• An open letter is circulating in support of Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire.
• The VC has come under fire for his recent comments about Zohran Mamdani, who he called an "Islamist."
• The letter has over 355 signatures.

An open letter voicing support for a Sequoia Capital partner is circulating online after the VC's remarks about New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani generated backlash.

Sequoia Capital has faced pressure to act after its partner, Shaun Maguire, called Mamdani an "Islamist" — a remark Maguire has said was political, not religious or racial. An open letter signed by hundreds of self-identified founders, investors, and tech workers called on the VC firm to take disciplinary action on Maguire.

Now, a letter of support is generating signatures of its own.

"On July 4, Shaun published a post on X," the letter reads. "Whether one agrees with his views or not, his words were not hate speech - they were the reflections of a principled thinker and a partner to countless founders who span geographies, faiths, and political beliefs."

"The calls to punish or remove him are part of a larger and worrying trend: ideological mobbing disguised as a moral virtue," the letter continued.

"We know Shaun personally. He has helped build careers, fund companies, and elevate voices across divides," the letter said. "We've experienced his integrity, intellectual honesty, and commitment to the global founder community firsthand. Attempts to paint him as bigoted are not only false - they're defamatory."

Read the letter in full below:

An Open Letter in Support of Shaun Maguire

We, the undersigned founders, investors, operators, and technologists from across the industry, are writing to express our unequivocal support for Shaun Maguire and to denounce the coordinated effort to silence him for expressing personal convictions.

On July 4, Shaun published a post on X. Whether one agrees with his views or not, his words were not hate speech - they were the reflections of a principled thinker and a partner to countless founders who span geographies, faiths, and political beliefs.

The calls to punish or remove him are part of a larger and worrying trend: ideological mobbing disguised as a moral virtue.

We know Shaun personally. He has helped build careers, fund companies, and elevate voices across divides. We've experienced his integrity, intellectual honesty, and commitment to the global founder community firsthand. Attempts to paint him as bigoted are not only false - they're defamatory.

We reject the framing of ideological disagreement as violence. We reject the chilling message that nuanced or unpopular opinions make one unfit to serve. And we reject the idea that the tech industry must conform to a narrow ideological orthodoxy in order to be "inclusive."

We call on our peers across the ecosystem to stand against ideological bullying - whether it targets Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, liberals, conservatives, or anyone in between.

Shaun has stood by peers and founders in their most difficult moments. It's time we return the favor.

Respectfully,
The undersigned

• Travelers no longer have to take off their shoes at US airports.
• The TSA will begin the new approach at airports nationwide.
• DHS Secretary Kristi Noem unveiled the change on Tuesday at Ronald Reagan National Airport.

You can finally keep your shoes on at airport security.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Tuesday that travelers at airports across the country won't have to remove their shoes at security checks beginning immediately, ending a nearly 20-year-old policy.

"This is something that I know for quite some time people have talked about and discussed," Noem said during a news conference at Ronald Reagan National Airport. "And we know that when President Trump was elected that he pledged to make life better for all Americans and that includes those that are travelers going through our busy airports."

Noem said advancements in technology allowed for TSA to do away with its old requirement. She repeatedly pointed to the implementation of Real ID, a long-delayed requirement that went into effect in part in May.

The Transportation Security Administration began requiring travelers to remove their shoes in 2006. In 2013, the TSA began allowing travelers who paid and qualified for their PreCheck program to keep their shoes on, along with other perks.

In 2001, Richard Reid, later known as "the shoe bomber," tried to ignite explosives hidden in his shoes. Five years later, the policy was viewed as a response to that incident. In 2006, then-TSA Director Kip Hawley told reporters that X-raying shoes was "an effective way of identifying any anomaly, including explosives."

The TSA has previously tested technology that would allow travelers to keep their shoes on, but until Tuesday, hadn't changed the requirement for all travelers.

Noem said other policies could change, too. She said policies requiring the removal of belts and limits on liquids are being reexamined as well.

• Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, is facing pushback over comments he made about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
• Maguire is one of Silicon Valley's more outspoken supporters of President Donald Trump.
• His career in venture capital goes back nearly a decade, and he's led investments in several of Elon Musk's companies.

Shaun Maguire, a partner at the blue-chip venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, is under fire for his comments about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — and his past remarks suggest he's not afraid of controversy.

In response to a New York Times story about Mamdani marking his ethnicity as both "Asian" and "Black or African American" on his 2009 application to Columbia University, Maguire wrote on X that the candidate "comes from a culture that lies about everything."

"It's literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda," he said.

The comments have ignited backlash from some in the tech world, including some founders backed by Sequoia. An online petition calling for the firm to take disciplinary action against Maguire and establish an avenue for Sequoia's founders to report discrimination and hate speech has more than 900 signatories who self-identified as founders, executives, or tech workers.

Meanwhile, others in the tech world, like Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, have expressed support for Maguire, and an open letter in his defense has begun circulating on X.

Sequoia declined to comment to Business Insider. When asked for comment, Maguire looped in Sequoia's communications team.

He previously pointed to posts he made on X in response to the backlash, including a video in which he defended his comments.

"To any Muslim that is not an Islamist, and to any Indian that took offense to this tweet, I am very, very sorry," he said in the video.

This is not Maguire's first time wading into political waters. The investor has become known for his outspoken conservative bent and is emblematic of a shift to the right in Silicon Valley.

From high school dropout to Silicon Valley big shot

Maguire followed a slightly unconventional path to venture capital.

After a lackluster high school performance — his GPA was 1.8 and he failed Algebra 2 — he dropped out of school in 10th grade and earned the equivalent of a GED, he said in a 2022 interview with the Caltech Heritage Project. He went on to enroll in community college and then graduate from the University of Southern California, where he was a member of the math team.

His interest in math took him to Stanford University, where he earned a Master's in statistics, and then to Caltech, where he earned a Ph.D. in physics.

While at the latter, he started working for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in Afghanistan. His work there led him to cofound Expanse (formerly Qadium), a network security company, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2020 for about $800 million.

He became a partner at Google Ventures in 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile. His investments there included Dandelion Energy, a geothermal heating and cooling company, IonQ, a quantum computing company, and Lambda School, a coding boot camp.

In 2019, Maguire joined Sequoia. He's led or co-led more than two dozen investments for the firm, including in AI upstarts Decart and Foundry, and several of Elon Musk's companies, like tunneling venture The Boring Company, AI platform xAI, and rocket builder SpaceX.

He's also interested in investments that support President Donald Trump's ambitions to "reshore the supply chain" through drones and silicon photonics, he told CNBC last month.

An outspoken Trump supporter: 'I was willing to face any consequences'

As his profile has risen in Silicon Valley, so has his political one.

Maguire, who went from supporting Hillary Clinton to embracing the Make America Great Again movement, has become one of the most prominent GOP supporters in Silicon Valley.

Following Trump's felony conviction last year, Maguire announced he'd back Trump in the 2024 election and would write his campaign a $300,000 check. In total, he donated about $800,000 to Republican causes last year, according to data from Open Secrets. Once Trump was elected, Maguire aided in the transition by interviewing candidates for positions in the defense department, The New York Times reported.

In a lengthy screed on X, Maguire, a staunch supporter of Israel, outlined the reasoning behind his political change of heart.

Part of his disillusionment with the Democrats hinged on foreign policy, including the fact that Joe Biden pulled US troops out of Afghanistan, he said. In contrast, he praised Trump as a "master of foreign policy" and described the myriad lawsuits against him as "double standards and lawfare."

His ideological shift extends beyond diplomatics. Over the past year, he's been posting near-daily diatribes on his politics.

He's criticized diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, claiming he wasn't promoted because he was a white man, and dabbled in conspiracy theories, including posting about how "antifa" is responsible for voter fraud.

"I had made enough money to where, if I got fired, I wasn't going to starve to death," he said earlier this year of his decision to be more outspoken on the "Uncapped" podcast. "I was at a point in my life where I was willing to face any consequences, as crazy as it sounds, even death."

His points of view have made him some enemies. He told Fortune that he "lost lots of friends and disappointed family."

The blowback following his comments on Mamdani, though, marks a new level.

Maguire isn't backing down, though.

In response to critics, he said on X, "You only embolden me."

• Bloomberg announced a newsroom reorg and staff cut but plans to end the year with more employees.
• The changes include merging finance teams and centralizing video.
• The newsroom, part of financial giant Bloomberg LP, is one of the largest and rarely cuts staff.

Bloomberg is making a rare staff cut as it reorganizes its newsroom, but plans to end the year with a bigger head count, according to a memo from editor in chief John Micklethwait, which was viewed by Business Insider.

Micklethwait announced several changes in the newsroom's structure to support three particular areas of recent focus:

• Bloomberg is merging some finance teams and consolidating them under Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam to support its coverage of private markets.
• It's also combining teams that focus on front-page news to provide more consistency in how news shows up throughout the week, a shift that will let Bloomberg put more attention on the rollout of AI tools across the newsroom.
• Third, it's centralizing video editorial under Kristin Powers, mirroring its audio editorial model.

While layoffs have become commonplace across the media landscape, staff reductions at Bloomberg's media arm are rare. The newsroom is one of the largest in the US and is partly insulated by its ownership by Michael Bloomberg's financial information giant Bloomberg LP, whose key product, the Bloomberg Terminal, is widely used on Wall Street. The company also has a history of hiring in economic downturns.

Bloomberg declined to comment on the scale of the cuts. The newsroom numbers around 2,700.

Here's Micklethwait's full memo to staff:

Our newsroom is always evolving. The capitalism that we chronicle keeps changing while the habits of our readers, listeners and viewers are also continually shifting. So we are always looking for ways in which we can improve our coverage. Look around Editorial & Research and we are currently adding people in Washington to cover the Trump presidency, expanding BI to cover more mid-cap companies, developing our geoeconomics and emerging markets offering, launching tech-focused TV programs in Europe and Asia, rolling out our Weekend product and experimenting with AI to improve our translation, summaries and our data journalism. Change is a constant.

However, if you look back over the past few years, three areas where we have leapt forward a long way stand out. We have deepened our coverage of private markets and credit, leading the way in a fast-growing part of the financial markets that is a priority for our company. We have continued to strengthen the ways we deliver and package news across our platforms, and record usage on the Terminal and strong growth in digital subscriptions are testament to our success. And we have built up our expertise in video - as proven by the two Emmys we won last month and the release of "Can't Look Away."

Today we are announcing several changes in our structure to consolidate our achievements in each of these three areas - and set ourselves up for future expansion.

Our advance into private markets has involved intense collaboration between our Credit and Finance groups. We now think the time is right to combine those teams - as well as Legal, Wealth and Investing - under the leadership of Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam. In a sign of how important Credit, Finance, Investing, Legal and Wealth are to us, Sree will join our Editorial & Research Management Committee.

Shannon Harrington, Executive Editor for Global Credit, will report into Sree as will two new Executive Editors: We will post for an Executive Editor for Finance, Investing & Legal in the Americas and an Executive Editor for Credit and Finance in APAC. In APAC, the Finance Managing Editor (Luo Jun) and the Credit Managing Editor (Andrew Monahan) will report to the new Executive Editor, with the Credit Managing Editor having a dual reporting line into Shannon.

Given the intensity of the story in the US, we are also uniting the Legal team with Financial Regulation under Managing Editor Benjamin Bain. Both Ben and the Finance & Investing Managing Editor for the Americas (Michael Moore) will report to the new Americas Executive Editor. The Managing Editors for Global Wealth (Brian Chappatta), Europe Finance & Investing (Tom Metcalf) and Mideast Money (Adveith Nair) will retain their reporting line into Sree.

Dan Hauck, who has overseen the combined Credit and Deals groups with great skill for the past six years, will continue to oversee Deals and still report into Heather Harris. Dan will work closely with Sree and Shannon on private equity in particular, where we have had a string of exclusives this year. He will also take on the editing mentoring work previously done by Wes Kosova.

One thing I must stress about Credit: although the growth in private markets has provided the catalyst for us to change formation, it doesn't in any way diminish our coverage of the much larger public credit markets where our customers rely on us to be first with new issues, loan deals and debt restructurings. Links with the other markets teams will remain as strong as ever and credit reporters will continue to file most of their stories into the Markets Editing hubs.

The second set of changes focuses on our front pages across all our platforms. The News Desks have for years been the arbiters of which stories we put in front of our readers on the Terminal and the Web during the workweek, while the 24/7 team built our successful offerings for mobile and oversaw news on the weekend. This setup made sense to get Daybreak and Bloomberg Today off the ground but it no longer fits a seven-day news cycle, where readers expect the same news judgment from us wherever they are and whatever day it is.

So we are combining the teams and reshaping the News Desks in each region, with one group overseeing front pages and news alerts (the now), one group looking ahead (Daybreak and Planning) and one group in charge of enterprise (the hub). Matt Miller will continue to oversee breaking news and economic data and devote more of his time to another of our key initiatives, the rollout of AI tools across the newsroom.

In the Americas under News Director Emma Moody, Alan Goldstein will join the desk as Executive Editor, with Managing Editors Katherine Cho and Kevin Whitelaw (weekends) reporting to him. Alison Ciaccio becomes Managing Editor for Planning and Daybreak, reporting to Emma, and Pratish Narayanan continues to oversee the hub as Executive Editor. The Web team under Lindsey Rupp continues to dual-report to the News Desk and Digital.

In Asia, News Director Mike Patterson will be joined by Linus Chua as Executive Editor. Maggie Otte and Shamim Adam (weekends) remain as Managing Editors and will report into Linus. The digital homepage team under Kristine Servando will dual-report into the News Desk and Saira Asher, Managing Editor for Digital in Asia. Emily Cadman continues to run the hub, and we will post for the Managing Editor for Daybreak and Planning.

Our EMEA News Director Ros Mathieson is keen to return to Asia, and I'm delighted that she will become our Chief Asia Correspondent based in Singapore, a new role reporting to John Fraher and Madeleine Lim. Will Kennedy will succeed her as News Director in London. His leadership team will include Executive Editors James Ludden (front pages, alerts) and Edward Evans (hub), and we will post for the Managing Editor roles for Daybreak/Planning and the front pages. A new digital homepage team under Niveditha Ravi will dual-report to the desk and Sarah Muller. Shiyin Chen will continue to oversee weekend news, reporting into James, while Adam Blenford moves to Katherine Bell's weekend team as a Senior Editor. We will post for a successor to Will as head of Energy and Commodities shortly.

The third set of changes focus on video. On the business side of Bloomberg Media, Roman Mackiewicz took over leading the video end-to-end strategy four months ago. To better align the editorial side with this (and also mirror our successful audio editorial model), we are unifying video editorial under Kristin Powers' leadership. Kristin has a wealth of experience across all our platforms - and helped launch both Green Docs and "Can't Look Away." Julie Alnwick McHale will continue to run Bloomberg Television and expand her remit to oversee all video news; Regina Dellea will be in charge of our studio, Bloomberg Originals; and Amina Wilson will be head of development for all programming, an expanded role. Julie, Regina and Amina will all report to Kristin, who will also continue to serve as Dave Merritt's deputy. The video alignment follows the successful integration of radio and podcasts in one audio division under Anthony Mancini two years ago.

To enable Kristin to focus on video, we are making some more changes in the Media Editorial group. Ted Fine and his partnerships team will now report to Julie Alnwick McHale. Emily Anton will take the lead for cross-platform projects. Loly Chan will run production across Businessweek and Markets magazines reporting into Katie Boyce. And we also want to simplify our approach to still images. For years we have run separate photography teams, serving our magazines, features, and the newswire. We'll now unite them into one group, led by Aeriel Brown and reporting up to Chris Nosenzo. We'll also be moving Dorothy Gambrell and Mark Glassman onto Martin Keohan's wider Data Viz group. These two changes will build on the success of our combined design merger.

Finally on the Media side, continuing our drive to build up our consumer product in Asia, Stephanie Phang will move over to Emma O'Brien's group where she will oversee our growing suite of newsletters that are helping us reach new audiences in the region. We will post for a new Managing Editor for Southeast Asia shortly.

As part of all these changes, we have sadly had to say goodbye to some colleagues. That too is part of how a newsroom evolves and gets stronger. To those who worry that this is driven by cost cutting, I will point out that we will end this year with a bigger newsroom than we started it. We have a responsibility not only to deliver the best content we can to our customers but also to create that content as efficiently as possible.

Reto and I and the rest of our leadership team are confident that these changes - as well as the long list of ongoing improvements and expansions that I mentioned at the beginning of this note - will all help us provide an even better Chronicle of Capitalism. And I am also certain that the newsroom and indeed our broader department will continue to evolve and change shape in the years ahead. The best, as we have occasionally pointed out before, is yet to come.

• Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to start a new political party called the America Party.
• Wedbush analyst Dan Ives thinks the Tesla board should limit the CEO's time spent on politics.
• Musk responded to Ives: "Shut up."

Even the most bullish of Tesla optimists can catch the ire of Elon Musk.

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, who often gives Tesla an "outperform" rating, said on X and in a note published Tuesday that Tesla's board of directors needs to create "ground rules" for Musk after the CEO said he would launch a new political party.

The analyst's suggestion stems from investor concerns that the CEO is once again diverting his attention away from Tesla and toward politics during a time when EV sales have slowed and the company is betting its future on autonomous vehicles and robotics.

Musk said on Saturday that he formed the "America Party" in response to the passing of the GOP's Big Beautiful Bill, which the CEO said would put the US in "debt slavery."

Ives said the company's board should increase Musk's voting power by up to 25% in his new pay package, establish "guardrails" for how much time Musk spends at Tesla, and provide "oversight on political endeavors."

One of Ives' suggestions is to fulfill Musk's previous demand to increase his ownership stake in the company, which stands at about 13%, as an incentive for him to stay on board at Tesla.

Even so, Musk responded to the analyst on X on Tuesday with a brief comment: "Shut up, Dan."

Ives appears to have brushed off the response.

"Elon has his opinion and I get it, but we stand by what the right course of action is for the Board," Ives told Business Insider in a text message.

Ives has been optimistic about Tesla's growth even as he recognized that the company was "going through a crisis" just several months ago when Tesla's stock was 53% below its all-time high from mid-December.

At the time, Musk was involved with the White House DOGE office which was created to reduce the size of the federal government and rein in spending.

Concerns about Musk's commitment to his company reached the top, according to The Wall Street Journal. In April, the Journal reported that Tesla's board opened a search for a potential replacement CEO. Robyn Denholm, Tesla's chair, said on X that the report was "absolutely false."

While Ives wouldn't go as far as calling for a replacement CEO — he previously said in an April 20 note that "Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla" — the analyst said at the time that Musk needed to do two things: make a statement outlining how he'd manage his time between Tesla and the White House, and establish a "roadmap" and timeline for Tesla's cheaper vehicles.

When Musk said he'd step back from DOGE, Ives called it "music to the ears of Tesla shareholders."

In Ives' latest note, the analyst wrote that it was time for the board to "take the bull by the horns."

Ives maintained Tesla's "outperform" rating.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

• The US Army is closing five equine programs to save $2 million annually.
• The five programs are all ceremonial units, but the Army could maintain recreational equines.
• Poor equine welfare and lack of veterinary resources may have contributed to the decision to downsize.

The US Army is axing almost all of its horse programs. But while some lament the blow to the service's cavalry history in exchange for $2 million in savings a year, the move may be wise considering the long-standing problems of poor equine welfare.

"I'm torn," an Army veterinarian familiar with the programs told Business Insider of the disbanding. "I think overall it's a relief, since there just aren't the veterinary resources available to take care of the horses properly."

"On the other hand, I wish we could provide quality care and keep them," they said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press.

Starting this month, the Army will begin shuttering five military equine programs operating at Fort Irwin in California, Fort Huachuca in Arizona, Fort Riley in Kansas, Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and Fort Hood in Texas.

All of the units perform ceremonial duties, such as parade and rodeo performances and mounted color guard duties, military traditions rooted in Army cavalry history.

Citing "care and compassion" as the guiding light, 141 horses in those five locations will be transferred outside of the military, Army spokesman Steve Warren told reporters Tuesday morning.

Two ceremonial caisson units, which specialize in transporting service member caskets at military funerals by horse-drawn wagons, will continue to operate — one at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia and another at Joint Base San Antonio in Texas.

Army equine issues spilled over into the public eye in 2022 after CNN reported multiple deaths among Arlington's horses, attributed to unsanitary living conditions and shoddy care. That report prompted an internal Army assessment of equine living conditions across the country, which found systemic problems related to equine healthcare rooted in a broad lack of equine understanding and poor funding.

The Arlington unit — one of the Army's most prestigious and revered postings — was shut down for almost two years for a serious overhaul in the wake of those findings.

After initially struggling to reform the unit, the service found multiple equestrian legends, including world-renowned carriage drivers and an Olympic gold medalist, to help rebuild the embattled program from scratch with input from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the British Royal Household Cavalry.

A new horse farm for the unit is in the works on top of a $30 million five-year budget approved last year that remains intact, said Lt. Col. Patrick Husted, a spokesman for the Army Military District of Washington, which oversees the unit.

"Sustaining our current budget is critical to the continued modernization of our caisson program, which encompasses personnel recruitment, herd acquisition, comprehensive training, equipment upgrades, and facility improvements," Husted wrote in an email to Business Insider.

Horses, especially those in performance programs such as military ceremonial units, require intense expert oversight often including personalized diets, custom-fitted saddles and harnesses, and advanced physical care that can include expensive water-treadmills or chiropractic treatments.

But such transformation seems to be limited to Arlington's horses, one of the Army's most public-facing units, which returned from its hiatus only recently. The Texas caisson program, meanwhile, does not appear to have undergone extensive reform like that of Arlington's. And it is unclear whether recreational equine programs that are set to remain have improved their equine care.

Nearly every Army equine unit was noted in the service's internal 2022 equine welfare report for subpar facilities and mismanagement.

Even for those non-ceremonial equines, the quality of care should exceed what most people determine to be sufficient, experts say, including things like routine specialized hoof maintenance by professional farriers, a role previously filled by soliders.

Neither the Air Force nor Navy appear to maintain ceremonial equine units.

The Marine Corps maintains two equine units— one at its Bridgeport, California Mountain Warfare Training Center, where troops learn how to use equines as wartime pack animals, and another in Barstow, California with a dozen horses dedicated to ceremonial purposes.

Laurie Pearson, a spokesperson for Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow, told BI that the Marines' mounted color guard does not plan to be disbanded.

"The USMC Mounted Color Guard is the last such unit in the Marine Corps," Pearson wrote in an email to BI. "They are a part of a robust Community Relations Program and Marine Corps recruiting efforts."

It is unclear whether the Marines' two equine units have undergone recent external equine assessments.

• The Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump to fire thousands of federal employees.
• A lower court had blocked the Trump administration from carrying out layoff plans.
• Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the Tuesday decision.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued an order that will effectively allow the Trump administration to proceed with plans for widespread layoffs at federal agencies, which could lead to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at enacting a "critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy" as part of DOGE. That order called for "large-scale reductions in force" across the federal government.

Several advocacy groups, local governments, and unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, challenged that order in April.

A federal judge in California then issued an order in May blocking the administration from carrying out reductions in force, which the Supreme Court lifted on Tuesday.

The court said in the unsigned opinion that it was taking "no view" on the substance of the Trump administration's layoff plans, and it's possible that the court could rule on their legality in the future.

In the meantime, Trump's reshaping of the federal bureaucracy will be allowed to proceed.

Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the sole public dissent in the case, calling the decision "hubristic and senseless."

"While the President no doubt has the authority to manage the Executive Branch, our system does not allow the President to rewrite laws on his own under the guise of that authority," Jackson wrote.

The coalition of groups who sued the administration called the decision "a serious blow to our democracy."

"This decision does not change the simple and clear fact that reorganizing government functions and laying off federal workers en masse haphazardly without any congressional approval is not allowed by our Constitution," the groups said. "While we are disappointed in this decision, we will continue to fight on behalf of the communities we represent and argue this case to protect critical public services that we rely on to stay safe and healthy."

• Sean "Diddy" Combs is hoping for zero jail time when he is sentenced on October 3.
• But prosecutors want the judge to weigh violence and drug evidence for which he was acquitted.
• They say they'll submit a list of "offense conduct" to federal probation officials by Friday.

Federal prosecutors say they are spending this week making a list of all the ways Sean "Diddy" Combs is a criminal — including some offenses he has been acquitted of — to use against him at his October 3 sentencing.

Prosecutors are drafting a confidential, so-called "summary of offense conduct" they say they'll submit to federal probation officials by Friday, according to a pre-sentencing schedule approved by the judge on Tuesday.

It's promising to be a long list, full of drug use and domestic violence that Combs has been acquitted of as elements of the unsuccessful sex trafficking and racketeering charges, but which he has also admitted to repeatedly since the start of the trial.

More than a dozen prosecution witnesses described violence and drug use during the two-month trial.

"Sean Combs has a temper, and when he drank, or when he did the wrong drugs, he would get violent — my client is not proud of that," defense lawyer Teny Geragos told jurors in May 12 opening statements.

But "domestic violence is not sex trafficking," Geragos told the jury repeatedly.

The defense "mea culpa" appears to have worked. Jurors apparently did make the distinction, convicting him only on two transporting for prostitution counts.

Combs was acquitted of top counts that alleged he essentially ran his businesses as a mob boss, and that he used drugs and violence to coerce two girlfriends into years of "freak offs," sexual performances with male escorts.

But these defense drug and violence admissions, strategic during trial, may come back to haunt Combs at sentencing, according to defense attorneys and former prosecutors.

These experts told Business Insider that judges can consider prior bad acts — even acts that resulted in acquittal — in sentencing, especially when the defendant has admitted to them.

Combs faces anywhere from zero jail time up to 20 years in prison on the two prostitution charges. Prosecutors said last week that they may seek somewhere in the four-to-five-year range, but warned that those numbers will very likely be revised upward.

"They're going to go full blast," defense attorney and former prosecutor Michael Bachner predicted of prosecutors on Tuesday.

"They can say the defendant is somebody who was admittedly a violent individual," he said.

"And they can also bring up his prior arrest record," said Bachner, who was part of the defense team that won gun possession and bribery acquittals for Combs and a former bodyguard in a 2001 trial in state court in Manhattan. Probation officials will use the defense list in drafting a pre-sentencing report that will recommend an amount of jail time, the former prosecutor said.

Prosecutors will have to ask the judge to consider acquitted conduct if they hope to win anywhere near a 20-year, maximum sentence, former federal prosecutor Nadia Shihata, who prosecuted the R. Kelly sex trafficking case, told BI after the verdict.

The judge can decide if there was a preponderance of evidence proving those acquitted crimes, she told BI.

"If so, 20 years is more likely," she said, adding that she believes the ultimate sentence will be far less.

Combs has remained behind bars since his arrest in mid-September.

After Wednesday's verdict, US District Judge Arun Subramanian denied Combs' fourth request for bail, a decision that left the rap mogul in a federal jail in Brooklyn.

Combs will remain jailed at least until October 3, the current date for his sentencing.

The jury found that Combs knowingly arranged for R&B singer Cassie Ventura and a later girlfriend, who testified pseudonymously as "Jane," to crisscross the country for drug-fueled hotel sex sessions.

Agnifilo had asked after the verdict that Combs be released on $1 million bail and allowed to live at his homes in Miami and Las Vegas while awaiting sentencing. He argued the conviction on the more minor charges didn't warrant being held without bail.

But the judge agreed with lead prosecutor Maurene Comey, who argued that Combs faces significant jail time and remains a threat, as a trio of federal judges has found in denying bail in the weeks after his arrest.

Combs continued to break the law last year after his homes were searched when he knew he was under investigation, the judge said.

Combs has admitted, through his lawyers, to domestic violence and drug use, the judge said.

"You, full-throatedly in your closing argument, told the jury that there was violence here," the judge told lead attorney Marc Agnifilo in denying bail on Wednesday.

"And domestic violence is violence."