today on getting answers. the supreme court issues a ruling that gives presidents criminal immunity in actions taken in an official capacity. we'll break down what it means for trump. the election and democracy. mark farrell is one of the leading

candidates for san francisco mayor, but his spending years ago as interim mayor and supervisor has piqued the interest and scrutiny of our media partner, the san francisco standard. and with climate change, i and acrimony. are you happy with our present? if not, how do we design a better future? the folks at stanford's renowned design school, or d.school have some thoughts in a new book. you're watching getting answers. i'm kristen z. before we get to those interviews, we begin with the dangerous heat wave coming our way. a red flag warning starts tonight, and a spare the air alert tomorrow. abc7 news meteorologist drew tuma has the details. >> later on this evening, we are going to have a red flag warning kick in for the north bay mountains and the east bay hills and what is going to happen? a northerly wind will develop overnight tonight could gust as high as about 25mph. that is going to bring in some very dry air. humidity levels could go as low as 10% combined with some warm air. likely these areas will stay in the 60s and 70s

overnight tonight, so that will elevate some of our fire concerns. here's a look at the wind early tomorrow morning. you can see that northerly component dragging in some of that dry air strongest in the north bay, but still will affect the east bay hills as well. but that humidity as we head into the afternoon will rise just a bit enough that we will not have as high as a fire danger tomorrow afternoon. but then the heat is really going to kick in. so here's a look at the fire danger index. this takes into account wind speeds, humidity levels, and air temperature. you can see the scale at the bottom of your screen and parts of the east bay. it's on the moderate to high end, but as you go into parts of the north bay, mainly parts of napa and solano county, we start to get to that very high kind of edge of the fire danger index, and that's why we have that red flag warning in effect. then tomorrow it's all about our heat wave beginning. we have heat advisories in effect. that does include the city of oakland, lots of the bay shoreline for temperatures in the 80s and in the 90s. but the pink color, an excessive heat

warning. that's the highest threat when it comes to heat related risks. that encompasses the north bay, the east bay, the south bay, the santa cruz mountains. because we will have some very warm temperatures to deal with starting tomorrow, and it will last for several days. in fact, this heat wave likely lasting five days until the start of the weekend. so you do take a look at future tracker temperatures. by tuesday afternoon, the city we're going to the 80s. look at oakland into the 90s. and then you see these hot temperatures as you head away from the coast in the north bay. the inland east bay, where well above 100 degrees. and that does continue into wednesday as well. by wednesday afternoon, we do have some cities flirting with 110 as their daytime high. so this is dangerous heat. remember, when it comes to these heat waves, it's a cumulative effect, meaning each day it wears your body down. so you do want to stay hydrated. because we have a major to extreme heat risk inland. those are the reds. and purples you see on your screen. so for a lot of folks who are underneath some of these

heat advisories and excessive heat warnings, we don't have ac. so ways to beat the heat without that ac. open your windows at night. get that cooler air into your home as early as you can in the morning. close those windows. close those blinds to keep the heat out. drink plenty of water. a hydrated body is really efficient at cooling itself off, and a lot of folks actually said right before bed, take a cold shower. it helps them sleep when we have these really warm temperatures. so the accuweather seven day forecast here we go with that heat wave. it begins tuesday will persist through the fourth. and in fact, we'll hang on through the start of the upcoming weekend. >> all right. a supreme court ruling today gives former president trump criminal immunity for official acts, saying it's within a president's constitutional power. house speaker mike johnson called the ruling a victory. senate majority leader chuck schumer says it's disgraceful. abc news reporter perry russom is at the supreme court in the six three decision. >> the justices ruling former presidents are shielded from prosecution for some acts, but

not all. the case is tied to trump's january 6th election interference case. today trump says the ruling is a big win, even as he's been calling for absolute immunity for all acts since he was first charged in the case. >> a president has to have immunity. if you don't have immunity, you just have a ceremonial president with the opinion of the court, chief justice john roberts writes. >> trump asserts a far broader immunity than the limited one we have recognized in dissent, justice sonia sotomayor writes, the ruling makes a mockery of the principle foundational to our constitution and system of government, that no man is above the law. after the ruling, the biden campaign with a dire prediction they just handed donald trump the keys to a dictatorship. special counsel jack smith, the prosecutor in trump's election interference case, not commenting today, his office and the department of justice now said to be reviewing their options, weighing acts that could be seen as official and which were not. now it's up to the lower courts to look at this ruling and see how it applies to this case, delaying both the interference case and the classified documents case even further until most likely

after the election. perry russom abc news at the supreme court. >> so what does the ruling mean for donald trump ahead of the november election? what does it mean for the institution of the presidency? what does it mean for our democracy? joining us live to talk about this impactful ruling ruling is rory little, professor of law, uc law, san francisco. professor little, thanks for your time today. >> thank you. what was the main legal reasoning behind the majority's ruling here? >> was it based on president? >> well, let me let me say that, the patina of their ruling makes it sound pretty reasonable. oh, it's a limited grant of immunity, it only applies to official acts. et cetera. et cetera. justice sotomayor, in dissent, says, she really sort of shreds the patina of moderation here and demonstrates that this is a wildly broad immunity that they have

recognized. and it's only because there are three justices appointed by president trump who have shifted the majority on this case, even justice barrett, appointed by justice trump or president trump. didn't agree with everything in the majority, it's not based on precedent. it's a new question. is there criminal immunity for the president? but, you know, the framers of the constitution pretty much recognized that there would be criminal prosecution of presidents. presidents. they said, in fact, in the impeachment clause, even if you're impeached, you could still be prosecuted criminally, which shows that they anticipated it. so it's a pretty disturbing, ruling. historically, it is the law, and the lower court will have to follow it, and of course, it means there will be no trial, prior to the election in november. yeah. >> let's get a little bit into this. who decides what is an official act and what is an unofficial act, a personal act and whether, you know, scenarios

you can imagine that might come up that could really blur the lines. >> well, you're absolutely right, you know, justice roberts, chief justice roberts says, hey, we're not going to decide how that's defined in the in the first instance. it's that's for the lower courts. they didn't address that below. now that we've recognized this distinction, we're going to let them do that, i have to say that justice sotomayor's dissent demonstrates the tests they have set up. they say we're going to offer some guidance. we're not going to decide how to do this. we'll just offer some guidance. and then they set up some tests. those tests are remarkably broad. it makes almost everything official action. and the majority says that the intention or the motive of the president, can't be admitted as evidence. that's just crazy. under criminal law in criminal law, it is the motive and the intention of the defendant that separates what's legal from what's not legal. >> okay, that's the second part. i like you to get into a little

bit more, because it's hard for me to even understand that. right. and that's the part that's not being reported on as widely. >> right? right. this this idea, it's only three pages in the opinion. but justice barrett actually dissents from it and says, i don't agree with the majority. she's a trump appointee. the dissenters kind of shredded the idea in a criminal case that you can't talk about the motive. you know, a police officer can exercise force to effect an arrest. now, if he exercises excessive force with a motive of actually discriminating, let's say, on the basis of race, then that can be crime, to say that the motive and the intention of the defendant doesn't matter and can't be admitted, even as evidence is a remarkable ruling. and that's kind of hidden on page 32 of the of the majority's opinion. >> yeah. you mentioned justice sotomayor. she wrote that this is akin to elevating a president into a monarch, which brings up the democracy question. right, how does this change? i guess our institutions and maybe the balance of power in our institutions?

>> well, it gives the president a remarkable amount of power, what we hope, right. what we hope is that we elect people of good character who are not going to come crossing the criminal law lines. they are going to follow the law. you know, the vice president, michael pence, stood there and defied trump and said, i don't have the authority to reject electoral college votes, and i'm not going to do it. well, good for him. but, you know, today, you could say, well, the president's immune for having even tried to do that, so the democracy, the effect of democracy is quite strong, and it puts the courts in an amazingly powerful position as opposed to allowing the jury and the prosecutor to put the evidence up and let a group of citizens decide in a in a unanimous jury verdict. >> does this create a new legal standard for potentially prosecuting former presidents? >> absolutely. it creates a new legal standard. it creates it

creates this standard of official versus unofficial action. it says even official action. that's not part of the core responsibility is presumptively immune, and then it sets up tests for how you decide if something is official, which says it's the outer perimeter of even the most arguable notion of what a president can do, justice sotomayor basically says the majority, even accepts because they don't say anything about it. this idea that the president could order the navy seals to execute a rival, everybody rejected that idea, but the majority today didn't say a word about it. so, it i'm disturbed by the ruling, even though on its surface it looks like, oh, you know, this is just going to be a normal case. and the lower court will make some decisions, right? >> i mean, of course, there are implications. i mean, this case began with trump, and right now that's as far as we can look. but really this is about the future and future presidents and what they are able to not and

not able to do. so from what you're saying, i gather you think this will weaken democracy, but can i just ask you, could it strengthen america? i mean, does strengthening or weakening democracy in america? are they one and the same? >> well, that's a good question, you know, the system is not perfectly democratic, right? we elect representatives who then represent us. we don't get to vote directly on everything. we often have to pay taxes for things we don't like, things like that, america is a is a constitutional system set up to be a republic with checks and balances. this decision really removes a lot of the checks and balances. congress passes a law saying you can't do bribery, and the president, if he does something official, is immune from a bribery prosecution. that's a remarkable change in the checks and balances. i think that the framers intended indeed . >> no more time for esoteric questions and, existential ones. but rory little, always appreciate talking with you. thank you so much.

>> thank you. christine >> a top contender in san francisco's mayoral race is facing scrutiny over his campaign account spending during his time as supervisor and interim mayor. next, the exclusive report from our media partner, the san francisco standard, and what

for san francisco. mayor by hair is former interim mayor and supervisor mark farrell. as he gets more attention. our media partner, the san francisco standard, dug into his spending from his office holder account and published this new article. exclusive mark farrell lived large on a campaign cash while mayor and supervisor. joining us

live now to talk about his article is senior reporter for the standard, josh kane. hey, josh, good to see you. >> hey, kristin. >> good to see you. all right. we should say off the top that farrell emphatically disputes the framing around the article and also the notion that anything improper happened. will share his statement in a minute. but first, tell us what prompted your investigation and what you found. >> well, lately i've been looking back at old campaign finance reports for people who are running for office. we talked recently about assembly member matt haney, who spent a lot of campaign cash on 40 niners tickets, which he called fundraisers. and so now just kind of going down the list, i decided to start looking at mayor candidates here in san francisco. and mark farrell has had some really interesting findings that were very different than almost everyone else who's running for mayor. >> all right. so tell us what they were. what did he spend money on? what kind of establishments, how much? and then, of course, you mentioned different. so how so? >> yeah. well, mark farrell, when he was a supervisor back in

2016, he ran for the local democratic party committee to be a member of that committee, and he had about $56,000 left over in the campaign account. and so he was still a supervisor. and at that time he started to use the money to go to some of the fanciest restaurants. and bars in san francisco. uh- spruce swig, balboa cafe. the list just keeps going and going. and so he started spending thousands of dollars on these meals and saying that he was meeting with d, triple c constituents, which is basically any democrat in san francisco. no other person who ran for supervisor. excuse me, who ran for the democratic party and is running for mayor now, had anything like that and really just all d triple c candidates, democratic party officials were like, this is an unusual pattern. and it carried on actually, after he was appointed mayor following the death of ed lee. >> all right, what is the implication of that? >> well, the implication is we should know who our elected

officials are meeting with. there's actually pretty strict rules about lobbying, and they have to keep calendars as elected officials. mark farrell's campaign said that they had no record of the meals for itemized receipts on what was spent. they said they had no record of who he was meeting with. and then also, maybe a bigger issue is not just the fact that he seems to be, you know, living large and drinking cocktails and beers and drinking wine and eating steak houses, but actually taking money from special interests like recology, which is the trash company for san francisco that's been involved in a massive corruption scandal. and maze oyster house, a restaurant that had business before the city. and as he was taking in this money, which could be at a threshold much higher than most elected officials in san francisco, he was then not only allowing them to you know, get his attention, but then he actually handed out commission appointments to people involved with these special interests. >> all right. granted, we don't know if that's coincidence.

right. and that's not something you address, i don't think, in the scope of your article, but farrell did say this was common practice for candidates and office holders and legal as well. so his statement to us here it is. quote, i follow the law around fundraising and spending at all times, all of the fundraising and expenses that i submitted were legitimate, vetted and approved by counsel. do you dispute any of that response or do you agree with that? >> i mean, honestly, i don't know for certain because i asked farrell's people to give me the records related to the meals they declined. i actually reached out to his accountant to see if they would actually have any records. they never responded, there's a lot of like , shadowy ness about this whole situation. and when i talk to campaign ethics experts, they likened farrell's use of this campaign account to a slush fund . so, i mean, you talk to enough people and kind of get a consensus. and i've been looking at campaign finance reports for over a dozen years. so like when i see something that strikes me

as unusual and then i go to trusted experts on the subject and they're like, yeah, this doesn't make sense. i feel like that's when i actually have a pretty good story on my hands. >> right. well, i do think a lot of people think of campaign funds like, oh, you got to spend it on ads or mailers or something, but actually, the law does allow farrell or any other politician to use it to spend it at a lavish restaurant could. well, i mean, a lot of restaurants in san francisco these days are lavish to entertain, right, to build relationships or to thank people. right? >> yeah, absolutely. you can use it on political, which is like, say a campaign event, a legislative or governmental purposes. and you know, there's a lot of broad discretionary use of these funds. it's up to donors if they decide that they, you know, want to continue to fund mark farrell's expenses at fancy restaurants and taking money from special interests. i mean, that's completely up to them. however, when you spend above a certain threshold, it has to be directly related to campaign, governmental or legislative purposes. so if you're not spending that money in the way that you claim or it

goes to a certain threshold, you got to be really on your p's and q's when it comes to that money. >> all right. the standard senior reporter josh kane, thank you very much. and if you want to read josh's article or check out more of the standard's other original reporting on their website, sf standard.com. abc seven will continue to bring you more segments featuring their city focused journalism twice a week here on getting answers. okay, are you ready for the tech transformation? we'll get some advice from two experts from the renowned stanford d school in designing the

raises questions about privacy, ethics, and the future of work. how can we safely navigate these changes and best adapt and thrive in this new tech world? joining us live now is scott dooley and carissa carter, experts from stanford's design school, or d.school. they've authored a new book, assembling tomorrow, a guide to designing a

thriving future. and i have a copy in my hands. chris and scott, thanks for coming on the show. >> thanks so much for having us. >> so what was your motivation to write this new book? >> well, so scott and i are in the business, the field of making things and teaching others how to make things. we're educators and even for us, it's a really overwhelming moment. the technologies that we're using to build with have the potential for a lot of great things in the world, but also a lot of harm. our climate is in dire straits. we're able to edit genes. there's a new algorithm released every day that can learn on its own, and it can feel like all of this is happening to us. but as makers, as educators, we know how much agency we all have. so we wrote the book to call attention to the urgency of this unsettling moment. and to pave a path forward that any of us can take on. >> so what is the right way to make right? whatever that thing that we want is? you point out that we have a tendency to be so creative, build something, but we don't really anticipate or

understand what the product of that product will be. and give us an example of how that's kind of harmed us, or put us in a pickle and how we can go about designing that, or redesigning that for the future. >> yeah. i mean, i think you can look at past eras for the for the answer, you know, the industrial era we created cars. cars are wonderful for everyone, except they also pollute the atmosphere. and so everything we create has hidden downsides that are very difficult to understand at the moment, that we create them. so we're very good at making things, and we're actually very bad at understanding the impacts of what we make. and so what we really need to do is, is be careful about what we're making and get good at understanding the downstream impacts. >> right. so, you know, one of the ways you try to do that in this book is you have a section that i think is really cool. it's speculative fiction short stories, histories of the future. i especially find this one apple attacks the amazon really interesting, summarize

that. and what is the point you're trying to convey? >> well, we have this speculative fiction in there because we want people to imagine the potential futures that we could be building and to try them on and see how those moments work and see if they like them, see if they like the future that we're building. scott, do you want to talk about that story? >> yeah. in that story, we play around with this moment where the company, computer company, apple and this is a work of fiction, heads down to the amazon rainforest to make sure that it's not being completely overrun because the company is so valuable at this point that the saving the rainforest is the best way to preserve their customer base. and really, it's a question of we're giving a lot of power to these corporations now, and that means they're going to have to take on more responsibility. and then it also brings into question, you know, is that the right place to make

our bets about our future? >> i want to say that this book is, you know, useful for, i guess, anyone who's building things in the future, running a business or want to relaunch a career or even parenting. but in the 30s we have left only because i'm a parent myself. so this always interests me. when you look at what's happening in technology and you know how jumbled everything is, how fast, how quickly it's all moving, what guidance might you have for parents? >> well, it's so scary to be a parent. i'm a parent too. so, scott, and i think it's scary because the jobs that our kids are going to have in the future, they don't even exist yet. so it's hard to prepare them for that. but i'll say within the lens of school, maybe don't specialize too soon. in the same way that we tell our kids not to or tell our kids to be multi-sport athletes, be a multi-subject learner. try chemistry, try math, try mandarin, try computer science. learn how a computer learns. they will be your colleagues in the future and learn from someone older, more adaptable, right? >> whatever happens. carissa

carter and scott dawley, thank you so much for coming on to talk about the book assembling tomorrow. a power outage is looming. that's just alert, he's always getting worked up about something. flex alerts notify us of preventable power outages. that way we always know when to help stop one. ok flex, just drop some knowledge on me again. oh, ok i will - i'll turn our thermostat to 78... i'll unplug the blender. the hair dryer. - my blankie? - yep! - let's talk about it! - nope. ooo, we can save the laundry til' the morning! oh, yes please! oh! little things like this help save our power and help save us from outages. with flex alerts, the power is ours.

area world news tonight tonight, the major supreme court decision on presidential immunity. an historic and landmark ruling that will be felt for decades. impacting the trials of donald trump, and the future of the presidency. the 6-3 decision by a court divided along it logical lines. the justices ruling former presidents are shieldem