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Tag: violence in society

  • Opinion: Addressing gun violence requires better means of measuring it | CNN

    Opinion: Addressing gun violence requires better means of measuring it | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Rosanna Smart is an economist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and co-leader of its Gun Policy in America initiative to understand the effects of gun policies. Andrew R. Morral is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND; co-leader of the initiative; and director of the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, a private philanthropy that funds gun violence prevention research. The views expressed in this piece are their own. View more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    Barely through January, America has this year already experienced 63 incidents with four or more people shot and more than 4,200 firearm deaths.

    These statistics do not come from official governmental sources, but are rather the result of information compiled and disseminated publicly by a small non-profit organization, the Gun Violence Archive, funded primarily by a single private donor. Our government collects no official data on mass shootings – and has no comprehensive data collection system tracking nonfatal firearm injuries – despite intense public concern about these events and the direction they may be trending.

    The federal government does collect data on firearm deaths, although complete nationwide data that link whether individual deaths occurred in the same incident is not yet available. And finalized data is always a year or so delayed. By comparison, federal data on poultry slaughter across the country lags by only a couple of weeks.

    What’s more, federal data collection on other aspects of gun crime and violence is abysmal.

    This seems like a pretty fundamental statistic we should know, or at least have some decent estimate of. Measuring only firearm deaths and not all injuries may underestimate the prevalence of firearm violence by a factor of two to three, showing only a skewed subset of firearm violence. Because firearm assaults and police shootings often result in nonfatal injuries, federal data systems track only a portion of these incidents that disproportionately affect Black Americans.

    Building a surveillance system for nonfatal firearm injuries would be difficult and expensive. In 1994, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded efforts to support such a system in seven states, but the project ended after just three years when Congress cut the CDC’s budget in response to its firearm violence research. It took more than two decades for Congress to approve federal funding to research gun violence.

    Now, a previously unreliable nonfatal firearm injury surveillance system is being redesigned with the goal of producing moderately precise national estimates of firearms injury hospitalizations by 2024. That’s a start, but what really may be needed is reliable state-level estimates to understand how laws and other prevention efforts affect firearm violence.

    The Firearm Injury Surveillance Through Emergency Rooms (FASTER) program, a 10-state pilot project launched by the CDC in September 2020, will test whether the National Syndromic Surveillance Program, which helps track urgent crises like the Covid-19 pandemic and opioid overdoses, can be used to monitor firearm injuries.

    The federal government could make important contributions to firearm injury prevention efforts by ensuring that funding for data collection and maintenance through FASTER or another system is sustained moving forward and creating straightforward mechanisms for researchers to access deidentified individual-level data with geographic indicators.

    Unfortunately, data quality on other aspects of gun violence is deteriorating. For decades, the FBI has compiled and disseminated information from local law enforcement agencies on aggravated assaults and robberies involving firearms. This system was retired in 2021. As a result, the federal government has been unable to provide comprehensive state or national estimates on important crime trends for the past two years.

    While a more detailed (and theoretically improved) system replaced the prior one, the rollout of this FBI System has not gone smoothly. In 2021, the FBI’s new data system collected crime information from just over 60% of law enforcement agencies nationwide, resulting in uncertainty about whether murder in 2021 was up 17% or down 7% from the year before.

    This crumbling of the nation’s crime data infrastructure, even if temporary, could be an urgent problem for any effort to proactively intervene to respond to emerging crime trends.

    Although the Federal government uses large-scale surveys of Americans to understand trends in health and risk behaviors – such as consumption of drugs and alcohol, use of seatbelts, exercise habits, and even sexual practices – questions about ownership, storage, and use of firearms have been notably absent from national versions of these surveys for almost two decades.

    Indeed, one of the CDC’s flagship health behavior surveys included questions on gun ownership, but removed that question from the core module after 2004. As a result, many studies of the effects of gun violence prevention that need information on state firearm ownership rates must use data that are almost 20 years old.

    Similarly, although the government’s 50-state National Survey on Drug Use and Health asks respondents aged 12 to 17 about handgun carrying behavior, no such questions are asked of adults, despite evidence linking gun carriage policies with firearm violence.

    Other important questions also are omitted from these surveys, such as defensive gun use, firearm storage practices, safe handling practices and training and safety perceptions.

    The lowest hanging fruit to improve our data collection could be to remove statutory barriers that prevent researchers from using important data that the federal government is already collecting, such as information on guns used in crimes. Since 2003, the Tiahrt Amendments have prohibited the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from sharing disaggregated crime gun trace data with researchers.

    Removing these blanket restrictions, or even providing more detailed aggregate statistics on crime gun possessors, sources and prior transactions, could help provide better understanding of diversion of firearms from legal to illegal markets, risk factors related to “straw-purchasing” (buying a gun for somebody legally prohibited from possessing it), and the flow of firearms between states with different gun law regimes.

    Other missing data from federal collection efforts include reliable information on police shootings, mass shootings, legal defensive firearm homicides, firearm sales and many other such data.

    Although everyone wants to see reductions in firearm violence in this country, specific proposals are often controversial, sometimes because there are no data demonstrating their effectiveness. If those data were collected, this would no longer be an excuse. Better evidence on the effectiveness of different policy or community interventions may rely on access to data that is not being collected now.

    The federal government has many of the requisite tools in place to do this, and it does it well on a wide range of other problems. Shying away from measuring this problem may also make it more difficult to fix it.

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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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  • 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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  • New GOP-led panel to hold first public hearing Thursday on alleged ‘weaponization’ of federal government | CNN Politics

    New GOP-led panel to hold first public hearing Thursday on alleged ‘weaponization’ of federal government | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The GOP-led House committee on the alleged “weaponization” of the federal government kicks off Thursday with its first public hearing with a witness list that suggests Republicans on the committee will push a popular narrative among conservatives that has been disputed by federal officials.

    The hearing will be split into two sessions, featuring a swath of current and former lawmakers, former FBI officials and legal experts. They plan to discuss allegations of how the government has been weaponized against Republicans, as well as the general belief among some conservatives that federal officials and mainstream media have been working to silence the right.

    “We’re focused on the whole weaponization of government, and the idea that the government is not working for the American people,” subcommittee chairman Jim Jordan told CNN. “The government is supposed to protect the First Amendment, not have, as Mr. (Jonathan) Turley said, ‘censorship by surrogate,’” he said, referencing one of the witnesses slated for Thursday’s hearing who is a George Washington University Law Center professor.

    The Ohio Republican continued, “I’m sure those will be some of the things that will come up in the course of the hearing,” he added, referencing a line from one of the witnesses GOP members have called.

    Democrats on the panel, however, tell CNN they reject the premise of the weaponization subcommittee itself – and much of their time will be spent disputing GOP messaging.

    “We have an overall strategy, which is to debunk the misrepresentations that are sure to be coming from it,” said Rep. Dan Goldman, a freshman Democrat from New York. “My understanding is that Sens. Grassley and Johnson are going to speak, and I’m glad they are. I hope they talk about how they used their Senate committees to weaponize Russian propaganda and disinformation in 2020.”

    “I think our intention is to make sure that the American people are aware of the actual truth of the matter, and not whatever partisan misinformation that Republicans are going to peddle,” Goldman added.

    Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is being called as one of the Democrats’ witnesses. He told CNN that “one basic question is whether weaponization is the target of the committee or if weaponization is the purpose of the committee” – previewing a potential line of attack.

    In a new memo released Thursday ahead of the subcommittee’s first hearing, the White House called the subpanel a “Fox News reboot of the House Un-American Activities Committee” and “a political stunt that weaponizes Congress to carry out the priorities of extreme MAGA Republicans in Congress.”

    White House Oversight spokesman Ian Sams writes that the committee “plans to weaponize the MAGA agenda against their perceived political enemies” and is “choosing to make it their top priority to go down the rabbit hole of debunked conspiracy theories about a ‘deep state’ instead of taking a deep breath and deciding to work with the President and Democrats in Congress to improve Americans’ everyday lives.”

    The first panel of witnesses to testify before the committee include GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, as well as former congresswoman from Hawaii and ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.

    The lawmakers are only slated to deliver opening statements and are not expected to answer any questions while testifying, sources familiar with the committee’s plans tell CNN.

    Gabbard has regularly appeared on Fox News since leaving Congress and frequently uses the network to accuse the FBI and the Justice Department of targeting political opponents of the Biden administration.

    Grassley and Johnson have both previously attacked the Justice Department for how it has handled its investigation into Hunter Biden and its approach to addressing threats against school administrators.

    Grassley has also accused the Justice Department of seeking to criminalize the First Amendment right of parents to protest school policies. The Justice Department has denied doing so, pointing to a line in the memo acknowledging that “spirited debate about policy matters is protected under or Constitution.”

    The witnesses’ previous comments regarding the politization of the Biden Justice Department suggest that the committee plans to push a narrative that is popular among the right, but has been publicly disputed by the FBI. There is little public evidence supporting such claims, which Jordan says are backed up by unnamed whistleblowers. Some allegations have been debunked by fact-checkers or news reports, and Jordan has falsely claimed for years that there is an anti-GOP “deep state” within the FBI.

    Democrats, meanwhile, plan to showcase Raskin’s testimony, who is the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee – which is investigating a series of polarizing issues such as Hunter Biden and the former and current presidents’ possession of classified documents. Raskin, a former member of the House select committee on the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection, and a key fixture in both of former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trials, has been a crucial messenger for the left in pushing back against the GOP’s claims and controversial probes.

    The second panel of witnesses will feature former FBI special agents Nicole Parker and Thomas Baker, as well as Turley and the Raben Group’s Elliot Williams.

    Parker wrote an op-ed last month detailing how she left the bureau after over 10 years of service because she believed it became “politically weaponized.”

    Baker, meanwhile, published a book in December 2022 titled, “The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy.”

    Turley was a prominent figure during Trump’s impeachment trials often referenced by the right.

    Williams, a CNN analyst, is appearing on behalf of the Democrats. Williams previously served as deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Department of Justice, where worked to secure Senate confirmation for both Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

    Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democratic member of the subcommittee, cast doubt on the effectiveness of Republicans’ strategy, telling CNN, “I fail to see what they think they’re going to accomplish by those kinds of witnesses. … I don’t know that that adds anything to their credibility or making their case. I’ll leave it at that.”

    But Democrats are also cognizant of one potential disadvantage ahead of Thursday’s hearing – the fact they have not yet met as a group while the Republicans have. Connolly told CNN that, given they were just named as member of the panel last week, they have not yet had the opportunity to begin preparing for the onslaught of investigations GOP members have planned.

    GOP subcommittee members told CNN the purpose of the first hearing is largely to outline the panel’s investigate plans in the months ahead, and set the stage for what viewers should anticipate from the weekly-hearings the committee is hoping to hold.

    “Chairman Jordan wants to introduce people to what the committee hopes to accomplish, and the scope of the problem. Having these senators speak with authority helps set it. They won’t be questioned as witnesses, but they are testifying as to their observations,” GOP Rep. Darrell Issa said.

    “I’m not sure we’re going to learn what we need to learn about what has happened inside government agencies in sufficient detail with these witnesses, but I think they can kind of cast the vision,” Republican subcommittee member Dan Bishop of North Carolina told CNN.

    Bishop said he hopes the work of this panel will pave the way for legislation to address what he claimed were agencies “going off rogue.”

    Jordan and House Judiciary Committee staff have met with series of whistleblowers behind closed doors this week for transcribed interviews regarding claims about the politicization of the Justice Department. The interviews will serve as the basis for much of the subcommittee’s probe, sources with direct knowledge of the interviews tell CNN.

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  • Man who allegedly fired replica gun inside San Francisco synagogue faces hate crime enhancement over public comments | CNN

    Man who allegedly fired replica gun inside San Francisco synagogue faces hate crime enhancement over public comments | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A man arrested after allegedly firing a replica gun several times in a San Francisco synagogue now faces a hate crime enhancement, the city’s district attorney said Wednesday.

    The hate crime allegation against 51-year-old Dmitri Mishin is tied to statements he made during the incident as well as social media posts he made involving “several postings of an individual in Nazi-type clothing,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said in a news conference.

    While officials did not share what Mishin said while inside the synagogue, prosecutors believe he “harbored antisemitic views and that was the motivation for his actions,” Jenkins said. The hate crime allegation will enhance punishment guidelines if he is convicted, she added.

    Mishin was arrested Friday, days after he allegedly stepped inside a synagogue in the Richmond District during a gathering and “made a verbal statement,” pulled out what appeared to be a firearm and shot several times inside the building, police have said.

    Police recovered expended shell casings at the scene and at the time said they believed he had been firing blanks.

    Mishin was charged Wednesday morning with two felony counts of “making threats obstructing exercise of religion,” and six misdemeanor counts of disturbing a religious meeting and brandishing a replica firearm, the district attorney’s office announced.

    He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of all charges, according to Jenkins. CNN has been unable to identify an attorney for Mishin.

    “It is clear that antisemitism is still active and strong even here in San Francisco, in such a diverse place, and it’s something that will not be tolerated by this office or by myself,” Jenkins said.

    Mishin was originally scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday but will now be arraigned Thursday, Jenkins said. Her office will request he be detained without bail, she added.

    “Anyone who would walk into a synagogue of that sort, and make the statements that he did and displayed what appeared to be a firearm, is somebody who poses a public safety risk,” Jenkins said.

    The incident at the San Francisco synagogue came just days after a man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at a New Jersey synagogue amid a backdrop of recent incendiary antisemitic incidents, including tweets from Kanye West, signs over a major Los Angeles bridge and messages projected on buildings in Florida.

    The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, which has tracked incidents of US antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault since 1979, found 2,717 incidents of antisemitism in the US in 2021, up a significant 34% from the previous year.

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  • 2 arrested in central California shooting that left 6 dead, including mother clutching 10-month-old son | CNN

    2 arrested in central California shooting that left 6 dead, including mother clutching 10-month-old son | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Two suspects were taken into custody, one after a shootout, in a “cartel-style” massacre last month that left six people dead in central California, including a young mother and her 10-month-old son, authorities announced Friday.

    The suspects, identified in charging documents as Angel Uriarte, 35, and Noah Beard, 25, are known members of the Norteño gang, Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux said during a news conference. He said the January 16 shooting was the likely result of a conflict with members of the Sureños, a rival gang.

    “The suspects and the victims have a long history of gun violence, heavily active in guns, gang violence, gun violence, and narcotics dealings,” Boudreaux said, adding, “the motive is not exactly clear at this point.”

    Authorities said Uriarte was injured in a shootout with ATF agents before he was taken into custody. He is hospitalized, and in stable condition, according to ATF Acting Special Agent in Charge Joshua Jackson. Beard was taken into custody without incident.

    Beard is accused of killing 16-year-old Alissa Parraz and her 10-month-old son, Nycholas, as they fled the overnight shooting at a home in Goshen, a farming community about 30 miles southeast of Fresno. Authorities showed surveillance video Friday showing the young mother lifting her son over a fence and climbing over. Both were found dead in the street outside the home.

    Along with the mother and her son, the four other victims were identified as Marcos Parraz, 19; Eladio Parraz, 52; Alissa’s grandmother, Rosa Parraz, 72; and Jennifer Analla, 49.

    Boudreaux said all the victims died of gunshot wounds, most were shot in the head, including the 10-month-old boy.

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    The surprising history of gun laws in America

    “This was clearly not a random act of violence. This family was targeted by coldblooded killers,” Boudreaux said.

    The arrests were part of a multiagency effort dubbed Operation Nightmare, which included searches of several California prisons and 24/7 surveillance of the suspects over the last 10 days. DNA left at the scene was credited with quickly leading law enforcement to zero in on the pair.

    Uriarte and Beard are each facing six counts of murder, according to Tulare County District Attorney Tim Ward, along with enhancements relating to the use of a firearm, and that the acts were committed in participation of a criminal street gang. The suspects may eventually face the death penalty if convicted.

    CNN is trying to determine if both suspects have legal representation.

    The massacre came before a series of back-to-back mass shootings in California late last month, including an attack during a Lunar New Year Celebration in suburban Monterey Park, just west of Los Angeles. That shooting on January 21 left 11 people dead.

    Another attack on January 23 left four dead at a California mushroom farm in Half Moon Bay. That night, another shooting, this time in Oakland, left one dead and seven others injured.

    Durbin on guns_00003306.png

    Mass shootings are ‘uniquely American experience,’ Dem Senator says

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  • Jim Jordan issues first subpoenas targeting Biden administration’s response to school board threats | CNN Politics

    Jim Jordan issues first subpoenas targeting Biden administration’s response to school board threats | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan on Friday subpoenaed the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Department of Education for documents as part of its investigation into whether a Justice Department strategy to address threats against teachers and school officials was abused to target conservative parents.

    The flurry of subpoenas are the first from the Judiciary’s subcommittee dedicated to investigating the alleged weaponization of the federal government and are an early indication that the newly minted chairman intends to aggressively pursue its probe into the Biden administration’s response to rising tensions and threats of violence surrounding school board meetings.

    The subpoenas set a document deadline of March 1. The panel sent the subpoenas after initially sending letters to the agencies for voluntary cooperation on January 17.

    The allegations being investigated date to 2021, when protests and some violence erupted at school board meetings across the country. Most of the anger came from conservative parents who wanted to repeal mask mandates, opposed anti-racism courses and had concerns about LGBTQ policies.

    With that backdrop, the National School Boards Association wrote to President Joe Biden asking for federal help to address the violence and threats against school administrators. The group said that “these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism” and encouraged the Justice Department to explore which laws, possibly including the Patriot Act, could be applied.

    The group soon apologized for “some of the language” in its letter. But it quickly drew backlash, particularly among conservatives.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland had issued a memo in response – which didn’t cite the letter, compare parents to “terrorists” nor invoke the Patriot Act. It merely told the FBI and federal prosecutors to step up collaboration with state and local law enforcement on the issue.

    According to a report Jordan released last year, emails show that the Biden White House consulted with the NSBA on the letter before the group made its letter public. An independent review by NSBA concluded, however, that there was no “direct or indirect evidence suggesting the Administration requested the Letter” or reviewed the contents before the letter was sent.

    Other emails also show that the Justice Department sent an advance copy of Garland’s memo to the NSBA.

    The FBI later established a “threat tag” to internally track cases about school board threats under the same categorization. Republicans have seized on the “threat tag” to accuse the FBI of carrying out Biden’s desire to stomp out conservative speech at school boards. But the creation of an internal database does not mean the FBI initiated any sort of crackdown against parents.

    Judiciary Republicans are requesting Garland provide a paper trail of the DOJ’s communications with the White House, intelligence agencies and members of the National School Boards Association about alleged violence at school board meetings.

    The subpoena also calls for a number of documents relating to Garland’s directive for FBI and US attorneys’ offices to meet with federal, state and local law enforcement partners to discuss strategies for addressing the issue, focusing specifically on what meetings took place and what recommendations were made.

    A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. Three days after Jordan’s voluntary request to DOJ, a department official responded to the Ohio Republican that “we share your belief that congressional oversight is vital to our functioning democracy” and encouraged the committee to prioritize its document requests to elicit efficient responses, according to a letter obtained by CNN.

    The FBI subpoena specifically demands that Director Chris Wray produce a variety of documents, including communications related to meeting with US attorneys’ offices and “establishment of the Department of Justice’s task force.”

    Wray is also told to hand over all documents related to formal and informal recommendations created or relied upon by FBI employees in accordance with Garland’s October 2021 memo.

    The FBI said in a statement that the bureau “has never been in the business of investigating speech or policing speech at school board meetings or anywhere else, and we never will be,” adding that “attempts to further any political narrative will not change those facts.”

    “The FBI recognizes the importance of congressional oversight and remains fully committed to cooperating with Congress’s oversight requests consistent with its constitutional and statutory responsibilities. The FBI is actively working to respond to congressional requests for information – including voluntary production of documents,” the FBI statement read.

    Jordan’s subpoena to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called on the Education Department to hand over any documents or communications related to a letter the National School Boards Association sent in September 2021.

    Jordan’s subpoena also called for any files related to Viola Garcia’s appointment to the National Assessment Government Board. Garcia was the president of the National School Boards Association and was one of two individuals who signed the September 2021 letter to Biden.

    An Education Department spokesperson told CNN that “the Department responded to Chairman Jordan’s letter earlier this week. The Department remains committed to responding to the House Judiciary Committee’s requests in a manner consistent with longstanding Executive Branch policy.”

    CNN has reached out to Garcia for comment.

    On Thursday, a day before the subpoena, the Education Department told Jordan’s team that the department played no role in crafting the letter from the National School Boards Association.

    “I would also like to reiterate – as the Department has repeatedly made clear – that the Secretary did not request, direct any action, or play any role in the development of the September 29, 2021, letter from the NSBA to President Biden,” Gwen Graham, assistant secretary for legislation and congressional affairs at the Education Department wrote in a letter obtained by CNN. Graham added that an independent review for counsel retained by the NSBA did not find any connection between the letter and Garcia’s appointment.

    Republicans gave Democrats on the committee a heads up that these subpoenas were coming, a source familiar told CNN. Democratic Del. Stacey Plaskett of the US Virgin Islands, the highest-ranking Democrat on the subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, said the subpoenas were underpinned by “conspiracy theories” and said she is confident that what the Republicans have asked for “will once again disprove this tired right-wing theory.”

    White House spokesperson for Congressional Oversight Ian Sams said in a statement to CNN, “Chairman Jordan is rushing to fire off subpoenas only two days after the Judiciary Committee organized, even though agencies already responded in good faith seeking to accommodate requests he made. These subpoenas make crystal clear that extreme House Republicans have no interest in working together with the Biden Administration on behalf of the American people and every interest in staging political stunts.”

    Since the uproar at school boards became a major political issue in late 2021, Republicans have pushed the baseless narrative that Biden, Garland and Wray have weaponized federal law enforcement to attack innocent parents who care about education.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy falsely claimed that “Biden used the FBI to target parents as domestic terrorists.” Jordan has said Garland tried “to use federal law enforcement tools to silence parents.” This claim even came up in the GOP response to last year’s State of the Union. These claims have been repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers from CNN and other outlets.

    For his part, Garland has aggressively pushed back against Republicans’ accusations. He previously testified to Congress that the Justice Department isn’t using counterterrorism resources against parents and said it was ridiculous to equate “angry” parents to “terrorists.”

    When GOP senators grilled Wray about the “threat tag” matter at an August hearing, he defended the FBI.

    “The FBI is not going to be in the business of investigating speech or policing speech at school board meetings,” Wray said. “We’re not about to start now. Threats of violence, that’s a different matter altogether. And there, we will work with our state local partners, as we always have.”

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  • Law barring people with domestic violence restraining orders from having guns is unconstitutional, court rules | CNN Politics

    Law barring people with domestic violence restraining orders from having guns is unconstitutional, court rules | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A federal law that prohibits people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms is unconstitutional, a conservative-leaning appeals court ruled Thursday.

    The ruling is the latest significant decision dismantling a gun restriction in the wake of the Supreme Court’s expansion of Second Amendment rights last year in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision.

    The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said that the federal law targeting those believed to pose a domestic violence threat could not stand under the Bruen test, which requires that gun laws have a historical analogy to the firearm regulations in place at the time of the Constitution’s framing.

    “Through that lens, we conclude that (the law’s) ban on possession of firearms is an ‘outlier’ that our ancestors would never have accepted,” the 5th Circuit said.

    The Justice Department signaled Thursday night that it plans to appeal the ruling. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement that Congress had determined the statute “nearly 30 years ago.”

    “Whether analyzed through the lens of Supreme Court precedent, or of the text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment, that statute is constitutional. Accordingly, the Department will seek further review of the Fifth Circuit’s contrary decision,” he said.

    The Justice Department did not specify its next step in seeking review of the ruling, which could include asking the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals for an en banc rehearing by all the judges on the court, or asking the US Supreme Court to take up an appeal.

    The court’s opinion was written by Judge Cory Todd Wilson, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump. He was joined by Reagan-appointee Judge Edith Jones and Judge James Ho, another Trump appointee who also wrote a concurrence.

    The 5th Circuit panel was not persuaded by the historical parallels put forward by the US Justice Department, which was defending the conviction of a person who possessed a firearm while under a domestic violence restraining order that had been imposed after he was accused of assaulting his ex-girlfriend. The Justice Department argued that the domestic violence law was analogous to 17th-and 18th century regulations that disarmed “dangerous” persons.

    “The purpose of these ‘dangerousness’ laws was the preservation of political and social order, not the protection of an identified person from the specific threat posed by another,” the 5th Circuit opinion read. “Therefore, laws disarming ‘dangerous’ classes of people are not ‘relevantly similar’” to “serve as historical analogues.”

    A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a CNN inquiry. If the 5th Circuit’s ruling is appealed, it could set up another showdown over gun rights at the Supreme Court.

    Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said clarity from the court is necessary.

    “One of two things is true: Either this kind of blind, rigid, context-free, and common-sense-defying assessment of history is exactly what the Supreme Court intended in its landmark ruling last June in Bruen, or it isn’t,” Vladeck said.

    “Either way, it’s incumbent upon the justices in the Bruen majority to clarify which one they meant – and to either endorse or reject the rather terrifying idea that individuals under an active domestic violence-related restraining order are nevertheless constitutionally entitled to possess firearms,” he added.

    The defendant challenging his conviction, Zackey Rahimi, had lost in an earlier round before the 5th Circuit, before the Supreme Court issued its Bruen ruling last year. The previous 5th Circuit opinion was withdrawn after the Bruen decision was handed down, and the appeals court did another round of briefing directed at the new test.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Ransomware attack closes schools in Nantucket | CNN Politics

    Ransomware attack closes schools in Nantucket | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A ransomware attack forced the closure Tuesday of four public schools serving 1,700 students on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, the school district’s superintendent said in an email to parents.

    The hacking incident shut down all student and staff devices, as well as safety and security systems at Nantucket Public Schools, forcing an early dismissal at noon on Tuesday, Superintendent Elizabeth Hallett said in the email, which she shared with CNN.

    The news came as Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), which calls itself the largest pre-K-12 school district in southern Arizona, also suffered a ransomware attack in recent days, according to local news reports. Representatives of TUSD did not respond to emails seeking comment. There was no evidence that the two incidents were related.

    Ransomware – malicious software that locks computers and holds them for ransom – has for years plagued US schools and other organizations that can be short on money and personnel to defend themselves from hacks.

    The hacks often force schools to temporarily close, further disrupting learning during the coronavirus pandemic. The lack of cybersecurity budgeting at primary schools is a “major constraint to implementing effective cybersecurity programs across all K–12 entities,” the federal US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned in a report this month.

    Nantucket Public Schools includes an elementary, middle and high school, and serves Nantucket, which is about 30 miles south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

    Athletic events at the school were still scheduled to proceed. “No school issued devices should be used at home until further notice, as it could compromise home networks,” Hallett said in her email to parents.

    “We do not have any updates yet on when we will return,” Hallett told CNN in a separate email.

    There have already been five ransomware attacks on US school districts in January, according to a tally from Brett Callow, threat analysts at cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. Forty-five US school districts operating 1,981 schools were hit by ransomware in 2022, according to Emsisoft.

    A year ago, New Mexico’s largest public school district had to close temporarily after a cyberattack hit computer systems that could affect learning and student safety.

    “The ransomware attacks on school districts across the country are a stark reminder that as a country we need to ensure our citizens are cyber literate,” Kevin Nolten, vice president of Cyber Innovation Center, a not-for-profit supported by federal grant money that promotes cybersecurity curricula in K-12 schools, told CNN.

    “Cybersecurity education is a national security issue and we must educate our country on protecting our most critical infrastructure from malicious attacks,” Nolten said in an email pointing to the high demand for cybersecurity skills in the workforce.

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  • Illinois prosecutors drop pending criminal cases against R. Kelly, who remains imprisoned on federal convictions | CNN

    Illinois prosecutors drop pending criminal cases against R. Kelly, who remains imprisoned on federal convictions | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Prosecutors in Illinois’ Cook County have dropped state sex-crime charges against singer R. Kelly, who has already been convicted of federal charges set to keep him in prison for decades.

    The Illinois charges – aggravated criminal sexual assault and aggravated criminal sexual abuse counts involving four accusers – are being dropped in part because of the prison sentences he’s already facing for his federal convictions, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said Monday.

    CNN has reached out to Kelly’s lawyer for comment.

    After Foxx’s office filed charges in 2019, Kelly was charged in federal courts in New York and Chicago, her office noted.

    In his federal case in New York, the disgraced R&B singer was sentenced to 30 years in prison after he was convicted in 2021 on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges.

    In a federal trial in Chicago, Kelly was convicted of multiple child pornography charges and acquitted on others in 2022, after a trial that included anonymous testimony from a woman who said Kelly sexually abused her and recorded the interactions when she was as young as 14.

    While a sentence hasn’t been announced in the latter trial, Kelly faces a minimum of 10 to 90 years in prison for that conviction, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office said.

    “I understand how hard it was for these victims to come forward and tell their stories. I applaud their courage and have the utmost respect for everyone who came forward,” Foxx said in a news release.

    “While this may not be the result they were expecting, due to the sentences that Mr. Kelly is facing, we do feel that justice has been served,” Foxx added.

    Cook County prosecutors had called for victims to come forward after the airing of “Surviving R. Kelly,” a Lifetime documentary series that chronicled allegations of abuse, predatory behavior and pedophilia against the singer.

    The office set up a hotline and interviewed hundreds of witnesses in Chicago, Atlanta and New York, according to the news release.

    “My office will direct our resources to find justice for other victims of sexual abuse who do not have the power of a documentary to bring their abusers to light,” Foxx added.

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  • Developments in Trump documents probe foretell a 2024 campaign clouded by legal tangles | CNN Politics

    Developments in Trump documents probe foretell a 2024 campaign clouded by legal tangles | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    There’s never been a presidential campaign like it.

    Donald Trump is taking every step of his bid for a third consecutive Republican nomination amid a darkening storm of legal uncertainty.

    The twice-impeached former president, who tried to steal an election and is accused of fomenting an insurrection, launched his first two-state campaign swing on Saturday as he seeks a stunning political comeback.

    Then on Monday, Trump’s potential exposure – in two of his multiple strands of legal peril – appeared to grow, foreshadowing a campaign likely to be repeatedly punctuated by distractions from criminal investigations.

    In a new twist to his classified material saga, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Katelyn Polantz reported that two people who found two classified documents in a Trump storage facility in Florida testified before a federal grand jury. Federal prosecutors are also pushing to look at files on a laptop of at least one staff member around Trump at Mar-a-Lago, CNN reported. The former president has not been charged with a crime, but these developments are the latest sign of an aggressive approach by special counsel Jack Smith in probing the matter. And it shows how a regular drumbeat of legal problems could detract from the former president’s attempts to inject energy into a so-far tepid campaign – especially given the multiple criminal threats he may face.

    On another front, The New York Times reported that a district attorney in Manhattan is presenting evidence to another grand jury probing Trump’s alleged role in paying hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Last week, a district attorney in Georgia said decisions are imminent on charges related to Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state. It is not known whether the ex-president is directly targeted by the investigation. This all comes as Smith is also probing Trump’s role in the US Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.

    The unique and extraordinary legal tangle surrounding Trump means that a third straight US election will be tainted by controversies that will drag the FBI and the Justice Department further into a political morass. (President Joe Biden is also facing a special counsel investigation over his handling of documents from his time as vice president, and former Vice President Mike Pence, who’s eying a 2024 bid, is under DOJ review for similar issues.) This follows the Hillary Clinton email flap in 2016 and investigations into the Trump campaign’s links with Russia during that White House bid, as well as Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in 2020.

    The fact that Trump is seeking the presidency again, under an extraordinary legal cloud, could have significant consequences for the wider 2024 campaign. Some of his potential Republican rivals, wary of trying to take him down, might hope that his legal troubles will do the job for them. Perceptions that Trump is caught in a web of criminal investigation might also further tarnish his personal political brand, which has already contributed to some Republican loses in national elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

    Still, Trump is a master of leveraging attempts to call him to account, legally and politically. He’s already built a central foundation of his new presidential quest around the idea that he’s being political persecuted by Justice Department investigations and what he claims are rogue Democratic prosecutors.

    “We’re going to stop the appalling weaponization of our justice system. There’s never been a justice system like this. It’s all investigation, investigation,” the ex-president said on the trail over the weekend.

    This is a message that may be attractive to some of Trump’s base voters who themselves feel alienated from the federal government and previously bought into his claims about a “deep state” conspiracy against him. It’s also a technique, in which a strongman leader argues that he is taking the heat so his followers don’t have to, that is a familiar page in the authority playbooks of demagogues throughout history.

    As is normal, it is not known what the people who found the classified documents at the Florida storage facility may have said to the grand jury. But the ex-president is being investigated not just for possible violations of the Espionage Act, but also for potential obstruction of justice related to the documents.

    The two individuals, who were hired to search four of Trump’s properties last fall months after the FBI executed a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago resort over the summer, were each interviewed for about three hours in separate appearances last week. The extent of information they offered the grand jury remains unclear, though they didn’t decline to answer any questions, one of the sources familiar with the investigation said.

    Ryan Goodman, a former special counsel at the Department of Defense, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday that the latest development was a sign of an advanced special counsel investigation and could indicate that Smith was leaning toward indictments.

    “It sounds like he is trying to lock in their testimony, to understand how they would testify at trial, whether it is incriminating evidence against Trump or exculpatory evidence that the prosecutors would then have that and have it solidified.”

    The simple, politically charged act of investigating an ex-president was always bound to create a political furor. The fact that Trump is running for the White House again multiplies the stakes and means profound decisions are ahead for Attorney General Merrick Garland if evidence suggests Trump should be charged.

    On a more granular level, the report about the grand jury underscores that for all the political noise, the investigation into Trump’s haul of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago is taking place inside its own legal bubble.

    This remains the case, despite the political gift handed to Trump with the discovery of classified documents at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home and at a Washington office he once used that should have been handed back when he left the vice presidency. Some classified material was also found at Pence’s Indiana home.

    Those discoveries allowed Trump to claim that he was being unfairly singled out, even if the cases have significant differences. Any Trump attempt to argue that he, like Biden and Pence, inadvertently took documents to his home will be undermined by the fact that he claimed the material belonged to him, and not the government, and what appears to be repeated refusals to give it back.

    Fresh indications of the momentum in the Trump documents special counsel probe followed the latest sign of a lopsided approach to the controversy over classified material by House Republicans, who are hammering Biden over documents but giving Trump a free pass.

    House Oversight Chairman James Comer was, for example, asked by CNN’s Pamela Brown this weekend why he had no interest in the more than 325 documents found at Trump’s home but was fixated upon the approximately 20 classified documents uncovered in Biden’s premises by lawyers and an unknown number also found during an FBI search of the president’s home this month.

    “If someone can show me evidence that there was influence peddling with those classified documents that were in the possession of President Trump, then we would certainly expand it,” the Kentucky Republican said. He went on to accuse Biden and his family of being “very cozy” with people from the Chinese Communist party but offered no evidence of such links or that they had anything to do with classified documents. His remarks left the impression that his committee is seeking to find evidence to condemn Biden but is treating Trump differently – exactly the kind of double standard the GOP has claimed the DOJ is employing toward Trump.

    The two special counsel investigations probing Trump and Biden’s retention of secret documents are unfolding independently. In a legal sense, there is no overlap between them. But they will both be subject to the same political inferno if findings are made public.

    Were Trump, for instance, to be prosecuted – over what so far appears to be a larger haul of documents and conduct that may add up to obstruction – and Biden is not, the ex-president would incite a firestorm of protest among his supporters. Even though the sitting president enjoys protections from prosecution because of historic Justice Department guidance, it’s hard to see how the political ground for prosecuting just one of them could hold firm – especially if Biden and Trump are rival presidential candidates in 2024.

    From the outside, it appears as if Biden and Pence were far more cooperative with the DOJ and the FBI after some classified documents were found at their properties than Trump has been. It took a search warrant for FBI agents to get into Mar-a-Lago, and the ex-president claimed that presidential documents that belonged to the federal government when he left office belonged to him. But voters might find it hard to understand nuanced legal differences between the two cases – a factor the House Republican counter-attack based on Biden’s documents made more likely.

    As the political fallout from the classified documents furor deepened on Monday, the country got a reminder of the treatment that can await lower-ranking members of the federal workforce when secret material is taken home.

    CNN’s Holmes Lybrand reported that court documents show that a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, who stored files with classified information at his Florida home, will plead guilty in February to one count of unlawful retention of national defense information.

    Robert Birchum served in the Air Force for more than 30 years and previously held top secret clearance. According to his plea agreement, he stored hundreds of files that contained information marked as top secret, secret or confidential classified outside of authorized locations. A plea agreement stated that “the defendant’s residence was not a location authorized to store classified information, and the defendant knew as much.”

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  • Virginia school announces new safety protocols as students return to class nearly a month after a 6-year-old allegedly shot a teacher | CNN

    Virginia school announces new safety protocols as students return to class nearly a month after a 6-year-old allegedly shot a teacher | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Richneck Elementary School has announced new safety protocols as students return to classes on Monday, nearly a month after a 6-year-old student allegedly shot his teacher inside a classroom.

    In an email to families, newly appointed school administrator Karen Lynch said the school in Newport News, Virginia, will have police on campus to “assist with the transition.”

    Children should arrive without a backpack because the school plans to provide them with clear ones on Monday, Lynch said. If students bring lunch items to school, they will be run through a metal detector and are subject to search, the email says.

    The school district told CNN it has installed two metal detectors on campus.

    The school will be limiting visitors during this first week of instruction to allow staff “the opportunity to establish routines and procedures with students,” the email states. Parents will not be allowed to enter classrooms and those who choose to walk their children to class must show identification and are also subject to search, it said.

    The school closed after first grade teacher Abby Zwerner was critically injured on January 6 when a bullet was shot through her hand and into her chest, according to police. The 25-year-old was later stabilized and released from the hospital.

    The incident has resulted in the ousting of the Newport News Public Schools superintendent and the reassignment of the school’s principal to another school. Since the shooting, the school board has held several meetings as it grapples with how to handle the incident amidst backlash from frustrated parents.

    See school board meeting where decision to cut ties with superintendent was made

    The father of a student who was in the same class as the 6-year-old said Monday he has “no misgivings” about sending his son back to school.

    “I think with new administration, this administration that listens to teachers, listens to concerns and acts on those concerns … this is probably going to be the safest school in the area for a good long while,” Thomas Britton told CNN’s Brian Todd.

    Last week, a lawyer representing the injured teacher alleged that school administrators were warned multiple times by staff who expressed concerns that the student had a gun and was making threats to people the day of the shooting. The lawyer, Diane Toscano, alleged Zwerner was shot about an hour after an employee was denied permission to search the student.

    CNN has reached out to the school district for comment on Toscano’s claims.

    While police have not publicly identified the student, his family has released statements saying the boy suffers from “an acute disability.”

    The family has said the gun the child allegedly brought to school in his backpack was secured by a trigger lock and kept on the top shelf of a closet. As part of his disability care plan, a family member usually went to class with him, but he was not accompanied the day of the incident, they said.

    “We will regret our absence on this day for the rest of our lives,” the family statement said.

    As students return to school, the district says support services made available to them since the incident will continue on site.

    The school has compiled an Amazon wish list of items teachers have requested “to support students’ social-emotional needs post-tragedy,” a post on the school’s Facebook account said.

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  • Manhunt continues for ‘extremely dangerous’ kidnapping suspect who may be using dating apps to evade capture, police say | CNN

    Manhunt continues for ‘extremely dangerous’ kidnapping suspect who may be using dating apps to evade capture, police say | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A sweeping multi-day manhunt continues for a suspect accused of brutally beating and kidnapping a woman in Oregon who remains in critical condition, according to police.

    While Benjamin Obadiah Foster, 36, has evaded capture since Tuesday, police say he is still active on dating apps. The Grants Pass Police Department warns he may be using the apps to find potential new victims or manipulate them into helping him escape.

    State and local investigators have been working “around the clock” to find Foster, who is wanted on suspicion of attempted murder, kidnapping and assault, Grants Pass Police Chief Warren Hensman has said.

    Investigators have been searching for Foster since Tuesday after they found a woman bound and beaten into unconsciousness in a residence in Grants Pass, police said. The suspect, identified by investigators as Foster, had already fled by the time police arrived, the department said.

    Prosecutors accuse Foster of trying to kill the victim while “intentionally torturing” her, according to charging documents obtained by CNN affiliate KDRV. Hensman said Thursday that the victim had been enduring the alleged abuses for a “protracted amount of time.”

    “I’m disgusted by what I know happened. This was an evil act,” Hensman said Thursday.

    The victim was brought to a local hospital where she remains in critical condition, police said Sunday. As of Thursday, police were providing security for the victim, according to Hensman.

    Police said Foster “likely received assistance in fleeing the area.” A 68-year-old woman has been arrested for “Hindering Prosecution” as authorities searched for Foster, the department has said.

    Police are urging the public to send in tips on the suspect’s whereabouts or any potential sightings. In a statement Sunday, the department said people should pay particular attention to his eyes and facial structure, as they believe he may try to alter his appearance by changing the cut or color of his hair and beard.

    In the statement, police said people should not approach the “extremely dangerous suspect” and should instead call 911 immediately. Authorities have said Foster could be armed.

    The department has set up a tip line and is offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to Foster’s capture and prosecution.

    “This is an all hands on deck operation and we won’t rest until we capture this man,” Hensman said on Thursday.

    During a Thursday press conference, Hensman said he is “troubled” by Foster’s history of domestic violence and assault charges, which are detailed in court records.

    Between 2017 and 2019, Foster was charged in two separate cases in which he was accused of attacking women in Las Vegas, according to Clark County court records.

    In the first case, Foster was charged with felony battery constituting domestic violence, the records show. Foster’s ex-girlfriend testified in a preliminary hearing that he tried to strangle her on Christmas Eve of 2017 after he saw that another man had texted her.

    While that case was still pending, Foster was charged with felony assault, battery and kidnapping for alleged abuses against his then-girlfriend in 2019, according to charging documents.

    The victim told police “Foster strangled (her) to the point of unconsciousness several times” and kept her tied up for most of the next two weeks. She said she was only able to escape after convincing Foster they needed to go shopping for food and water, and ran away when he got out of the car to let their dog use the bathroom, the court records show.

    The woman was able to run through a store and into a nearby apartment complex, where somebody offered to take her to a hospital, according to a Las Vegas police report. There, she was found to have seven broken ribs, two black eyes and abrasions to her wrists and ankles from being tied up, the report said.

    Foster accepted plea deals in both cases. In the first case, he was sentenced to a maximum of 30 months in prison but given credit for 729 days served.

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  • Meta and Twitter decided to restore Trump’s account. Will other platforms follow suit? | CNN Business

    Meta and Twitter decided to restore Trump’s account. Will other platforms follow suit? | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Former president Donald Trump could soon make a return to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and reach the massive audiences on each, now that the companies behind those platforms have restored access to his accounts.

    But that could just be the start. The decisions by Twitter and now Facebook-parent Meta to bring back Trump could push — or at least provide cover for — a number of other platforms to make similar moves. 

    Facebook and Twitter restricted Trump’s accounts in the aftermath of the January 6 attack. The bans were seen as necessary by tech executives, and indeed many on Capitol Hill, believing Trump could use their platforms to incite further violence.

    Many other platforms followed suit by banning or restricting Trump, including YouTube, Snapchat and game streaming platform Twitch. Shopify, an e-commerce company, removed two stores associated with Trump, and digital payments provider Stripe said it would stop processing payments for Trump’s campaign. In some cases, platforms restricted channels or content that was associated with the then-president, if not directly affiliated — Reddit and Discord, for example, banned pro-Trump groups on their platforms.

    The net effect was that Trump, or at least his accounts, essentially vanished or went silent across the mainstream internet. Trump’s digital exile pushed him to launch his own social media platform, Truth Social. His media company even teased plans to create rivals to other online services, including Stripe. (Trump has not said whether he will resume posting from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram; he is believed to have some form of an exclusivity deal with Truth Social’s parent company to post there.)

    For now, some of these other companies appear to be sticking with their policies. On Wednesday, Snapchat parent Snap indicated that it is not planning to revisit its decision to ban Trump’s account two years ago.

    “In January 2021, Donald Trump’s Snapchat account was terminated for violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines,” a Snap spokesperson said in a statement to CNN. “According to our Community Guidelines, if your account is terminated for violating our Terms of Service or the Guidelines, you are not allowed to use Snapchat again.”

    But for other platforms, Meta’s ruling this week could add to the pressure many had already been facing to reconsider their bans after Trump announced he’d seek a third bid for the White House in 2024 and new Twitter owner Elon Musk gave him back his account.

    “Usually these companies do fly in a flock and whoever makes the first movements, other companies do tend to try to, in succession, follow behind because the initial company takes the biggest media hit and then the rest of them don’t suffer the reputational hit of being the first technology company to make a decision,” Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, told CNN earlier this month.

    A YouTube spokesperson told CNN Wednesday that the company currently had “nothing to share” on whether the company is or plans to consider reversing its suspension. Shopify, Stripe, Discord and Reddit did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the possibility of following Meta and Twitter’s leads and reversing their bans.

    When Musk announced the decision to reinstate Trump’s Twitter account in November, shortly after completing his acquisition of the company, it came with little explanation beyond Musk’s previously stated desire for freer speech on the platform. Musk conducted an informal poll of his followers and more voted in favor of restoring the account than not.

    Meta’s decision, by contrast, could provide a new set of precedents for platforms on how to handle Trump and other world leaders who violate their rules.

    In announcing its decision on Wednesday, Meta laid out “new guardrails” for how it will handle possible rules violations by Trump if he opts to return to Meta’s platforms. In short: yes, Trump can get suspended again, but a permanent ban no longer appears to be on the table.

    “In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation,” Clegg said. He added that the new, harsher penalties for repeat violations will also apply to other public figures whose accounts are reinstated following suspensions related to civil unrest.

    For content that doesn’t violate its rules but “contributes to the sort of risk that materialized on January 6th, such as content that delegitimizes an upcoming election or is related to QAnon,” Meta may limit distribution of the posts, Clegg said. The company could, for example, remove the reshare button or keep the posts visible on Trump’s page but not in users’ feeds, even for those who follow him, he said. For repeated instances, the company may restrict access to its advertising tools.

    If Trump again posts content that violates Meta’s rules but the company determines “there is a public interest in knowing that Mr. Trump made the statement that outweighs any potential harm,” Meta may similarly restrict the posts’ distribution but leave them visible on Trump’s page.

    The new policy may still require Meta’s leadership to make significant, subjective decisions about what content is potentially harmful public safety at large, but the rules could act as a model for how other platforms could bring back the former president without appearing reckless.

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  • RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel elected to fourth consecutive term | CNN Politics

    RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel elected to fourth consecutive term | CNN Politics

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    Dana Point, California
    CNN
     — 

    Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel was elected to a fourth consecutive term Friday after winning the support of about two-thirds of the RNC members who gathered here for their winter meeting.

    McDaniel fended off a stronger-than-expected challenge from Harmeet Dhillon, an RNC committeewoman from California and an attorney who has represented former President Donald Trump.

    The vote was conducted by secret ballot and McDaniel needed a majority of the members casting ballots to win. After just one round of voting, the parliamentarian announced that McDaniel had received 111 of the 167 votes cast. Dhillon received 51 votes and four ballots were cast for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a 2020 election denier and ardent Trump backer.

    Dhillon had argued the party needed to “radically reshape” its leadership amid recriminations about Republicans’ lackluster showing in the midterm elections, which compounded disappointments over the results in the previous two cycles.

    After her win Friday, McDaniel invited Dhillon and Lindell onstage for a photo op, implicitly attempting to rebut criticism about the fractured nature of the party. “With us united and all of us going together, the Democrats are going to hear us in 2024,” McDaniel said.

    But moments later, Dhillon told reporters that GOP leaders would have to reckon with widespread distrust in the party among rank-and-file voters across the country – which she said was reflected in the support she garnered as she challenged McDaniel over the past two months.

    “The results were not what we or hundreds of thousands of supporters around the country were hoping for, and I think the party is going to have to deal with that fallout of being in a disconnect from the grassroots,” Dhillon told reporters outside the RNC’s general session at the Waldorf Astoria Monarch Beach resort.

    “The party is not united, but it’s our job to try and unite the party, and that’s going to mean changes at the RNC,” Dhillon added.

    Both McDaniel and Dhillon have ties to Trump. The former president backed McDaniel when she first ran for party chair in 2017. Dhillon’s law firm represented Trump in his dealings with the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The RNC paid more than $1 million for the legal work.

    But Trump stayed neutral in the race for RNC chair, stating that McDaniel and Dhillon should “fight it out.” On Friday, he congratulated McDaniel on her “big WIN” in a post on his Truth Social platform.

    Trump’s likely rival in the 2024 contest for the White House, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, weighed in on the race in an interview that posted Thursday, telling Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, a conservative web show host, that it was time for “some new blood in the RNC.” But the GOP governor stopped short of offering a formal endorsement of Dhillon.

    The feud between McDaniel and Dhillon has underscored the fractious nature of the Republican Party at this moment. There are broad disagreements among RNC members about how to steer the party back into a position of strength before the 2024 presidential election, with Trump already an announced candidate. Dhillon, for example, has said the party must do more to encourage early voting to compete with Democrats after years in which Trump has undermined that method of casting ballots in his quest to sow doubt in election results.

    During a speech at the beginning of Friday’s meeting, McDaniel implicitly pushed back at criticisms of her leadership record as she argued that the party must be united headed into 2024. “We’re working overtime to learn the lessons of the midterms – what went right and what went wrong,” she said.

    McDaniel won public commitments from more than 100 RNC members to back her before Friday’s secret ballot election that unfolded among other votes on party business and resolutions. Dhillon’s allies had suggested that many members would switch to the California committeewoman when the secret voting began, but that dynamic did not pan out.

    The race for RNC chair had grown increasingly contentious over the past two months with Dhillon allies raising questions about the compensation and benefits that McDaniel earned as party chair, and McDaniel supporters pointing to the lucrative payments Dhillon’s law group has received for representing both Trump and the RNC. Both women assured members that they would look closely the RNC’s spending on consultants and outside vendors as the party charts the course forward into the next cycle.

    As the GOP wrestles with how much influence Trump should exert over the party’s leadership and machinery, Trump’s candidates for RNC co-chair and treasurer were defeated during the voting on leadership positions by RNC members Friday afternoon in Dana Point, California.

    Trump’s endorsed candidate for RNC co-chair, North Carolina Republican Chairman Michael Whatley, withdrew after trailing South Carolina GOP Chairman Drew McKissick, who won after several rounds of voting. Trump had recently endorsed Whatley after crediting him with “leading North Carolina to tremendous success in the recent election” and said he was “MAGA all the way.” Trump’s choice for RNC Treasurer, Joe Gruters – the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida who had backed McDaniel in her run for a fourth consecutive term – also lost on Friday. Vicki Drummond of Alabama was reelected to a term as treasurer.

    RNC members also approved a resolution opposing “all forms of antisemitism, antisemitic statements and any antisemitic elements that seek to infiltrate the Republican Party.” The resolution explicitly condemned White supremacist Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West – who have well-publicized antisemitic views and dined with Trump in November at his Mar-a-Lago estate – by name.

    The resolution approved by a voice vote Friday said that the Republican National Committee “formally condemns, denounces, censures and opposes Kanye West, also known as Ye, Nicholas ‘Nick’ Fuentes, Congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and all others promoting their antisemitism beliefs.” It added that the Republican National Committee “affirms antisemitism has no place in our political party, American politics, or any political discourse.”

    Trump acknowledged that the dinner occurred in a post on Truth Social after the controversy erupted, stating that West had unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends “whom I knew nothing about” and described the dinner as “quick and uneventful.”

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Jan. 6 rioter who assaulted Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick sentenced to over 6 years in jail | CNN Politics

    Jan. 6 rioter who assaulted Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick sentenced to over 6 years in jail | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A man who assaulted United States Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick with pepper spray on January 6, 2021, was sentenced on Friday to 80 months behind bars.

    Julian Khater pleaded guilty in September to two counts of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers with a dangerous weapon. His co-defendant, George Tanios, pleaded guilty last summer to disorderly conduct and entering and remaining in a restricted building. Khater was also ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and $2,000 in restitution.

    Tanios was sentenced to time served and one year of supervised release. He previously spent more than five months behind bars.

    The day after the attack, Sicknick died after suffering several strokes. Washington, DC’s chief medical examiner, Francisco Diaz, determined that the officer died of natural causes and told The Washington Post that the riot and “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”

    Sicknick’s family and partner were present for the sentencing and law enforcement officers dressed in uniform filled the courtroom.

    According to the plea agreements, Tanios bought two cans of bear spray in preparation for his trip with Khater to Washington on January 6. During the Capitol attack, when the two men arrived near a line of police officers by the steps of the Capitol, Khater said to Tanios, “Give me that bear s**t,” according to the plea.

    Khater took a white can of bear spray from Tanios’s backpack, walked up to the line of officers and, as rioters started pulling on the bike rack barrier separating them and the police, Khater sprayed multiple officers – including Sicknick – who had to retreat from the line.

    One of those officers, Caroline Edwards, gave a witness impact statement before DC District Judge Thomas Hogan during the sentencing hearing.

    “I felt like the absolute worst kind of officer, someone who didn’t help – couldn’t help – their friend,” she said of not being able to help Sicknick after being sprayed herself seconds later by Khater. “Sometimes when I close my eyes I can still see his face, white as a sheet.”

    Hogan called Khater’s actions that day “inexcusable,” adding that “three officers (who) were doing their duty … are suddenly sprayed directly in the face.”

    “I’m not going to give a lecture on the riot,” Hogan said, adding that “every time you see the video you’re shocked over again” and that “something has come out of this country that is very, very serious.”

    After recovering from the bear spray attack, Sicknick continued to help protect the Capitol that day, according to court documents, remaining on duty until late into the evening.

    “Just before approximately 10:00 p.m., Officer Sicknick began slurring his speech while talking to fellow officers,” court documents state. “He slumped backwards and lost consciousness, and emergency medical technicians were summoned for assistance. He was transported to the George Washington University Hospital where he remained on life support for nearly 24 hours and was pronounced dead at 8:51 p.m. the following day.”

    President Joe Biden awards the Presidential Citizens Medal to US Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick, whose mother Gladys Sicknick accepts on his behalf.

    Khater’s defense attorney said that Hogan should not sentence his client for the death of Sicknick, which the attorney noted was determined to be of natural causes. The judge agreed, noting he “can’t sentence Mr. Khater (for) causing officer Sicknick’s death.”

    Calling his client “sheepish” and “sweet and gentle,” Khater’s attorney said his actions that day amounted to seconds of “emotionally charged conduct” from a man who suffered from anxiety.

    In his statement to the judge, Khater began by highlighting how long he had already served behind bars and how it had “taken a huge toll” on him. “I wish I could take it all back,” he said. “It’s not who I am.”

    Hogan pressed Khater on why he did not expressly apologize to the officers in the courtroom and Sicknick’s family. “Somewhere along the lines we lost the sense of responsibility,” the judge said.

    “It’s the elephant in the room,” Khater said, adding that “there’s a civil thing going on” – in reference to a civil lawsuit from Sicknick’s estate – and that his lawyer had warned him about what to say in court Friday.

    “You should be afraid,” Hogan said of the lawsuit.

    Sicknick’s partner, Sandra Garza, had asked the judge to impose the maximum sentence for both men.

    “I realize it will not bring back Brian, nor give him peace in his last moments on earth, but it will give some sense of justice in my universe,” Garza wrote to the judge.

    “The only thing that surpasses my anger is my sadness,” Sicknick’s brother, Kenneth, wrote in his statement to the judge. “Sadness that the only time I can communicate with Brian is to speak into the nothingness and hope that he is listening.”

    Kenneth continued, “Brian was never one for the spotlight. He preferred to go about his business, not bringing attention to himself. My family and I quietly smile at each other when we attend an event honoring and remembering Brian and the weather turns bad. We know it’s Brian telling us that it is OK, he is OK, please don’t make a big deal about me, take care of the others that need it. That’s what he would have done.”

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Trump hits the trail in New Hampshire and South Carolina as he looks to rejuvenate 2024 campaign | CNN Politics

    Trump hits the trail in New Hampshire and South Carolina as he looks to rejuvenate 2024 campaign | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump on Saturday will deliver the keynote address at the New Hampshire Republican Party’s annual meeting as he returns to the trail looking to ramp up his 2024 presidential campaign.

    Trump will address hundreds of Republican leaders and grassroots activists at the meeting in Salem before headlining a second campaign event in South Carolina – also an early voting state – later in the day.

    The pair of events offers Trump an opportunity to reinvigorate his campaign, which has been slow-moving since he announced his candidacy in November. The former president remains the only declared major 2024 candidate, but several Republicans have been either publicly weighing or fueling speculation about potential bids.

    In New Hampshire, Trump is expected to formally announce that outgoing state GOP Chairman Stephen Stepanek will be added to his campaign operation in the Granite State as a senior adviser, a source familiar with the hire told CNN.

    Stepanek co-chaired Trump’s first presidential campaign before becoming the top GOP official in New Hampshire, serving two terms. He joins Trump’s team as the three-time presidential contender looks to repeat his 2016 victory in the first-in-the-nation primary, a task potentially complicated by waning support among state officials who are looking for a fresh face to top their party’s ticket.

    Trump’s decision to tap Stepanek was first reported by Politico.

    Stepanek had previously expressed enthusiasm about the former president’s upcoming address, saying in a statement, “President Trump has long been a strong defender of New Hampshire’s First in the Nation Primary Status and we are excited that he will join us to deliver remarks to our Members.”

    Trump’s visit comes days before the Democratic National Committee is set to meet to vote on a new proposed 2024 presidential primary calendar put forward by President Joe Biden that would strip New Hampshire of it’s first-in-the-nation primary status – a move strongly opposed by New Hampshire Democrats. Republicans have already locked in their early state lineup of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada – the same lineup Democrats previously had.

    New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, seen as a potential contender for the 2024 GOP nomination, has been sharply critical of Trump. He argued in December that Trump is “not the influence he thinks he is” and said that the Republican Party was “moving on” from him.

    After the New Hampshire event, Trump will fly to South Carolina, a state that helped pave his way to becoming the GOP nominee in 2016 and where he is expected to unveil a leadership team and a handful of endorsements. Among the top South Carolina Republicans scheduled to attend the event at the Statehouse in Columbia in support of the former president are Sen. Lindsey Graham, Gov. Henry McMaster and US Rep. Russell Fry, who won a primary last year over a GOP incumbent who had voted to impeach Trump.

    Trump continues to be investigated by the Department of Justice, and special counsel Jack Smith is overseeing the criminal probes into the retention of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and into parts of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. Both investigations implicate the conduct of Trump.

    Trump’s Saturday campaign events come in the wake of recent revelations that classified documents were also found at locations tied to both Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a separate special counsel to take over the investigation into the Obama-era classified documents found at Biden’s home and former private office.

    Earlier this week, Facebook parent company Meta announced it would restore Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram in the coming weeks, just over two years after suspending him in the wake of the January 6 attack.

    This story and headline have been updated.

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  • Peter Navarro contempt of Congress trial will be delayed for months, judge says | CNN Politics

    Peter Navarro contempt of Congress trial will be delayed for months, judge says | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge on Friday delayed the contempt of Congress trial for former Donald Trump adviser Peter Navarro, likely for months, to allow for additional pre-trial debate over the role executive privilege could play when the case goes to a jury.

    Over the course of a nearly two-hour hearing Friday, US District Judge Amit Mehta grilled Justice Department prosecutors on the position the department has taken, in previous internal Office of Legal Counsel opinions, that close aides to a president can be immune from congressional subpoenas.

    The trial had been scheduled to begin on Monday.

    Mehta had opened the door to the possibility that Navarro could present evidence at trial – potentially taking the stand – that he had been told by Trump that the former president was invoking executive privilege over his testimony to the House January 6 Committee.

    So far, Navarro has presented no evidence that Trump made a such an invocation when he was subpoenaed for documents and testimony by the now defunct House January 6 select committee.

    Federal prosecutors bristled at the idea that Navarro should still be allowed to present such evidence, arguing that it doesn’t exist in the first place and that if it did, it would not be up to the jury to decide whether such invocation would have shielded Navarro from the subpoenas.

    Mehta ultimately decided that the issue raised legal questions that needed to be decided before trial, so he postponed its Monday start date.

    The judge did not schedule a new date for the trial, and instead set a briefing schedule on the privilege questions that will extend through the end of March.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Jan. 6 Committee failed to hold social media companies to account for their role in the Capitol attack, staffers and witnesses say | CNN Business

    Jan. 6 Committee failed to hold social media companies to account for their role in the Capitol attack, staffers and witnesses say | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    “There might be someone getting shot tomorrow.”

    That was the warning from Twitter staff at an internal meeting on Jan. 5, 2021, the eve of the deadly attack on the US Capitol. It wasn’t the only stark warning Twitter management received ahead of the insurrection, according to two former Twitter employees who spoke to the House Jan. 6 Committee.

    But now these witnesses, along with some committee staff, are frustrated, saying the committee failed to adequately hold major social media companies to account for the role they played in the worst attack on the Capitol in 200 years.

    It was a “real missed opportunity,” Anika Collier Navaroli, a former Twitter employee turned whistleblower who gave evidence to the committee, told CNN in an interview last week. “I risked a lot to come forward and speak to the committee and to share the truth about these momentous occasions in history,” Navaroli said.

    CNN spoke to half a dozen people who interacted with and were familiar with the Jan. 6 Committee’s so-called “purple team” – a group that included staff with expertise in extremism and online misinformation. Some witnesses and staff said the committee pulled its punches when it came to Big Tech, failing to include critical parts of the team’s work in its final report. The discontent has poured into public view, with an unpublished draft of the team’s findings leaked and obtained by multiple news organizations, including CNN.

    One source familiar with the probe acknowledged that the committee obtained evidence that social media companies like Twitter largely ignored concerns that were raised internally prior to Jan. 6, but while those platforms should have done something at the time, the panel was limited in its ability to hold them accountable. A lawyer who worked on the committee said the panel did its job and focused on the unique and malign role of then-President Donald Trump in an unprecedented attack on American democracy. They also said the final report outlines structural issues across social media and society that need to be studied further.

    Disagreement about social media companies’ role in the Jan. 6 attack comes as 2023 looks to be a pivotal year for Silicon Valley firms in Washington, DC. Spurred in part by the release of Elon Musk’s so-called “Twitter Files,” House Republicans are set to investigate purported Big Tech censorship, particularly as it pertains to social media companies’ handling of a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop. Facebook parent company Meta’s high-stakes decision Wednesday to reinstate Trump on its platforms is also expected to stoke further scrutiny of tech companies’ influence in elections. At the Supreme Court, justices are set to rule this year on a case that could strip key protections afforded to tech companies moderating online speech.

    It isn’t just Navaroli who has taken issue with the committee’s findings. Three of the committee’s own staff members, part of the so-called purple team, published an article earlier this month, sharply criticizing the decisions made by social media companies in the lead up to the attack.

    The final report’s “emphasis on Trump meant important context was left on the cutting room floor,” they wrote.

    “Indeed, the lack of an official Committee report chapter or appendix dedicated exclusively to these matters does not mean our investigation exonerated social media companies for their failure to confront violent rhetoric,” they wrote.

    In wake of the decision, CNN has reviewed thousands of pages of deposition transcripts and other supporting documents the committee has publicly released that provide insight into Silicon Valley’s action and inaction in the critical period between Election Day 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021.

    Navaroli, who worked on Twitter’s safety policy team, told the committee she had repeatedly warned Twitter’s leadership in the lead-up to Jan. 6 about the dangers of not cracking down on what she said was violent rhetoric.

    Navaroli pointed to Trump’s infamous “stand back and stand by” message to the Proud Boys at the first 2020 presidential debate as one instance that incited more violent rhetoric on Twitter.

    Navaroli initially appeared before the committee as an anonymous whistleblower. Part of her testimony was played during the public committee hearings last summer, with her voice distorted to protect her identity. However, she later decided to go public, testifying before the committee for a second time, and speaking to The Washington Post.

    In an interview with CNN, Navaroli said she is speaking out now because she believes it is important for the “truth to be on the record.” She warned that without a full reckoning of social media’s role in the Capitol attack, political violence could once again ignite in the United States and elsewhere around the world, pointing to recent unrest in Brazil where supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country’s top government offices.

    The final report from the Jan. 6 Committee stated, “Social media played a prominent role in amplifying erroneous claims of election fraud.”

    But a far more blistering assessment was laid out in an unpublished draft document prepared by committee staff that was obtained by several news organizations, including CNN. Its key findings included:

    • “Social media platforms delayed response to the rise of far-right extremism—and President Trump’s incitement of his supporters—helped to facilitate the attack on January 6th.”
    • “Fear of reprisal and accusations of censorship from the political right compromised policy, process, and decision-making.”
    • “Twitter failed to take actions that could have prevented the spread of incitement to violence after the election.”
    • “Facebook did not fail to grapple with election delegitimization after the election so much as it did not even try.”

    Tech companies would broadly dispute these findings and have repeatedly said they are working to keep their platforms safe.

    Twitter’s previous management repeatedly outlined steps it said it was taking to crack down on hateful and violent rhetoric on its platform prior to Jan. 6, 2021, but stressed it didn’t want to unnecessarily limit free expression. Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter no longer has a responsive communications team, and the company did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Facebook parent company Meta, pointed to an earlier statement from the company where it said it was cooperating with the committee.

    Jacob Glick, an investigative counsel, conducted multiple depositions for the Jan. 6 Committee, including Navaroli's.

    Jacob Glick, an investigative counsel who conducted multiple depositions for the Jan. 6 Committee, including Navaroli’s, told CNN he believes the committee did its job to show “the American public the dangers posed by President Trump’s multilayered attack on our democracy.”

    He said the lack of awareness he believes tech companies have shown about their role in the attack was “stark.”

    “I don’t think social media companies recognize they were dealing with a sustained threat to American democracy,” he said.

    Glick, who now works at the Georgetown Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, said the purple team’s report had not been fact-checked, contains some errors, and should not have been leaked.

    Another source familiar with the committee’s work told CNN, “It couldn’t be clearer that Trump was at the center of this plot to overturn the election. Not everything staff worked on could fit into this extensive report and hearings, including some who wanted their work to be the center of the investigation.”

    How social media platforms write and enforce their rules has become a central and ongoing debate, raising the key question of what power the companies should wield when it comes to politicians like Trump.

    While some, including Navaroli, insist Trump repeatedly broke social media platforms’ rules by inciting violent rhetoric that should have resulted in his removal before Jan. 6, others including Musk and Twitter’s previous management, argue that what politicians say should be made available to as many people as possible so they can be held to account.

    Meta and Twitter have both reversed their bans on Trump.

    “We’re moving backwards and it’s concerning to me,” Navaroli said of the return of prominent election conspiracy theorists to major tech platforms. “History has taught us what happens when political speech on social media companies is allowed to fester unchecked.”

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