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Tag: federal prosecutor

  • Trump administration says it’s freezing child care funds to Minnesota after series of fraud probes

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    President Donald Trump’s administration announced on Tuesday that it’s freezing child care funds to Minnesota amid ongoing investigations into fraud allegations. Related video above: Group of Minnesota House and Senate Republicans calling on Gov. Tim Walz to resign over fraud investigationsActing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Jim O’Neill announced on the social platform X that the step is in response to “blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country.”“We have turned off the money spigot and we are finding the fraud,” he said.O’Neill said all payments through the Administration for Children and Families, an agency within the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, will require “justification and a receipt or photo evidence” before money is sent. They have also launched a fraud-reporting hotline and email address, he said.The announcement comes after years of investigation that began with the $300 million scheme at the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, for which 57 defendants in Minnesota have been convicted. Prosecutors said the organization was at the center of the country’s largest COVID-19-related fraud scam, when defendants exploited a state-run, federally funded program intended to provide food for children.A federal prosecutor alleged earlier in December that half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that supported 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen. Most of the defendants are Somali Americans, they said.O’Neill also called out a conservative influencer who had posted a video Friday claiming he found that day care centers operated by Somali residents in Minneapolis had committed up to $100 million in fraud. O’Neill said he has demanded Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz submit an audit of these centers that includes attendance records, licenses, complaints, investigations and inspections.Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, has said fraud will not be tolerated and his administration “will continue to work with federal partners to ensure fraud is stopped and fraudsters are caught.”Walz has said an audit due by late January should give a better picture of the extent of the fraud. He said his administration is taking aggressive action to prevent additional fraud. He has long defended how his administration responded.Minnesota’s most prominent Somali American, Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, has urged people not to blame an entire community for the actions of a relative few.

    WASHINGTON —

    President Donald Trump’s administration announced on Tuesday that it’s freezing child care funds to Minnesota amid ongoing investigations into fraud allegations.

    Related video above: Group of Minnesota House and Senate Republicans calling on Gov. Tim Walz to resign over fraud investigations

    Acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Jim O’Neill announced on the social platform X that the step is in response to “blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country.”

    “We have turned off the money spigot and we are finding the fraud,” he said.

    O’Neill said all payments through the Administration for Children and Families, an agency within the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, will require “justification and a receipt or photo evidence” before money is sent. They have also launched a fraud-reporting hotline and email address, he said.

    The announcement comes after years of investigation that began with the $300 million scheme at the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, for which 57 defendants in Minnesota have been convicted. Prosecutors said the organization was at the center of the country’s largest COVID-19-related fraud scam, when defendants exploited a state-run, federally funded program intended to provide food for children.

    A federal prosecutor alleged earlier in December that half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that supported 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen. Most of the defendants are Somali Americans, they said.

    O’Neill also called out a conservative influencer who had posted a video Friday claiming he found that day care centers operated by Somali residents in Minneapolis had committed up to $100 million in fraud. O’Neill said he has demanded Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz submit an audit of these centers that includes attendance records, licenses, complaints, investigations and inspections.

    Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, has said fraud will not be tolerated and his administration “will continue to work with federal partners to ensure fraud is stopped and fraudsters are caught.”

    Walz has said an audit due by late January should give a better picture of the extent of the fraud. He said his administration is taking aggressive action to prevent additional fraud. He has long defended how his administration responded.

    Minnesota’s most prominent Somali American, Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, has urged people not to blame an entire community for the actions of a relative few.

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  • ‘Betrayed’: Investors grapple with Trump commuting sentence of man who defrauded them

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    WASHINGTON — Jeffrey Rosenberg is still trying to understand why President Trump would free the man who defrauded him out of a quarter of a million dollars.

    Rosenberg, a retired wholesale produce distributor living in Nevada, has supported Trump since he entered politics, but the president’s decision in November to commute the sentence of former private equity executive David Gentile has left him angry and confused.

    “I just feel I’ve been betrayed,” Rosenberg, 68, said. “I don’t know why he would do this, unless there was some sort of gain somewhere, or some favor being called in. I am very disappointed. I kind of put him above this kind of thing.”

    Trump’s decision to release Gentile from prison less than two weeks into his seven-year sentence has drawn scrutiny from securities attorneys and a U.S. senator — all of whom say the White House’s explanation for the act of clemency is not adding up. It’s also drawn the ire of his victims.

    “I think it is disgusting,” said CarolAnn Tutera, 70, who invested more than $400,000 with Gentile’s company, GPB Capital. Gentile, she added, “basically pulled a Bernie Madoff and swindled people out of their money, and then he gets to go home to his wife and kids.”

    Gentile and his business partner, Jeffry Schneider, were convicted of securities and wire fraud in August 2024 for carrying out what federal prosecutors described as a $1.6-billion Ponzi scheme to defraud more than 10,000 investors. After an eight-week trial, it took a jury five hours to return a guilty verdict.

    More than 1,000 people attested to their losses after investing with GPB, according to federal prosecutors who described the victims as “hardworking, everyday people.”

    When Gentile and Schneider were sentenced in May, Joseph Nocella Jr., the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, and Christopher Raia, a senior official in the Justice Department, called their punishment “well deserved” and a warning to would-be fraudsters.

    “May today’s sentencing deter anyone who seeks to greedily profit off their clients through deceitful practices,” Raia said in a statement.

    Then, on Nov. 26 — just 12 days after Gentile reported to prison — Trump commuted his sentence with “no further fines, restitution, probation, or other conditions,” according to a grant of clemency signed by Trump. Under those terms, Gentile may not have to pay $15 million that federal prosecutors are seeking in forfeiture.

    Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters this month that prosecutors had failed to tie “supposedly fraudulent” representations to Gentile and that his conviction was a “weaponization of justice” led by the Biden administration — even though the sentences and convictions were lauded by Trump’s own appointees.

    The White House declined to say who advised Trump in the decision or whether Trump was considering granting clemency to Schneider, Gentile’s co-defendant. Attorneys for Gentile and Schneider did not respond to a request seeking comment.

    Adam Gana, a securities attorney whose firm has represented more than 250 GPB investors, called the White House’s explanation “a word salad of nonsense,” and questioned why Trump granted Gentile a commutation, which lessens a sentence, rather than a pardon, which forgives the offense itself.

    “If the government wasn’t able to prove their case, why not pardon David Gentile? And why is his partner still in prison?” Gana said. “It’s left us with more questions than answers.”

    ‘It hurts a lot’

    To Rosenberg, Tutera and two other investors interviewed by The Times, the president’s decision stripped away any sense of closure they felt after Gentile and Schneider were convicted.

    Rosenberg has tried not to dwell on the $250,000 he lost in 2016, after a broker “painted a beautiful picture” of steady returns and long-term profits. The investments were supposed to generate income for him during retirement.

    “A quarter of a million dollars, it hurts a lot,” Rosenberg said. “It changed a lot of things I do. Little trips that I wanted to take with my grandkids — well, they’re not quite as nice as they were planned on being.”

    Jeffrey Rosenberg, a longtime Trump supporter, said he felt “betrayed” after the president granted clemency to convicted fraudster David Gentile.

    (Scott Sady / For The Times)

    Tutera, who runs a hormone replacement therapy office in Arizona, invested more than $400,000 with GPB at the recommendation of a financial advisor. She hoped the returns would help support her retirement after her husband had died.

    “I was on grief brain at the time and just feel I was taken advantage of and really sold a bill of goods,” said Tutera, 70. Now, she says: “I have to keep working to make up for what I was owed.” She has been able to recover only about $40,000.

    Tutera said her sister, Julie Ullman, and their 97-year-old mother also fell victim to the scheme. Their mother lost more than $100,000 and now finds herself spending down savings she had planned to leave to her children and not trusting people, she said.

    “That’s really sad,” Tutera said. “People, unfortunately, have turned into thieves, liars and cheaters, and I don’t know what’s happened to the world, but we’ve lost our way to be kind.”

    Ullman, 58, who manages a medical practice in Arizona, said the financial loss was life-changing.

    “I’m going to have to work longer than I thought I would because that was my retirement fund,” Ullman said.

    Mei, a 71-year-old licensed acupuncturist who asked to not use her full name out of embarrassment, said a broker introduced her to the GPB investment funds at a lunch meeting targeting divorced women. She eventually invested $500,000 and lost all of it. It was only through lawsuits that she was able to recover roughly $214,000 of her money, she said.

    Mei had planned to retire in New York to be close to her children. But the loss of income has forced her to live in China, where the cost of living is much lower, six months out of the year, she said.

    Mei fears Trump’s decision to commute Gentile’s sentence will allow these schemes to continue.

    “Donald Trump is promoting more white-collar financial criminals, for sure,” Mei said. “How unfair.”

    Bob Van De Veire, a securities attorney who has represented more than 100 GPB investors, said he has mostly handled negligence cases against the brokers who touted GPB investments.

    “Based on all the red flags that were present, they should have never sold these investments at all,” Van De Veire said.

    Gana, the securities attorney, added that he will continue to fight for victims in civil court, noting the clemency only addressed the criminal conviction.

    The commutation caught the eye of Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who sent a letter to the White House last week asking several questions: Why, for example, did Gentile receive clemency while Schneider did not? And what were the trial errors cited as a reason for the commutation? He said victims deserve answers.

    “They will not forget that when they needed their government to stand with them against the man who stole their futures, their President chose to stand with the criminal instead,” Gallego wrote.

    Rosenberg, the retiree from Nevada, said he still supports the president but can’t help but think Trump’s decision makes him “look like another of the swamp” that Trump says he wants to drain.

    “I think Trump does a lot of good things,” he said, “but this is a bad one.”

    Still, Rosenberg is hopeful Trump may do right by the victims — even if it’s just by admitting he made a mistake.

    “I would like to think that he was fed some bad information somewhere along the way,” he said. “If that is the case … at least come forward and say, ‘I regret it.’ ”

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    Ana Ceballos

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  • Tijuana assassination mystery deepens as Mexico arrests suspect in 1994 Colosio case

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    MEXICO CITY — A breakthrough in the decades-long investigation of a political assassination that convulsed the nation?

    Or a political stunt meant to distract from more pressing issues?

    Those are the questions that emerged in Mexico after the arrest last weekend of an alleged “second shooter” in the 1994 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was gunned down at a rally in the border city of Tijuana.

    His slaying is widely regarded as one of the most consequential — and contentious— events of recent Mexican history.

    Doubts and conspiracy theories have long swirled over Colosio’s killing, long blamed on a “lone gunman” who was captured at the scene. Many have compared the lingering uncertainty about Colosio’s demise to the never-ending debate in the United States surrounding the 1963 killing of President John F. Kennedy, an assassination also blamed on a lone gunman with ill-defined motives.

    Many in Mexico have disputed the prevalent theory: That an apparently nonpolitical factory worker, Mario Aburto, shot the candidate twice at point-blank range as Colosio mingled with citizens during the campaign event.

    “I looked up and saw the gun right in front of me,” Maria Vidal, who was walking with Colosio at the scene, told the Times in 1994. “Then I saw him fall to the ground. Blood was coming out of his head.”

    Colosio was shot once in the head and once in the abdomen, feeding speculation that a second gunman was involved.

    People place flowers on March 23, 2004, in tribute to Luis Donaldo Colosio during a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of his assasination in Tijuana.

    (David Maung / Associated Press)

    Aburto, who says he was tortured into confessing, continues to serve a 45-year prison sentence.

    The Colosio case generated tens of thousands of pages of testimony from hundreds of witnesses, along with books, documentaries, and a TV miniseries on Netflix, all examining the question: What actually happened in Tijuana on March 23, 1994?

    Speculation has fingered everyone from political insiders to drug traffickers as the ones behind Colosio’s assassination, which contributed to a sense of upheaval in Mexico. The year 1994 opened with a Zapatista rebellion in the south, soon followed by Colosio’s stunning murder, and culminated with a December collapse of the peso, triggering an economic crisis.

    More than a quarter-century after the killing, Mexican writer Cuauhtémoc Ruiz captured the ubiquitous sense of ambiguity in his 2020 book, “Colosio: Sospechosos y Encubridores” — roughly, “Colosio: Suspects and Cover-ups,”

    The Colosio case even spawned its own version of the Zapruder film, the storied home-movie sequence of JFK’s assassination in Dallas. Video clips from the fateful 1994 rally show Colosio, his curly black hair flecked with confetti, shaking hands and signing autographs as he winds his way through a gleeful political crowd.

    Suddenly, the image of a hand grasping a pistol emerges from the scrum. The gun fires directly into the right side of the candidate’s head. Chaos ensues.

    On Saturday ,according to reports here, federal prosecutors in Tijuana arrested a former intelligence agent, Jorge Antonio Sánchez Ortega, who had been wanted since last year in connection with Colosio’s killing.

    Sánchez Ortega, authorities say, was part of federal protection team assigned to Colosio’s rally in Tijuana’s Lomas Taurinas neighborhood, near the city airport. The agent was arrested shortly after the killing, but prosecutors now say he was freed and whisked away as part of a cover-up. The agent’s clothing was stained with the victim’s blood, and ballistic evidence indicated he had fired a weapon, authorities say.

    His new arrest stems from a bombshell about-face last year by the office of Mexico’s attorney general, which abruptly retreated from the lone-gunman allegation. Instead, prosecutors endorsed the hypothesis of a second shooter and named as a suspect “Jorge Antonio S.,” now identified as Sánchez Ortega.

    But the former agent’s arrest has left more questions than answers. Prosecutors have provided no overarching theory on why Colosio was targeted, and who was behind his slaying.

    Neither the ex-agent or his lawyer have commented since his arrest.

    Jesús González Schmal, attorney for Aburto, the convicted assassin, hailed the arrest as a step toward clarifying what really happened to Colosio.

    “This will open a horizon of knowledge about what occurred 31 years ago,” the lawyer said in a television interview.

    But some labeled the arrest a thinly disguised attempt to distract people from more pressing current issues of crime and corruption.

    The government of President Claudia Sheinbaum is using the memory of Colosio “to cover up its ineptitude,” Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas, president of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, declared on X. The president, he said, “has no shame and no idea of how to govern.”

    At the time of his slaying, Colosio was the presidential candidate of the PRI, which governed Mexico in authoritarian fashion for most of the 20th century. He was on track to be elected Mexico’s next president a few months later.

    Colosio, 44, was seen widely viewed as a charismatic and progressive voice inside the rigid hierarchy of the PRI. He vowed to institute reforms and clean up deeply entrenched corruption and cronyism. Some have speculated that hard-liners within the ruling party were behind his killing — a theory long rejected by the PRI leadership.

    After Colosio’s slaying, the PRI named Ernesto Zedillo, who had been Colosio’s campaign manager, as its candidate. Zedillo, a party loyalist and lackluster technocrat, won in a landslide and served a six-year term.

    But, these days, the PRI is a weakened minority player in opposition to the government of Sheinbaum, elected under the banner of the now-dominant Morena party.

    The arrest of an alleged accomplice in the Colosio killing comes days after another high-profile political assassination, this time of Mayor Carlos Manzo of the western city of Uruapan. He was gunned down at a Day of the Dead festival this month in what some call Mexico’s most sensational political assassination since Colosio’s slaying.

    The killing of Manzo — who assailed Sheinbaum’s government for not doing more to combat cartels — sparked massive protests in his home state of Michoacán, a cartel battleground. Many criticized Sheinbaum’s government for what they called its lax attitude toward organized crime, an allegation denied by the president.

    A generation after his assassination, Colosio’s slaying remains an epochal event that continues to cast a shadow over Mexican politics.

    Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell

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  • Trump nominates replacement for acting U.S. attorney in office probing Letitia James

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    President Trump said Saturday that he would be nominating senior White House aide Lindsey Halligan to serve as the top federal prosecutor for the Virginia office that was thrown into turmoil when its U.S. attorney, Erik Siebert, abruptly left on Friday.

    In a social media post just after he departed the White House for an event at Mount Vernon, Mr. Trump wrote he would be nominating Halligan as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, writing that she “will be Fair, Smart, and will provide, desperately needed, JUSTICE FOR ALL!”

    Mr. Trump’s selection of Halligan came just hours after another conservative lawyer, Mary “Maggie” Cleary, said in an email to staff that was obtained by CBS News that she had been named acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

    “While this appointment was unexpected, I am humbled to be joining your ranks,” Cleary told employees in the email. “The Eastern District of Virginia has a distinguished legacy upon which we will build.” 

    CBS News has reached out to the White House for clarification on whether Cleary or Halligan will be leading the Eastern District of Virginia while Halligan’s Senate nomination process plays out.

    Halligan has been part of Mr. Trump’s legal orbit for the last several years, including serving as one of his attorneys in the early days of the FBI’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

    She has more recently been enlisted in a White House effort to remove what the administration contends is “improper ideology” from Smithsonian properties.

    Lindsey Halligan, senior White House aide for President Trump, holds ceremonial proclamations to be signed by Mr. Trump, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 6, 2025. / Credit: Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images

    Siebert resigned amid pressure from Trump administration officials to bring criminal charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James in a mortgage fraud investigation. Multiple sources had told CBS News Friday that federal prosecutors for the district were concerned that Siebert could be removed for failing to prosecute James. 

    Mr. Trump did not push back on those concerns, saying Friday, “Yeah, I want him out.” 

    Halligan would take over an office in tumult over political pressure by administration officials to criminally charge James, a longtime foe of Mr. Trump. In May, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CBS News that the Justice Department had launched a criminal fraud probe targeting James.

    The investigation stems from allegations that James provided false information on mortgage applications to get better loan rates for a home in Virginia.

    The Justice Department has spent months conducting the investigation but has yet to bring charges, and there’s been no indication that prosecutors have managed to uncover any degree of incriminating evidence necessary to secure an indictment. James’ lawyers have vigorously denied any allegations and characterized the investigation as an act of political revenge.

    In 2022, James sued Mr. Trump for years of alleged financial fraud, claiming Mr. Trump and his family participated in a conspiracy to inflate his net worth by billions of dollars in order to secure better loan rates, among other things. A judge found them liable and ultimately ruled Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization must pay $354 million in fines, though the actual total recently climbed to above $500 million due to interest amid the appeals process. In August, a New York appellate court threw out the half-billion-dollar penalty, ruling that the fine was “excessive,” while saying they were divided on the merits of the case.

    While Siebert said in an email to colleagues Friday evening that he had submitted his resignation, Trump wrote in a social media post: “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”

    Mr. Trump wrote Friday that he “withdrew” Siebert’s nomination for U.S. attorney when he “was informed” that Siebert had “received the UNUSUALLY STRONG support” of Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner of Virginia. Both senators had expressed support for Siebert’s nomination back in May.

    “What is Trump focused on?” the two senators wrote in a joint statement Friday. “Threatening to pull anyone who criticizes him on TV off the air. And now, pushing out the interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia that we recommended and he himself nominated because Erik Siebert is an ethical prosecutor who refused to bring criminal charges against Trump’s perceived enemies when the facts wouldn’t support it.”

    The president reiterated his statement that he fired Siebert in follow-up Truth Social post Saturday, writing that Siebert “lied to the media and said he quit, and that we had no case. No, I fired him, and there is a GREAT CASE, and many lawyers, and legal pundits, say so.”

    In that follow-up post, Mr. Trump also praised Halligan as a “really good lawyer.” A little over one hour later, he announced that he would be nominating her to lead the Eastern District of Virginia.

    Cleary recently rejoined the Justice Department as a senior counsel in the criminal division after working as a prosecutor in the Culpepper Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office. She also worked as deputy secretary of public safety in Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration and later served in Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares’ office.

    Cleary wrote in an article for The Spectator World earlier this year about being wrongly identified in a photo which allegedly placed her on Capitol grounds during the Jan. 6 riot. Cleary, who at the time was working as a federal prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia, wrote: “Everyone knew I was a conservative. It was all over my resume. I was in leadership in my local Republican Committee. But I had not gone to the Capitol that day.”

    She described being placed on administrative leave and interviewed by agents before later being cleared to return to work.

    “In the last four years, I’ve been somewhat cautious about sharing my experience, but now, while Donald Trump is president, I feel emboldened to finally tell how, I, too, was targeted politically,” Cleary wrote.

    At the time the article was published in May, she was interviewing to serve as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia. Cleary said she wanted that job “to end this type of treatment.”

    Watch: Right-wing protest in the Netherlands erupt into violence

    Saturday Sessions: Maren Morris performs “Running”

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  • Former Inglewood police officer recorded by FBI making drug deal with stolen evidence is sentenced

    Former Inglewood police officer recorded by FBI making drug deal with stolen evidence is sentenced

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    John Abel Baca pulled up to the meeting in a Ferrari with a gram of cocaine in a medical glove.

    The man he was there to meet was a customer, and Baca, an Inglewood police officer and the department’s union rep at the time, said he had a kilogram more of the product he could sell for $22,000.

    But Baca wasn’t working an undercover case. Instead, the meeting in 2021 was being recorded by the FBI.

    On Tuesday, Baca, 48, was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to one count of distribution of cocaine and ordered to pay a $40,000 fine.

    In a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, Baca admitted he’d stolen drugs from Inglewood Police Department’s evidence room and sold them on the side for profit.

    “Former officer Baca tarnished the badge and dishonored the majority of those who serve and protect our communities with integrity,” said Akil Davis, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.

    U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada echoed that sentiment in a statement, saying Baca “abused his position as a law enforcement officer to promote his drug trafficking activities.”

    Baca bragged to a potential buyer in September 2020 that he stole narcotics and money during routine traffic stops, prosecutors said. He offered to sell “White China” heroin, an unlimited supply of black tar heroin and a kilogram of cocaine, according to his plea agreement. The buyer informed the FBI of what Baca was saying in February 2021.

    The buyer, later identified as a confidential witness in court records, asked Baca what he should say if anyone asked where he got the cocaine.

    Baca reportedly told him, “Tell them it came from f— Mexico,” according to court records.

    Prosecutors focused on two meetings in their case against Baca.

    In April 2021, Baca drove to a buyer’s home in his 2012 Ferrari FF with a small sample of cocaine in a medical glove. The meeting was recorded by federal agents, according to court records.

    Afterward, the buyer gave the cocaine to the FBI. The product tested at 75% purity, prosecutors said.

    In a follow up call, Baca arranged to sell the confidential witness a kilogram of cocaine. He met the buyer at his business on May 4, 2021. On that visit, he drove up in a Nissan Maxima with no license plates.

    He delivered a brick of cocaine wrapped in a plastic bag and tape, which he carried in a Target shopping bag, according to court records. He asked the buyer for $22,000, which was provided by the FBI as part of their operation. Baca claimed he was making only $1,000 as part of the deal, but the government never recovered the cash.

    Baca told a federal informant that he often traveled to Las Vegas to gamble at casinos and launder his money, according to court records.

    Baca was also accused of recruiting a second person to help in his drug dealing. That person, Gerardo Ekonomo, 42, from South L.A., was arrested in Las Vegas in June 2021 with 3 kilograms of heroin in his car, prosecutors said.

    According to federal prosecutors, Baca called Las Vegas police and tried to intervene in Ekonomo’s case. He claimed he was Ekonomo’s “handler” and suggested he “work the case off” by helping them.

    Ekonomo was eventually charged with intent to distribute the heroin, and on Oct. 28, 2021, the FBI dug in his yard and found large quantities of drugs wrapped in black plastic, including 1,258 grams of fentanyl and roughly 462 grams of heroin, court records show. FBI agents also found evidence of a drug trafficking operation in his home.

    Ekonomo claimed he worked for Baca as an informant and was authorized to transport the drugs to Las Vegas as part of a law enforcement operation, prosecutors said, but he also claimed ignorance of the drugs in the yard.

    Prosecutors said Baca had $300,000 in his bank accounts and a similar amount in investments around the time of his arrest in October 2021. The amount of money in his accounts dwarfed his household income, prosecutors said. He also owned or partially owned multiple homes in California and Arizona, along with a 2018 Audi Q7, a 2001 Chevy pickup truck, and the Ferrari.

    Baca offered a “sincere apology” in court, according to a statement from his attorney Victor Sherman.

    He said he recognized that “he disgraced the police badge which he will live with for the rest of his life.”

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    Nathan Solis

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  • Howard University rescinds Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ honorary degree, citing video of him attacking Cassie Ventura

    Howard University rescinds Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ honorary degree, citing video of him attacking Cassie Ventura

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    Howard University trustees on Friday voted to rescind an honorary degree granted to Sean “Diddy” Combs, citing a recently surfaced video of the hip-hop mogul repeatedly attacking Casandra “Cassie” Ventura in a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.

    Trustees of the Washington, D.C., university also disbanded a scholarship in Combs’ name and terminated a 2016 “gift agreement” in which Combs had contributed $1 million through his foundation, according to a university statement. His foundation’s future financial pledges have also been canceled.

    The university, which Combs attended, said the vote “to accept the return … of the honorary degree conferred upon him in 2014” was unanimous.

    “Mr. Combs’ behavior as captured in a recently released video is so fundamentally incompatible with Howard University’s core values and beliefs that he is deemed no longer worthy to hold the institution’s highest honor,” the statement continued. “The university is unwavering in its opposition to all acts of interpersonal violence.”

    Friday’s decision is the latest setback for Combs, and comes as federal prosecutors in New York are considering whether a Homeland Security Investigations probe into alleged sex trafficking should result in criminal charges.

    In the 2016 video, obtained and published by CNN last month, Combs is seen chasing, kicking, dragging and hurling a glass vase at Ventura, who was his girlfriend at the time. The video seemed to confirm at least some of the physical abuse allegations against the singer detailed in a lawsuit filed in November — accusations Combs had denied.

    That lawsuit was settled a day after it was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. In it, Ventura alleged that Combs “became extremely intoxicated and punched” her in the face, “giving her a black eye” during an attack in March 2016.

    In a video statement posted on Instagram days after the video’s release, Combs said, “My behavior on that video is inexcusable. I take full responsibility for my actions in that video.”

    “I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now,” he added. “I went and I sought out professional help. I got into going to therapy, going to rehab. I had to ask God for his mercy and grace. I’m so sorry. But I’m committed to be a better man each and every day. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m truly sorry.”

    Federal prosecutors are preparing grand jury subpoenas for witnesses to testify in the sex-trafficking investigation against Combs, according to a source familiar with the matter.

    Investigators have already interviewed several witnesses and told them to be prepared to testify, the source said, though it remains unclear when that testimony will occur or how far federal officials are in determining whether to bring charges. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.

    Combs has not been charged with any crime and has denied any wrongdoing. The probe was launched after three women, including Ventura, accused him of rape, assault and other abuses dating back three decades.

    In March, investigators searching Combs’ Holmby Hills mansion emptied safes, dismantled electronics and left papers strewn in some rooms, sources told The Times.

    Combs’ lawyers have strongly criticized the federal probe, calling the searches of his homes “militarized” and a “witch hunt.”

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    Richard Winton

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  • Is Shohei Ohtani a theft victim? Is he in trouble? Legal experts say probes underway

    Is Shohei Ohtani a theft victim? Is he in trouble? Legal experts say probes underway

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    Uncertainty suddenly surrounds one of Major League Baseball’s biggest stars, with Shohei Ohtani mired in recent days in a growing scandal linked to a federal investigation into illegal sports gambling.

    The public so far has only a fragmented picture of the case. But more facts could emerge in coming days and weeks, legal experts said, as federal prosecutors try to make sense of competing claims about Ohtani’s money being used to pay down gambling debts with a suspected illegal bookmaker in California. One key question — but not the only one — is whether the Japanese slugger was, as his representatives claim, the victim of a “massive theft” by his interpreter and right-hand man, Ippei Mizuhara.

    “If there has been a ‘massive theft,’ you would expect Ohtani’s people to cooperate with federal investigators,” said Jeff Ifrah, a former federal prosecutor and sports betting expert who now works as a defense attorney, including for professional athletes. “They will figure out whether or not the interpreter is lying, and whether or not Ohtani is a true victim.”

    Meanwhile, the federal investigation will almost certainly inform a separate, internal inquiry by Major League Baseball into whether — potential crimes aside — there were any violations of league policies around players gambling on sports other than their own, experts said.

    “There has to be an investigation,” said Andrew Brandt, a sports commentator and executive director of the Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law at Villanova University. “The firing of the interpreter is not going to sweep this under the rug.”

    Neither Ohtani nor Mizuhara has been charged with a crime. No betting on baseball has been alleged.

    Still, the betting scandal has enveloped the MLB and one of its most high-profile — and highest paid — superstars. It has occurred so quickly that it has been difficult for observers, including many Dodgers fans, to keep track of what is being alleged and by whom.

    One moment this week, Ohtani and Mizuhara were chuckling with one another during a game. The next, Ohtani’s representatives were making the theft allegations. Soon after, MLB announced Mizuhara was fired.

    Mizuhara’s story, meanwhile, was rapidly shifting as well, according to reporting by The Times and ESPN. At first, he said Ohtani had learned of his debts and agreed to bail him out by wiring funds to an associate of Mizuhara’s alleged bookmaker, Orange County resident Mathew Bowyer. But soon after that, Mizuhara retracted that version of events, according to ESPN, and said Ohtani had no knowledge of his gambling debts and had not transferred money on his behalf.

    Evidence to support either camp’s version of events has been far slower to materialize.

    Ohtani’s camp has not responded to questions about the alleged nature of the theft, how the payments were made, or what Ohtani knew of Mizuhara’s debts if he didn’t know about the payments themselves. Mizuhara could not be reached for comment.

    An attorney for Bowyer said the alleged bookmaker — who is the target of an existing federal investigation but has not been charged with a crime — never interacted directly with Ohtani. Court records show federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have been conducting an investigation since 2017 into illegal gambling operations.

    The U.S. attorney’s office in L.A. declined to comment on the Ohtani matter.

    Depending on the circumstances, transferring funds to an illegal bookmaker can raise legal questions about aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise, or engaging in wire fraud or money laundering, legal experts said. But such charges against individual gamblers are rare and usually filed to get those gamblers to flip on bookmakers, the experts said.

    That said, stealing millions of dollars from someone, as Ohtani now accuses Mizuhara of doing, is definitely a crime, and not one that federal prosecutors are likely to ignore — especially when the allegations are coming from someone as high-profile as Ohtani, experts said.

    David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor who now has a white-collar criminal defense practice, said there are very clear steps that the parties should be taking in light of the latest allegations by Ohtani — if they haven’t already.

    Ohtani and his attorneys should start compiling whatever evidence they can as to the alleged theft, he said.

    They should proactively reach out to federal authorities, alert them of the alleged theft and that they are compiling records that they may be willing to share, and prepare their own internal analysis of the records. They also should reach out to MLB, say that they are taking the matter seriously and conducting a review, and that they have cut off all contact with Mizuhara.

    In addition to working with federal authorities, Ohtani’s lawyers should also be preserving a record for any potential civil litigation that Ohtani may want to bring against Mizuhara, Weinstein said.

    To the extent Mizuhara disputes the theft allegation, Weinstein said the translator and his attorneys should be compiling their own evidence to rebut the claim, including any communications with Ohtani that would indicate he was aware of the transactions. As any such evidence is found, they should be sharing that with federal authorities.

    “At this point, it’s every person for themselves,” Weinstein said.

    Meanwhile, federal prosecutors already investigating Bowyer will probably begin looking through whatever records they already have for anything related to Ohtani or Mizuhara, Weinstein said. They may also reach out directly to Ohtani and ask for an interview and any evidence he has of the alleged theft.

    “The authorities are going to look and say, ‘OK, let me see the bank account and show me where the theft is. Did you authorize these transactions?’” Weinstein said.

    At some point, prosecutors will also reach out to Mizuhara to ask for an interview with him, Weinstein said. If they believe there is a potential case to be made, they could also start subpoenaing bank records, he said.

    Ifrah said high-paid athletes often have staff who handle their business and financial interests, and sometimes do fall victim to betrayal by those people.

    “We get a lot of calls about professional athletes being in some kind of financial mess because someone close to them accesses their accounts or uses some sort of authority to access their financial assets,” Ifrah said.

    Because of that, the first question he would be asking if he were a prosecutor on the case, he said, is what kind of access Mizuhara had to Ohtani’s bank accounts. Ifrah said it would be hard to imagine Mizuhara siphoning millions from Ohtani in cash — which is what most illegal bookmakers deal in, if not crypto payments — without Ohtani or his financial managers knowing or agreeing to it.

    “You start to wonder, how was that a ‘massive theft’?” Ifrah said. “How did someone go and get cash from a bank account or liquidate one of your financial assets to get cash without you knowing?”

    Daniel Wallach, a sports betting and gambling attorney in Florida, agreed that any disappearance of millions of dollars should have set off alarms for the people who manage Ohtani’s assets and should have been addressed long before the media started asking questions.

    “The biggest red flag of all is that this pronouncement that there has been this ‘massive theft’ only occurred in response to the media poking around — like it was Crisis Management 101 to shift the attention away from Ohtani,” he said.

    Wallach said there are so many unanswered questions and contradictory explanations from Ohtani and Mizuhara at this point that, in addition to the federal investigation, MLB has no choice but to launch its own review — in part to make a decision as to whether Ohtani deserves to be benched.

    “This requires a full-on investigation because there’s so many inconsistencies and already deeply troubling facts,” he said. “MLB needs to get as much information about this as possible early on to make at least a preliminary assessment as to whether Ohtani should be placed on leave until the conclusion of an investigation.”

    Punishments for players are at the discretion of the MLB commissioner, and while suspending or fining Ohtani may be unpopular, Wallach said, “the league’s going to have a major reputational problem on its hands if there isn’t a deeper probe into the underlying events.”

    Cathy Fleming, a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey, has represented clients — namely family members of players — who have come under internal investigation by the MLB.

    She said the league has a “pretty good internal investigation unit” with smart lawyers who deal with players with respect but aren’t pushovers — and who will undoubtedly be training their eye on Ohtani soon, if they haven’t already.

    “He’s not only going to be dealing with whatever happens” in the federal case, she said, “but I’m sure MLB is going to be looking at it with a microscope.”

    Times staff writers Bill Shaikin, Nathan Fenno and Paul Pringle contributed to this report.

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    Kevin Rector

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  • Feds arrest Los Angeles man accused of exporting microelectronics to Russia

    Feds arrest Los Angeles man accused of exporting microelectronics to Russia

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    A 66-year-old man was arrested in Los Angeles on Wednesday in connection with an alleged years-long scheme to export sensitive technology illegally from the United States to a business tied to the Russian military, according to federal prosecutors.

    The man, Ilya Kahn, is a citizen of the United States, Israel and Russia and has residences in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Los Angeles, federal prosecutors said Thursday in charging documents filed in New York.

    Kahn is the owner of Senesys Inc., a California-based company, and Sensor Design Assn., a New York-based company. The ventures are involved in developing security software and testing silicon wafers for military aviation electronics and space equipment, court documents say.

    Federal prosecutors allege that the two companies are actually the same entity, and that from 2017 through 2023 they shipped more than 290,000 microelectronics and other items out of the U.S.

    Kahn worked with a Russian semiconductor company called Joint Stock Company Research and Development Center Elvees, which was sanctioned by the U.S. government in February 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Elvees played a critical role in assisting the Russian military, court documents say.

    Between 2012 and 2022, financial records show, Kahn’s business received more than $37 million from Elvees and related entities, including more than $2.1 million in 2021 and 2022, prosecutors allege.

    Kahn is charged with conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act, which regulates the export of goods, technology and software that have potential military use.

    Prosecutors allege that in 2019, Kahn exported U.S.-made microcontrollers to Elvees in Russia, and in 2022 he exported other equipment through a Hong Kong-based shipping company without the necessary licenses from the U.S. government. According to prosecutors, that equipment included network interface controllers and a radio frequency transmitter, whose exports are limited for national security and anti-terrorism reasons.

    Prosecutors accused Kahn in court papers of a number of other acts to support Elvees, including:

    • Arranging for Elvees to continue receiving semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan after Russia’s invasion.
    • Illegally shipping the items from Taiwan to the U.S. and then to Russian after the Taiwanese company refused to ship the Elvees-designed semiconductors directly to Russia.
    • Shipping thousands of microchips based on an Elvees design from a manufacturer in Taiwan through a New York-based shipper to a Hong Kong-based shipping company, and then to mainland China.

    “Mr. Kahn stands accused of repeatedly exporting sensitive technology to Russia before, during, and after Russia launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” Assistant Atty. Gen. Matthew Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division said in a statement. “Violations of U.S. sanctions and export control laws that aid Russia and other hostile powers endanger our nation’s security and will be met with the full force of the Justice Department.”

    Kahn could face a maximum of 20 years in prison if found guilty, according to prosecutors. He was scheduled to appear in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom Thursday.

    It was not immediately clear if Kahn had any legal representation.

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    Nathan Solis

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  • A squatter, a shotgun and stolen items: How one man overstayed his welcome in Yosemite

    A squatter, a shotgun and stolen items: How one man overstayed his welcome in Yosemite

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    A man squatting in Yosemite National Park was sentenced to more than five years and three months in prison on Monday for breaking into a private residence and possessing a sawed-off shotgun and ammunition, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Sacramento.

    Devin Michael Cuellar, 29, broke into the home on Koon Hollar Road in Wawona in 2021 and resided there for several months without permission from the owner, damaging and stealing property, according to federal prosecutors. Cuellar was previously convicted of carjacking and possessing controlled substances for sale and was prohibited from possessing firearms and ammunition.

    He is also a longtime gang member who is known to use narcotics such as heroin, prosecutors said.

    Cuellar, who had already been jailed for 11 months, asked to be sentenced to time served with 60 months’ probation and in-patient treatment for his drug abuse, according to a sentencing memo. But prosecutors requested a term of 63 months, noting he had received lenient sentences in the past but still “led his life from one bad decision to another.”

    The National Park Service was assisted in its investigation by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Marshals Service, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the California Department of Justice’s Bureau of Forensic Services and the Madera County Sheriff’s Office.

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    Roberto Reyes

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  • ‘She’s Going to Be Famous for a Long Time’

    ‘She’s Going to Be Famous for a Long Time’

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    For many judicial nominees, a Senate confirmation hearing is one of life’s most grueling experiences—an hours-long job interview led by lawmakers who are trying to get them to face-plant on national television.

    Not for Aileen Cannon. When the federal judge who will oversee former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial testified in 2020, the Senate Judiciary Committee didn’t go easy on her so much as they ignored her.

    Cannon, then a 39-year-old prosecutor, appeared on Zoom alongside four other nominees, her face framed by a wall of diplomas on one side and an American flag on the other. Her opening statement lasted all of three minutes and sounded like an Oscar winner’s speech—lots of thank-yous and little else. She didn’t say a word about her legal philosophy or how she would approach the job of a judge. The senators didn’t seem to mind: None of them addressed a question specifically to Cannon for the rest of the hearing. The committee’s chair at the time, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, skipped the proceeding entirely, as did each of the five most senior Republicans on the panel. The hearing was over after barely an hour. Three months later, while Trump was beginning his effort to overturn his defeat in the presidential election, a bipartisan Senate majority (including a dozen Democrats) voted to confirm Cannon’s nomination as a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida.

    For low-profile nominations like Cannon’s, perfunctory hearings aren’t unusual. But the scrutiny she was spared in the Senate is coming her way now. After just two and a half years as a judge, Cannon will soon preside over a trial with no precedent in American history. The defendant is the former president who appointed her, and her rulings during the investigation that led to Trump’s indictment have already prompted many legal experts to fear that she will tilt the trial in his favor.

    But some of the Democratic lawyers who have appeared in Cannon’s courtroom don’t share those worries. They say that she is a smarter, more deliberate, and more even-handed judge than the early criticism of her would suggest. “I think the government should be very happy that they have Judge Cannon,” says Richard Klugh, a longtime defense attorney in Miami who has dealt with Cannon both as a judge and when she served as a federal prosecutor there. Klugh, a lifelong Democrat, told me that aside from her “narrow” rulings on Trump’s case last summer, he had heard no complaints about Cannon from either prosecutors or defense attorneys. “She’s very confident, very honest … and very thorough,” he told me. “She’s confident enough to go through things independently.”

    Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?

    That may be, but she’s extremely inexperienced. Since taking her seat on the bench, Cannon has worked mostly out of a courthouse in Fort Pierce, a two-hour drive from Miami and a town that one local lawyer described to me as “a backwater.” She has presided over just four trials as a judge, none of which covered crimes remotely similar to the willful retention of classified documents that the government has accused Trump of committing. (She is set to oversee a far more complex trial involving alleged Medicare fraud in the coming months.)

    Cannon was born in Colombia and is the daughter of Cuban refugees. In her brief statement to the Judiciary Committee, she described how her mother, at the age of 7, “had to flee the repressive Castro regime in search of freedom and security.” Cannon graduated from Duke University, and by the time she earned her law degree from the University of Michigan, she had already joined the conservative Federalist Society. After law school, she embarked on a fairly conventional legal career: She clerked for an appellate judge, spent several years at a large law firm, and then became an assistant U.S. attorney in Miami. In written responses to the Judiciary Committee, Cannon wrote that she considered herself both an “originalist” and a “textualist”—two approaches long identified with conservative judges—but that she would follow all precedents set by the Supreme Court and other appellate rulings.

    Two South Florida lawyers told me that they were struck by Cannon’s overt religiosity, which has seeped into her pronouncements in court. She routinely tells defendants “God bless you” after they enter guilty pleas, said Valentin Rodriguez, a lawyer who has appeared before Cannon. “In my entire 30-year career I’ve never had a judge mention God to a client ever,” Rodriguez told me. “She does that as a matter of course.”

    Although presidents formally nominate all federal judges, they frequently appoint district-court judges at the recommendation of home-state senators. Cannon told the Judiciary Committee that she was first approached about filling a judicial vacancy by the office of Senator Marco Rubio in 2019, nearly a year before Trump sent her nomination to the Senate. Her appointment came at a moment when Trump and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were trying to reshape the federal courts by filling as many open judgeships as possible with young conservatives in their 30s and 40s. Three previous nominations for judgeships in Florida’s Southern District had gone to men in their 40s. “It made sense that Trump would select a woman with good credentials who also happens to be Hispanic,” a South Florida defense lawyer who knows Cannon told me. (The lawyer requested anonymity to speak candidly about a judge in their jurisdiction.)

    At the time of her nomination, Cannon had virtually no public profile outside of the courtroom. On her Senate questionnaire, she said she had never given a speech, served on a panel discussion, or testified before a legislative body. She had never held public office and told the Senate she had never participated in a political campaign, although she and her husband each contributed $100 to Ron DeSantis’s bid for governor in 2018. The only interview Cannon said she had ever given for publication was for a photo feature on TheKnot.com about her wedding. Her relative anonymity has caused headaches for publications that have searched in vain for a public photo of Cannon that hasn’t already been used repeatedly; almost every story features the same Zoom screenshot from her Senate testimony in 2020.

    Like most Republican-appointed judges in Florida’s Southern District, Cannon is known as a tough sentencer. But there have been notable exceptions when she has handed down a shorter prison term than she could have, Rodriguez told me. He mentioned a case in which a 21-year-old defendant, Artavis Spivey, who had been incarcerated on and off since he was 11, pleaded guilty to armed carjacking. He and another defendant committed the crime just 18 days after Spivey had been released from prison. Cannon sentenced Spivey to 15 years, but Rodriguez said she could have added many more years to his term. “She could have thrown the book at him, and I think she saw redeeming qualities in the young man,” Rodriguez said. Spivey had grown up in a troubled home without a father, “kind of given up by his parents,” Rodriguez added. “That experience tended to make me appreciate the fact that she could look beyond just the retribution and vengeance of a sentence and look at the person.”

    Andrew Weissmann: A ruling untethered to the law

    Cannon also handed down a lighter-than-expected sentence to a 34-year-old man, Christopher Wilkins, who threw a chair at and threatened to kill a federal prosecutor after receiving a 17.5-year sentence on gun and witness-tampering charges. Cannon added six and a half years to his prison term, which was less than the sentencing guidelines called for. “I’ve heard stuff about tough sentencing. I can’t report that. I can report fair sentencing,” Wilkins’s lawyer, Jeffrey Garland, a Republican, told me.

    Yet none of the decisions that Cannon has made in her young judicial career have stirred as much controversy as her rulings in the lawsuit that Trump filed after the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago estate for unreturned classified documents last summer. Cannon initially appointed a special master to review the documents that federal investigators had collected, and barred the government from accessing some of them. The rulings were a gift to Trump at the time and delayed the FBI’s investigation. But in a sharp rebuke of Cannon, the conservative Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overruled her decisions and said she should not have even heard the case.

    Some legal experts have cited those rulings and the fact that Trump appointed Cannon as reasons for her to recuse herself or be taken off the case. A few of the Florida defense lawyers I interviewed—who, it should be noted, routinely argue against the government’s position—characterized Cannon’s orders as understandable considering how unprecedented the case was. The defense lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity, however, was more critical. “That ruling was totally out of bounds,” the lawyer told me.

    One of the most significant decisions Cannon now faces is whether to attempt to hold the trial in advance of the 2024 presidential election. Should Trump win the White House, he could quash the government’s prosecution of him. South Florida lawyers were dubious that Cannon could try the case before the election, noting the complexities surrounding classified documents that frequently slow down prosecutions at the federal level. Howard Srebnick, a Democratic defense lawyer on the Medicare-fraud case before Cannon, also praised her early performance on the bench. But he said that it still took 18 months for the Medicare case to get to trial even though it does not involve government secrets. “The notion that this case could go quickly? That’s absurd,” Klugh told me.

    Still, Cannon has already issued her first order—one that could indicate she wants to move swiftly. On Thursday, she instructed lawyers who want to take part in the case to get security clearances by next week. That was the first of many decisions Cannon will make that, in ways big and small, will shape the first-ever federal criminal prosecution of a former president. They will change Cannon’s life, creating a reputation for favoritism or fairness where none existed. A young judge whose photograph had never appeared in a newspaper until last year is set to become a household name. As Rodriguez observed with a slightly nervous laugh: “She’s going to be famous for a long time.”

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    Russell Berman

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