On the same day that that the Bahamas extradited FTX co-founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to the U.S. to face criminal charges, two former executives at FTX and Alameda Research pleaded guilty Wednesday to federal fraud charges.
Caroline Ellison, 28, the former chief executive of Alameda Research — the crypto trading company founded by Bankman-Fried — and Zixiao (Gary) Wang, 29, co-founder of crypto platform FTX and its former chief technology officer, were charged for their roles in contributing to the crypto platform’s collapse.
The pair each faced decades-long prison sentences if convicted, and pleaded guilty to charges that included wire fraud, securities fraud and commodities fraud in exchange for leniency. In a video Wednesday night, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams of the Southern District of New York said both were cooperating in the continuing investigation into FTX and Bankman-Fried.
Williams added that Bankman-Fried, 30, was in FBI custody and will appear in court in “as soon as possible,” and suggested more charges in the FTX case could be forthcoming.
“If you participated in misconduct at FTX or Alameda, now is the time to get ahead of it,” Williams said. “We are moving quickly and our patience is not eternal. … and we are far from done.”
According to the SEC complaint, Ellison helped manipulate the price of FTX-issued crypto token FTT, which served as collateral for undisclosed loans from FTX customers’ assets to Alameda. In addition, the SEC alleges Bankman-Fried misled customers by falsely claiming FTX was a safe trading platform with strict risk-mitigation measures.
The SEC claims Wang created software code to allow Alameda to divert FTX customers’ funds, and that Ellison used those funds for Alameda’s trading activity.
“As part of their deception, we allege that Caroline Ellison and Sam Bankman-Fried schemed to manipulate the price of FTT, an exchange crypto security token that was integral to FTX, to prop up the value of their house of cards,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a statement. “We further allege that Ms. Ellison and Mr. Wang played an active role in a scheme to misuse FTX customer assets to prop up Alameda and to post collateral for margin trading. When FTT and the rest of the house of cards collapsed, Mr. Bankman-Fried, Ms. Ellison, and Mr. Wang left investors holding the bag. Until crypto platforms comply with time-tested securities laws, risks to investors will persist. It remains a priority of the SEC to use all of our available tools to bring the industry into compliance.”
Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas last week after he was indicted by U.S. federal prosecutors, who allege he played a key role in the collapse of FTX, diverting billions of dollars of customer assets and defrauding investors, customers and lenders.
NASSAU, Bahamas — Bahamian authorities said Wednesday that former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has been extradited to the United States, where he faces criminal charges related to the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange.
Bahamas’s attorney general’s office said that Bankman-Fried would be leaving for the United States later Wednesday, noting he had waived his right to challenge the extradition.
Reporters on the scene witnessed Bankman-Fried leaving a Magistrate Court in Nassau in a dark SUV earlier Wednesday. The vehicle was later seen arriving at a private airfield by Nassau’s airport, from which he is expected to be flown to the United States. He is due to land in New York and will likely appear in front of a U.S. judge on Thursday.
“The Bahamas has determined that the provisional arrest, and subsequent written consent by (Bankman-Fried) to be extradited without formal extradition proceedings satisfies the requirements of the (extradition treaty between the U.S. and the Bahamas) and our nation’s Extradition Act,” said Bahamian Attorney General Ryan Pinder, in a statement.
Bahamian authorities arrested Bankman-Fried last week at the request of the U.S. government. U.S. prosecutors allege he played a central role in the rapid collapse of FTX and hid its problems from the public and investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission said Bankman-Fried illegally used investors’ money to buy real estate on behalf of himself and his family.
The 30-year-old could potentially spend the rest of his life in jail.
Bankman-Fried was denied bail Friday after a Bahamian judge ruled that he posed a flight risk. The founder and former CEO of FTX, once worth tens of billions of dollars on paper, had been held in the Bahamas’ Fox Hill prison, which has been has been cited by human rights activists as having poor sanitation and as being infested with rats and insects.
Once he’s back in the U.S., Bankman-Fried’s attorney will be able to request that he be released on bail.
Bankman-Fried was one of the world’s wealthiest people on paper, with an estimated net worth of $32 billion. He was a prominent personality in Washington, donating millions of dollars toward mostly left-leaning political causes and Democratic political campaigns. FTX grew to become the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
He has said that he did not “knowingly” misuse customers’ funds, and said he believes his millions of angry customers will eventually be made whole.
At a congressional hearing last week, the new FTX CEO John Ray III, who is tasked with taking the company through bankruptcy, bluntly disputed those assertions: “We will never get all these assets back,” Ray said.
The Consumer Financial Protection Board on Tuesday said it is requiring Wells Fargo & Co. to pay $3.7 billion as a result of alleged widespread mismanagement of auto loans, mortgages and deposit accounts.
The CFPB said Wells Fargo “repeatedly misapplied loan payments, wrongfully foreclosed on homes and illegally repossessed vehicles, incorrectly assessed fees and interest, charged surprise overdraft fees, along with other illegal activity affecting over 16 million consumer accounts.”
Wells Fargo WFC, -2.01%
has been ordered to pay more than $2 billion in redress to consumers in addition to a $1.7 billion civil penalty for legal violations.
“Consumers were illegally assessed fees and interest charges on auto and mortgage loans, had their cars wrongly repossessed, and had payments to auto and mortgage loans misapplied by the bank,” the CFBP said.
Wells Fargo did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said the settlement marks an “important milestone in our work to transform the operating practices of Wells Fargo and to put these issues behind us.”
As a result of the settlement, the CFPB will terminate a 2016 consent order, Wells Fargo said.
The settlement will also provide clarity and a path forward for termination of a 2018 consent order and will underscore that the CFPB “recognizes recent acceleration of efforts,” the bank said.
“The CFPB recognized that since 2020, the company has accelerated corrective actions and remediation, including to address the matters covered by today’s settlement,” the bank said in a statement.
Wells Fargo warned it will book an operating-loss expense of $3.5 billion, or $2.8 billion net of tax, when it reports fourth-quarter results on Jan. 13.
“Wells Fargo has made significant progress in strengthening its risk and control infrastructure over the past several years,” the bank said.
Jefferies analyst Ken Usdin said in a research note that the CFPB action marks a “positive step in the regulatory improvement process” for Wells Fargo.
But he said Wells Fargo’s plan to book a fourth-quarter operating loss of $3.5 billion does not mean that the bank’s accrual for probable and estimable losses (RPL), which it discloses every quarter, will go to zero.
“We would hope that probable and estimated losses would decline somewhat after [the fourth quarter] given the magnitude of today’s settlement,” Usdin said. “[Wells Fargo’s] separate announcement that it will book $3.5 billion of operating losses in [the fourth quarter] suggests that only some of the CFPB-specific settlement was already reserved for. But this sizable [fourth-quarter] number also means that [Wells Fargo] has been booking losses for other actions along the way that are still open-ended.”
Scharf has been CEO of Wells Fargo since late 2019 and has been focusing on bringing the megabank into regulatory compliance.
While an asset cap has remained in place for Wells Fargo since 2018 as punishment for its phony-accounts scandal, other regulatory matters are now in the rear-view mirror.
In December 2021, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) terminated a consent order issued in 2015 regarding add-on products that the bank sold to retail banking customers.
A CFPB consent order issued in 2016 regarding the bank’s retail practices expired in 2021, and a 2015 consent order from the OCC regarding Wells Fargo’s bank-secrecy and anti-money-laundering compliance was terminated in January 2021.
Finally, a CFPB consent order issued in 2015 regarding claims that the bank violated the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act expired in January 2020.
Shares of Wells Fargo fell 0.3% on Tuesday. The stock is down 13.1% in 2022, compared with a 19.6% loss by the S&P 500 SPX, +0.10%.
has a legal hearing set to start Monday related to a product liability case that resulted in a $1.7 billion punitive award against the auto maker. Investors seem to be a little nervous about the Georgia case. They probably don’t need to be — yet.
The award was part of a jury verdict that held, in part, Ford (ticker: F) was responsible for insufficient roof strength of its super-duty trucks. Two people were killed in 2014 after their super-duty truck rolled over. Ford maintains that its design is sound.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Jan. 6 committee is wrapping up its investigation of the violent 2021 U.S. Capitol insurrection, with lawmakers expected to cap one of the most exhaustive and aggressive congressional probes in memory with an extraordinary recommendation: The Justice Department should consider criminal charges against former President Donald Trump.
At a final meeting on Monday, the panel’s seven Democrats and two Republicans are poised to recommend criminal charges against Trump and potentially against associates and staff who helped him launch a multifaceted pressure campaign to try to overturn the 2020 election.
While a criminal referral is mostly symbolic, with the Justice Department ultimately deciding whether to prosecute Trump or others, it is a decisive end to a probe that had an almost singular focus from the start.
“I think the president has violated multiple criminal laws and I think you have to be treated like any other American who breaks the law, and that is you have to be prosecuted,” Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from Southern California and a member of the panel, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The panel, set to dissolve on Jan. 3 with the advent of a Republican-led House, has conducted more than 1,000 interviews, held 10 well-watched public hearings and collected more than a million documents since it launched in July 2021. As it has gathered the massive trove of evidence, the members have become emboldened in declaring that Trump is to blame for the violent attack on the Capitol by his supporters almost two years ago.
After beating their way past police, injuring many of them, the Jan. 6 rioters stormed the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s win, echoing Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud and sending lawmakers and others running for their lives.
The attack came after weeks of Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat — a campaign that was extensively detailed by the committee in its multiple public hearings. Many of Trump’s former aides testified about his unprecedented pressure on states, federal officials and on Vice President Mike Pence to find a way to thwart the popular will.
“This is someone who in multiple ways tried to pressure state officials to find votes that didn’t exist, this is someone who tried to interfere with a joint session, even inciting a mob to attack the Capitol,” Schiff said. “If that’s not criminal, then I don’t know what it is.”
Members of the committee have said that the referrals for other individuals may also include ethics violations, legal misconduct and campaign finance violations. Lawmakers have suggested in particular that their recommended charges against Trump could include conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress and insurrection.
On insurrection, Schiff said Sunday that “if you look at Donald Trump’s acts and you match them up against the statute, it’s a pretty good match.” He said that the committee will focus on those individuals — presumably Trump — for whom they believe there is the strongest evidence.
While a so-called criminal referral has no real legal standing, it is a forceful statement by the committee and adds to political pressure already on Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith, who is conducting an investigation into Jan. 6 and Trump’s actions.
The committee is also expected at the hearing to preview its massive final report, which will include findings, interview transcripts and legislative recommendations. Lawmaker have said a portion of that report will be released Monday.
“We obviously want to complete the story for the American people,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and constitutional scholar who serves on the select committee. “Everybody has come on a journey with us and we want a satisfactory conclusion, such that people feel that Congress has done its job.”
The panel was formed in the summer of 2021 after Senate Republicans blocked the formation of what would have been a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate the insurrection. That opposition spurred the Democratic-controlled House to form a committee of its own. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of California, a Trump ally, decided not to participate after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected some of his appointments. That left an opening for two anti-Trump Republicans in the House — Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — to join the seven Democrats serving on the committee.
While the committee’s mission was to take a comprehensive accounting of the insurrection and educate the public about what happened, they’ve also aimed their work at an audience of one: the attorney general. Lawmakers on the panel have openly pressured Garland to investigate Trump’s actions, and last month he appointed a special counsel, Smith, to oversee several probes related to Trump, including those related to the insurrection.
In court documents earlier this year, the committee suggested criminal charges against Trump could include conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress.
In a “conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the committee argues that evidence supports an inference that Trump and his allies “entered into an agreement to defraud the United States” when they disseminated misinformation about election fraud and pressured state and federal officials to assist in that effort. Trump still says he won the election to this day.
The panel also asserts that Trump obstructed an official proceeding, the joint session of Congress in which the Electoral College votes are certified. The committee said Trump either attempted or succeeded at obstructing, influencing or impeding the ceremonial process on Jan. 6 and “did so corruptly” by pressuring Pence to try to overturn the results as he presided over the session. Pence declined to do so.
The committee may make ethics referrals for five House Republicans — including McCarthy — who ignored congressional subpoenas from the panel. Those referrals are unlikely to result in punishment since Republicans are set to take over the House majority in January.
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which faced a colossal collapse this year, was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday, and is facing criminal charges in the United States, according to a Bahamian official.
The Attorney General of the Bahamas, through spokesman Latrae Rahming, posted a statement on Twitter detailing the arrest. Bankman-Fried, commonly known as SBF, lives in the Bahamas, where the cryptocurrency exchange was also based.
“SBF’s arrest followed receipt of formal notification from the United States that it has filed criminal charges against SBF and is likely to request his extradition,” the statement reads.
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York later tweeted that his office had filed a sealed indictment, which led to the arrest.
“We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time,” Damian Williams said in a tweet from the office’s official Twitter account.
FTX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, filed for bankruptcy protection in November, and Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO. The new CEO of FTX, John J. Ray III, is expected to testify in front of members of Congress on Tuesday, and in prepared remarks released Monday, he said that Bankman-Fried’s management of FTX was an “utter failure” that lacked any level of financial control.
MarketWatch staff writer Robert Schroeder contributed to this article.
The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday sued Microsoft Corp. to block its $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard Inc.
The acquisition, which would be Microsoft’s MSFT, +1.07%
largest and the biggest ever in the video gaming industry, would “enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business,” the FTC claimed.
“Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals,” Holly Vedova, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, said in a statement. “Today we seek to stop Microsoft from gaining control over a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple dynamic and fast-growing gaming markets.”
FTC members pointed to Microsoft’s record of “acquiring and using valuable gaming content to suppress competition from rival consoles,” including its acquisition of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda Softworks.
Microsoft President Brad Smith indicated the software giant will fight the lawsuit. In a statement, he said Microsoft has “been committed since Day One to addressing competition concerns.”
“While we believed in giving peace a chance, we have complete confidence in our case and welcome the opportunity to present our case in court,” Smith said.
Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, in a statement, said the suit “sounds alarming, so I want to reinforce my confidence that this deal will close. The allegation that this deal is anti-competitive doesn’t align with the facts, and we believe we’ll win this challenge.”
Still, In recent weeks Microsoft has taken steps to demonstrate to regulators its acquisition of Activision would not give it an unfair advantage in the gaming market. On Tuesday, Microsoft said it would bring the “Call of Duty” franchise to Nintendo Co.’s 7974, -1.31%
Switch, a rival of Microsoft Xbox, and Microsoft has said it would make Call of Duty available on rival Sony Group Corp.’s SONY, -0.06%
PlayStation.
“It’s a bad idea,” Geoffrey Manne, president of the International Center for Law and Economics, said of the FTC’s lawsuit vs. Microsoft. “There may be markets in which some activities of some of these large tech companies cause concerns, but when they are expanding into new markets or enhancing competition in markets where they aren’t leaders, we should be encouraging them, not threatening them with lawsuits.”
The government’s action in administrative court marks the first serious regulatory threat to Microsoft’s business in more than two decades, when the Justice Department brought a landmark antitrust lawsuit against the software giant that took years and was settled in 2002. Since then, Microsoft had sidestepped antitrust scrutiny and Smith in particular has focused the glare on its tech rivals Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +2.24%,
Apple Inc. AAPL, +1.19%,
Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL, -0.94%
Shares of Microsoft are up 1% in trading Thursday. Activision’s ATVI, -1.33%
stock is down 1.5%.
The FTC’s lawsuit comes the same day it is heading to court in San Jose, Calif., in what is expected to be a three-week trial to bloc Meta’s $300 million acquisition of VR fitness app maker Within.
The trial is likely to showcase an intriguing look at the agency’s ability to stifle alleged anticompetitive conductusing largely untested legal theories at a time when Congress is sitting on tech antitrust legislation.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A judge on Wednesday sentenced former Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani to nearly 13 years in prison for his role in the company’s blood-testing hoax — a sentence slightly longer than that given to the CEO, who was his lover and accomplice in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest scandals.
Balwani was convicted in July of fraud and conspiracy connected to the company’s bogus medical technology that duped investors and endangered patients. His sentencing came less than three weeks after Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s founder and CEO, received more than 11 years in prison for her part in the scheme.
The scandal revolved around the company’s false claims to have developed a device that could scan for hundreds of diseases and other potential problems with just a few drops of blood taken with a finger prick.
The case threw a bright light on Silicon Valley’s dark side, exposing how its culture of hype and boundless ambition could veer into lies.
Holmes, 38, could have gotten up to 20 years in prison — a penalty that U.S. District Judge Edward Davila could have imposed on Balwani, who spent six years as Theranos’ chief operating officer while remaining romantically involved with Holmes until a bitter split in 2016.
While on the witness stand in her trial, Holmes accused Balwani, 57, of manipulating her through years of emotional and sexual abuse. Balwani’s attorney has denied the allegations.
The two trials had somewhat different outcomes. Unlike Balwani, Holmes was acquitted on several charges of defrauding and conspiring against people who paid for Theranos blood tests that produced misleading results and could have pointed patients toward the wrong treatment. The jury in Holmes’ trial also deadlocked on three charges.
Balwani was convicted on all 12 felony counts, and his lawyers sought a far more lenient sentence of just four to 10 months in prison. Prosecutors for the Justice Department asked for 15 years. A probation report recommended nine years.
Duncan Levin, a former federal prosecutor who is now a defense attorney, described Balwani’s bid for a light sentence as “utterly unrealistic.” Levin suspects the judge may give greater weight to the Justice Department and the probation office recommendations, which mirror the sentences those agencies sought for Holmes.
The judge ultimately gave her 11 1/4 years in prison and recommended that the sentence be served in a low-security facility in Byran, Texas.
Federal prosecutors also want the judge to order Balwani to pay $804 million in restitution to defrauded investors — the same amount sought from Holmes. Davila deferred a decision on restitution during Holmes’ Nov. 18 sentencing until an unspecified future date.
In court documents, Balwani’s lawyers painted him as a hardworking immigrant who moved from India to the U.S. during the 1980s to become the first member of his family to attend college. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1990 with a degree in information systems.
He later moved to Silicon Valley, where he first worked as a computer programmer for Microsoft before founding an online startup that he sold for millions of dollars during the dot-com boom of the 1990s.
Balwani and Holmes met around the same time she dropped out of Stanford University to start Theranos in 2003. He became enthralled with her and her quest to revolutionize health care.
Balwani’s lawyers said he eventually invested about $5 million in a stake in Theranos that eventually became worth about $500 million on paper — a fraction of Holmes’ one-time fortune of of $4.5 billion.
That wealth evaporated after Theranos began to unravel in 2015 amid revelations that its blood-testing technology never worked as Holmes had boasted in glowing magazine articles that likened her to Silicon Valley visionaries such as Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Before Theranos’ downfall, Holmes teamed up with Balwani to raise nearly $1 billion from deep-pocketed investors that included software mogul Larry Ellison and media magnate Rupert Murdoch.
“Mr. Balwani is not the same as Elizabeth Holmes,” his lawyers wrote in a memo to the judge. “”He actually invested millions of dollars of his own money; he never sought fame or recognition; and he has a long history of quietly giving to those less fortunate.” Balwani’s lawyers also asserted that Holmes “was dramatically more culpable” for the Theranos fraud.
Echoing similar claims made by Holmes’s lawyers before her sentencing, Balwani’s attorneys also argued that he has been adequately punished by the intense media coverage of Theranos, which has been the subject of a book, documentary and award-winning TV series.
Balwani “has lost his career, his reputation and his ability to meaningfully work again,” his lawyers wrote.
Federal prosecutors cast Balwani as a ruthless, power-hungry accomplice in crimes that ripped off investors and imperiled people who received flawed results. The blood tests were to be available in a partnership with Walgreen’s that Balwani helped engineer.
“Balwani presented a fake story about Theranos’ technology and financial stability day after day in meeting after meeting,” the prosecutors wrote in their memo to the judge. “Balwani maintained this façade of accomplishments, after making the calculated decision that honesty would destroy Theranos.”
BERLIN (AP) — Thousands of police carried out a series of raids across much of Germany on Wednesday against suspected far-right extremists who allegedly sought to overthrow the state in an armed coup.
Federal prosecutors said some 3,000 officers conducted searches at 130 sites in 11 of Germany’s 16 states against adherents of the so-called Reich Citizens movement. Some members of the grouping reject Germany’s postwar constitution and have called for the overthrow of the government.
Justice Minister Marco Buschmann described the raids as an “anti-terrorism operation,” adding that the suspects may have planned an armed attack on institutions of the state.
Prosecutors said 22 German citizens were detained on suspicion of “membership in a terrorist organization.” Three other people, including a Russian citizen, are suspected of supporting the organization, they said. A further 27 people are being investigated.
Weekly Der Spiegel reported that locations searched include the barracks of Germany’s special forces unit KSK in the southwestern town of Calw. The unit has in the past been scrutinized over alleged far-right involvement by some soldiers.
Federal prosecutors declined to confirm or deny that the barracks was searched.
Along with detentions in Germany, prosecutors said that one person was detained in the Austrian town of Kitzbuehel and another in the Italian city of Perugia.
Prosecutors said those detained are alleged to last year have formed a “terrorist organization with the goal of overturning the existing state order in Germany and replace it with their own form of state, which was already in the course of being founded.”
The suspects were aware that their aim could only be achieved by military means and with force, prosecutors said.
Some of the group’s members had made “concrete preparations” to storm Parliament with a small armed group, according to prosecutors. “The details (of this plan) still need to be investigated” to determine whether any of the suspects can be charged with treason, they said.
The group is alleged to have believed in a “conglomerate of conspiracy theories consisting of narratives from the so-called Reich Citizens as well as QAnon ideology,” according to the statement. Prosecutors added that members of the group also believe Germany is ruled by a so-called ‘deep state;’ similar baseless claims about the United States were made by former President Donald Trump.
Prosecutors identified the suspected ringleaders as Heinrich XIII P. R. and Ruediger v. P., in line with German privacy rules. Der Spiegel reported that the former was a well-known 71-year-old member of a minor German noble family, while the latter was a 69-year-old former paratrooper.
Federal prosecutors said Heinrich XIII P. R., whom the group planned to install as Germany’s new leader, had contacted Russian officials with the aim of negotiating a new order in the country once the German government was overthrown. He was allegedly assisted in this by a Russian woman, Vitalia B.
“According to current investigations there is no indication however that the persons contacted responded positively to his request,” prosecutors said.
A further person detained by police Wednesday was identified by prosecutors as Birgit M.-W. Der Spiegel reported that the woman is a judge and former lawmaker with the far-right Alternative for Germany party.
The party, known by its German acronym AfD, has increasingly come under scrutiny by German security services due to its ties with extremists. It declined to comment immediately on the report.
Prosecutors said that apart from a council of leaders, or Rat, the group had tasked several members with the formation of an armed wing. Led by Ruediger v. P., the they planned to obtain weapons and conduct firearms training. It was unclear how far advanced these plans were.
Germany’s chief federal prosecutor planned to make a statement on the case later Wednesday.
NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s company was convicted of tax fraud on Tuesday in a case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, a significant repudiation of financial practices at the former president’s business.
A jury found two corporate entities at the Trump Organization guilty on all 17 counts, including conspiracy charges and falsifying business records.
The verdict came on the second day of deliberations following a trial in which the Trump Organization was accused of being complicit in a scheme by top executives to avoid paying personal income taxes on job perks such as rent-free apartments and luxury cars.
The conviction is a validation for New York prosecutors, who have spent three years investigating the former president and his businesses, though the penalties aren’t expected to be severe enough to jeopardize the future of Trump’s company.
As punishment, the Trump Organization could be fined up to $1.6 million — a relatively small amount for a company of its size, though the conviction might make some of its future deals more complicated.
Trump, who recently announced he was running for president again, has said the case against his company was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” waged against him by vindictive Democrats.
Trump himself was not on trial but prosecutors alleged he “knew exactly what was going on” with the scheme, though he and the company’s lawyers have denied that.
The case against the company was built largely around testimony from the Trump Organization’s former finance chief, Allen Weisselberg, who previously pleaded guilty to charges that he manipulated the company’s books and his own compensation package to illegally reduce his taxes.
Weisselberg testified in exchange for a promised five-month jail sentence.
To convict the Trump Organization, prosecutors had to convince jurors that Weisselberg or his subordinate, Senior Vice President and Controller Jeffrey McConney, were “high managerial” agents acting on the company’s behalf and that the company also benefited from his scheme.
Trump Organization lawyers repeated the mantra “Weisselberg did it for Weisselberg” throughout the monthlong trial. They contended the executive had gone rogue and betrayed the company’s trust. No one in the Trump family or the company was to blame, they argued.
Though he testified as a prosecution witness, Weisselberg also attempted to take responsibility on the witness stand, saying nobody in the Trump family knew what he was doing.
“It was my own personal greed that led to this,” an emotional Weisselberg testified.
Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to dodging taxes on $1.7 million in fringe benefits, testified that he and McConney conspired to hide that extra compensation from his income by deducting their cost from his pre-tax salary and issuing falsified W-2 forms.
During his closing argument, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass attempted to refute the claim that Trump knew nothing about the scheme. He showed jurors a lease Trump signed for Weisselberg’s company-paid apartment and a memo Trump initialed authorizing a pay cut for another executive who got perks.
“Mr. Trump is explicitly sanctioning tax fraud,” Steinglass argued.
The verdict doesn’t end Trump’s battle with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat who took office in January.
Bragg has said that a related investigation of Trump that began under his predecessor, District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., is “active and ongoing.”
In that wide-ranging probe, investigators have examined whether Trump misled banks and others about the value of his real estate holdings, golf courses and other assets — allegations at the heart of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ pending lawsuit against the former president and his company.
The district attorney’s office has also investigated whether any state laws were broken when Trump’s allies made payments to two women who claimed to have had sexual affairs with the Republican years ago.
Near the end of his tenure last year, Vance directed deputies to present evidence to a grand jury for a possible indictment of Trump. After taking office, though, Bragg let that grand jury disband so he could give the case a fresh look.
On Monday, he confirmed that a new lead prosecutor had been brought on to handle that investigation, signaling again that it was still active.
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Thursday ended an independent review of documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, removing a hurdle the Justice Department said had delayed its criminal investigation into the retention of top-secret government information.
The decision by the three-judge panel represents a significant win for federal prosecutors, clearing the way for them to use as part of their investigation the entire tranche of documents seized during an Aug. 8 FBI search of Mar-a-Lag o. It also amounts to a sharp repudiation of arguments by Trump’s lawyers, who for months had said that the former president was entitled to have a so-called “special master” conduct a neutral review of the thousands of documents taken from the property.
The ruling from the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit had been expected given the skeptical questions the judges directed at a Trump lawyer during arguments last week, and because two of the three judges on the panel had already ruled in favor of the Justice Department in an earlier dispute over the special master.
The special master litigation has played out alongside an ongoing investigation examining the potential criminal mishandling of national defense information as well as efforts to possibly obstruct that probe. Attorney General Merrick Garland last month appointed Jack Smith, a veteran public corruption prosecutor, to serve as special counsel overseeing that investigation.
It remains unclear how much longer the investigation will last, or who, if anyone, might be charged. But the probe has shown signs of intensifying, with investigators questioning multiple Trump associates about the documents and granting one key ally immunity to ensure his testimony before a federal grand jury. And the appeals court decision is likely to speed the investigation along by cutting short the outside review of the records.
The conflict over the special master began just weeks after the FBI’s search, when Trump sued in federal court in Florida seeking the appointment of an independent arbiter to review the roughly 13,000 documents the Justice Department says were taken from the home.
A federal judge, Aileen Cannon, granted the Trump team’s request, naming veteran Brooklyn judge Raymond Dearie to serve as special master and tasking him with reviewing the seized records and filtering out from the criminal investigation any documents that might be covered by claims of executive privilege or attorney-client privilege.
She also barred the Justice Department from using in its criminal investigation any of the seized records, including the roughly 100 with classification markings, until Dearie completed his work.
The Justice Department objected to the appointment, saying it was an unnecessary hindrance to its criminal investigation and saying Trump had no credible basis to invoke either attorney-client privilege or executive privilege to shield the records from investigators.
It sought, as a first step, to regain access to the classified documents. A federal appeals panel sided with prosecutors in September, permitting the Justice Department to resume its review of the documents with classification markings.
The department also pressed for access to the much larger trove of unclassified documents, saying such records could contain important evidence for their investigation.
Just hours after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcyin New Jersey on Monday, cryptocurrency lender BlockFi filed a lawsuit against a holding company by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried over his shares in trading platform Robinhood, the Financial Times reported.
The suit was filed against Bankman-Fried’s vehicle Emergent Fidelity Technologies, of whom BlockFi is seeking to recover unpaid collateral.
The filing – also lodged in New Jersey – says BlockFi entered into a pledge agreement with Emergent on Nov. 9 stating that an unnamed borrower was obliged to pledge “certain shares of common stock” and has breached the agreement by failing to comply with its payment obligations.
The Financial Times reports the collateral in question is Bankman-Fried’s 7.6% stake in Robinhood which he bought earlier this year.
“Emergent has defaulted on its obligations under the pledge agreement and failed to satisfy its obligations thereunder despite written notice of default and acceleration,” the lawsuit filing says.
The lawsuit also named London-based brokerage ED&F Man Capital Markets for refusing to “transfer the collateral” to BlockFi.
“This is a highly complex matter,” a spokesperson for ED&F Man Capital Markets told MarketWatch in an emailed statement.
“We cannot comment on matters that are subject to legal proceedings but will of course comply with any direction given by the judge,” they added.
On Monday, BlockFi, who was once valued at $3 billion, filed for bankruptcy protection after becoming the latest company to be pushed over the edge from the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.
The lawsuit is the latest headache for Bankman-Fried, who is already the subject of a number of investigations in the U.S. and the Bahamas – where FTX was based. The downfall of FTX has triggered a chain reaction of crypto-casualties including crypto financial-services firm Genesis.
CHESAPEAKE, Va. (AP) — A Walmart manager opened fire on fellow employees in the break room of a Virginia store, killing six people in the country’s second high-profile mass shooting in four days, police and a witness said Wednesday.
The gunman, who apparently shot himself, was dead when police found him, Chesapeake Police Chief Mark G. Solesky said. There was no clear motive for the shooting, which also put four people in the hospital.
The store was busy just before the attack Tuesday night as people stocked up ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, a shopper told a local TV station.
Employee Briana Tyler said workers had gathered in the break room as they typically did ahead of their shifts. “I looked up, and my manager just opened the door and he just opened fire,” she told ABC’s “Good Morning America,” adding that “multiple people” dropped to the floor.
“He didn’t say a word,” she said. “He didn’t say anything at all.”
Solesky confirmed that the shooter, who used a pistol, was a Walmart employee but did not give his name because his family had not been notified. The police chief could not confirm whether the victims were all employees.
Employee Jessie Wilczewski told Norfolk television station WAVY that she hid under the table and the shooter looked at her with his gun pointed at her, told her to go home and she left.
“It didn’t even look real until you could feel the … ‘pow-pow-pow,’ you can feel it,” Wilczewski said. “I couldn’t hear it at first because I guess it was so loud, I could feel it.”
President Joe Biden in a statement said he and first lady Jill Biden “grieve for the family, for the Chesapeake community and for the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
Gov. Glenn Youngkin tweeted that he was in contact with law-enforcement officials in Chesapeake, Virginia’s second largest city, which lies next to the seaside communities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach.
“Our hearts break with the community of Chesapeake this morning,” Youngkin wrote. “Heinous acts of violence have no place in our communities.”
It was the second time in a little more than a week that Virginia has experienced a major shooting. Three University of Virginia football players were fatally shot on a charter bus as they returned to campus from a field trip on Nov. 13. Two other students were wounded.
“I am devastated by the senseless act of violence that took place late last night in our city,” Mayor Rick W. West said in a statement posted on the city’s Twitter account Wednesday. “Chesapeake is a tight-knit community, and we are all shaken by this news.”
A database run by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University that tracks every mass killing in America going back to 2006 shows this year has been especially violent.
The U.S. has now had 40 mass killings so far in 2022, compared with 45 for all of 2019. The database defines a mass killing as at least four people killed, not including the killer.
The attack at the Walmart came three days after a person opened fire at a gay nightclub in Colorado, killing five people and wounding 17. Last spring, the country was shaken by the deaths of 21 when a gunman stormed an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Tuesday night’s shooting also brought back memories of another at a Walmart in 2019, when a gunman who targeted Mexicans opened fire at a store in El Paso, Texas, and killed 22 people.
A 911 call about the shooting came in just after 10 p.m. Solesky did not know how many shoppers were inside, whether the gunman was working or whether a security guard was present.
Joetta Jeffery told CNN that she received text messages from her mother who was inside the store when the shots were fired. Her mother, Betsy Umphlett, was not injured.
“I’m crying, I’m shaking,” Jeffery said. “I had just talked to her about buying turkeys for Thanksgiving, then this text came in.”
One man was seen wailing at a hospital after learning that his brother was dead, and others shrieked as they left a conference center set up as a family reunification center, The Virginian-Pilot reported.
Camille Buggs, a former Walmart employee, told the newspaper she went to the conference center seeking information about her former co-workers. “You always say you don’t think it would happen in your town, in your neighborhood, in your store — in your favorite store, and that’s the thing that has me shocked,” Buggs said.
Walmart WMT, +0.74%
tweeted early Wednesday that it was “shocked at this tragic event.” In the aftermath of the El Paso shooting, Walmart made a decision in September 2019 to discontinue sales of certain kinds of ammunition and asked that customers no longer openly carry firearms in its stores.
It stopped selling handgun ammunition as well as short-barrel rifle ammunition, such as the .223 caliber and 5.56 caliber used in military style weapons. Walmart also discontinued handgun sales in Alaska.
The company had stopped selling handguns in the mid-1990s in every state but Alaska. The latest move marked its complete exit from that business and allowed it to focus on hunting rifles and related ammunition only.
Many of its stores are in rural areas where hunters depend on Walmart to get their equipment.
Theranos founder and former chief executive Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 135 months, or over 11 years, in prison, putting an endpoint on the unraveling of a onetime vigorously hyped Silicon Valley startup that collapsed under allegations of fraud.
The sentence, handed down from U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, came after Holmes was convicted in January of defrauding investors in the blood-testing company, which purported to have technology that could identify diseases from a pinprick of blood from the tip of a finger.
Prior to the sentencing, Holmes had sought more lenient treatment, while prosecutors aimed for more. Holmes had requested up to 18 months in prison, along with home confinement and community service, according to The Wall Street Journal. Prosecutors sought 15 years in prison, a three-year supervised release and restitution of $800 million, the Journal said.
Holmes had until April 27 to surrender, and 14 days to appeal the conviction, according to the Journal. Her lawyers said they would seek permission to keep her out of prison on bail, pending appeal, the Journal said.
Founded in 2003, Theranos’ value over the years ballooned to $9 billion. But the company’s pitch of simple-to-use blood-testing technology — which attracted the likes of the Walton and Murdoch families, along with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — began to fall apart in 2015, after reporting from the Wall Street Journal raised questions about the claims’ veracity.
The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018 charged Holmes and former president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani with what the agency called “massive fraud,” leading Holmes to give up control of the company. Criminal charges, and the company’s dissolution, followed later that year.
Remember that hack of nearly half a billion dollars in cryptocurrency from bankrupt FTX last weekend? Turns out it was actually a government asset seizure.
The Securities Commission of the Bahamas has now acknowledged that it was behind the removal of $477 million in crypto assets from the bankrupt exchange on Nov. 12.
“The Securities Commission of the Bahamas, in the exercise of its powers as regulator acting under the authority of an order made by the Supreme Court of the Bahamas, took the action of directing the transfer of all the digital assets of FTX Digital Markets Ltd. to a digital wallet controlled by the commission, for safekeeping,” the agency said in a statement.
The transfer occurred the day after FTX had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware and immediately sparked concerns of a major hack. The company announced that day that “unauthorized access to certain assets has occurred” and that they were coordinating with law enforcement on the matter.”
On Thursday, the U.S.-based bankruptcy administrators led by John Ray, III, who have taken control of FTX, said in court filings that they had “credible evidence” that officials in the Bahamas had directed FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to access FTX’s systems after the Chapter 11 filing, “for the purpose of obtaining digital assets of the debtors.”
The seizure of assets came amid an emerging fight for control over the direction of the bankruptcy proceeding, with officials in the Bahamas filing a separate Chapter 15 bankruptcy petition in federal court in New York on Nov. 15.
That filing was on behalf of FTX Digital Markets Ltd., a subsidiary that managed significant aspects of the company’s operations from its headquarters in the Caribbean island nation.
A Chapter 15 filing is used typically in cases involving companies with debtors in multiple countries.
In its statement, the Bahamian Securities Commission said it believed FTX Digital Markets was not part of the Delaware bankruptcy proceeding.
The administrators of the Delaware bankruptcy have asked the judge in their case to combine the cases, saying that it was duplicative and confusing to keep them separate. The judge scheduled a hearing on the matter for Monday.
The administrators of the Delaware case have accused Bankman-Fried of attempting to undermine their efforts to sort out the mess he left behind by pushing the second bankruptcy case brought by Bahamian officials.
The announcement has led some to speculate that Trump may be hoping that becoming a presidential candidate will in some way shield him from prosecution.
Donald Trump has announced his bid to run in the 2024 presidential race. WSJ’s Alex Leary breaks down the challenges the former president will face on the campaign trail, including new political rivals and a waning influence among voters. Photo Composite: Adele Morgan
So, does an indictment—or even a felony conviction—prevent a presidential candidate from running or serving in office?
The short answer is no. Here’s why:
The U.S. Constitution specifies in clear language the qualifications required to hold the office of the presidency. In Section 1, Clause 5 of Article II, it states: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
These three requirements—natural-born citizenship, age, and residency—are the only specifications set forth in the United States’ founding document.
Congress has ‘no power to alter’
Furthermore, the Supreme Court has made clear that constitutionally prescribed qualifications to hold federal office may not be altered or supplemented by either the U.S. Congress or any of the states.
Justices clarified the court’s position in their 1969 Powell v. McCormack ruling. The case followed the adoption of a resolution by the House of Representatives barring pastor and New York politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr. from taking his seat in the 90th Congress.
The resolution was not based on Powell’s failure to meet the age, citizenship and residency requirements for House members set forth in the Constitution. Rather, the House found that Powell had diverted Congressional funds and made false reports about certain currency transactions.
When Powell sued to take his seat, the Supreme Court invalidated the House’s resolution on grounds that it added to the constitutionally specified qualifications for Powell to hold office. In the majority opinion, the court held that: “Congress has no power to alter the qualifications in the text of the Constitution.”
For the same reason, no limitation could now be placed on Trump’s candidacy. Nor could he be barred from taking office if he were to be indicted or even convicted.
But in case of insurrection…
The Constitution includes no qualification regarding those conditions—with one significant exception. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies any person from holding federal office “who, having previously taken an oath…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Under the provisions of the 14th Amendment, Congress is authorized to pass laws to enforce its provisions. And in February 2021, one Democratic congressman proposed House Bill 1405, providing for a “cause of action to remove and bar from holding office certain individuals who engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”
Even in the event of Trump being found to have participated “in insurrection or rebellion,” he might conceivably argue that he is exempt from Section 3 for a number of reasons. The 14th Amendment does not specifically refer to the presidency and it is not “self-executing”—that is, it needs subsequent legislation to enforce it. Trump could also point to the fact that Congress enacted an Amnesty Act in 1872 that lifted the ban on office holding for officials from many former Confederate states.
He might also argue that his activities on and before Jan. 6 did not constitute an “insurrection” as it is understood by the wording of the amendment. There are few judicial precedents that interpret Section 3, and as such its application in modern times remains unclear. So even if House Bill 1405 were adopted, it is not clear whether it would be enough to disqualify Trump from serving as president again.
Running from behind bars
Even in the case of conviction and incarceration, a presidential candidate would not be prevented from continuing their campaign—even if, as a felon, they might not be able to vote for themselves.
History is dotted with instances of candidates for federal office running—and even being elected—while in prison. As early as 1798—some 79 years before the 14th Amendment — House member Matthew Lyon was elected to Congress from a prison cell, where he was serving a sentence for sedition for speaking out against the Federalist Adams administration.
Eugene Debs, founder of the Socialist Party of America, ran for president in 1920 while serving a prison sentence for sedition. Although he lost the election, he nevertheless won 913,693 votes. Debs promised to pardon himself if he were elected.
Several provisions within the Constitution offer alternatives that could be used to disqualify a president under indictment or in prison.
The 25th Amendment allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to suspend the president from office if they conclude that the president is incapable of fulfilling his duties.
The amendment states that the removal process may be invoked “if the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
It was proposed and ratified to address what would happen should a president be incapacitated due to health issues. But the language is broad and some legal scholars believe it could be invoked if someone is deemed incapacitated or incapable for other reasons, such as incarceration.
To be sure, a president behind bars could challenge the conclusion that he or she was incapable from discharging the duties simply because they were in prison. But ultimately the amendment leaves any such dispute to Congress to decide, and it may suspend the president from office by a two-thirds vote.
Indeed, it is not clear that a president could not effectively execute the duties of office from prison, since the Constitution imposes no requirements that the executive appear in any specific location. The jail cell could, theoretically, serve as the new Oval Office.
Finally, if Trump were convicted and yet prevail in his quest for the presidency in 2024, Congress might choose to impeach him and remove him from office. Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution allows impeachment for “treason, bribery, and high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Whether that language would apply to Trump for indictments or convictions arising from his previous term or business dealings outside of office would be a question for Congress to decide. The precise meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” is unclear, and the courts are unlikely to second-guess the House in bringing an impeachment proceeding.
For sure, impeachment would remain an option—but it might be an unlikely one if Republicans maintained their majority in the House in 2024 and 2026.
Stefanie Lindquist is Foundation Professor of Law and Political Science at Arizona State University. She previously taught at Vanderbilt University, the University of Georgia and the University of Texas.
PHOENIX — Democrat Katie Hobbs was elected Arizona governor on Monday, defeating an ally of Donald Trump who falsely claimed the 2020 election was rigged and refused to say she would accept the results of her race this year.
Hobbs, who is Arizona’s secretary of state, rose to prominence as a staunch defender of the legitimacy of the last election and warned that her Republican rival, former television news anchor Kari Lake, would be an agent of chaos. Hobbs’ victory adds further evidence that Trump is weighing down his allies in a crucial battleground state as the former president gears up for an announcement of a 2024 presidential run.
She will succeed Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who was prohibited by term limit laws from running again. She’s the first Democrat to be elected governor in Arizona since Janet Napolitano in 2006.
“For the Arizonans who did not vote for me, I will work just as hard for you — because even in this moment of division, I believe there is so much more that connects us,” Hobbs said in a statement declaring victory. “This was not just about an election — it was about moving this state forward and facing the challenges of our generation.”
Lake did not immediately comment after the race was called.
The Associated Press called the governor’s race for Hobbs after the latest round of vote releases gave her a big enough lead that the AP determined she would not relinquish it. The AP concluded that, even though Lake had been posting increasingly larger margins in vote updates from Maricopa County, she was not gaining a big enough share to overtake Hobbs and was running out of remaining votes.
Vote counting had gone on for days since the Tuesday election, as officials continued to tally massive amounts of late-arriving ballots.
A onetime Republican stronghold where Democrats made gains during the Trump era, Arizona has been central to efforts by Trump and his allies to cast doubt on Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory with false claims of fraud. This year, many Trump-endorsed candidates faltered in general elections in battleground states, though his pick in the Nevada governor’s race, Republican Joe Lombardo, defeated an incumbent Democrat.
Before entering politics, Hobbs was a social worker who worked with homeless youth and an executive with a large domestic violence shelter in the Phoenix area. She was elected to the state Legislature in 2010, serving one term in the House and three terms in the Senate, rising to minority leader.
Hobbs eked out a narrow win in 2018 as secretary of state and was thrust into the center of a political storm as Arizona became the centerpiece of the efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost. She appeared constantly on cable news defending the integrity of the vote count.
The attention allowed her to raise millions of dollars and raise her profile. When she announced her campaign for governor, other prominent Democrats declined to run and Hobbs comfortably won her primary.
She ran a cautious campaign, sticking largely to scripted and choreographed public appearances. She declined to participate in a debate with Lake, contending that Lake would turn it into a spectacle by spouting conspiracy theories and making false accusations.
She bet instead that voters would recoil against Lake, who picked verbal fights with journalists as cameras rolled and struck a combative tone toward Democrats and even the establishment Republicans who have long dominated state government.
Pre-election polls showed the race was tied, but Hobbs’ victory was still a surprise to many Democrats who feared her timidity would turn off voters. She overcame expectations in Maricopa and Pima counties, the metro Phoenix and Tucson areas where the overwhelming majority of Arizona voters live. She also spent considerable time in rural areas, looking to minimize her losses in regions that traditionally support Republicans.
Lake is well known in much of the state after anchoring the evening news in Phoenix for more than two decades. She ran as a fierce critic of the mainstream media, which she said is unfair to Republicans. She earned Trump’s admiration for her staunch commitment to questioning the results of the 2020 election, a stand she never wavered from even after winning the GOP primary.
She baselessly accused election officials of slow-rolling the vote count this year and prioritizing Democratic ballots as she narrowly trailed Hobbs for days following the election.
She has cited a problem with printers at about a third of Maricopa County vote centers that led on-site tabulators to reject some ballots. Election officials told voters to put ballots in a separate box to be counted later, but Republican leaders told their supporters to ignore that instruction and lines in some places backed up.
The problem affected about 7% of ballots cast in person on Election Day and about 1% of the total cast in the county.
Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone said he increased security around the elections center Monday in anticipation that the race would be called and emotions could run hot, though he said there was no specific threat. Demonstrators have gathered outside the building for several days but have remained peaceful, he said.
“I think we’re getting close to the end game so I want to be sure that we’re prepared,” Penzone told reporters in a news conference hours before the race call.
The sheriff’s office was caught off guard two years ago when armed and angry protesters descended on the elections building in downtown Phoenix after Fox News and the AP called Arizona for Biden, marking the first time a Democrat won the state in more than two decades.
NEW YORK — Prosecutors in New York do not plan to bring criminal charges against Rudy Giuliani in connection with a probe into his interactions with Ukrainian figures, they revealed in a letter to a judge Monday.
They said they made the decision after a review of evidence resulting from raids on his residence and law office in April 2021. Federal prosecutors ware investigating whether Giuliani’s dealings with figures in Ukraine in the run-up to the 2020 election required him to register as a foreign agent.
Prosecutors said a grand jury probe that led to the issuance of warrants that resulted in the seizure of Giuliani’s electronic devices had concluded.
They said that based on information currently available, criminal charges would not be forthcoming.
“In my business, we would call that total victory,” Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, told The Associated Press. “We appreciate what the U.S. attorney’s has done. We only wish they had done it a lot sooner.”
Sixteen of Giuliani’s devices were seized as part of a federal investigation into Giuliani’s interactions with Ukrainian figures to see whether he violated a law governing lobbying on behalf of foreign countries or entities.
Giuliani is an attorney and a former personal lawyer for ex-President Donald Trump. His communications with clients are generally protected by law, though there are exceptions.
Giuliani maintained throughout the probe that he had done nothing wrong. At the time of the filing by prosecutors, Giuliani was on a talk show and apparently unaware of the development.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — The three students killed in a shooting at the University of Virginia were all members of the school’s football team, the school’s president said.
President Jim Ryan told a Monday morning news conference the shooting happened Sunday night on a school bus of students returning from an off-campus trip.
The suspect has been identified as Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., who is also student.
The incident occurred Sunday near a university parking garage. In addition to the three football players killed, two others were reported to have been wounded.
Police went on a manhunt Monday in search of the student suspected in the attack, officials said.
During a press conference in the 11 o’clock hour local time, the university police chief, Tim Longo, was given word that the suspect was in custody. He immediately returned to the microphone and reported that update to the assembled reporters.
Classes at the university were canceled Monday, following the violence Sunday night, and the Charlottesville campus was unusually quiet as authorities searched for the suspect, whom university President Ryan identified as Christopher Darnell Jones Jr.
A shelter-in-place order to the university community had been lifted less than an hour earlier after a law-enforcement search of the campus.
In a letter to the university posted on social media, Ryan said the shooting happened around 10:30 p.m. Sunday.
The university’s emergency management issued an alert Sunday night notifying the campus community of an “active attacker firearm.” The message warned students to shelter in place following a report of shots fired on Culbreth Road on the northern outskirts of campus.
Access to the shooting scene was blocked by police vehicles Monday morning.
Officials urged students to shelter in place and helicopters could be heard overhead as a smattering of traffic and dog-walkers made their way around campus.
The university police department posted a notice online saying multiple police agencies including the state police were searching for a suspect who was considered “armed and dangerous.”
In his letter to campus, the university president said Jones was suspected to have committed the shooting and that he was a student.
“This is a message any leader hopes never to have to send, and I am devastated that this violence has visited the University of Virginia,” Ryan wrote. “This is a traumatic incident for everyone in our community.”
Eva Surovell, 21, the editor in chief of the student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, said that after students received an alert about an active shooter late Sunday night, she ran to the parking garage, but saw that it was blocked off by police. When she went to a nearby intersection, she was told to go shelter in place.
“A police officer told me that the shooter was nearby and I needed to return home as soon as possible,” she said.
She waited with other reporters, hoping to get additional details, then returned to her room to start working on the story. The gravity of the situation sunk in.
“My generation is certainly one that’s grown up with generalized gun violence, but that doesn’t make it any easier when it’s your own community,” she said.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said agents were responding to the campus to assist in the investigation.
The Virginia shooting came as police were investigating the deaths of four University of Idaho students found Sunday in a home near the campus. Officers with the Moscow Police Department discovered the deaths when they responded to a report of an unconscious person just before noon, according to a news release from the city. Authorities have called the deaths suspected homicides but did not release additional details, including the cause of death.
On April 16, 2007, another Virginia university was the scene of what was then one of the deadliest shootings in U.S. history. Twenty-seven students and five faculty members at Virginia Tech were gunned down by Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old mentally ill student who later died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Billionaire Dallas Maverick’s owner Mark Cuban recently offered his perspective on the implosion of crypto platform FTX late this week.
“‘That’s somebody running a company that’s just dumb-as-fucking greedy.’”
— Mark Cuban
Cuban, speaking on Friday at a conference in Washington, D.C. hosted by Sports Business Journal, shared the view that avarice was at the root of the downfall of one-time crypto darling Sam Bankman-Fried, whose firm FTX Group just filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
“So what does Sam Bankman [Fried] do, he’s just–‘gimme more, gimme more, gimme more.’ So I’m gonna borrow money, loan it to an affiliated company and hope and pretend to myself that the FTT tokens that are in there on my balance sheet are gonna to sustain their value.”
FTX’s collapse marks a stunning turnabout for a company, which was once valued at $26 billion, and whose founder, Bankman-Fried was viewed by many in the crypto industry as a venerable actor in the Wild West of digital exchanges.
On Thursday, the 30-year-old entrepreneur tweeted: “I f—ked up, and should have done better,” referencing the collapse of his exchange.
Embattled FTX, short billions of dollars, sought bankruptcy protection after the exchange experienced the crypto equivalent of a bank run. FTX, an affiliated hedge fund Alameda Research, and dozens of other related companies also filed a bankruptcy petition in Delaware on Friday morning. Boasting a nearly $16 billion fortune recently, Sam Bankman Fried’s net worth had all but evaporated in the wake of the FTX implosion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The price of FTX’s native token FTT went down about 88.8% over the past seven days to around $2.74, according to CoinMarketCap data.
The U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are looking into the crypto exchange to determine whether any criminal activity or securities offenses were committed.
Regulators and are examining whether FTX used customer deposits to fund bets at Alameda Research, a no-no in traditional markets, according to reports.
Cuban, who is one of the stars of the investing show “Shark Tank” and owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, is a big investor in crypto and blockchain-related platforms. According to a CNBC report, he has said that 80% of his investments that aren’t on Shark Tank are crypto-centric.
Cuban mentioned Voyager in his Friday interview. Representatives for the billionaire investor didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Mavericks owner took to Twitter on Saturday to say that the crypto implosions “have been banking blowups. Lending to the wrong entity, misvaluations of collateral, arrogant arbs, followed by depositor runs.”
