The United States is “engaged with Syria, engaged with third countries” to try to bring detained journalist Austin Tice home, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.
“We are extensively engaged with regard to Austin, engaged with Syria, engaged with third countries, seeking to find a way to get him home. And we’re not going to relent until we do,” Blinken said in remarks at a Washington Post event on World Press Freedom Day.
Tice was taken hostage in Syria in 2012. President Joe Biden declared last year that the US government knows “with certainty that he has been held by the Syrian regime” and called on Damascus to cooperate on efforts to release him.
The government of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has not publicly acknowledged they are detaining Tice. The US does not have diplomatic relations with the Syrian regime and has voiced opposition to rapprochement with Assad.
Blinken did not provide details about the engagements to bring Tice home. White House and State Department officials would not confirm a report from the Wall Street Journal that US officials had held talks with Syrian officials in Oman.
“We cannot confirm any specific meetings past or present. As you know in general meetings and negotiations to secure the release of wrongfully detained Americans, that is incredibly sensitive,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a White House briefing. “We want to be really, really careful and mindful and don’t want to confirm any specific conversation from the past or in the present.”
CNN reported last August that the Biden administration had direct engagements with the Syrian government in an effort to secure Tice’s release. In 2020 under the Trump administration, Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens secretly traveled to Damascus and met with Assad regime officials.
Austin Tice’s mother Debra Tice told CNN Monday that she thinks that the administration is committed to bringing her son home but “they stumble over what needs to be done.” She said she had no doubt that her son would walk free.
Biden paid tribute to Austin Tice and other wrongfully detained Americans, including Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan in Russia, in remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday.
A number of family members of wrongfully detained Americans – many of whom have joined forces in an organization called the “Bring Our Families Home” campaign – as well as those who had been freed from detention gathered in Washington, DC, this week to seek a meeting with the president and call on the US government to do more to secure the release of their loved ones.
“Although our loved ones are wrongfully detained and held hostage abroad, including China, including Russia, including Iran, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela, our voices are stronger together,” said Harrison Li, the son of Kai Li, who is detained in China.
“Although each case has its own idiosyncrasies, we all need the same things: for President Biden to meet with us, and to use all tools to bring them home,” he said.
“We have asked for a meeting with the president for so long now that I frankly don’t know how else to ask or what else to say,” Hannah Sharghi, whose father Emad Shargi is detained in Iran, said at a news conference Wednesday.
Former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, once again refused to concede that he lost the 2020 election and repeated false claims about it being stolen at a CNN town hall in New Hampshire on Wednesday.
Taking questions from GOP primary voters at the town hall moderated by “CNN This Morning” anchor Kaitlan Collins, Trump remained defiant about the 2020 election as well as the myriad investigations into him – making clear that he’s sticking to the script he’s delivered over the past two years on conservative media.
The town hall at Saint Anselm College – his first appearance on CNN since 2016 – came as unprecedented legal clouds hang over him as he seeks to become only the second commander in chief ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms. New Hampshire, home to the first-in-the-nation GOP primary, is also home to many swing voters and is a state he lost in both 2016 and 2020 after winning the primaries.
The audience of Republicans and undeclared voters who plan to vote in the GOP primary cheered Trump throughout the evening, including when he attacked Tuesday’s jury verdict that found he sexually abused former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll. Trump mocked Carroll on Wednesday while downplaying the significance of the $5 million the jury awarded her for battery and defamation.
The former president said he would pardon “a large portion” of the rioters at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and even pulled out a printout of his own tweets from that day in an attempt to deflect blame as Collins pressed him on why he waited three hours before telling the rioters to leave the Capitol.
“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Trump said Wednesday night.
When Collins pressed Trump on the Manhattan federal jury finding Trump sexually abused Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in 1996, Trump suggested it was helping his poll numbers.
When asked if the jury’s decision would deter women from voting for him, the former president said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Trump insulted Carroll, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and even Collins when she pressed him on a question about why he hadn’t returned classified documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago.
“It’s very simple – you’re a nasty person, I’ll tell you,” Trump said on stage.
Trump also took questions from New Hampshire voters on the economy and policy issues, such as abortion. The former president, who solidified the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that struck down Roe v. Wade, repeatedly declined to say whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if he won a second term.
Trump suggested Republicans should refuse to raise the debt limit if the White House does not agree to spending cuts.
“I say to the Republicans out there – congressmen, senators – if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default, and I don’t believe they’re going to do a default because I think the Democrats will absolutely cave, will absolutely cave because you don’t want to have that happen, but it’s better than what we’re doing right now because we’re spending money like drunken sailors,” Trump said.
When Collins asked him to clarify whether the US should default if the White House doesn’t agree to cuts, Trump said, “We might as well do it now than do it later.”
Trump pleaded not guilty last month to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump also faces potential legal peril in both Washington, DC – where a special counsel is leading a pair of investigations – and in Georgia, where the Fulton County district attorney plans to announce charges this summer from the investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State.
Still, the twice-impeached former president has repeatedly said that any charges will not stop him from running for president, dismissing all of the investigations as politically motivated witch hunts. That’s a view many GOP voters share, according to recent surveys. Nearly 70% of Republican primary voters in a recent NBC News poll said investigations into the former president “are politically motivated” and that “no other candidate is like him, we must support him.”
Trump was pressed on the investigation into his handling of classified documents and why he didn’t return all of the documents in his possession after receiving a subpoena. He responded by pointing out the classified documents found at the homes of others – including President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. But they both returned the documents once they discovered they had them in their possession.
The FBI obtained a search warrant and retrieved more than 100 classified documents from Trump’s Florida resort in August 2022, which came after he had received a subpoena to return documents in June 2022 and after his attorney had asserted that all classified material in his possession had been returned.
Asked during the town hall whether he showed the classified documents to anyone at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said, “Not really.”
The former president would not say whether he wants Russia or Ukraine to win the war during Wednesday’s town hall, instead saying that he wants the war to end.
“I don’t think in terms of winning and losing. I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people,” he said.
When asked again whether or not the former president wants Ukraine to win, Trump did not answer directly, but instead claimed that he would be able to end the war in 24 hours.
“Russians and Ukrainians, I want them to stop dying,” Trump said. “And I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”
Trump said he thinks that “(Russian President Vladimir) Putin made a mistake” by invading Ukraine, but he stopped short of saying that Putin is a war criminal.
That’s something that “should be discussed later,” Trump said.
“If you say he’s a war criminal, it’s going to be a lot tougher to make a deal to make this thing stopped,” he said.
While a handful of rivals have entered the Republican presidential primary – and Trump’s biggest potential rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has not yet officially launched a bid – Trump has maintained a healthy lead in early GOP primary polling. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Sunday, 43% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents named Trump unprompted when asked who they would like to see the party nominate in 2024, compared with 20% naming DeSantis, and 2% or less naming any other candidate.
Trump’s participation in the town hall was indicative of a broader campaign strategy to try to expand his appeal beyond conservative media viewers, CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported earlier Wednesday. He’s surrounded himself with a more organized team and has been making smaller retail politics stops while scaling back larger rallies – signs of a more traditional campaign than his 2016 and 2020 operations. He lost that 2020 race by about 7 million votes, although he continues to falsely claim it was stolen from him – claims he stuck to on Wednesday night.
There have been warning signs for the GOP that the obsession with the 2020 election isn’t palatable beyond the base. Many of Trump’s handpicked candidates who embraced his election lies in swing states lost in last year’s midterm elections. And his advisers acknowledge he still has work to do to engage with Republican voters outside of his loyal base of supporters, multiple sources told CNN.
But that didn’t mean Trump was ready to acknowledge the reality that he lost the 2020 election. And if he becomes the GOP nominee in 2024, Trump said Wednesday he would not commit to accepting the results regardless of the outcome, saying that he would do so if he believes “it’s an honest election.”
“If I think it’s an honest election, I would be honored to,” he said.
This story has been updated with additional details from the town hall.
Donald Trump’s attorney on Wednesday said the former president “wishes” to appear at next week’s civil trial where a jury will hear columnist E. Jean Carroll’s assault and defamation claims against him – but his attendance should not be necessary because it would be a “burden” on the city and court.
The letter to the judge, from attorney Joseph Tacopina, appears to argue that Trump shouldn’t attend his civil trial without saying he won’t.
“Defendant Trump wishes to appear at trial,” the letter states, but adds “concern” that New York City and the court would face “logistical and financial burdens” to have a former president travel with the Secret Service and other security protections to the proceedings.
“In order for Defendant Trump to appear, his movement would need to be coordinated preliminarily by a Secret Service advance team hours beforehand each day that he is present, so that a tactical plan may be developed,” such as locking down parts of the courthouse, Tacopina said. Tacopina raised the disruption Trump’s recent criminal arraignment caused in the state court as an example.
“Your consideration is greatly appreciated,” Tacopina added.
Jury selection begins next Tuesday in Carroll’s lawsuit alleging that Trump raped her in a New York dressing room in the mid-1990s and then defamed her years later when he denied it took place, said she wasn’t his “type,” and suggested she made up the story to promote a new book. Trump has denied all allegations against him.
If he were to be called to testify, Trump would show up in person, Tacopina said. If he does not appear, his legal team asks the judge to instruct jurors that he isn’t required to attend and he wouldn’t be there because of the logistical burdens.
Carroll plans to attend the trial, her attorney has said.
In a response to the court on Wednesday afternoon, Carroll’s attorney criticized Trump’s reasoning, but indicated that a live appearance from the former president was not needed for the trial.
“Either way, Ms. Carroll has a right to play Donald Trump’s deposition at trial,” the lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, wrote, “so she has no need for him to testify live.”
“Mr. Trump has yet to answer the Court’s question, and he now asks the Court to deliver an excuse to the jury in the event he decides not to attend trial,” Kaplan wrote. “Given the gravity of the allegations at issue in this case, one might expect Mr. Trump to appear in person. But he is obviously free to choose otherwise … This Court and the City it calls home are fully equipped to handle any logistical burdens that may result from Mr. Trump’s appearance at a weeklong trial.”
They also noted Trump has traveled for other recent events, including an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, and has a campaign appearance scheduled two days into the trial.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
The House advanced a slate of bills Tuesday afternoon, bringing a floor blockade to an end after a tentative agreement was reached between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and hardline conservatives who had brought the chamber floor to a halt in retaliation over how GOP leadership handled the debt ceiling deal.
The stalemate is at an end for now, but tensions continue to erupt in the House Republican conference, including from moderates frustrated and angry at conservatives for halting floor action.
The floor blockade also showed how a relatively small faction of conservatives can derail or hold hostage McCarthy’s agenda – and the hardliners have made clear they reserve the right to use every tool available to them to potentially make life harder for GOP leadership in the future.
With the stalemate over at least for now, the House held votes Tuesday evening, including passing a measure to block a pistol brace regulation and failing to override a presidential veto on a measure to overturn a DC policing bill aimed at accountability and reform.
Multiple members leaving the speaker’s office on Monday said the hardline conservatives agreed to end the blockade while they continue discussions with McCarthy about future spending decisions and a new “power-sharing agreement,” though they said the exact details are still being worked out and did not say whether they would ever be made public or put into a written statement.
But even with the news that House action will proceed, frustration among moderates over the blockade was on full display Tuesday morning during a closed-door GOP conference meeting.
GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Minnesota slammed the House Freedom Caucus blockade of the House floor in a heated, expletive-laden speech during the closed-door meeting, according to multiple sources in the room.
Orden got up at the mics and said his daughter is dying of cancer, and yet he still “shows up to work every f—ing day,” and complained that he has been trying to introduce bills to save lives, specifically a train bill, but “it’s not shit that gets on Fox News.”
Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas then responded and said he also has constituents he represents and that he came to Washington to shrink government. Roy declined to comment on the interaction after the meeting, but did defend his efforts to hold up the floor in exchange for more concessions from McCarthy.
Some members were happy Van Orden spoke up during the meeting, as they have been frustrated that a small band of hardliners have been able to hold things up.
Reps. Mike Lawler of New York and Tom McClintock of California also stood up to blast the hardliners for holding the floor hostage and warned that the House GOP cannot be controlled by a small faction.
House GOP leadership has attempted to downplay the issues within the conference.
McCarthy was asked by CNN about the drama inside the meeting and he called it “a little bit of fun.”
When CNN pressed House GOP Whip Tom Emmer on internal conference dynamics given the House has not voted in a week following the action by House Freedom Caucus, he said that “communication and respect” are key to moving forward with a unified conference.
The hardline conservatives who have held up legislative action have done so in protest of the deal McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden to raise the nation’s borrowing limit last month. Conservatives wanted the debt ceiling deal to cut more federal spending than it did, and several far-right members of McCarthy’s conference accused him of reneging on commitments he made to them in private in order to win the speakership in January.
After the meeting, Roy wouldn’t comment on the specific comments Van Orden made, but when asked by CNN to respond to frustrations from his colleagues over the floor standstill said, “Well, my experience in life is that the more Congress is open more than American people should be nervous. But the first five months this year we were united doing good things, and it’s my aim to get us back into that row boat.”
Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon said, “there was a little bit of slugging going on,” as he exited the meeting, but noted that 95% of the conference is on McCarthy’s side.
House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar and Vice Chair Ted Lieu blasted House Republicans for shepherding through what they called a week of “chaos” in the lower chamber.
“We haven’t voted for about a week because the Republicans lost control of the House floor,” Lieu said. “So we had all this chaos, the forced shut down.”
This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.
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.
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.
Ellen Min doesn’t go to the grocery store anymore. She avoids bars and going out to eat with her friends; festivals and community events are out, too. This year, she opted not to take her kids to the local St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Min isn’t a shut-in. She’s just a Korean American from central Pennsylvania.
Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.
“You can’t avoid paying attention to the rhetoric, because it has a direct impact on our lives,” Min said.
That rhetoric surged again this week as a hostile House committee grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew for more than five hours on Thursday about the app’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. After lawmakers repeatedly accused Chew, who is Singaporean, of working for the Chinese government and tried to associate him with the Chinese Communist Party, Vanessa Pappas, a top TikTok executive, condemned the hearing as “rooted in xenophobia.”
Chew had taken pains to distance TikTok from China, going so far as to anglicize his name for American audiences and to play up his academic credentials — he holds degrees from University College London and Harvard Business School. But it was not enough to prevent lawmakers from blasting TikTok as “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party” and as “the spy in Americans’ pockets,” all while mangling pronunciations of Chew’s name and the names of other officials at its parent company, ByteDance. After Chew’s testimony, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said the CEO should be “deported immediately” and banned from the United States, saying his defense of TikTok was “beneath contempt.”
There are good reasons to be mistrustful of ByteDance given that it is subject to China’s extremely broad surveillance laws. (TikTok has failed to assuage concerns the Chinese government could pressure ByteDance to improperly access the data, despite a plan by TikTok to “firewall” the information.) And the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to numerous other issues clashes with important American values, said many Asian Americans interviewed for this article.
But they also warned that policymakers’ choice to use inflammatory speech — in some cases, language tinged with 1950s-era, Red Scare-style McCarthyism — endangers countless innocent Americans by association. Moreover, politicians’ increasingly strident tone is creating conditions for new discriminatory policies at home and the potential for even more anti-Asian violence, civil rights leaders said.
“We are afraid that, more and more, the actions and the language of the government is premised on the assumption that just because we are Chinese or have cultural ties to China that we could be disloyal, or be spies, or be under the influence of a foreign government,” said Zhengyu Huang, president of the Committee of 100, an organization co-founded by the late architect IM Pei, the musician Yo-Yo Ma and other prominent Chinese Americans. “We want to deliver the message: Not only are we not a national security liability — we are a national security asset.”
But as the country wrestles with China’s influence as a competitive global power, caught in the middle are tens of millions of Americans like Min who, thanks to their appearance, may now face greater suspicion or hostility than they experienced even during the pandemic, according to Asian American lawmakers, civil society groups and ordinary citizens.
The heated rhetoric surrounding China has undergone a shift from the pandemic’s early days, when xenophobia linked to Covid-19 was unambiguous.
At the time, Asian Americans feared an uptick in violence inspired by derogatory phrases such as “Kung-flu” and “China virus.” That language had emerged amid then-President Donald Trump’s wider criticisms of China, which had led to a damaging trade war with the country. It was against that backdrop that Trump first threatened to ban TikTok, a move some critics said was an attempt to stoke xenophobia.
In recent years, criticism of China has significantly expanded to encompass even more aspects of the US-China relationship. Concerns about China have gone mainstream as US national security officials and lawmakers have publicly grappled with state-backed ransomware attacks and other hacking attempts. The Biden administration has sought to confront China on how the internet should be governed, and like the Trump administration, it’s now taking aim at TikTok, again.
As that shift has occurred, criticism of China has stylistically evolved from blatant name-calling to the more clinical vocabulary of national security, allowing an undercurrent of xenophobia to lurk beneath the respectable veneer of geopolitics, civil rights leaders said.
In January, House lawmakers stood up a new select committee specifically focused on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.” At its first hearing, the panel’s chairman, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, said: “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”
A week later, US intelligence officials warned that the Chinese Communist Party represents the “most consequential threat” to US global leadership. An unclassified intelligence community report released the same day said China views competition with the United States as an “epochal geopolitical shift.” (Even so, the report maintained that the “most lethal threat to US persons and interests” continues to be racially motivated extremism and violence, particularly by White supremacy groups.)
While some policymakers have added that their issue is with the Chinese government, not the Chinese people or Asians in general, leaders of Asian descent say the caveat has too often been a footnote in debates about China and not emphasized nearly enough. Leaving it unsaid or merely implied creates room for listeners to draw bigoted conclusions, critics said.
“That can’t be a footnote; it can’t be an afterthought,” said Charles Jung, a California employment attorney and the national coordinator for Always With Us, a nationwide memorial event to remember the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women. “I’m speaking specifically, directly to both GOP and Democratic politicians: Be mindful of the words that you use. Because the words you use can have real world impacts on the bodies of Asian American people on the streets.”
The current climate has led to at least one US lawmaker directly questioning the loyalty of a fellow member of Congress.
California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden. Gooden’s remarks were swiftly condemned by his congressional colleagues. But to Chu, the incident was an example of the way politics surrounding China, technology and national security have fueled anti-Asian sentiment.
“Rising tensions with China have clearly led to an increase in anti-Asian xenophobia that has real consequences for our communities,” Chu told CNN.
Concerns about xenophobia are bipartisan. Rep. Young Kim, a California Republican, told CNN there is “no question” that anti-Asian hate crimes have risen since the pandemic.
“This is unacceptable,” said Kim. “Asian American issues are American issues, and all Americans deserve to be treated with respect. We can treat all Americans with respect and still be wary of threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.”
But even in discussing the Chinese government’s real, demonstrated risks to US security, the way that some Americans describe those dangers is counterproductive, needlessly provocative and historically inaccurate, said Rep. Andy Kim, a New York Democrat and a member of the House select committee. Even the name “Chinese Communist Party” can itself prime listeners to adopt a Cold War mentality — a framework whose analytical value is dubious, Kim argued.
“A lot of my colleagues, especially on the select committee, use rhetoric like, ‘This is a new Cold War,’” said Kim. “First of all, it’s not true: The Soviet Union was a very different competitor than China. And it’s framed in a very zero-sum way … It’s very much being talked about as if their entire way of life is incompatible with ours and cannot coexist with ours, and that heightens the tension.”
In a November op-ed, Gallagher and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio directly linked that rhetoric to TikTok, calling for the app to be banned due to the United States being “locked in a new Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party, one that senior military advisers warn could turn hot over Taiwan at any time.”
Just because China may view its dynamic with the United States as an epic struggle does not mean Americans must be goaded into doing the same, Kim argued. Beyond the violence it could trigger domestically, a stark confrontational framing could cause the United States to blunder into poor policy choices.
For example, he said, the right mindset could mean the difference between legally fraught “whack-a-mole” attempts to ban Chinese-affiliated social media companies versus passing a historic national privacy law that safeguards Americans’ data from all prying eyes, no matter what tech company may be collecting it.
Security researchers who have examined TikTok’s app say that the company’s invasive collection of user data is more of an indictment of lax government policies on privacy, rather than a reflection of any TikTok-specific wrongdoing or national security risk.
“TikTok is only a product of the entire surveillance capitalism economy,” said Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “Governments should try to better protect user information, instead of focusing on one particular app without good evidence.”
Asked how he would advise policymakers to look at TikTok, Lin said: “What I would call for is more evidence-based policy.” Instead, some policymakers appear to have run in the opposite direction.
Anti-China sentiment has already led to policies that risk violating Asian-Americans’ constitutional rights, several civil society groups said.
John Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, pointed to the Justice Department’s now-shuttered “China Initiative,” a Trump-era program intended to hunt down Chinese spies but that produced a string of discrimination complaints and case dismissals involving innocent Americans swept up in the dragnet. The Biden administration shut down the program last year.
More recently, Yang said, proposed laws in Texas and Virginia aimed at keeping US land out of the hands of those with foreign ties would create impossible-to-satisfy tests for Asian-Americans, showing how anti-China fervor threatens to infringe on the rights of many US citizens.
“National security has often been used as a pretext specifically against Asian-Americans,” Yang said, referring to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the racial profiling of Muslim-Americans following Sept. 11. “We should remember that many Chinese-Americans came to this country to escape the authoritarian regime of China.”
Though he fears the situation for Asian-Americans will get worse before it gets better, Yang and other advocates called for US policymakers to stress from the outset that their quarrel lies with the Chinese government and not with people of Chinese descent.
“We know from experience in the United States that once you demonize Chinese people, all Asian people living in this country face the brunt of that rhetoric,” said Jung. “And you see it not just in spy balloons and the reactions surrounding it and TikTok and Huawei, but also in modern-day racist alien land laws.”
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Min was no stranger to racially motivated violence: Her home was regularly vandalized with eggs, tomatoes and epithet-laden graffiti (“Go home, gooks”); her father once discovered a crude homemade explosive stuffed in his car.
But fears of racism stoked by modern US political rhetoric has forced Min to change how her family lives in ways they never had to during her childhood.
Last year, amid another spate of assaults targeting elderly Asian-Americans, Min said her mother sold the family dry-cleaning business and moved to Korea, following Min’s father who had moved the year before.
“It was a sad reality to say that as much as we want our family close to us and their grandchildren, they will be safer in Korea,” Min said.
A Texas man facing charges in connection to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol opened fire on law enforcement officers last week when they arrived at his house in the Dallas area for a welfare check, according to an affidavit.
Nathan Donald Pelham, who is charged with misdemeanors for entering the restricted Capitol building and disorderly conduct, now faces a charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm after opening fire on authorities from Hunt County Sheriff’s Office, according to court documents.
Politico first reported the standoff with Pelham. CNN has reached out to Pelham’s attorney for comment.
Pelham’s father called law enforcement on April 12, warning that his son had a gun and was threatening suicide, the affidavit said. That same day, an FBI agent had called Pelham to notify him of a warrant for his arrest related to charges from the insurrection and Pelham had agreed to turn himself in the following week.
After arriving at Pelham’s home and speaking to a neighbor, officers saw a young girl, Pelham’s daughter, walk out of the house and she was put in a patrol car for safety, according to the affidavit.
Then authorities from the sheriff’s department heard gunshots coming from inside the house, the affidavit said.
“Deputy J.W. reported that the gunshots were spread out in time and that they were not towards the HCSO personnel,” the agent wrote. “At approximately 9:38 p.m., Pelham’s father arrived on scene. Deputy J.W. heard another gunshot and reported that ‘the bullet from this gunshot came in so close proximity to myself that I could hear the distinct whistling sound as the bullet traveled by me and then strike a metal object to my right side.’”
The standoff lasted until shortly after midnight when law enforcement left without arresting Pelham, according to the affidavit. Pelham was arrested on Tuesday, according to online court records.
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.”
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.”
The US Supreme Court on Friday put on hold the execution of Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma death row inmate whose capital conviction the state attorney general has said he could no longer support.
The latest round of litigation was brought to the Supreme Court by Glossip, with the support of the Oklahoma Attorney’s General office, who asked for his May 18 execution to be set aside.
The emergency hold on his execution will stay in place while the justices consider his request that they formally take up his case.
There were no noted dissents from Friday’s order. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in Friday’s ruling.
Glossip has maintained his innocence, having been convicted in 1998 of capital murder for ordering the killing of his boss.
A review launched by Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general found that prosecutors had failed to disclose evidence to Glossip that they were obligated to produce and that the evidence showed that the prosecutors’ key witness – the supposed accomplice of Glossip’s who committed the murder – had given false testimony.
Despite Oklahoma’s assertions that it could no longer stand by Glossip’s conviction, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeal declined Glossip’s request that his execution be halted.
In their filings with the US Supreme Court, Glossip’s attorneys argued that – in addition to the obviously irreparable harm he would suffer if the execution moves forward – Oklahoma “will also suffer harm from its Department of Corrections executing a person whom the State has concluded should never have been convicted of murder, let alone sentenced to die, in the first place.”
Glossip’s case has been before the Supreme Court before, including in a major challenge the justices heard in 2015 that he and other death row inmates brought to the lethal injection protocol used in executions.
In that case, the court’s conservative majority rejected the inmates’ claims that the lineup of the lethal drugs, which had come under scrutiny after several botched executions, violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Glossip has narrowly avoided being executed on several occasions, including months after the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling, when the execution was called off at the last minute by state officials because of questions about the drugs they were planning to use.
This story has been updated with additional details.
Kim Bok-dong is determined to share her story of sexual slavery until she’s no longer physically able
Kim was held prisoner by the Japanese military in a “comfort station” for five years, raped ceaselessly
She says she won’t rest until she receives a formal apology from the Japanese government
CNN
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Kim Bok-dong is 89 now, and is going blind and deaf. She knows her health is fading, and she can no longer walk unassisted. But her eyes burn bright with a passion borne of redressing her suffering of a lifetime ago.
She enters a meeting of Tokyo foreign correspondents in a wheelchair, visibly exhausted after a flight from Seoul and days of interviews and meetings.
The nightmares from five years as a sex slave of the Japanese army, from 1940 onwards, are still crystal clear. Kim is determined to share her story with anyone who will listen, until she’s no longer physically able.
“My only wish is to set the record straight about the past. Before I die,” Kim says.
Kim was a 14-year-old girl when the Japanese came to her village in Korea. She says they told her she had no choice but to leave her home and family to support the war effort by working at a sewing factory.
“There was no option not to go,” she recalls. “If we didn’t go, we’d be considered traitors,”
Instead of going to a sewing factory, Kim says she ended up in Japanese military brothels in half a dozen countries. Along with about 30 other women, she says she was locked in a room and forced to do things no teenage girl – no woman – should ever have to do.
Kim describes seemingly endless days of soldiers lined up outside the brothel, called a “comfort station.”
Often they were so close to the front lines, they could hear the battles of World War Two happening all around them.
“Our job was to revitalize the soldiers,” she says. “On Saturdays, they would start lining up at noon. And it would last until 8pm. There was always a long line of soldiers. On Sunday it was 8 a.m to 5 p.m. Again, a long line. I didn’t have the chance to count how many.”
Kim estimates each Japanese soldier took around three minutes. They usually kept their boots and leg wraps on, hurriedly finishing so the next solider could have his turn. Kim says it was dehumanizing, exhausting, and often excruciating.
“When it was over, I couldn’t even get up. It went on for such a long time. By the time the sun went down, I couldn’t use my lower body at all. After the first year, we were just like machines,” she says.
Kim believes the years of physical abuse took a permanent toll on her body. Tears stream down her cheeks as she explains how she was never able to fulfill her dream of having children.
“When I started, the Japanese military would often beat me because I wasn’t submissive,” Kim says.
“There are no words to describe my suffering. Even now. I can’t live without medicine. I’m always in pain.”
Kim is part of an NGO called the “Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan,” which is fighting for an apology.
Some Japanese prime ministers have personally apologized in the past, but the NGO director believes that it’s not nearly enough.
Tokyo maintains its legal liability for the wrongdoing was cleared by a bilateral claims treaty signed in 1965 between South Korea and Japan.
Kim’s story matches testimony from other so-called “comfort women.”
In Washington, as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe conducts a state visit to the United States, former Korean sex slave Lee Yong-soo makes a tearful plea to him, demanding an official apology for Japan’s sexual enslavement of an estimated 200,000 comfort women, mostly Korean and Chinese. Many have since passed away, but those still alive want individual compensation for their treatment.
Critics say Abe has not been vocal enough. They fear his government is trying to whitewash the past, to appease conservatives who feel comfort women were paid prostitutes, not victims of official military policy.
“When it comes to the comfort women sex slave system, it is pretty much unique to Japan. I think Nazi Germany had some of it to a smaller degree. But in the Japanese case it was large scale, and state-sponsored, essentially,” says Koichi Nakano, a professor of political science at Tokyo’s Sophia University.
Nakano points out that, since Abe first came to office his government has succeeded in removing references to “comfort women” from many Japanese school textbooks.
It’s part of what critics call Japan’s track record of glossing over its war crimes.
“(Comfort women) have gone through tremendous trauma. And in a way, the Japanese government risks a second rape by discrediting their testimonies and treating (their experiences) as if they were lies,” Nakano says.
Abe insists he and other Prime Ministers have made repeated apologies.
“I am deeply pained to think of the comfort women who experienced immeasurable pain and suffering,” Abe told diet lawmakers last year.
Abe gave a similarly worded statement during a press conference Tuesday in Washington, DC – leading critics to question the sincerity of Abe’s expressions of remorse over the issue. Abe has said he does not believe women were coerced to work in the military brothels.
Nakano says Abe and conservative lawmakers feel “singled out.”
“They feel there’s some sort of a plot by other Asian countries to sully the Japanese name to their advantage.”
With Abe’s historic visit to the U.S. just months before the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two, Kim wants President Obama to pressure his key Asian ally to do more to acknowledge history.
Meanwhile, Kim has had enough of the excuses she says are hampering her efforts to finally get peace.
“To say there’s no evidence is absurd. I am the evidence,” she says.
The FBI is investigating the “suspicious death” of a female passenger onboard the Carnival Sunshine cruise ship, the agency announced in a news release Sunday.
The woman was found unresponsive during the ship’s February 27 voyage to Nassau, Bahamas, the FBI field office in Columbia, South Carolina, said.
Medical staff and crew members attempted life-saving measures after learning she was unresponsive, but the woman was pronounced dead on the ship, the FBI said.
“Both the deceased and her husband were debarked in Nassau and Bahamian authorities have already investigated the circumstances and are conducting an autopsy,” Carnival Cruise Line spokesperson Matt Lupoli said in a statement to CNN.
“We are fully cooperating. This is a matter for authorities in the Bahamas and Charleston and we have no further comments,” said Lupoli.
On March 4, when the ship returned to Charleston, an FBI team processed the passenger’s room for evidence, the FBI release states.
The incident was isolated and there wasn’t a threat to any other passengers before or after the woman was found dead, the FBI said.
The FBI investigates suspicious deaths of US nationals as well as “certain crimes on the high seas,” the release states.
The incident remains under investigation, the FBI said.
The 19-year-old gunman who killed two people and wounded several others at his former high school left a note saying his struggles led to “the perfect storm for a mass shooter,” St. Louis police said.
Orlando Harris graduated from Central Visual and Performing Arts High School last year and returned Monday with an AR-15-style rifle, over 600 rounds of ammunition and more than a dozen high-capacity magazines, St. Louis police Commissioner Michael Sack said.
Harris died at a hospital after a gun battle with officers.
Investigators found a handwritten note in the car Harris drove to the school. Sack detailed some of the passages:
“I don’t have any friends. I don’t have any family. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never had a social life. I’ve been an isolated loner my entire life,” the note said, according to Sack. “This was the perfect storm for a mass shooter.”
Given the gunman’s extensive arsenal, the tragedy could have been “much worse,” the police chief said.
Authorities credited locked doors and a quick law enforcement response – including by off-duty officers – for preventing more deaths at the school.
But the shooter did not enter a checkpoint where security guards were stationed, said DeAndre Davis, director of safety and security for St. Louis Public Schools.
Davis also said the security guards stationed in the district’s schools are not armed, but mobile officers who respond to calls at schools are.
“For some people that would cause a stir of some sort,” Davis said Tuesday. “For us, we thought it’s best for our officers, for the normalcy of school for kids, to not have officers armed in the school.”
Student Alexandria Bell, 15, and teacher Jean Kuczka, 61, were gunned down in the attack.
One of the teacher’s colleagues, Kristie Faulstich, said Kuczka died protecting her students.
During the rush to evacuate students from the school, “One student looked at me and she said, ‘They shot Ms. Kuczka.’ And then she said that Ms. Kuczka had put herself between the gunman and the students,” Faulstich said.
Kuczka was looking forward to retiring in just a few years, her daughter Abigail Kuczka told CNN.
Alexandria was looking forward to her Sweet 16, her father Andre Bell told CNN affiliate KSDK.
“It’s a nightmare,” Bell said. “I am so upset. I need somebody – police, community folks, somebody – to make this make sense.”
He joins a growing list of parents grappling with the reality of their child being killed at school.
Across the country, at least 67 shootings have happened on school grounds so far this year.
As the shooting unfolded in St. Louis, a Michigan prosecutor who just heard the guilty plea of a teen who killed four students last fall said she was no longer shocked to hear of another school shooting.
“The fact that there is another school shooting does not surprise me – which is horrific,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said.
“We need to keep the public and inform the public … on how we can prevent gun violence. It is preventable, and we should never ever allow that to be something we just should have to live with.”
Bell, the father of the slain teen, said he’s struggling to get answers about what happened.
“I really want to know: How did that man get inside the school?” he told KSDK.
Authorities have said the doors were locked. But the St. Louis police commissioner declined to detail how the shooter got in.
“I don’t want to make this easy for anybody else,” Sack said.
The gunman didn’t conceal his weapon when entering the school, Sack said.
“When he entered, it was out … there was no mystery about what was going to happen,” the commissioner said. “He had it out and entered in an aggressive, violent manner.”
Faulstich said school’s principal came over the intercom and used the code phrase “Miles Davis is in the building” to let faculty know an active shooter was in the building.
“I instantly but calmly went to lock my door and turn off the lights,” the teacher said. “I then turned to my kids and told everyone to get in the corner.”
Within a minute of locking her second-floor classroom door, Faulstich said, someone started “violently jostling the handle, trying to get in.”
“I absolutely commend my students for their response,” Faulstich said. “Even in the moments when they were hearing gunfire going on all around they stood quiet and I know they did it to keep each other safe.”
Adrianne Bolden, a freshman at the school, told KSDK that students thought the school was conducting a drill – until they heard the sirens and noticed their teachers were scared.
“The teacher, she crawled over and she was asking for help to move the lockers to the door so they can’t get in,” Bolden said. “And we started hearing glass breaking from the outside and gunshots outside the door.”
Sophomore Brian Collins, 15, suffered gunshot wounds to his hands and jaws. He escaped by jumping from a classroom window onto a ledge, his mother VonDina Washington said.
“He told me they heard an active shooter notification over the intercom so everyone in the class hid,” Washington said. According to her son, the gunman then came into the classroom and fired several shots before leaving.
After the gunman left the third-floor classroom, Washington said another student opened a classroom window, and some of them jumped.
Brian has numbness in his hands and trouble moving some of his right-hand fingers.
“He’s really good at drawing,” Washington said. “He went to CVPA for visual arts, and we’re hoping he’ll be able to draw again.”
Math teacher David Williams told CNN everyone went into “drill mode,” turning off lights, locking doors and huddling in corners so they couldn’t be seen.
He said he heard someone trying to open the door and a man yell, “You are all going to f**king die.”
A short time later, a bullet came through one of the windows in his classroom, Williams said.
His classroom is on the third floor, where Sack said police engaged the shooter.
Eventually, an officer said she was outside, and the class ran out through nearby emergency doors.
Security personnel were at the school when the gunman arrived, St. Louis Public Schools Communications Director George Sells said.
“We had the seven personnel working in the building who did a wonderful job getting the alarm sounded quickly,” Sells said.
The commissioner did say the school doors being locked likely delayed the gunman.
“The school was closed and the doors were locked,” Sack told CNN affiliate KMOV. “The security staff did an outstanding job identifying the suspect’s efforts to enter, and immediately notified other staff and ensured that we were contacted.”
After widespread controversy over the delayed response in confronting school shooters in Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Florida, Sack said responding officers in St. Louis wasted no time rushing into the school and stopping the gunman.
“There was no sidewalk conference. There was no discussion,” Sack said. “There was no, ‘Hey, where are you going to?’ They just went right in.”
A call about an active shooter at the high school came in around 9:11 a.m., according to a timeline provided by the commissioner.
Police arrived on scene and made entry four minutes later.
Officers found the gunman and began “engaging him in a gunfight” at 9:23 a.m. Two minutes later, officers reported the suspect was down.
Asked about the eight minutes between officers’ arrival and making contact with the gunman, Sack said “eight minutes isn’t very long,” and that officers had to maneuver through a big school with few entrances and crowds of students and staff who were evacuating.
Police found the suspect “not just by hearing the gunfire, but by talking to kids and teachers as they’re leaving,” Sack said.
As phone calls came in from people hiding in different locations, officers fanned out and searched for students and staff to escort them out of the building.
Officers who were at a church down the street for a fellow officer’s funeral also responded to the shooting, the commissioner said.
A SWAT team that was together for a training exercise was also able to quickly load up and get to the school to perform a secondary sweep of the building, Sack said.
Some officers were “off duty; some were in T-shirts, but they had their (ballistic) vests on,” the commissioner said. “They did an outstanding job.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story gave the wrong age for 15-year-old Alexandria Bell, who was killed in the shooting.
