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  • 14 promises Donald Trump has made in his campaign for a second term | CNN Politics

    14 promises Donald Trump has made in his campaign for a second term | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump has hit the 2024 campaign trail and is giving voters a preview of what a second Trump presidency could look like if he’s elected. He’s made many campaign promises – many of which are often vague and lacking in details or specifics – including ending the war in Ukraine, building 10 new cities and giving drug smugglers the death penalty.

    Here are some of the policies he says he would enact if elected for a second term.

    “The drug cartels are waging war on America—and it’s now time for America to wage war on the cartels,” former President Donald Trump said in a January campaign video.

    If elected, Trump said in his November 2022 campaign announcement that he would ask Congress to ensure that drug smugglers and human traffickers can receive the death penalty for their “heinous acts.” The former president also vowed to “take down” drug cartels by imposing naval embargos on cartels, cutting off cartels’ access to global financial systems and using special forces within the Department of Defense to damage the cartels’ leadership.

    “When I am president, we will put parents back in charge and give them the final say,” Trump said in a January campaign video, speaking about education

    The former president said he would give funding preferences and “favorable treatment” to schools that allow parents to elect principals, abolish teacher tenure for K-12 teachers, use merit pay to incentivize quality teaching and cut the number of school administrators, such as those overseeing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

    Trump also said in the campaign video that he would cut funding for schools that teach critical race theory and gender ideology. In a later speech, Trump said he would bring back the 1776 Commission, which was launched in his previous administration to “teach our values and promote our history and our traditions to our children.”

    Lastly, the former president said he would charge the Department of Justice and the Department of Education with investigating civil rights violations of race-based discrimination in schools while also removing “Marxists” from the Department of Education. A second Trump administration would pursue violations in schools of both the Constitution’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, which prohibit the government establishment of religion and protect a citizen’s right to practice their own religion, he said.

    “I will revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilation of our youth and ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states,” Trump said at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference in March.

    Trump added in a campaign video that he would issue an executive order instructing federal agencies to cut programs that promote gender transitions, as well as asking Congress to stop the use of federal dollars to promote and pay for gender-affirming procedures. The former president added that his administration would not allow hospitals and healthcare providers to meet the federal health and safety standards for Medicaid and Medicare if they provide chemical or physical gender-affirming care to youth.

    Trump said in two February campaign videos that, if “Marxist” prosecutors refuse to charge crimes and surrender “our cities to violent criminals,” he “will not hesitate to send in federal law enforcement to restore peace and public safety.”

    Trump added that he would instruct the Department of Justice to open civil rights investigations into “radical left” prosecutors’ offices that engaged in racial enforcement of the law, encourage Congress to use their legal authority over Washington, DC, to restore “law and order” and overhaul federal standards of disciplining minors to address rising crimes like carjackings.

    Addressing policies made in what Trump calls the “Democrats’ war on police,” the former president vowed in a campaign video that he would pass a “record investment” to hire and retrain police, strengthen protections like qualified immunity, increase penalties for assaulting law enforcement officers and deploy the National Guard when local law enforcement “refuses to act.” The former president added that he would require law enforcement agencies that receive money from his funding investment or the Department of Justice to use “proven common sense” measures such as stop-and-frisk.

    “Shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled,” Trump said at a New Hampshire campaign event, adding in another speech that it would take him “no longer than one day” to settle the war if elected. Trump offered no details on how he would end the war in Ukraine.

    Trump further addressed his strategy of stopping the “never-ending wars” by vowing to remove warmongers, frauds and “failures in the senior ranks of our government,” and replace them with national security officials who would defend America’s interests. The former president added in a campaign video that he would stop lobbyists and government contractors from pushing senior military officials towards war.

    Trump said he would restore his “wonderful” travel ban on individuals from several majority-Muslim countries to “keep radical Islamic terrorists out of our country” after President Joe Biden overturned the ban in 2021.

    Trump said in multiple campaign videos that he would spearhead an effort to build Freedom Cities to “reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American Dream.”

    In his plan, the federal government would charter 10 new cities on federal land, awarding them to areas with the best development proposals. The former president said in a campaign video that the Freedom Cities would bring the return of US manufacturing, economic opportunity, new industries and affordable living.

    In the March video, Trump added that the US under a second Trump administration would lead in efforts to “develop vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles for families and individuals,” not letting China lead “this revolution in air mobility.” The former president said these airborne vehicles would change commerce and bring wealth into rural communities.

    “When I am president, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. There won’t be anything left,” Trump said in a January video.

    To address the “disturbing” relationship between technology platforms and the government, the former president said he would enact a seven-year cooling off period before employees at agencies such as the FBI or CIA can work for platforms that oversee mass user data.

    Trump added in multiple campaign releases that he would task the Department of Justice with investigating and prosecuting the online censorship “regime,” ban federal agencies from “colluding” to censor citizens, fire bureaucrats who are believed to engage in federal censorship and suspend federal money to universities participating in “censorship-supporting activities.”

    On false information, the president would ban the use of taxpayer dollars to label any domestic speech as mis- or disinformation, as well as stopping federal funding of nonprofits and academic programs that study mis- or disinformation.

    Under the proposed Trump Reciprocal Trade Act, the former president said if other countries impose tariffs in the US, “we charge THEM – an eye for an eye, a tariff for a tariff, same exact amount.”

    Trump vowed in a campaign video to impose the same tariffs that other countries may impose on the US on those countries. The goal, the former president said, is to get other countries to drop their tariffs.

    As part of a larger strategy to bring jobs back into the US, Trump said he would also implement his America First trade agenda if elected. Setting universal baseline tariffs on a majority of foreign goods, the former president said Americans would see taxes decrease as tariffs increase. His proposal also includes a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods, as well as stopping China from buying up America and stopping the investment of US companies in China.

    “With victory, we will again build the greatest economy ever,” Trump said in his November campaign announcement. “It will take place quickly. We will build the greatest economy ever,” though he didn’t provide specific policy proposals or explain how he would improve the economy.

    Trump said he would repeal Biden’s tax hikes, “immediately tackle” inflation and end what he called Biden’s “war” on American energy production.

    At CPAC, Trump promised to, “fire the unelected bureaucrats and shadow forces who have weaponized our justice system like it has never been weaponized before…” Trump also said in a campaign video that he would reinstate a 2020 executive order to remove “rogue” bureaucrats and propose a constitutional amendment for term limits on members of Congress.

    Trump also pledged to “appoint US Attorneys who will be the polar opposite of the Soros District Attorneys and others that are being appointed throughout the United States.” The former president added on to this message, vowing to end the “reign” of such investigations and district attorneys and overhaul the Department of Justice and the FBI.

    “I will take Biden’s executive order directing the federal government to target the firearms industry, and I will rip it up and throw it out on day one,” Trump said at the 2023 National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action leadership forum in April.

    The former president also promised in the speech that the government would not infringe on citizens’ Second Amendment rights and that he would push Congress to pass a concealed carry reciprocity.

    “I will create a special team to rapidly review every action taken by federal agencies under Biden’s ‘equity’ agenda that will need to be reversed. We will reverse almost all of them,” Trump said in a campaign video.

    Trump added in multiple campaign videos that he would revoke Biden’s equity executive order that required federal agencies to deliver equitable outcomes in policy and conduct equity training. If elected, Trump said he would also fire staffers hired to implement Biden’s policy, and then reinstate his 2020 executive order banning racial and sexual stereotyping in the federal government.

    “When I’m president, I will ensure that America’s future remains firmly in American hands just as I did when I was president before,” Trump said in a campaign video.

    Trump vowed to restrict Chinese ownership of US infrastructure such as energy, technology, telecommunications and natural resources. The former president also said he would force the Chinese to sell current holdings that may put national security at risk. “Economic security is national security,” he said.

    Trump vowed in a June campaign video to reinstate his previous executive order that the US government would pay the same price for pharmaceuticals as other developed countries to “end this global freeloading on American consumers for once and for all.”

    Some of the former presidents’ pharmaceutical policies were overturned by Biden. Trump said in the video his administration would pay the best prices offered to other countries, who he said often pay lower pharmaceutical prices than Americans. This policy, Trump believes, would cause the pharmaceutical industry to raise prices for other countries while lowering costs for Americans.

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  • Inside the long and winding road to Trump’s historic indictment | CNN Politics

    Inside the long and winding road to Trump’s historic indictment | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The New York grand jury hearing the case against Donald Trump was set to break for several weeks. The former president’s lawyers believed on Wednesday afternoon they had at least a small reprieve from a possible indictment. Trump praised the perceived delay.

    Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had other plans.

    Thursday afternoon, Bragg asked the grand jury to return an historic indictment against Trump, the first time that a current or former US president has been indicted. The surprise move was the final twist in an investigation that’s taken a long and winding road to the history-making charges that were returned this week.

    An indictment had been anticipated early last week – including by Trump himself, who promoted a theory he would be “arrested” – as law enforcement agencies prepared for the logistics of arraigning a former president. But after the testimony of Robert Costello – a lawyer who appeared on Trump’s behalf seeking to undercut the credibility of Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen – Bragg appeared to hit the pause button.

    Costello’s testimony caused the district attorney’s office to reassess whether Costello should be the last witness the grand jury heard before prosecutors asked them to vote on an indictment, multiple sources told CNN.

    So they waited. The next day the grand jury was scheduled to meet, jurors were told not to come in. Bragg and his top prosecutors huddled the rest of the week and over the weekend to determine a strategy that would effectively counter Costello’s testimony in the grand jury.

    They called two additional witnesses. David Pecker, the former head of the company that publishes the National Enquirer, appeared on Monday. The other witness, who has still not been identified, testified on Thursday for 35 minutes in front of the grand jury – just before prosecutors asked them to vote on the indictment of more than 30 counts, the sources said.

    Trump and his attorneys, thinking Bragg might be reconsidering a potential indictment, were all caught off-guard, sources said. Some of Trump’s advisers had even left Palm Beach on Wednesday following news reports that the grand jury was taking a break, the sources added.

    After the indictment, Trump ate dinner with his wife, Melania, Thursday evening and smiled while he greeted guests at his Mar-a-Lago club, according to a source familiar with the event.

    The Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Trump has been ongoing for years, dating back to Bragg’s predecessor, Cy Vance. Its focus shifted by mid-2020 to the accuracy of the Trump Org.’s financial statements. At the time, prosecutors debated legal theories around the hush money payments and thought they were a long shot. At several points, the wide-ranging investigation seemed to have been winding down – to the point that prosecutors resigned in protest last year. One even wrote a book critical of Bragg for not pursuing charges against Trump released just last month.

    The specific charges against Trump still remain under seal and are expected to be unveiled Tuesday when Trump is set to be arraigned.

    There are questions swirling even among Trump critics over whether the Manhattan district attorney’s case is the strongest against the former president amid additional investigations in Washington, DC, and Georgia over both his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents at his Florida resort.

    Trump could still face charges in those probes, too, which are separate from the New York indictment.

    But it’s the Manhattan indictment, dating back to a payment made before the 2016 presidential election, that now sees Trump facing down criminal charges for the first time as he runs again for the White House in 2024.

    It was just weeks before the 2016 election when Cohen, Trump’s then-lawyer, paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep silent about an alleged affair with Trump. (Trump has denied the affair.) Cohen was later reimbursed $420,000 by the Trump Organization to cover the original payment and tax liabilities and to reward him with a bonus.

    That payment and reimbursement are keys at issue in the investigation.

    Cohen also helped arrange a $150,000 payment from the publisher of the National Enquirer to Karen McDougal to kill her story claiming a 10-month affair with Trump. Trump also denies an affair with McDougal. During the grand jury proceedings, the district attorney’s office has asked questions about the “catch and kill” deal with McDougal.

    When Cohen was charged by federal prosecutors in New York in 2018 and pleaded guilty, he said he was acting at the direction of Trump when he made the payment.

    At the time, federal prosecutors had determined they could not seek to indict Trump in the scheme because of US Justice Department regulations against charging a sitting president. In 2021, after Trump left the White House, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York decided not to pursue a case against Trump, according to a recent book from CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig.

    But then-Manhattan District Attorney Vance’s team had already picked up the investigation into the hush money payments and begun looking at potential state law violations. By summer 2019, they sent subpoenas to the Trump Org., other witnesses, and met with Cohen, who was serving a three-year prison sentence.

    Vance’s investigation broadened to the Trump Org.’s finances. New York prosecutors went to the Supreme Court twice to enforce a subpoena for Trump’s tax records from his long-time accounting firm Mazars USA. The Trump Org. and its long-time chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg were indicted on tax fraud and other charges in June 2021 for allegedly running an off-the-books compensation scheme for more than a decade.

    Weisselberg pleaded guilty to the charges last year and is currently serving a five-month sentence at Rikers Island. Prosecutors had hoped to flip Weisselberg to cooperate against Trump, but he would not tie Trump to any wrongdoing.

    Disagreements about the pace of the investigation had caused at least three career prosecutors to move off the investigation. They were concerned that the investigation was moving too quickly, without clear evidence to support possible charges, CNN and others reported last year.

    Vance authorized the attorneys on the team to present evidence to the grand jury near the end of 2021, but he did not seek an indictment. Those close to Vance say he wanted to leave the decision to Bragg, the newly elected district attorney.

    Bragg, a Democrat, took office in January 2022. Less than two months into his tenure, two top prosecutors who had worked on the Trump case under Vance abruptly resigned amid a disagreement in the office over the strength of the case against Trump.

    On February 22, 2022, Bragg informed the prosecution team that he was not prepared to authorize charges against Trump, CNN reported. The prosecutors, Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, resigned the next day.

    In his resignation letter, Pomerantz said he believed Trump was guilty of numerous felonies and said that Bragg’s decision to not move forward with an indictment at the time was “wrong” and a “grave failure of justice.”

    “I and others believe that your decision not to authorize prosecution now will doom any future prospects that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted for the criminal conduct we have been investigating,” Pomerantz wrote in the letter, which was reviewed by CNN.

    At that point, the investigation was focused on Trump’s financial statements and whether he knowingly misled lenders, insurers, and others by providing them false or misleading information about the value of his properties.

    Prosecutors were building a wide-ranging falsified business records case to include years of financial statements and the hush money payments, people with direct knowledge of the investigation told CNN. But at the time, those prosecutors believed there was a good chance a felony charge related to the hush money payment would be dismissed by a judge because it was a novel legal theory.

    Dunne and Pomerantz pushed to seek an indictment of Trump tied to the sweeping falsified business records case, but others, including some career prosecutors, were skeptical that they could win a conviction at trial, in part because of the difficulty in proving Trump’s criminal intent.

    Despite the resignations of the prosecutors on the Trump case, Bragg’s office reiterated at the time that the investigation was ongoing.

    “Investigations are not linear so we are following the leads in front of us. That’s what we’re doing,” Bragg told CNN in April 2022. “The investigation is very much ongoing.”

    At the same time that Bragg’s criminal investigation into Trump lingered last year, another prosecution against the Trump Org. moved forward. In December, two Trump Org. entities were convicted at trial on 17 counts and were ordered to pay $1.6 million, the maximum penalty, the following month.

    Trump was not personally charged in that case. But it appeared to embolden Bragg’s team to sharpen their focus back to Trump and the hush money payment.

    Cohen was brought back in to meet with Manhattan prosecutors. Cohen had previously met with prosecutors in the district attorney’s office 13 times over the course of the investigation. But the January meeting was the first in more than a year – and a clear sign of the direction prosecutors were taking.

    As investigators inched closer to a charging decision, Bragg was faced with more public pressure to indict Trump: Pomerantz, the prosecutor who had resigned a year prior, released a book about the investigation that argued Trump should be charged and criticized Bragg for failing to do so.

    “Every single member of the prosecution team thought that his guilt was established,” Pomerantz said in a February interview on “CNN This Morning.”

    Asked about Bragg’s hesitance, Pomerantz said: “I can’t speak in detail about what went through his mind. I can surmise from what happened at the time and statements that he’s made since that he had misgivings about the strength of the case.”

    Bragg responded in a statement saying that more work was needed on the case. “Mr. Pomerantz’s plane wasn’t ready for takeoff,” Bragg said.

    Prosecutors continued bringing in witnesses, including Pecker, the former head of American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer. In February, Trump Org. controller Jeffrey McConney testified before the grand jury. Members of Trump’s 2016 campaign, including Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks, also appeared. In March, Daniels met with prosecutors, her attorney said.

    And Cohen, after his numerous meetings with prosecutors, finally testified before the grand jury in March.

    The second week of March, prosecutors gave the clearest sign to date that the investigation was nearing its conclusion – they invited Trump to appear before the grand jury.

    Potential defendants in New York are required by law to be notified and invited to appear before a grand jury weighing charges.

    Behind the scenes, Trump attorney Susan Necheles told CNN she met with New York prosecutors to argue why Trump shouldn’t be indicted and that prosecutors didn’t articulate the specific charges they are considering.

    Trump, meanwhile, took to his social media to predict his impending indictment. In a post attacking Bragg on March 18, Trump said the “leading Republican candidate and former president of the United States will be arrested on Tuesday of next week.”

    “Protest, take our nation back,” Trump added, echoing the calls he made while he tried to overturn the 2020 election.

    Trump’s prediction would turn out to be premature.

    Trump’s call for protests after a potential indictment led to meetings between senior staff members from the district attorney’s office, the New York Police Department and the New York State Court Officers – who provide security at the criminal court building in lower Manhattan.

    Trump’s lawyers also made a last-ditch effort to fend off an indictment. At the behest of Trump’s team, Costello, who advised Cohen in 2018, provided emails and testified to the grand jury on Monday, March 20, alleging that Cohen had said in 2018 that he had decided on his own to make the payment to Daniels.

    Costello’s testimony appeared to delay a possible indictment – for a brief time at least.

    During the void, Trump continued to launch verbal insults against Bragg, calling him a “degenerate psychopath.” And four Republican chairmen of the most powerful House committees wrote to Bragg asking him to testify, which Bragg’s office said was unprecedented interference in a local investigation. An envelope containing a suspicious white powder and a death threat to Bragg was to delivered to the building where the grand jury meets – the powder was deemed nonhazardous.

    The grand jury would not meet again until Monday, March 27, when Pecker was ushered back to the grand jury in a government vehicle with tinted windows in a failed effort to evade detection by the media camped outside of the building where the grand jury meets.

    Pecker, a longtime friend of Trump’s who had a history of orchestrating so-called “catch and kill” deals while at the National Enquirer, was involved with the Daniels’ deal from the beginning.

    Two days after Pecker’s testimony, there were multiple reports that the grand jury was going into a pre-planned break in April. The grand jury was set to meet Thursday but it was not expected to hear the Trump case.

    Instead, the grand jury heard from one last witness in the Trump case on Thursday, whose identity is still unknown. And then the grand jury shook up the American political system by voting to indict a former president and 2024 candidate for the White House.

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  • Exclusive: National security officials tell special counsel Trump was repeatedly warned he did not have the authority to seize voting machines | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: National security officials tell special counsel Trump was repeatedly warned he did not have the authority to seize voting machines | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Former top national security officials have testified to a federal grand jury that they repeatedly told former President Donald Trump and his allies that the government didn’t have the authority to seize voting machines after the 2020 election, CNN has learned.

    Chad Wolf, the former acting Homeland Security secretary, and his former deputy Ken Cuccinelli were asked about discussions inside the administration around DHS seizing voting machines when they appeared before the grand jury earlier this year, according to three people familiar with the proceedings. Cuccinelli testified that he “made clear at all times” that DHS did not have the authority to take such a step, one of the sources said.

    Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, in a closed-door interview with federal prosecutors earlier this year, also recounted conversations about seizing voting machines after the 2020 election, including during a heated Oval Office meeting that Trump participated in, according to a source familiar with the matter.

    Details about the secret grand jury testimony and O’Brien’s interview, neither of which have been previously reported, illustrate how special counsel Jack Smith and his prosecutors are looking at the various ways Trump tried to overturn his electoral loss despite some of his top officials advising him against the ideas.

    Now some of those same officials, including Wolf, Cuccinelli and O’Brien, as well as others who have so far refused to testify, may have to return to the grand jury in Washington, DC, to provide additional testimony after a series of pivotal court rulings that were revealed in recent weeks rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege.

    Cuccinelli was spotted going back into the grand jury on Tuesday, April 4.

    Without that privilege shield, former officials must answer questions about their interactions and conversations with the former president, including what he was told about the lack of evidence for election fraud and the legal remedies he could pursue.

    That line of questioning goes to the heart of Smith’s challenge in any criminal case he might bring – to prove that Trump and his allies pursued their efforts despite knowing their fraud claims were false or their gambits weren’t lawful. To bring any potential criminal charges, prosecutors would have to overcome Trump’s public claim that he believed then and now that fraud really did cost him the election.

    “There’s lots of ways you can show that. But certainly one of them is if they were told by people who knew what they were talking about, that that there was no basis to take the actions,” said Adav Noti, an election law attorney who previously served in the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC, and at the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office.

    “I would not want to be a defense lawyer trying to argue, ‘Well, yes, my client was told that, but he never really believed it,’” Noti said.

    Inside the Trump White House after the 2020 election, the push to seize voting machines eventually led to executive orders being drafted in mid-December of that year, directing the military and DHS to carry out the task despite Wolf and Cuccinelli telling Trump and his allies their agency did not have the authority to do so.

    Those orders, which cited debunked claims about voting system irregularities in Michigan and Georgia, were presented to Trump by his former national security adviser Michael Flynn and then-lawyer Sidney Powell during a now-infamous Oval Office meeting on December 18.

    Smith’s team has asked witnesses about that meeting in front of the grand jury and during closed-door interviews, multiple sources told CNN. Among them was O’Brien, who told the January 6 House select committee that he was patched into the December 18 meeting by phone after it had already devolved into a screaming match between Flynn, Powell and White House lawyers, according to a transcript of O’Brien’s deposition that was released by the panel.

    O’Brien told the committee that at some point someone asked him if there was evidence of election fraud or foreign interference in the voting machines. “And I said, ‘No, we’ve looked into that and there’s no evidence of it,” O’Brien said he responded. “I was told we didn’t have any evidence of any voter machine fraud in the 2020 election.”

    When asked about that meeting by federal prosecutors working for Smith, O’Brien reiterated that he made clear there was no evidence of foreign interference affecting voting machines, according to the source familiar with the matter.

    O’Brien met with prosecutors earlier this year after receiving a subpoena from Smith’s team and is among the Trump officials who could be called back to discuss conversations with Trump under the judge’s recent decision on executive privilege.

    Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who personally told allies of the former president that there was no evidence of foreign election interference or widespread fraud that would justify taking extreme steps like seizing voting machines, must also testify, the judge decided.

    A spokesperson for Ratcliffe did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. Wolf declined to comment.

    Cuccinelli acknowledged to the January 6 committee last year that, after the election, he was asked several times by Trump’s then-attorney Rudy Giuliani, and on at least one occasion by Trump himself, if DHS had authority to seize voting machines. Wolf told the committee he was repeatedly asked the same question by then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

    Giuliani, who was subpoenaed by the Justice Department before Smith took over the investigation, previously acknowledged to the January 6 committee that he participated in that December 18 Oval Office meeting and other conversations about having DHS and the military seize voting machines.

    Giuliani told congressional investigators that he and his team “tried many different ways to see if we could get the machines seized,” including options involving DHS, according to the transcript of his committee interview. Giuliani also acknowledged taking part in conversations – even before the Dec. 18 Oval Office meeting – where the idea of using the military to seize voting machines was raised.

    “I can remember the issue of the military coming up much earlier and constantly saying, ‘Will you forget about it, please? Just shut up. You want to go to jail? Just shut up. We’re not using the military,’” he added.

    Robert Costello, an attorney for Giuliani, told CNN that Giuliani has not received a subpoena from Smith. Costello said that in early November, Giuliani was subpoenaed by the DC US Attorney seeking documents and testimony. Costello says he told the Justice Department Giuliani couldn’t comply with the given deadlines because they were in the middle of disciplinary proceedings at the time. That was the last time Giuliani heard from DOJ, says Costello.

    “I haven’t heard a word since November 2022,” Costello told CNN on March 30.

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  • Sexual assaults in the US military increased by 1% last year | CNN Politics

    Sexual assaults in the US military increased by 1% last year | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The US military saw a 1% increase in sexual assaults last year, according to the Pentagon’s latest annual report.

    There were 7,378 reports of sexual assault against service members in 2022, according to the Fiscal Year 2022 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, released on Thursday. That is up from 7,260 reports of assault in 2021.

    All of the services aside from the Army saw an increase in reports from last year, officials said during a briefing on the report on Thursday: the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force saw a 9%, 3.6%, and 13% increase in reports, respectively. The Army, meanwhile, saw a 9% decrease.

    Overall, the number of reports of assault has consistently increased in the military since 2010.

    And while the Defense Department is working through implementing dozens of recommendations from an independent review commission on sexual assault, officials said commanders and service members on the ground still have a responsibility to do their part.

    “At the end of the day, we can only do so much at the headquarters level,” Beth Foster, director of the Office of Force Resiliency, told reporters. “But, you know, really, this is on our commanders, on our [non-commissioned officers], our frontline leaders to make sure that they are addressing this problem. And, you know, the Secretary says … we need to lead on that. And that that is for at every level of the department.”

    In addition to the 7,378 reports of assault that occurred during military service in 2022, there were also 797 Defense Department civilians who reported being assaulted by service members, and 580 service members who reported being assaulted before their military service.

    The report released Thursday looks at the number of sexual assault reports, as opposed to a separate report the Pentagon releases every other year that estimates the total number of service members experiencing sexual assault. Ideally, the Defense Department has said a sign of progress would be seeing the number of reports go up, while the prevalence of sexual assault go down.

    However, the 2021 prevalence survey – released August 2022 – showed an in increase in how many service members were estimated to have experienced assault. The Pentagon estimated that 35,875 service members experienced unwanted sexual contact in 2021.

    Also, within the report released on Thursday was data showing a decrease in how many cases of assault, which had evidence that supported the charges, were referred to court-martial by commanders. Only 37% of cases were referred to court-martial in 2022, which falls in line with a steady decrease over the last 10 years.

    Instead, there has been an increase in cases that are dealt with through administrative action and discharges of offenders. Dr. Nate Galbreath, the deputy director for the Defense Department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, told reporters on Thursday that the decrease in court-martials is in part because of support being provided to victims of military sexual assault.

    “One of the things that we’ve seen year after a year since 2015, with the addition of the Special Victims Counsel program – which are attorneys that represent victims throughout the military justice process – is that victims have made it abundantly clear that they would like to help see the department hold their offenders appropriately accountable, but they’d like to do it through nonconfrontational means, and that’s essentially what we see in the percentages with administrative actions and discharges and non-judicial punishment,” Galbreath said.

    He added, however, that the decrease in taking sexual assault cases to court is also due to victims not having faith in the military justice system to handle their cases appropriately.

    The military services’ newly appointed Special Trial Counsels, who are appointed officers that report directly to the service secretaries and have exclusive authority to prosecute sexual assault cases, will be charged with restoring “that perception of fairness back into the system.”

    Ultimately, officials reiterated that while work is ongoing, the ongoing trend of sexual assault isn’t going to change “overnight.”

    “We certainly, if we could flip a switch and make this change instantly, we would,” Foster said. “But we know this is going to take some time.”

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  • Why are so many Americans unhappy with the state of the US today? Here’s what they said in CNN’s latest poll | CNN Politics

    Why are so many Americans unhappy with the state of the US today? Here’s what they said in CNN’s latest poll | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    It’s one of the most commonly asked poll questions: How do Americans feel about the state of the nation? And recently, the answer has usually been a negative one.

    But figuring out why people are unhappy is complicated. CNN’s latest polling asked Americans whether things in the country were going well or badly – and then, to explain in their own words, why they felt that way.

    Among the 69% who said things were going either pretty or very badly, dim views of the nation’s economic conditions were a top driver. The smaller share who were more positive often cited their own, rosier takes on the economy.

    Other factors that influenced Americans’ outlooks, whether positive or negative, included their views of the current occupant of the White House, opinions on social issues, conclusions drawn from their daily lives or a combination of disparate concerns. Their explanations help shed light on what respondents really mean when they answer the broad, state-of-the-nation questions frequently included on surveys.

    Here’s a look at some common themes that emerged in our latest poll, as well as a sampling of responses from people across the country. Some answers have been lightly edited for length, grammar and clarity.

    Views of the nation and the economy often go hand in hand. Asked to explain their view of how things are going in the US today, both 35% of those who said things were going well and 52% who said things were going badly mentioned economic factors.

    Slightly over half of women, men, Whites, people of color, those younger than 45 and those 45 and older who said things were going badly all mentioned the economy when asked to explain why they felt that way.

    But there were differences both along and within partisan lines among this pessimistic group.

    A 58% majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents cited the economy as a reason for their discontent, with a smaller 42% of Democrats and Democratic leaners saying the same.

    Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents younger than 45 were 11 points likelier than their older counterparts to cite an economic reason. Among Republicans, there was no difference by age in the share citing the economy.

    Beyond general concerns about the economy, issues such as inflation and the cost of living hit home for many Americans who said the country was doing badly.

    • “Cost of living is way too high. Just seems like the economy is not doing very well, but it has been like this for years. Housing market is terrible, gas prices are terrible. Student loan debt is astronomical. Even though I agree students should pay their own loan, it shouldn’t be that expensive in the first place.” – Republican man, 29, from Pennsylvania
    • “A single mother cannot effectively support a household on one income. The price of everything is too high. Rent [is] outrageous while people trying to get a loan to buy a home is also unreachable to most.” – Republican woman, 30, from Iowa
    • “The economy is TERRIBLE. My cost of living is MUCH MUCH MUCH higher. Go to the grocery store and you will find out.” – Republican-leaning man, 71, from Illinois

    By contrast, those in the positive camp largely focused on the availability of jobs and a perception that the economy was improving. Among this group, Americans in households making $50,000 or more annually were 19 percentage points more likely than those in lower-earning households to name economic factors as a reason to say things were going well, 44% to 25%.

    • “The economy is doing well. I’m unhappy with women losing bodily autonomy, and the creeping fascism from the right, but I believe Biden is doing an excellent job with the economy, the environment, and international relations.” – Democratic woman, 65, from North Dakota
    • “There are still changes that I hope will be made, but for the most part we’re heading in the right direction. There is food on the shelves at the grocery stores. There are jobs at slightly better pay than before the pandemic.” – Democratic woman, 52, from Michigan
    • “Unemployment is at a historic low, economy isn’t bad. Inflation is a sign that people have more money.” – Democratic-leaning man, 51, from Massachusetts

    The public’s views of the economy are often deeply polarized, with Americans far more likely to rate conditions as good when their party holds the White House – either because their political beliefs drive them to different conclusions or because they treat survey questions as a way to tout their partisan allegiances.

    Views about the broader state of the US were also deeply polarized in CNN’s latest poll, with a near-unanimous 91% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents saying things in the US were going badly, a view shared by 48% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

    Among those who said things were going badly, 11% put the blame primarily on President Joe Biden or the Democrats, with smaller shares pointing to Congress or the government as a whole. Among Republicans and Republican leaners in that camp, the share was 17%

    • “My country is having a real rough time under Biden’s presidency. Things have gone downhill the past few years.” – Republican woman, 80, from Pennsylvania
    • “This country is going down the tubes. He has ruined it with everything he’s done. At least Trump was making America great again.” – Republican woman, who did not give her exact age, from New York
    • “Congress is simply not focused on working together to resolve the problems facing our country.” – Republican man, 65, from Colorado

    Among those who said things were going well, 5% credited Biden or the Democratic Party, and 6% offered comments opposing former President Donald Trump, with others citing improvements in government leadership or a general sense of stability.

    • “We have moved out of the dishonest and corrupt shadows of the Trump and ‘conservative’ fascist dominated term of misgovernance.” – Democratic man, 44, from Nebraska
    • “I think it could be so much worse, and the president is doing the best he can do with all the problems we have.” – Democratic-leaning woman, 67, from New Jersey
    • “Democrats are in office. Republicans will NEVER do anything to help the working class and poor.” – Democratic man, 60, from Indiana

    Others saw polarization itself as the issue. Of those who said things in the US were going badly, 7% said it was because they were concerned about political or societal divisions in the country. Democrats (13%) and those with college degrees (12%) were likelier than others to mention the issue as a main reason for their discontent.

    • “We’re more divided than we’ve ever been. The GOP is trying to destroy diversity, take away women’s and LGBTQ rights. It’s a disaster here.” – Democratic woman, 37, from Connecticut
    • “We have never been so divided as a nation on almost every topic and Biden is making it worse.” – Republican man, 60, from Kansas
    • “The division among the citizens continues to grow. Nobody cares about their neighbors and the community.” – independent man, 38, from Texas

    Among those unhappy with the state of the country, a significant share, 16%, cited crime or gun violence. But their precise focus varied widely, spanning everything from concerns about unrest and lawlessness to dismay about school shootings. Women were slightly more likely than men to express such concerns. A smaller share of Americans also mentioned a related constellation of issues, including policing, the criminal justice system, homelessness and drugs.

    Another 10% of those who said things were going badly mentioned immigration or the situation at the border, with that concern relatively high among Republicans (17% of whom cited the issue), those age 45 and older (15%) and White Americans (12%).

    • “The massive amount of senseless gun violence” – Democratic woman, 30, from California
    • “The biggest thing is the violence in major cities.” – Republican woman, 71, from Ohio
    • “Too many people killing kids and adults. Too much aggression and violence.” – independent woman, 40, from Oregon
    • “I say things are going pretty badly because they are not handling the gun violence and school shootings. Children do not feel safe going to schools because they are afraid of someone in their school or someone coming to their school shooting it up, because it’s so easy to buy a gun now, and because most parents have them and are not watching them or locking them up away from their children. … As an African American, I feel scared for my life every time I step out the house, because I never know when something is going to happen or I get into a situation with a cop and it goes badly.” – independent woman, 18, from Texas
    • “Country is headed for a depression with all these illegal immigrants costing us in money, resources, etc. Getting close to World War III. Lawlessness pervades us.” – Republican-leaning woman, 66, from Kansas

    In stark contrast to the widespread discontent with the state of the nation, most Americans tend to be relatively satisfied with the course of their own lives. That shaped the broader outlooks of some of those surveyed – among those who said that things in the country were going well, 8% pointed at least in part to positive aspects of their own lives.

    • “For me, I have a job, a family and have everything that I need.” – Democratic man, 70, from Texas
    • “I’m not living in a box or a tent.” – Republican man, 63, from Pennsylvania
    • “I’m in the military and my life hasn’t been impacted like others have.” – independent woman, 26, from Oklahoma
    • “I’m looking in the mirror. You listen to the news but also to your own world.” – Democratic man, 60, from Pennsylvania
    • “Everything comes down to our individual personal situation, and mine is better than it has been throughout most of my life. … Our environmental issues for future generations do not apply to me as it is highly unlikely there will be a future generation of my family. … Inflation is of little concern to me as I have always waited to buy everything on sale, and I know how to cook economically. My health is excellent. My finances are sound.” – Republican woman, 78, from Nebraska

    The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS from March 1 through March 31 among a random national sample of 1,595 adults initially reached by mail. Surveys were either conducted online or by telephone with a live interviewer. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points; it is larger for subgroups.

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  • NY judge to hear arguments over DA’s bid to limit Trump’s ability to publicize information in criminal case | CNN Politics

    NY judge to hear arguments over DA’s bid to limit Trump’s ability to publicize information in criminal case | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A New York judge will hear arguments Thursday over a proposed protective order in Donald Trump’s criminal case that would limit the former president’s ability to publicize information about the investigation.

    The Manhattan district attorney’s office is seeking to restrain Trump’s access to the evidence it turns over to his attorneys, in part, it says, because of his social media posts about the District Attorney Alvin Bragg and witnesses in the case.

    Trump will not be in attendance at Thursday’s hearing with Judge Juan Merchan.

    The former president’s attorneys oppose the DA’s proposal, arguing that the state should be just as restrained as Trump from what information it can discuss publicly and says that Trump, as a presidential candidate, should have the ability to defend himself against the charges while campaigning.

    “To state the obvious, there will continue to be significant public commentary about this case and his candidacy, to which he has a right and a need to respond, both for his own sake and for the benefit of the voting public,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.

    The proposed protective order submitted by prosecutors, Trump’s attorneys wrote, “would severely hamper President Trump’s ability to publicly defend himself and prepare for trial.”

    Trump’s attorneys are asking that any limitations to disclosing evidence in the case be placed on both Trump and the district attorney’s office. They criticized a press conference held by Bragg last month as revealing information that they say would be violated by the district attorney’s own proposed order.

    “Surprisingly, the People apparently believe that New York law allows the District Attorney’s Office and its witnesses to freely speak and quote from grand jury evidence, but not President Trump or his counsel,” they wrote.

    Prosecutors have cited Trump’s public attacks on Bragg and prosecution witness Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, as one reason to restrict what he could say. Trump’s attorneys contend that Bragg and former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz made “disparaging and obnoxious” comments about their client.

    Manhattan prosecutors have accused Trump of falsifying business records with the intent to conceal illegal conduct connected to his 2016 presidential campaign. The criminal charges stem from Bragg’s investigation into hush money payments, made during the 2016 campaign, to women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump, which he denies. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.

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  • Chinese police detain man for allegedly using ChatGPT to spread rumors online | CNN Business

    Chinese police detain man for allegedly using ChatGPT to spread rumors online | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Police in China have detained a man they say used ChatGPT to create fake news and spread it online, in what state media has called the country’s first criminal case related to the AI chatbot.

    According to a statement from police in the northwest province of Gansu, the suspect allegedly used ChatGPT to generate a bogus report about a train crash, which he then posted online for profit. The article received about 15,000 views, the police said in Sunday’s statement.

    ChatGPT, developed by Microsoft

    (MSFT)    -backed OpenAI, is banned in China, though internet users can use virtual private networks (VPN) to access it.

    Train crashes have been a sensitive issue in China since 2011, when authorities faced pressure to explain why state media had failed to provide timely updates on a bullet train collision in the city of Wenzhou that resulted in 40 deaths.

    Gansu authorities said the suspect, surnamed Hong, was questioned in the city of Dongguan in southern Guangdong province on May 5.

    “Hong used modern technology to fabricate false information, spreading it on the internet, which was widely disseminated,” the Gansu police said in the statement.

    “His behavior amounted to picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” they added, explaining the offense that Hong was accused of committing.

    Police said the arrest was the first in Gansu since China’s Cyberspace Administration enacted new regulations in January to rein in the use of deep fakes. State broadcaster CGTN says it was the country’s first arrest of a person accused of using ChatGPT to fabricate and spread fake news.

    Formally known as deep synthesis, deep fake refers to highly realistic textual and visual content generated by artificial intelligence.

    The new legislation bars users from generating deep fake content on topics already prohibited by existing laws on China’s heavily censored internet. It also outlines take down procedures for content considered false or harmful.

    The arrest also came amid a 100-day campaign launched by the internet branch of the Ministry of Public Security in March to crack down on the spread of internet rumors.

    Since the beginning of the year, Chinese internet giants such as Baidu

    (BIDU)     and Alibaba

    (BABA)    have sought to catch up with OpenAI, launching their own versions of the ChatGPT service.

    Baidu unveiled “Wenxin Yiyan” or “ERNIE Bot” in March. Two months later, Alibaba launched “Tongyi Qianwen,” which roughly translates as seeking truth by asking a thousand questions.

    In draft guidelines issued last month to solicit public feedback, China’s cyberspace regulator said generative AI services would be required to undergo security reviews before they can operate.

    Service providers will also be required to verify users’ real identities, as well as providing details about the scale and type of data they use, their basic algorithms and other technical information.

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  • Democratic congressman’s staff attacked by man with baseball bat | CNN Politics

    Democratic congressman’s staff attacked by man with baseball bat | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Virginia Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly said two staffers were injured Monday by a man wielding a bat who came into his district office in Fairfax.

    Connolly told CNN that the assailant who entered his office and attacked two of his aides did so with a metal bat. The attacker struck one senior aide in the head with the metal bat, he said. The attacker also hit an intern – on her first day on the job – in the side with the bat.

    In a statement earlier Monday, Connolly said that both aides were taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries, and City of Fairfax Police Department arrested the man.

    Lawmakers on Capitol Hill facing unprecedented number of threats

    The suspect, whom US Capitol Police identified as 49-year-old Xuan Kha Tran Pham of Fairfax is facing charges for one count of aggravated malicious wounding and one count of malicious wounding, USCP stated.

    “At this time, it is not clear what the suspect’s motivation may have been,” USCP said in their statement. “Based on what we know right now, investigators do not have any information that the suspect was known to the USCP.”

    Pham suffers from schizophrenia, his father said in an interview with CNN, and had previously been charged with assaulting a law enforcement officer before the charge was subsequently dropped, records show.

    The attacker, who is a constituent from his district but who Connolly said he doesn’t know, caused wide damage in his office, shattering glass in a conference room and breaking computers along the way. “He was filled with out of control rage,” Connolly told CNN in a phone interview.

    Connolly said later Monday that the man had contacted his office in the past.

    “He had contacted our office, soliciting help on something, and my staff were helping him,” Connolly told CNN. “But there is no indication today that the two were related at all. And my staff did sense in talking to him that he engaged in bizarre statements. Never threatening, however.”

    The Virginia Democrat said he didn’t “think there’s a motivation” for the incident, adding: “I think we are talking about real mental illness.”

    Connolly said he was at a ribbon cutting at the time for a food bank when the assailant drove to his office and entered the building. The congressman estimates it took police about five minutes to respond to the emergency call for help.

    Neighbors identified Pham as a person captured on a home security camera Monday morning wielding a bat and chasing a woman in his neighborhood.

    The security video, provided to CNN by a homeowner who lives near the suspect, shows a woman screaming as she flees from the man with the bat. The recording was timestamped as occurring at 10:34 a.m., before the attack at the congressional office.

    A law enforcement source confirmed that prior to the attack in the congressional office, the suspect confronted a woman in Fairfax County. He damaged her vehicle with a baseball bat, the source said.

    Pham’s father, Hy Xuan Pham, told CNN his son is schizophrenic and hadn’t taken his medication for three months. He said that he last saw him Monday morning, and later heard from police that he had been arrested.

    “He is in a really bad condition,” the father said in an interview. “All day and all night, he mumbles … he talks and looks like he talks with someone in his brain, and suddenly, he is shouting angrily.”

    The suspect’s father said that he had tried to get his son mental health treatment but hadn’t been able to.

    Virginia court records show that Pham was previously charged in January 2022 in Fairfax with felony assault on a law enforcement officer, several charges of attempted disarmament of a law enforcement officer’s stun gun, and obstructing justice or resisting arrest. The case’s disposition was listed as “nolle prosequi,” which generally means that the district attorney declined to prosecute it. No further details about the case were immediately available Monday afternoon.

    Last year, someone with the same name and city of residence as Pham filed a federal lawsuit against the CIA, alleging in a short handwritten complaint that the agency was guilty of “wrongfully imprisoning me in a lower perspective based on physics called the book world since 1975,” and “brutally torturing me with a degenerating disability consistently since 1988 till the present from the fourth dimension.”

    The CIA moved to dismiss the case, which Pham filed without a lawyer, earlier this year, calling his claims “facially implausible.” The motion is pending.

    Monday’s attack comes amid a string of incidents where members of Congress, their staff and their families have been attacked in recent months.

    In March, a staffer for Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was stabbed in Washington, DC. In February, a man assaulted Democratic Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota in the elevator of her apartment building also in Washington. In October, a man attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hospitalizing him after hitting Paul Pelosi with a hammer in the couple’s home in San Francisco.

    Connolly said Monday that there needs to be more security funding for members’ offices in their districts.

    “I think we’re gonna have to reassess the security we provide or don’t provide district offices,” Connolly said. “So if you’re a member of Congress and your office happens to be in a federal building, in the courthouse, you’re gonna have security. But if you’re in a commercial office space like me, you have no security. None. And what could go wrong with that? Well, we learned the answer to that this morning.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • How the technology behind ChatGPT could make mind-reading a reality | CNN Business

    How the technology behind ChatGPT could make mind-reading a reality | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    On a recent Sunday morning, I found myself in a pair of ill-fitting scrubs, lying flat on my back in the claustrophobic confines of an fMRI machine at a research facility in Austin, Texas. “The things I do for television,” I thought.

    Anyone who has had an MRI or fMRI scan will tell you how noisy it is — electric currents swirl creating a powerful magnetic field that produces detailed scans of your brain. On this occasion, however, I could barely hear the loud cranking of the mechanical magnets, I was given a pair of specialized earphones that began playing segments from The Wizard of Oz audiobook.

    Why?

    Neuroscientists at the University of Texas in Austin have figured out a way to translate scans of brain activity into words using the very same artificial intelligence technology that powers the groundbreaking chatbot ChatGPT.

    The breakthrough could revolutionize how people who have lost the ability to speak can communicate. It’s just one pioneering application of AI developed in recent months as the technology continues to advance and looks set to touch every part of our lives and our society.

    “So, we don’t like to use the term mind reading,” Alexander Huth, assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “We think it conjures up things that we’re actually not capable of.”

    Huth volunteered to be a research subject for this study, spending upward of 20 hours in the confines of an fMRI machine listening to audio clips while the machine snapped detailed pictures of his brain.

    An artificial intelligence model analyzed his brain and the audio he was listening to and, over time, was eventually able to predict the words he was hearing just by watching his brain.

    The researchers used the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI’s first language model, GPT-1, that was developed with a massive database of books and websites. By analyzing all this data, the model learned how sentences are constructed — essentially how humans talk and think.

    The researchers trained the AI to analyze the activity of Huth and other volunteers’ brains while they listened to specific words. Eventually the AI learned enough that it could predict what Huth and others were listening to or watching just by monitoring their brain activity.

    I spent less than a half-hour in the machine and, as expected, the AI wasn’t able to decode that I had been listening to a portion of The Wizard of Oz audiobook that described Dorothy making her way along the yellow brick road.

    Huth listened to the same audio but because the AI model had been trained on his brain it was accurately able to predict parts of the audio he was listening to.

    While the technology is still in its infancy and shows great promise, the limitations might be a source of relief to some. AI can’t easily read our minds, yet.

    “The real potential application of this is in helping people who are unable to communicate,” Huth explained.

    He and other researchers at UT Austin believe the innovative technology could be used in the future by people with “locked-in” syndrome, stroke victims and others whose brains are functioning but are unable to speak.

    “Ours is the first demonstration that we can get this level of accuracy without brain surgery. So we think that this is kind of step one along this road to actually helping people who are unable to speak without them needing to get neurosurgery,” he said.

    While breakthrough medical advances are no doubt good news and potentially life-changing for patients struggling with debilitating ailments, it also raises questions about how the technology could be applied in controversial settings.

    Could it be used to extract a confession from a prisoner? Or to expose our deepest, darkest secrets?

    The short answer, Huth and his colleagues say, is no — not at the moment.

    For starters, brain scans need to occur in an fMRI machine, the AI technology needs to be trained on an individual’s brain for many hours, and, according to the Texas researchers, subjects need to give their consent. If a person actively resists listening to audio or thinks about something else the brain scans will not be a success.

    “We think that everyone’s brain data should be kept private,” said Jerry Tang, the lead author on a paper published earlier this month detailing his team’s findings. “Our brains are kind of one of the final frontiers of our privacy.”

    Tang explained, “obviously there are concerns that brain decoding technology could be used in dangerous ways.” Brain decoding is the term the researchers prefer to use instead of mind reading.

    “I feel like mind reading conjures up this idea of getting at the little thoughts that you don’t want to let slip, little like reactions to things. And I don’t think there’s any suggestion that we can really do that with this kind of approach,” Huth explained. “What we can get is the big ideas that you’re thinking about. The story that somebody is telling you, if you’re trying to tell a story inside your head, we can kind of get at that as well.”

    Last week, the makers of generative AI systems, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, descended on Capitol Hill to testify before a Senate committee over lawmakers’ concerns of the risks posed by the powerful technology. Altman warned that the development of AI without guardrails could “cause significant harm to the world” and urged lawmakers to implement regulations to address concerns.

    Echoing the AI warning, Tang told CNN that lawmakers need to take “mental privacy” seriously to protect “brain data” — our thoughts — two of the more dystopian terms I’ve heard in the era of AI.

    While the technology at the moment only works in very limited cases, that might not always be the case.

    “It’s important not to get a false sense of security and think that things will be this way forever,” Tang warned. “Technology can improve and that could change how well we can decode and change whether decoders require a person’s cooperation.”

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  • Charged rhetoric swirls online and off as Trump’s Miami court date looms | CNN Politics

    Charged rhetoric swirls online and off as Trump’s Miami court date looms | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    From the halls of Congress to the dark corners of the internet, charged and violent rhetoric is echoing among some Donald Trump sympathizers ahead of the former president’s appearance in a Miami court on Tuesday

    FBI special agents across the country assigned to domestic terrorism squads are actively working to identify any possible threats, four law enforcement sources told CNN, following Trump’s second indictment.

    So far, the FBI is aware of various groups like the Proud Boys discussing traveling to south Florida to publicly show support for Trump, sources said, but there is currently no indication of any specific and credible threat.

    “We have now reached a war phase,” Rep. Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican and prominent supporter of Trump’s election denialism, tweeted Friday. “Eye for an eye.” Biggs’ office later said his comment was a call for the GOP to “step up and use their procedural tools” to counter “the Left’s weaponization of our federal law enforcement apparatus.”

    Speaking at a Republican event in Georgia on Friday night, Kari Lake, who unsuccessfully ran for governor of Arizona last year and is still spreading falsehoods about that election, said: “If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me and 75 million Americans just like me.”

    “And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA,” she said to applause, adding, “That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”

    On some pro-Trump forums, anonymous users were less circumspect. “MAGA will make Waco look like a tea party!” one user posted Friday in an apparent reference to the April 1993 Waco, Texas siege that left 76 people dead.

    On Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, one anonymous user posted Thursday, “This is a Declaration of War against the American People. It is time We The People exercise our 2nd Amendment rights and burn the corruption out of DC.”

    The former president himself has been posting frequently on Truth Social throughout the weekend. “SEE YOU IN MIAMI ON TUESDAY!!!” he posted Friday.

    Still, at least on public social media forums, there doesn’t appear to be a mass online mobilization effort for people to gather people in Miami this week like there was in the lead-up to the events in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021.

    However some prominent right-wing figures are calling for Trump supporters to protest in Miami on Tuesday.

    One influential right-wing activist in Florida who has almost half a million followers on Twitter is promoting a flag-waving event outside Trump’s golf course in Doral on Monday and a protest the following day against the “weaponization of government” outside the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. Courthouse, where the former president is set to appear.

    Some Trump supporters online have stressed the need for protests to remain peaceful and some have said they will not demonstrate in Miami on Tuesday, fearing it could be a trap. This is an extension of the false belief held by some that the January 6 attack on the US Capitol was a set-up designed to incriminate supporters of the former president.

    But at least one person who has served prison time for his role in the January 6 riot said he will be in Miami to protest on Tuesday.

    Anthime Gionet, a prominent online streamer better known by his moniker “Baked Alaska,” plead guilty to unlawfully protesting after he livestreamed himself breaching the Capitol in a nearly 30-minute video that showed him encouraging others in the mob to enter the building.

    Gionet served a two month sentence and was released at the end of March, according to federal records.

    On Friday, he lamented Trump’s latest indictment in a livestream outside Mar-a-Lago. During the livestream, Gionet said he and another person who was with him outside Mar-a-Lago would both be in Miami on Tuesday. The other person is heard on the stream responding, “we weren’t supposed to talk about that.” Gionet replied, “I know but it leaked so f*** it.”

    The exchange may be illustrative of the shifting ways people use the internet to organize – something that has proven to be a challenge for law enforcement.

    While much of the planning for January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol was done on public forums that could be read by anyone, a lot of that communication has since shifted to private channels, experts say.

    The secretive nature of many private forums has caused federal agents working domestic terrorism matters to place greater emphasis on recruiting informants who can report on potential threats discussed online among extremists, law enforcement sources told CNN.

    But even messages posted publicly cannot be accessed by investigators without lawful investigative purposes. The FBI’s own investigative guidelines limit what material can be accessed by agents and analysts, even when it is in the public domain. These policies prevent FBI employees from trawling the internet looking for concerning material, unless a formal assessment or investigation has been authorized and opened.

    The FBI’s investigative efforts to identify possible threats include querying existing confidential human informants reporting on domestic terrorism issues for any indication of potential threats, sources said.

    In addition to working their informant networks, FBI agents and analysts are reviewing publicly available online platforms frequented by domestic extremists for any indication of plans for violence.

    Ben Decker, CEO of Memetica, a threat intelligence company, told CNN on Sunday, “Given the robust and successful grassroots architecture of right-wing culture war campaigns and anti-Pride protests this month, there are concerns that many of these in-person rally groups could pivot directly into more Trump-themed protests around the country over the coming days.”

    But, at this point, Daniel J. Jones, the president of Advance Democracy, a non-profit that conducts public interest research, told CNN that his group had not identified “what we would assess to be specific and credible plans for violence yet.”

    “However,” he added ,”as we saw during the events of January 6, it’s Trump’s statements that drive the online rhetoric and real-world violence. As such, much depends on what Trump says of his perceived opponents, as well as what he asks of his supporters, in the days ahead.”

    Juliette Kayyem, a CNN national security analyst and a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, echoed this concern. “We know how incitement to violence works. It is nurtured from the top and given license to spread by leaders. They don’t have to direct it to one place or time. They can simply unleash it, knowing full well that someone may become emboldened to act,” she said.

    Last month, the Department of Homeland Security issued a nationwide bulletin indicating the country “remains in a heightened threat environment,” warning that individuals “motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and personal grievances continue to pose a persistent and lethal threat to the homeland.”

    DHS analysts indicated the motivating factors that could incite extremists to violence include perception about the integrity of the 2024 election cycle, and, while not specifically citing Trump’s legal woes, also pointed to “judicial decisions” in their list of grievances among extremist groups.

    Ahead of Trump’s Tuesday court appearance, law enforcement will continue to remain on alert.

    “We do not want a repeat of [the January 6] violence,” one senior FBI source said.

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  • ‘Maybe they don’t exist’: Republicans question legitimacy of alleged audio recordings of Biden bribery scheme | CNN Politics

    ‘Maybe they don’t exist’: Republicans question legitimacy of alleged audio recordings of Biden bribery scheme | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa claimed on the Senate floor earlier this week that the foreign national who allegedly bribed then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter has 17 audio recordings of their conversations but questioned whether those tapes even existed in an interview with CNN days later.

    “I don’t even know where they are. I just know they exist, because of what the report says. Now, maybe they don’t exist. But how will I know until the FBI tells us, are they showing us their work?” Grassley said Thursday.

    And Grassley is not the only Republican questioning the validity of the supposed tapes.

    House Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky, who is overseeing the GOP investigation into the Biden family business dealings and has been quick to make the alleged bribery scheme a focus of his work, admitted to not knowing whether the tapes were legitimate.

    “We don’t know if they’re legit or not, but we know that the foreign national claims he has them,” Comer said of the alleged recordings during a Tuesday interview on Newsmax.

    House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, who also serves on the Oversight panel and has made the Department of Justice and FBI a target of his investigative efforts, told CNN of the tapes, “I have no reason to doubt anything Senator Grassley says, but I don’t know if they exist or not.”

    And Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who led his own investigation into the Biden family in 2020 and has long peddled the notion of wrongdoing, said in a separate Newsmax interview, “I’m not even aware that we verified those recordings exist.”

    The tapes are the latest unverified allegations Republicans have raised as they’ve launched investigations into the Biden family’s business dealings as well as the work of the FBI. While Republicans have used their subpoena power to go after the Biden family’s foreign business dealings, they have still not established a direct link to President Biden.

    Grassley first raised the existence of audio recordings after the FBI document that memorializes these allegations redacted them in the version shown to House Oversight Committee members.

    Prior to the full committee viewing the redacted document, Comer and the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, had viewed a version of the document that included mention of the recordings, according to two sources familiar with their briefing.

    In a statement to CNN the chairman said, “The FBI’s Biden bribery record contains several investigative leads, but it is unclear what, if anything, the FBI has done to verify these allegations.”

    The FBI document at the heart of this debate, known as an FD-1023, summarizes multiple conversations a trusted FBI informant had with a foreign national alleging that an executive with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma offered both Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden bribes of $5 million.

    Former Attorney General Bill Barr, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump to serve during his administration, said when these bribery allegations came to light he tapped Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady to look into the 1023 form and other claims. Barr has described this effort as a “screening, clearing house function” and said once the information was checked out the allegations were passed on to Delaware US Attorney David Weiss, who is overseeing an ongoing criminal investigation into Hunter Biden. Investigators were unable to corroborate the claims in the 1023.

    “That information was checked out, and it was determined that it was not likely to have been disinformation. It doesn’t say whether it’s true or not, but there was no sign there was disinformation. And so it was provided to the ongoing investigation in Delaware to follow up on and check out,” Barr said on Fox last week.

    Acting assistant director for the FBI’s office of congressional affairs Christopher Dunham has explained in previous correspondence with Congress that an FD-1023 form is “used by FBI agents to record unverified reporting from a confidential human source,” and noted that there are strict Justice Department guidelines about when that information can be provided outside of the FBI.

    Comer subpoenaed the document last month, and House Republicans have railed against the FBI for continuing to keep an unclassified document under close hold.

    “Congress still lacks a full and complete picture with respect to what that document really says. That’s why it’s important that the document be made public without unnecessary redactions for the American people to see,” Grassley said on the floor earlier this week.

    House Republicans were poised to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress earlier this month for his refusal to turn over the document, but a last-minute deal between Comer and Wray that included allowing the full committee to view the form halted the contempt proceedings. They are still publicly clamoring for the FBI to provide more detail about what steps were taken to investigate the claims in the document.

    Democrats meanwhile continue to dismiss the allegations. The White House continues to frame Republicans’ investigative efforts as politically motivated. White House spokesman Ian Sams said in a statement to CNN, “Everything in their so-called investigation seems to be mysteriously missing: informants, audio tapes, and most importantly of all – any credible evidence.”

    Raskin, who has painted the allegations as secondhand, told CNN, “It was thoroughly checked out by the Trump Justice Department, and they couldn’t find anything there. And if anybody would have an incentive to find something there it would have been the Trump Justice Department.”

    Another Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida, accused Republicans of having alternative motives for surfacing the allegations in the first place.

    “What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to muddy the water because Trump is in so much trouble. They got to distract from that and pretend like, you know Joe Biden, which they say he’s sleepy and boring, is now somehow Tony Soprano,” he said.

    But Republicans who viewed the version of the FD-1023 form that redacted mention of the audio recordings are continuing to raise questions.

    One of those members, GOP Rep. Russell Fry of South Carolina, told CNN, “My assumption was that if they were going to redact things in that document that it would have been names and places and not actual corroborating evidence. So I think it’s unfortunate that the FBI decided to do that. And I look forward to seeing hopefully an unredacted copy of that 1023.”

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  • Trump should not be trusted with national secrets if charges prove true, his ex-Defense secretary says | CNN Politics

    Trump should not be trusted with national secrets if charges prove true, his ex-Defense secretary says | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump’s onetime Defense secretary said Sunday that the former president should not be trusted with the nation’s secrets again should the allegations made in his federal indictment over his handling of classified documents prove true.

    “Based on his actions – again, if proven true – under the indictment by the special counsel, no,” Mark Esper told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

    “It’s just irresponsible action that places our service members at risk, places our nation security risk. You cannot have these documents floating around. They need to be secured,” he said.

    Trump has pleaded not guilty to 37 federal charges, including 31 counts of “willful retention of national defense information.” The former president denies any wrongdoing.

    Esper’s critical remarks about his onetime boss follow damning language by another high-profile Trump administration official – former Attorney General Bill Barr – who said last week that Trump was “toast” if even half of the details in his indictment were true.

    “The revelations are very troubling, disturbing,” Esper said Sunday when asked by Tapper if Trump’s actions put America’s national security at risk. “Yes, I do. If the allegations are true that it contained information about our nation’s security, about our vulnerabilities, about other items, it could be quite harmful to the nation. And, look, no one is above the law. And so I think this process needs to play out and people held to account, the president held to account.”

    Trump fired Esper as his Defense secretary in November 2020, shortly after Joe Biden was projected as the winner of the presidential election.

    Meanwhile, in a separate interview on “State of the Union,” House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner said he was “not going to defend the behavior” listed in the indictment against Trump but the government would need to prove its case as the legal process moves forward.

    The Ohio Republican also said he had “grave concern” about the way documents were stored not just as it pertained to Trump but to Biden as well. A separate special counsel is leading an investigation into Obama-era classified documents found at Biden’s home and former private office.

    ‘Grave concern’: GOP House Intel Chair on classified Trump docs – full interview

    “The chair and ranking (member) of both the House Intel and Senate Intel (committees) have seen some of the documents, both from the Biden cache and the Trump documents itself. And I can tell you that, from having looked at both of those documents, I have grave concern about both of those type of documents being out in an unsecured place,” Turner said. “Both of them included details of national security issues that should not have been outside of a controlled environment.”

    Turner also previewed a closed-door meeting Tuesday his committee will be holding with John Durham, the special counsel who concluded in a report released last month that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.

    “We’re pulling him in to our committee to say, ‘OK, now that we have seen that there were abuses, that this was wrong, and that there are problems with (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) itself, what are the recommendations that you think we should pursue?’” Turner said.

    Durham is expected to testify publicly before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

    His 300-plus page report states that the FBI used “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence” to launch its Trump-Russia investigation but used a different standard when weighing concerns about alleged election interference regarding Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

    Durham, however, did not recommend any new charges against individuals or “wholesale changes” about how the FBI handles politically charged investigations, despite strongly criticizing the agency’s behavior.

    This report has been updated with additional details.

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  • Who is David Weiss, the US attorney overseeing Hunter Biden criminal probe? | CNN Politics

    Who is David Weiss, the US attorney overseeing Hunter Biden criminal probe? | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Donald Trump-appointed US attorney leading the investigation into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter has decades of experience as a federal prosecutor.

    David Weiss, the Delaware US attorney, met in April with Hunter Biden’s attorneys, who had requested a routine status update on the investigation. The long-running probe, which began as early as 2018, at one time concerned multiple financial and business activities in foreign countries dating to when Joe Biden was vice president.

    On Tuesday, the Justice Department said in court filings that Biden will plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and struck a deal with federal prosecutors regarding a felony gun charge.

    In 2018, the Senate confirmed Weiss to serve as US attorney for the District of Delaware. At the time of his nomination, he was serving as the acting US attorney for the district and was one of nine candidates whom Trump said shared his “vision for ‘Making America Safe Again.’”

    The Philadelphia native is a member of the Delaware and Pennsylvania bars.

    A Washington University in St. Louis and Widener University School of Law graduate, Weiss began his career in law in 1984 as a clerk to Justice Andrew D. Christie of the Delaware Supreme Court, according to his Justice Department biography.

    Following his clerkship, Weiss prosecuted violent crimes and white-collar offenses as an assistant US attorney before joining firm Duane Morris, where he was a commercial litigation associate and eventually became a partner. He later served as chief operating officer and senior vice president at The Siegfried Group, a financial services firm, according to his biography.

    He served as the first assistant US attorney starting in 2007.

    Weiss’ investigation into Hunter Biden continued into the Biden administration, prompting Attorney General Merrick Garland to stress during a March Senate committee hearing that he would not interfere with the investigation. Weiss, he reiterated at the time, had “full authority” to carry out the investigation and to bring in another jurisdiction if necessary.

    Garland said Weiss was “not to be denied anything that he needs.”

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  • Hurd says he won’t sign GOP presidential debate pledge | CNN Politics

    Hurd says he won’t sign GOP presidential debate pledge | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, who announced his 2024 Republican presidential campaign earlier Thursday with an anti-Donald Trump message, said he won’t sign the Republican National Committee’s pledge to back the party’s ultimate nominee in order to participate in primary debates.

    “I won’t be signing any kind of pledges, and I don’t think parties should be trying to rig who should be on a debate stage,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Thursday evening.

    “I am not in the business of lying to the American people in order to get a microphone, and I’m not going to support Donald Trump. And so I can’t honestly say I’m going to sign something even if he may or may not be the nominee,” he added.

    Hurd joins a crowded field looking to challenge Trump, the front-runner for the nomination, and he admitted it’ll be “difficult for a dark-horse candidate like me.”

    An undercover CIA officer before entering politics, Hurd has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump following his indictment on federal charges over alleged mishandling of classified documents. Asked if the former president, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, betrayed the country, Hurd said, “100% he did.”

    Hurd told Collins that if the allegations are true, “It’s slapping the men and women who put themselves in harm’s way every single night in order to keep us safe.”

    Hurd launched his campaign earlier in the day calling for “common sense.”

    “This is a decision that my wife and I decided to do because we live in complicated times and we need common sense,” he said on CBS earlier Thursday morning.

    “There are a number of generational defining challenges that we’re faced with in the United States of America – everything from the Chinese government trying to surpass us as the global superpower, the fact that inflation is persistent at a time when technologies like artificial intelligence is going to upend every single industry, and our kids, their scores in math, science and reading are the lowest they’ve ever been in this century,” the former congressman said.

    “These are the issues we should be talking about. And to be frank, I’m pissed that we’re not talking about these things,” Hurd added in the CBS interview.

    Besides Trump, Republican presidential contenders also include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez and conservative talk radio host Larry Elder.

    “Too many of these candidates in this race are afraid of Donald Trump,” Hurd said on CBS of the GOP primary field.

    Hurd added that, if elected to the White House, he would not pardon Trump should the former president be convicted, adding that he thought it was “insane” that other candidates were open to the idea.

    Ramaswamy has committed to pardoning Trump if he’s elected president. Haley, Suarez and Elder have also suggested they would be inclined to do so.

    Hurd was a rare Republican critic of Trump during his time in Congress from 2015 to 2021. Representing a swing district in Texas that covered the largest stretch of the US-Mexico border of any congressional seat, he opposed Trump’s border wall and argued it was less effective than other forms of border security.

    Hurd was one of four House Republicans in 2019 to vote in support of a resolution condemning Trump’s racist tweets targeting four Democratic congresswomen of color. He also authored a New York Times op-ed in 2018 arguing that Trump was being manipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Despite his outspoken criticism, Hurd said in 2019 that he would vote for Trump the following year were he to be the GOP nominee.

    Hurd had been fueling speculation about a potential presidential run with trips to early-voting primary states in recent months. Hurd was in New Hampshire last week and told local station WMUR 9 he was evaluating whether his candidacy would have a path to the GOP nomination. In January, he spoke at the annual meeting of the New Hampshire Republican Party – the same event where Trump kicked off his 2024 campaigning. Hurd also visited Iowa for the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring event that included several other 2024 GOP hopefuls.

    Hurd was the only Black Republican in the House when he announced in 2019 that he would not seek reelection and instead pursue opportunities outside government to “solve problems at the nexus between technology and national security.” Hurd served in the CIA for almost a decade before coming to Congress. As a congressman, he served on the House Intelligence Committee, which is charged with oversight of the US intelligence community.

    Hurd first ran for Congress in 2010, losing to Quico Canseco in a runoff for the GOP nomination. Four years later, Hurd defeated Canseco, by then a former congressman, in another primary runoff before narrowly unseating Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego in the general election. He was narrowly reelected in 2016 and 2018, defeating Gallego and Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones, respectively.

    This story has been updated with Hurd’s interview on CNN.

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  • China-based hackers breached US government email accounts, Microsoft and White House say | CNN Politics

    China-based hackers breached US government email accounts, Microsoft and White House say | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    China-based hackers have breached email accounts at two-dozen organizations, including some United States government agencies, in an apparent spying campaign aimed at acquiring sensitive information, according to statements from Microsoft and the White House late Tuesday.

    The full scope of the hack is being investigated, but US officials and Microsoft have been quietly scrambling in recent weeks to assess the impact of the hack, which targeted unclassified email systems, and contain the fallout.

    The federal agency where the Chinese hackers were first detected was the State Department, a person familiar with the matter told CNN. The State Department then reported the suspicious activity to Microsoft, the person said.

    The Department of Commerce, which has sanctioned Chinese telecom firms, was also breached. The hackers accessed Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s email account, one source familiar with the investigation told CNN. The Washington Post first reported on the access of the secretary’s account.

    The Chinese hackers were detected targeting a small number of federal agencies and just a handful of officials’ email accounts at each agency in a hack aimed at specific officials, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.

    “Microsoft notified the (Commerce) Department of a compromise to Microsoft’s Office 365 system, and the Department took immediate action to respond,” a department spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday.

    The spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the targeting of Raimondo’s email account.

    The hackers targeted email accounts at the House of Representatives, but it was unclear who was targeted and if the breach attempts were successful, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The breaches add to what is already one of the steepest cybersecurity challenges facing the Biden administration: limiting the ability of Beijing’s formidable hacking teams to access US government and corporate secrets.

    “Last month, US government safeguards identified an intrusion in Microsoft’s cloud security, which affected unclassified systems,” National Security Council spokesperson Adam Hodge said in a statement to CNN.

    “Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service,” Hodge said. “We continue to hold the procurement providers of the US Government to a high security threshold.”

    The State Department “detected anomalous activity, took immediate steps to secure our systems, and will continue to closely monitor and quickly respond to any further activity,” a department spokesperson said on Wednesday.

    US Capitol Police declined to comment, referring CNN to the FBI.

    Hodge did not identify who was behind the hack, but Microsoft executives said in a blog post that the hackers were based in China and focused on espionage.

    In response to the Microsoft and White House statements, the Chinese foreign ministry on Wednesday accused Washington of conducting its own hacking operations.

    US officials have consistently labeled China as the most advanced of US adversaries in cyberspace, a domain that has repeatedly been a source of bilateral tension in recent years. The FBI has said Beijing has a larger hacking program than all other governments combined.

    China has routinely denied the allegations.

    The hacking began in mid-May, when the China-based hackers used a stolen sign-in key to burrow their way into email accounts, according to Microsoft. The tech giant has since blocked the hackers from accessing customer emails using that technique, Microsoft said late Tuesday.

    Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China in mid-June, but it was not immediately clear if the cyber-espionage campaign was connected to that high-stakes visit.

    Some US officials credited the State Department with investing in more cyber-defense capabilities, allowing the agency to detect the suspicious activity earlier than in past advanced hacks.

    The number of US organizations, public or private, impacted by the hacking campaign is in the “single digits,” a senior US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official told reporters on Wednesday.

    “This appears to have been a very targeted, surgical campaign,” the official said.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Appeals court can rule at any time in dispute over suspending FDA approval of medication abortion drug | CNN Politics

    Appeals court can rule at any time in dispute over suspending FDA approval of medication abortion drug | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department and a manufacturer of abortion pills have submitted the final round of court briefs in the emergency dispute over whether an appeals court should freeze a judge’s ruling that would suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of medication abortion drugs.

    Now that the filings have been submitted, the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Court could rule at any time on whether to put a hold on the order from US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.

    Kacsmaryk on Friday night said he was halting the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone but that he was delaying the order by seven days to give the pill’s defenders time to appeal the case. The Justice Department has asked the appeals court to act by 12 p.m. CT Thursday on its request that Kacsmaryk’s ruling be paused, to give the government time to seek a Supreme Court intervention if need be. The 5th Circuit is not obligated to meet that deadline.

    The Justice Department wrote in its new filing that Kacsmaryk purported “to be acting in a restrained manner … but there is nothing modest about upending the decades-long status quo by blocking access nationwide to a safe and effective drug.”

    “Effectively requiring Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro to cease distribution of mifepristone after more than two decades would upend the status quo, severely harming women, healthcare systems, and the public,” the Justice Department said, referring to the two US manufacturers of mifepristone.

    The Justice Department filing pushed back on the assertions by the challengers, made in their filing overnight in the emergency dispute, that the 5th Circuit did not have the authority to hear the appeal of Kacsmaryk’s ruling. The Justice Department also called out Kacsmaryk and the challengers for relying on anonymous blog posts to claim mifepristone is unsafe.

    Danco Labroratories, which intervened in the case to defend mifepristone’s approval, wrote in its new filing with the appeals court that if the ruling is not frozen, “women across the nation will face serious, unnecessary health risks from the elimination of access to a drug FDA has repeatedly deemed safe and effective and that is the standard of care.”

    In an overnight filing, the anti-abortion doctors who sued to ban medication abortion drugs told a federal appeals court that it should leave in place the ruling that will halt the drug’s FDA approval.

    The anti-abortion doctors defended Kacsmaryk’s ruling called it a “meticulously considered” ruling that “paints an alarming picture of decades-long agency lawlessness – all to the detriment of the women and girls FDA is charged to protect.”

    Mifepristone has been approved by the FDA for terminating pregnancies for nearly 23 years. Leading medical associations have rebuked the claims by the approval’s legal challengers and by the judge that the drug is unsafe.

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  • Seagate to pay $300 million penalty for shipping Huawei hard drives in violation of US export control laws | CNN Business

    Seagate to pay $300 million penalty for shipping Huawei hard drives in violation of US export control laws | CNN Business

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    Reuters
     — 

    Seagate Technology has agreed to pay a $300 million penalty in a settlement with US authorities for shipping over $1.1 billion worth of hard disk drives to China’s Huawei in violation of US export control laws, the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday.

    Seagate

    (STX)     sold the drives to Huawei between August 2020 and September 2021 despite an August 2020 rule that restricted sales of certain foreign items made with US technology to the company. Huawei was placed on the Entity List, a US trade blacklist, in 2019 to reduce the sale of US goods to the company amid national security and foreign policy concerns.

    The penalty represents the latest in a string of actions by Washington to keep sophisticated technology from China that may support its military, enable human rights abuses or otherwise threaten US security.

    Seagate shipped 7.4 million drives to Huawei for about a year after the 2020 rule took effect and became Huawei’s sole supplier of hard drives, the Commerce Department said.

    The other two primary suppliers of hard drives ceased shipments to Huawei after the new rule took effect in 2020, the department said. Though they were not identified, Western Digital

    (WDC)     and Toshiba

    (TOSBF)     were the other two, the US Senate Commerce Committee said in a 2021 report on Seagate.

    The companies did not respond to requests for comment.

    Even after “its competitors had stopped selling to them … Seagate continued sending hard disk drives to Huawei,” Matthew Axelrod, assistant secretary for export enforcement at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement. “Today’s action is the consequence.”

    Axelrod said the administrative penalty was the largest in the history of the agency not tied to a criminal case.

    Seagate’s position was that its foreign-made drives were not subject to US export control regulations, essentially because they were not the direct product of US equipment.

    “While we believed we complied with all relevant export control laws at the time we made the hard disk drive sales at issue, we determined that … settling this matter was the best course of action,” Seagate CEO Dave Mosley said in a statement.

    In an order issued on Wednesday, the government said Seagate wrongly interpreted the foreign product rule to require evaluation of only the last stage of its manufacturing process rather than the entire process.

    Seagate made drives in China, Northern Ireland, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the United States, the order said, and used equipment, including testing equipment, subject to the rule.

    In August, the US Department of Commerce sent the company a “proposed charging letter,” warning the company that it may have violated export control laws. The letter kicked off some eight months of negotiations.

    Seagate’s $300 million penalty is due in installments of $15 million per quarter over five years, with the first payment due in October. It also agreed to three audits of its compliance program, and is subject to a five-year suspended order denying its export privileges.

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  • House Republicans grapple with cutting DOJ and FBI funding amid growing internal divisions and outside pressure | CNN Politics

    House Republicans grapple with cutting DOJ and FBI funding amid growing internal divisions and outside pressure | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House Republican leadership came into power on a pro-police, tough-on-crime message. Four months later, that position is in limbo.

    The internal differences emerged soon after Republicans took control of the House. In January, an effort to pass a resolution expressing support for law enforcement agencies, which was meant to serve as a messaging tool, fell apart. The House GOP’s behind-the-scenes disagreements reflect growing divisions inside the conference over whether to defund or restrict the Department of Justice and FBI. The contentious political issue is returning to center stage as CNN has learned that some House Republicans are actively sketching out ways to limit certain federal law enforcement programs through the appropriations process.

    The sponsor of the January resolution, GOP Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, a former federal prosecutor, wanted to offer broad support for all levels of law enforcement. But a faction of hard-line members, led by House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio, wanted to restrict it only to state and local authorities, multiple sources told CNN.

    “The language that they wanted to incorporate was not something that I could agree to,” said Buck.

    Describing the diverging viewpoints over the issue within the House GOP conference, a separate source familiar with the negotiations in January told CNN, “We were starting a big oversight of the FBI, we didn’t want to lock ourselves in here,” referring to the Judiciary committee’s effort to investigate the FBI.

    Conversations with more than a dozen lawmakers since the January dust up reveal that a growing number of House Republicans are proposing ways to act on calls made by former President Donald Trump to crack down on federal law enforcement. Support started building after Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was searched by the FBI in August 2022, as part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents. And that support to act on the calls was super-charged by Trump’s indictment by the Manhattan District Attorney at the end of March.

    This comes as Jordan and the “weaponization” subcommittee he leads have waged a protracted campaign against the DOJ and FBI, and as House Judiciary Republicans are considering recommending various budget cuts to DOJ through the Appropriations process, a source familiar with the plans tells CNN.

    One of the cuts House Judiciary Republicans are exploring, which could be proposed as its own legislation or part of a broader House spending package, includes restricting funding to specific DOJ departments that refuse to respond to oversight requests, a source familiar with the discussions tells CNN.

    Other proposals include reigning in the ability for DOJ to give out grants, and clawing back civil asset forfeiture funds obtained through a program that allows the federal government to coordinate with state and local officials to seize cash, drugs, guns and other assets from suspects before they have been convicted of a crime, the source added.

    CNN has also obtained multiple letters sent by House Republicans to the House Committee on Appropriations that outline specific cuts that could be made to DOJ.

    DOJ declined to comment. CNN has reached out to the FBI.

    Democrats, meanwhile, are painting any Republicans who voice support for defunding federal law enforcement as hypocritical, just as Republicans were once framing Democrats as the party that wanted to defund the police. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, has said he will introduce a measure condemning Trump’s calls to defund the DOJ, seeking to create a political liability for Republicans.

    Calls to defund, restructure or decentralize federal law enforcement vary across the House Republican conference, both in degree and specificity. With many moderate Republicans still balking at the idea, and since the conference has yet to reveal its budget, it is unclear if any of these proposals have broad support.

    Some lawmakers on the far right such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Matt Gaetz of Florida and Paul Gosar of Arizona, have carried Trump’s mantel in calling for a full defund of the FBI.

    GOP Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, who floated the idea of defunding the FBI and DOJ at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year, told CNN, “I would suggest that we look internally at a line item by line-item basis in those two areas, DOJ and FBI, and make them justify everything. Start it out at a 0 basis.”

    Buck, meanwhile told CNN, “I will not support any drastic cut in appropriations.”

    While Jordan said he wanted to support rank-and-file agents at the FBI, he said vaguely “everything should be on the table” when asked what parts of federal law enforcement need to be cut and referenced a since withdrawn memo from an FBI field office focusing on extremism in the Catholic Church as an example of the kind of actions he believes need to change. Jordan has often argued, without much specificity, the best way to hold DOJ and FBI accountable is through “the power of the purse.”

    Some House Republicans, however, are more specific about how to restrict certain activities or restructure certain components.

    Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio, who acknowledged the role Trump has had in swaying members on this issue, told CNN he believes the problem “has less to do with funding and more to do with structure,” and floated an idea of using US Marshals to take over a lot of FBI’s current responsibilities, with “an entirely different law enforcement entity” taking over the bureau’s international aspects.

    Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, who serves on the Judiciary Committee, told CNN he does not believe the FBI needs a new headquarters and said he would like federal law enforcement to focus less on domestic terrorism.

    “I would like to take it back at a minimum to pre-9/11 to focus on crime and working with local and state jurisdictions to combat crime and not be so much dwelling on the domestic terrorism bit, which they exploited in ways that I don’t think is particularly beneficial,” he said.

    Roy was also one of 12 Republicans to send a letter, obtained by CNN, to the Committee on Appropriations in March requesting Congress “prohibit funding” for DOJ to enforce the FACE Act, which protects individuals obtaining an abortion as well as religious freedom.

    Twenty-eight House Republicans sent a separate March letter to the Appropriations subpanel that oversees DOJ funding, which was reviewed by CNN, calling for appropriators to prohibit the federal government from taking “any discriminatory action” against an individual who has the “sincerely held religious belief, or moral conviction that marriage is, or should be recognized as, a union of one man and one woman.”

    Another effort led by Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana to defund “woke programs” and initiatives across the federal government has included letters to each of the 12 House Appropriations subcommittees in March, and calls for no more funding to certain programs within DOJ that target diversity, equity, inclusion and climate.

    Multiple Republicans told CNN that they are looking to Jordan’s “weaponization” subcommittee to outline cuts for the Committee on Appropriations to carry out.

    Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida said the “weaponization” subcommittee must “identify and isolate” what types of cuts to the DOJ and FBI need to be made for GOP appropriators to then “take a scalpel and cut them out.”

    GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, who serves on Jordan’s weaponization subcommittee, said the subpanel’s job is to “expose” parts of the DOJ and FBI he believes to be hurting freedom of speech for appropriators to take up.

    “I think at a minimum, no funds may be used to do ‘X’ are likely to be either in the bill or in amendments, where we specifically deny them certain activities,” the California Republican said. “However, you know, nobody that I know of is talking about defunding these organizations, but defunding programs.”

    Another weaponization committee member, Rep. Dan Bishop, acknowledged to CNN that details of what should be defunded, restructured or decentralized still need to be worked out. But the North Carolina Republican said he intends to see reforms take effect “if I do nothing else in Congress.”

    “The FBI and the Department of Justice obviously require very substantial reform. Precisely what that is, we’ll see,” Bishop said.

    Republicans on the Appropriations committee receiving these requests also present a spectrum of opinions.

    Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who sits on the specific subcommittee that oversees DOJ’s budget, told CNN, “It seems like that one of the few things that three letter agencies listen to is their budget.”

    Another one of those appropriators, Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas – who said he saw some “shortcomings” from DOJ and FBI leadership, but offered support to rank-and-file agents – acknowledged of his Republican colleagues on the right, “I will tell you, I know there are members of our conference that would like a pound of flesh.”

    Despite increasing pressure, Appropriations Committee member GOP Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio said that while things will “take a haircut” as the result of the House GOP’s proposal on the debt ceiling, “in reality, I don’t think there is ever going to be a blanket defund.”

    Looking at the process from across the aisle, the top Democrat on Jordan’s select subcommittee, Del. Stacey Plaskett of the US Virgin Islands, told CNN she is worried about the groundwork Republicans on the subcommittee are laying.

    “I am concerned about them trying to outline through their conspiracy theories and others going down their rabbit holes that they are making an argument that the FBI is an enemy of the state,” she said. “I’m concerned about they’re trying to fracture rule of law here in the country.”

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  • Republican governors call for withdrawal of proposed Title IX rule changes around transgender student athletes | CNN Politics

    Republican governors call for withdrawal of proposed Title IX rule changes around transgender student athletes | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A group of 25 Republican governors called on the Biden administration Friday to withdraw or delay recently proposed rule changes to Title IX that could prevent states from enforcing anti-transgender sports bans.

    As several bills that aim to ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity make their way through GOP-led state legislatures across the country, the governors argued in a letter sent to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona that such bans ensure fairness.

    Led by Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, the group – including the governors of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming – slammed the administration’s proposal as “a blatant overreach.”

    In April, the Biden administration proposed a new federal rule change for Title IX that would prohibit policies that “categorically” ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender. However, according to a public notice from the department, the proposal would allow schools to enforce some restrictions in “competitive” environments.

    “Leaving aside the Department’s utter lack of authority to promulgate such a regulation, neither states nor schools should be subjected to such a fluid and uncertain standard,” the governors said in the letter. “Nor, most importantly, should the historic advancements and achievements of our sisters, mothers, and daughters be erased.”

    The governors went on to argue that the proposed changes create confusion for states and schools and claimed that the government was threatening to withhold federal funds to coerce schools to comply with a “completely subjective standard that is based on a highly politicized gender ideology.”

    CNN has reached out to the Department of Education for comment.

    Seventeen of the states signed onto the letter have enacted such bans with a few facing legal challenges, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that advocates for issues including LGBTQ rights. This week, Missouri lawmakers passed a bill prohibiting students from competing in gendered athletic competitions that do not match their biological sex as listed on a birth certificate or government record, and the governor is expected to sign the measure.

    Proponents of such limitations in sports have argued that transgender women have a physical advantage over cisgender women and allowing them to compete would be unfair. However, a 2017 report in the journal Sports Medicine found “no direct or consistent research” on any such advantage.

    When the proposed rule changes were announced, advocates celebrated the new protections but called on the administration to eliminate the exemptions.

    “Every student deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. This includes transgender girls of all ages and in all sports, without exception,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ advocacy group.

    “The new rule should be clarified to ensure that all transgender students should be presumed eligible to participate in sports consistent with their gender identity,” Robinson added in a statement at the time. “This moment we’re in is truly a crisis for transgender young people – and we’re calling on elected leaders at every level of government to fight harder for our kids.”

    Democratic governors of several states whose legislatures have pushed anti-trans sports bans were not listed among the letter’s signers, including from North Carolina, Kansas and Kentucky. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, more than 470 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced nationwide this legislative session.

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  • Exclusive: Senior US general ordered Twitter announcement of drone strike on al Qaeda leader that may have instead killed civilian | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: Senior US general ordered Twitter announcement of drone strike on al Qaeda leader that may have instead killed civilian | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The senior general in charge of US forces in the Middle East ordered that his command announce on Twitter that a senior al Qaeda leader had been targeted by an American drone strike in Syria earlier this month – despite not yet having confirmation of who was actually killed in the strike, according to multiple defense officials.

    Nearly three weeks later, US Central Command still does not know whether a civilian died instead, officials said. CENTCOM did not open a review of the incident, officially known as a civilian-casualty credibility assessment report, until May 15 – twelve days after the strike. That review is ongoing.

    One defense official with direct knowledge of the situation told CNN that some of CENTCOM Commander Gen. Erik Kurilla’s subordinates urged him to hold off on the tweet until there was more clarity on who was actually killed.

    Two other officials denied that, and said they were not aware of any staffers voicing consternation or disagreement with the announcement.

    Either way, the statement ultimately posted to Twitter from the official CENTCOM Twitter account did not identify the supposed senior al Qaeda leader, raising more questions about what had occurred.

    “At 11:42 am local Syrian time on 3 May, US Central Command Forces conducted a unilateral strike in Northwest Syria targeting a senior Al Qaeda leader,” the tweet read. “We will provide more information as operational details become available.”

    The tweet has not been taken down and CENTCOM has not tweeted about the strike again.

    The episode raises questions about how thoroughly CENTCOM has implemented the military’s civilian harm mitigation policy – a process for preventing, mitigating and responding to civilian casualties caused by US military operations.

    The policy was developed in 2022 after a botched US drone strike in Kabul killed 10 civilians in August 2021.

    Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said on Tuesday that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is “absolutely” confident in the Defense Department’s civilian harm mitigation efforts.

    “In terms of CENTCOM’s strike, as you know, they conducted that strike on the third of May. They are investigating the allegations of civilian casualties,” Ryder said at a Pentagon news briefing. “So, you know, I think our record speaks for itself in terms of how seriously we take these. Very few countries around the world do that. The secretary has complete confidence that we will continue to abide by the policies that we put into place.”

    CENTCOM acknowledged last week following a Washington Post report questioning the strike that the operation may have resulted in a civilian casualty and said in a statement that it was “investigating” the incident. The civilian casualty review was not launched until a week after the Post began presenting information to CENTCOM suggesting that the strike had killed a civilian.

    CENTCOM still has not opened a formal investigation into the strike, known as a 15-6 investigation, defense officials told CNN. The officials said the civilian casualty review first needs to determine that a noncombatant was indeed killed in the strike. Then, a commander needs to decide that there are other unanswered questions remaining about the operation that require a more thorough investigation. A 15-6 investigation was launched less than a week after the errant Kabul strike.

    Defense officials told CNN that in the immediate aftermath of the strike, Kurilla and his staff had high confidence that they had killed the senior al-Qaeda leader, though they declined to say why they were so convinced. But they also knew it would likely take a few days to confirm the person’s identity definitively. The US has no military footprint in northwest Syria, an area still recovering from the effects of a devastating earthquake.

    But as the days passed, CENTCOM still could not determine the identity of who they had killed. Some defense officials considered that a red flag, they told CNN.

    By May 8, CENTCOM still had not confirmed the person’s identity, and began receiving information from the Washington Post that raised questions about whether a civilian had been killed, defense officials said. The Post’s information led CENTCOM to open a review into the strike, and whether it had killed a civilian, on May 15.

    There is still some disagreement within the administration about the identity of the person killed, defense officials told CNN. Some intelligence officials continue to believe that the target of the strike was a member of al-Qaeda, even if he wasn’t a senior leader. But there is a growing belief inside the Pentagon that the man – identified by his family as Loutfi Hassan Mesto, a 56-year-old father of ten – was a farmer with no ties to terrorism.

    Mesto’s family told CNN that he had been out grazing his sheep when he was killed. Loutfi never left his village during the Syrian uprisings and did not support any political faction, his brother said.

    Mohamed Sajee, a distant relative living in Qurqaniya, also told CNN that Loutfi was never known to be in favor or against the Syrian regime.

    “It’s impossible that he was with al Qaeda, he doesn’t even have a beard,” he said.

    The Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, told CNN they arrived on the scene of the strike after being contacted on their local emergency number.

    “The team noticed only one crater caused by the missile, which was next to the man’s body,” the White Helmets said, also confirming that the man had been grazing his sheep.

    “When the team arrived, his wife, neighbors, and other people were at the location,” the group added.

    The White Helmets tweeted on May 3 that they had recovered the body of Mesto, who they described as “a civilian aged 60” who was killed in a missile strike while grazing sheep. CENTCOM was aware of the White Helmets’ tweet, officials said, but the group’s information was not considered solid enough yet to open a review.

    The May 3 incident bears a stunning similarity to another CENTCOM operation: a US drone strike in Kabul during the closing days of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which killed 10 Afghan civilians, including 7 children. The Pentagon initially claimed it had eliminated an ISIS-K threat and defended the operation for weeks, with Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley going as far as to call it a “righteous” strike in a Pentagon briefing two days later.

    A suicide bombing at Kabul’s international airport three days earlier, which killed 13 US service members, had added pressure on CENTCOM to act against any potential threats, and officials believed at the time that another attack was imminent.

    Austin ultimately decided no one would be punished over the botched operation, even as he instructed Central Command and Special Operations Command to improve policies and procedures to prevent civilian harm more effectively.

    Austin committed to adjusting Defense Department policies to better protect civilians, even establishing a civilian protection center of excellence in 2022.

    “Leaders in this department should be held to account for high standards of conduct and leadership,” Austin said at the time.

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