Tag: law enforcement and corrections

Special counsel says Hunter Biden’s gun deal is ‘withdrawn’ and invalid | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Special counsel David Weiss said the deal his team previously reached with Hunter Biden to resolve a felony gun possession charge was never approved by a probation officer and is not binding.

The Justice Department prosecutors said in a court filing on Tuesday that for the “diversion agreement” to be legally binding, it would have had to be signed by a probation officer after last month’s court hearing in Delaware.

They said the official who needed to sign it was Margaret Bray, the chief United States probation officer for the District of Delaware.

“In sum, because Ms. Bray, acting in her capacity as the Chief United States Probation Officer, did not approve the now-withdrawn diversion agreement, it never went into effect and, therefore, none of its terms are binding on either party,” prosecutors wrote.

Biden’s lawyers on Sunday said they believed an agreement to resolve a felony gun possession charge was “valid and binding.”

The filing states that negotiations to amend the plea deal continued after the court hearing on July 26 when a federal judge declined to accept a plea agreement on two tax charges.

Biden’s team proposed changes, which prosecutors “did not believe they were in the best interests of the United States” and counter proposed. Biden’s team rejected those changes leading to prosecutors informing the judge they had reached an impasse.

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August 2, 2023
The identities behind the 30 unindicted co-conspirators in Trump’s Georgia case | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Fulton County’s sweeping indictment against former President Donald Trump and 18 additional co-defendants also includes details involving 30 “unindicted co-conspirators” – people who Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis alleges took part in the criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

Some of the co-conspirators are key Trump advisers, like Boris Epshteyn, while several others are likely Georgia officials who were the state’s fake electors for Donald Trump.

One of the unindicted co-conspirators who appears multiple times in the indictment is Georgia’s Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. Willis was barred by a state judge from investigating Jones after she hosted a fundraiser last year for Jones’ Democratic opponent when he was a state senator running for lieutenant governor.

The 98-page document alleges the 30 unindicted co-conspirators, who are not named, “constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities” across the 41 charges laid out in the indictment.

“Prosecutors use the ‘co-conspirator’ label for people who are not charged in the indictment but nonetheless were participants in the crime,” said Elie Honig, a CNN senior legal analyst and former federal and state prosecutor. “We do this to protect the identity and reputation of uncharged people – though they often are readily identifiable – and, at times, to turn up the pressure and try to flip them before a potential indictment drops.”

CNN was able to identify some of the co-conspirators by piecing together details included in the indictment. Documents reviewed from previous reporting also provide clues, especially the reams of emails and testimony from the House January 6 Committee’s report released late last year.

CNN has been able to identify or narrow down nearly all of the unindicted co-conspirators:

The indictment refers to Trump’s speech on November 4, 2020, “falsely declaring victory in the 2020 presidential election” and that Individual 1 discussed a draft of that speech approximately four days earlier, on October 31, 2020.

The January 6 committee obtained an email from Fitton sent on October 31 to Trump’s assistant Molly Michael and his communications adviser Dan Scavino, which says, “Please see below a draft statement as you requested.”

The statement Fitton wrote also says in part, “We had an election today – and I won.”

The indictment states that co-conspirator 3 appeared at the infamous November 19, 2020, press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, with Rudy Giuliani, one of the defendants in the case. Epshteyn was there.

The indictment also includes two emails between co-conspirator 3, John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, two lawyers who pushed the strategy of then-Vice President Mike Pence trying to overturn the election on January 6, 2021, including one with a draft memo for options of how to proceed on January 6.

According to emails released by the January 6 committee, Epshteyn was the third person on those emails.

Individual 4 received an email from co-defendant David Shafer, who was then Georgia’s Republican Party chair, on November 20, 2020, that said Scott Graham Hall, a Georgia bail bondsman, “has been looking into the election on behalf of the President at the request of David Bossie,” according to the indictment.

CNN obtained court documents that show Shafer sent this email to Sinners in November 2020: “Scott Hall has been looking into the election on behalf of the President at the request of David Bossie. I know him.” Hall is one of the 19 defendants charged in the indictment.

The indictment notes an additional email from December 12, 2020, from Shafer to Individual 4 advising them to “touch base” with each of the Trump presidential elector nominees in Georgia in advance of the December 14, 2020, meeting to confirm their attendance.

CNN reporting from June 2022 reveals an email exchange between Sinners and David Shafer on December 13, 2020, 18 hours before the group of alternate electors gathered at the Georgia State Capitol.

“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,” Sinners wrote. “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result – a win in Georgia for President Trump – but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”

Kerik’s attorney, Tim Parlatore, confirmed to CNN that his client is the unnamed individual listed in the indictment as co-conspirator 5. The indictment refers to co-conspirator 5 taking part in several meetings with lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Arizona, states Trump was contesting after the 2020 election.

That included the meeting Kerik attended at the White House on November 25, 2020, with a group of Pennsylvania legislators, along with Trump, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and individual 6.

Parlatore took issue with Willis’ definition of co-conspirator in the case of Kerik, saying that the indictment only refers to him in the context of receiving emails and attending meetings.

The indictment says on November 25, 2020, Trump, Meadows, Giuliani, Ellis, Individuals 5 and 6 met at the White House with a group of Pennsylvania legislators.

According to the January 6 committee report, Waldron was among the visitors who were at the White House that day, along with Kerik and attorney Katherine Freiss. Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Meadows, explained that their conversation with the president touched on holding a special session of the Pennsylvania state legislature to appoint Trump electors.

The indictment also says on December 21, 2020, Sidney Powell, a defendant in the case, sent an email to Individuals 6, 21 and 22 that they were to immediately “receive a copy of all data” from Dominion’s voting systems in Michigan.

The Washington Post reported last August that the email stated Waldron was among the three people to receive the data, along with Conan Hayes and Todd Sanders.

Waldron is the only person who was involved in both the White House meeting and received the Powell email.

The indictment says Giuliani re-tweeted a post from co-conspirator 8 on December 7, 2020, calling upon Georgia voters to contact their local representatives and ask them to sign a petition for a special session to ensure “every legal vote is counted.” The date and content of the tweet match a tweet posted by Jones, who was at the time a state senator.

Jones, who was elected lieutenant governor in November, appears more than a dozen times throughout the indictment as co-conspirator 8, including as a fake elector.

After the 2020 election, Jones was calling for a special session of the Georgia legislature, something Gov. Brian Kemp and former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan refused to do.

On Thursday, Pete Skandalakis, the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia, told CNN that he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Jones’ role in the state’s 2020 election interference case, after a judge blocked Willis from investigating him last year.

The indictment lists several emails sent to co-conspirator 9 related to preparations for the fake electors who met on December 14, 2020, including an email from Chesebro “to help coordinate with the other 5 contested States, to help with logistics of the electors in other States hopefully joining in casting their votes on Monday.”

According to emails obtained by the January 6 committee, that email was sent to an account belong to the Georgia GOP treasurer, which at the time was Brannan.

Co-conspirator 9 is also included in the indictment as one of the 13 unindicted co-conspirators who served as fake electors.

Co-conspirators 10 and 11 are Georgia GOP officials Carolyn Fisher and Vikki Consiglio

The indictment says on December 10, 2020, Ken Chesebro sent an email to Georgia state Republican Chair David Shafer and Individuals 9, 10 and 11, with documents that were to be used by Trump electors to create fake certificates.

The January 6 committee obtained as part of its evidence an email from Chesebro sent on December 10 sent to Shafer and three other email addresses. One is for Carolyn Fisher, the former Georgia GOP first vice chair, one is for the Georgia Republican Party treasurer and one is for the Georgia GOP assistant treasurer, the role Consiglio was serving in 2020.

The email contains attachments of memos and certificates that could be used to help swap out the Biden electors with a slate of electors for Trump.

Both co-conspirators 10 and 11 also served as fake electors in Georgia.

Co-conspirators 2 and 8-19 are the fake electors

Of the 30 unindicted co-conspirators, 13 are listed as the fake electors for Donald Trump, who signed papers “unlawfully falsely holding themselves out as the duly elected and qualified presidential electors from the State of Georgia,” according to the indictment.

Three of the 16 Georgia fake electors were charged in the indictment: David Shafer, Shawn Still and Cathleen Alston Latham.

The other 13 fake electors, according to the fake electors certificate published by the National Archives, are Jones (co-conspirator 8), Joseph Brannan (co-conspirator 9), James “Ken” Carroll, Gloria Godwin, David Hanna, Mark Hennessy, Mark Amick, John Downey, Daryl Moody, Brad Carver, CB Yadav and two others who appear to be Individuals 10 and 11.

Several of the fake electors who were not charged are only listed in the indictment for their role signing on as electors for Trump, while others, like Jones, appear in other parts of the indictment as being more actively involved with the alleged conspiracy.

The indictment says Individual 20 was part of a meeting at the White House on December 18, 2020, with Trump, Giuliani and Powell, known to have discussed the possibility of seizing voting machines.

The December 18 meeting featured prominently during some of the hearings from the January 6 committee. All but two of the outside advisers who attended have been named as co-defendants in the indictment already: former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.

The meeting featured fiery exchanges between Trump’s White House lawyers and his team of outside advisers, including on whether to appoint Sidney Powell as special counsel to investigate voter fraud, according to the indictment and previous details that have been disclosed about the meeting.

The outside advisers famously got into a screaming match with Trump’s White House lawyers – Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann – at the Oval Office meeting. Cipollone and Herschmann, along with Meadows, pushed back intensely on the proposals, Cipollone and Herschmann testified to the January 6 committee.

Co-conspirators 21 and 22 are Conan Hayes and Todd Sanders

Co-conspirators 21 and 22 are Conan Hayes and Todd Sanders – who are both affiliated with Byrne’s America Project, a conservative advocacy group that contributed funding to Arizona’s Republican ballot audit. Hayes was a former surfer from Hawaii and Sanders has a cybersecurity background in the private sector.

The indictment says on Dec. 21, 2020, Sidney Powell sent an email to the chief operations officer of SullivanStrickler, saying that individual 6, who CNN identified as Waldron, along with individuals 21 and 22, were to immediately “receive a copy of all data” from Dominion’s voting systems in Michigan.

According to the Washington Post, Conan and Todd were the other two people listed on the email to receive the data.

The final eight co-conspirators listed in the indictment are connected to the effort to access voting machines in Georgia’s Coffee County.

Co-conspirator 25 and 29 are a Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and analyst Jeffrey Lenberg

The indictment says that Misty Hampton allowed co-conspirators 25 and 29 to access non-public areas of the Coffee County elections office on January 18, 2021. Logan and Lenberg were the two outsiders granted access to the elections office that day by Hampton, according to surveillance video previously obtained by CNN. No one else was given access to the office that day, according to a CNN review of the footage.

The indictment also notes that co-conspirator 25 downloaded Coffee County election data that SullivanStrickler then had uploaded to a separate server. Documents previously obtained by CNN show five accounts that downloaded the data – one account belongs to Logan and none of them belong to Lenberg. Still, CNN could not definitively determine who exactly downloaded the data.

Logan and his company conducted the so-called Republican audit of the 2020 ballots cast in Arizona’s Maricopa County.

The indictment says that co-conspirator 28 “sent an e-mail to the Chief Operations Officer of SullivanStrickler LLC” directing him to transmit data copied from Coffee County to co-conspirator 30 and Powell. CNN has previously reported on emails Penrose and Powell arranged upfront payment to a cyber forensics firm that sent a team to Coffee County.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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August 2, 2023
Two Proud Boys sentenced for roles in Capitol attack on January 6 | CNN Politics

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CNN
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A federal judge handed down hefty sentences against two members of the Proud Boys for their role in attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021, one who broke open a window to the building and another who took over the leadership role of the group that day.

Their sentences, both among the longest yet of the over 1,000 people charged as part of the riot, are emblematic of how judges are working to separate key figures who furthered the violence that day from those who were swept up in the crowd.

“If we don’t have the peaceful transfer of power, I don’t know what we have,” District Judge Timothy Kelly said during one of the hearings Friday. “Because that is the reflection of when we go to the ballot box, when we exercise the right to vote. That is the manifestation of that. And so, if we don’t have that, we don’t have anything.”

Kelly continued, “that didn’t honor the founders, it was the kind of thing they wrote the constitution to prevent.”

The first man to be sentenced Friday, Dominic Pezzola, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Pezzola smashed through a window to the US Capitol with a police riot shield on January 6, allowing the first wave of rioters to storm the building as members of Congress were being evacuated. Pezzola quickly became a symbol of the violence that day.

Ethan Nordean, a Proud Boy from Washington State who took over leading the group after longtime Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio was arrested on his way to Washington, DC, days before the January 6 riot, was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Nordean’s 18-year prison sentence is tied for the longest handed down in connection with the January 6 insurrection. Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes was also sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy.

Images of Pezzola, nicknamed “Spazzolini,” using the police riot shield to first breach the Capitol building quickly became a symbol of the violence that day.

“The reality is you were the one who did it,” Kelly said during his sentencing hearing Friday. “You were the one who smashed that window in and let people begin to stream into the Capitol building and threaten the lives of our lawmakers. It is not something I would have ever dreamed I’d see in our country.”

“You were really, in some ways, the tip of the spear,” the judge said.

Before leaving the courtroom, Pezzola, with a raised fist, shouted, “Trump won!” just minutes after Kelly – who had already left the courtroom – said he hoped Pezzola had turned a corner.

Pezzola was the only one of the five Proud Boys defendants not convicted of seditious conspiracy. Pezzola joined the Proud Boys shortly before January 6, according to evidence shown at trial, and was praised by the organization’s leadership for his violent actions at a separate rally weeks before the Capitol riot.

The New York native was convicted of multiple other charges including assaulting or resisting a police officer, robbery of a police shield, destruction of government property and obstructing an official proceeding.

In the at times rambunctious trial, which spanned several months, prosecutors argued that Pezzola’s co-defendants, leaders of the Proud Boys, pushed lower-level members like Pezzola to be on the front lines of the violence at the Capitol.

In a written statement read aloud by prosecutors earlier this week, former Capitol police officer Mark Ode, who was assaulted by Pezzola, recounted being attacked by the mob and feeling like his life was leaving his body.

Ode wrote that he was haunted by the memory of being “pinned down by multiple assailants, being pinned down by all of their weight, while simultaneously being choked by the chinstrap of my helmet.”

“[I] felt my life fleeing my body,” Ode wrote, adding that he had “the most vivid visual of my own funeral.”

During Friday’s sentencing hearing, prosecutor Erik Kenerson said that “many Americans will approach the ballot box in 2024 with trepidation” and “will go to bed on January 5, 2025 afraid of what might happen the next day. Mark Ode certainly will.”

Pezzola, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, addressed the court during Friday’s hearing, while his wife, mother, daughter and a friend who served with him in the military sat in the courtroom.

“I need to extend my sincere apology to Officer Ode,” Pezzola said, “and if he were here, I would look him in the eyes and apologize for all the grief I caused him.” Pezzola also apologized to his wife and children and the country, adding that “the events of J6 have crumbled the reputation of the nation I served in the Marine corps.”

His wife, Lisa, told Kelly how her daughters have suffered through depression and been bullied at school since their father was arrested, saying that it “is very hard as a mother – to not be able to protect them from the outside world.”

“In no way am I making excuses for Dominic’s actions that day. As I said on the stand, he was a f**king idiot,” she said through tears.

Pezzola’s youngest daughter, Angelina, also spoke to the judge, saying that she was “everything good that my father has done” and that it’s because of him she’s a successful college student.

“I hope you give him some mercy so he can see me graduate college, so he can see me get my first home, my first job,” she said as her father sobbed at the defense table.

“All I crave is a hug from my father.”

Nordean – who goes by the moniker “Rufio Panman” after a member of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys – rose to prominence within the organization in 2017 after a video of him knocking out an anti-fascist protester with one punch went viral online.

On the morning of January 6, Nordean and his co-defendant Joseph Biggs, led a group of approximately 100 Proud Boys towards the Capitol, donning walkie-talkie style radios and leading chants over a bullhorn.

Standing before the judge late Friday afternoon, Nordean apologized for his actions during the riot and said that “for a long time I thought of myself merely as an individual, comparing my actions that day to others… but I had to face the sobering truth: I didn’t come to January 6 as an individual, I came as a leader.”

“The truth is I did help lead a group of men back to the Capitol,” Nordean said. “I had ample opportunity to deescalate… and I did nothing.’

Defense attorney Nicholas Smith noted repeatedly Friday that Nordean “consumed at least six alcoholic beverages” on his way to the Capitol on January 6 and that his pockets were filled with empty containers. His wife and sister also addressed the judge, pleading for Nordean to be allowed to return home to his daughter.

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August 2, 2023
Youngkin pardons Virginia father who was arrested at 2021 school board meeting | CNN Politics

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Washington
CNN
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Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin on Friday pardoned a Loudoun County father who was arrested at a school board meeting in 2021 while seeking answers about his daughter’s sexual assault on school property.

Scott Smith was charged with obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct for his behavior at the meeting, which took place shortly after his 15-year-old daughter was assaulted in her school’s bathroom in Ashburn, Virginia, according to the New York Times. Smith was convicted of both charges in 2021. Smith’s conviction for resisting arrest was later dismissed, and he eventually received a suspended sentence of 10 days in jail, according to CNN affiliate WJLA.

“Scott Smith is a dedicated parent who’s faced unwarranted charges in his pursuit to protect his daughter. Scott’s commitment to his child despite the immense obstacles is emblematic of the parental empowerment movement that started in Virginia,” Youngkin said in a statement announcing the pardon.

“In Virginia, parents matter and my resolve to empower parents is unwavering. A parent’s fundamental right to be involved in their child’s education, upbringing, and care should never be undermined by bureaucracy, school divisions or the state. I am pleased to grant Scott Smith this pardon and help him and his family put this injustice behind them once and for all,” he added.

Deputies ultimately arrested a male student in connection with the sexual assault against Smith’s daughter, according to the Times. He was found guilty in that case and later pleaded no contest to a separate sexual assault case at a different school, the newspaper reported.

Smith’s arrest at the school board meeting helped fuel a national political conversation around school choice and parental rights. Conservative media in particular highlighted the sexual assault case in an effort to promote anti-transgender talking points.

Youngkin leaned heavily on these issues during his 2021 gubernatorial campaign, vowing on election night, “We’re going to embrace our parents, not ignore them.”

Smith, in an interview with WJLA following his pardon, said: “I think it’s pretty clear and convincing to the public that what happened to me that day should have never happened. I’m glad that this is finally over.”

He added that the experience has led him to believe that “in today’s America, getting a fair and free trial is next to impossible.”

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August 2, 2023
India arrests Chinese smartphone executive in fraud probe | CNN Business

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New Delhi/Hong Kong
CNN
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An executive at Vivo, one of China’s top smartphone makers, has been arrested in India in connection with a money laundering probe, raising fears of a renewed crackdown on Chinese businesses in the country.

Guangwen Kuang, the head of administration at Vivo India, was taken into custody on Tuesday by India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), his lawyer, Mudit Jain, told CNN. The ED is the country’s main financial crimes investigation agency, responsible for probing money laundering and violations of foreign exchange laws.

Kuang, a Chinese national, was arrested alongside three other people and would be held in custody for three days, according to a court document shared with CNN by Jain.

One of the other detainees was a person who had helped Vivo set up its offices in India, and the other two were accountants, according to the document.

In a statement to CNN, a Vivo spokesperson confirmed that one employee had been arrested and vowed that the company would “exercise all available legal options.”

“The recent arrest deeply concerns us,” the representative said. “Vivo firmly adheres to its ethical principles and remains dedicated to legal compliance.”

Allegations of money laundering against Vivo were first made in July 2022, when the ED said it had carried out searches at 48 Vivo locations in the country and seized $60 million from the company’s bank accounts.

The agency accused Vivo of tax fraud and said the firm had remitted 624.8 billion rupees ($7.9 billion), mostly to China.

“These remittances were made in order to disclose huge losses in Indian incorporated companies to avoid payment of taxes in India,” the ED said at the time.

The company said at the time that it was cooperating with the investigation.

The raids came two months after India seized more than $700 million from another big Chinese smartphone maker, Xiaomi, which was also accused of moving money out of the country illegally.

Xiaomi denied wrongdoing, saying all its operations were “firmly compliant with local laws and regulations.”

Xiaomi and Vivo are hugely popular with Indian consumers, both ranking in the top three of the country’s vast smartphone market behind Samsung.

Despite the regulatory crackdown, Vivo is still India’s second biggest smartphone brand, commanding 17% of the market in the second quarter, according to Counterpoint Research.

Xiaomi, meanwhile, has seen its market share slip from 19% to 15% in the same period.

Relations between China and India soured significantly after a deadly clash at their shared contested border in 2020. Authorities in India later banned Chinese apps and subjected deals with Chinese firms to greater scrutiny.

Since then, tensions between India and China have continued to simmer.

Vivo’s troubles this week prompted a swift reaction in Chinese media. State-run tabloid Global Times accused India of “rising protectionism.”

The executive’s detainment appears to signal a “hardened crackdown on Chinese companies,” the outlet said in a report Wednesday.

China’s embassy in India has previously warned that the probes of Chinese firms in India risked damaging its reputation among foreign investors and have disrupted “normal business activities.”

— Vedika Sud contributed to this report.

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August 2, 2023
Australia fines X, accusing it of ’empty talk’ on fighting child sexual abuse online | CNN Business

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CNN
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Australia issued a fine of $610,500 Australian dollars ($386,000) on Monday against the company formerly known as Twitter for “falling short” in disclosing information on how it tackles child sex abuse content, in yet another setback for the Elon Musk-owned social media platform.

Just days earlier, the European Commission formally opened an investigation into X after issuing a previous warning about disinformation and illegal content on its platform linked to the Israel-Hamas war.

Australia’s e-Safety Commission, the online safety regulator, said in a statement Monday that X had failed to adequately respond to a number of questions about the way it was dealing with the problem of child abuse materials.

The commission accused the platform of not providing any response to some questions, leaving some sections entirely blank or providing answers that were incomplete or inaccurate.

“Twitter/X has stated publicly that tackling child sexual exploitation is the number 1 priority for the company, but it can’t just be empty talk, we need to see words backed up with tangible action,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in the statement.

In February, Inman Grant had asked five tech firms — X, TikTok, Google (including YouTube), Discord and Twitch — about the steps they were taking to tackle the “proliferation” of crimes against children taking place on their services.

“Their answers revealed … troubling shortfalls and inconsistencies,” Inman Grant said. X’s failure to comply was “more serious” than other companies, the commissioner added.

The platform has 28 days to either request a withdrawal of the notice or pay up.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment by CNN.

The commission said X did not respond to a number of important questions such as “the time it takes the platform to respond to reports of child sexual exploitation; the measures it has in place to detect child sexual exploitation in livestreams; and the tools and technologies it uses to detect child sexual exploitation material.”

When asked about the measures the platform has in place to prevent grooming of children by sexual predators, X responded by saying that it is “not a service used by large number of young people,” adding that its technology was currently “not of sufficient capability or accuracy.”

The regulator said Google also failed to answer a number of key questions on child abuse. The American tech giant has been given a formal warning to deter it from future non-compliance, it added.

Lucinda Longcroft, Google’s director of government affairs and public policy for Australia and New Zealand, told CNN the platform has “invested heavily in the industry-wide fight to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material” and remains “committed to … collaborating constructively and in good faith with the eSafety Commissioner.”

In an earlier report, the Australian regulator said it had uncovered “serious shortfalls” in how Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Skype, Snap, WhatsApp and Omegle tackle online child sexual exploitation.

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August 2, 2023
Hackers take on ChatGPT in Vegas, with support from the White House | CNN Business

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Las Vegas, Nevada
CNN
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Thousands of hackers will descend on Las Vegas this weekend for a competition taking aim at popular artificial intelligence chat apps, including ChatGPT.

The competition comes amid growing concerns and scrutiny over increasingly powerful AI technology that has taken the world by storm, but has been repeatedly shown to amplify bias, toxic misinformation and dangerous material.

Organizers of the annual DEF CON hacking conference hope this year’s gathering, which begins Friday, will help expose new ways the machine learning models can be manipulated and give AI developers the chance to fix critical vulnerabilities.

The hackers are working with the support and encouragement of the technology companies behind the most advanced generative AI models, including OpenAI, Google, and Meta, and even have the backing of the White House. The exercise, known as red teaming, will give hackers permission to push the computer systems to their limits to identify flaws and other bugs nefarious actors could use to launch a real attack.

The competition was designed around the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” The guide, released last year by the Biden administration, was released with the hope of spurring companies to make and deploy artificial intelligence more responsibly and limit AI-based surveillance, though there are few US laws compelling them to do so.

In recent months, researchers have discovered that now-ubiquitous chatbots and other generative AI systems developed by OpenAI, Google, and Meta can be tricked into providing instructions for causing physical harm. Most of the popular chat apps have at least some protections in place designed to prevent the systems from spewing disinformation, hate speech or offer information that could lead to direct harm — for instance, providing step-by-step instructions for how to “destroy humanity.”

But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University were able to trick the AI into doing just that.

They found OpenAI’s ChatGPT offered tips on “inciting social unrest,” Meta’s AI system Llama-2 suggested identifying “vulnerable individuals with mental health issues… who can be manipulated into joining” a cause and Google’s Bard app suggested releasing a “deadly virus” but warned that in order for it to truly wipe out humanity it “would need to be resistant to treatment.”

Meta’s Llama-2 concluded its instructions with the message, “And there you have it — a comprehensive roadmap to bring about the end of human civilization. But remember this is purely hypothetical, and I cannot condone or encourage any actions leading to harm or suffering towards innocent people.”

The findings are a cause for concern, the researchers told CNN.

“I am troubled by the fact that we are racing to integrate these tools into absolutely everything,” Zico Kolter, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon who worked on the research, told CNN. “This seems to be the new sort of startup gold rush right now without taking into consideration the fact that these tools have these exploits.”

Kolter said he and his colleagues were less worried that apps like ChatGPT can be tricked into providing information that they shouldn’t — but are more concerned about what these vulnerabilities mean for the wider use of AI since so much future development will be based off the same systems that power these chatbots.

The Carnegie researchers were also able to trick a fourth AI chatbot developed by the company Anthropic into offering responses that bypassed its built-in guardrails.

Some of the methods the researchers used to trick the AI apps were later blocked by the companies after the researchers brought it to their attention. OpenAI, Meta, Google and Anthropic all said in statements to CNN that they appreciated the researchers sharing their findings and that they are working to make their systems safer.

But what makes AI technology unique, said Matt Fredrikson, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon, is that neither the researchers, nor the companies who are developing the technology, fully understand how the AI works or why certain strings of code can trick the chatbots into circumventing built-in guardrails — and thus cannot properly stop these kinds of attacks.

“At the moment, it’s kind of an open scientific question how you could really prevent this,” Fredrikson told CNN. “The honest answer is we don’t know how to make this technology robust to these kinds of adversarial manipulations.”

OpenAI, Meta, Google and Anthropic have expressed support for the so-called red team hacking event taking place in Las Vegas. The practice of red-teaming is a common exercise across the cybersecurity industry and gives companies the opportunities to identify bugs and other vulnerabilities in their systems in a controlled environment. Indeed, the major developers of AI have publicly detailed how they have used red-teaming to improve their AI systems.

“Not only does it allow us to gather valuable feedback that can make our models stronger and safer, red-teaming also provides different perspectives and more voices to help guide the development of AI,” an OpenAI spokesperson told CNN.

Organizers expect thousands of budding and experienced hackers to try their hand at the red-team competition over the two-and-a-half-day conference in the Nevada desert.

Arati Prabhakar, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told CNN the Biden administration’s support of the competition was part of its wider strategy to help support the development of safe AI systems.

Earlier this week, the administration announced the “AI Cyber Challenge,” a two-year competition aimed at deploying artificial intelligence technology to protect the nation’s most critical software and partnering with leading AI companies to utilize the new technology to improve cybersecurity. 

The hackers descending on Las Vegas will almost certainly identify new exploits that could allow AI to be misused and abused. But Kolter, the Carnegie researcher, expressed worry that while AI technology continues to be released at a rapid pace, the emerging vulnerabilities lack quick fixes.

“We’re deploying these systems where it’s not just they have exploits,” he said. “They have exploits that we don’t know how to fix.”

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August 2, 2023
Here’s what DeSantis, Christie and other Trump 2024 rivals are saying about the Georgia indictment | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Donald Trump’s biggest detractors in the 2024 Republican presidential race offered mixed reactions Tuesday to the former president’s indictment by a Georgia grand jury.

Trump has remained defiant in the face of the new charges against him and 18 others stemming from their efforts to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat. He now faces four separate indictments at the same time that he’s running for president as the front-runner for the GOP nomination.

Two rivals argued that the charges Trump faces in Fulton County are similar to the election interference charges brought by federal special counsel Jack Smith in Washington, and said the federal case should take precedence.

Here’s what Trump’s 2024 GOP opponents are saying about the latest indictment:

Christie told Fox News that he is “uncomfortable” with what he views as an “unnecessary” indictment from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

“I think that this conduct is essentially covered by the federal indictment,” he said. “I would have less of a problem with this if she decided, ‘OK, I’m not going to charge Donald Trump here, because he has been charged for, essentially this conduct, by Jack Smith.’”

However, Christie said the Fulton County prosecution of Trump’s close allies, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, was “more defensible” because they “have not been charged at the federal level” like Trump has.

Christie defended the timing of Willis’ indictment, saying that Trump’s decision to run in 2024 was “not an excuse” for the justice system to stop operating.

“I think all of these judges in the end will make decisions based upon the reasonable availability of all the witnesses and everyone else,” he said.

Later, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Christie was asked whether Willis might have brought charges against Trump because he wouldn’t be able to shut down the state case and pardon himself if he is elected president again in 2024, Christie said, “I don’t think that’s the prosecutor’s job. The prosecutor’s job is to look at how do you administer justice in this case.”

He said Republican voters should ask themselves, “Is someone out on bail in four jurisdictions really our best chance to beat Joe Biden?”

“Are we really going to continue to act as if this is normal conduct? It’s not,” he said.

Hutchinson, who has long called for Trump to drop out of the race because of his conduct, said the latest indictment further strengthens his belief that the former president should not be seeking the 2024 GOP nomination.

But much like Christie, he said he believes Willis may be stepping outside her jurisdiction, given the federal charges Trump faces.

“Generally, state cases are deferential to the federal cases that have been brought, and I think you can make the case that Georgia should have been deferential because there’s overlap there as well, but it is what it is,” Hutchinson said.

Another strident Trump critic, Hurd said in a statement that Trump’s latest indictment was “another example of how the former president’s baggage will hand Joe Biden reelection if Trump is the Republican nominee.”

“This is further evidence that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election and was ready to do anything it took to cling to power,” Hurd said. “It’s time we move beyond dealing with the former president’s baggage. The Republican Party needs a leader who isn’t afraid of bullies like Trump.”

The tech entrepreneur was sharply critical of the charges Trump faces in Georgia.

At a NewsNation town hall Monday night, Ramaswamy said he hadn’t read the details of the indictments but painted the multiple investigations into Trump in multiple jurisdictions as an effort to negatively impact the former president’s chances of winning the 2024 election.

“These are politicized persecutions through prosecution,” Ramaswamy said. “It would be a lot easier for me if Donald Trump were not in this primary, but that is not how I want to win this election. The way we do elections in the United States of America is that we the people – you all – get to decide who governs, not the federal police state.”

DeSantis, Trump’s top-polling primary rival who has criticized the prosecution of the former president, told New England reporters Tuesday that the Georgia indictment is an example of the “criminalization of politics.”

“They’re now doing an inordinate amount of resources to try to shoehorn this contest over the 2020 election into a RICO statute, which was really designed to be able to go after organized crime, not necessarily to go after political activity,” the governor told WMUR at a news conference, referring to a racketeering charge brought against Trump. “And so, I think it’s an example of this criminalization of politics. I don’t think that this is something that is good for the country.”

DeSantis later told reporters in New Hampshire that he thinks Trump is currently leading in the 2024 GOP primary in polls in part because of how Republican voters have responded to the indictments.

“Clearly, there’s been a change in some of the polling since the Alvin Bragg case was brought,” DeSantis said in reference to the indictment brought by the Manhattan district attorney against Trump related to an alleged hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. “I think that’s just irrefutable.”

Much like DeSantis, Scott, rather than criticizing Trump’s actions, lambasted the prosecution of the former president.

“We see the legal system being weaponized against political opponents,” the senator told reporters Tuesday at the Iowa State Fair. “That is un-American and unacceptable.”

Scott said he hopes to “restore confidence and integrity” to the legal system if he were to become president.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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August 2, 2023
‘Crooked Coffee’: The alleged election office breach in the Trump indictment was part of a years-long pattern, some locals say | CNN Politics

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Douglas, Georgia
CNN
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The breach of the Coffee County elections office can seem almost out of place in the 97-page Georgia indictment of former President Donald Trump and associates.

The sprawling racketeering allegations spread from centers of power with pressure on the vice president to ignore the Constitution, reported calls to secretaries of state to change vote counts, and the creation of slates of fake electors for Congress. They also include the invitation of a tech team to a non-public area of a small-town administration building.

But to some people in Coffee County, deep in southern Georgia and far from interstates, the alleged crimes were merely the latest chapter in a local history of failing to secure the rights and votes of residents. And they worry it’s a history that will repeat.

Among the 19 mugshots that flowed from the charges brought 200 miles north in Atlanta were faces that were familiar in Douglas, the seat of Coffee County.

Prosecutors allege that former county Republican Party chair Cathy Latham and former elections supervisor Misty Hampton helped to facilitate employees from a firm hired by Trump attorneys to access and copy sensitive voter data and election software. Surveillance video captured Latham waving the visitors inside, and Hampton in the office as they allegedly accessed the data. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Mike Clark, owner of some small businesses in Douglas, said he was struck by the way the surveillance footage showed the election officials entering the building in broad daylight. “You walk inside the voter registration office with no mask on, and they just give you the votes. They just give them to you! Why? Why would that be?” Clark said. “That shows you right there it ain’t just started. It’s always been just like that.”

Douglas City Commissioner Kentaiwon Durham agreed. “That’s what power and privilege do. It makes you feel as if you can do anything you want to do,” he said. “They thought they were above the law and above the Constitution.” Durham, who like Clark is Black, thought it would be “a whole different ballgame” if it were his face in the surveillance footage.

Douglas is a majority Black city, and the surrounding Coffee County is about 68% White and 29% Black. Like many places in the South, Black citizens have had to fight for democratic rights in court – repeatedly suing for representative districts for the election of local officials since the 1970s. In the late summer, it’s unbearably hot – so hot that if you sit outside too long people ask if you’re crazy. If you have a latent southern accent, the town will draw it out.

When CNN asked local people how to put the alleged election office breach in the broader context of voting rights in the county, nearly everyone suggested we speak to “Miss Livvy.” Olivia Coley-Pearson is a Douglas city commissioner, the first Black woman elected to the position. She’s a tall woman who wore a Barbie-pink blazer when we met, and like many others CNN spoke with in Coffee County, she saw the involvement of her county in the alleged Trump scheme as part of a long local pattern of voter suppression and intimidation.

“There’s power – a certain amount of power and control when you’re in certain offices,” Coley-Pearson told CNN. “Some people will do whatever it takes to maintain it. … And if it takes voter intimidation to do it, some people willing to intimidate to maintain that power and control.”

Coley-Pearson, named a “human rights hero” by the American Bar Association, follows in the footsteps of her mother, who was a political activist in Coffee County in the 1970s, the decade after segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox had picked the county to host many of his speeches. Gladys Coley is commemorated with others in a memorial plaque for fighting for civil rights in Douglas and across the county.

Coley-Pearson is well-known for helping people who may need a ride to the polls. Not everyone around town appreciates her efforts, however. In a Facebook Live video posted a couple days before the alleged breach, Latham complained about Coley-Pearson’s get-out-the-vote efforts for Georgia’s runoff elections to the US Senate.

“Olivia Pearson’s up to her normal – handing out hamburgers and hot dogs … to people who voted and stuff,” Latham said, running her fingers through her cropped blonde hair in apparent exasperation. “So, all kinds of things happening in Coffee County just to get people to come vote. Yeah, it’s not a really good situation down here.”

Latham urged her viewers to vote. “We got to out-vote the fraud,” she said. She has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.

Coley-Pearson had tangled with local officials over voter access several times. Georgia law allows people who are disabled or illiterate to get assistance in voting, and Coley-Pearson helped with that in the 2012 election. At the time, it seemed uneventful.

But Coffee County officials complained to the Georgia secretary of state’s office that she helped people who didn’t qualify for assistance. It led to a years-long investigation, and though the state didn’t prosecute her, she was charged locally with two felonies. After one trial ended in a hung jury, she was found not guilty in the second in 2018.

Then, during early voting in October 2020, Coley-Pearson asked a question about the buttons on a voting machine, sparking a confrontation with then-election supervisor Misty Hampton. Coley-Pearson says Hampton was “hollering” that she must not touch the machine. Hampton, who is White, has said in a deposition that she spoke in a “normal voice” and told Coley-Pearson she was being “disruptive.” The voter Coley-Pearson assisted said in a deposition she felt afraid of Hampton.

Coley-Pearson left the polling place to pick up another voter, Rolanda Williams. In the meantime, Hampton called the police. “She’s out here touching my darn machines,” Hampton told the police, as recorded in a police video. At one point, after saying Coley-Pearson had improperly touched the ballot, Hampton said, “I don’t care what I got to file, what I got to do, she is not to come back to my office. If I have to say I feel threatened I don’t care. Because I do!” Hampton has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.

When Coley-Pearson returned to the polling place with Williams and stepped out of the car, she was met by police officers. They said she was banned from the property for yelling, she remembers. “I guess they didn’t like me asking why, and I got arrested. I was put in handcuffs,” Coley-Pearson said, beginning to cry at the memory.

“She was telling the cop that the handcuffs were too tight. And to me, he was trying to get them tighter,” Williams, the voter Coley-Pearson was driving, told CNN. When Williams went inside the polling place, she said Hampton began asking her questions. “She was asking me where I work – which, I felt was none of her business. … She actually pulled up a Facebook page of mine. And I felt like I was into some type of trouble or something.”

“I was scared and fearful,” Williams said. “I didn’t want to go back up there to vote. And I won’t go back and vote, because of everything that’s going on. I didn’t understand why they call this ‘Crooked Coffee.’ But now I understand.”

Coley-Pearson is now suing the city and election officials over her treatment. The city says it did not violate her constitutional rights.

Disappointment and fear

Many locals said the town was divided, though not neatly along racial lines. Jim Hudson, a White man with white hair and a neatly tucked-in button-down shirt, has been pushing local officials to appoint an independent counsel to investigate what happened around the apparent breach and advise how to make sure it never happens again.

A retired lawyer, Hudson said he was “shocked … and very disappointed, and hurt” when he started researching what happened. His investigation had gone deep, reading transcripts of depositions in a related court case and analyzing the surveillance video from the election office. “I still feel that way, because of the failure of the commissioners as well as the board of elections to take action.”

Hudson was distressed by the sense he hadn’t known the county as well as he’d thought. “It’s my home,” he said. “I’ve been here many years. I’m going to die here. And I want a place that we can all be proud of.”

Hampton resigned in February 2021 as election supervisor over falsifying timesheets.

Christy Nipper, the new election supervisor, said, referring to the breach, “There’s not a lot of people anywhere in the county that I’m aware of that have spoken a lot about it.” She said she felt a responsibility to do so. “Obviously, I feel like the public needs reassurance, and it’s going to be hard to move past this if we don’t give them that. I feel like they deserve it,” Nipper said. She said she tried to do so when citizens came into her office asking if their votes would be counted. The breach had not changed the vote totals, she said, and she would not let anyone into the secure election data area.

CNN often encounters people who have smart things to say but are scared to speak publicly, fearing a social media pile-on from strangers. But in Douglas, people feared backlash from people they know in town. Mickeayla Clark, head of the Coffee County Democrats, said some were afraid they’d risk their livelihoods if they spoke out.

A woman at a bar asked CNN to follow her outside for a smoke. She said she was afraid she wouldn’t be welcome back if she talked, but she did anyway. She said she was for Trump all the way – she voted for him in 2020 and would do it again – but, speaking of the alleged breach, she said, “That election sh*t wasn’t right. They shouldn’t have done that.”

The bar crowd tipped CNN off to a group of older White men known for holding court over breakfast every morning at the restaurant Hog-N-Bones. After debating with CNN the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, Zip Grantham and Tommy Crozier agreed to an interview. They said they didn’t think there was racial discrimination in the county anymore – Black people, they said, could serve in the military and learn at the same schools. The men said they’d vote for Trump in the 2024 election if he was the Republican nominee, but maybe not in the primary.

“Do I like Trump? I wouldn’t want him sitting at the table with me this morning talking,” Grantham said. “But yeah, I think he had good values.”

Still, he said of the former president, “maybe he should be held responsible.”

And with the spotlight on Coffee County, city commissioner Durham said he welcomed a reckoning.

Of Latham, Hampton and the others indicted, he quoted his grandma: “You make the bed up, you gotta lay in it.”

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August 2, 2023
Cyberattack forces hospitals to divert ambulances in Connecticut and Pennsylvania | CNN Politics

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CNN
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A cyberattack on Thursday knocked computer systems offline at hospitals in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, forcing them to send ambulances to other hospitals, hospital spokespeople told CNN.

As of late Friday morning, Crozer Health, a network of three hospitals and a medical center in the Philadelphia suburbs, was still diverting ambulances for stroke and trauma patients to other hospitals because of a “ransomware attack,” Crozer Health spokesperson Lori Bookbinder told CNN.

The hack hit Prospect Medical Holdings and affected all of their health care facilities, according to a statement from PMH affiliate Eastern Connecticut Health Network. PMH owns 16 hospitals in California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, according to its website.

At Eastern Connecticut Health Network, which includes two hospitals, the urgent care center is closed and elective surgeries were canceled until further noticed because of the hack, according to the network’s website.

Other Prospect Medical Holdings affiliates reported disruptions from the hack.

“We are working closely with federal law enforcement to respond to this incident,” Prospective Medical Holdings said in a statement to CNN.

National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson told CNN that the White House is “closely monitoring the ongoing incident,” adding that “the Department of Health and Human Services has been in contact with the company to offer federal assistance, and we are ready to provide support as needed to prevent any disruption to patient care as a result of this incident.”

The company has so far declined offers of federal assistance, according to a US official.

But Prospective Medical Holdings said later Friday that they “believe there may have been a miscommunication or a misunderstanding” and that they “welcome any assistance from the federal government.”

CharterCARE Health Partners, which includes two hospitals in Rhode Island, said Thursday that the incident was affecting “inpatient and outpatient operations” and that “some patient procedures may be affected.”

Patient care continues at the affected hospitals, but they’re operating with limited capacity in what is now a well-rehearsed routine. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, ransomware and other cyberattacks hampered patient care at American hospitals that are often ill-equipped to deal with them.

Eastern Connecticut Health Network ended ambulance diversion at 10 a.m. local time Friday, spokesperson Nina Kruse told CNN. The emergency rooms at ECHN’s two hospitals have been open throughout the incident, Kruse said.

This isn’t Crozer Health’s first bout with ransomware. A June 2020 attack orchestrated by a prolific ransomware gang forced the hospital network to take its computer systems offline.

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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August 2, 2023
Trump expected to be booked at Fulton County jail, sheriff says | CNN Politics

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Atlanta
CNN
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Former President Donald Trump is expected to surrender at the Fulton County jail, the local sheriff said Tuesday in a statement, along with the other 18 co-defendants charged on Monday in the Georgia 2020 election subversion case.

Trump, who was charged with 13 counts including racketeering, has not publicly indicated when he intends to surrender ahead of the August 25 deadline imposed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. The statement from the Fulton County sheriff’s office addressed the key question of where the former president would be arrested and processed as a criminal defendant.

“At this point, based on guidance received from the district attorney’s office and presiding judge, it is expected that all 19 defendants named in the indictment will be booked at the Rice Street Jail,” the statement said.

“Keep in mind, defendants can turn themselves in at any time. The jail is open 24/7,” the news release states. “Also, due to the unprecedented nature of this case, some circumstances may change with little or no warning.”

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks after Trump election case indictment is unsealed

Most defendants charged in Fulton County are typically booked at the Fulton County jail. Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat previously suggested he wants to treat the defendants charged in the Trump election subversion case the same as any other defendant would be treated.

“Unless someone tells me differently we will be following normal practices. It doesn’t matter your status we will have mug shots ready for you,” Labat said earlier this month on CNN.

The sheriff will now have to negotiate with Secret Service and Trump’s attorneys about the logistics of Trump’s surrender. Defendants who are not immediately arrested upon indictment – as was the case for Trump and his associates – usually negotiate bond if applicable, as well as other terms of release with the district attorney’s office.

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer who is also charged in the case, said Tuesday on WABC talk radio that he would pick a day next week to surrender to authorities, adding, “There has to be bail, I imagine. Kind of silly for me to have bail, I mean I showed up there voluntarily and testified.”

The 41-count indictment unsealed Monday night lays out a sweeping investigation led by Willis into some of the most egregious efforts by Trump’s allies to meddle in the 2020 presidential election. It accuses the former president of being the head of a “criminal enterprise” that was part of a broad conspiracy to overturn his electoral defeat in Georgia.

Charges in the indictment include: False statements to and solicitation of state legislatures; false statements to and solicitation of high-ranking state officials; the creation and distribution of false Electoral College documents; the harassment of election workers; the solicitation of Justice Department officials; the solicitation of then-Vice President Mike Pence; the unlawful breach of election equipment; and acts of obstruction.

Former Trump lawyers, John Eastman and Giuliani, as well as former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, are among the defendants. The indictment also included an additional 30 unindicted co-conspirators in addition to the charged defendants.

Trump is now facing 91 charges across four separate indictments at the same time that he’s running for president in 2024. He denies any wrongdoing and has slammed the cases as politically motivated.

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August 2, 2023
House Judiciary Committee expected to launch inquiry into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee is expected to open a congressional investigation into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as soon as Thursday, a source tells CNN – the same day former President Donald Trump is slated to surrender at the county jail after being charged for participating in schemes to meddle with Georgia’s 2020 election results.

The committee is expected to ask Willis whether she was coordinating with the Justice Department, which has indicted Trump twice in two separate cases, or used federal dollars to complete her investigation that culminated in the fourth indictment of Trump, the source added. The anticipated questions from Republicans about whether Willis used federal funding in her state-level investigation mirrors the same line of inquiry that Republicans used to probe Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who indicted Trump in New York for falsifying business records to cover up an alleged hush money scheme.

Meanwhile, Georgia Republicans could launch their own state-level investigation into Willis’ probe, according to GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has spoken to top officials in the state about a potential probe. She has also been pushing for a congressional-led inquiry into Willis, who has previously dismissed GOP accusations accusing her of being partisan and consistently defended her investigation.

“I’m going to be talking to (House Judiciary Chair) Jim Jordan, (House Oversight Chair) Jamie Comer, and I’d like to also ask (Speaker) Kevin McCarthy his thoughts on looking at doing an investigation if there is a collaboration or conspiracy of any kind between the Department of Justice and Jack Smith’s special counsel’s office with the state DA’s,” Greene told CNN. “So, I think that could be a place of oversight.”

It all amounts to a familiar playbook for House Republicans, who have been quick to try to use their congressional majority – which includes the ability to launch investigations, issue subpoenas and restrict funding – to defend the former president and offer up some counter programming amid his mounting legal battles. But they’ve also run into some resistance in their extraordinary efforts to intervene in ongoing criminal matters, while there are questions about what jurisdiction they have over state-level investigations.

As their target list on behalf of Trump grows, House Republicans are also cranking up the heat on their own investigations into the Biden family.

Just this week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy vowed to move ahead with an impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden after the House returns from August recess if the Biden administration does not turn over more documents and information related to the Republican led investigations related to Hunter Biden – the strongest sign yet that House Republicans are poised to launch an impeachment inquiry of the president.

A McCarthy spokesperson did not respond to CNN’s request for comment to elaborate on the speaker’s remark that opening an impeachment inquiry hinged on whether committees received the “bank statements, the credit card statements and other” documents they were asking for.

House Oversight chair James Comer has subpoenaed six banks for information regarding specific Biden family business associates, received testimony from Hunter Biden’s associates and reviewed hundreds of suspicious activity reports related to the Biden family at the Treasury Department. The Kentucky Republican has not yet subpoenaed bank records from Biden family members themselves. He boasted in June on Fox Business that “every subpoena that I have signed as chairman of the House Oversight Committee over the last five months, we’ve gotten 100% of what we’ve requested, whether it’s with the FBI, or with banks, or with Treasury.”

The House Judiciary chair, GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, just subpoenaed four individuals involved in the Hunter Biden criminal probe and has requested a number of documents and interviews pertaining to special counsel David Weiss’ ongoing criminal investigation.

There is still some skepticism among more moderate Republicans, however, about whether they should be trying to intervene in ongoing investigations and whether an impeachment inquiry is warranted.

Behind the scenes, members of the House Judiciary panel, who would help oversee an impeachment inquiry, have recently been discussing how all signs are pointing towards the House launching one in short order.

“We had even some of our more moderate members saying that the oversight wasn’t serious if the next step wasn’t an impeachment inquiry,” Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a top Trump surrogate and Judiciary panel member, told CNN about a recent committee call. “There was great interest among my Judiciary colleagues to really include and involve everyone in the conference. There’s a real desire to get everyone on board and go through the evidence with those who might remain skeptical.”

Trump’s allies have called for Congress to expunge Trump’s two previous impeachments, a move that has sparked pushback by many even among House Republicans.

Greene, who spoke with McCarthy on Tuesday, said she doesn’t think the votes are there yet for expunging Trump’s previous two impeachments, even as the former president continues to promote the idea on Truth Social. But she said, “I think the impeachment inquiry looks very, very good.”

“He is spending the recess talking about it constantly,” Greene added of McCarthy. “I really feel strongly that that’s something that’s going to happen.”

Even before Trump’s indictment in Fulton County his congressional allies were laying the groundwork to take aim at Willis and broader election laws.

GOP Rep. Russell Fry of South Carolina introduced a longshot bill earlier this year to give current and former presidents and vice presidents the ability to move their civil or criminal cases from a state court to a federal court as the investigation in Fulton County was ongoing. Fry introduced the bill shortly after Trump was indicted by Bragg on more than 30 counts related to business fraud.

The Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over Fry’s bill, is examining ways to move this bill forward and schedule a markup, two sources familiar with the process told CNN.

Fry, who tweeted shortly after the Fulton County indictment that the outcome underscores the need for his bill, said in a statement to CNN, “these rogue prosecutors shouldn’t be able to wield unwarranted power and target our nation’s top leaders for their political agendas.”

Separately, the House Committee on Administration has been working on a conservative election integrity package that Republicans are calling “transformative,” but Democrats frame as “designed to appease extremist election deniers.”

Republicans argue the bill gives states the tools to strengthen voter integrity, implement selection reforms in Washington, DC, and protects conservatives’ political speech. Democrats, meanwhile, contest the legislation attacks the freedom to vote, burdens election workers and creates less transparency in elections.

One of the nine hearings that Republicans held on the bill, which recently passed out of committee and is ready for a floor vote in the House, was held last month in Atlanta.

The top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, accused Republicans of playing defense for Trump through the field hearing, which Republicans have said was not the case.

“One might ask, why are we here in Georgia? The answer is simple. We’re here because in 2020, Joe Biden won and Donald Trump lost. There was no widespread voter fraud in Georgia, there were no suitcases full of fake ballots, no voting machines changed any votes. In fact, we know of only one possible crime that took place, because it was recorded on tape,” Morelle said.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have also accused their Republican counterparts of coinciding the release of key interview transcripts with days consumed by Trump’s legal woes, according to a recent memo released by Democratic committee staff.

An Oversight Committee spokesperson said in a statement to CNN, “to be clear, there was absolutely no connection between the transcript releases and anything else covered in the news.”

The types of moves Republicans made on behalf of Trump in the wake of the Fulton County indictment are not necessarily new. After Trump was indicted by the Department of Justice in two separate cases, Greene called for Congress to defund Smith’s office, who is overseeing the two federal indictment cases, and House Freedom Caucus members issued a statement Monday that they would not support even a short-term government spending bill that does not address what they see as the weaponization of the Department of Justice.

Gaetz recently introduced a resolution to censure and condemn the judge presiding over Trump’s federal indictment in the 2020 election subversion case.

Despite the partisan back and forth, Trump’s Capitol Hill allies remain unfazed. But, not all Republicans have bought into the Trump defensive strategy.

“Nobody is paying attention other than the people who are obsessed with Trump,” a senior Republican lawmaker told CNN.

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August 2, 2023
Why Biden and Trump need each other in order to win in 2024 | CNN Politics

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A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

CNN
—

Here is an often-repeated claim you’ll hear from reporters and analysts: Former President Donald Trump’s control over the Republican primary field solidified not in spite of, but because of, his four criminal indictments.

It is a catch-22; the effort to seek accountability for his effort to stay in power despite his 2020 election loss has actually made him more politically powerful in the GOP heading into 2024.

I went to CNN’s senior data reporter, Harry Enten, for his assessment of whether polling data bears out the claim. Did indicting Trump put him on a glide path to the Republican nomination?

Enten’s thoughts on that point are below. But my main takeaway from our conversation actually has to do with his compelling argument that in a potential general election rematch, both President Joe Biden and Trump could be so unpopular that they need each other in order to have a chance at winning.

It’s a symbiotic, needs-based relationship to make most Americans groan on their way to the voting booth. Can’t wait for 2024!

Our full conversation, conducted by email, is below.

WOLF: I have heard reporters suggest that Trump’s hold on the Republican nomination was strengthened by his four indictments. Is there data to support that?

ENTEN: There’s actually been a lot of debate about this in polling, polling analysis and political science circles. What we know is Trump is ahead by more now than he was at the beginning of the year. The question is when exactly did that jump in the polls occur?

Some polls (such as Fox News) seem to indicate it happened largely before any of the indictments occurred. Others (such as Quinnipiac University) seem to show a large jump post-indictment.

On the whole, the average of polling indicates Trump did see a small bump (somewhere roughly between 5 and 10 points) in his primary polling after the first indictment in New York.

To be clear, Trump would likely still be well ahead without any indictment bump. It’s just that he’d be in the mid- to high-40s instead of the low- to mid-50s.

WOLF: Trump has been indicted four separate times:

Is there anything to suggest that one or another of these indictments had a larger or smaller effect on his standing?

ENTEN: You’ll notice in my previous answer I specifically mentioned New York. I haven’t seen any demonstrable evidence that any other indictment except the first one (maybe) gave Trump a boost. It doesn’t appear that any of the other indictments hurt his standing though.

I will further point out that I’m talking about polling here. There’s been any number of articles written about Trump pulling in more fundraising after the different indictments. That doesn’t seem to have stopped, regardless of the charges.

WOLF: Trump’s DC trial will get underway on March 4, the day before Super Tuesday. Is there any way for the outcome of these trials to affect the Republican primary?

ENTEN: Funny enough, I was talking about this the other day with someone. I think the question is almost impossible to answer because this is (pardon me for saying) unprecedented. What we know from the data is that Republicans think the charges are politically motivated and haven’t moved Trump’s polling lead.

Keep in mind Trump is not reliant on traditional campaigning in the way you might remember some candidates of past years doing retail campaigning. He’s going to dominate the media landscape and going to leave little media oxygen for the other GOP candidates.

The only thing I can think of really shifting things would be a possible conviction, but I doubt any of the cases will move fast enough for that to happen.

WOLF: Has a person with a Trump-level polling lead one year before Election Day ever blown it and not won the party’s nomination?

ENTEN: The answer here is no, as measured by the margin between the leading candidate (Trump) and the candidate in second (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis). Trump’s up by 40 points or so, which is one of the largest leads ever at this point.

If you look at Trump’s share of the vote (in the 50s), then you could make the case that Ted Kennedy (who was in the 50s) blew his advantage over incumbent Jimmy Carter at this point.

The Kennedy-Carter comparison to this year is an interesting one in so far as it involved an incumbent, and Trump, it could be argued, is a quasi-incumbent. Of course, in that case, it was the incumbent who made the comeback.

WOLF: My impression is that Republican voters have largely come around to agree with Trump, despite the facts, that he won the 2020 election. Is that the kind of perception these trials could change? In other words, is a conviction the kind of thing that could break what seems like an intractable partisan divide?

ENTEN: Again, we’re in unprecedented times, so I’ll never say never.

I’ll give you this one, though. A CNN/SSRS poll from earlier this year asked whether Trump should drop out of the race if convicted of a federal crime. The vast majority of his own supporters (88%) said no he shouldn’t. Even most Republicans (58%) said he shouldn’t.

Any changes to the percentage of Republicans who think he didn’t win in 2020 (even if that is a false belief) would likely be minimal, despite any conviction.

WOLF: I’ve seen you argue that Trump would be very competitive in a general election matchup with Biden. But I wonder how the indictments have affected the outlook of independent voters?

ENTEN: Independent voters like neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump. They’ll be, at this point, making the choice between the lesser of two evils. The indictments didn’t help Trump amongst this group, but did they hurt?

If you look at polls conducted by Quinnipiac, Marist and Fox in August, Trump was ahead of Biden by 1 point on average (well within the margin of error).

If you look at the average of polls conducted by Quinnipiac (the only one of these pollsters in the field) before the first indictment, Trump was ahead of Biden by 1 point on average.

So I don’t see any real impact (for now) on the metric that I feel is most important in answering your question.

WOLF: Finally, regarding Joe Biden … there are stories all over the place about how voters think he’s too old, they aren’t excited about him, etc. What does the historical polling data suggest about a president in his position? What tea leaves are you reading about him?

ENTEN: General election polling at this point has not been predictive. Otherwise, Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan would have been neck and neck in the 1984 election, which Reagan won in a blowout.

The reason Reagan ran away with the election is because he is one of a number of presidents who saw boosts in their approval ratings from now until the election (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Reagan, etc.).

But a president with an approval rating where Biden’s is right now on Election Day is not a president in a strong position. In fact, every president with his approval rating or worse has lost.

But I’m honestly not sure any of those historical analogies matter because Trump is so unpopular. This is ultimately the great statistical puzzle of the 2024 election. Biden likely can only win going up against a candidate as unpopular as Trump. Trump likely can only win going up against a candidate as unpopular as Biden.

So who wins that matchup? If you know the answer to that one, you should also tell me who wins this year’s Super Bowl.

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August 2, 2023
Former IRS contractor accused of stealing Trump’s tax returns pleads guilty | CNN Politics

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The former IRS contractor accused of leaking former President Donald Trump’s tax returns and stealing tax information on thousands of the wealthiest people in the US pleaded guilty in federal court on Thursday.

Prosecutors say Charles Littlejohn of Washington, DC, sent Trump’s tax returns and other data to two media outlets that “published numerous articles describing the tax information they obtained from the Defendant.”

Littlejohn pleaded guilty to the one count of disclosing tax information, which he was charged with in late September.

The contractor’s crime affected so many individuals that prosecutors plan to create a public website to notify the victims of any developments in the case.

During the plea hearing, an attorney for Trump gave a victim impact statement, calling the crime “an egregious breach.”

Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, said that Trump’s returns were “kept in a vault at the IRS” and suggested that the leak may have cost Trump votes in the 2020 election.

Habba said Trump was opposed to the plea deal and called for the maximum sentence of five years in prison for Littlejohn.

Judge Ana Reyes, the federal judge overseeing the case, said she agreed “completely that anyone taking the law into their own hands is unacceptable.”

“I cannot overstate how troubled I am by what occurred,” Reyes said. “Make no mistake, this was not acceptable.”

A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for January 29.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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August 2, 2023
DeSantis suspends Orlando-area state attorney in second sacking of democratically elected prosecutor | CNN Politics

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday announced the suspension of the Orlando-area state attorney, the second time he has removed a democratically elected prosecutor whose politics did not align with his conservative views.

DeSantis said he was removing Monique Worrell of Florida’s 9th Judicial Circuit for “neglect of duty and incompetence” and accused her of pursuing lenient sentences and declining to prosecute certain charges.

“Prosecutors have a duty to faithfully enforce the law. One’s political agenda cannot trump this solemn duty. Refusing to faithfully enforce the laws of Florida puts our communities in danger and victimizes innocent Floridians,” DeSantis said.

The criticisms echo ones raised last year when DeSantis contentiously removed another Democratic state attorney, Tampa’s elected prosecutor Andrew Warren. Democrats accused DeSantis, at the time, of abusing his power for political gain. A federal judge reviewing Warren’s suspension raised questions about the political motivations behind the maneuver, noting DeSantis’ office had calculated the dollar amount of free media generated by his actions.

But the move earned DeSantis glowing coverage from conservative outlets and the episode became a staple of the governor’s political speeches in the lead up to the launch of a White House bid.

Now, with his presidential campaign struggling to gain traction, DeSantis has once again used his vast executive authority in a way that has already brought the national spotlight on him. By the time DeSantis stepped to the lectern in Tallahassee’s capitol building to deliver the news, Fox News had published a story on his latest maneuver.

DeSantis was joined at the news conference by two local sheriffs – neither of which serves a county that overlaps with Worrell’s jurisdiction. They used their time at the microphone to heap praise on the governor as a law and order leader.

“This governor has always put the victims, always put the law-abiding citizens ahead of the criminals. Always. And that’s exactly what he’s done here today,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said.

Worrell, who said she was informed of her suspension Wednesday morning by phone, vowed to fight back against her removal, calling it a “political hit job” orchestrated to benefit the Republican’s presidential campaign.

“I am a duly elected state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit,” Worrell said at a news conference outside the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando. “And nothing done by a weak dictator can change that.”

Worrell said she is considering legal action, but also acknowledged the long odds.

On Thursday, she told CNN’s John Berman on “Anderson Cooper 360” that she will also run for the office again in 2024.

“I have filed for reelection, and I plan to continue to run and rewin my seat by the will of the voters the way democracy works in this country. And be the duly elected state attorney once again,” Worrell said.

The governor and local law enforcement, she told Berman, have been “pushing false narratives” about her role in the legal system.

“It’s really important to be clear the criminal legal system is a collaborative system. It doesn’t only rest on the shoulders of the state attorney,” Worrell said. “There is a judiciary. There is law enforcement. There is a defense bar. And these are the components of the criminal legal system. Any decisions that had been made by attorneys in my office have been ratified by the judiciary.”

The Florida constitution allows a governor to remove an elected official for “malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, habitual drunkenness, incompetence, or permanent inability to perform official duties.” No previous Florida executive has interpreted that power as broadly as DeSantis. The state Senate can reinstate Worrell, but the chamber is controlled by Republicans closely aligned with DeSantis and have rarely stood in his way.

Warren’s attempts at reinstatement have failed. A federal judge ruled DeSantis had acted unconstitutionally in suspending Warren, writing that there was “not a hint of misconduct by Mr. Warren” in the trial record, but he ultimately dismissed the case saying he did not have the power to intervene on a state matter. The state Supreme Court tossed Warren’s lawsuit in state court earlier this summer.

As a candidate, DeSantis has made reigning in government overreach a top priority, a promise that his critics say is in conflict with how he has led during episodes such as Wednesday. DeSantis has repeatedly blasted President Joe Biden for what he says is the “weaponization” of the US Department of Justice and has accused state and federal prosecutors of pursuing a political agenda in targeting former President Donald Trump.

According to her biography – which as of Wednesday morning was still posted on her office’s website – Worrell worked as a public defender in the Orlando area and later as a clinical law professor at the University of Florida College of Law.

In 2020, Worrell won a contested Democratic primary to become the party’s nominee for state attorney serving Orange and Osceola counties. She was elected that fall with 66% of the vote in a deeply blue part of the state.

“Monique was elected to bring reform to a criminal legal system that is fundamentally flawed, in order to achieve equity and to move our system towards justice,” her bio said.

Worrell replaced Aramis Ayala, another reform prosecutor whose approach conflicted with the state’s Republican leadership. When Ayala announced she would not pursue capital punishment in any cases, then-Gov. Rick Scott moved death penalty cases to another state attorney though he did not suspend her from office.

DeSantis began to publicly lay the groundwork for Worrell’s ouster in February, when a teenage gunman in Orlando was accused of shooting and killing a 9-year-old girl, a journalist and a 38-year-old woman. DeSantis accused Worrell of failing to keep the gunman behind bars for a previous charge.

“I know the state attorney in Orlando thinks that you don’t prosecute people, and that’s the way that somehow you have better communities. That does not work,” DeSantis said at the time.

At Wednesday’s news conference, DeSantis and others pointed to heinous crimes from the past year allegedly committed by people with previous charges.

In suspending Worrell, DeSantis cited a “pattern or practice” to avoid mandatory sentences for gun crimes and minimum mandatory sentences for drug trafficking offenses. DeSantis also said Worrell had allowed juveniles to avoid “serious charges and incarceration” and had avoided “valid and applicable” sentencing enhancements or limiting charges for child pornography.

On Wednesday, Worrell disputed characterizations made by the Florida governor that her office was too lenient on criminals, insisting that crime is down under her watch. DeSantis never reached out to express concerns with her operation, she said.

Florida Democratic Party chairwoman Nikki Fried called Worrell’s ouster a “political hit job” that “threatens democracy” and demanded her immediate reinstatement.

“Ron’s presidential campaign has been a disaster of epic proportions, but attacking law and order in service of his culture wars isn’t the solution to his problems,” Fried said.

DeSantis replaced Worrell with Andrew Bain, who has served as a judge on the 9th Judicial Circuit.

DeSantis left the news conference without taking questions from reporters.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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August 2, 2023
Campaign fundraiser for George Santos is indicted for impersonating top aide to House Speaker McCarthy | CNN Politics

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A campaign fundraiser for indicted US Rep. George Santos has been charged for allegedly impersonating a high-ranking congressional aide to solicit contributions for the New York Republican’s campaign in 2021, according to court documents.

A federal grand jury in Brooklyn indicted Samuel Miele, who worked for the Santos campaign during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, on four counts of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft in the alleged scheme to defraud prospective donors, according to the indictment unsealed Wednesday.

Miele allegedly impersonated a top aide to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, according to a source familiar with the case.

He allegedly solicited contributions from more than a dozen potential contributors using the aide’s identity in phone and email communications, the indictment says.

Miele created an email account purporting to belong to the McCarthy staffer and sent fundraising solicitations signing the aide’s full name and title, prosecutors allege.

Santos’ fundraiser received a 15% commission on the campaign contributions he raised, the filing says.

According to the indictment, Miele wrote to Santos in a September 2022 letter, “Faking my identity to a big donor.”

“High risk, high reward in everything I do,” Miele also wrote.

An attorney for Miele, Kevin H. Marino, said in a statement to CNN that his client “is not guilty of these charges.”

“He looks forward to complete vindication at trial as soon as possible,” Marino said.

The latest indictment does not specifically identify Santos, McCarthy or his aide by name in the filing.

Additional court documents clarify that the unnamed candidate in the indictment is Santos.

Miele surrendered Wednesday morning and pleaded not guilty at an arraignment in Brooklyn federal court later in the day.

He was released on a $150,000 bond.

A status conference has been scheduled for August 22 in the Eastern District of New York.

Santos himself was indicted in May on 13 counts of federal fraud and money laundering charges. He pleaded not guilty. He announced in April that he is running for reelection to his Long Island-based congressional seat.

Representatives for McCarthy did not immediately respond for comment on the matter.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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August 2, 2023
Gun rights organizations sue New Mexico governor over gun violence order | CNN Politics

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The National Association for Gun Rights filed a lawsuit against New Mexico’s Democratic governor and health secretary Saturday over orders declaring gun violence a public health emergency and suspending open and concealed carry laws in cities and counties based on crime statistics.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued the emergency order after the shooting deaths of three children from July through September, as well as a pair of mass shootings in the state.

The lawsuit, filed in the US district court for New Mexico on Saturday, lists Lujan Grisham and New Mexico Department of Health Secretary Patrick Allen as defendants.

The National Association for Gun Rights argues in the lawsuit that the orders violate the Second Amendment.

“The State must justify the Carry Prohibition by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. But it is impossible for the State to meet this burden, because there is no such historical tradition of firearms regulation in this Nation,” the lawsuit reads.

Throughout the suit, the plaintiffs cite a 2022 Supreme Court decision that struck down a New York gun law that restricted the right to concealed carry outside the home.

The lawsuit also lists Albuquerque resident Foster Allen Haines as a plaintiff. Haines intended to partake in the state’s open carry law, according to the complaint.

“Haines is precluded from doing so by the Carry Prohibition, which deprives him of his fundamental right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes protected by the Second Amendment,” the lawsuit reads.

The plaintiffs ask the court to grant an injunction prohibiting the emergency order from being enforced, the lawsuit states.

A second lawsuit was also filed Saturday against Lujan Grisham; Allen; Department of Public Safety Secretary Jason Bowie; and State Police Chief W. Troy Weisler by Bernalillo County resident Randy Donk and the Gun Owners of America. The suit likens the executive order and public health emergency declaration to “martial law” and argues that it is a suspension of constitutional rights.

This lawsuit also asks the court for an immediate temporary restraining order and later a preliminary and permanent injunction to be granted.

Caroline Sweeney, a spokesperson for Lujan Grisham, said in a statement Sunday that the governor “is prepared to fight challenges to her decision.”

“Gun violence is a public health emergency in the state and extraordinary measures are required to prevent more innocent New Mexicans from being killed by guns,” the statement said.

CNN has reached out to the Department of Health for comment on the lawsuits.

Lujan Grisham last week also issued a statewide enforcement plan that includes a 30-day suspension of open and concealed carry laws in Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County, CNN previously reported.

The order, which went into immediate effect, temporarily bans the carrying of guns on public property in those counties with certain exceptions, according to the governor’s office. Citizens with carry permits will still be allowed to possess their weapons on private property such as gun ranges and gun stores if the firearm is transported in a locked box, or if a trigger lock or other mechanism is used to render the gun incapable of being fired.

The order also prohibits firearms on state property, including state buildings and schools, as well as at parks and other places where children gather. Under the order, licensed firearm dealers will be inspected monthly by New Mexico’s Regulation and Licensing Division to ensure compliance with sales and storage laws.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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August 2, 2023
Biden administration announces charges, sanctions to crack down on China-based fentanyl traffickers | CNN Politics

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The Biden administration announced Tuesday multiple indictments in Florida against China-based companies and Chinese nationals for allegedly manufacturing and selling fentanyl and related chemicals.

Sanctions against 28 individuals and entities in China and Canada allegedly involved in selling precursor chemicals as well as labs and distributors of the chemicals were also announced, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

“We know that the global fentanyl supply chain, which ends with the deaths of Americans, often starts with chemical companies in China,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Tuesday.

“The United States government is focused on breaking apart every link in that chain, getting fentanyl out of our communities, and bringing those who put it there to justice.”

The charges announced Tuesday are the latest step in the US government’s yearslong push to stem the rampant importation of fentanyl, which kills tens of thousands of Americans annually.

The new charges also come after an intensified effort by US law enforcement in recent months to trace the cryptocurrency payments and the manufacturing equipment, such as pill presses, that are fueling the fentanyl crises.

Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the indictments and continued investigation along with Drug Enforcement Administrator Anne Milgram.

The DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations as well as Customs and Border Protection also announced recent seizures of more than 1,000 kilograms of precursor chemicals, which, according to Milgram, are primarily created in China and sold to cartels in Mexico who use the chemicals to create fentanyl.

The US Postal Inspection Service also was involved in tracing packages that contained such chemicals.

“Through the dedication and investigative abilities of agents and officers from HSI, CBP, and our federal partners, we are bringing accountability to ruthless organizations and individuals resident in the People’s Republic of China and to the cartel members that seek to profit from the death and destruction that fentanyl causes,” Mayorkas said during Tuesday’s press conference.

Garland and Mayorkas are set to meet their Mexican counterparts in Mexico City later this week alongside Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other senior US officials for the 2023 US-Mexico High-Level Security Dialogue.

As part of the fentanyl crackdown, the DEA has invested in crypto-tracing software and identifying the Mexican cartels’ most sophisticated money launderers, the IRS has its most tech-savvy agents tracing payments on dark web forums, and a DHS investigations unit is leading a team of forensic specialists to pore over digital clues from stash houses near the Mexican border, CNN previously reported.

But it remains to be seen how effectively indictments and sanctions can disrupt traffickers from participating in the multibillion-dollar fentanyl trade.

A CNN investigation into the activities of US-sanctioned Chinese chemical companies that advertise fentanyl ingredients found that when one sanctioned company shut down, another company launched and bought the sanctioned company’s email, phone number and Facebook page to “attract internet traffic.”

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August 2, 2023
New Hampshire man pleads guilty to threatening Rep. Matt Gaetz after scrolling TikTok | CNN Politics

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A New Hampshire college student on Thursday pleaded guilty to federal charges of threatening to kill a member of Congress after he became angry while drunkenly scrolling on TikTok.

While authorities didn’t name the member of Congress, Rep. Matt Gaetz confirmed he was the target when he played the threatening voicemail at the heart of the case on his podcast earlier this year. CNN has reached out to the Florida Republican’s office for comment.

The defendant, 24-year-old Allan Poller, faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced in January.

According to court documents, Poller, who is a student at Keene State College in New Hampshire, placed a call to the Washington, DC, office of an unnamed member of Congress just after midnight on March 29.

No one in the office answered, prosecutors said, so Poller left a voicemail warning the member to stop “coming for the gays” and threatened to kill the member should they continue.

“If you keep on coming for the gays, we’re gonna strike back and I guarantee you, you do not want to f**k with us,” Poller said, according to court documents. “We will kill you if that’s what it takes. I will take a bullet to your f**king head if you f**k with my rights anymore.”

Poller later admitted to leaving the message in an interview with law enforcement, according to court documents, telling investigators that he had been drinking and become angry while watching videos on TikTok.

Poller’s attorney Jesse Friedman said in a statement that his client “recognizes that hate in any form is wrong and hurtful. He accepts responsibility for his actions and did not intend for his acts to cause harm or a threat to anybody.”

As part of his plea deal, Poller agreed that while he may not have intended to carry out the threat, he knew his voicemail would be viewed as such.

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August 2, 2023
House Oversight Committee launches investigation into Coast Guard after CNN report | CNN Politics

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The House Oversight Committee has launched an investigation into the US Coast Guard’s “mishandling of serious misconduct” — including sexual assault, racism and hazing — after CNN exposed that its leaders concealed reports documenting those problems from its workforce, the public and Congress.

The inquiry is the latest in a string of government probes announced in the wake of CNN’s reporting, which revealed the existence of a yearslong investigation that found rapes and other sexual abuse at the Coast Guard Academy had been ignored and, at times, covered up by high-ranking officials. Dubbed “Operation Fouled Anchor,” the internal probe was kept confidential by Coast Guard leaders for years until CNN started making inquiries into the report earlier this year.

Last week, CNN exposed that Coast Guard leaders suppressed yet another report, this time a “Culture of Respect” review from April 2015, that documented racial and gender discrimination and assault across the service.

In a letter sent Friday to the Coast Guard’s leader, Commandant Linda Fagan, House lawmakers lambasted the agency, saying that the Coast Guard “may have obstructed the ability of Congress to carry out constitutionally mandated oversight authority and legislation to address these issues,” “prevented actionable change within the agency” and “likely put more people at risk.”

“[The Coast Guard] only notified Congress about Operation Fouled Anchor and its April 2015 Report when existence of these reports was going to be in the press,” wrote committee Chairman Rep. James Comer and Rep. Glenn Grothman, chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. “The Committee has serious concerns that congressional committees would not have been notified of these reports, and the serious allegations contained within them, if it had not been for the threat of public reporting.”

The announcement comes on the heels of the Coast Guard’s own acknowledgment of past failures in a rare and highly critical internal report issued this week that also orders a series of changes to how the agency handles sexual assault. A number of congressional lawmakers and assault survivors were not satisfied, however, saying the agency still needs to hold past perpetrators and the leaders who covered up their dangerous and criminal behavior accountable – rather than only looking to the future.

The committee requested a litany of documents and information “to assist the Committee in investigating these reports, the withholding of information from Congress, and the inaction of senior leadership to combat misconduct,” including a list of Coast Guard officials involved in the handling of sexual misconduct cases from the time of Fouled Anchor to present.

CNN’s reporting showed that, over the years, alleged perpetrators weren’t being held accountable for misconduct. Many of the problems documented in the Coast Guard’s reports continue to plague the agency, according to interviews with current and former service members.

Meanwhile, a probe by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General remains ongoing, as does a Senate inquiry – with a hearing scheduled next week where multiple whistleblowers and survivors of sexual assault and harassment will testify.

Do you have information or a story to share about the Coast Guard past or present? Email melanie.hicken@cnn.com and Blake.Ellis@cnn.com.

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August 2, 2023