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Tag: trial and procedure

  • Exclusive: Attorney for Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend says prosecutors didn’t have credible evidence to charge | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: Attorney for Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend says prosecutors didn’t have credible evidence to charge | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A defense attorney who represented the former girlfriend of Rep. Matt Gaetz says that prosecutors made the right decision not to charge the Florida Republican after a yearslong federal sex trafficking investigation.

    Attorney Tim Jansen told CNN on Saturday that Justice Department prosecutors were aggressive with his client. She was initially approached as a possible target in the sex-trafficking investigation but eventually agreed to cooperate and testified before an Orlando grand jury hearing evidence in the case last year.

    The ex-girlfriend, whom CNN has not named, is not the underage woman at the center of the sex-trafficking investigation.

    Jansen, who said the DOJ thoroughly pursued leads against Gaetz, disputed the notion that the congressman was cleared because he was in a powerful position, arguing that the evidence against Gaetz simply wasn’t credible and couldn’t hold up in court.

    “They turned over every stone. And I think they ultimately made a decision that they didn’t have evidence to prove a crime,” Jansen said. “And I know critics think that the congressman somehow bought it off or somehow used his power, but I found (federal prosecutor) Todd (Gee) very responsible. He was very organized. He had evidence that he believed that he was following, and they made a determination that they weren’t going to charge.”

    CNN has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

    CNN first reported this week that the Justice Department had informed lawyers for Gaetz and several witnesses that it would not prosecute the GOP lawmaker.

    Last fall, investigators working on the case recommended not bringing charges amid concerns that the central witnesses in the case would not be perceived as credible, including Joel Greenberg, a former Seminole County, Florida, tax collector who pleaded guilty to six federal crimes, including sex trafficking, and agreed to cooperate with the government.

    The DOJ’s formal decision not to charge Gaetz, who has been serving in Congress since 2017, marks the end of a long-running investigation into allegations that the congressman violated federal law by transporting underage girls across state lines for sex.

    Gaetz has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

    Jansen told CNN that his client was initially threatened with prosecution by federal investigators as part of the investigation. Her phone was seized, and she was told she could be a target in the investigation. She ultimately became a witness, Jansen said.

    But Jansen said the problems with Greenberg’s credibility and the inconsistencies in the testimony of the women ultimately prompted Gee, a deputy chief of the Justice Department’s public integrity section, not to charge Gaetz.

    “In order to prosecute a case, you have to have credible evidence, either tangible witnesses, and in this case, there was no credible evidence of any wrongdoing,” Jansen said. “Joel Greenberg was somebody who (you) couldn’t put on the witness stand, as a prosecutor. I believe these women; none of them believed they were victims of any crime.”

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  • These 26 words ‘created the internet.’ Now the Supreme Court may be coming for them | CNN Business

    These 26 words ‘created the internet.’ Now the Supreme Court may be coming for them | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Congress, the White House and now the US Supreme Court are all focusing their attention on a federal law that’s long served as a legal shield for online platforms.

    This week, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on two pivotal cases dealing with online speech and content moderation. Central to the arguments is “Section 230,” a federal law that’s been roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats for different reasons but that tech companies and digital rights groups have defended as vital to a functioning internet.

    Tech companies involved in the litigation have cited the 27-year-old statute as part of an argument for why they shouldn’t have to face lawsuits alleging they gave knowing, substantial assistance to terrorist acts by hosting or algorithmically recommending terrorist content.

    A set of rulings against the tech industry could significantly narrow Section 230 and its legal protections for websites and social media companies. If that happens, the Court’s decisions could expose online platforms to an array of new lawsuits over how they present content to users. Such a result would represent the most consequential limitations ever placed on a legal shield that predates today’s biggest social media platforms and has allowed them to nip many content-related lawsuits in the bud.

    And more could be coming: the Supreme Court is still mulling whether to hear several additional cases with implications for Section 230, while members of Congress have expressed renewed enthusiasm for rolling back the law’s protections for websites, and President Joe Biden has called for the same in a recent op-ed.

    Here’s everything you need to know about Section 230, the law that’s been called “the 26 words that created the internet.”

    Passed in 1996 in the early days of the World Wide Web, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was meant to nurture startups and entrepreneurs. The legislation’s text recognized that the internet was in its infancy and risked being choked out of existence if website owners could be sued for things that other people posted.

    One of the law’s architects, Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, has said that without Section 230, “all online media would face an onslaught of bad-faith lawsuits and pressure campaigns from the powerful” seeking to silence them.

    He’s also said Section 230 directly empowers websites to remove content they believe is objectionable by creating a “good Samaritan” safe harbor: Under Section 230, websites enjoy immunity for moderating content in the ways they see fit — not according to others’ preferences — although the federal government can still sue platforms for violating criminal or intellectual property laws.

    Contrary to what some politicians have claimed, Section 230’s protections do not hinge on a platform being politically or ideologically neutral. The law also does not require that a website be classified as a publisher in order to “qualify” for liability protection. Apart from meeting the definition of an “interactive computer service,” websites need not do anything to gain Section 230’s benefits – they apply automatically.

    The law’s central provision holds that websites (and their users) cannot be treated legally as the publishers or speakers of other people’s content. In plain English, that means that any legal responsibility attached to publishing a given piece of content ends with the person or entity that created it, not the platforms on which the content is shared or the users who re-share it.

    The seemingly simple language of Section 230 belies its sweeping impact. Courts have repeatedly accepted Section 230 as a defense against claims of defamation, negligence and other allegations. In the past, it’s protected AOL, Craigslist, Google and Yahoo, building up a body of law so broad and influential as to be considered a pillar of today’s internet.

    “The free and open internet as we know it couldn’t exist without Section 230,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, has written. “Important court rulings on Section 230 have held that users and services cannot be sued for forwarding email, hosting online reviews, or sharing photos or videos that others find objectionable. It also helps to quickly resolve lawsuits cases that have no legal basis.”

    In recent years, however, critics of Section 230 have increasingly questioned the law’s scope and proposed restrictions on the circumstances in which websites may invoke the legal shield.

    For years, much of the criticism of Section 230 has come from conservatives who say that the law lets social media platforms suppress right-leaning views for political reasons.

    By safeguarding platforms’ freedom to moderate content as they see fit, Section 230 does shield websites from lawsuits that might arise from that type of viewpoint-based content moderation, though social media companies have said they do not make content decisions based on ideology but rather on violations of their policies.

    The Trump administration tried to turn some of those criticisms into concrete policy that would have had significant consequences, if it had succeeded. For example, in 2020, the Justice Department released a legislative proposal for changes to Section 230 that would create an eligibility test for websites seeking the law’s protections. That same year, the White House issued an executive order calling on the Federal Communications Commission to interpret Section 230 in a more narrow way.

    The executive order faced a number of legal and procedural problems, not least of which was the fact that the FCC is not part of the judicial branch; that it does not regulate social media or content moderation decisions; and that it is an independent agency that, by law, does not take direction from the White House.

    Even though the Trump-era efforts to curtail Section 230 never bore fruit, conservatives are still looking for opportunities to do so. And they aren’t alone. Since 2016, when social media platforms’ role in spreading Russian election disinformation broke open a national dialogue about the companies’ handling of toxic content, Democrats have increasingly railed against Section 230.

    By safeguarding platforms’ freedom to moderate content as they see fit, Democrats have said, Section 230 has allowed websites to escape accountability for hosting hate speech and misinformation that others have recognized as objectionable but that social media companies can’t or won’t remove themselves.

    The result is a bipartisan hatred for Section 230, even if the two parties cannot agree on why Section 230 is flawed or what policies might appropriately take its place.

    “I would be prepared to make a bet that if we took a vote on a plain Section 230 repeal, it would clear this committee with virtually every vote,” said Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse at a hearing last week of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The problem, where we bog down, is that we want 230-plus. We want to repeal 230 and then have ‘XYZ.’ And we don’t agree on what the ‘XYZ’ are.”

    The deadlock has thrown much of the momentum for changing Section 230 to the courts — most notably, the US Supreme Court, which now has an opportunity this term to dictate how far the law extends.

    Tech critics have called for added legal exposure and accountability. “The massive social media industry has grown up largely shielded from the courts and the normal development of a body of law. It is highly irregular for a global industry that wields staggering influence to be protected from judicial inquiry,” wrote the Anti-Defamation League in a Supreme Court brief.

    For the tech giants, and even for many of Big Tech’s fiercest competitors, it would be a bad thing, because it would undermine what has allowed the internet to flourish. It would potentially put many websites and users into unwitting and abrupt legal jeopardy, they say, and it would dramatically change how some websites operate in order to avoid liability.

    The social media platform Reddit has argued in a Supreme Court brief that if Section 230 is narrowed so that its protections do not cover a site’s recommendations of content a user might enjoy, that would “dramatically expand Internet users’ potential to be sued for their online interactions.”

    “‘Recommendations’ are the very thing that make Reddit a vibrant place,” wrote the company and several volunteer Reddit moderators. “It is users who upvote and downvote content, and thereby determine which posts gain prominence and which fade into obscurity.”

    People would stop using Reddit, and moderators would stop volunteering, the brief argued, under a legal regime that “carries a serious risk of being sued for ‘recommending’ a defamatory or otherwise tortious post that was created by someone else.”

    While this week’s oral arguments won’t be the end of the debate over Section 230, the outcome of the cases could lead to hugely significant changes the internet has never before seen — for better or for worse.

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  • Black man killed by Shreveport police had previously sued the same department for excessive use of force against him | CNN

    Black man killed by Shreveport police had previously sued the same department for excessive use of force against him | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    An unarmed Black man who was shot and killed by a Shreveport, Louisiana, police officer had previously sued the police department, alleging excessive force, according to a lawsuit obtained by CNN.

    Alonzo Bagley, 43, was killed earlier this month after officers responded to a domestic disturbance call at an apartment complex, according to Louisiana State Police. When police arrived, Bagley jumped down from an apartment balcony and fled, and after a brief foot chase, one officer fatally shot Bagley – who was later found to be unarmed, state police said.

    The officer is on paid administrative leave, and the state police are investigating the incident, which includes reviewing the officer’s body worn camera.

    Documents show Bagley had a previous run-in with Shreveport police, years before he was killed.

    Twelve months after Shreveport police allegedly assaulted Bagley during an arrest in January of 2018, he filed a federal lawsuit against the department.

    Bagley required “treatment of a broken occipital orbital eye-socket bones, contusions to the head and face, and a number of his front upper teeth knocked out,” the suit says.

    During the 2018 incident, officers responded to a domestic dispute between Alonzo and his wife, the complaint states.

    Bagley was put into handcuffs that “were placed too tightly” on him and he “maneuvered his hands to the front of his body due to the pain and discomfort of being handcuffed behind his back in the back passenger portion of an SPD (Shreveport Police Department) patrol car,” the suit says. According to the filing, he “was not attempting and did not attempt to escape but only rearranged himself out of the painful position he was in.”

    One police officer then opened the door and “delivered forceful and several close-fisted strikes to the head and face” and a second officer did not stop the assault, the suit says. Bagley was handcuffed the entire time and offered no resistance, the lawsuit says.

    In response to the complaint, the city said that one of its officers did open the door of the patrol car, but was assisting Bagley because he was “attempting to strangle or choke himself with the seatbelt.”

    The city went on to say the officer did strike Bagley’s “head and facial area when Plaintiff (Bagley) covered his head with his arms and prevented Officer Kolb from removing the seatbelt and removing Plaintiff from the vehicle.”

    It is unclear what the resolution was on the lawsuit.

    An attorney that represented Bagley in the case did not return calls from CNN seeking comment.

    Bagley was charged with domestic abuse battery and resisting an officer related to the incident. The domestic abuse charge was dismissed, and he pleaded guilty in February 2018 to the charge of resisting an officer, according to court records.

    CNN has requested comment from the police department, and filed an open records request with the city to find out more about the 2018 incident.

    Alexander Tyler – the officer who shot and killed Bagley this month – was not with the department when the 2018 incident occurred.

    Bagley’s family has sued Tyler, seeking more than $10 million in damages, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court. The lawsuit alleges that the office violated Alonzo Bagley’s Fourth Amendment rights.

    Louisiana State Police says the case is still under investigation.

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  • ‘Does that mean that I am a suspect?’ Footage shows investigator asking Alex Murdaugh if he killed his wife and son | CNN

    ‘Does that mean that I am a suspect?’ Footage shows investigator asking Alex Murdaugh if he killed his wife and son | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: The HBO docuseries “Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty” chronicles the family’s influence in South Carolina. It airs on CNN Sunday, February 19, at 8 p.m. ET.



    CNN
     — 

    The jury in Alex Murdaugh’s double murder trial saw footage Wednesday from a crucial interview he had with state investigators where he was asked for the first time if he killed his wife and son.

    The interview on August 11, 2021, was the third Murdaugh had with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which was investigating the murders of his wife, Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, and grown son, Paul Murdaugh, two months earlier, according to testimony Wednesday by SLED agent Lt. David Owen.

    The interview was about to end when Owen told Murdaugh he had “a few more questions.”

    “Did you kill Maggie?” Owen asked, according to the footage played in court.

    “No,” Murdaugh said. “Did I kill my wife? No, David.”

    “Do you know who did?”

    “No, I do not know who did,” Murdaugh said.

    “Did you kill Paul?”

    “No, I did not kill Paul,” Murdaugh said.

    “Do you know who did?”

    “No, sir, I do not know who did,” Murdaugh said. “Do you think I killed Maggie?”

    “I have to go where the evidence and the facts take me,” Owen said.

    “I understand that. And you think I killed Paul?”

    “I have to go where the evidence and the facts take me,” Owen said again. “And I don’t have anything that points to anybody else at this time.”

    “So does that mean that I am a suspect?”

    Owen told Murdaugh he was “still in this,” adding, “I have to put my beliefs aside, and go with the facts.”

    Owen’s testimony Wednesday comes as the state nears the end of its case, in which prosecutors contend Murdaugh killed his wife and son to distract from a mountain of alleged financial crimes he had committed and to stave off a “day of reckoning” when those crimes might come to light.

    The defense maintains Murdaugh – who has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and two weapons charges in the killings – was a loving father and husband who called 911 the night of the killings after he found his wife and son shot at the family’s estate in Islandton, South Carolina, a property known as Moselle.

    At the time of the August 11, 2021, interview, Murdaugh was “the only known suspect” in the murders, Owen testified Wednesday.

    The case was transferred that same day from the local solicitor to the Attorney General’s Office, which has been prosecuting the case due to the Murdaugh family’s long ties with the local solicitor: Three generations of Murdaughs served as the 14th Circuit Solicitor over about 87 years.

    Murdaugh’s statements during the August 2021 interview were voluntary, Owen testified Wednesday. Murdaugh wanted to ask SLED agents questions about the investigation, Owen said, and the agent told him he wanted to ask Murdaugh some questions, too. Murdaugh indicated he was comfortable answering the agents’ questions.

    Murdaugh claimed to law enforcement he last saw Maggie and Paul earlier in the evening of the murders. They ate dinner together before Murdaugh took a nap and then drove to Almeda to visit his mother. He discovered the bodies of his wife and son, he said, when he returned home and called 911 at 10:07 p.m.

    The footage played in court Wednesday showed SLED agents confronting Murdaugh about evidence that appeared to contradict his earlier statements to law enforcement.

    It was the first time, Owen testified, that Murdaugh was confronted with the fact that Paul’s friend, Rogan Gibson, said he heard Murdaugh’s voice in the background of a phone call he had with Paul that night, shortly before the murders took place.

    “You were heard in the background, and that was prior to 9 p.m. … Was it you?” Owen asked Murdaugh, per the footage shown in court Tuesday.

    “At nine o’clock? No, sir,” Murdaugh said, “not if my times are right.”

    “Who do you think it could have been?”

    “I have no idea.”

    “And Rogan’s been around your family for pretty much all his life,” Owen said, something Murdaugh agreed with. “And he recognizes your voice, and you have a distinct voice. Can you think of anybody else that has a voice similar to yours that he may have misinterpreted?”

    “No, sir.”

    Months later, investigators discovered a video on Paul’s phone that he filmed immediately after that call, at 8:44 p.m. in the area of the family’s dog kennels, near where the bodies were found. Multiple witnesses at trial have identified Murdaugh’s voice, along with Maggie’s and Paul’s, in that video, contradicting Murdaugh’s statements to investigators he had not gone to the kennels before finding the bodies.

    The footage played Wednesday also showed the agents confront Murdaugh about another piece of footage filmed by Paul the night of the killings: A Snapchat video showing Murdaugh looking at a sapling on the family’s property. In it, Murdaugh is seen wearing pants and a blue shirt. But later, he was wearing shorts and a white T-shirt.

    “There’s a video on Paul’s phone of you and him on the farm that night. You’re wearing khaki pants and a dress shirt … When I met you that night, you were in shorts and a T-shirt,” Owen said. “At what point in the evening did you change clothes?”

    “I’m not sure,” Murdaugh said. “What time of day was that? I would have thought I would have already changed.”

    Testimony in recent days similarly undermined statements Murdaugh made to SLED during the August 2021 interview – namely, that Maggie decided to go to Moselle the night of the killings because she was worried about him and his father, whose health was deteriorating.

    Two witnesses disagree: On Tuesday, Maggie’s sister testified it was Murdaugh who wanted Maggie to come to Moselle. Maggie was staying in the family’s Edisto Beach property and did not want to go to Islandton, Marian Proctor said, recalling a conversation they had the day of the murders.

    Proctor encouraged Maggie to go, she said, breaking down in court.

    Blanca Simpson, a family housekeeper, similarly testified last week that Maggie told her the day of the murders that Alex had asked both Maggie and Paul to come to Moselle that night.

    During cross-examination, defense attorney Jim Griffin noted that investigators had the Snapchat video in July, but did not ask Murdaugh about the whereabouts of the blue shirt and pants he was seen wearing in that footage. Owen testified that he never asked Murdaugh for those clothes.

    “And the reason you didn’t, (was because) you weren’t concerned about those clothes. Your investigation had been focused since early June on the T-shirt he was wearing, the shorts he was wearing and shoes he was wearing at the time he called 911,” Griffin said.

    “Yes,” Owen replied.

    Owen testified that he had told a county grand jury that an expert found multiple particles of blood spatter on the front of the T-shirt, and it was sent to a lab for testing. The test, however, found no blood on the shirt.

    “Y’all completely overlooked the fact that when you did a HemaTrace test to confirm whether there’s blood, it came up negative. Wasn’t that overlooked?” asked Griffin.

    “I had never seen that report,” responded Owen, who admitted he did not see it until November 2022, just months before the trial began.

    “Whoever killed Maggie and Paul would likely have biological material on them from the blasts that killed the two victims, right?,” Griffin asked Owen.

    “They would have some, yes,” Owen answered.

    Griffin established that Murdaugh’s mother’s property in Almeda was not searched until months after the killings, in September 2021. No weapons were found on that property, Owen testified.

    Owen also testified that nearby waterways and the route from Moselle to Almeda was “driven several times,” but not walked over.

    At one point Wednesday, Judge Clifton Newman ruled against allowing testimony about a roadside shooting that injured Murdaugh in September 2021. Authorities have alleged that Murdaugh arranged for another man, Curtis Edward Smith, to shoot him so his surviving son could obtain millions of dollars in life insurance.

    But the judge later Wednesday decided to allow that testimony after Smith was brought up during Owen’s cross-examination.

    Griffin seemed to suggest the killings could have been related to a money dispute with a drug gang, telling the court that Murdaugh was buying $50,000 worth of drugs each week from Smith. Owen agreed, testifying that he has been told the same.

    Griffin said Smith owed a lot of money to a drug gang, and Owen testified that he was told the gang was not worried about the money because it knew it was going to get paid.

    Owen testified that Smith was brought into the investigation on September 4, 2021, the day of the roadside incident. Before that, Murdaugh had never mentioned his involvement with Smith in relation to Maggie’s and Paul’s killings, according to Owen.

    “Prior to that day, had Alex Murdaugh ever mentioned to you Curtis Edward Smith or anyone else that might have been involved in his son’s or his wife’s murder?” prosecutor John Meadors asked.

    “No, sir,” responded Owen.

    Asked if a cell phone analysis had been performed to see if any of the drug gang members were in the area the night of the killings, Owen said drug gang members typically use burner phones, and he didn’t have their phone numbers. But state investigators performed an analysis around Moselle and had identified only first responders as coming to the scene, Owen said.

    The defense attorney also asked Owen if any DNA analysis had been done to match a small amount of unknown male DNA found under Maggie Murdaugh’s fingernail. Owen said no.

    The drug investigation is ongoing, Owen testified.

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  • Pence says he’s willing to take fight against DOJ subpoena in Trump probe to Supreme Court | CNN Politics

    Pence says he’s willing to take fight against DOJ subpoena in Trump probe to Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday that he is willing to take his fight against a subpoena for his testimony in the Justice Department’s 2020 election subversion investigation all the way to the Supreme Court.

    “I am going to fight the Biden DOJ subpoena for me to appear before the grand jury because I believe it’s unconstitutional and unprecedented,” Pence told reporters after making a speech in Iowa.

    He said he expects former President Donald Trump to bring his own challenge to the subpoena that will raise executive privilege claims. Pence, however, intends to fight the subpoena under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which shields legislators from certain law enforcement actions targeting conduct related to their legislative duties.

    While other witnesses have raised Speech or Debate Clause argument in efforts to resist subpoenas in the DOJ probe and in the other investigations into January 6, 2021, Pence plans to invoke the clause in relation to his role as president of the Senate – which is believed to be untrod legal ground.

    In that role, he presided over Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results on January 6, 2021.

    “On the day of January 6, I was acting as President of the Senate, presiding over a Joint Session, described in the Constitution itself,” Pence said. “And so, I believe that that Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution actually prohibits the executive branch from compelling me to appear in a court, as the Constitution says, or in any other place. And we’ll stand on that principle and we’ll take that case as far as it needs to go, if need be to the Supreme Court of the United States, because to me, it’s – it’s an issue of the separation of powers.”

    He said that over the last “several months,” his team had made it clear to the Justice Department that he believed the Speech or Debate Clause precluded a subpoena for his testimony.

    CNN previously reported on Pence’s plans to raise claims under the Speech or Debate Clause.

    Pence also noted that he has written and spoken publicly about the events leading up to the January 6 certification vote. But, he said, “if we were to accede to accept a subpoena for appearance before a grand jury or a trial, I believe that would diminish the privileges enjoyed by any future vice president, either Democrat or Republican. I simply will not do that.”

    Pence first spoke publicly about his plans to fight the subpoena at an event in Minneapolis earlier Wednesday, saying that his fight was about ” separation of powers” and “defending the prerogatives that I had as president of the Senate.”

    “My fight is on the separation of powers. My fight against the DOJ subpoena very simply is on defending the prerogatives that I had as president of the Senate to preside over the Joint Session of Congress on January 6,” Pence told reporters in Minneapolis.

    “For me this is a moment where you have to decide where you stand and I stand on the Constitution of the United States,” he added.

    Pence is one of several former members of Trump’s inner circle whose testimony federal investigators have sought, as they scrutinize the events leading up to and during the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. That probe, as well as the federal investigation into Trump’s handling of documents from his White House that were found at Mar-a-Lago, have taken a more aggressive tack since special counsel Jack Smith took over both investigations.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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

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

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Pence to fight subpoena on separation of powers grounds because he was president of Senate | CNN Politics

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

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Conservative activist Matt Schlapp denies sexual battery allegations in new court documents | CNN Politics

    Conservative activist Matt Schlapp denies sexual battery allegations in new court documents | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The staffer and his attorney declined to provide further comment.

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  • Harvey Weinstein sued by woman who he was convicted of raping in Los Angeles criminal trial | CNN

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

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • What to know about the lawsuit aiming to ban medication abortion drug mifepristone | CNN Politics

    What to know about the lawsuit aiming to ban medication abortion drug mifepristone | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

    Here’s what to know about the lawsuit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

    Hilton and Fallon did not respond to requests for comment.

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

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

    Guy Oseary and Madonna at a 2016 Billboard Women In Music event. Oseary said both bought NFTs from Bored Ape Yacht Club.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Mad Dog Jones' SHIFT// goes on view as part of 'Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale' at Sotheby's in June 2021. NFTs have been celebrated as the future of digital art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Paxton was reelected as attorney general in November.

    This headline has been updated.

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  • Family of Emmett Till files lawsuit demanding sheriff arrest Carolyn Bryant Donham | CNN

    Family of Emmett Till files lawsuit demanding sheriff arrest Carolyn Bryant Donham | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    CNN has reached out to Banks for comment.

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  • Pence subpoenaed by special counsel investigating Trump | CNN Politics

    Pence subpoenaed by special counsel investigating Trump | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

    ABC News first reported on the subpoena.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • California county to pay $4.5 million settlement in death of man shocked by deputies’ Tasers | CNN

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

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

    No deputies were charged in his death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Republican AGs sue ATF over new rule regulating pistol-stabilizing braces | CNN Politics

    Republican AGs sue ATF over new rule regulating pistol-stabilizing braces | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Family of slain cinematographer sues Alec Baldwin and ‘Rust’ production company | CNN

    Family of slain cinematographer sues Alec Baldwin and ‘Rust’ production company | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The parents and sister of Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer who was shot and killed during a rehearsal on the ‘Rust’ film set in 2021 are suing actor Alec Baldwin, the movie’s production company and others over her death.

    The lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court alleges the defendants caused intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence and loss of consortium in Hutchins’ untimely death, attorney Gloria Allred announced in a news conference.

    Hutchins’ parents and sister live in Ukraine and are struggling to cope with the tragedy while living “in the midst of Putin’s war,” Allred said. Hutchins’ mother is a nurse, treating soldiers in a hospital near Kiev, and her brother-in-law is a soldier fighting in the war.

    CNN is seeking comment from Baldwin and the film’s production company.

    An attorney for on-set armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, who was also named in the suit, had no comment.

    Last fall, a settlement was reached between Baldwin and the production company and Matthew Hutchins, Halyna Hutchins’ widower. Allred said this lawsuit is necessary because these family members also deserve accountability and justice, and claims that Baldwin and the film production team have not reached out these family members.

    “They haven’t heard from Alec Baldwin – the man with the gun,” Allred said, “the gun that ended the life of their daughter.”

    Baldwin and movie set armorer Gutierrez Reed are also facing criminal charges related to the shooting. David Halls, also named in the suit, has reached a plea agreement with the Santa Fe County District Attorney’s Office.

    “What we seek is an acknowledgement of what was taken – the loving relationship,” said Allred. “Whatever happens with the criminal case, we are pursuing this civil lawsuit for them to win justice.”

    Allred added: “There’s no real justice when someone’s been killed.”

    “Justice is in finding the truth,” added co-counsel John Carpenter.

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  • Family of student who died during 2021 hazing incident sues Delta Chi fraternity for $28 million | CNN

    Family of student who died during 2021 hazing incident sues Delta Chi fraternity for $28 million | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The family of a 19-year-old Virginia college student who died during a hazing incident in 2021 is suing the Delta Chi fraternity and several others for $28 million, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.

    Adam Oakes, a freshman at Virginia Commonwealth University, had been offered a bid to join the Delta Chi fraternity and had gone to a party to begin the initiation process on February 26.

    Oakes died during a “Big Brother ritual” where he was coerced to drink an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, leaving him “dangerously intoxicated,” according to the wrongful death lawsuit filed in Richmond Circuit Court.

    Other fraternity members took Oakes and the other pledges outside to throw up on the lawn, but Oakes did not throw up, according to the lawsuit. They then took him “back into the fraternity house and abandoned him on the floor,” the lawsuit states.

    The next morning, Oakes was pronounced dead at the scene, with a blood-alcohol content level of .419%, according to the suit.

    In the wrongful death lawsuit, obtained by CNN affiliate WTVR, 13 VCU Delta Chi chapter members are listed as those being involved in the hazing procedure.

    Eleven of them were charged in connection with the death of Oakes by the Richmond Police, CNN previously reported. All 11 were charged with unlawful hazing of a student and six were additionally charged with purchasing and providing alcohol to a minor in September 2021, according to Richmond Police.

    Of those 11, four have pleaded guilty, three have not entered a plea, two had their cases dropped, one pleaded no contest and one entered a different plea, according to court records.

    The Richmond Commonwealth Attorney’s Office told CNN that since several of the defendants charged in the case have pending court dates, the “rules of ethics and professional responsibility prevent” them from commenting on the case.

    The Delta Chi fraternity house at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.

    According to the suit, the VCU Chapter of Delta Chi operates as an unincorporated association, but the incorporated arm has “the power to revoke the charter of the chapter, order that its activities cease and, in effect, deem the existence of the unincorporated association as being terminated.”

    “Unknown to Adam and his family, and known and never disclosed by Delta Chi or the VCU Chapter to Adam, is that the VCU Chapter has a long history of engaging in high-risk misconduct at VCU that resulted in VCU revoking its recognition in August 2018, and prohibiting its presence or activity at VCU, for a period of four years ‘due to serious health and safety concerns’ involving the VCU Chapter and its activities,” the lawsuit states.

    Despite this, the chapter’s legal counsel worked to reinstate the organization on campus, the lawsuit added.

    In statement shared with CNN Wednesday, Delta Chi’s International Headquarters for the Fraternity said, “Adam’s death and other tragedies in recent years make clear that fraternity members, organizations, and society continue to have more work to do.”

    “Hazing, the misuse of alcohol, and putting the health and safety of any person at risk has no place in Delta Chi,” the statement said. “The Fraternity continues to fund hazing prevention research, support meaningful anti-hazing legislation and provide member safety and hazing prevention education to Delta Chi chapters.”

    CNN has reached out to VCU and the Oakes’ family attorney for comment.

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  • First on CNN: Trump’s former national security adviser subpoenaed in special counsel probes of classified documents, January 6 | CNN Politics

    First on CNN: Trump’s former national security adviser subpoenaed in special counsel probes of classified documents, January 6 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former national security adviser Robert O’Brien has been subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith in both his investigation into classified documents found at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and the probe related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to a source familiar with the matter.

    O’Brien has been asserting executive privilege in declining to provide some of the information that prosecutors are seeking from him, the source said.

    CNN has reached out to O’Brien for comment.

    O’Brien considered resigning from his post over Trump’s response to the violence on January 6, 2021, but ultimately decided to remain in the job, CNN previously reported. The National Security Council should have been involved in the handling of classified documents at end of the Trump presidency, and O’Brien may have knowledge of how those records ended up at Mar-a-Lago.

    Separately, Trump’s former acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf was interviewed by Justice Department lawyers in recent weeks as part of the ongoing special counsel investigation related to 2020 election interference, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

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

    Wolf declined to comment on his recent interview with federal investigators, which was first reported by Bloomberg. A spokesman for Smith also declined to comment.

    The interview comes after Wolf’s former deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, testified last month before a federal grand jury as part of Smith’s election interference probe. When Cuccinelli was asked at the time whether privilege claims arose, he said: “They did, and I didn’t say anything.”

    O’Brien, Wolf and Cuccinelli were previously interviewed by the House select committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection.

    For the time being, Smith has not sought testimony from a handful of other potentially relevant Trump administration officials, including former Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller or former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, two other sources tell CNN.

    In the days after the January 6 attack, Wolf urged Trump and all elected officials to condemn the violence on Capitol Hill, calling what transpired “tragic and sickening.”

    “While I have consistently condemned political violence on both sides of the aisle, specifically violence directed at law enforcement, we now see some supporters of the President using violence as a means to achieve political ends,” Wolf said at the time. “This is unacceptable.”

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  • Forensic expert testifies she found gunshot primer residue particles on Alex Murdaugh’s shirt and hands, and on a jacket | CNN

    Forensic expert testifies she found gunshot primer residue particles on Alex Murdaugh’s shirt and hands, and on a jacket | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A forensic scientist testified in Alex Murdaugh’s murder trial Tuesday she found gunshot primer residue particles on clothes the now-disbarred South Carolina attorney was wearing the night his wife and son were killed – and on a blue jacket that has drawn increasing attention in the proceedings.

    The particles were found on samples taken from Murdaugh’s hands, as well as the shirt and shorts he was wearing the night the two were fatally shot in 2021, Megan Fletcher, a forensic scientist who analyzes gunshot residue for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, testified.

    The findings could mean those items were close to a firearm that was discharged, or the particles could have been transferred to those items from an object with gunshot primer residue on it, she said.

    In the case of a person’s hands, the particles could indicate the person fired a gun, Fletcher testified. She could not say when those particles would have been deposited. The Murdaughs owned firearms and had a shooting range on their property.

    Primer is one of the elements – along with the powder, the bullet and the casing – that make up an ammunition cartridge, often referred to as a round.

    Fletcher also examined a blue rain jacket that investigators found in a closet at the home of Murdaugh’s mother several months after the killings, she said. She found 38 particles of gunshot primer residue inside the jacket, which she described as a “significant number,” as well as 14 particles on the outside, she testified.

    “If a recently fired firearm were wrapped up inside that jacket, would that be consistent with your findings?” prosecutor John Meadors asked.

    “There is a possibility of that, yes,” Fletcher responded. The prosecution has said the murder weapon has yet to be found.

    The court heard about that blue rain jacket a day earlier, when defense attorneys argued to keep it out of evidence. A caregiver for Murdaugh’s mother, Mushell Smith, first testified Monday that Murdaugh went to his mother’s home early one morning after the killings and headed upstairs with something blue – which she described as a tarp – in his hands.

    South Carolina Law Enforcement Division Agent Kristin Moore told the court later on Monday. agent Kristin Moore told the court later on Monday investigators found both a blue tarp and a blue rain jacket on the second floor of the mother’s home.

    Without the jury present, the defense on Monday asked the judge to rule that the jacket shouldn’t be considered evidence. They argued the caregiver testified she saw Murdaugh carrying only a tarp – not a jacket – and said nothing connected Murdaugh to the jacket. The judge on Tuesday denied the defense’s request.

    Under cross-examination Wednesday, Fletcher acknowledged there were myriad possibilities for how the particles could have ended up on Murdaugh’s hands or the jacket, including if he had simply held a firearm or if the jacket made contact with the weapon.

    First responders testified early in the prosecution’s case that Murdaugh had a shotgun when they arrived at the scene. It was entered into evidence and is not believed to be a murder weapon.

    “When I analyzed the evidence, I did not know that he had a firearm in his hand,” Fletcher said under questioning by defense attorney Jim Griffin. “But that would be consistent with somebody who had a firearm in his hand prior to collection.”

    Griffin posited there were “just a whole lot of possibilities what could have happened, right?”

    “That’s correct,” Fletcher said.

    “And all you can tell us is what you saw under a microscope.”

    “Yes, sir.”

    “You can’t tell us how it got there, or when it got there.”

    “That’s correct.”

    But on re-direct, Fletcher underscored that the number of gunshot residue particles found on the interior of the jacket was unusual.

    “Typically, people wear their clothing right side out,” she said. “And so, if they’re in the vicinity to the discharge of a shooting, that’s where the particles are going to land.

    “On the outside?” Meadors asked.

    “Yes, sir,” Fletcher said.

    Murdaugh has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime in the killings of his wife Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh and his 22-year-old son Paul on June 7, 2021.

    Murdaugh called 911 the night of the killings to report he’d found his wife and son shot dead at the family’s home in Islandton, South Carolina – a property known as Moselle.

    Prosecutors accuse Murdaugh of committing the murders to distract attention from a series of alleged illicit schemes he was running to avoid “personal legal and financial ruin,” per court filings. Separate from the murder charges, Murdaugh faces 99 charges stemming from alleged financial crimes, per the state attorney general. Opening statements were delivered January 25.

    Jurors on Tuesday also heard from Murdaugh’s longtime friend and former law partner, who became the third witness to identify the disgraced former attorney’s voice on a video clip that authorities say was recorded shortly before the killings.

    The video, just short of a minute long, was filmed on Paul Murdaugh’s phone starting at 8:44 p.m. the night of the killings, a law enforcement witness testified earlier in the trial. Three different voices could be heard in the footage, which appeared to have been recorded around the Murdaugh family’s kennels, according to that earlier testimony.

    Prosecutors believe one of those voices – the only other on the video besides the victims’ – belongs to Alex Murdaugh, placing him at the scene at the time of the killings. Murdaugh has maintained in interviews with law enforcement he was not there.

    On Tuesday, the friend and former law partner, Ronnie Crosby, testified that after the killings, Murdaugh shared he had dinner with Maggie and Paul, and then fell asleep on the couch while the two went to the kennels on the Murdaugh property.

    Murdaugh told Crosby that after he woke up, Murdaugh drove to his parents’ house – roughly 20 minutes away – to see his mother, and when he returned home, discovered Maggie and Paul had been fatally shot, Crosby testified.

    “He specifically said he did not (go to the kennels),” Crosby testified.

    When the prosecution on Tuesday played the video from Paul’s phone, Crosby said he identified three voices: Paul’s, Maggie’s and Alex’s. When asked if he was certain that’s who he heard, Crosby replied, “I’m 100% sure that’s whose voices are on that audio.”

    Two other witnesses told the court last week they were certain they heard Alex Murdaugh’s voice in that footage.

    Smith, the caregiver, testified Monday that Murdaugh visited his mother for about 15 or 20 minutes the night of the killings.

    Also Tuesday, jurors heard from Jeanne Seckinger, the chief financial officer of Alex Murdaugh’s former law firm who testified last week without the jury present. At the time, the judge still was weighing whether to allow the admission of evidence about the alleged financial schemes. He decided Monday to allow it.

    Seckinger testified Tuesday – this time in front of jurors – that she confronted Murdaugh about missing funds from the firm on the morning of June 7, 2021 – hours before his wife and son would be killed.

    She looked for Alex that morning and found him standing outside his office, she testified. He “looked at me with a pretty dirty look – one I’ve not seen before – and said, ‘What do you need now?’ Clearly disgusted with me.” she testified.

    Seckinger told Murdaugh she had reason to believe he personally received legal fees from a settlement – amounting to about $792,000 – that should have been made payable to the law firm, she testified.

    “He assured me again that money was in there,” Seckinger said Tuesday. “I told him I still needed to see ledgers or proof that it was.”

    Jeanne Seckinger speaks about Alex Murdaugh's alleged financial crimes during his double murder trial at the Colleton County Courthouse on Tuesday.

    At the time, Murdaugh was facing a lawsuit from the family of 19-year-old Mallory Beach, who was killed in February 2019 when a boat, owned by Murdaugh and allegedly driven by Paul, struck a bridge piling.

    Murdaugh’s financial records – which state court filings said “would expose (Murdaugh) for his years of alleged misdeeds” – could have been disclosed following a hearing in the civil case scheduled for June 10, 2021, three days after the killings.

    Prosecutors’ pretrial motion contended “the murders served as Murdaugh’s means to shift the focus away from himself and buy some additional time to try and prevent his financial crimes from being uncovered, which, if revealed, would have resulted in personal legal and financial ruin for Murdaugh.” According to that filing, the missing money had already been spent.

    But the June 10 hearing was canceled after Maggie’s and Paul’s deaths, Seckinger said last week.

    Immediately after the killings, no one at the firm was concerned about finding the missing money, “because we were concerned about Alex,” Seckinger testified Tuesday.

    Yet Seckinger dug into more of Murdaugh’s records in the weeks ahead and found more impropriety, she testified. In September 2021, the firm’s partners confronted Murdaugh about the money and informed him they were forcing him to resign, she told the court.

    To cover the cost of the misappropriated money, “Each partner put up money and we refunded the money to the clients,” Seckinger told the court. When asked why, she said that Murdaugh “stole it.”

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