for the sale and only spoke with Cox rather than soliciting other buyers. The acquisition united old and new media in an era characterized by a surge of mergers in the publishing world as one of the largest antitrust trials ever to hit the publishing industry over the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster unfolds in Washington. A father and son who were convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 and committing a hate crime were sentenced to life in prison, and their neighbor who filmed the altercation received a 35-year sentence. Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William Bryan Jr. asked the judge to consider sending them to a federal prison rather than the Georgia prison system due to a risk of vigilante justice, but the judge denied their request. Hate crimes skyrocketed in 2020 with the FBI reporting 2,871 hate crimes targeting Black people that year. In another case that garnered attention for the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, four current and former Louiseville police officers were charged last week with civil rights violations in the deadly raid that k