With just one week to go before the UFC White House card finally happens, a lawsuit looks to stop that from being the case.<\/p>\n
In a press release acquired by MMA Fighting on Sunday, a lawsuit has been filed by Paul Romano, a retired Air Force Sergeant and Vietnam veteran, and Susan Douglas, a longtime civic activist and organizer, both of whom seek to \u201cpreserve Washington\u2019s monumental spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n
The lawsuit describes UFC White House as \u201ca corrupt scheme to hand the White House South Lawn and Lincoln Memorial to a private, for-profit sports promoter in violation of federal law.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe event, scheduled for June 14, was conceived by President Trump and organized by UFC CEO Dana White, a close personal ally of Trump, and will benefit both men financially,\u201d writes Samuel T. Ward-Packard of the Public Integrity Project, the lead attorney on the case.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrump purchased up to $50,000 in UFC parent company TKO stock earlier this spring, while White\u2019s company is selling VIP packages for $1.5 million each, and benefiting from what one TKO executive called \u201cthe greatest earned-marketing tool of all time.\u201d Additionally, a weigh-in for fighters is scheduled for the night before, and is set to occur at the Lincoln Memorial.\u201d<\/p>\n
The complaint focuses on a trio of \u201cunlawful\u201d grounds. The first is a Violation of National Park Service agreements, which prohibit sporting events from taking place on federal parklands, and plaintiffs say does not fall under any acceptable regulatory exemption. The second is that \u201cThe Claw\u201d \u2014 part of the staging setup for the event on the White House lawn \u2014 has no congressional authorization, a requirement for building on federal parklands. Lastly, the complaint argues about the potential cost to taxpayers for repairs of the South Lawn.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe President arranged to hand two of America\u2019s most cherished monuments to a private corporation so he and his allies could profit from them. That is corruption,\u201d plaintiff Susan Douglas stated. \u201cThese monuments belong to all of us Americans, not to Dana White, not to advertisers like Crypto.com, and not to Donald Trump. We\u2019re asking the court to enforce the law because the administration refuses to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Per the release, the plaintiffs are also in the process of filing for a temporary restraining order, which, if it\u2019s granted, could actually stop the event while the court looks over the facts of the case.<\/p>\n
UFC White House, which takes place in a week, is headlined by Ilia Topuria vs. Justin Gaethje for the undisputed lightweight title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With just one week to go before the UFC White House card finally happens, a lawsuit looks to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":721927,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,701,44,41,39,42,40,640,702],"class_list":["post-721926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-latest-news","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721926\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/721927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}