Tag: law and legal system

Family of unarmed Black man sues the Louisiana officer who killed him while waiting for release of body-camera video | CNN

CNN
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The family of an unarmed Black man who was shot and killed by a Shreveport, Louisiana, police officer has filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the officer.

The lawsuit filed Saturday in the Western District of Louisiana alleges the officer violated Alonzo Bagley’s Fourth Amendment rights.

Bagley, 43, was shot and killed earlier this month after police responded to a domestic disturbance call at an apartment complex, Louisiana State Police said in a statement. When two officers arrived around 10:50 p.m. on February 3, Bagley jumped down from an apartment balcony and fled, said the statement from state police, which is the agency investigating the shooting.

After a short foot pursuit, an officer “located Mr. Bagley as he rounded a building corner and fired one shot from his service weapon, which struck Mr. Bagley in the chest,” state police said. Bagley later was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Detectives did not find any weapons on or near Bagley when they processed the scene, Louisiana State Police Superintendent Col. Lamar Davis said.

The “use of lethal force against an unarmed man who posed no threat is objectively unreasonable, excessive and wholly without justification,” the lawsuit alleges.

The family is seeking more than $10 million in damages, according to the lawsuit.

The officer who shot Bagley was identified by state police as Alexander Tyler.

Tyler is currently on paid administrative leave pending results of the state police investigation, the Shreveport Police Department told CNN. The officer has been with the department since May 2021, Chief Wayne Smith said.

The investigation into Bagley’s shooting death comes as police use of force against people of color, particularly Black Americans, is under intense scrutiny nationwide, including the brutal beating death of Tyre Nichols by Memphis officers conducting what police said was a traffic stop.

In Louisiana, four state troopers and another law enforcement officer were indicted on charges last year stemming from the in-custody killing of 49-year-old Ronald Greene, a Black man violently beaten by officers during an arrest.

“I am asking for the community to remain patient as we continue to conduct a very thorough investigation,” Davis said following Bagley’s death. “Transparency in the investigation is a priority for our agency.”

Investigators are reviewing body-worn and dashboard camera videos and hope to release them to the public, Davis has said.

“The family hopes to view the video before (Bagley’s) funeral,” Ronald Haley, the family’s attorney, told CNN, noting the funeral is scheduled for Saturday.

State police declined Tuesday to say when the video would be released.

“Further information will be released in coordination with the District Attorney’s Office. We do not have a timeline at this time,” Nick Manale, a spokesperson for state police, told CNN via email.

The Caddo Parish District Attorney’s Office told CNN it has not received any investigative materials from investigators.

“Louisiana State police has the case under investigation,” Laura Fulco, the first assistant district attorney for Caddo Parish, said. “It is still under investigation.”

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February 15, 2023
Third Trump attorney appears before federal grand jury investigating Mar-a-Lago documents | CNN Politics

CNN
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Alina Habba, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, appeared last month before a federal grand jury investigating the mishandling of classified documents from his time in the White House, two sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.

Habba is the third Trump lawyer known to have been brought before the DC-based grand jury, which is investigating obstruction in addition to criminal violations of government records laws.

While Habba has not played the prominent role that other Trump attorneys have played in responding to the documents probe, which spilled out in public view with an August FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, she has made notable TV appearances defending Trump and criticizing the federal documents probe.

Habba also has been a lead attorney in litigation related to New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil case against the Trump family and their business for alleged financial fraud. In that role, she personally searched several Trump properties – including Trump’s residence and private office at Mar-a-Lago – weeks before the FBI search.

She was tasked with recovering any Trump Organization documents that James was seeking but told a New York court she didn’t find any records covered by the subpoena from the attorney general.

Habba’s spokesperson declined to comment on her recent appearance in the federal documents probe.

Since Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith has taken over the federal investigation, it has taken significant steps. Trump attorneys Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb recently appeared before the grand jury as well, CNN reported last week.

Corcoran was in contact with federal officials as the efforts to retrieve and scrutinize the documents in question ramped up last year. He also drafted a statement – ultimately signed by Bobb in June – asserting that Trump’s representatives had complied with a subpoena for documents marked as classified that remained at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

In the weeks after, the FBI came to believe that other classified documents were still at Mar-a-Lago and executed a search warrant in August.

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February 14, 2023
Man who allegedly drove U-Haul truck into people in New York City will face murder and attempted murder charges, police say | CNN

New York
CNN
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A man who allegedly drove a U-Haul truck into pedestrians in New York City on Monday will face one charge of second-degree murder and seven counts of attempted murder, New York Police Chief of Detectives James Essig said at a Tuesday news conference.

Weng Sor, a 62-year-old man from Las Vegas, allegedly was driving the U-Haul on Monday and hit people as he fled to evade a car stop, according to police.

A 44-year-old died as a result of his injuries, and eight others including a police officer were injured, according to Essig. One person is in critical but stable condition, and injuries for the others ranged from broken bones to cuts and bruises, Essig said.

CNN was not able to immediately identify an attorney for Sor. It’s unclear what formal charges Sor will face when he is arraigned in Kings County Criminal Court.

“He’s still in police custody so no arraignment any time soon,” an email response from the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office said. “Still sorting out charges.”

The incident began when police pulled over the rented truck at about 10:49 a.m. in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the New York Police Department said. The driver evaded police and was taken into custody a few blocks away after hitting the victims.

Sor lives in Las Vegas with his mother and traveled to Florida on February 1 where he rented a U-Haul, Essig said.

Sor was arrested in South Carolina while driving to New York for reckless driving and possession of marijuana, he added.

The suspect’s ex-wife and son live in Brooklyn, Essig said, and Sor stopped at their residence twice before Monday’s incident to shower. The second time, he had “an altercation with his son,” Essig told reporters.

“Based on interviews with his family members and confirmed when interrogated by members of the New York City detective bureau, we believe Mr. Sor was suffering from a mental health crisis,” Essig said. “At this time, there is no nexus to terrorism.”

It appears Sor was living in the U-Haul, according to a law enforcement source. Boxes of his clothes and other items were found in the van, the source said.

According to Essig, Sor told investigators that when was driving the rental truck Monday, he saw “an invisible object come towards the car.”

“And at that point, he says, ‘I’ve had enough’ and he goes on his rampage,” Essig said.

Sor told police officers they should have shot him when he was arrested, he said.

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February 14, 2023
Pence to fight subpoena on separation of powers grounds because he was president of Senate | CNN Politics

CNN
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Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to fight a recent subpoena from the special counsel based on the grounds that he was president of the Senate at the time and therefore shielded from the order, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

Pence is expected to address the subpoena and his response to it during a trip to Iowa on Wednesday, according to a source familiar with his plans.

Pence has been subpoenaed by the special counsel investigating former President Donald Trump and his role in January 6, 2021, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. Special counsel Jack Smith’s office is seeking documents and testimony, the source said. Investigators want the former vice president to testify about his interactions with Trump leading up to the 2020 election and the day of the attack on the US Capitol.

The subpoena marks an important milestone in the Justice Department’s two-year criminal investigation, now led by the special counsel, into the efforts by Trump and allies to impede the transfer of power after he lost the 2020 election. Pence is an important witness who has detailed in a memoir some of his interactions with Trump in the weeks after the election, a move that likely opens the door for the Justice Department to override at least some of Trump’s claims of executive privilege.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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February 14, 2023
Memphis firefighters union defends EMTs in Tyre Nichols case, says they weren’t given ‘adequate information’ | CNN

CNN
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The president of the firefighters union in Memphis, Tennessee is defending the actions of EMTs involved in the Tyre Nichols case.

In a letter to the Memphis City Council, Thomas Malone, president of the Memphis Fire Fighters Association, said his members “were not given adequate information upon dispatch or upon arrival on the scene” where Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, had been repeatedly punched and kicked by police after a traffic stop on January 7.

“Quite frankly, there was information withheld by those already on the scene which caused our members to handle things differently than they should have,” Malone suggested.

Three Memphis Fire Department personnel were fired for failing to render emergency care during the January 7 incident.

CNN obtained the letter from Memphis City Council member Dr. Jeff Warren. CNN has reached out to both Malone and Ben Crump, an attorney for the Nichols family, and has yet to hear back.

Malone also said he was “disheartened” to see some members of the 1,600-employee department criticizing fellow members during a city council meeting last week.

“Our members respond to hundreds of calls over and over, without fail. One incident should not define the good work being done by these dedicated public servants and some have taken that position, unfortunately,” he said.

Memphis Fire Chief Gina Sweat told the council that training issues and the failure of EMTs to take personal accountability on a call were to blame for her department’s handling of the Nichols case.

Emergency medical technicians Robert Long and JaMichael Sandridge and fire Lt. Michelle Whitaker were fired, the fire department announced last month.

An investigation concluded that the two EMTs “failed to conduct an adequate patient assessment of Mr. Nichols” after responding based on both the initial call – in which they heard a person was pepper-sprayed – and information they were told at the scene, Sweat said in a news release.

Whitaker had remained in the fire truck, according to the chief’s statement.

The truck carrying the EMTs arrived at about 8:41 p.m. when Nichols was on the ground leaning against a police vehicle, the fire department said. An ambulance was called at 8:46 p.m. the department said. The ambulance arrived at 8:55 p.m. and left with Nichols 13 minutes later, according to the fire department.

Pole-camera video shows that between the time the EMTs arrived and the ambulance arrived, first responders repeatedly walked away from Nichols, with Nichols intermittently falling onto his side.

Since the incident, six officers have been fired, including five who are facing murder charges in Nichols’ death. On Monday, the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office spokesperson told CNN another of the fired officers involved in the incident would have his case’s reviewed.

The former officer, Preston Hemphill, was also fired for violating multiple police department policies, including personal conduct and truthfulness. He has not been charged in the case.

Last week, the district attorney’s office announced it would investigate all prior and pending cases involving the five officers who were criminally charged.

The officers were also added to a Giglio list, also known as a Brady list which documents law enforcement members who have been charged criminally or involved in incidents of untruthfulness or other issues that may undermine their credibility, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

“The Shelby County District Attorney’s Office will add former Memphis Police Department Officer Preston Hemphill to the Giglio list. Additionally, the Office will investigate all prior and pending cases of Hemphill,” spokesperson Erica Williams said.

Hemphill’s attorney, Lee Gerald, declined to comment about the investigation or his client’s addition to the Giglio list.

Hemphill was seen on body camera video using his Taser on Nichols and later could be heard saying, “I hope they stomp his ass.”

After Nichols’ beating, Hemphill provided conflicting statements about the case, first saying on a form that Nichols tried to grab a fellow officer’s weapon, but later telling investigators he did not see that occur, according to a police department document obtained by CNN.

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February 13, 2023
Quake-hit Turkey and Syria face years of rebuilding. Experts say it didn’t have to be this way | CNN

CNN
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Five days after a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked Turkey and Syria the number of dead is staggering.

Drone footage and satellite imagery have conveyed the stark reality of widespread destruction in an area that straddles two very different nations.

The scale of the disaster is enormous. “We’ve done a bit of mapping of the size of the affected area,” said Caroline Holt, director of disasters, climate and crises at the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC). “It’s the size of France.”

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Thursday that “we haven’t yet seen the full extent of the damage and of the humanitarian crisis unfolding before our eyes,” while estimates from the World Health Organization suggest up to 23 million people could be impacted by the natural disaster.

Once search efforts have ended, attention will turn to longer-term reconstruction. Turkey has suffered earthquakes in the past, and has rebuilt. But how much can be learned from this history and will these lessons be implemented? And will the same efforts be matched across the border?

The death toll broke the grim milestone of 22,000 on Friday. As it continues to climb, so too have feelings of anger and resentment. Turkey is no stranger to earthquakes and many feel that the government failed to prepare for another catastrophic event.

This frustration dogged Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as he made a whistle-stop tour of the Kahramanmaras region – near the epicenter of the deadly earthquake – on Wednesday and Thursday. Erdogan defended his government’s response, admitting to “shortcomings,” before stressing that it’s “not possible to be prepared for such a disaster.” He also announced that the government’s target was to rebuild “in one year,” though experts told CNN it could take much longer.

Major earthquakes such as these are infrequent, but many in Turkey are still harrowed by memories of the 1999 Izmit earthquake in the Marmara region.

Ajay Chhibber, an economist who was World Bank director for Turkey when that 7.6 magnitude quake struck two decades ago, told CNN that “it’s like a bad movie [that’s] come back again.” Similar to this week’s event, that tremor struck in the early hours but it occurred in the country’s northwest – a densely populated area closer to Istanbul. He said it lasted around 45 seconds, leaving more than 17,000 dead and an estimated 500,000 people homeless.

Flying into the region in the immediate aftermath, Chhibber told CNN he “hadn’t seen that much devastation before.” He recalled traveling in with the Japanese and German ambassadors at the time, who told him “this looks to us like World War II.”

Buildings “flattened like pancakes” were among the apocalyptic scenes Chhibber encountered in 1999. In the city of Golcuk, where a naval base was located, he remembered seeing “submarines that were tossed up out of the water, lying 300, 400 feet up a mountain.”

“You could see submarines sitting there. It was unbelievable. And what I’m seeing now is just a redo,” he said.

Some may question if the Turkish president’s current target of a year for reconstruction is achievable, given he also said that more than 6,000 buildings had collapsed. But Chhibber pointed out that “Turkey is capable of moving very, very swiftly – if they can get their act together on this.”

Chhibber helped implement a four-part recovery plan in the wake of the 1999 disaster that provided cash to residents, aided in reconstructing infrastructure and housing, established an insurance system and developed an organizational system that cascaded from a national level down to the community for overall coordination efforts.

“Compared to disasters around the world, it was one of the most rapid reconstruction and recoveries that I ever saw,” Chhibber said. He added that the majority of the work was completed in two years.

Ismail Baris, professor of social work at Istanbul’s Uskudar University and former mayor of Golcuk at the time of the quake, told CNN in an email that “in addition to the collapsed private and public buildings, the city’s water transport pipes, water supply network, sewage system [and] storm water system were completely destroyed,” as well as 80% of the city’s roads. He added that the full reconstruction of the city took four years.

In photos: Deadly quake strikes Turkey and Syria

However, much of the reconstruction then was aided by the Turkish army, which was brought in when many local administrations collapsed. Chhibber said this enabled the rubble clearing to be done quickly.

“But Izmit is in the heartland of Turkey,” said Chhibber. Many Kurds live in the areas hit by the earthquake and bringing in the army may cause problems.

“This is a huge challenge,” said Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London. While the army has the personnel and resources, “they also have the unfortunate history of often abusing their power,” Kelman told CNN.

“The Kurds in that region and many Turks in that region, understandably, would be very hesitant to have the army in the streets even more than they have been,” he said.

Experts said there also needs to be a review of what went wrong. The country has strict rules that came into place after 1999 – construction regulations were implemented that required the more modern builds to be able to withstand these quakes. Yet many of the apartment blocks within the earthquake zone appeared to have been newly-constructed and still collapsed.

Stadium in Kahramanmaras, Turkey.

Sinan Ulgen, a Turkish former diplomat currently chairing the Istanbul-based Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy, said there had been awareness regarding the preparations that still needed to be done but that “unfortunately over the past two decades, this has remained mostly on paper.”

“There was a special fund with taxes raised for rehabilitation of cities to withstand these types of natural disasters. Some of that money got squandered, didn’t go to the right places. And then the lack of enforcement, which is really the big liability,” Ulgen told UK broadcaster Channel 4. “The regulations have certainly been improved … but it’s really a matter of enforcing those regulations. And there, Turkey really needs to upgrade its game.”

Chhibber too said Turkey hadn’t learned enough from the lessons of the past and questioned why there was a failure to enforce building regulations. He said the Turkish government had regularly allowed for so-called “construction amnesties” – essentially legal exemptions that, for a fee, allowed for projects without the necessary safety requirements. The most recent amnesty was passed in 2018.

He said building amnesties were “a huge issue.”

“They just go ahead and make the building. They don’t follow the code. They know that at some point some politicians – because they’re financing their political parties – they’ll grant them an amnesty. That’s a huge problem.”

Turkey’s justice minister said Friday that investigations into builders in earthquake regions had begun, according to Turkish state media Anadolu. “As a result, as I said, whoever has faults, negligence or deficiency will be brought to justice and they will be held accountable before the law,” Bekir Bozdağ said.

Across the border in Syria, rebuilding efforts will be even more complicated. Guterres warned Thursday that Syrians face “nightmares on top of nightmares,” and the World Food Programme has described the situation in the northwest of the country as a “catastrophe on top of catastrophe.”

“We have the perfect humanitarian storm in Syria,” said Caroline Holt, IFRC director for disasters, climate and crises.

The UN estimates more than four million people were already dependent on humanitarian aid in the worst-affected parts of rebel-controlled Syria, due to the civil war that has ravaged the country since 2011. When the earthquake struck there, many traumatized residents first wondered if they were being woken by the sound of warplanes once again.

“After 12 years of constant pain, suffering and living in a vulnerable context, your ability to withstand – especially in winter – the harsh conditions that you’re facing [is diminished],” Holt told CNN.

In Syria, political fault lines run deep. Some of the areas most impacted by the earthquake are controlled by the Assad regime, others by Turkish-backed and US-backed opposition forces, Kurdish rebels and Sunni Islamist fighters. These political divisions create logistical knots. Negotiating them will frustrate recovery efforts.

“The conflict – or conflicts – are much worse in that area of Syria than in that area of Turkey,” Kelman said.

While Turkey has political problems of its own, “they do have a comparatively strong government and comparatively strong military in comparison to Syria, which is at war,” he added.

Turkey also has greater “pre-earthquake resources,” Kelman said. “Neither country is especially rich, but Turkey at least has that baseline where they’ve not been in a major conflict dividing the country for 12 years. They have not been isolated through sanctions.”

The sanctions have created geopolitical obstacles that humanitarian aid has to maneuver around. The Assad regime insists that all aid to the country, including aid that is meant for areas outside its control, be directed to the capital Damascus. The Syrian government on Friday approved sending aid into rebel territory in the northwest, according to a statement, but provided no timeline for delivery.

But the regime has long siphoned off aid intended for rebel-controlled regions. As such, relief workers attempting to clear the rubble depend on resources sent via a single road, the Bab al-Hawa crossing – the only humanitarian aid corridor between Turkey and Syria.

The result is that “most of the work is done by hand,” according to Mohammad Hammoud, Syria manager for the Norwegian Red Cross. Hammoud told CNN how Syria lacks the machinery available to Turkey – and the little machinery they have has no fuel to run on, after supplies from Damascus were shut off. “We are mainly reliant on manpower,” he said.

These discrepancies mean Syria’s recovery is likely to progress along a stunted timeline. Given its lack of coordination, basic questions may go unanswered for some time.

“It’s about, first of all, removing the debris and the rubble. What do you do with that? It can either become an environmental hazard, or it can become an asset, if you choose to pave roads with it,” said Holt.

The IFRC director estimates that in Turkey much of the recovery work will be done within two to three years. But in Syria, “we’re looking at a five to 10-year frame just to get recovery underway,” she said.

While disasters like this wreak havoc, they also create opportunities to prevent such havoc being wrought again. There is a man-made part of every natural disaster, according to Chhibber.

Earthquakes are inevitable; their effects are not. Chhibber said he saw this point illustrated after the Izmit earthquake in 1999. “You’d have one building completely erect, the next building completely flat like a pancake.” The same sights can now be seen in Turkey’s Gaziantep.

For Chhibber, this is the result of choices. “There is an earthquake, but it need not be a disaster to this scale, unless it’s man-made. And the man-made part comes from the lack of a proper building code being enforced. There’s no reason these buildings should have collapsed that easily. Some of them were built only a year or two ago,” he said.

Kelman also stressed that disasters create the opportunity for things to be done differently. He hopes the quake can be used as a spur for “disaster diplomacy,” which asks “whether or not dealing with disasters in any way can end conflict and create peace.”

However, not all governments choose to take these opportunities.

Related article: How to help victims of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria

“We do have examples where people have taken the opportunity to say there has been a disaster, and we want to help people, so let’s try to reconstruct in such a way that we are supporting peace,” Kelman said.

“At the moment, I do not see either government responding in that way, and I do not see the world responding in that way.”

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February 12, 2023
After recent student fentanyl overdoses in Texas community, court documents reveal drug supplier lived blocks away from schools | CNN

CNN
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Parents across the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District (CFBISD), located in a Dallas, Texas, suburb, are reeling following a string fentanyl overdoses by nine students who attend schools in the district.

The students, who range in age from 13 to 17 and are not identified by name in court documents, overdosed between September 18, 2022 and February 1, 2023. Three of the students died, and one of the students, a 14-year-old girl, overdosed twice, according to a statement by the US Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Texas.

Law enforcement officers traced the drugs the students overdosed on to a house within walking distance from a middle school and a high school, court documents say.

“First with all the school shootings, now this with drugs,” Lupe Rebadan, who has two children, as well as nieces and nephews, attending schools in the district told CNN. “Our kids are not safe at school… When is this all going to stop?”

Luis Eduardo Navarette and Magaly Mejia Cano have been charged with conspiracy to distribute fentanyl, according to the US Attorney’s Office.

“To deal fentanyl is to knowingly imperil lives. To deal fentanyl to minors – naive middle and high school students – is to shatter futures. These defendants’ alleged actions are simply despicable,” US Attorney Leigha Simonton said in the statement.

The complaint illuminates a network of drug dealers and users, most of them teenagers who attend R.L. Turner High School, Dan Long Middle School and Dewitt Perry Middle School, and traced the proliferation of fentanyl tainted “M30” pills to Navarette and Cano’s residence.

International drug trafficking organizations often produce M30 pills by mixing highly addictive fentanyl with acetaminophen “and other binder type substances and pressed into various tablets/pills,” says an affidavit by a Drug Enforcement Administration task force officer included in the criminal complaint.

Many fake pills are made to look like prescription opioids such as oxycodone (Oxycontin, Percocet), hydrocodone (Vicodin), and alprazolam (Xanax); or stimulants like amphetamines (Adderall),” according to the DEA’s “One Pill Can Kill” website.

Criminal organizations, according to the DEA officer’s affidavit, sell M30 pills for $1 to $2 dollars per pill when the purchasers buy in bulk amounts. Those are later sold to “street level dealers” for $3 to $5 per pill, and later sold to consumers for $10 per pill.

Law enforcement tracked multiple teenagers engaging in “hand-to-hand transactions” with Navarette and Cano outside of their house, which is approximately five blocks from R.L. Turner High School and two blocks from DeWitt Perry Middle School, the court documents reveal.

On January 12, a Carrollton Street Crimes Unit detective observed a 16-year-old obtain M30 pills from Navarette and Cano’s residence.

The teenager appeared to crush and snort a pill on their front porch, “possibly package” the drugs, then walk toward the high school, where he was enrolled, according to the complaint.

The school was notified by law enforcement, and later that day a school resource officer located the teenager in a bathroom making a “snorting sound” and appearing intoxicated.

Navarette and Cano made their initial appearances in court on Monday, Erin Dooley of the US Attorney’s Office in Northern Texas told CNN. Naverette waived his right to a detention hearing and was ordered detained pending trial, and Cano had her detention hearing on Friday, she added. Attorneys for Navarette and Cano haven’t responded to CNN’s requests for comment.

Days after the complaint outlining the 10 overdoses became available to the public, CFBISD released a statement expressing sorrow and concern over “the loss of young lives.”

The district explained how it has educated the community about the threat from fentanyl over the past several months.

“We will continue to work cooperatively with local law enforcement agencies to address this issue and to maximize safety on our campuses in every way possible. We believe if we work together as a community, we can avoid these tragedies,” the district said.

The district said Narcan, or naloxone, an emergency drug used to treat fentanyl overdoses, had been obtained for all district facilities in October and random canine searches were being conducted on secondary campuses.

Drug awareness presentations for parents will also resume this year, according to the district.

“The fentanyl crisis is claiming far too many young Texans,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott tweeted Wednesday. Abbott launched the #OnePillKills campaign in October 2022 to “combat the growing national fentanyl crisis plaguing Texas.”

In the first week of school in 2022, four students died from “fentanyl poisoning, or suspected poisoning” in Hays County Independent School District (HCISD), located in a suburb of Austin. This prompted the district to create “Fighting Fentanyl,” an informational campaign warning students and faculty about the deadly drug.

Tim Savoy, the chief communication officer at HCISD, noted that the district has spent tens of millions of dollars for preventative measures against school shootings and Covid-19, two issues that have affected schools nationwide. The fentanyl crisis on school campuses deserves the same level of concern and response, he said.

“This is a threat. We’re losing students, too. And so we made the decision that we have to get this equal attention and resources and do what we can,” Savoy told CNN.

Despite the district’s awareness-raising campaign, an email from the superintendent on January 9 informed parents of “three more suspected accidental fentanyl poisonings” and one death in which fentanyl may have been to blame.

“Our students are dying from this, and we have to do what we can,” Savoy said. “This is not just something that you’re seeing elsewhere. This is really happening in our community.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, median monthly overdose deaths among 10- to 19-year-olds across the United States involving illicitly manufactured fentanyl surged 182% from December 2019 to December 2021.

Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to fentanyl exposure due to the “proliferation of counterfeit pills resembling prescription drugs containing IMFs (illicitly manufactured fentanyls), and the ease of purchasing pills through social media,” according to the CDC.

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February 11, 2023
Second Trump attorney met with Mar-A-Lago probe grand jury in recent weeks | CNN Politics

CNN
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Trump attorney Christina Bobb appeared before a federal grand jury in Washington, DC, in recent weeks in connection with the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents, two sources have told CNN.

Bobb’s appearance marks the second Trump lawyer involved with Trump’s handling of government documents to meet with the grand jury recently. CNN reported that Trump attorney Evan Corcoran appeared before the grand jury last month.

The Wall Street Journal first reported Bobb’s appearance.

The disclosure of the testimony by the Trump lawyers comes amid a steady drip of recent moves by special counsel Jack Smith to obtain grand jury testimony from very close contacts of the former president, in many cases about what Trump was told and what he said at the end of his presidency and afterward.

It also comes amid an escalation of activity in Smith’s other Trump probe, looking into the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and efforts to impede the transfer of power following the 2020 election.

Smith issued a subpoena in that investigation to former Vice President Mike Pence in recent days, seeking documents and testimony. Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien also received a subpoena, as CNN first reported.

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February 11, 2023
Conservative activist Matt Schlapp denies sexual battery allegations in new court documents | CNN Politics

CNN
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High-profile conservative activist Matt Schlapp is denying claims of sexual assault and wants the man who is accusing him to be publicly identified, according to court documents filed Thursday in the lawsuit against Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes Schlapp.

The documents claim the lawsuit, which seeks more than $9 million in damages from the Schlapps, “reeks of gamesmanship and hypocrisy” and say the accuser’s request to remain anonymous “is utterly without justification.”

The Schlapps state the staffer’s identity should be made public because they allege that his own reputation should be questioned, asserting that the staffer can’t “meet his burden of showing special circumstances which outweigh the public interest in knowing his name,” according to the documents.

“Plaintiff simply cannot proceed on his claims of alleged impropriety by the Defendants while shielding from scrutiny his own past admitted unsavory affiliations with white nationalists and anti-Semites by proceeding as a ‘John Doe,’” the documents say.

The initial complaint said the staffer, identified only as John Doe, faced an “unusual risk of retaliatory physical or mental harm” if he was named, based on the Schlapps’ popularity and prominence.

The Schlapps are now being represented by attorney Benjamin Chew, known for winning the defamation case against actor Johnny Depp. The 2022 trial, which saw a jury award Depp $15 million in his lawsuit against former wife Amber Heard, became known for airing many personal and intimate details publicly.

The original lawsuit, filed in January, alleges that Schlapp, the president of the American Conservative Union, inappropriately fondled the genital area of a male Republican strategist during a car ride back to Schlapp’s hotel in Atlanta last year. Schlapp was in Georgia for Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign and had spoken at an event earlier in the day. The staffer was assigned to drive Schlapp back to his hotel, and to another Walker event scheduled for the following morning.

In addition to sexual battery allegations against Matt Schlapp, the lawsuit also accuses both Schlapps of defamation and conspiracy to discredit the staffer.

The Schlapps’ response to the lawsuit denies all claims of sexual battery and inappropriate touching but admits to phone calls and text messages exchanged between Matt Schlapp and the staffer, which have been previously reported and reviewed by CNN.

The Schlapps admit to a text message in which Matt Schlapp suggests he and the staffer meet up for drinks, writing, “I have a dinner at 7. May grab a beer after if you want to join let me know.” The staffer responds, “I’d enjoy that,” according to the documents.

The Schlapps also admit to a phone call later the night of the alleged incident, to arrange pickup for the following morning, and a text message at 7:26 a.m. from Matt Schlapp to the staffer that said, “I’m in the lobby,” waiting for the staffer to drive him to the planned Walker event in Macon, Georgia.

CNN previously reported that after the alleged sexual assault, the staffer notified Walker campaign officials, who told him not to drive Schlapp in the morning and to instead give him the phone number to a local car service.

The staffer responded to Schlapp’s text, saying, “I did want to say I was uncomfortable with what happened last night. The campaign does have a driver who is available to get you to Macon and back to the airport,” and provided the number. The Schlapps admit to this detail in the court documents and to three attempts Matt Schlapp made to call the staffer, which went unanswered.

Several hours later, Matt Schlapp texted the staffer, “If you could see it in your heart to call me at the end of day. I would appreciate it. If not I wish you luck on the campaign and hope you keep up the good work” – another exchange the Schlapps admit to in the documents.

As part of the defamation count in the original lawsuit, the complaint claimed that Mercedes Schlapp sent a message to a neighborhood group text that smeared the staffer’s character and claimed he’d been fired from jobs for “lying and lying on his resume.” The Schlapps deny that allegation in their response.

The Schlapps are requesting the court dismiss the complaint. A preliminary hearing on whether the staffer should be identified is set for March 8 in Alexandria Circuit Court in Virginia.

The staffer and his attorney declined to provide further comment.

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February 11, 2023
Harvey Weinstein sued by woman who he was convicted of raping in Los Angeles criminal trial | CNN

CNN
—

A woman has filed a civil lawsuit against disgraced former film producer Harvey Weinstein for sexual battery, false imprisonment and other claims after he was convicted of raping her last December in Los Angeles.

The model and actress, who is identified as Jane Doe 1 in court documents, was the first to testify in Weinstein’s Los Angeles trial in 2022.

The three charges Weinstein was convicted of last December – rape, sexual penetration by a foreign object and forcible oral copulation – were all tied to Jane Doe 1, who testified the movie mogul assaulted her in a Beverly Hills hotel room in 2013.

But the jury deadlocked on the alleged aggravating factors attached to the charges, which could have increased his sentence and the judge declared a mistrial on those allegations.

Weinstein is set to be sentenced on February 23, at which time the judge will consider a motion from defense attorneys asking for a new trial.

The new lawsuit, filed February 9 in the Superior Court of California for Los Angeles County, alleges Weinstein met Jane Doe 1 briefly at a film festival and then showed up at her hotel room later that evening and assaulted her in February 2013.

The plaintiff is suing Weinstein for sexual battery, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligence. She is also seeking an undisclosed amount in punitive and other damages.

“Harvey has always denied the allegations, and even more, has maintained that he was never together with her in Mr. Cs hotel at all and that these events never happened. Certain witnesses lied about crucial evidence that could have exonerated Mr. Weinstein, and it was deemed unnecessary by the court for the jury to hear or know about these facts,” Juda Engelmayer, a representative for Weinstein, told CNN in a statement.

Engelmayer added that Weinstein’s attorneys have “submitted a motion detailing those facts and contend that the jury would not have convicted him had they known the specifics…”

The assault happened after Weinstein allegedly showed up at the hotel and asked a front desk staffer to connect him with the victim, the lawsuit said. After the front desk called Jane Doe, Weinstein ended up talking on the phone with the victim and asked her for her room number. She declined to offer her room number and hung up.

Minutes later, Weinstein showed up outside her room, and when the woman refused to let him inside, he “bullied his way into her room,” the lawsuit says.

“Once in the room, he engaged in small talk with Plaintiff but in an arrogant and intimidating manner. He quickly made his real intentions clear. He wanted to have sex with her,” the lawsuit says. “He sat on her bed and then forcibly grabbed Plaintiff and made her sit down next to him.”

After telling her that she was “pretty,” he commented on her breasts and “grabbed” at them, the lawsuit says.

Jane Doe repeatedly asked Weinstein to leave her hotel room, but he ignored her and became aggressive verbally and physically, according to the lawsuit.

“He then forced Plaintiff to orally copulate him and then he forcibly moved her into the bathroom, where he blocked her from leaving and then raped her,” the lawsuit says. “After he was done raping her, he acted as if nothing out of the ordinary happened, and left.”

California law allows adult victims of sexual assault to file a civil action within ten years of the alleged assault and within one year of the defendant being convicted of a felony, according to the lawsuit.

The victim’s attorney, Dave Ring, said in a statement to CNN that they “look forward to have Weinstein finally testify under oath in this case.”

“Harvey Weinstein has been convicted of raping Jane Doe 1,” Ring said. “Her lawsuit seeks to recover compensation from him for the horrific rape she endured and all of the issues she has suffered through for the past ten years because of that rape.”

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February 11, 2023
‘A recipe for disaster.’ Deadly encounter in Memphis comes at a critical time in American policing | CNN

CNN
—

Since the night Tyre Nichols was kicked, pepper-sprayed, punched and struck with a baton by Memphis police officers, six cops have been fired and five of them charged with murder. Seven others face internal disciplinary charges.

Nichols died three days after the January 7 traffic stop and subsequent fatal encounter captured on video and principally involving five officers with two to six years on the job.

The death of the 29-year-old Black man comes at a critical juncture in American law enforcement, as departments across the country – including the Memphis PD – struggle to recruit qualified officers and fill shifts, lure candidates with signing bonuses worth thousands of dollars, and at times curtail standards and training in a desperate bid to strengthen patrols amid rising gun violence, according to law enforcement experts.

“That is a recipe for disaster,” said Kenneth Corey, a retired NYPD chief who once ran the training division. “We’ve seen it happen before. You couldn’t fill seats. You lowered standards. And now you’ve got scandal and use of force. And when you look at the individuals involved you say, we never would have hired this guy once upon a time.”

In the weeks since authorities released video of Nichols’ brutal beating, little information has come out about the recruitment and training of the five former officers facing murder charges – Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Justin Smith, Emmitt Martin III and Desmond Mills Jr.

The five men were part of a now disbanded specialized street crime unit formed just over a year ago as part of the city’s strategy to combat rising violence. The SCORPION unit focused on homicides, robberies, assaults and other felonies.

Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, said Nichols’ killing raises questions about “how those officers were trained and supervised and selected.”

“Over time you always want to look at the backgrounds of those officers – that will be important. The hiring process – that will be important,” he said. “In this case we don’t know enough yet.”

Bean, 24, was commissioned as an officer in January 2021, personnel records show. His attorney has not responded to CNN’s requests for comment.

Haley, 30, was commissioned as an officer in January 2021, the records show. He is a former correctional officer. His attorney has not respond to requests for comment.

Martin, 30, joined the department in 2018, according to the records. He will plead not guilty, according to his attorney, William Massey, who said: “No one out there that night intended for Tyre Nichols to die.”

Mills, 32, a former jailer in Mississippi and Tennessee, joined the department as a recruit in March 2017, the records show. He, too, plans to plea not guilty, said Blake Ballin, his attorney, who described Mills as “devastated” and “remorseful.”

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis told CNN last month that Nichols’ death was indicative of “a gap somewhere” in the specialized street crime unit.

“We train and we retrain these officers, just like specialized units around the country,” she said. “These officers working in specialized units, you always need to make sure that the supervision is there and present.”

On January 28, one day after the release of the video, Memphis PD announced that it had permanently disbanded the unit.

Davis said the department was unaware of any evidence the unit had previously engaged in misconduct but added that an investigation is ongoing.

The five former Memphis officers charged in Nichols’ death also are accused of assaulting another young Black man just three days before the fatal police encounter, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The suit accuses the city of failing to prevent or address an alleged pattern of policing abuses by the SCORPION unit, which it claims operated like a “gang of vigilantes” without adequate training or supervision. Police declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing ongoing litigation.

The Shelby County District Attorney’s office in Memphis said it will review all cases involving the five officers charged with Nichols’ death.

Davis, speaking at a Memphis city council meeting Tuesday, said training was not an issue with the unit. Instead, she said, “egos” and a “wolf pack mentality” contributed to the killing.

“Culture is not something that changes overnight. You know, there is a saying in law enforcement that ‘culture eats policy for lunch.’ We don’t want to just have good policies because policies can be navigated around,” she said. “We want to ensure that we have the right people in place to ensure our culture is evolving.”

These are the moments that led to Tyre Nichols’ death

Nichols’ death comes as many police departments in the US have been reeling from an exodus of officers due to resignations and retirements and scrambling to attract new recruits. The staffing crisis has been exacerbated by high-profile cases such as the 2020 murder of George Floyd that have put policing under scrutiny and made it a frequent target of protests and moves to decrease funding.

“The pandemic impacted recruiting and then George Floyd’s murder really was a moment in time that made prospective police applicants think twice – Is this a job for me?” Wexler said.

“And now, unfortunately, with the Tyre Nichols killing you simply compounded what was already arguably a challenging environment to hire a police officer.”

Wexler’s group, in a 2021 survey, found that retirements had risen 45% that year since 2019. Resignations had jumped 18% in that two-year period.

The number of officers on the Memphis Police Department dropped by more than 22% since 2011 – from 2,449 in September 2011 to a low of 1,895 officers last December, according to the Memphis Data Hub website.

The department was budgeted for 2,300 officers last year, CNN affiliate WMC reported. In 2015, nearly 200 Memphis police officers resigned over changes to pension and benefit plans, according to WMC.

“It had gotten to the point that we were having sergeants as acting lieutenants,” said Alvin Davis, a former Memphis police lieutenant and recruiter who retired last year. “Hundreds of people did it over a period of time because we didn’t have enough supervisors. So many people were running out the door.”

Like other departments around the country, the Memphis PD in 2021 began offering $15,000 signing bonuses and $10,000 in relocation assistance. Additionally, requirements on college credits, military experience and employment history have been loosened, WMC reported.

“Departments around the country … are offering between $25,000 and $30,000 signing bonuses,” Wexler said. “You’ve got a national shortage of applicants which has forced police departments to do unprecedented things like offering signing bonuses and, in some cases, modifying the standards for hiring.”

Greg Umbach, associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said there is a direct correlation between higher standards for new recruits and lower incidents of bad behavior.

“We know from decades of research that the number of cops meeting higher qualifications, most notably a college degree, matters far more than anything else, for the number of civilian complaints a department gets,” Umbach said.

And if the pipeline of good officers is low, Umbach said, then so is the quality of supervision – a reality that has plagued the Memphis Police Department and other agencies nationwide.

“Any police sergeant watching that video, their first thought is, ‘My God, where was the supervision and why did they think this was okay,’” Umbach said.

Davis, the former lieutenant and recruiter, asked a similar question about supervision.

“If you pepper-spray someone or you tase someone, you’re supposed to call a supervisor,” said Davis, who spent 22 years on the job. “That’s just policy. Why they didn’t, I can’t say.”

But, Davis said, the behavior of the former officers who beat Nichols did not entirely surprise him – given the curtailed training and standards, shortage of skilled supervisors and growing number of officers lured by monetary incentives and without the requisite experience being deployed on the city’s streets.

“The standards kept dropping and dropping to bring people in,” said Davis, who was in charge of recruiting. “And then they start throwing money out to lure people in and this is what you got.”

He added, “Just about everybody who came, the first thing they asked us was about was the money. How long did they have to stay on the job? Do I have to do a year? Two years? Nobody is trying to make a career out of it. It was the money.”

The Memphis PD did not immediately respond to a request for comment on training, recruitment and staffing issues.

“It’s not the job that it used to be, when you felt like you’re the ‘best in blue’ and you have your head up because you really feel like you accomplished something,” said Davis, referring to the Memphis Police Department’s longtime “Join the best in blue” recruitment campaign. “It’s not that kind of job anymore.”

It’s too early to tell exactly what factors contributed to the behavior of the former officers who beat Nichols to death on January 7, law enforcement experts said.

Wexler and others pointed to previous policing scandals that were preceded by periods of hiring under lax standards and curtailed training.

In the late 1980s, nearly 10% of the officers in the Miami Police Department were suspended or fired after a corruption scandal involving rogue officers who became known as the “River Cops.” Nearly 20 former officers were convicted on various state and federal charges, including using their police powers as a racketeering enterprise to commit murder.

In 1990, an investigation into the hiring and training of police officers in Washington, DC by the General Accounting Office found that a hiring rush during the previous decade – prompted by a wave of drug and gun violence – led to cutting corners on recruiting, background checks and training.

Eight years later, another report by the GOA, the investigative arm of Congress, examined drug-related police corruption and said “rapid recruitment initiatives” coupled with loosening education requirements and inadequate training and supervision “might have permitted the hiring of recruits who might not otherwise have been hired.”

“These are all lessons of history,” said Corey, the former NYPD chief. “You have to make the profession attractive to the type of people you want to recruit. It’s not that people have lost interest in policing. They just don’t see it as a viable occupation.”

He added, “What we ask of our cops is that they think like lawyers, speak like psychologists, and perform like athletes but we pay them as common laborers. A starting officer in New York City makes $42,000 a year, which means about $20 dollars an hour. It also means that at McDonald’s they could be making $15 dollars an hour with none of the stress, trauma or risk.”

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February 11, 2023
What to know about the lawsuit aiming to ban medication abortion drug mifepristone | CNN Politics

CNN
—

A federal judge may rule later this month on a lawsuit seeking to block the use of medication abortion nationwide, in the biggest abortion-related case since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.

The lawsuit, filed in November by anti-abortion advocates against the US Food and Drug Administration, targets the agency’s 20-year-old approval of mifepristone, the first drug in the medication abortion process

Medication abortion, which now makes up a majority of abortions obtained in the US, has become a particularly acute flashpoint in the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade.

US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, has extended the briefing deadline in the case until February 24.

Reproductive rights advocates say that if Kacsmaryk sides with the plaintiffs, “it would eliminate the most commonly used method of abortion care,” according to NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Here’s what to know about the lawsuit:

The lawsuit, filed last year by a coalition of anti-abortion national medical associations under the umbrella of the “Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine” and several doctors, is seeking a number of actions by the court, chief among them a preliminary and permanent injunction ordering the FDA “to withdraw mifepristone and misoprostol as FDA-approved chemical abortion drugs and to withdraw defendants’ actions to deregulate these chemical abortion drugs.”

“After two decades of engaging the FDA to no avail, plaintiffs now ask this court to do what the FDA was and is legally required to do: protect women and girls by holding unlawful, setting aside, and vacating the FDA’s actions to approve chemical abortion drugs and eviscerate crucial safeguards for those who undergo this dangerous drug regimen,” the complaint reads.

The FDA responded to the lawsuit last month by asking the judge to deny the motion for a preliminary injunction, arguing that issuing one in the matter “would upend the status quo and the reliance interests of patients and doctors who depend on mifepristone, as well as businesses involved with mifepristone distribution.”

The agency also says a ruling against it would set a dangerous precedent.

“More generally, if longstanding FDA drug approvals were so easily enjoined, even decades after being issued, pharmaceutical companies would be unable to confidently rely on FDA approval decisions to develop the pharmaceutical-drug infrastructure that Americans depend on to treat a variety of health conditions,” the FDA wrote.

“A preliminary injunction would interfere with Congress’s decision to entrust FDA with responsibility to ensure the safety and efficacy of drugs. In discharging this role, FDA applies its technical expertise to make complex scientific determinations about drugs’ safety and efficacy, and these determinations are entitled to substantial deference.”

Danco, which makes mifepristone, also made a similar request to the FDA’s in a court filing, stressing that the lawsuit could decimate the company’s business.

“Danco is a small pharmaceutical company. It sells one drug: Mifeprex,” lawyers for the company wrote in court papers. “Entering the mandatory preliminary injunction plaintiffs seek would force FDA to withdraw approval for Danco’s only product, effectively shuttering Danco’s business.”

“Congress entrusts decision-making like this with the FDA. And they’re coming in trying to overrule that, saying this medication is unsafe because women bleed. Well, that’s part of having an abortion. It’s also part of having a pregnancy,” said Ryan Brown, an attorney representing Danco in the case. “The bottom line being that they just want to do away with abortion across the board and for any reason.”

Kacsmaryk was appointed to the court in 2017 by then-President Trump and was confirmed by a 52-46 vote in 2019.

Since then, he’s helped make Texas a legal graveyard for policies of President Joe Biden’s administration, presiding over 95% of the civil cases brought in Amarillo, Texas.

In December, Kacsmaryk put on hold the Biden administration’s most recent attempt to end the so-called “Remain in Mexico” program. And he has overseen Texas cases challenging vaccine mandates, the gender identity guidance issued by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the administration’s limits on the use of Covid-19 relief funds for tax cuts.

Before joining the court, Kacsmaryk served as deputy general counsel at the First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit religious liberty legal group, where he worked mainly on “religious liberty litigation in federal courts and amicus briefs in the US Supreme Court,” according to his White House biography.

The case is being closely watched by a number of interested parties, including Republican and Democratic state attorneys general. On Friday, two different multi-state coalitions filed amicus briefs with the court urging them to act one way or another in the matter.

A coalition of 22 Democratic attorneys general urged Kacsmaryk to deny the motion for a preliminary injunction, writing in court papers that “annulling – or even merely limiting – any of the FDA’s actions relating to medication abortion would result in an even more drastic reduction in abortion access across the entire nation, worsening already dire outcomes, deepening entrenched disparities in access to health care, and placing a potentially unbearable strain on the health care system as a whole.”

And a coalition of 22 Republican attorneys general asked the court to issue the preliminary injunction, arguing the FDA exceeded its authority when it approved the medication.

“State laws on chemical abortion thus account for the public interests at issue – and they do so with the benefit of democratic legitimacy (and legal authority). The FDA’s actions can make no such claim. By obstructing the judgments of elected representatives, the agency has undermined the public interest,” they wrote.

Abortion rights advocates have sounded the alarm on the case, stressing that a ruling by Kacsmaryk in favor of the plaintiffs would affect every corner of the country since the lawsuit is targeting a federal agency.

“If FDA approval of mifepristone is revoked, 64.5 million women of reproductive age in the US would lose access to medication abortion care, an exponential increase in harm overnight,” NARAL said in a statement on Friday, pointing to internal research.

“This research reveals the high stakes of this lawsuit, and we can only expect the worst from this Trump-appointed federal judge. Americans want access to abortion, but anti-choice bad actors are dead set on restricting reproductive freedom by any means possible,” said Angela Vasquez-Giroux, the group’s vice president of communications and research.

And activists are mobilizing in Texas around the issue, with the Women’s March planning to hold a rally at the federal courthouse in Amarillo, Texas, on Saturday.

“We’ve said it before: the fight for reproductive rights now lies in the states, and legal challenges like these are just the latest example of how our fight is bigger than Roe,” said Rachel Carmona, the executive director of Women’s March.

On Thursday, Kacsmaryk told the plaintiffs that they had until February 24 to respond to a recent filing by the Danco, writing in an order that following the deadline, “briefing will then be closed on the matter, absent any ‘exceptional or extraordinary circumstances.’”

On Friday, the plaintiffs in the case submitted one response to the FDA’s filing. But the deadline extension means that after the plaintiffs submit a separate response to Danco, the case is ripe for judgment since all required briefings will have been filed.

Kacsmaryk can rule at any time after that, though he could also call for a hearing, or ask for additional responses as well.

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February 11, 2023
Police arrest three after protest at asylum seeker hotel in England | CNN

CNN
—

Police in the northern England town of Knowsley, Merseyside, arrested three people on Friday after violence broke out during a protest outside a hotel used to house asylum seekers.

Merseyside Police said those arrested were being held “on suspicion of violent disorder and taken to police stations to be questioned.”

The protest, sparked by a video filmed near the hotel, had started peacefully, police said, but the situation later became tense and projectiles were thrown at the officers.

Videos shared online Friday from the area appeared to show officers in riot gear with large shields and a police vehicle set ablaze.

The police said they were dealing with two groups of protesters after a demonstration descended into chaos outside the Suites Hotel in Ribblers Lane.

Care4Calais, a refugee charity, tweeted: “The far right have split into three groups and surrounded us at the hotel. The police don’t have the capacity to cover all three groups.”

Clare Moseley, founder of Care4Calais, told the UK Press Association news agency that she “was among 100 to 120 people from pro-migrant groups who went to the scene in reaction to the protest to show support for the asylum seekers.”

“I’m trying to get in touch with some of the poor men in that hotel, I can only imagine how frightened they are. It was like a war zone,” she told the PA on Friday.

Assistant Chief Constable Paul White of Merseyside Police said in a statement: “We will always respect the right to protest when these are peaceful, but the scenes tonight were completely unacceptable, putting those present, our officers and the wider community in danger.”

“Thankfully we have not had any serious injuries reported up to this point, but for officers and police vehicles to be damaged in the course of their duty protecting the public is disgraceful,” he said.

“We have arrested some of those suspects and will continue without hesitation to review all and any evidence which comes in, through CCTV, images or other information you may have,” he added.

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February 10, 2023
A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes | CNN Business

CNN
—

Sitting across from Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show,” Paris Hilton, wearing a sparkling neon green turtleneck dress and a high ponytail, looked at a picture of a glum cartoon ape and said it “reminds me of me.” The audience laughed. It did not look like her at all.

Hilton and Fallon were chatting about their NFTs – non-fungible tokens, typically digital art bought with cryptocurrency – from the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The camera zoomed in on framed printouts of the ape cartoons. “We’re both apes,” Fallon said. Hilton, with her signature vocal fry, replied, “Love it.”

“The Tonight Show” episode from January 2022 is a YouTube time capsule showing the temporary alliance between celebrity marketing and the crypto industry. Bored Ape Yacht Club was not the biggest crypto phenomenon, but it was one of the top beneficiaries of celebrity hype. That celebrity hype, in turn, helped draw new consumers to crypto — an industry rife with manipulation and fraud, and one that US regulators are now giving more scrutiny in the wake of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. But for a time, when crypto’s prices seemed to have no limit, the money appeared too good for some to ask questions — questions like: Why are some of those apes wearing prison clothes?

“That was a very significant moment, because the audience for that show is very different from the typical crypto person,” explained Molly White, a software engineer and a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. The Bored Apes — a computer-generated collection of 10,000 cartoons — were being presented as a status symbol, membership in an exclusive club. Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities had joined — and viewers could join, too, if they bought an NFT.

A class action lawsuit, filed in December, alleges Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities conspired in a “vast scheme” to artificially inflate the price of Bored Ape NFTs and enrich themselves, the crypto payments company they used to get the apes, MoonPay, and the company that made the Bored Apes, Yuga Labs.

Hilton and Fallon did not respond to requests for comment.

In April 2021, Yuga Labs released the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of cartoon apes with a computer-generated combination of features and accessories, such as gold fur, a sailor hat, laser eyes, 3-D glasses, a cigarette, as well as “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison jumpsuit, a pith helmet, and a “sushi chef” headband. The founders were anonymous, known only by their online screen names.

That fall, Hollywood agent Guy Oseary reached out to Yuga Labs, eventually investing in the company and joining its board. Soon celebrities started posting their Bored Apes on social media — including Oseary’s client Madonna, along with Steph Curry, Lil Baby, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and more. Bored Apes started selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Justin Bieber bought an ape for $1.3 million. By March 2022, Yuga got a $450 million venture capital investment, and was valued at $4 billion.

The class action lawsuit claims, “this purported interest in” Bored Apes “by high-profile taste makers was entirely manufactured by Oseary at the behest of” Yuga Labs. “In order to make the promotion of, and subsequent interest in, the BAYC NFTs appear to be organic (as opposed to being solely the result of a paid promotion), the Company needed a way to discreetly pay their celebrity cohorts.” The suit alleges they did this through MoonPay.

When Jimmy Fallon introduced his audience to crypto, he also presented a frictionless way to buy in: MoonPay, a payments company that allows customers to buy crypto through most major payment systems like with a credit card. In November 2021, Fallon said on “The Tonight Show” that he’d bought his first NFT through MoonPay. “MoonPay? MoonPay! I did my homework — Moonpay, which is like PayPal but for crypto,” Fallon said. The following January, when Hilton showed her ape on the show, she said, “You said you got it on MoonPay, so I went and I copied you.”

A few months later, in April 2022, MoonPay announced more than 60 celebrities and influencers had invested in the firm. MoonPay spokesman Justin Hamilton told CNN that Hilton became an investor, but not until after she spoke with Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” The FTC generally requires an endorser to disclose when they have a financial interest in promoting a company.

The celebrity hype and unbelievable prices generated enormous media interest. “Rolling Stone” minted NFTs of the magazine with Bored Apes on the cover. Guy Oseary was on the cover of “Variety” under the headline “NFT King.”

Independent journalists, under the names of Coffeezilla and Dirty Bubble Media, noticed blockchain ledger records suggesting not everything was as it appeared. Cryptocurrency is traded on the blockchain, a permanent and public ledger of every transaction. That means it can reveal financial relationships, if you figure out the right questions to ask.

Hours before Justin Bieber bought an ape for the equivalent of $1.3 million on January 29, 2022, Bieber received Ethereum worth about $2.5 million in his crypto wallet, the blockchain shows. A couple weeks before Post Malone released a music video in November 2021 in which he bought a Bored Ape through MoonPay, MoonPay transferred cryptocurrency then worth about $760,000 into the artist’s wallet, and sent two more payments, worth about $640,000, a couple weeks after. MoonPay admits it paid for the placement in Post Malone’s video but says other celebrities paid full price for their service in US dollars.

Joined @BoredApeYC ready for the reveal? Thanks @moonpay concierge pic.twitter.com/gzm1JQEHHF

— Gwyneth Paltrow (@GwynethPaltrow) January 26, 2022

Many celebrities who got apes thanked MoonPay on social media. Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted, “Joined @BoredApeYC ready for the reveal? Thanks @moonpay concierge.” The rapper Gunna posted on Instagram, “I Bought A @boredapeyachtclub NFT worth 300K No Cap ! His Name is BUTTA Thanks @moonpay !” Lil Baby mentioned MoonPay in his song “Top Priority.”

The blockchain shows MoonPay paying high prices for the apes, and then transferring them to purported celebrity wallets for free. MoonPay explains this as a service that helps wealthy people buy NFTs without setting up their own crypto wallet.

The company says the “white-glove” service was created because MoonPay’s CEO, Ivan Soto-Wright, had a lot of celebrity friends, and many of them asked how they could get an NFT. Jimmy Fallon, Lil Baby — they were Soto-Wright’s friends, Hamilton said.

CNN spoke to several former MoonPay employees who said they were skeptical the celebrities paid for their NFTs, because there was no evidence on the blockchain.

The company’s ape purchases have been significant. Since 2021, one of its wallets, “MoonPayHQ,” has spent at least $25 million on NFTs — 60% or about $15 million of that was spent on Bored Apes. The company told CNN they had 14 apes in a cold storage wallet, which offers more safety. It said that five of those NFTs were “purchased by concierge clients that are in the process of being transferred.” The last ape was purchased in April 2022, 10 months ago, according to blockchain records.

One influencer has said he was approached about an ape. In a Twitter Spaces audio chat last year, celebrity jeweler Ben Baller said, “Real talk: not once, not twice, three times, I’ve been offered a Bored Ape through MoonPay. … The fact that some of these super top-tier all-star NBA players have them? And I was like, ‘Yo this is all cap [lies.]’ They didn’t buy this sh*t.” Baller did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. MoonPay’s spokesman said this didn’t happen.

Oseary, the Hollywood agent and MoonPay/Yuga investor, texted CNN in response to a question: “NO ONE is paid to join the club and Yuga do NOT and have NOT given away any apes.” He said he paid full price for his Bored Ape, and so did Madonna.

Yuga Labs declined an on-the-record interview with CNN. In a statement, the company said, “In our view, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic. We strongly believe that they are without merit, and look forward to proving as much.” Hamilton, MoonPay’s spokesman, said of the lawsuit, “We look forward to it being dismissed.”

“The fine art market is a scam – that’s OK, at least there’s art going on,” said Max Gail, who’s been a blockchain developer since 2010, and founded Omakasea and Eth Gobblers.com. (Gail hosted the Twitter Space in which Baller discussed Bored Apes.) The NFT market, he said, “is like a parody of the fine art market. They took the same strategies that had been employed in the fine art market, but then distorted it with some strange crypto economics.”

Anonymous buyers and sellers dealing in items whose values are difficult to calculate has made the fine art market susceptible to money laundering, a Senate investigation found in 2020. In 2022, an average of more than half of NFT trading volume on the Ethereum blockchain was “wash” trading, according to an analysis at Dune Analytics. (Most NFTs are on Ethereum.) Essentially, wash trades are a transaction in which the buyer and seller are the same person, or they’re working together. Wash trading has been illegal in traditional finance since the Great Depression, because it can distort the market by making people believe there is a high volume of interest in the investment. The ability to open many anonymous cryptocurrency wallets makes wash trading NFTs easier. A Chainalysis report found one “prolific NFT wash trader” made 830 sales to self-financed wallets in 2021.

Though NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art, and a way for artists to earn royalties, many NFT collections operate more like securities — a financial instrument, like stocks or bonds, that hold some monetary value. “People will say that the technology itself has provided this whole new way of creating digital art,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “It’s not that unique. The unique part of it is the speculative bubble.”

The NFT marketplace does not always make sense even to those who benefit from it. “Bored Apes have gone from $100 to $100,000 in a year. Nothing appreciates that fast,” a successful NFT artist said. The artist’s own works had gone from a couple hundred dollars to tens of thousands. One of the artist’s major collectors “treats me as a commodity and my art is a commodity and he’s always pumping and dumping it. … It’s being treated as a financial vehicle.”

But there is pressure not to raise questions about the system. The NFT artist did not want to go on the record, saying it would be career suicide. “The big collectors watch for artists that FUD. And as soon as an artist FUDs, they get cancelled,” the artist said. FUD is “fear, uncertainty, and doubt,” or criticism of crypto.

Beyond how the Bored Ape NFTs are traded, what they depict is at issue in yet another Yuga Labs legal battle.

In the fall of 2021, accusations began swirling on social media that the Bored Ape Yacht Club contained visual references to racist memes from the troll site, 4chan. The artist Ryder Ripps — who’s worked with stars like Kanye West and Tame Impala — started tweeting about the claims of racist imagery. Ripps claims Guy Oseary, the Hollywood agent on Yuga’s board, called to pressure him to stop talking about the claims. (Oseary told CNN, “I can’t speak on active litigation.”)

Ripps doubled down and made a website cataloging the claims. Then, in an act he says was meant to protest the alleged racism and comment on the idea you can’t copy an NFT, Ripps made copycat NFTs he sold as RR/BAYC. Yuga sued Ripps for trademark infringement, and argues that his maligning of the Yuga apes is nothing more than a profiteering tactic. Ripps says Yuga is trying to silence its critics, and has doubled down on his claims as part of his defense in the trademark suit.

Yuga Labs called the accusations “the incoherent ramblings of a small group of for-profit conspiracy theorists.” However, the Yuga lawsuit against Ripps could affect the class action lawsuit against Yuga. Ripps’s lawyers have issued subpoenas to Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon.

To assert its trademark rights, Yuga must show that consumers associate its logos with its products, and it did so in a legal filing, in part, by pointing to celebrity owners “including TV host Jimmy Fallon…”

Ripps’s lawyer, Louis Tompros, asserts Yuga compensated celebrities for promoting its NFTs, and they did not disclose it. “And by doing that, in our view, they have gotten this public notoriety for their brand improperly,” Tompros told CNN. “And so having gotten it improperly, they now can’t go and assert that they have these rights.”

This week Yuga co-founder Wylie Aronow published a 24-page letter explaining that he was stepping back from the company and addressing widespread rumors that the company and its products were connected to the alt-right.

“I will soon call out this utter bullsh*t under oath,” he wrote.

So what are the racist references alleged by Ripps and others? To start, there’s what’s right on the surface: some of the NFTs are pictures of apes in “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison uniform, a bone necklace, gold and diamond grills. Record executive Dame Dash, a crypto enthusiast, pointed out on a podcast last year that monkeys and apes are old racist tropes.

“Think if you were a racist, like ‘Guess what I’m gonna do? I’mma get Black people to love monkeys so much that they gonna buy them, wear them on their neck… go to something called ApeFest and they’re gonna like it!’ Wouldn’t that sound funny?” Dash said on the podcast. “That’s what’s happening.”

Dash told CNN he hadn’t intended to target Yuga directly. But he’d started to wonder if he was being trolled, given the ubiquity of apes in crypto. “Racism is different these days — you can’t be so overt about it. You have to kind of troll,” Dash said.

This week Yuga agreed to settle a lawsuit with a developer who worked with Ripps, with the developer agreeing to pay them $25,000 and saying he would reject all disparaging statements against Yuga Labs.

Ryan Hickman, a software engineer who also worked with Ripps on RR/BAYC, is also being sued separately by Yuga. Hickman, who is Black, thought the Bored Apes looked like stereotypical portrayals of Black people as stupid or lazy. He said he thought this would be obvious to most people the second they saw an image of a Bored Ape. But, he said, “then somebody says, ‘Well, it’s worth $100,000.’ They say, ‘Okay well, tell me more.’”

In a statement, Yuga said, “Our company and founders strongly condemn the spread of hate, in any form, against any group.” Hollywood agent Oseary said he’d never been on the troll site 4chan.

The crypto community has adopted a lot of terms — rekt, frens, wagmi — that were popularized on 4chan, and it’s not always clear if the person using them understands where they came from. “I doubt that they were a massive alt-right troll campaign,” Harvard’s Molly White said. “I do think it’s likely that the creators of the project basically included some nods to 4chan.”

“It’s not one thing that makes it racist. It’s everything together as a package,” programmer and 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan said, looking at comparisons between Pepe the Frog memes and Bored Apes. Brennan took an interest in the claims that Yuga referenced 4chan memes, because he’d seen them so often when he was running 8chan, a similar troll site. He quit 8chan in 2016, and in 2019 pushed for it to be taken down because it had become a hub for extremist violence. He began to suspect the Yuga founders were like the people he used to know.

Take one of the apes’ characteristics, which Yuga calls a “sushi chef headband.” Brennan reads and speaks Japanese, and saw the headband actually said “kamikaze,” which has been used as a slur against Japanese people. A similar headband appeared on a Pepe meme. “That one was the most shocking,” he told CNN.

In a legal filing connected to the Ripps case, Yuga said the apes reflected a combination of many traits, “not any person’s purported racism.”

“I was hoping, in my eternal optimism,” Brennan said, “that people would become a lot more skeptical of tech bros. … And that liberal — so-called — celebrities in Hollywood would view these people with suspicion. Apparently not.”

– CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify when Paris Hilton invested in MoonPay. Jimmy Fallon is not an investor, a company spokesman said.

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February 10, 2023
One month before Tyre Nichols arrest, activists made city council presentation over fears of violent traffic stops in Memphis | CNN

CNN
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A month before Tyre Nichols arrest and death, activists and organizers gave a presentation at the Memphis City Council public safety committee hearing to highlight their concern about violent pretextual traffic stops in the city they say led to the death or injury of five people since 2013, video from the committee hearing shows.

Activists with Decarcerate Memphis made their presentation on December 6, almost exactly one month to the day Nichols was brutally beaten during a traffic stop by members of the now disbanded Scorpion unit.

There was no specific reference to the Scorpion unit during the presentation, a review by CNN found.

Among those at the committee hearing were Police Chief Cerelyn Davis and council members JB Smiley, Dr. Jeff Warren, Worth Morgan, Michalyn Easter-Thomas and Chase Carlisle.

To highlight some of the danger of police stops, activists listed some of the people who had been harmed, including Anjustine Hunter, who was killed by police in 2013 after being pulled over for vehicle registration; Darrius Stewart, who was killed in 2015 after being pulled over for a headlight issue, and D’Mario Perkins, who died in 2018 after being pulled over for vehicle registration. According to CNN affiliate WMC, the Shelby county prosecutor in 2019 declined to file charges in Perkins’ death after the medical examiner ruled his shooting a suicide. According to investigators, two officers opened fire at the traffic stop after Perkins fired his weapon, the station reported.

Two others were reported to be wounded during traffic stops in 2018, and 2021, respectively.

According to the group’s analysis of traffic stops in Memphis using police data, Black male drivers in the city were disproportionately stopped by Memphis police officers, being cited 3.4 times more than White male drivers, while Black women were cited 4.7 times as often as White women in the city. The group said Black Memphians under 30 were cited six times as often as White Memphians under 30, also according to its analysis of police data

The group argued that the action of pretextual stops were “discriminatory,” “counterproductive” and “dangerous” to residents of the city.

“For a city that has the kind of traffic problems that we have, traffic enforcement is important. However, we do not want to enforce traffic from a standpoint of profiling any particular community, any particular group,” the pollce chief said at the committee hearing in response to the data presented. “We do live in a city that’s predominately African American. We do live in a city that has problems in our African American community.”

“We need to really look at how do we extract data and be very transparent about the activity of our officers on the road,” Davis said.

Unlike some other cities, Memphis does not publicize traffic enforcement data. Decarcerate Memphis said it collected its data from five years of tickets obtained from the department through public records requests.

Five Black officers involved in Nichols’ arrest are due to be arraigned February 17 after they were fired January 20, then indicted on seven counts each, including second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping and official misconduct. A sixth officer, who is White, was fired and disciplined for violating policies in the Nichols case, while a seventh officer who has not been publicly identified is on administrative leave and under investigation.

The SCORPION unit was created to tackle rising crime in the city. It was disbanded amid national outcry following Nichols’ death, the department has said.

Defense attorneys in Memphis are going through their cases, trying to see whether any of their clients had run-ins with members of the unit, according to lawyer Mike Working. The hope is that whatever legal jeopardy their clients faced or faces will crumble, just as the credibility of the unit has.

City officials have not released any roster of the specialized unit so attorneys are searching charging documents for mentions of the team’s involvement.

“The tactics of the Scorpion unit were so brazen, and so many people have come forward that the entire unit is in question. And defense attorneys will ask for the chance to really review everything,” Working said.

Charges will not automatically be dismissed, but the presence of the unit now means that defense attorneys will be able to see discovery, like body cameras or dash cameras, as much as six months earlier than usual, he said. The ability to wade through evidence sooner could mean attorneys could find something to get their client’s case thrown out, he added.

“Scorpion, by its name, means there’s probably something there for the defense to investigate that must be disclosed,” Working said.

It’s unclear how many criminal cases currently involve Scorpion unit officers, but after Tyre Nichols, it will be that much more difficult for prosecutors to build and maintain a case through trial, Working said.

“They worked in teams, most officers on the team participated in an arrest,” he said. “So if all the people are going to be on a Scorpion team, I think it could be hard for the [district attorney] to piece that case back together once it’s been tainted by the Scorpion [unit].”

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February 10, 2023
Texas Attorney General Paxton agrees to $3.3 million settlement with whistleblowers who accused him of abuse of office and bribery | CNN Politics

CNN
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has agreed to a $3.3 million settlement and an apology as part of a tentative settlement with four whistleblowers who publicly accused Paxton of abuse of office, bribery and other criminal offenses in 2020.

The former high-level aides – who also reported their allegations to the FBI – were fired within a month of their denouncement of Paxton, a Republican. They filed a lawsuit seeking reinstatement to their former positions or equivalent positions, as well as reinstatement of lost fringe benefits and seniority rights.

In a filing on Friday, both parties asked the Texas Supreme Court to defer consideration on the case to allow the parties to finalize and fund a settlement agreement.

The filing included the mediated agreement which says that Paxton’s office will pay $3.3 million and that the final settlement will say Paxton accepts that the former aides were acting in a manner they thought was right and apologizes for referring to them as “rogue employees.”

Paxton also agreed to remove the 2020 press release from his office’s website in which he described his aides as “rogue.” The press release has already been removed, and the filing says the settlement is contingent on all necessary approvals for funding.

Despite the apology, the formal settlement agreement does not contain an admission of liability or fault by any party.

In a statement on Friday, Paxton acknowledged the settlement, explaining why he agreed to “put this issue to rest” but did not mention the apology portion of the agreement.

“After over two years of litigating with four ex-staffers who accused me in October 2020 of ‘potential’ wrongdoing, I have reached a settlement agreement to put this issue to rest. I have chosen this path to save taxpayer dollars and ensure my third term as Attorney General is unburdened by unnecessary distractions. This settlement achieves these goals. I look forward to serving the People of Texas for the next four years free from this unfortunate sideshow.”

Lawyers for three of the plaintiffs also issued a statement to CNN, saying: “Our clients have spent more than two years fighting for what is right. We believe the terms of the settlement speak for themselves.”

Former Texas deputy attorneys general James Blake Brickman, Mark Penley, and Ryan Vassar – along with former director of law enforcement David Maxwell – were the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

CNN has previously reported that Paxton is facing an FBI investigation for abuse of office. He is also under indictment for securities fraud in a separate, unrelated case. Paxton has denied all charges and allegations.

The former senior staff members largely stayed out of the limelight after filing the suit, but they broke their silence early last year ahead of the GOP primary, when Paxton was seeking the Republican nomination to be reelected as attorney general. They issued a statement responding to public comments that Paxton had made about the lawsuit during his reelection campaign.

Paxton was reelected as attorney general in November.

This headline has been updated.

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February 10, 2023
Family of Emmett Till files lawsuit demanding sheriff arrest Carolyn Bryant Donham | CNN

CNN
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In a federal lawsuit filed earlier this week, a family member of Emmett Till is demanding that Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks serve an arrest warrant from 1955 on Carolyn Bryant Donham for her role in the death of Till.

Last year, a five-member search group, including members of Till’s family found an unserved 1955 arrest warrant for Bryant at the Leflore County courthouse.

Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, was visiting family in Mississippi when he had his fateful encounter with then-20-year-old Carolyn Bryant. Accounts from that day differ, but witnesses alleged Emmett whistled at Bryant (now Donham) at the market she owned with her husband in Money, Mississippi.

Later, her husband, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, took Till from his bed and ordered him into the back of a pickup truck and beat him before shooting him in the head and tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River. They were both acquitted of murder following a trial in which Carolyn Bryant testified that Emmett grabbed and verbally threatened her.

In 2007, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Donham on any charges.

“It was Carolyn Bryant’s lie that sent Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam into a rage, which resulted in the mutilation of Emmett Till’s body into a [sic] unrecognizable condition,” the newly filed lawsuit states.

“The Leflore County Sheriff is complicit in the trio’s escape from justice even though both Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam admitted to the crime,” it continued.

“To this day, the warrant issued for Carolyn Bryant remains unserved. Carolyn Bryant’s whereabouts are known. This action is being brought in order to compel the Lelfore County Sheriff to serve the warrant upon Carolyn Bryant,” it added.

CNN has reached out to Banks for comment.

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February 10, 2023
Pence subpoenaed by special counsel investigating Trump | CNN Politics

CNN
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Former Vice President Mike Pence has been subpoenaed by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump and his role in January 6, 2021, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s office is seeking documents and testimony related to January 6, the source said. They want the former vice president to testify about his interactions with Trump leading up to the 2020 election and the day of the attack on the US Capitol.

The subpoena marks an important milestone in the Justice Department’s two-year criminal investigation, now led by the special counsel, into the efforts by Trump and allies to impede the transfer of power after he lost the 2020 election. Pence is an important witness who has detailed in a memoir some of his interactions with Trump in the weeks after the election, a move that likely opens the door for the Justice Department to override at least some of Trump’s claims of executive privilege.

Pence’s attorney Emmet Flood is known as a hawk on executive privilege, and people familiar with the discussions have said Pence was expected to claim at least some limits on providing details of his direct conversations with Trump. Depending on his responses, prosecutors have the option to ask a judge to compel him to answer additional questions and override Trump’s executive privilege claims.

ABC News first reported on the subpoena.

Pence’s office declined to confirm he had been subpoenaed. A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment to CNN on the matter.

Months of negotiations preceded the subpoena to the former vice president, CNN has reported.

Justice Department prosecutors had reached out to Pence’s representatives to seek his testimony in the criminal investigation, according to people familiar with the matter. Pence’s team had indicated he was open to discussing a possible agreement with DOJ to provide some testimony, one person said.

That request occurred before the department appointed Smith to oversee two Trump-related investigations, the January 6-related probe and another into alleged mishandling of classified materials found at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

In November, Pence published his memoir that detailed some of his interactions with Trump as the former president sought to overturn the results of his election loss to President Joe Biden. Pence and his team knew that the book’s publication would raise the prospect that the Justice Department would likely seek information about those interactions as part of its criminal investigation, people briefed on the matter told CNN.

Pence rebuffed an interview request from the House select committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection, but allowed top aides to provide testimony in the House’s probe, as well as in the Justice Department’s criminal investigation. The DOJ successfully secured answers from top Pence advisers Greg Jacob and Marc Short in significant court victories that could make it more likely the criminal investigation reaches further into Trump’s inner circle.

There are no plans for Trump’s team to challenge the grand jury subpoena of Pence at this time, according to a source familiar with its thinking. But it would still be possible for Trump to attempt to assert executive privilege over some conversations they had, if Pence declines to detail those conversations to the grand jury.

So far, Trump’s team has lost those challenges when Pence’s deputies and two White House counsel’s office attorneys testified, following Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s rulings that they must answer questions they initially refused to because of confidentiality around the presidency.

Howell’s tenure as chief judge of the DC District Court ends in mid-March, meaning a different federal judge, James Boasberg, could be the one to field privilege disputes in the continuing grand jury investigation.

CNN reported earlier Thursday that Smith had also subpoenaed former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien in both of the Trump-related probes, according to a source familiar with the matter. O’Brien has been asserting executive privilege in declining to provide some of the information that prosecutors are seeking from him, the source said.

Trump’s former acting Department of Homeland Security secretary was separately interviewed by Justice Department lawyers in recent weeks as part of the probe into 2020 election interference, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Rather than appearing before a federal grand jury, former acting secretary Chad Wolf was interviewed under oath by Justice Department lawyers and FBI officials, something one of the sources characterized as a “standard” first step for prosecutors.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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February 10, 2023
California county to pay $4.5 million settlement in death of man shocked by deputies’ Tasers | CNN

CNN
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The family of a 36-year-old Black man who died after sheriff’s deputies shocked him with Tasers in California’s San Mateo County in 2018 has reached a $4.5 million settlement with the county, the family’s attorneys announced.

The settlement between Chinedu Okobi’s family and the Northern California county was reached in August but has just become public, a release from law firm Pointer and Buelna LLP, which is representing the family, said Thursday.

CNN has sought comment from San Mateo County and the county sheriff’s office.

The sheriff’s office said deputies in October 2018 confronted Okobi because he was running in and out of traffic, and that he subsequently assaulted one of them. In trying to subdue Okobi, deputies deployed Tasers several times, authorities said.

Okobi died of cardiac arrest after physical exertion, restraint and electro-muscular disruption, a pathology report from the coroner’s office said.

No deputies were charged in his death.

Okobi’s family and their attorneys had viewed a 25-30 minute composite video – made up of witness cell phone video, surveillance footage and deputies’ dashcam footage, San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe told CNN in 2018. The footage was released to the public in 2019.

Okobi’s sister said after viewing footage of the incident in 2018 that her brother was “getting tortured to death in broad daylight.”

In the family’s news release Thursday, an attorney said “the destiny of an unarmed Black man having a mental health crisis shouldn’t be death at the hands of police.”

“This happens far too easily and far too often and police officers should be regularly trained on de-escalation strategies for non-violent incidents, and not handed potentially lethal weapons with little training and no outside oversight,” Adanté Pointer, an attorney for Okobi’s mother, said.

Okobi was a Morehouse College graduate, a poet and a father to a young daughter, who was 12 years old at the time of his death, his family said.

The family is calling for reform in Taser use by law enforcement, saying the devices “kill hundreds of people like Chinedu every year,” the release said.

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February 9, 2023
Republican AGs sue ATF over new rule regulating pistol-stabilizing braces | CNN Politics

CNN
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A coalition of primarily GOP-led led states sued the Biden administration Thursday in an effort to block a new federal rule that subjects pistol-stabilizing braces to additional regulations, including higher taxes, longer waiting periods and registration.

The rule, announced earlier this year by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, went into effect on January 31. Gun control proponents have argued that stabilizing braces effectively transform a pistol into a short-barreled rifle, which is heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act.

But in the lawsuit filed by 25 Republican state attorneys general, a Second Amendment advocacy coalition and two of its members, and a disabled gun owner who uses the stabilizing braces, the plaintiffs argue the regulations are “arbitrary and capricious” and are not covered by the 1934 law or the Gun Control Act of 1968.

“The rule regulates pistols and other firearms equipped with stabilizing braces, even though the text, structure, history, and purpose of the NFA and GCA show that the statute does not regulate such weapons,” states the lawsuit, which names US Attorney General Merrick Garland, the ATF and its director as defendants.

ATF declined to comment on the lawsuit. CNN has reached out to the Justice Department for comment on the suit.

The coalition of states challenging the rule is led by West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who said Thursday during a news conference announcing the suit that the ATF’s new rule “is also another case of a federal agency not staying in its lane and doing the job the Constitution clearly delegates to Congress – writing laws.”

“Let’s call this what it is: An effort to undermine Americans’ Second Amendment rights,” he said. “This is an egregious final rule turning millions of common firearms accessories into ‘short-barreled rifles.’ This is a completely nonsensical regulation.”

According to the new rule, manufacturers, dealers and individual gun owners have 120 days to register tax-free any existing short-barreled rifles covered by the rule. They can also remove the stabilizing brace or surrender covered short-barreled rifles to the ATF, the agency said.

Restrictions on stabilizing braces have been hotly debated after they were proposed by the ATF in 2020, when the bureau suggested a new rule that would regulate pistol braces under the NFA. The 2020 proposal sparked a major backlash from groups such as the National Rifle Association.

The regulations challenged on Thursday were given new life in 2021 after pistols with stabilizing braces were used in mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado, and in Dayton, Ohio. At the time, Garland unveiled several proposals aimed at curbing gun violence, including reupping the restriction on pistol braces.

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February 9, 2023