A federal grand jury in California has indicted Hunter Biden, son of President Biden, on nine counts of tax crimes, three felonies and six misdemeanors. Catherine Herridge has details.
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A federal grand jury in California has indicted Hunter Biden, son of President Biden, on nine counts of tax crimes, three felonies and six misdemeanors. Catherine Herridge has details.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Hunter Biden was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday on nine tax-related charges, and the case was assigned to Judge Mark Scarsi, an appointee of former President Donald Trump.
In a 56-page document filed in a Los Angeles, California, federal court, President Joe Biden‘s son is accused of failing to pay taxes, filing a fraudulent form and evading an assessment. Three of the nine charges are felony counts.
“The Defendant engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019,” the indictment read, adding Biden “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills.”
The charges against Biden were brought by Special Counsel David Weiss, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee the investigation into Biden.
“Between 2016 and October 15, 2020, the Defendant spent this money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes,” the indictment said.
Reuters reported that Biden faces up to 17 years in prison if convicted of all nine charges. In October, Biden pleaded not guilty to charges that he lied about his drug use while buying a handgun.
Newsweek contacted a lawyer for Hunter Biden and the White House via email Thursday night for comment.
President Joe Biden, left, walks next to his son Hunter Biden, right, as they exit Holy Spirit Catholic Church after attending Mass in Johns Island, South Carolina, on August 13, 2022. Hunter Biden on Thursday was indicted on nine tax-related charges. Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images
Scarsi is a native of Syracuse, New York, and he attended Syracuse and Georgetown universities.
Then-President Trump announced he would nominate Scarsi to serve as a district judge in October 2018. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in September 2020.
This is a breaking story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Special counsel Jack Smith wants everyone to know he’s got the dirt on Donald Trump. Kind of.
A released version of the search warrant used to obtain information from Trump’s Twitter account should scare the pants off of anyone who actually believes in any of that “democracy” stuff Democrats like to talk about so often.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s comprehensive search warrant … sought the 2024 Republican presidential primary front-runner’s search history, drafted tweets, blocks and mutes.
The special counsel also demanded a list of all devices used to log into the account and information on users interacting with Trump, heavily redacted court filings show.
The search warrant, issued in January against the company now known as X, was among several documents released by the Justice Department Monday as part of a lawsuit brought by media organizations seeking sunlight on the special counsel’s investigation into Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
The filings shed some light on what investigators were looking for when they issued the warrant against the social media company owned by Elon Musk.
Eight of the 14 pages related to the search warrant are completely redacted.
MORE MOTIONS: Trump’s lawyers continue to fight Jack Smith/Chutkan attempts to conceal info and proceedings from American people.
New filing asks to make public currently sealed scope of Special Counsel’s office and redacted “sensitive materials” in discovery. pic.twitter.com/FEGnqlUM1C
But the preposterously redacted warrant also includes this:
All information from the ‘Connect’ or ‘Notifications’ tab for the account, including all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by the account, as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account (i.e. “mentions” or “replies”)
Got that? Doesn’t that sound awfully close to a general warrant? The kind we fought the American Revolution over? The government doesn’t need lists of people who “liked” things on a social media site.
For all the “threats to democracy” Democrats constantly crow about, you’re looking at them.
If Trump ran afoul of the law, he should be held accountable. But over time, it sure feels like the Left is throwing everything at him and hoping some of it sticks.
Of a 14 page document related to the search warrant, why are eight of those pages redacted? That’s more than half.
If they’re not trying to hide something, you couldn’t tell the average person that. It all looks suspicious.
And as Donald Trump has said, he’s just one more indictment away from being re-elected president.
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A Los Angeles judge found Monday that there is enough evidence for A$AP Rocky to stand trial for allegations that he fired a gun at a former friend and collaborator outside a Hollywood hotel in 2021.
Superior Court Judge M.L. Villar made the ruling at at a preliminary hearing, after hearing roughly a day and a half of testimony. Rocky has pleaded not guilty to two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm. His attorney attempted to cast doubt on the case while questioning a police detective.
Rakim Mayers, aka A$AP Rocky, sits during a preliminary hearing in the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles, Monday, Nov. 20, 2023. A judge is set to hear evidence Monday against the 35-year-old rap star and father of two children with Rihanna as he decides whether he should stand trial on two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm. He has pleaded not guilty. (Allison Dinner/Pool Photo via AP)
Allison Dinner / AP
Rocky previously pleaded not guilty to two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm. His attorney attempted to cast doubt on the case while questioning a police detective.
The 35-year-old hip-hop star, born Rakim Mayers, is also a fashion mogul and two-time Grammy nominee. He is in a relationship with pop star Rihanna, with whom he has two young sons.
Villar said “the totality of the video and testimony” shows there is sufficient evidence for the defendant to go to trial. She emphasized that preliminary hearings have a much lower evidence standard than a trial, and she was only finding probable cause.
Rocky, sitting in the courtroom, showed no visible reaction.
At the first day of the hearing, which resumed Monday after a long delay, Terell Ephron testified that he and Rocky, a friend since childhood, had belonged to the same collective of musicians and artists at their New York high school.
He said their relationship had started to go sour and resulted in the standoff in Hollywood on Nov. 6, 2021, when he said Rocky first pulled a gun on him, and in a later confrontation fired shots that grazed Ephron’s knuckles.
Rocky’s attorney Joe Tacopina established while questioning a police detective that seven officers who searched a sidewalk and street about 20 minutes after the shots were allegedly fired found no evidence of the shooting, and that a pair of 9 mm shell casings in police possession were recovered by Ephron, who returned to the scene about an hour after the standoff.
Tacopina played body camera video of the officers, who searched the ground for about 10 minutes. Ephron, who first went to police to report the incident two days later, turned over the shell casings, which the detective said had no recoverable fingerprints on them.
Prosecutors showed a separate video from near the scene where no people are initially visible, but what sounds like two gunshots can be heard. Then a man comes running around a corner, then slows to a walk. The man’s identity is not clear in the video, but Flores testified they have established it is Rocky.
LAPD Detective Frank Flores testified under Tacopina’s questioning that no 9 mm pistol was recovered when a search warrant was served on Rocky.
Prosecutors showed a still from surveillance video showing a man in a hooded sweatshirt whose face is not visible holding what appears to be a gun, along with another image from the same video showing the face of the man in the sweatshirt, with no gun visible. Flores testified that the combined images led them to establish it was Rocky.
Tacopina, who is also representing Donald Trump in his New York criminal case and others, pressed the detective on the weapon, suggesting police had no way of knowing whether it was a loaded or even real gun.
“That gun or whatever it was was not tested, right?” Tacopina asked. “No, it was never recovered,” Flores said.
Tacopina asked, “You’re not sure if it’s an operable gun or a non-operable gun or whatever?”
“Without having it, I can’t tell you whether it’s operable,” the detective replied.
Tacopina tried to cast doubt on the minor injury to Ephron’s hand, questioning why he waited until he returned to New York to seek medical treatment.
He showed the detective a photo of the scraped fingers and said, sarcastically, “It’s a miracle he survived that shooting.”
The judge admonished him, one of several times she told Tacopina to change his tone.
He has released little music in recent years, and has become better known as the romantic partner, fellow fashion influencer and co-parent of Rihanna, with whom he had a second son in May. His first two studio albums in 2013 and 2015 both went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
Rocky also became an unlikely cause for then-President Donald Trump, who said he was trying to get the rapper freed and returned to the U.S. when he was jailed after a brawl in Sweden in 2019. He was found guilty of assault at trial but was given a “conditional sentence” that meant no additional jail time.
In California courts, preliminary hearings like these are a sort of miniature version of a trial, with only a judge deciding whether sufficient evidence exists to move forward. The standard of proof for doing so is far lower than what’s required for criminal guilt.
Studios are said to be negotiating with the principals of the New York v. Donald Trump case for the rights to a courtroom drama.
Columbia Pictures and Castle Rock Entertainment are in discussions regarding a potential courtroom drama with the principals of the State of New York v. Donald Trump fraud case. The ex-president is on trial there for alleged fraudulent business dealings.
“Queen Latifah would make a great A.G. Letitia James,” says Rob Reiner. Photo by Sister Circle TV, CC BY 3.0.
Castle Rock and Columbia are the same entities who produced the much-acclaimed film, “A Few Good Men” in 1992. Observers have drawn parallels between the fictional and the real life courtroom dramas.
Rob Reiner, who directed the original film, is said to interested in the proposed second movie, which is reported to have a budget of $250 million and a working title of “A Few Big Schmucks.”
The cast has not yet been announced, but Columbia is reportedly in talks with Sean Penn to play the ex-president; Stormy Daniels to portray Ivanka Trump; and the role of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is prosecuting the case, is reportedly Queen Latifah’s, “if she wants it.”
Jack Nicholson is interested in playing Trump, citing his starring role in 1980’s “The Shining” as proof of his ability to play deranged characters, but he was dismissed by the former-president out-of-hand as “just too damn old.” Trump is said to prefer Brad Pitt.
Studio officials are also considering making “A Few Good Schmucks” into a multi-media or hybrid production and portraying Eric and Donald Trump Jr. by cartoon icons Heckle and Jeckle, the yellow-billed magpies. Deliberations are reportedly underway with Terrytoons and CBS.
Bill Tope is a retired (caseworker, cook, construction worker, nude model for art classes, and so on) who lives with his mean little cat Baby.
The head of a Mexican megachurch who is serving more than 16 years in a California prison for sexually abusing young followers was charged Wednesday with two federal crimes involving a 16-year-old girl, prosecutors said.
A federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted Naasón Joaquín García, 54, on two charges of possessing and producing child pornography, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney’s office.
When he was arrested in California in 2019, Garcia had an iPad that contained five videos depicting the then-teenaged girl engaging in sexual activity, the statement said.
“We did not indict until after the state case was finished,” the U.S. attorney’s office added in an email.
Garcia is the head of La Luz del Mundo (The Light of the World), which claims to have 5 million followers worldwide. Believers consider him to be the “apostle” of Jesus Christ.
But prosecutors in California say Garcia used his spiritual sway to have sex with girls and young women who were told it would lead to their salvation — or damnation if they refused.
An email seeking comment from the church on the new federal charges wasn’t immediately returned Wednesday.
Garcia currently is serving a prison sentence at the California Institution for Men in Chino. Last year, he pleaded guilty to two state counts of forcible oral copulation involving minors and one count of a lewd act upon a child who was 15.
In exchange, California prosecutors dropped 16 counts that included allegations of raping children and women, as well as human trafficking to produce child pornography.
At the time, the church said that García pleaded guilty because he didn’t think he could get a fair trial after prosecutors withheld or doctored evidence and the agreement would allow him to be freed sooner.
Victims who spoke at Garcia’s trial objected to the plea deal, saying it was too lenient.
If convicted of the federal charges, Garcia would face 15 to 30 years in federal prison for producing child pornography and up to 10 years in prison for possessing it. A judge would decide whether he served the time concurrently or in addition to his state sentence, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
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A Colorado funeral home where 189 decaying bodies were discovered this month appears to have fabricated cremation records and may have given families fake ashes, according to information gathered by The Associated Press from customers and crematories.
The families that did business with Return to Nature Funeral Home fear their loved ones weren’t cremated at all and instead could be among the yet unidentified corpses authorities discovered after responding to a report of an “abhorrent smell.”
“My mom’s last wish was for her remains to be scattered in a place she loved, not rotting away in a building,” said Tanya Wilson, who believes the ashes she spread in Hawaii in August were fake. “Any peace that we had, thinking that we honored her wishes, you know, was just completely ripped away from us.”
Return to Nature gave Wilson’s family and some others death certificates stating their loved ones’ remains had been handled by one of two crematories. But those businesses told the AP they were not performing cremations for Return to Nature on the dates included on the certificates.
Calls and texts sent to numbers listed for Return to Nature and owners Jon and Carie Hallford have gone unanswered since the discovery of the decaying bodies. No arrests have been made. Law enforcement officials have said Return to Nature’s owners were cooperating as investigators sought to determine any criminal wrongdoing.
The AP reviewed four death certificates shared by families. All list a crematory owned by Wilbert Funeral Services, but the deaths came at least five months after the company stopped doing cremations for the financially troubled Return to Nature Funeral Home last November. Lisa Epps, attorney for Wilbert, said members of at least 10 families told the company they had death certificates from after November.
A second crematory, Roselawn Funeral Home in Pueblo, Colorado, was contacted by a family last week that had a 2021 death certificate from Return to Nature listing Roselawn as the crematory. Roselawn did not do the cremation, said its manager, Rudy Krasovec.
Dry concrete
None of the families the AP interviewed received an identification tag or certificate that experts say are usually given to ensure cremations are authentic. Members of all four families described a similar consistency of the ashes that seemed like dry concrete. Two mixed some ashes with water and said they solidified. Dry concrete has been used before by funeral homes to mimic human ashes.
Stephanie Ford said her dry-witted adrenaline junkie husband, Wesley Ford, had nightmares of waking up in a coffin and hated the idea of being buried and his body decaying.
“He wanted to be cremated,” she said, “and back to the earth quickly.”
Wesley Ford died in April, and Return to Nature handled the cremation. When Stephanie Ford learned of the grim discovery at the funeral home this month, her daughter, a physician, took a closer look at the ashes.
“Mom, that’s not dad,” she told her mother.
“I know logically it’s not my fault,” said Stephanie Ford, pushing the words through tears. “There’s a little bit of guilt on my part that I let him down.”
Financial and legal troubles
Public records show the Hallfords and their company, which opened in 2017 and offered cremations and “green” burials without embalming fluids, were beset by recent financial and legal troubles. Among the problems were a forced eviction, unpaid taxes and a lawsuit by Wilbert, which received a $21,000 judgment in June because Return to Nature failed to pay for “a couple hundred” cremations, Epps said.
When Return to Nature gave the ashes to Wilson’s family, her brother, Jesse Elliott, thought they were unusually heavy. Elliott confronted Carie Hallford about his concerns.
“Jesse, of course this is your mother,” Elliott recalled Hallford telling him after she handed him a June death certificate that said Wilbert handled the cremation.
With both siblings skeptical, Wilson took some of the ashes to a different funeral home for a second opinion. Funeral director Amber Flickinger from Platt’s Funeral Home told the AP that the ashes were unusually fine and dark, adding, “I’ve never seen anything that looks like that in the range of what cremated remains would typically expect to look like.”
After the bodies were found at Return to Nature, Michelle Johnston also became skeptical of the ashes that the funeral home said were of her husband, Ken, a retired UPS driver with a gentle demeanor. After mixing the ashes with water, she said, it looked like concrete.
“I was kind of getting to a place where I wasn’t losing it every day,” she said, and now, “I don’t know where my husband is.”
Properly cremated remains are made up of bone fragments that do not have any organic material left, which means they lack DNA that could be used to identify individuals, said Barbara Kemmis, director of the Cremation Association of North America. Sometimes RNA is preserved in the bone fragments, and that can distinguish if the ashes are from a male or female and if they are human or from another animal, she said.
Determining that ashes are fake can be more straightforward, particularly when they’ve been substituted with concrete. A simple test entails wetting the material and seeing if it hardens when it dries, Kemmis said. Real ashes won’t solidify and would stay brittle, said Faith Haug, who chairs the mortuary science program at Colorado’s Arapahoe Community College.
Authorities could be waiting to bring charges until they determine if there are any more improperly stored bodies, said Ian Farrell, a criminal law expert at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
Potential charges under state law could include misdemeanor violations of mortuary regulations and misdemeanor fraud, Farrell said. Each body could result in separate charges, meaning potential fines topping $1 million. The maximum consecutive sentence for misdemeanors is 2 years in jail, he said.
If any federal charges were brought, the penalties potentially could be more severe. In January, a Colorado funeral home operator accused of illegally selling body parts and giving clients fake ashes received a 20-year prison sentence for federal mail fraud.
Abby Swoveland hired Return to Nature when her mother, Sally Swoveland, passed away. The senior Swoveland had run a muzzleloader gun shop called The Mountain Man for nearly 50 years with a sense of humor and a sharp tongue.
When Abby Swoveland called Wilbert Funeral Services, listed on the death certificate, and learned they had long ago stopped doing business with Return to Nature, she was devastated.
“It completely has undone any healing that was taking place,” Swoveland said.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s former top executive for his crypto hedge fund says the collapse of FTX left her feeling “relief that I didn’t have to lie anymore.”
In emotional testimony in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, Caroline Ellison blamed Bankman-Fried for crafting justifications for conduct that was wrong and illegal.
Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, recalled Bankman-Fried’s contention that he wanted to do the greatest good for the most people, and that edicts such as “don’t lie” or “don’t steal” had to be ignored at times.
Testifying for a second day, Ellison said she thought her onetime romantic partner’s philosophy made her “more willing to do things like lie and steal over time.”
After several hours on the witness stand, Ellison got choked up as she described the final days of FTX and Alameda, saying that the early November period before the businesses filed for bankruptcy “was overall the worst week of my life.”
Ellison said she felt bad for “all the people harmed” when there wasn’t enough money left for all of FTX’s customers and Alameda’s lenders.
When the collapse happened, Ellison said it left her with a “sense of relief that I didn’t have to lie anymore.”
Balancing Act
Earlier in her testimony, Ellison disclosed she changed balance sheets to try to hide that Alameda was borrowing about $10 billion from FTX customers in June 2022, when the cryptocurrency market was plummeting and some lenders were calling on Alameda to return their money.
Ellison at one point said she had created seven different balance sheets after Bankman-Fried told her to figure out ways to cover up things that might cast a negative light on Alameda’s operations.
“I didn’t really want to be dishonest, but I also didn’t want them to know the truth,” the 28-year-old said.
Ellison said in years past, she never would have thought she’d be sending phony balance sheets to lenders or misallocating customer money, “but I think it became something I became more comfortable with as I was working there.”
Ellison said she dreaded what would occur if customer withdrawals from FTX couldn’t be covered or that what they had done would become public.
“In June 2022, we were in the bad situation and I was concerned that if anybody found out, it would all come crashing down,” she said.
That crash came last November, when FTX couldn’t fulfill a rush of customer withdrawals, forcing it into bankruptcy and prompting investigations by prosecutors and regulators.
Bankman-Fried, 31, has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges. His lawyers argue he was not criminally responsible for the demise of his businesses.
Initially confined to his parents’ Palo Alto, California, home under terms of a $250 million bond, Bankman-Fried has been jailed since August after Judge Lewis A. Kaplan concluded that he had tried to improperly influence potential witnesses, including Ellison.
The son of Stanford University law professors, Bankman-Fried is accused of funneling billions of dollars from FTX to Alameda, allegedly using as much as $10 billion in customer deposits to cover luxury real estate purchases and large political donations. He faces a potential prison term of more than a century if convicted of federal fraud and money-laundering charges.
U.S. Rep. George Santos stole the identities of donors to his campaign and then used their credit cards to ring up tens of thousands of dollars in unauthorized charges, according to a new indictment filed Tuesday.
He then wired some of the money to his own personal bank account, prosecutors said, while using the rest to inflate his campaign coffers.
The 23-count indictment replaces one filed in May against the New York Republican charging him with embezzling money from his campaign and lying to Congress about his wealth, among other offenses.
In the updated indictment, prosecutors accuse Santos of charging more than $44,000 to his campaign over a period of months using cards belonging to contributors without their knowledge. In one case, he charged $12,000 to a contributor’s credit card and transferred the “vast majority” of that money into his personal bank account, prosecutors said.
Santos is also accused of falsely reporting to the Federal Elections Commission that he had loaned his campaign $500,000 when he actually hadn’t given anything and had less than $8,000 in the bank. The fake loan was an attempt to convince Republican Party officials that he was a serious candidate, worth their financial support, the indictment said.
“As alleged, Santos is charged with stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, lying to the FEC and, by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.
Santos came out of a two-hour Republican conference at the U.S Capitol and told reporters he had no comment on the superseding indictment. “I was in conference like everyone else, without my phone, so I have nothing to say,” he said. He has previously maintained his innocence, claiming he is the victim of a “witch hunt.”
The new charges deepen the legal peril for Santos, who likely faces a lengthy prison term if convicted. So far, he has resisted all calls to resign, insisting he intends to run for reelection next year.
Santos’ personal and professional biography as a wealthy businessman began to unravel soon after winning election to represent parts of Long Island and Queens last year, revealing a tangled web of deception.
In addition to lying to voters — about his distinguished Wall Street background, Jewish heritage, academic and athletic achievements, animal rescue work, real estate holdings and more — Santos is accused of carrying out numerous schemes meant to enrich himself and mislead his donors.
He was initially arrested in May on a 13-count federal indictment, which charged him with using funds earmarked for campaign expenses on designer clothes and other personal expenses and improperly obtaining unemployment benefits meant for Americans who lost work because of the pandemic.
Free on bail while awaiting trial, Santos has described his litany of lies as victimless embellishments, while blaming some of his financial irregularities on his former campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, who he claims “went rogue.”
Last week, Marks, a longtime Long Island political bookkeeper, pleaded guilty to a fraud conspiracy charge, telling a judge she helped her former boss hoodwink prospective donors and Republican party officials by submitting bogus campaign finance reports.
Tuesday’s indictment said Marks and Santos were involved in the same scheme to fake a $500,000 campaign loan in order to meet a benchmark that would unlock additional support from a Republican Party committee. Santos has now also been charged with recording fake donations from at least 10 people, all his or Marks’ relatives, as part of the same effort to make the campaign look like it hit those fundraising goals.
Santos was not initially charged in the criminal complaint against Marks, but was identified in court papers as a “co-conspirator.”
The new indictment alleges a multi-part fraud by Santos, who allegedly duped both his donors and his family members.
In one instance, Santos allegedly swiped the credit card information of one of his contributors, who had already donated $5,800 to the campaign, to give himself an additional $15,800 in payments, the indictment said. Because the unauthorized charges exceeded contribution limits under federal law, Santos listed the additional payments as coming from his own unwitting relatives, prosecutors allege.
The credit card fraud scheme began in December 2021, prosecutors said, shortly after Santos failed to qualify for a Republican Party program that would have provided financial and logistical support to his second congressional campaign.
In text messages to Marks at the time, he described himself as “lost and desperate,” prosecutors said.
Financial questions have continued to swirl around Santos, who claimed to be rich but spent much of his adulthood bouncing between low-paying jobs and unemployment, while fending off eviction cases and two separatecriminal charges relating to his use of bad checks.
A separate fundraiser for Santos, Sam Miele, was also previously indicted on federal charges that he impersonated a high-ranking congressional aide while soliciting contributions for the Republican’s campaign.
Prosecutors said Miele, 27, impersonated the former chief of staff to GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who at the time was the House minority leader, by setting up dummy email addresses that resembled the staffer’s name.
Miele’s attorney, Kevin Marino, previously predicted his client would be exonerated at trial.
The woman accused of drunkenly plowing her vehicle into a golf cart, killing a newly-wed bride and injuring the man she’d married just hours earlier, has been indicted by a grand jury in South Carolina.
Jamie Komoroski was charged in Charleston County with reckless homicide, felony DUI resulting in death and two counts of felony DUI resulting in great bodily injury, according to court documents obtained by WSCS. Police said her blood alcohol content was more than three times the legal limit the night of the deadly crash, which unfolded on April 28 on Folly Beach, near Charleston.
Just hours earlier, Samantha and Aric had exchanged vows by the water during a romantic wedding ceremony. They were in a golf cart carrying them away from their wedding reception when they were hit by Komoroski, who was traveling 65 mph in a 25 mph zone.
Charleston County Sheriff’s Office
Jamie Komoroski (Charleston County Sheriff’s Office)
The 34-year-old bride was pronounced dead on the scene. Her husband sustained a brain injury and broken bones, according to a statement his family posted to a GoFundMe page. He has since filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Komoroski as well as the bars that served her in the hours leading up to the deadly collision: Snapper Jacks, The Drop-In Bar and Deli, The Crab Shack, Taco Boy, El Gallo Bar and Grill, and Bottle Cap Holdings, LLC.
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, Komoroski told investigators she’d only had a beer and a tequila drink before the crash, but Hutchinson’s lawsuit alleges she enjoyed a “booze-filled” bar-hop across Folly Beach.
Last month, Komorski’s request for bond was denied by Judge Michael Nettles who set the condition that the case be tried by March 2024.
Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden, was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury in Delaware on three felony gun charges related to a 2018 purchase of a firearm during a time in which he admitted to being addicted to drugs. The indictment comes less than two months after a plea agreement on gun and tax charges between Biden’s attorneys and federal prosecutors fell apart. Catherine Herridge has the details.
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President Biden’s son, Hunter, has been indicted on three federal counts related to his purchase of a firearm in October 2018, while he was a drug user, according to court filings. Norah O’Donnell anchored CBS News’ special report on the indictment.
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A judge on Friday denied Mark Meadows’ request to move his Georgia election subversion case to federal court, ruling that the Trump White House chief of staff must fight the charges in state court instead.
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones in Atlanta wrote in a 49-page ruling that Meadows “has not met even the ‘quite low’ threshold” to move his case to federal court, noting that the question was whether the actions at issue were related to his role as a federal official.
“The evidence adduced at the hearing establishes that the actions at the heart of the State’s charges against Meadows were taken on behalf of the Trump campaign with an ultimate goal of affecting state election activities and procedures,” Jones wrote. “Meadows himself testified that working for the Trump campaign would be outside the scope of a White House Chief of Staff.”
The ruling is a big early win for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who spent 2 1/2 years investigating and building the case against former President Donald Trump, Meadows and 17 others before obtaining the sweeping indictment under Georgia’s anti-racketeering law. She has said she wants to try all the defendants together.
Trump has indicated that he is considering asking for his trial to be moved to federal court, and several other defendants have already made the request. The ruling by Jones against Meadows could signal that the others may struggle to meet the burden required to win removal when their lawyers make their arguments before the judge later this month, though Jones made clear that he will assess each of those cases individually.
The practical effects of moving to federal court would be a jury pool that includes a broader area than just overwhelmingly Democratic Fulton County and a trial that would not be photographed or televised, as cameras are not allowed inside federal courtrooms. But it would not open the door for Trump, if he’s reelected in 2024, or another president to issue pardons because any conviction would still happen under state law.
A lawyer for Meadows did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday evening. But Meadows is expected to appeal the ruling. In a court filing earlier this week, he asked to separate his case from the other defendants in the case and to halt his proceedings in the state court until a final determination is reached on his attempt to move to federal court, “including through appeal, if an appeal is taken.”
Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows talks to reporters on Oct. 21, 2020.
TASOS KATOPODIS / Getty Images
A spokesperson for Willis declined to comment.
Meadows and the others were indicted last month by a Fulton County grand jury on charges they participated in a sprawling scheme to illegally try to overturn Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss in Georgia even though the state’s voters had selected Joe Biden.
All have pleaded not guilty.
Meadows said his actions were taken as part of his role as chief of staff to the Republican president. He and his lawyers also argued that, since he was a federal official at the time, the charges against him should be heard in federal court and, ultimately, dismissed for lack of merit.
Prosecutors said the actions laid out in the indictment were meant to keep Trump in office after he lost to Biden, a Democrat. They said the acts were explicitly political in nature and are illegal under the Hatch Act, which restricts partisan political activity by federal employees. As such, they said, the case should stay in Fulton County Superior Court.
Jones wrote that the evidence “overwhelmingly suggests” that most of the actions attributed to Meadows in the indictment did not fall within “his scope of executive branch duties.”
“Even if Meadows took on tasks that mirror the duties that he carried out when acting in his official role as White House Chief of Staff (such as attending meetings, scheduling phone calls, and managing the President’s time) he has failed to demonstrate how the election-related activities that serve as the basis for the charges in the Indictment are related to any of his official acts,” the judge wrote.
Jones also made clear that he was making no judgment on the merits of the case against Meadows or any defense he might offer.
Earlier Friday, another Georgia judge released the full report prepared by a special purpose grand jury in the investigation that led up to the indictments.The 23 special grand jurors had the ability to subpoena witnesses and recommend charges in the report, which they completed in January but which was largely kept under seal until now.
The report reveals that a majority of the members recommended charges against 27 people “with respect to the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election” — including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; former Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia; and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who were not ultimately among those charged in the case.
In a statement Friday, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung blasted Willis and the special grand jury process as “politically motivated” and “clearly biased,” saying that they “voted to indict dozens of innocent individuals, including former and sitting United States Senators, simply for raising concerns about election integrity and exercising their First Amendment Rights under the Constitution.”
The MSNBC panel was awaiting former president Donald Trump’s Fulton County Jail mug shot, when Rachel Maddow asked her audience to register the gravity of the moment. “I’m saying we should slow down here just for a second, because this is serious stuff for the nation, for who we are as a country,” she said last week, as MSNBC aired the photo—the first of any current or former United States president. “This is not something to take lightly. Our constitutional republic depends on the very basic concept of rule by law, not rule by man,” Maddow continued. It was fitting that Trump looked so angry in the mug shot; despite being the fourth indictment and arrest this year, it was Trump’s first. “He’s embodying…the avatar for the rage that he has traded off of to become president in the first place,” Joy Reid said.
But not every moment was that earnest on MSNBC that night. Over the course of the segment, which followed everything from Trump’s plane landing in Atlanta to his motorcade to and from the jailhouse, the MSNBC panel—Reid, Maddow, Chris Hayes, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Nicolle Wallace—oscillated between analysis, weighty reflection, and, well, schadenfreude. O’Donnell mused, was the “strawberry” hair color listed in the booking information Trump’s own description? Maddow cast a cheeky glance to her colleagues when she read his listed height: “six-foot-three.” Then came Trump’s weight—listed as 215 pounds—sending the table into hysterics.
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MSNBC’s talking heads had been given the license to have a little fun. Even when Maddow and others were reflecting on the sheer weightiness of this newscycle—that even a former president can be held accountable under the criminal justice system—a viewer could tell: This panel was relishing every part of it. And, it seems, the viewers are relishing in it all too.
MSNBC has emerged as the network of choice for viewers looking for coverage of Trump’s criminal charges. The timing of Trump’s arrest in Georgia—Thursday night—didn’t correspond with Maddow’s regular Monday slot, but the network brought her on anyway; it was an evening ripe for the heavy hitters, after all. The tactic seems to be working. The network has seen a bump in ratings recently, reportedly beating Fox News in prime-time ratings for a full week in early June amid coverage of Trump’s second indictment, on charges related to classified documents. The network continued to bear the fruits of Trump’s legal woes earlier this month, which has been MSNBC’s most-watched in more than two years. When Trump was indicted for the fourth time, over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, MSNBC prevailed over Fox News for the top three spots in the cable lineup, Forbes reported, citing Nielson data. More viewers turned to MSNBC from 9 p.m. through 3 a.m. than Fox News and CNN combined. Maddow’s 9 p.m. program, which happened to feature a previously scheduled interview with Hillary Clinton, drew 3.9 million viewers, and was the number one show across all of television, including broadcast. MSNBC beat Fox News in prime time again the next night. “While most of the country is experiencing some level of fatigue over Trump’s legal battles, MSNBC’s viewership has increased with each subsequent indictment,” Axios’s Sara Fischernoted.
MSNBC’s approach—and success—is in spite of the broader recalibration toward nonpartisan media that newer outlets like Semafor and The Messenger have said they see a market for. CNN, too, made an apparent attempt to overcorrect for its breathless coverage of the Trump White House. The result, largely ushered under now ex-CEO Chris Licht, has at times been over-sanitized, leaving viewers unsure of what the network is offering.
“CNN has definitely lost a ton of audience to MSNBC,” one CNN producer tells me. “One of Chris Licht’s great legacies was basically telling the audience we built during the Trump era: You’re not welcome, we don’t work for you. I don’t know if that’s ever going to be undone, and this new lineup is certainly not a strategy to attract this audience back.” CNN is maintaining its focus on hard news, both in its latest streaming effort and newly cemented prime-time lineup. “We now have a decade of data telling us that cable news viewers don’t want news in prime time,” the producer adds. “So this completely ‘blinders on, we’re gonna double down on news in prime time and hope for the best’—it just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Meanwhile, MSNBC has seemingly only doubled down on being the premier news source for the Trump resistance. For two years, the network’s coverage and numbers were largely driven by Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. “In addition to breaking pieces of news related to the probe—working in tandem with journalists from NBC News—MSNBC’s anchors, and, in particular, its opinionated progressive evening hosts, turned the Russia story into a gripping daily soap opera that not only helped grow the channel’s audience, but kept it coming back for more,” my colleague Joe Pompeo wrote back in 2019. A person close to MSNBC’s strategic thinking credits the network’s ratings to more than just the recent indictments, pointing to both the network’s consistency with viewers and expanded footprint across digital, audio, and streaming. Following Trump’s departure from office, the mandate for hosts has been to keep it nice, as Semafor reported—opinion without snark or bombast.
Now MSNBC is approaching what could be the apex in Trump political coverage: his indictments, trials, and another presidential run. The network appears particularly well-positioned to take on this story with its stable of legal analysts, including former top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, former acting US solicitor general Neal Katyal, and former US attorney Joyce Vance. It helps that NBC News has also been a central player this political cycle and appears well-sourced with both Trumpworld and Ron Desantis’s camp; NBC nabbed the first network interview with the Florida governor after he launched his campaign, and has been nabbing scoops on him as well as on the Biden administration.
Timing, too, is on their side; MSNBC is firing on all cylinders just as its competitors face a period of instability. Fox News is still figuring out its future without Tucker Carlson and girding for more defamation suits, while CNN is rudderless, with temporary management attempting to pick up the pieces post-Licht’s tenure, as the company searches for a new CEO.
Over at MSNBC, things are comparatively low drama. I’m told that MSNBC president Rashida Jones has an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality that has been well-received by top talent.
Former President Donald Trump is expected to turn himself in Thursday in Fulton County, Georgia, igniting a new chapter in ongoing legal proceedings. Trump’s surrender comes as nine of his co-defendants have turned themselves in this week, including his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani. CBS News’ Nikole Killion reports from Georgia.
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Rudy Giuliani, the one-time personal attorney for former President Donald Trump, surrendered at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta on Wednesday to face 13 state felony counts charging him as part of an alleged scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. He was one of 19 people, included Trump, who have been indicted in the case. Trump is expected to surrender Thursday. Nikole Killion has more.
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“Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED by a Radical Left District Attorney, Fani Willis, who is overseeing one of the greatest Murder and Violent Crime DISASTERS in American History,” he wrote.
“In my case, the trip to Atlanta is not for ‘Murder,’ but for making a PERFECT PHONE CALL! She campaigned, and is continuing to campaign, and raise money on, this WITCH HUNT. This is in strict coordination with Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ. It is all about ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”
Fulton County prosecutors have charged Trump under Georgia’s racketeering and corrupt organizations statutes, accusing the Republican of hatching a scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election so he could remain in office.
The president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former law professor John Eastman also face multiple criminal charges.
Donald Trump at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Aug. 13.
Mike Stobe via Getty Images
Earlier on Monday, the Fulton County district attorney’s office set Trump’s bond at $200,000.
The pretrial release terms also bar Trump, who is a 2024 presidential candidate, from intimidating his co-defendants or witnesses, online or in person.
An order signed by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee stated, “The Defendant shall perform no act to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a codefendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.”
“The above shall include, but are not limited to, posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media.”
Though Trump is facing criminal charges in four separate matters, the Fulton County case is the first of the four to set cash bail for the self-proclaimed billionaire.
He was released on personal recognizance after being booked in Miami for his alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
In Washington, D.C., Trump was ordered not to communicate with witnesses and/or co-defendants in the federal election subversion case without his lawyer present.
He was instructed to use a lawyer if communicating with anyone involved in his New York City hush money case.
Last week, Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat said Trump and the co-defendants won’t be getting any special treatment when they show up for arraignment.
“It doesn’t matter your status. We have a mug shot ready for you. Unless someone tells me differently, we are following our normal practices,” he told NPR.
His public efforts on behalf of Trump, with partner Marissa Goldberg, have been fairly aggressive. When Findling’s hiring was announced last August he labeled Willis’s inquiry “an erroneous and politically driven persecution.” In February, he strongly criticized Emily Kohrs,the forewoman of the Fulton County special purpose grand jury investigating Trump, for giving interviews. “This type of carnival, clown-like atmosphere that was portrayed over the course of the last 36 hours takes away from the complete sanctity and the integrity and, for that matter, the reliability [of the investigation],” Findling told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He followed up in March by filing a motion attacking Willis’s conduct and seeking to quash the grand jury’s final report. Obviously that didn’t work, and now the skirmishing will likely grow far more intense.
Findling, 63, has come a very long way from his scuffling childhood in Coram, New York, a blue-collar Long Island town, where, from the age of eight, he was raised by a single mother who worked as a grocery store cashier. A track scholarship took Findling to Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University; he stayed in town to attend law school at Emory. He went from the public defender’s office to his own firm, where, among many other cases, Findling won the battered spouse acquittal of a woman who had doused her husband with gasoline and set him on fire, and a not guilty verdict, on 27 felony counts, for Victor Hill, a county sheriff accused of racketeering (it was the Hill case, Findling says, that motivated another Trump Atlanta attorney, Jennifer Little, to reach out to him last year).
But it wasn’t until 2013 that Findling became a star beyond courthouse circles. He took on a client named Radric Davis, who had been arrested for hitting a soldier with a Champagne bottle in a nightclub. Findling wasn’t aware that Davis was far better known as Gucci Mane, or that the alleged victim was apparently a fan who wanted a photo with Gucci. The trap pioneer was at a low point, struggling with drugs; Findling helped turn his life around, negotiating a federal plea deal for possession of a firearm by a felon, then attaining Gucci Mane’s early release from prison. Since then Findling has become a favorite of Atlanta rap royalty, including Waka Flocka Flame and Migos. He has always dressed the part, in a Miami Vice kind of way, with slick-backed hair, dark sunglasses, and windowpane suits; Findling’s Instagram page, run by one of his sons, has picked up 240,000 followers.
So when Cardi B was charged with felony assault in connection with the attacks on two women in a Queens strip club, her husband, Georgia-native rapper Offset, knew just the guy for her to call. The case dragged on for four years, but Cardi ultimately pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors. “Cardi thinks Drew is the best lawyer she’s ever worked with, and she also considers him a friend,” says her manager, Shawn Holiday. The rapper is a fiercely outspoken Democrat who endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 election cycle; what does she make of Findling taking on Trump as a client? “No comment,” Holiday says. (A representative for Cardi told The New Yorker that “she gave him shit about it.” “She did not,” Findling tells me. “She’s been 100% supportive.”)
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“I am not a ‘rapper’ attorney,” Findling says, estimating that hip-hop clients are a mere 5% of his firm’s business and pointing to major commodities trading and political corruption cases on its record. The Trump case, though, is the one that is giving Findling a national profile and that is calling into question the consistency of his ideals. In 2020, Findling posted a nearly five-minute video invoking the memory of his recently deceased mother as he passionately praised the Black Lives Matter movement. Last June, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, he declared on Instagram that he would “commit my law firm to fighting to restore a woman’s right to choose which has been destroyed by the Supreme Court.” Defending Trump—who Findling’s firm has so far billed for at least $800,000—would seem to run counter to those values. “I believe in this defense, and I believe in everything we’re saying,” he says. “It has nothing at all to do with the past—it has to do with this case, and my commitment to my client’s innocence in this case. Which I believe in.”
Donald Trump is getting mocked on social media after making two announcements in a row on Thursday.
First, the former president canceled his big news conference on Monday, when he had promised to deliver “irrefutable” evidence of 2020 presidential election fraud in a “CONCLUSIVE” report that would lead to “a complete EXONERATION.”
Trump and his allies have failed to produce any such evidence in the nearly three years since the 2020 election despite constantly claiming to have it.
Now Trump claims the evidence will be presented in legal filings instead.
And second, he fired off a message indicating he won’t participate in next week’s Republican presidential debate.
“People know my Record, one of the BEST EVER, so why would I Debate?” he wrote.
Trump’s critics mocked him for backing down in both cases:
