By SYLVIE CORBET, Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — A Paris court sentenced former French President Nicolas Sarkozy to 5 years in prison and — in a major surprise — said he’ll be incarcerated even if he appeals, after finding him guilty Thursday in his trial for alleged illegal campaign financing by Libya.

The court said the date of his incarceration will be decided later, sparing the 70-year-old the humiliation of being marched out of the courtroom by police officers and going straight to jail.

The court found Sarkozy guilty of criminal association in a plot from 2005 to 2007 to finance his campaign with funds from Libya in exchange for diplomatic favors. But it cleared him of three other charges — including passive corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of the embezzlement of public funds.

FILE – French President Nicolas Sarkozy, left, greets Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi upon his arrival on Dec. 10 2007 at the Elysee Palace, in Paris. (AP Photo/Francois Mori, File)

The court also found two of Sarkozy’s closest associates when he was president — former ministers Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux — guilty of criminal association but likewise acquitted them of some other charges.

Overall, the ruling suggested that the court believed that the men conspired to seek Libyan funding for Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign but that judges weren’t convinced that the conservative leader himself was directly involved in the funding effort or that any Libyan money ended up being used in his winning campaign.

The chief judge, in an hours-long reading of the lengthy verdict, said Sarkozy allowed his close associates to reach out to Libyan authorities “to obtain or try to obtain financial support in Libya for the purpose of securing campaign financing.” He stood as she read out the verdict.

But the court also said it couldn’t determine with certainty that Libyan money ended up financing Sarkozy’s campaign. Still, under French law, a corrupt scheme can still be a crime even if money wasn’t paid or cannot be proven, the court explained.

Sarkozy, accompanied by his wife, the singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, was present in the courtroom, which was also filled with reporters and members of the public. Sarkozy sat in the front row of the defendant’s seats. His three adult sons were also in the room.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni Sarkozy arrive to the courtroom for his verdict for alleged illegal financing of his 2007 presidential campaign by the government of then-Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025 in Paris. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

Sarkozy, who was elected in 2007 but lost his bid for reelection in 2012, denied all wrongdoing during a three-month trial earlier this year that also involved 11 co-defendants, including three former ministers.

Despite multiple legal scandals that have clouded his presidential legacy, Sarkozy remains an influential figure in right-wing politics in France and in entertainment circles, by virtue of his marriage to Bruni-Sarkozy.

Alleged Libya financing

The accusations trace their roots to 2011, when a Libyan news agency and Gadhafi himself said the Libyan state had secretly funneled millions of euros into Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign.

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In 2012, the French investigative outlet Mediapart published what it said was a Libyan intelligence memo referencing a 50 million-euro funding agreement. Sarkozy denounced the document as a forgery and sued for defamation. The court ruled Thursday that it “now appears most likely that this document is a forgery.”

Investigators also looked into a series of trips to Libya made by people close to Sarkozy when he served as interior minister from 2005 and 2007, including his chief of staff.

In 2016, Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told Mediapart that he had delivered suitcases filled with cash from Tripoli to the French Interior Ministry under Sarkozy. He later retracted his statement.

That reversal is now the focus of a separate investigation into possible witness tampering. Both Sarkozy and his wife were handed preliminary charges for involvement in alleged efforts to pressure Takieddine. That case has not gone to trial yet.

Takieddine, who was one of the co-defendants, died on Tuesday in Beirut. He was 75. He had fled to Lebanon in 2020 and did not attend the trial.

Prosecutors alleged that Sarkozy had knowingly benefited from what they described as a “corruption pact” with Gadhafi’s government.

Libya’s longtime dictator was toppled and killed in an uprising in 2011, ending his four-decade rule of the North African country.

Sarkozy denounced a ‘plot’

The trial shed light on France’s back-channel talks with Libya in the 2000s, when Gadhafi was seeking to restore diplomatic ties with the West. Before that, Libya was considered a pariah state.

Sarkozy has dismissed the allegations as politically motivated and reliant on forged evidence. During the trial, he denounced a “plot” he said was staged by “liars and crooks” including the “Gadhafi clan.”

He suggested that the allegations of illegal campaign financing were retaliation for his call — as France’s president — for Gadhafi’s removal.

Sarkozy was one of the first Western leaders to push for military intervention in Libya in 2011, when Arab Spring pro-democracy protests swept the Arab world.

“What credibility can be given to such statements marked by the seal of vengeance?” Sarkozy asked in comments during the trial.

Stripped of the Legion of Honor

In June, Sarkozy was stripped of his Legion of Honor medal — France’s highest award — after his conviction in a separate case.

Earlier, he was found guilty of corruption and influence peddling for trying to bribe a magistrate in 2014 in exchange for information about a legal case in which he was implicated.

Sarkozy was sentenced to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet for one year. He was granted a conditional release in May due to his age, which allowed him to remove the electronic tag after he wore it for just over three months.

In another case, Sarkozy was convicted last year of illegal campaign financing in his failed 2012 reelection bid. He was accused of having spent almost twice the maximum legal amount and was sentenced to a year in prison, of which six months were suspended.

Sarkozy has denied the allegations. He has appealed that verdict to the highest Court of Cassation, and that appeal is pending

Associated Press journalist John Leicester contributed.

Because there is a silver lining for most things in life, maybe there is also one for ABC’s craven (if brief) suspension, under thuggish government pressure, of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. To wit: Now the left is once again all but unanimous in wanting to defend free speech.

That hasn’t always been the case in recent years.

It wasn’t the case when, a day before Kimmel’s suspension, Amy Klobuchar called on Congress to prevent violence like Charlie Kirk’s murder by cracking down on speech online. “I’m not for censorship, but I do think that more has to be done online,” said the Democratic senator from Minnesota. Sentences that begin “I’m not for censorship, but …” are usually calls for censorship.

It wasn’t the case this spring when Democrats in the Colorado legislature sought to criminalize some speech that “misgendered” or “deadnamed” transgender children, including custody threats to parents who refused to use their child’s preferred pronouns.

It wasn’t the case in 2023 when a RealClear Opinion Research poll found that three-fourths of Democrats believe government has a responsibility to limit “hateful” or inaccurate social media posts, as compared with roughly half of Republicans.

It wasn’t the case when, in the summer of 2021, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski asked, with clear relish, whether social media companies shouldn’t be “open to lawsuits” for publishing what she and the government deemed to be “misinformation” on the COVID vaccines.

It wasn’t the case when Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director then being interviewed by Brzezinski, answered, “We’re reviewing that, and certainly they should be held accountable.”

It wasn’t the case when, in February 2021, Facebook announced that it would treat claims that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured” — that is, the lab-leak hypothesis — as a form of misinformation, leading to the removal of all mention of it. Mark Zuckerberg later complained that the Biden administration pressured the company to take down posts about COVID-19, including humor, according to a report in Politico.

It wasn’t the case among the stars of the liberal literary establishment, including Sally Rooney and Arundhati Roy, who demanded boycotts of Israeli publications, publishers and institutions on account of their presumptive complicity in oppressing Palestinians.

It wasn’t the case, either, when another batch of liberal writers, including cartoonist Garry Trudeau and novelist Peter Carey, rebuked the PEN American Center for its decision to give an award to Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper that lost 12 of its staff members in a 2015 terrorist attack.

It wasn’t the case when the New York publishing industry began capitulating to social-media demands to cancel or torpedo books whose authors had run afoul of one left-wing orthodoxy or another: Jeanine Cummins and “American Dirt,” Richard North Patterson and “Trial,” Dr. Seuss and “If I Ran the Zoo” and several other titles.

It wasn’t the case when the editors of Slate indefinitely suspended podcast host Mike Pesca for arguing that it could be appropriate to mention a racial slur if not using it as an epithet. Or when The Atlantic fired conservative writer Kevin Williamson after a few days of employment because of a handful of remarks made years earlier. Or when NBC parted ways with Megyn Kelly because she said (and then apologized for saying) that, in her childhood, using blackface was “OK as long as you were dressing up like a character.”

It wasn’t the case in 2021 when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceled a prestigious science lecture by geophysicist Dorian Abbot because it didn’t like his views about diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Or when Harvard University pushed out evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven because of her insistence on the fundamental realities of sex differences. Or when Jason Kilborn, a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago (a public university), was suspended merely for referring to two slurs without specifically mentioning the actual slurs.

Some readers might argue that the effort to cancel Kimmel is unique — and uniquely dangerous — because it was pushed by Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission. That is true, but then why the comparative liberal silence about the Biden administration’s efforts to police speech on social media? Others might argue that COVID misinformation or hate speech should be subject to different rules from mundane political speech. More than a century of First Amendment jurisprudence, from liberal and conservative justices alike, says otherwise.

And then there are those who point to the hypocrisy of conservatives, Carr not least, who rail against censorship and cancellation when it comes from the left and then enforce their own cancel (or consequence) culture the moment they are in power. A very fair point — and all the more reason for liberals to stick by liberal principles when it comes to their own side’s self-appointed censors.

It’s a cliché, but can’t be said enough, that speech is genuinely free only when it is speech we like the least from those we dislike the most. Rosa Luxemburg put it well: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”

Shana tova.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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Once again, Congress seems to be barreling toward a government shutdown. Once again, the process is likely to be costly, counterproductive and completely unnecessary.

As so often in recent years, Congress has yet to pass all 12 appropriations bills needed to fund the government on time. Unless a deal materializes, the lights will go out on Oct. 1. Republicans were able to pass a mostly party-line bill in the House on Friday but will need bipartisan support to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.

With this bit of leverage, Democrats are thinking of forcing a shutdown to induce certain policy concessions. Although their goals are legitimate, closing the government won’t further any of them.

Last week, party leaders aired two main objectives. The first concerns health-care policy. Enhanced Covid-era tax credits for insurance bought on Affordable Care Act exchanges are set to expire at the end of the year, potentially raising out-of-pocket costs by as much as 75% and jeopardizing coverage for 4 million people. This would indeed be a bad outcome and extending the subsidies is a reasonable priority.

A second concern is that the White House keeps refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress. In July, it requested a “rescission” of about $9 billion in foreign-aid funding and media subsidies (which Congress partly accepted) and in August asserted the right to cut another $4.9 billion effectively without legislative consent. Again, Democrats have a point: This maneuver is anti-democratic, probably illegal and worth fighting over.

The problem is that a shutdown won’t address either concern. Across five decades of these fights, the party demanding concessions has almost always taken the blame in the court of public opinion and has almost never accomplished its goals. In this case, a minority in the Senate would be defying majorities in both chambers as well as the president in pursuit of unrelated policy changes. It’s hardly a winning hand.

Moreover, closing the government is costly in itself. A 16-day shutdown in 2013 led to perhaps $6 billion in lost output and $2 billion in added costs. That’s to say nothing of the harm to services: Air travel may be disrupted, Food and Drug Administration inspections halted, benefits delayed, data releases postponed, national parks shuttered and much else. Hundreds of thousands of workers would likely be furloughed without pay.

Rather than picking this unwinnable fight, Democrats should agree to a stopgap funding bill, then do the hard work of negotiating compromises and winning elections.

A bipartisan deal on the Obamacare subsidies — ideally one that includes a long-term extension in return for gradually moderating tax credits for the highest earners — should be achievable: Neither party wants to see big premium hikes in an election year. As for “pocket rescissions,” a court challenge is underway; the Government Accountability Office has deemed the practice illegal; and half a dozen prominent Republicans, including the Senate majority leader, have publicly broken with the president on the topic. Should the White House attempt further such gambits, a bipartisan rejection seems likely.

More important for Democrats is that they have a good chance of winning the House and making gains in the Senate next November, so long as they don’t blow it by engaging in stunts like this. Midterms historically favor the opposition party, and the president remains quite unpopular. If they wish to advance their policy goals and reassert authority over a wayward executive, the ballot box is the place to do it.

— The Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board

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Property owners in Washington County can now learn if their property ever had a racial covenant — a clause in a property deed that barred people who were not white from owning homes or land for the first half of the 20th century.

The properties are marked on a new online map from Mapping Prejudice, an ongoing University of Minnesota Libraries research project working to expose structural racism.

So far, researchers have mapped 438 properties with racial covenants in the county, and the work is continuing, said Dave Brandt, the county’s geospatial systems architect, who has been working with the U of M researchers.

While the U.S. Supreme Court made racial covenants legally unenforceable in 1948, many sellers continued to add them to properties after that date, said Michael Corey, technical lead for Mapping Prejudice. They were made fully illegal nationwide by the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

Acknowledging the racial covenants and the wrongs they inflicted is the first step toward reversing wealth gaps around the country, Corey said.

Covenants were put on properties “to attract white buyers,” he said. “They were seen as a selling point. It was an amenity, a new technology that they said would make your neighborhood better.”

Mapping Prejudice, which was started in 2016, has uncovered more than 35,000 racial covenants to date in Minnesota, he said. The earliest one found so far is from 1910.

Racial covenants and other tools “shut people out from generations of wealth-building,” Corey said.

“Now that discrimination is theoretically illegal, we’re not all starting from the same place,” he said. “We’re starting from a place where some people have had 100 years of investment in their neighborhoods. They’ve gone to college, they’ve been able to retire. Other people are on the opposite end of that, where maybe they were only able to live in a neighborhood that had a freeway next to it or was redlined, and they weren’t able to get a loan and maybe didn’t have access to college. Some people are starting in a hole while other people were given a huge leg up.”

Mapped homes

The properties that have been mapped to date in Washington County appear with detailed descriptions of the racially restrictive covenants, the addresses and the dates they were added.

Among them are homes on North Shore Circle in Forest Lake, homes along the shore of Bone Lake in Scandia and homes scattered throughout Oakdale, St. Paul Park, Lake St. Croix Beach and St. Mary’s Point. There also are a few in Lakeland and one in Newport.

About 45 homes built between Lake Demontreville and Lake Olson in the Tri-Lake neighborhood of Lake Elmo contain racial covenants. Most of the racial covenants were placed in 1925; another dozen or so were added in 1951.

Many of the covenants in that area of Lake Elmo state that “the said property shall not … be conveyed or leased to, or occupied or used by, any other person or persons than those of the white Caucasian race, but this provision shall not be construed to prevent the occupation of said property by persons of other races, where they are employed as servants.”

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Washington County commissioners in June 2021 approved an agreement with the University of Minnesota Libraries giving researchers bulk access to property-record images free of charge for deeds filed from 1910 to 1968.

After they received images of the microfilmed property records from Washington County, volunteers fed the images through optical-character-recognition software to screen for racist language, Corey said. Anything the software flagged was then reviewed, he said.

If volunteers found a racist covenant, they then transcribed the text of the covenant and recorded the date, the name of the buyer, the name of the seller and the physical description of the property.

Shocked to learn

The covenants are never removed from the history of the deed, but they can be discharged, Corey said.

“We don’t actually want to redact the historical record,” he said. “But when you discharge your covenant, it actually puts another note in the stack of files associated with the property that says, ‘There was a covenant. Here’s where it was, and we disavow that.’”

“We think it’s really important that we don’t erase the evidence of racial covenants,” he said. “The only reason that we can find these now and map them and have these conversations is because they were preserved as part of the historical record. Sometimes I think people would just prefer that this history was gone, but in the past, that has meant that people have avoided talking about this history and pretending it didn’t happen.”

A woman who owns one of the houses in Lake Elmo said she was shocked to learn her deed includes a clause that once prohibited any non-white person from buying or renting it. She and her husband, who bought the house in 2010, plan to contact the Washington County’s property records department and begin the process of having the covenant discharged, she said.

There is no charge to do so, thanks to a law passed by the Minnesota Legislature earlier this year, Corey said.

“A lot of people have found discharging their covenants really meaningful and important, and we support that,” he said. “We also say that that needs to be the beginning of a conversation, not the end of a conversation. Now that we know that this was here, what are we going to do about it? Discharging your covenant does not undo the damage that was done by that covenant being there for 50 years.”

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Racial covenants info, talk

Anyone who wants to have a racial covenant discharged in Washington County should contact the County Recorder’s Office at 651-430-6175 or recorder@washingtoncountymn.gov or stop by the front desk at the Washington County Government Center in Stillwater. There is no fee.

Dave Brandt will present a Tea Talk on the Mapping Prejudice project from 5-6 p.m. Friday at the Washington County Historic Courthouse in Stillwater. Registration is $15 at WashingtonCountyMN.gov/ParksPrograms (search for “Tea Talk”).