Tag: brand safety-nsf crime

US transfers Guantanamo Bay detainee to Belize | CNN Politics

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The US has transferred a Guantanamo Bay detainee who was convicted of terrorism offenses in 2012 to Belize, the Pentagon announced on Thursday.

Majid Khan, a Pakistani citizen and US resident, who went to high school in Baltimore, was captured in 2003 and was held for more than three years at secret CIA prisons known as “black sites.” He was transferred to the US military prison in Cuba in 2006.

“Majid Khan pled guilty before a Military Commission in February 2012. Pursuant to the terms of the plea agreement, Khan pledged to cooperate with the U.S. Government and honored his cooperation commitment,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “He was sentenced in 2021 to a term of confinement for over 10 years with credit for the years he spent cooperating with U.S. personnel. He has subsequently completed his sentence.”

The Biden administration has promised to close the prison which currently holds 34 detainees, 20 of whom are eligible for transfer, according to the Pentagon’s Thursday statement.

Khan lived in the US from 1996 to early 2002 and was suspected of assisting al Qaeda in planning attacks on the US and elsewhere. Authorities believed he joined al Qaeda after the attacks on September 11, 2001.

He was accused of working for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has been called the mastermind behind 9/11, and conspiring with him to blow up underground storage tanks at gas stations in the US; traveling to Pakistan from Baltimore with fraudulently obtained travel documents; traveling to Thailand to give $50,000 of al Qaeda funds to an affiliate group, which was later used to fund a 2003 bombing of the J.W. Marriot Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia; and recording a martyr video and preparing to bomb a mosque where Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was anticipated to be. The plan ultimately failed.

In 2012, Khan was found guilty of conspiracy, spying, murder in violation of the law of war, attempted murder in violation of the law of war, and providing material for terrorism.

In 2021 a US military panel asked for clemency in his case, saying in a letter obtained by CNN that the treatment Khan has experienced while in US custody over the past almost two decades was “an affront to American values and concept of justice.”

“Although designated an ‘alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,’ not technically afforded the rights of US citizens, the complete disregard for the foundational concepts upon which the Constitution was founded is an affront to American values and concepts of justice,” the letter said.

According to the Defense Department release, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin notified Congress of his intent to transfer Khan to Belize on December 22.

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February 2, 2023
Comparing the classified document discoveries plaguing Biden, Trump and Pence | CNN Politics

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Washington – President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence are all facing scrutiny regarding their potential mishandling of classified documents.

In all three cases, sensitive government materials were found in places where they shouldn’t have ended up. But there are key distinctions that differentiate each situation, including how Biden, Trump and Pence responded to the discovery of documents and how aggressively the Justice Department is currently investigating.

Here’s a breakdown of the similarities and differences between the Biden, Trump and Pence cases.

The Biden and Pence situations are similar – their lawyers discovered the classified documents, alerted the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and turned over the papers. In Biden’s case, FBI agents later found additional documents when they searched his home in Wilmington, Delaware.

Trump followed a different path. After he left the White House, NARA realized that materials were missing. In May 2021, they reached out to Trump’s lawyers who negotiated for months over the voluntary return of several boxes of important documents.

The Justice Department obtained a subpoena in May 2022, a year after NARA’s initial flag, after suspecting that Trump was still holding onto some classified records. Trump gave back more files but didn’t return everything in his possession. The FBI later executed a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago resort in August, where more documents were found. The search was the first time in American history that a former president’s home was searched as part of a criminal investigation.

The exact number is unknown in Biden’s case. Approximately 20 classified documents had been recovered before the FBI searched Biden’s home in Wilmington. The FBI uncovered even more classified files during that search, but neither side has publicly disclosed the specific number of additional documents found.

For Trump, more than 325 classified records have been recovered. This includes documents returned voluntarily to NARA, turned over to the Justice Department under subpoena, and found by the FBI.

With Pence’s situation, CNN has reported that his team found about a dozen documents at his Indiana home.

Some of Biden’s documents were marked “top secret,” which is the highest level of classification. Some of those documents had an “SCI” designation, which stands for “sensitive compartmented information” and refers to extremely sensitive material gleaned from US intelligence sources.

At least 60 of the Trump documents were labeled “top secret,” including some files with SCI markings. There were also some documents with “SAP” designation, which stands for “special access programs” and is used for documents that are closely held with special protocols for who can access the material.

A source who was briefed on some of the Pence documents previously told CNN that the government papers recovered from his home were “lower level” classification, without any SCI or SAP markings.

Attorney General Merrick Garland brought on special prosecutors to investigate Biden and Trump. The Trump matter is being investigated by special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed in November. And the Biden matter is being investigated by special counsel Robert Hur, who was appointed in January.

CNN has previously reported that the FBI and Justice Department are conducting a review of the Pence documents and how they ended up at his home. This is less than a full-blown criminal probe.

The Trump investigation has progressed the farthest. Federal prosecutors got a subpoena, demanded the return of all classified documents and tried to hold Trump in contempt when he didn’t fully comply. Investigators also got a judge to approve a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago and CNN has reported that there is an active grand jury based in Washington, DC, that recently heard testimony from witnesses.

There haven’t been any known subpoenas or search warrants in the Biden inquiry, though the FBI has conducted voluntary interviews with some of the people on Biden’s team who handled documents.

There aren’t any known subpoenas, search warrants or FBI interviews in the Pence-related review.

Biden and Pence both maintain that they engaged early with NARA to return missing documents and are cooperating fully with the Justice Department.

Whether it was intentional or not, Trump repeatedly missed opportunities to return the documents to the government. Criminal prosecutors eventually concluded that there might have been intentional efforts to hold onto the documents, and Trump is now under investigation for potential obstruction.

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February 2, 2023
MLK invoked as Tyre Nichols’ life is celebrated in song and tributes in Memphis | CNN

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Mourners, from Vice President Kamala Harris to the activist the Rev. Al Sharpton, on Wednesday celebrated the life of Tyre Nichols, whose death at the hands of police in Memphis led to second-degree murder charges against five officers.

“Mothers around the world, when their babies are born, pray to God when they hold that child, that that body and that life will be safe for the rest of his life,” Harris said to applause during Nichols’ funeral service in a packed Memphis sanctuary.

“And when we look at this situation, this is a family that lost their son and their brother through an act of violence at the hands and the feet of people who had been charged with keeping them safe.”

Nichols, 29, who was Black, was subdued yet continuously beaten after a traffic stop by Memphis police on January 7. He died three days later.

“The people of our country mourn with you,” Harris told Nichols’ family.

Sharpton, in a painfully familiar role, delivered an impassioned eulogy that paid tribute to Nichols’ life and served as a clarion call for justice.

Sharpton said he visited the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. He called out the five Black former officers charged in Nichols’ death.

“There’s nothing more insulting and offensive to those of us that fight to open doors, that you walked through those doors and act like the folks we had to fight for to get you through them doors. You didn’t get on the police department by yourself,” Sharpton said.

If Nichols had been white, Sharpton said, “you wouldn’t have beat him like that,” referring to the five former officers.

“You don’t fight crime by becoming criminals yourself… That ain’t the police. That’s punks.”

The reverend invoked King’s 1968 “Mountaintop” speech in Memphis, where King said he had reached the peak and seen the Promised Land. The former cops accused of killing Nichols, he said, failed to live up to that legacy. “He expected you to bring us on to the Promised Land,” Sharpton said.

RowVaughn Wells, Nichols’ mother, remembered her son as “a beautiful person” and echoed others at the celebration of life in calling for passage of the George Floyd Policing Act.

“There should be no other child that should suffer the way my son and all the other parents here (who) have lost their children,” she said.

Nichols’ older sister, Keyana Dixon, recalled looking after her younger brothers.

“With Ty, I didn’t mind,” she said. “He never wanted anything but to watch cartoons and a big bowl of cereal. So it was pretty easy to watch him.”

Dixon said all she wants is her “baby brother back.’

Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Nichols’ family, said the charges against the five ex-officers in Nichols’ death set a precedent. Within 20 days of his death, the former officers were indicted on charges that included murder and kidnapping.

“We can count to 20 and every time you kill one of us on video, we’re going to say the legacy of Tyre Nichols is that we have equal justice swiftly,” he said.

For the day, mourners at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church shifted the focus from the heart-wrenching footage of the beating that Nichols in a hospital bed with his face badly swollen and bruised before his death, sparking protests across the country.

Harris was joined other senior level Biden administration officials, including White House Director for the Office of Public Engagement Keisha Lance Bottoms, former mayor of Atlanta, and Senior Adviser to the President Mitch Landrieu.

Representing other Black people killed by police, Tamika Palmer – whose daughter Breonna Taylor was fatally shot in her Louisville, Kentucky, home by police during a botched raid in March 2020 – attended the service.

Also there was Philonise Floyd, the younger brother of George Floyd, whose name reverberated across the nation following his May 2020 death after an ex-cop Minneapolis cop knelt on his neck and back for more than 9 minutes.

“The family needs all the support that they can get,” Gwen Carr, whose son, Eric Garner, died after being placed in a chokehold by an NYPD officer in 2014, told CNN Wednesday before attending the service. “It’s so fresh for them but for me, it just digs into old wounds.”

The service was scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. local time but was pushed back because of bad weather and travel delays. It began shortly after 1 p.m. on the first day of Black History Month with African tribal drummers and a gospel choir.

With Nichols’ black casket, draped in a white bouquet of flowers, as a centerpiece, the young man was praised by the Rev. J. Lawrence Turner as “a good person, a beautiful soul, a son, a father, a brother, a friend, a human being – gone too soon.”

Mourners watched slide shows of a smiling Nichols at different times in his life. A photo montage opened with a quote from Nichols: “My vision is to bring my viewers deep into what I am seeing through my eye and out through my lens.”

Tiffany Rachal, the mother of Jalen Randle, a 29-year-old Black man killed by a Houston police officer last year, offered her condolences to the family before singing, “Lord I will lift my eyes to the hills.”

On Tuesday, Sharpton and Nichols’ family gathered at the Mason Temple Church of God In Christ headquarters in Memphis – where King Jr. delivered his famous “Mountaintop” speech the night before he was killed.

“We will continue in Tyre’s name to head up to Martin’s mountaintop,” Sharpton said from the “sacred ground” where MLK delivered his speech 55 years ago.

Sharpton reflected on the family’s loss as their son’s name is added to a vast pantheon of Black people who died after encounters with police.

“They will never ever recover from the loss,” Sharpton said.

Before Wednesday’s service, Dan Beazley, 61, carried a towering wooden cross over his shoulder outside the Memphis church. He said he drove 12 hours – including through an ice storm – from Northville, Michigan, to pay his respects and shine a light.

Nichols has been described as a devoted son who had tattooed his mother’s name on his arm, a loving father to a 4-year-old boy, and a free spirit with a passion for skateboarding and capturing sunsets on his camera.

Public outrage over the disturbing arrest video led to firings or disciplinary action against other public servants who were at the scene, including the firings of three Memphis Fire Department personnel. Two sheriff’s deputies have been put on leave. Additionally, two more police officers have been placed on leave.

Nichols’ funeral took place less than a week after Friday evening’s public release of footage of the attack on him shook a nation long accustomed to videos of police brutality, especially against people of color.

The brutal attack sparked largely peaceful protests from New York to Los Angeles as well as renewed calls for police reform and scrutiny of specialized police units that target guns in high crime areas.

Up to 20 hours of video recordings haven’t been released, Shelby County District Attorney Steven Mulroy told CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” on Wednesday. The audio from the recordings is “probably more useful” in some cases than what the video shows, Mulroy said.

He didn’t specify what can be heard on the recordings, which he said include sound captured after the beating took place.

The release of that footage will be determined by city officials, he added.

The prosecutor said he has asked the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to expedite its investigation into the other emergency responders – those besides the five already indicted – to see whether any charges are warranted for them. Those people include the officers who filed the paperwork, he said.

Nichols was the baby of his family, the youngest of four children, according to RowVaughn Wells.

He moved to Memphis from California right before the Covid-19 pandemic and remained there after the mandatory lockdowns prompted by the health crisis, his mother has said.

Nichols was a regular at a Germantown, Tennessee, Starbucks where he befriended a group of people who set aside their cellphones at a table and talked mostly about sports, particularly his beloved San Francisco 49ers.

His visits to Starbucks were typically followed by a nap before heading to a his job at FedEx. He would come home for dinner during his break.

Nichols was also a fixture among the skateboarders at Shelby Farms Park, where he photographed memorable sunsets, according to his mother.

In fact, taking pictures served as a form of self-expression that writing could never capture for Nichols, who had written on his photography website that it helped him look “at the world in a more creative way.”

He preferred capturing landscapes.

“I hope to one day let people see what i see and to hopefully admire my work based on the quality and ideals of my work,” he wrote.

Before moving to Memphis, Nichols lived in Sacramento, California, where a friend recalled that “skating gave him wings.”

On Wednesday, one song performed at the end of the service was a gospel version of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

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February 1, 2023
Suspect in Molotov cocktail attack at New Jersey synagogue is charged with federal crime | CNN

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CNN
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A New Jersey man has been arrested and charged with one count of attempted use of fire to damage a building after allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at a New Jersey synagogue Sunday, according to court documents.

Nicholas Malindretos, 26, of Clifton, will appear in federal court in Newark on Thursday for an initial appearance, the US Attorney’s Office in the District of New Jersey said in a news release.

A suspect lit and threw a Molotov cocktail at the front door of Temple Ner Tamid around 3 a.m. Sunday and fled the scene, according to Bloomfield Police officials. The bottle broke, but did not cause any damage to the building, police said.

Officials said a license plate reading device near the incident recorded the car that Malindretos allegedly used in the attack, according to a criminal complaint. Officials located the vehicle Tuesday and saw a hooded sweatshirt, items made of a white cloth material similar to the gloves the suspect was wearing during the incident and bottle of unidentified liquids, all visible inside the car.

If convicted, Malindretos faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000, according to prosecutors.

CNN was unable to immediately identify an attorney for Malindretos but reached out to the federal public defender’s office to see whether they are representing him.

“No one should find that their lives are at risk by exercising their faith,” US Attorney Philip Sellinger said in the release. “The defendant is alleged to have gone to a synagogue in the middle of the night and maliciously attempted to damage and destroy it using a firebomb. Protecting communities of faith and houses of worship is core to this office’s mission.”

New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin thanked officials for their work apprehending the suspect.

“In New Jersey, we stand united against hate and bias, and we speak with one voice to show that our state will remain a place where all can live and worship freely and safely,” Platkin said.

Temple Ner Tamid earlier this week confirmed in a phone call with CNN that it was the synagogue that was targeted. It includes a preschool and a K-12 religious school, according to its website. The synagogue describes itself as a “welcoming, diverse, and musical Reform congregation where members connect with their heritage while thinking progressively about the present.”

Police in Livingston, New Jersey, said they would increase patrols of temples in the area as a result of the attack. Livingston is about 8 miles west of Bloomfield.

No other temples were affected, Bloomfield police told CNN.

The synagogue’s Rabbi Marc Katz expressed his anger at the attack as well as his gratitude for the Jewish community.

“Everything worked as it should. Our cameras recorded the incident and our shatter-resistant doors held,” he said in the temple’s statement.

“But what I cannot do, is convince our community not to grow despondent,” he went on. “There is hate everywhere, and hate wins when we let it penetrate. When the weight of this grows too heavy, I remind my congregation that every day, despite what is happening, in Jewish communities around the world, babies are named, children are educated, people are married.

“Our religious traditions continue. No act of hate can stop the power of religious freedom.”

Dov Ben-Shimon, the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest New Jersey, to which Temple Ner Tamid belongs, wrote on Twitter that the attack was part of a wider spike in antisemitic hate crimes.

The “incident comes amidst a climate of intimidation and intolerance, and a rising tide of anti-Jewish hate crimes and hate speech against Jews,” he said.

The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, which has tracked incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism, and assault in the US since 1979, reported 2,717 incidents of antisemitism in 2021 – up 34% from the previous year.

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February 1, 2023
2 witnesses in Alex Murdaugh’s murder trial testify Murdaugh’s voice is on video made just before killings | CNN

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Two witnesses in the murder trial of Alex Murdaugh told the court Wednesday they are “100%” certain that Murdaugh’s voice is on footage prosecutors say undermines the disgraced former South Carolina attorney’s claim he was not present at the scene of the killings when his wife Maggie and 22-year-old son Paul were fatally shot.

The video, just short of a minute long, was filmed on Paul’s phone starting at 8:44 p.m. the night of the killings in 2021, according to Lt. David Britton Dove, a supervisor in the computer crimes center at the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division who extracted forensic data from the phones belonging to Murdaugh, his son and his wife. In his review of the trio’s phones, the footage was the only video or photo Dove deemed relevant to the investigation, he said, telling the court it appeared to be recorded in the area of the Murdaugh family’s kennels.

Three different voices could be heard in the footage, Dove testified Wednesday. And while Dove did not personally know the voices, he said, “You can tell that they’re different voices.”

Prosecutors believe one of those voices belongs to Murdaugh, and that voice is the only other on the video besides the victims and places him at the scene at the time of the murders. Two witnesses Wednesday backed up that claim.

Rogan Gibson, who described himself as a close friend of Paul’s and the Murdaughs as being like a second family, told investigators shortly after the killings that along with the voices of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh, he was “99% sure” the third person heard was Alex Murdaugh. Last November, he told investigators that he was 100% sure, and repeated that in court Wednesday.

When asked by state prosecutor Creighton Waters if he recognized Alex’s voice, Gibson said, “Yes, sir.”

“100%?” asked Waters. “Yes, sir” replied Gibson.

Will Loving, another witness who was Paul’s friend, also testified that he was “100%” sure it was Alex’s voice on the video.

Prosecutors have indicated cell phone evidence is key in their case against Murdaugh, who has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime in the killings of his wife Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh and his 22-year-old son Paul on June 7, 2021.

Murdaugh called 911 the night of the killings to report he’d found his wife and son shot dead at the family’s home in Islandton, South Carolina – a property known as Moselle.

But prosecutors accuse Murdaugh of committing the murders to distract attention from a series of alleged illicit schemes he was running to avoid “personal legal and financial ruin,” per court filings. Separate from the murder charges, he is also facing 99 charges stemming from alleged financial crimes, per the state attorney general.

Evidence will show, the state has claimed, that Murdaugh’s alleged financial crimes were “about to come to light” when his wife and son were killed.

Gibson said he had known the Murdochs practically all his life, and testified that it was Alex Murdaugh’s voice that could be heard in the video calling for the family’s yellow lab, Bubba, to drop a chicken from his mouth.

Paul Murdaugh called Gibson the night of the shooting, at 8:40 p.m., to ask if something was wrong with Gibson’s dog, Cash, which was in a kennel at the Murdaugh property. The two tried to hold a video call so that Gibson could see the dog, but the reception was not good enough, Gibson testified. Paul told him he would take a video of the dog and send it to him if the FaceTime call didn’t work, Gibson said, but he never received the footage.

Gibson testified that he tried to call and text Paul after the failed video call, but his friend never responded.

Murdaugh appeared to sob while the video played in court the first time.

Prosecutor Waters of the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office – which is prosecuting the case due to the Murdaugh family’s decades-old ties with the local solicitor’s office – teased the video in his opening statement last week, saying that while Alex claimed to investigators he was napping at the house, video evidence would show he was present at the family’s kennels, where the bodies of his son and wife were found.

“You’ll see that video and you’ll hear from witnesses that identify Paul’s voice, Maggie’s voice and Alex’s voice,” Waters said, telling the court Paul was filming a dog that belonged to his friend because they were concerned about the animal’s tail. Murdaugh “told anyone who would listen he was never there … The evidence will show that he was there. He was at the murder scene with the two victims” minutes before Paul’s phone “locks forever.”

In his own opening statement, defense attorney Dick Harpootlian said the audio from the video obtained by the prosecution would simply show Murdaugh and his wife having a “normal discussion” with “no animosity.” Paul is “very happy,” Harpootlian claimed. “Nobody’s down there threatening him. Daddy is not pulling out a shotgun and killing him.”

During cross examination by the defense Wednesday, Gibson said Alex and Paul Murdaugh had a great relationship, and spoke about Alex as an affectionate and loving father who was involved with his sons. Alex was like a second father to him, Gibson said.

Murdaugh cried a lot and “was just real distraught, sad, just tore up” about the deaths, Gibson testified.

“Can you think of any circumstance that you can envision, knowing them as you do, where Alex would brutally murder Paul and Maggie?” defense attorney Jim Griffin asked.

“Not that I can think of,” Gibson answered.

The defense attorney also questioned Gibson about the sheds, workshops and vehicles frequently being left unlocked at the Murdaugh property, and guns often left unprotected or just laying around. Gibson conceded it would be easy for someone to sneak on the property and steal something. On redirect from the prosecution, Gibson acknowledged he had never heard Paul complain about people doing that.

In his testimony Tuesday, Dove, the 15th witness called by the prosecution, detailed the communications of Maggie’s phone the night of the killings, including a text from Alex at 9:47 p.m. that read, “Call me babe.” It was never read.

In his opening statement last week, Waters told the jury Murdaugh repeatedly called his wife that evening before texting her that he was going to visit his mother and driving to Almeda, South Carolina.

“It’s up to you,” Waters said, “to decide whether or not he’s trying to manufacture an alibi.”

According to Dove’s testimony Tuesday, the night she was killed, Maggie read two text messages – at 8:31 p.m. and 8:49 p.m. – in a group chat with family about Murdaugh’s father, who was in ailing health, seconds before her phone locked for the final time.

The display of Maggie’s phone turned off minutes later, at 8:53 p.m. At 8:54 p.m., the orientation changed to landscape and the camera activated – an indication, Dove said, the phone was moved and the camera tried to locate Maggie’s face in an unsuccessful attempt to unlock.

Maggie’s phone showed repeated missed calls from her husband over the course of the next hour, Dove testified, along with evidence it had switched to portrait mode. That, the expert said, was another indication the phone was likely held in someone’s hand. A final call from Murdaugh was missed just before 10:04 p.m.

But those calls appeared to be missing from Murdaugh’s phone, Dove said Wednesday, testifying that call logs show a gap in calls between June 4 and 10:25 p.m. the night of June 7.

“A gap like that would indicate” that calls were “actually removed from there,” Dove said, adding the only way to remove the calls from the log would be to do so manually.

Asked specifically if the calls were deleted from the log, Dove said, “it would appear that way,” noting there was no way to know when they were deleted or who was responsible.

Additionally, Murdaugh was in the same group chat as his wife when relatives were texting about his dying father, Dove said Wednesday. And while evidence shows Maggie read both messages, Murdaugh did not read them until the next day, Dove said, despite telling state investigators about his concern for his father’s health.

This behavior appeared to be outside Murdaugh’s typical texting habits, Dove testified, saying Murdaugh typically had a habit of checking texts within 5 minutes, or sometimes 30 to 40 minutes.

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February 1, 2023
Cohen says he handed over phones to Manhattan DA | CNN Politics

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Washington
CNN
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Michael Cohen, former President Donald Trump’s former attorney, has handed over his cell phones to Manhattan prosecutors, he told “CNN This Morning” on Wednesday.

Prosecutors are zeroing in on the Trump Organization’s involvement in hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels as part of an effort to stop her from going public about an alleged affair with Trump days before the 2016 presidential election. A grand jury in New York has been convened to hear evidence related to the effort, sources familiar with the matter have told CNN.

Cohen met last month with the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Trump has denied the affair.

CNN has reported that former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker was set to meet with prosecutors this week as part of the probe. The district attorney’s office also reached out to Keith Davidson, who represented Daniels in the hush money deal, in recent weeks.

Manhattan prosecutors are looking into whether Trump and his business falsified business records by improperly treating the reimbursement as a legal expense. That charge is a misdemeanor in New York unless it can be tied to another crime, such as campaign finance laws.

Prosecutors working under the previous DA, Cy Vance, had explored bringing charges related to the hush money scheme but some attorneys on the team were not convinced that a charge involving a federal election law violation would survive legal challenges, people familiar with the investigation told CNN.

Last year, a jury convicted two Trump Organization entities of a decade-long tax fraud scheme, which appears to have emboldened prosecutors.

This story is breaking and will be updated.

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February 1, 2023
Alec Baldwin has been formally charged in ‘Rust’ shooting | CNN

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Actor and producer Alec Baldwin has been criminally charged in connection with the 2021 fatal shooting on the set of the movie “Rust,” the Santa Fe County, New Mexico, district attorney’s office told CNN Tuesday.

The charges against Baldwin and the set’s armorer, Hannah Guiterrez Reed, include two counts of involuntary manslaughter, the DA’s office said. Attorneys for both defendants previously insisted their respective clients are innocent.

District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies told CNN earlier this month she would charge Baldwin and the film’s armorer with involuntary manslaughter, accusing them of failing to perform safety procedures that could have prevented the accident that resulted in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.

This story is developing…

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January 31, 2023
Ransomware attack closes schools in Nantucket | CNN Politics

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A ransomware attack forced the closure Tuesday of four public schools serving 1,700 students on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, the school district’s superintendent said in an email to parents.

The hacking incident shut down all student and staff devices, as well as safety and security systems at Nantucket Public Schools, forcing an early dismissal at noon on Tuesday, Superintendent Elizabeth Hallett said in the email, which she shared with CNN.

The news came as Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), which calls itself the largest pre-K-12 school district in southern Arizona, also suffered a ransomware attack in recent days, according to local news reports. Representatives of TUSD did not respond to emails seeking comment. There was no evidence that the two incidents were related.

Ransomware – malicious software that locks computers and holds them for ransom – has for years plagued US schools and other organizations that can be short on money and personnel to defend themselves from hacks.

The hacks often force schools to temporarily close, further disrupting learning during the coronavirus pandemic. The lack of cybersecurity budgeting at primary schools is a “major constraint to implementing effective cybersecurity programs across all K–12 entities,” the federal US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned in a report this month.

Nantucket Public Schools includes an elementary, middle and high school, and serves Nantucket, which is about 30 miles south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Athletic events at the school were still scheduled to proceed. “No school issued devices should be used at home until further notice, as it could compromise home networks,” Hallett said in her email to parents.

“We do not have any updates yet on when we will return,” Hallett told CNN in a separate email.

There have already been five ransomware attacks on US school districts in January, according to a tally from Brett Callow, threat analysts at cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. Forty-five US school districts operating 1,981 schools were hit by ransomware in 2022, according to Emsisoft.

A year ago, New Mexico’s largest public school district had to close temporarily after a cyberattack hit computer systems that could affect learning and student safety.

“The ransomware attacks on school districts across the country are a stark reminder that as a country we need to ensure our citizens are cyber literate,” Kevin Nolten, vice president of Cyber Innovation Center, a not-for-profit supported by federal grant money that promotes cybersecurity curricula in K-12 schools, told CNN.

“Cybersecurity education is a national security issue and we must educate our country on protecting our most critical infrastructure from malicious attacks,” Nolten said in an email pointing to the high demand for cybersecurity skills in the workforce.

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January 31, 2023
Dead chickens and decomposing bodies: Inside South Africa’s power blackout ‘pandemic’ | CNN

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Johannesburg, South Africa
CNN
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Car crashes, opportunistic criminals, rotting food, decomposing bodies, bankrupt businesses, and water shortages. Welcome to life under South Africa’s power blackouts.

Last week the grim extent of the outages was laid bare when South Africans were advised to bury dead loved ones within four days.

In a public statement, the South African Funeral Practitioners Association warned that bodies in mortuaries were rapidly decomposing because of the unrelenting electricity outages, putting huge pressure on funeral parlors struggling to process corpses.

The situation is so bad that the country’s President Cyril Ramaphosa is considering declaring a national disaster, similar to one in 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic, which had a devastating effect on the country’s economy.

Last week scores of supporters from the Democratic Alliance opposition party marched under heavy security through the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town to voice their frustrations over the persistent blackouts.

Known locally as loadshedding, widespread electricity blackouts are carried out multiple times a day by state-owned energy utility Eskom to avoid the total collapse of the grid.

Shortages on the electricity system unbalance the network, and Eskom has stated that controlled outages are necessary to ensure reserve margins are maintained, and the system remains stable.

While the country has been experiencing on-off power outages for years, since September 2022 scheduled blackouts have become routine, affecting every part of South African society.

For some people, not having access to reliable power can be the difference between life and death.

Before she died in October 2022, Lis Van Os needed oxygen for 17 hours a day. Her stationary oxygen machine required mains power, making periods of loadshedding extremely stressful, particularly when power did not return as scheduled, her family said.

Her daughter Karin McDonald was forced to explore backup options such as inverters and a back up oxygen mobile tank, which only lasted short periods.

“Towards the end (of her life) power outages created a lot of anxiety for everyone,” she said.

South Africans experienced more than twice as many power cuts in 2022 than in any other year. And things are set to get worse in 2023.

Even simple daily tasks need to be arranged around loadshedding schedules, including meal planning, travel times, work that requires internet connectivity.

From preparing baby formula to keeping fans running during the summer heat, not having access to mains power is makes daily life challenging for South Africans.

Maneo Motsamai, a domestic worker in Johannesburg, says the outages prevents her from simple tasks such as cooking.

“I boil water to cook mealie meal (maize porridge) and the power goes. I can’t eat, it’s a waste. I can’t cope like that,” Motsamai told CNN.

Pump stations can’t provide water and many small businesses without access to backup power are having to close shop and lay off employees, according to people CNN spoke to.

Thando Makhubu runs Soweto Creamery, an ice cream shop in Jabulani, Soweto, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. His family pooled small welfare grants they received during the Covid-19 pandemic to set up the business, but are now feeling the pressure from power outages.

In early January, the shop was without power for 72 hours, when electricity did not return as scheduled. Thando was forced to shell out money for diesel to power their generator and prevent all his stock melting. He says the outages are costly and destroying their hopes of expanding.

Bongi Monjanaga, who runs a startup cleaning services company operating across Johannesburg, says the outages affect every part of her fledgling business, such as operating electric cleaning equipment, entering and leaving premises when security gates aren’t functioning, and having internet to invoice clients and complete online tax compliance documents.

“I find myself in this pool of misery when I’m just trying to start up. I’m just trying to grow,” she says.

The escalation of power outages is also deeply worrying for South Africa’s food security, driving up prices, and placing an even greater strain on stretched household budgets.

With modern farming practices ever more reliant on electricity for crop irrigation, processing, and storage, loadshedding is having a huge impact on agricultural output.

Gys Olivier, a farmer from Hertzogville in Free State province, in east-central South Africa, says he and other farmers in the area have been forced to throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of seed potatoes due to disruptions to the ‘cold chain’ – (the process of keeping produce refrigerated throughout the supply chain.)

There is also less demand from growers due to water shortages, with pump stations reliant on electricity to operate.

“We have done everything we can to make sure there is food on the table for a very good price, but it’s become so capital-intensive to farm,” Olivier says.

Meanwhile livestock and poultry are dying before they even get to the slaughterhouse.

A gruesome video circulating on social media shows workers removing 50,000 dead broiler chickens from a farm in North West province, the birds suffocated when power outages caused ventilation systems to stop. The financial damage to the farmer was around ZAR1.6m ($93,300) according to local media reports.

South Africa is notorious for high crime rates, and loadshedding is making it worse as home security systems fail when the power goes out, giving criminals a field day inside unsecured properties.
Policing also becomes harder, with officers unable to reach crime scenes fast enough due to congestion when traffic lights are off.

Tumelo Mogodiseng, General Secretary of the South African Policing Union (SAPU), describes the load-shedding as “a pandemic.”

He says his members’ lives are now more at risk, with officers unable to see potentially dangerous situations in the darkness, and police stations, many of which don’t have backup power systems, at risk of attack from criminals during blackouts.

“Police are dying every day in this country. If this is happening in the daylight, what happens when there is no light for them to see at night?”

Mogodiseng also worries that crimes are going unreported, with citizens fearful of leaving their houses during outages and traveling in the darkness. “Communities won’t travel to police stations to open cases because they are afraid,” he told CNN.

Gareth Newham, who runs the Justice and Violence Prevention Programme at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria, says that it’s hard to get solid data on the impact outages are having on crime. While anecdotal evidence suggests criminals are exploiting outages, the recent escalation of loadshedding has coincided with the Christmas holidays, when crime rates typically spike.

His biggest concern is that continued loadshedding or a temporary grid collapse could lead to a repeat of the coordinated civil unrest, rioting, and looting in parts of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces 18 months ago.

“A complete breakdown in the grid could be the trigger for local level gangs getting more power, and we could see a similar kind of violence to that we saw in July 2021.”

Under the ruling African National Congress (ANC), in charge since 1994, Eskom has become synonymous with corruption, crime, and mismanagement.

Last year a judge-led inquiry into graft under the former president, Jacob Zuma, found that there were grounds to prosecute several former Eskom executives.

The government has failed to build new power stations to keep up with increased demand, and warnings from energy experts on looming supply shortages across the past two decades have gone ignored.

A 2019 report by the South African Institution of Civil Engineering shows skilled engineers have been leaving the country in droves.

Despite spending billions of USD on two huge coal power stations, neither works properly.

Older plants are dilapidated due to a lack of maintenance, and organized crime steals vital coal supplies and cable from the rail lines going from mines to power stations.

Renewable energy companies say they are desperate to supply to the grid, but the government has been slow to cut red tape and streamline regulatory processes that would reduce the time frame for environmental authorisations, registration of new projects and grid connection approvals.

Legal challenges against the government and Eskom are stacking up. Several political parties and trade unions say they will take the government and state utility to court for not upholding their duty to provide electricity.

With no end in sight to the outages, South Africans are desperate for alternative energy sources, but even they are out of the reach of many citizens.

Thando Makhubu says he was shocked by the cost to power his ice cream business off-grid. “We were quoted R100,000 ($5,945) and that excluded the solar panels.”

Karin McDonald, who runs a swimming school, similarly found the upfront costs of solar prohibitive. “We received quotes for solar for the business and house and were not looking at anything less than half a million rand ($29,500) which is a major life decision to make,” she said.

There is also a long wait for solar. “I know a solar provider that had 40 requests just last week, all for big solar projects, ” said Angus Williamson, a cattle farmer from KwaZulu-Natal province.

As they come to terms with their new reality, many South Africans are finding it hard to stay optimistic.

“The light at the end of the tunnel is a train heading in our direction,” said Williamson.

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January 31, 2023
New US ransomware strategy prioritizes victims but could make it harder to catch cybercriminals | CNN Politics

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Washington
CNN
—

US and European law enforcement’s disruption last week of a $100-million ransomware gang is the clearest public example yet of a new high-stakes strategy from the Biden administration to prioritize protecting victims of cybercrime – even if it means tipping off suspects and potentially make it harder to arrest them.

The extent to which the FBI and Justice Department can carry out similar operations on other ransomware groups – and get the balance right between when to collect intelligence on hackers’ operations and when to shut down computer networks – could affect how acute the threat of ransomware attacks is to US critical infrastructure for years to come.

In the case revealed last week, the FBI says it had extraordinary access for six months to the computer infrastructure of a Russian-speaking ransomware group known as Hive, which had extorted more than $100 million from victims worldwide, including hospitals. That covert access, officials said, allowed the FBI to pass “keys” to victims so that they could decrypt their systems and thwart $130 million in ransom payments.

Justice officials are still trying to arrest the people behind Hive and know where some of them are located, a senior Justice Department official told CNN. But sometimes waiting for an arrest before seizing hacking infrastructure “may mean waiting for a very long time – perhaps an unacceptably long time,” the official said in an interview granted on the condition of anonymity to discuss the case.

The decision to go public with a splashy news conference, fronted by FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, before making any arrests is evidence of a new approach to ransomware attacks which cost the US hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, annually.

The strategy shift toward doing more to help victims of cybercrime – announced a year ago – is loosely based on the US government’s approach to counterterrorism, which centers around disrupting plots and thwarting attacks.

“I was preparing for this to be public long, long ago and was kind of surprised that we were able to do this for this long,” the senior Justice Department official said of US officials’ covert access to Hive computer servers.

After multiple ransomware attacks hobbled US critical infrastructure firms in 2021, pressure grew on US law enforcement from Congress, the White House and the public to do more to disrupt the hackers’ operations.

Still, the FBI announcement raised questions about why the bureau decided to go public with the action now rather than continuing to lurk in the Hive hackers’ networks and collect intelligence. And it is possible or even likely, US officials concede, that Hive’s operators will set up new infrastructure to try to resume their extortion attempts.

One law enforcement source told CNN the timing made sense because US officials may have exhausted the intelligence they were going to glean from Hive’s servers.

The senior Justice Department official explained the decision this way: “We saw significant value in the reputational damage we were going to incur against Hive by announcing this.”

Like in other businesses, customers of ransomware gangs have a choice of who they buy hacking tools from. One goal of the operation, the senior Justice official said, was to “discredit” Hive in the eyes of other ransomware criminals and have a psychological effect on their operations.

“Other [ransomware] groups will watch this and have to spend more time and money securing their infrastructure,” said Bill Siegel, CEO of Coveware, a cybersecurity firm that works closely with victims and the FBI.

The spate of significant ransomware attacks in the US in 2021 brought more scrutiny to how quickly the FBI and its partners can mitigate the impact the attacks.

After a July 2021 ransomware attack on a Florida-based software firm compromised up to 1,500 businesses, multiple US government agencies, including the FBI, deliberated about how and when to get the decryptor to victims. At least one victim organization, a Maryland tech firm, complained that they could have used the decryption key earlier to save on recovery costs, the Washington Post reported.

US officials weigh a number of factors when considering law enforcement operations to disrupt cybercriminal groups, a senior FBI official told CNN, including how the disruption will impact the broader cybercriminal ecosystem, how the FBI can help victims of the hackers recover, and the long-term “pursuit of justice” for the victims.

“Each case is different as far as what access [to the hackers’ infrastructure] looks like … what can be done quietly versus noisily,” the senior FBI official said. “Those all go into it.”

John Riggi, a former senior FBI official who is now national adviser for cybersecurity and risk at the American Hospital Association, applauded the disruption of Hive and hoped the crackdown on ransomware groups would continue. But ransomware attacks on health care organizations will likely continue as long as the hackers are getting paid off and are willing to tolerate the risk of carrying out the attacks, Riggi said.

Some cybercriminals “still view their attacks on hospitals as primarily data and financially motivated,” he told CNN.

One lingering problem for the FBI: Not enough victims are reporting ransomware attacks, leaving the bureau in the dark about the scope of the threat. Just 20% of Hive’s victim reported an incident to the FBI, Director Christopher Wray said last week.

“I still think that people have concerns that when they call the FBI that we’re going to come in with coats and we’re going to take their servers and they’re going to lose control of their business,” the senior FBI official told CNN. “And that’s so far from the truth, but most people are not interacting with the FBI on a daily basis.”

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January 31, 2023
Pakistan mosque blast death toll rises to 92 as country faces ‘national security crisis’ | CNN

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Islamabad, Pakistan
CNN
—

The death toll from a suspected suicide bomb that ripped through a mosque in northwestern Pakistan Monday has risen to at least 92, marking one of the deadliest attacks in the country in years as it faces what one analyst described as “a national security crisis.”

Peshawar deputy commissioner Shafiullah Khan on Tuesday confirmed the fatalities and said more than 80 victims were still being treated in hospital following the blast at the mosque in a police compound in the city.

Nasarullah Khan, a police official who survived the explosion, said he remembered seeing “a huge burst of flames” before becoming surrounded by a plume of black dust.

Khan said his foot broke in the blast and he was stuck in the rubble for three hours.

“The ceiling fell in… the space in between the ceiling and wall is where I managed to survive,” he said.

Meanwhile, hope was fading in the search for survivors as rescue workers sifted through the rubble of the mosque that was all but destroyed Monday, when worshipers – mainly law enforcement officials – had gathered for evening prayers.

Photos and video show walls of the mosque reduced to fragments, with glass windows and paneling destroyed in the powerful blast.

“We are not expecting anyone alive to be found. Mostly dead bodies are being recovered,” Bilal Faizi, a rescue spokesperson, said Tuesday.

The blast Monday is the latest sign of the deteriorating security situation in Peshawar, capital of the restive Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province that borders Afghanistan and the site of frequent attacks by the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP).

The TTP is a US-designated foreign terrorist organization operating in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Last year, the breakdown of an already shaky year-long ceasefire between the TTP and Pakistan’s government threatened not only escalating violence in that country but potentially an increase in cross-border tensions between the Afghan and Pakistani governments.

Initially on Monday, TTP officials Sarbakaf Mohmand and Omar Mukaram Khurasani had claimed the blast was “revenge” for the death of TTP militant Khalid Khorasani last year.

But the TTP’s main spokesperson later denied the group was involved in the attack.

“Regarding the Peshawar incident, we consider it necessary to clarify that Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has nothing to do with this incident,” TTP spokesperson Muhammad Khorasani said in a statement late Monday. “According to our laws and general constitution, any action in mosques, madrasas, funerals grounds and other sacred places is an offense.”

Pakistan authorities say an investigation is underway and have not confirmed either claim.

On Monday, Peshawar Police Chief Mohammad Aijaz Khan said the blast inside the Police Lines Mosque was “probably a suicide attack,” echoing a statement from Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

“The brutal killing of Muslims prostrating before Allah is against the teachings of the Quran,” Sharif said, adding that “targeting the House of Allah is proof that the attackers have nothing to do with Islam.”

Rights groups have condemned the deadly attack, which has raised fears of fresh violence amid a deteriorating security situation in the country.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in a statement Monday said the attack could have been avoided if the “state heeded earlier warnings from civil society about extremist outfits in the province.”

“Ill-equipped law enforcement personnel continue to be targeted in incidents that dearly cost civilian and police lives. We demand the state take action now,” the statement said.

Madiha Afzal, a fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the 2021 Taliban takeover in Afghanistan has “emboldened” the TTP and other terror groups.

“The TTP has also been emboldened by a Pakistani state that has had a shaky, uncertain response to the group in the last couple of years,” she said, adding a “sloppy policy toward terrorist groups has been more or less consistent across governments in Pakistan since the mid-2000s.”

Negotiations with the militants have “failed repeatedly because these groups are existentially opposed to the Pakistani state and constitution,” she added.

“This is now a national security crisis for Pakistan once again. The solution has to be a concerted military operation (against the TTP),” she said. “But that is now complicated by the fact that the TTP can go across the border into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.”

The attack also comes at a fragile time for Pakistan, which has been grappling with a cost of living crisis as food and fuel shortages wreak havoc in the country of 220 million.

Sharif’s government has struggled to revive the country’s economy, further devastated by deadly floods last year that killed more than 1,500 people and submerged entire villages.

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January 31, 2023
Illinois prosecutors drop pending criminal cases against R. Kelly, who remains imprisoned on federal convictions | CNN

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CNN
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Prosecutors in Illinois’ Cook County have dropped state sex-crime charges against singer R. Kelly, who has already been convicted of federal charges set to keep him in prison for decades.

The Illinois charges – aggravated criminal sexual assault and aggravated criminal sexual abuse counts involving four accusers – are being dropped in part because of the prison sentences he’s already facing for his federal convictions, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said Monday.

CNN has reached out to Kelly’s lawyer for comment.

After Foxx’s office filed charges in 2019, Kelly was charged in federal courts in New York and Chicago, her office noted.

In his federal case in New York, the disgraced R&B singer was sentenced to 30 years in prison after he was convicted in 2021 on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges.

In a federal trial in Chicago, Kelly was convicted of multiple child pornography charges and acquitted on others in 2022, after a trial that included anonymous testimony from a woman who said Kelly sexually abused her and recorded the interactions when she was as young as 14.

While a sentence hasn’t been announced in the latter trial, Kelly faces a minimum of 10 to 90 years in prison for that conviction, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office said.

“I understand how hard it was for these victims to come forward and tell their stories. I applaud their courage and have the utmost respect for everyone who came forward,” Foxx said in a news release.

“While this may not be the result they were expecting, due to the sentences that Mr. Kelly is facing, we do feel that justice has been served,” Foxx added.

Cook County prosecutors had called for victims to come forward after the airing of “Surviving R. Kelly,” a Lifetime documentary series that chronicled allegations of abuse, predatory behavior and pedophilia against the singer.

The office set up a hotline and interviewed hundreds of witnesses in Chicago, Atlanta and New York, according to the news release.

“My office will direct our resources to find justice for other victims of sexual abuse who do not have the power of a documentary to bring their abusers to light,” Foxx added.

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January 30, 2023
Retired Air Force officer set to plead guilty to storing classified information at his Florida home | CNN Politics

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CNN
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A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who stored files with classified information at his Florida home is set to plead guilty in February to one count of unlawful retention of national defense information, according to court documents.

The defendant, Robert Birchum, served in the Air Force for more than 30 years and previously held top secret clearance. According to his plea agreement, he stored hundreds of files that contained information marked as top secret, secret or confidential classified outside of authorized locations.

In 2017, investigators found a thumb drive, two hard drives and paper documents containing classified information in Birchum’s possession, including at his home, court documents state. Two of the files on the thumb drive at Birchum’s home contained information on the National Security Agency’s “methods of collection, and identify targets’ vulnerabilities,” according to the plea.

CNN has reached out to Birchum’s attorney for comment.

A plea hearing is set for February 21 in a district court in Florida, and he faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.

The Daily Beast first reported on the plea agreement.

The case comes to a close as Washington is embroiled in controversy over the handling of classified documents by President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence. Two special counsels are investigating Biden and Trump, and the Justice Department is reviewing the Pence case.

While Birchum had top secret clearance through his various positions in the Air Force, including as an Intelligence Officer, “(t)he defendant’s residence was not a location authorized to store classified information, and the defendant knew as much,” the plea agreement states.

On a hard drive at his home, investigators found 10 files that had “information marked as Secret,” according to the agreement, as well as 48 paper documents that also contained information marked as secret. On the thumb drive recovered from his home, investigators say they found 135 files marked as containing classified information.

Separately, in a temporary residence overseas outside of a designated sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), investigators say they found another hard drive containing 117 files with classified national defense information.

According to court filings, Birchum retired from the Air Force in 2018. An Air Force spokesperson declined to comment.

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January 30, 2023
Developments in Trump documents probe foretell a 2024 campaign clouded by legal tangles | CNN Politics

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CNN
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There’s never been a presidential campaign like it.

Donald Trump is taking every step of his bid for a third consecutive Republican nomination amid a darkening storm of legal uncertainty.

The twice-impeached former president, who tried to steal an election and is accused of fomenting an insurrection, launched his first two-state campaign swing on Saturday as he seeks a stunning political comeback.

Then on Monday, Trump’s potential exposure – in two of his multiple strands of legal peril – appeared to grow, foreshadowing a campaign likely to be repeatedly punctuated by distractions from criminal investigations.

In a new twist to his classified material saga, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Katelyn Polantz reported that two people who found two classified documents in a Trump storage facility in Florida testified before a federal grand jury. Federal prosecutors are also pushing to look at files on a laptop of at least one staff member around Trump at Mar-a-Lago, CNN reported. The former president has not been charged with a crime, but these developments are the latest sign of an aggressive approach by special counsel Jack Smith in probing the matter. And it shows how a regular drumbeat of legal problems could detract from the former president’s attempts to inject energy into a so-far tepid campaign – especially given the multiple criminal threats he may face.

On another front, The New York Times reported that a district attorney in Manhattan is presenting evidence to another grand jury probing Trump’s alleged role in paying hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Last week, a district attorney in Georgia said decisions are imminent on charges related to Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state. It is not known whether the ex-president is directly targeted by the investigation. This all comes as Smith is also probing Trump’s role in the US Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.

The unique and extraordinary legal tangle surrounding Trump means that a third straight US election will be tainted by controversies that will drag the FBI and the Justice Department further into a political morass. (President Joe Biden is also facing a special counsel investigation over his handling of documents from his time as vice president, and former Vice President Mike Pence, who’s eying a 2024 bid, is under DOJ review for similar issues.) This follows the Hillary Clinton email flap in 2016 and investigations into the Trump campaign’s links with Russia during that White House bid, as well as Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in 2020.

The fact that Trump is seeking the presidency again, under an extraordinary legal cloud, could have significant consequences for the wider 2024 campaign. Some of his potential Republican rivals, wary of trying to take him down, might hope that his legal troubles will do the job for them. Perceptions that Trump is caught in a web of criminal investigation might also further tarnish his personal political brand, which has already contributed to some Republican loses in national elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

Still, Trump is a master of leveraging attempts to call him to account, legally and politically. He’s already built a central foundation of his new presidential quest around the idea that he’s being political persecuted by Justice Department investigations and what he claims are rogue Democratic prosecutors.

“We’re going to stop the appalling weaponization of our justice system. There’s never been a justice system like this. It’s all investigation, investigation,” the ex-president said on the trail over the weekend.

This is a message that may be attractive to some of Trump’s base voters who themselves feel alienated from the federal government and previously bought into his claims about a “deep state” conspiracy against him. It’s also a technique, in which a strongman leader argues that he is taking the heat so his followers don’t have to, that is a familiar page in the authority playbooks of demagogues throughout history.

As is normal, it is not known what the people who found the classified documents at the Florida storage facility may have said to the grand jury. But the ex-president is being investigated not just for possible violations of the Espionage Act, but also for potential obstruction of justice related to the documents.

The two individuals, who were hired to search four of Trump’s properties last fall months after the FBI executed a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago resort over the summer, were each interviewed for about three hours in separate appearances last week. The extent of information they offered the grand jury remains unclear, though they didn’t decline to answer any questions, one of the sources familiar with the investigation said.

Ryan Goodman, a former special counsel at the Department of Defense, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday that the latest development was a sign of an advanced special counsel investigation and could indicate that Smith was leaning toward indictments.

“It sounds like he is trying to lock in their testimony, to understand how they would testify at trial, whether it is incriminating evidence against Trump or exculpatory evidence that the prosecutors would then have that and have it solidified.”

The simple, politically charged act of investigating an ex-president was always bound to create a political furor. The fact that Trump is running for the White House again multiplies the stakes and means profound decisions are ahead for Attorney General Merrick Garland if evidence suggests Trump should be charged.

On a more granular level, the report about the grand jury underscores that for all the political noise, the investigation into Trump’s haul of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago is taking place inside its own legal bubble.

This remains the case, despite the political gift handed to Trump with the discovery of classified documents at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home and at a Washington office he once used that should have been handed back when he left the vice presidency. Some classified material was also found at Pence’s Indiana home.

Those discoveries allowed Trump to claim that he was being unfairly singled out, even if the cases have significant differences. Any Trump attempt to argue that he, like Biden and Pence, inadvertently took documents to his home will be undermined by the fact that he claimed the material belonged to him, and not the government, and what appears to be repeated refusals to give it back.

Fresh indications of the momentum in the Trump documents special counsel probe followed the latest sign of a lopsided approach to the controversy over classified material by House Republicans, who are hammering Biden over documents but giving Trump a free pass.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer was, for example, asked by CNN’s Pamela Brown this weekend why he had no interest in the more than 325 documents found at Trump’s home but was fixated upon the approximately 20 classified documents uncovered in Biden’s premises by lawyers and an unknown number also found during an FBI search of the president’s home this month.

“If someone can show me evidence that there was influence peddling with those classified documents that were in the possession of President Trump, then we would certainly expand it,” the Kentucky Republican said. He went on to accuse Biden and his family of being “very cozy” with people from the Chinese Communist party but offered no evidence of such links or that they had anything to do with classified documents. His remarks left the impression that his committee is seeking to find evidence to condemn Biden but is treating Trump differently – exactly the kind of double standard the GOP has claimed the DOJ is employing toward Trump.

The two special counsel investigations probing Trump and Biden’s retention of secret documents are unfolding independently. In a legal sense, there is no overlap between them. But they will both be subject to the same political inferno if findings are made public.

Were Trump, for instance, to be prosecuted – over what so far appears to be a larger haul of documents and conduct that may add up to obstruction – and Biden is not, the ex-president would incite a firestorm of protest among his supporters. Even though the sitting president enjoys protections from prosecution because of historic Justice Department guidance, it’s hard to see how the political ground for prosecuting just one of them could hold firm – especially if Biden and Trump are rival presidential candidates in 2024.

From the outside, it appears as if Biden and Pence were far more cooperative with the DOJ and the FBI after some classified documents were found at their properties than Trump has been. It took a search warrant for FBI agents to get into Mar-a-Lago, and the ex-president claimed that presidential documents that belonged to the federal government when he left office belonged to him. But voters might find it hard to understand nuanced legal differences between the two cases – a factor the House Republican counter-attack based on Biden’s documents made more likely.

As the political fallout from the classified documents furor deepened on Monday, the country got a reminder of the treatment that can await lower-ranking members of the federal workforce when secret material is taken home.

CNN’s Holmes Lybrand reported that court documents show that a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, who stored files with classified information at his Florida home, will plead guilty in February to one count of unlawful retention of national defense information.

Robert Birchum served in the Air Force for more than 30 years and previously held top secret clearance. According to his plea agreement, he stored hundreds of files that contained information marked as top secret, secret or confidential classified outside of authorized locations. A plea agreement stated that “the defendant’s residence was not a location authorized to store classified information, and the defendant knew as much.”

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January 30, 2023
A 6th Memphis officer is off the force, and 3 fire department workers are fired as new details emerge from the deadly police beating of Tyre Nichols | CNN

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Editor’s Note: This article contains graphic videos and descriptions of violence.

CNN
—

[Breaking news update, published at 5:55 p.m. ET]

Three Memphis Fire Department personnel who responded to the Tyre Nichols beating have been fired, according to the department.

[Previous story, published at 5:04 p.m. ET]

Fallout from the deadly police beating of Tyre Nichols now includes a sixth Memphis officer removed from duties, demands for more criminal charges against officers and calls for nationwide police reform.

Officer Preston Hemphill “was relieved of duty with the other officers” involved in the January 7 encounter with Nichols, Memphis police Maj. Karen Rudolph said Monday.

Hemphill has actually been on administrative leave since the beginning of the investigation, Memphis police spokesperson Kimberly Elder told CNN. Elder declined to say whether Hemphill is being paid or whether any other officers were put on leave.

Body cam footage reveals Hemphill fired a Taser at Nichols and saying, “One of them prongs hit the bastard.”

Later, Hemphill says to another officer: “I hope they stomp his ass.”

Five other Memphis officers have been fired and face charges of second-degree murder in connection with the beating death of Nichols.

Hemphill has not been charged. “He was never present at the second scene” that escalated to the beating, and Hemphill has been cooperating with the investigation, his attorney Lee Gerald said.

Attorneys for Nichols’ family wonder why authorities were quick to fire five Black police officers and charge them with murder – while staying relatively quiet about Hemphill role in the encounter.

“The news today from Memphis officials that Officer Preston Hemphill was reportedly relieved of duty weeks ago, but not yet terminated or charged, is extremely disappointing. Why is his identity and the role he played in Tyre’s death just now coming to light?” attorneys Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci said in a statement Monday.

“It certainly begs the question why the White officer involved in this brutal attack was shielded and protected from the public eye.”

But officials knew releasing video footage of Nichols’ beating without filing charges against officers could be “incendiary,” Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy said Sunday. “The best solution was to expedite the investigation and to expedite the consideration of charges so that the charges could come first and then the release of the video,” he said.

Video of the gruesome beating “outraged” the Memphis police chief. The footage showed “acts that defy humanity,” Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis said.

The attack has fueled broader public scrutiny of how US police use force, especially against people of color. And weeks after Nichols’ death, many questions remain. Among them:

• Whether more officers will face charges or other: Memphis City Council member Frank Colvett said he wanted to know why more officers at the scene of Nichols’ beating scene had not been disciplined or suspended.

It’s also not clear whether Hemphill or others will face criminal charges. “We are looking at all of the officers and first responders at the scene,” Shelby County District Attorney’s Office spokesperson Erica Williams said Monday. “They could face charges, or they could not, but we are looking at everyone.”

It was “unprecedented” for indictment charges against the officers to come within weeks, said Mulroy, the Shelby County district attorney.

• How Memphis’ police chief will fare: While some have praised Chief Davis’ swift action in the case, she also created the controversial SCORPION unit that the charged officers were linked to. “There is a reckoning coming for the police department and for the leadership,” Colvett said. “She’s going to have to answer not just to the council but to the citizens – and really the world.”

• What happens to fire and sheriff’s personnel: Two Memphis Fire Department employees who were part of Nichols’ initial care were relieved of duty, pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

And two deputies with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office have been put on leave pending an investigation.

• If Nichols’ death spurs national-level police reform: The Congressional Black Caucus has asked for a meeting with President Joe Biden this week to push for negotiations on police reform.

Video of the fatal encounter is difficult to watch. It starts with a traffic stop and later shows officers repeatedly beating Nichols with batons, punching him and kicking him – even as his hands are restrained behind his back at one point.

Nichols is heard calling for his mother as he was kicked and pepper-sprayed.

He was left slumped to the ground in handcuffs. Another 23 minutes passed before a stretcher arrived at the scene. Nichols was hospitalized and died three days later.

“All of these officers failed their oath,” said Crump, one of the attorneys representing the Nichols family, “They failed their oath to protect and serve.”

At the residential street corner where Nichols was beaten, mourners created a makeshift memorial. Across the country, protesters marched in cities including New York, Atlanta, Boston and Los Angeles.

Nichols’ family remembered him as a good son and father who enjoyed skateboarding, photography and sunsets. They recalled his smile and hugs and mourned the moments they’ll never have again.

Family members promised to “keep saying his name until justice is served.”

The five fired officers charged in connection with Nichols’ beating – Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Justin Smith, Emmitt Martin and Desmond Mills Jr. – are expected to be arraigned February 17.

Mills Jr. didn’t cross lines “that others crossed” during the confrontation with Nichols and instead was a “victim” of the system he worked within, his attorney, Blake Ballin, told CNN.

Martin’s attorney, William Massey, said “no one out there that night intended for Tyre Nichols to die.”

Attorneys for the other former officers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Memphis Police Association declined to comment on the terminations beyond saying the city of Memphis and Nichols’ family “deserve to know the complete account of the events leading up to his death and what may have contributed to it,” the union said in a statement.

The Shelby County district attorney’s office said each of the five fired officers face seven counts, including: second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping with bodily injury, aggravated kidnapping in possession of a deadly weapon, official misconduct and official oppression.

But a second-degree murder charge – which requires intent to kill – might be harder to prove than a first-degree felony murder charge, said Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, assistant professor of law and co-director of the Center for Criminal Justice at Brooklyn Law School.

“For first-degree felony murder, it means that a murder happened in conjunction with an underlying felony,” said Hoag-Fordjour, noting she practiced law in Tennessee.

“Here, every single charge that the Memphis district attorney charged these five individuals with were felonies. And the underlying felony that would support a first-degree murder charge – felony murder – is kidnapping.”

The kidnapping counts against officers may seem unusual because “we obviously deputize law enforcement officials to make seizures, to make arrests,” Hoag-Fordjour told “CNN This Morning” on Monday.

“But at this point … what would have been legitimate behavior crossed the line into illegitimacy.”

While first-degree felony murder might be easier to prove, Hoag-Fordjour said, second-degree murder convictions are still possible.

Under Tennessee law, a person can be convicted of second-degree murder if they could be reasonably certain their actions would result in somebody’s death, Hoag-Fordjour said.

And some of the blows dealt to Nichols – including kicks to the head and strikes with a baton while he was subdued on the ground – could be deemed deadly, she said.

The five fired officers charged in Nichols’ beating were members of the now-scrapped SCORPION (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods) unit, Memphis police spokesperson Maj. Karen Rudolph said Saturday.

Hemphill, the officer placed on administrative leave, was also a member of the SCORPION unit, a source familiar with his assignment confirmed to CNN.

The unit, launched in 2021, put officers into areas where police were tracking upticks in violent crime.

“That reprehensible conduct we saw in that video, we think this was part of the culture of the SCORPION unit,” Crump said.

“We demanded that they disbanded immediately before we see anything like this happen again,” he said. “It was the culture that was just as guilty for killing Tyre Nichols as those officers.”

Memphis police will permanently deactivate the unit. “While the heinous actions of a few casts a cloud of dishonor on the title SCORPION, it is imperative that we, the Memphis Police Department take proactive steps in the healing process for all impacted,” the department said.

Colvett supported the dismantling of the SCORPION unit.

“I think the smart move and the mayor is correct in shutting it down,” the council member said. “These kinds of actions are not representative of the Memphis Police Department.”

The case should give the city a chance to “dig deeper” into community and police relations, City Council member Michalyn Easter-Thomas said.

“We saw a very peaceful and direct sense of protest in the city of Memphis, and I think it’s because maybe we do have faith and hope that the system is going to get it right this time,” Easter-Thomas said.

Crump called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the Democratic-controlled House in 2021 but t.

“The brutal beating of Tyre Nichols was murder and is a grim reminder that we still have a long way to go in solving systemic police violence in America,” Congressional Black Caucus chair Rep. Steven Horsford said Sunday in a statement.

The Tennessee State Conference NAACP president applauded Davis for “doing the right thing” by not waiting six months to a year to fire the officers who beat Tyre Nichols.

But she had had harsher words for Congress: “By failing to craft and pass bills to stop police brutality, you’re writing another Black man’s obituary,” said Gloria Sweet-Love. “The blood of Black America is on your hands. So, stand up and do something.”

On the state level, two Democratic lawmakers said they intend to file police reform legislation ahead of the general assembly’s Tuesday filing deadline.

The bills would seek to address mental health care for law enforcement officers, hiring, training, discipline practices and other topics, said Tennessee state Rep. G.A. Hardaway, who represents a part of Memphis and Shelby County.

While Democrats hold the minority, with 24 representatives compared to 99 GOP representatives, this legislation is not partisan and should pass on both sides of the legislature, Rep. Joe Towns Jr. said.

“You would be hard-pressed to look at this footage (of Tyre Nichols) and see what happened to that young man, OK, and not want to do something,” he said. “If a dog in this county was beaten like that, what the hell would happen?”

Correction: An earlier version of this story had the wrong first name for Tyre Nichols.

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January 30, 2023
Monterey Park hero and Tyre Nichols’ family invited to attend State of the Union address | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Lawmakers have invited the parents of Tyre Nichols and the man who disarmed a gunman in a Southern California mass shooting to attend President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on February 7.

Nichols’ death days after being beaten by police in Memphis on January 7 and the mass shooting at a Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park on January 21 that killed 11 has outraged many Americans and brought renewed calls for sweeping gun and policing reform ahead of Biden’s address.

Congressional Black Caucus executive director Vincent Evans tweeted on Sunday that the caucus chairman, Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford of Nevada, invited Nichols’ parents to Washington as guests of the caucus, and that they have accepted the invitation.

CNN has reached out to Nichols’ family for comment.

Brandon Tsay, who disarmed the Monterey Park gunman as he attempted to attack a second dance studio near Los Angeles, was invited to the speech by Democratic Rep. Judy Chu of California.

Chu said Tsay’s story “was so amazing” that she called him to be her guest at the president’s address. But just one hour after Chu spoke with him, Biden called Tsay to personally offer his own invite, Chu said. The White House declined to comment on Sunday.

Tsay, 26, was awarded a medal of courage from the Alhambra Police Department during a ceremony Sunday. Biden called him last week to thank him for his act of bravery, CNN previously reported.

“I wanted to call to see how you’re doing and thank you for taking such incredible action in the face of danger,” Biden told Tsay. “I don’t think you understand just how much you’ve done for so many people who are never going to even know you. But I want them to know more about you.”

In an interview on MSNBC on Sunday, Horsford said he called Nichols’ family to extend the invitation.

“Earlier today, I spoke to the family of Tyre Nichols on behalf of the Congressional Black Caucus to first extend our condolences to them, to let them know that we stand with them, to ask them what they want from us in this moment, to honor the legacy of their son, and to extend an invitation to them to be our guest at the State of the Union on February 7 so that we can make sure that this issue of police culture, culture of policing, which, unfortunately in this country has now contributed to countless deaths,” he said.

Protesters took to the streets over the weekend to decry police brutality after the release of video depicting the violent police beating.

Nichols, 29, could be heard yelling for his mother in the video, which begins with a traffic stop and goes on to show officers repeatedly beating him with batons, punching him and kicking him – including at one point while his hands were restrained behind his back.

He was left slumped to the ground in handcuffs, and 23 minutes went by before a stretcher arrived at the scene. Nichols was eventually hospitalized and died three days later.

Biden said in a statement he was “outraged and deeply pained” after seeing the video. “It is yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that Black and Brown Americans experience every single day.”

The CBC is requesting a meeting with Biden this week to push for negotiations on police reform, Horsford said in a statement Sunday.

“We are calling on our colleagues in the House and Senate to jumpstart negotiations now and work with us to address the public health epidemic of police violence that disproportionately affects many of our communities,” he wrote. “The brutal beating of Tyre Nichols was murder and is a grim reminder that we still have a long way to go in solving systemic police violence in America.”

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January 30, 2023
Virginia school announces new safety protocols as students return to class nearly a month after a 6-year-old allegedly shot a teacher | CNN

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Richneck Elementary School has announced new safety protocols as students return to classes on Monday, nearly a month after a 6-year-old student allegedly shot his teacher inside a classroom.

In an email to families, newly appointed school administrator Karen Lynch said the school in Newport News, Virginia, will have police on campus to “assist with the transition.”

Children should arrive without a backpack because the school plans to provide them with clear ones on Monday, Lynch said. If students bring lunch items to school, they will be run through a metal detector and are subject to search, the email says.

The school district told CNN it has installed two metal detectors on campus.

The school will be limiting visitors during this first week of instruction to allow staff “the opportunity to establish routines and procedures with students,” the email states. Parents will not be allowed to enter classrooms and those who choose to walk their children to class must show identification and are also subject to search, it said.

The school closed after first grade teacher Abby Zwerner was critically injured on January 6 when a bullet was shot through her hand and into her chest, according to police. The 25-year-old was later stabilized and released from the hospital.

The incident has resulted in the ousting of the Newport News Public Schools superintendent and the reassignment of the school’s principal to another school. Since the shooting, the school board has held several meetings as it grapples with how to handle the incident amidst backlash from frustrated parents.

See school board meeting where decision to cut ties with superintendent was made

The father of a student who was in the same class as the 6-year-old said Monday he has “no misgivings” about sending his son back to school.

“I think with new administration, this administration that listens to teachers, listens to concerns and acts on those concerns … this is probably going to be the safest school in the area for a good long while,” Thomas Britton told CNN’s Brian Todd.

Last week, a lawyer representing the injured teacher alleged that school administrators were warned multiple times by staff who expressed concerns that the student had a gun and was making threats to people the day of the shooting. The lawyer, Diane Toscano, alleged Zwerner was shot about an hour after an employee was denied permission to search the student.

CNN has reached out to the school district for comment on Toscano’s claims.

While police have not publicly identified the student, his family has released statements saying the boy suffers from “an acute disability.”

The family has said the gun the child allegedly brought to school in his backpack was secured by a trigger lock and kept on the top shelf of a closet. As part of his disability care plan, a family member usually went to class with him, but he was not accompanied the day of the incident, they said.

“We will regret our absence on this day for the rest of our lives,” the family statement said.

As students return to school, the district says support services made available to them since the incident will continue on site.

The school has compiled an Amazon wish list of items teachers have requested “to support students’ social-emotional needs post-tragedy,” a post on the school’s Facebook account said.

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January 30, 2023
DOJ tells senators it is working to satisfy Trump and Biden document demands without harming special counsel probes | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The Justice Department has told lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee that it is working to satisfy their demands for information about classified documents found at properties of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump without harming ongoing special counsel investigations into both matters, according to a new letter obtained by CNN.

The DOJ letter, dated Saturday, responds to the committee’s August request for information about the documents recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and follow-up inquiries by the panel about classified material found at the Penn Biden Center as well as Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.

“We are working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to support the provision of information that will satisfy the Committee’s responsibilities without harming the ongoing Special Counsel investigations,” Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte wrote to Democratic Sen. Mark Warner and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, the Intelligence panel’s top lawmakers.

“Although one of the Special Counsels was appointed only on January 12, prosecutors on both matters are actively working to enable sharing information with the Committee,” Uriarte said.

The letter also notes that the DOJ “worked in good faith to schedule a briefing in September 2022,” but since that time, there have been “significant developments, including the appointment of two separate Special Counsels to handle the respective matters.”

“The Department looks forward to continuing to engage with the Committee to meet its needs while protecting the Department’s interests,” the letter states.

The DOJ’s response, which was also sent to the top lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, comes with Warner and Rubio reiterating their call for department to share the classified documents obtained from the properties of Biden and Trump.

In an interview Sunday with “Face the Nation” on CBS, Warner and Rubio objected to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s policy to withhold the documents until the special counsels handling each investigation give authorization. Warner said the DOJ policy “doesn’t hold water.”

“Our job is to make sure there’s not an intelligence compromise, and while the Director of National Intelligence had been willing to brief us earlier, now that you’ve got the special counsel, the notion that we’re going to be left in limbo, and we can’t do our job, that just cannot stand,” the Virginia Democrat said.

Rubio called into question the logic behind the Justice Department’s position to not share the documents with the committee, arguing that as members of the Senate Intelligence panel, it’s likely they already have the proper clearance to view the documents.

“I don’t know how congressional oversight on the document, actually knowing what they are, in any way impedes an investigation,” the Florida Republican said. “These are probably materials we already have access to. We just don’t know which ones they are.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

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January 30, 2023
Manhunt continues for ‘extremely dangerous’ kidnapping suspect who may be using dating apps to evade capture, police say | CNN

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CNN
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A sweeping multi-day manhunt continues for a suspect accused of brutally beating and kidnapping a woman in Oregon who remains in critical condition, according to police.

While Benjamin Obadiah Foster, 36, has evaded capture since Tuesday, police say he is still active on dating apps. The Grants Pass Police Department warns he may be using the apps to find potential new victims or manipulate them into helping him escape.

State and local investigators have been working “around the clock” to find Foster, who is wanted on suspicion of attempted murder, kidnapping and assault, Grants Pass Police Chief Warren Hensman has said.

Investigators have been searching for Foster since Tuesday after they found a woman bound and beaten into unconsciousness in a residence in Grants Pass, police said. The suspect, identified by investigators as Foster, had already fled by the time police arrived, the department said.

Prosecutors accuse Foster of trying to kill the victim while “intentionally torturing” her, according to charging documents obtained by CNN affiliate KDRV. Hensman said Thursday that the victim had been enduring the alleged abuses for a “protracted amount of time.”

“I’m disgusted by what I know happened. This was an evil act,” Hensman said Thursday.

The victim was brought to a local hospital where she remains in critical condition, police said Sunday. As of Thursday, police were providing security for the victim, according to Hensman.

Police said Foster “likely received assistance in fleeing the area.” A 68-year-old woman has been arrested for “Hindering Prosecution” as authorities searched for Foster, the department has said.

Police are urging the public to send in tips on the suspect’s whereabouts or any potential sightings. In a statement Sunday, the department said people should pay particular attention to his eyes and facial structure, as they believe he may try to alter his appearance by changing the cut or color of his hair and beard.

In the statement, police said people should not approach the “extremely dangerous suspect” and should instead call 911 immediately. Authorities have said Foster could be armed.

The department has set up a tip line and is offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to Foster’s capture and prosecution.

“This is an all hands on deck operation and we won’t rest until we capture this man,” Hensman said on Thursday.

During a Thursday press conference, Hensman said he is “troubled” by Foster’s history of domestic violence and assault charges, which are detailed in court records.

Between 2017 and 2019, Foster was charged in two separate cases in which he was accused of attacking women in Las Vegas, according to Clark County court records.

In the first case, Foster was charged with felony battery constituting domestic violence, the records show. Foster’s ex-girlfriend testified in a preliminary hearing that he tried to strangle her on Christmas Eve of 2017 after he saw that another man had texted her.

While that case was still pending, Foster was charged with felony assault, battery and kidnapping for alleged abuses against his then-girlfriend in 2019, according to charging documents.

The victim told police “Foster strangled (her) to the point of unconsciousness several times” and kept her tied up for most of the next two weeks. She said she was only able to escape after convincing Foster they needed to go shopping for food and water, and ran away when he got out of the car to let their dog use the bathroom, the court records show.

The woman was able to run through a store and into a nearby apartment complex, where somebody offered to take her to a hospital, according to a Las Vegas police report. There, she was found to have seven broken ribs, two black eyes and abrasions to her wrists and ankles from being tied up, the report said.

Foster accepted plea deals in both cases. In the first case, he was sentenced to a maximum of 30 months in prison but given credit for 729 days served.

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January 29, 2023
Video of Nichols’ beating prompts renewed calls for police reform | CNN Politics

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A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

CNN
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New York to San Francisco. Baltimore to Portland. Boston to Los Angeles, and countless cities in between.

Protesters once again took to the streets over the weekend to decry police brutality after the release of video capturing the violent Memphis police beating that led to the death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols.

On Sunday morning, Nichols’ family attorney made note of the outrage as he aimed a simple but pointed message at Washington.

“Shame on us if we don’t use [Nichols’] tragic death to finally get the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed,” Ben Crump said on CNN’s “State of Union.”

President Joe Biden referenced the failed legislation in his statement about Nichols on Friday, and many leaders – from the chairs of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio – are acknowledging a potential role for federal legislation.

The Congressional Black Caucus is requesting a meeting with Biden this week to push for negotiations. “We are calling on our colleagues in the House and Senate to jumpstart negotiations now and work with us to address the public health epidemic of police violence that disproportionately affects many of our communities,” CBC Chair Steven Horsford, a Nevada Democrat, wrote in a statement on Sunday.

Gloria Sweet-Love, the Tennessee State Conference NAACP president, called on Congress to step up during a Sunday evening news conference in Memphis. “By failing to craft and pass bills to stop police brutality, you’re writing another Black man’s obituary. The blood of Black America is on your hands. So stand up and do something.”

But with Congress as divided as ever, it appears public outrage is once again on a collision course with Washington partisanship.

Here’s what you need to know about the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, why it failed, and what chances it stands in the current political climate.

The legislation, originally introduced in 2020 and again in 2021, would set up a national registry of police misconduct to stop officers from evading consequences for their actions by moving to another jurisdiction.

It would ban racial and religious profiling by law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels, and it would overhaul qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that critics say shields law enforcement from accountability.

According to a fact sheet on the legislation at the time, the measure would also allow “individuals to recover damages in civil court when law enforcement officers violate their constitutional rights by eliminating qualified immunity for law enforcement.”

The fact sheet also states that the legislation would “save lives by banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants” and would mandate “deadly force be used only as a last resort.”

The bill twice cleared the House under Democratic control – in 2020 and 2021 – largely along party lines. But it never went anywhere in the Senate, even after Democrats won control in 2021, in part, because of disagreements about qualified immunity, which protects police officers from being sued in civil court.

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina spent some six months trying to hash out a deal that could win 60 votes in the Senate, but talks were stymied by a number of complicated issues.

“It was clear at this negotiating table, in this moment, we were not making progress,” Booker told reporters in the spring of 2021. “In fact, recent back-and-forth with paper showed me that we were actually moving away from it. The negotiations we were in stopped. But the work will continue.”

With the legislation stuck, Biden signed a more limited executive order to overhaul policing on the second anniversary of Floyd’s death. It took several actions that can be applied to federal officers, including efforts to ban chokeholds, expand the use of body-worn cameras and restrict no-knock warrants, among other things.

But the president cannot mandate that local law enforcement adopt the measures in his order; the executive action lays out levers the federal government can use, such as federal grants and technical assistance, to incentivize local law enforcement to get on board

And since then, little has happened on the federal legislative front.

Here’s the reality: the road for police reform has only become more challenging in the new Congress now that House Republicans, who have placed their priorities elsewhere, are in the majority.

Senate Democrats picked up one more seat in last year’s midterm elections to pad their majority, but they’re still far short of the 60 votes that would be need for such an effort to succeed. That means any policing overhaul that can find meaningful support in Congress will likely be stripped of the kind of measures that protesters are calling for.

State officials have been initiating investigations into local police departments, recognizing that the federal government can’t take on every case nationwide.

And, in some cases, local governments have taken their own steps. In the year after Floyd was killed, at least 25 states had considered some form of qualified immunity reform. In 2021, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law a series of police reforms that created a system to decertify law enforcement officers found to have engaged in serious misconduct – joining the majority of states that have similar decertification authorities.

But, for many, it’s not nearly enough. Read this CNN Opinion piece from Sonia Pruitt, a retired Montgomery County, Maryland, police captain:

“Many have noted the police assault on Nichols is reminiscent of that on Rodney King, a Black man whose beating at the hands of Los Angeles police officers in 1991 was captured on video. But the beating of Nichols is actually much worse because it shows that after nearly 32 years, the needle of police reform has barely moved, and seemingly minor traffic violations continue to lead to the deaths of Black and other minority men and women in police encounters.”

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January 29, 2023

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