Lawyers for President Joe Biden found more classified documents at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than previously known, the White House acknowledged Saturday.

White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of classified documents were found during a search of Biden’s private library. The White House had said previously that only a single page was found there.

The latest disclosure is in addition to the discovery of documents found in December in Biden’s garage and in November at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, from his time as vice president. The apparent mishandling of classified documents and official records from the Obama administration is under investigation by a former U.S. attorney, Robert Hur, who was appointed as a special counsel on Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Sauber said in a statement Saturday that Biden’s personal lawyers, who did not have security clearances, stopped their search after finding the first page on Wednesday evening. Sauber found the remaining material Thursday, as he was facilitating their retrieval by the Justice Department.

“While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” Sauber said. “The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.”

Sauber has previously said that the White House was “confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.”

Sauber’s statement did not explain why the White House waited two days to provide an updated accounting of the number of classified records. The White House is already facing scrutiny for waiting more than two months to acknowledge the discovery of the initial group of documents at the Biden office.

On Thursday, asked whether Biden could guarantee that additional classified documents would not turn up in a further search, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, “You should assume that it’s been completed, yes.”

Sauber reiterated Saturday that the White House would cooperate with Hur’s investigation.

Bob Bauer, the president’s personal lawyer, said his legal team has “attempted to balance the importance of public transparency where appropriate with the established norms and limitations necessary to protect the investigation’s integrity.”

The Justice Department historically imposes a high legal bar before bringing criminal charges in cases involving the mishandling of classified information, with a requirement that someone intended to break the law as opposed to being merely careless or negligent in doing so. The primary statute governing the illegal removal and retention of classified documents makes it a crime to “knowingly” remove classified documents and store them in an unauthorized way.

The circumstances involving Biden, at least as so far known, differ from a separate investigation into the mishandling of classified documents at former President Donald Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.

In Trump’s case, special counsel Jack Smith is investigating whether anyone sought to obstruct their investigation into the retention of classified records at the Palm Beach estate. Justice Department officials have said Trump’s representatives failed to fully comply with a subpoena that sought the return of classified records, prompting agents to return to the home with a search warrant so they could collect additional materials.

 
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The Biden administration is nearing deals with two Pacific Island nations to extend ties that are considered critical to maintaining balance in the U.S.-China rivalry for influence in a region where the Chinese are rapidly expanding their economic, diplomatic and military clout. 

This week, the U.S. signed memorandums of understanding with the Marshall Islands and Palau that administration officials hope will pave the way for the quick completion of broader agreements that will govern the islands’ relations with Washington for the next two decades. Those ties grant the U.S. unique military and other security rights on the islands in return for substantial aid. 

The administration believes that extending those so-called “Compacts of Free Association” agreements will be key to efforts to retain American power and blunt Chinese assertiveness throughout the Indo-Pacific.

The memorandums signed this week lay out the amounts of money that the federal government will provide to the Marshall Islands and Palau if their compacts are successfully renegotiated. Negotiations on a similar memorandum with a third compact country, Micronesia, are ongoing.

The current 20-year compacts with the Marshall Islands and Micronesia expire this year; the current compact with Palau expires in 2024 but administration officials said they believe all three can be renewed and signed by mid- to late-spring.

Officials would not discuss specifics of the amounts of money involved because the deals aren’t yet legally binding and must still be reviewed and approved by Congress as part of the budget process.

A Micronesian news outlet, Marianas Variety, reported Thursday that the Marshall Islands will receive $700 million over four years under the memorandum that it signed. But that amount would cover only one-fifth of a 20-year compact extension and does not include the amount Palau would receive.

Joe Yun, Biden’s special presidential envoy for compact negotiations, said the amounts will be far greater than what the U.S. had provided in the past.

Islanders have long complained that the previous compacts they signed did not adequately address their needs or long-term environmental and health issues caused by U.S. nuclear testing in the 1950s and ’60s. Lawmakers had expressed concern dating back to 2021 that the administration was not giving enough attention to the matter.

Yun, who signed the memorandums with representatives of the Marshalls and Palau on Tuesday and Wednesday in Los Angeles, said the Marshall Islands would be compensated for such damage and would be given control over how that money is spent.

Yun said it would pay “nuclear-affected communities’ health, welfare and development” and noted that the U.S. had committed to building a new hospital as well as a museum in the Marshalls to preserve the memory and legacy of their role, notably in the Pacific theater during WWII.

This week’s signings clear the way for individual federal agencies — including the Postal Service, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Weather Service — to negotiate their own agreements with the Marshalls and Palau, which will then become part of the broader compacts.

Along with the federal money, those agencies provide their services to the islands. In return, the U.S. is given unique military and national security basing rights and privileges in an area where China is increasingly flexing its muscles.

Yun said China did not come up specifically in the negotiations, but it was a major element in all sides’ discussions.

“The threat from China is unstated but there is no question that China is a factor,” Yun said. Not only does China have a large and growing economic presence in the region, but the Marshall Islands and Palau both recognize Taiwan diplomatically. “They are coming under Chinese pressure,” he said.

China has steadily poached allies from Taiwan in the Pacific, including Kiribati and the Solomon Islands in 2019. The U.S. announced plans last year to reopen an embassy in the Solomon Islands, which has signed a security agreement with China.

Since World War II, the U.S. has treated the Marshall Islands, along with Micronesia and Palau, much like territories. On the Marshall Islands, the U.S. has developed military, intelligence and aerospace facilities in a region where China is particularly active.

In turn, U.S. money and jobs have benefited the islands’ economy. And many islanders have taken advantage of their ability to live and work in the U.S., moving in the thousands to Arkansas, Guam, Hawaii, Oregon and Oklahoma.
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 The recent discovery of classified documents at U.S. President Joe Biden’s former office at a think tank in Washington and his home in Delaware has invited comparisons to a case involving former President Donald Trump’s handling of government records.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Thursday that he was appointing a special counsel to examine the Biden documents case, just weeks after he named a special counsel to investigate Trump’s handling of classified documents at his Florida estate.

Meanwhile, Representative Jim Jordan, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said on Friday that the panel will investigate the Justice Department’s handling of both cases, saying “we have a similar situation happening to President Biden.”

But with much of both investigations under wraps, legal experts cautioned against drawing hasty comparisons.

“I think it’s very early to be making comparisons generally as there is more information publicly known about the Mar-a-Lago matter and other matters than there are about the [current] president’s case,” said Jordan Strauss, a former federal prosecutor now a managing director at Kroll.

Here is a look at the similarities and differences between the two cases and the stakes for Biden and Trump:

What documents were found

Both cases involve classified documents, including some marked “top secret.”

Federal investigators have recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings that left the White House with Trump, according to court documents.

About 100 of those documents, some of them classified as “top secret,” were seized during the FBI’s August 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

By comparison, Biden’s personal lawyers say they found a “small number” of classified documents – said to number fewer than a dozen – at the Washington office of the Penn Biden Center on Nov. 2, 2022, and another “small” batch at Biden’s Delaware home on Dec. 20.

But legal experts said the substance of the documents is more important than their number.

“What matters to me … is what those documents were,” said Charles Stimson, a former federal prosecutor and deputy assistant secretary of defense who is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.  “I mean you could have one document that had special compartmentalized information in it that could be incredibly damaging if disclosed to the wrong people versus 40 documents that were classified but not as important.”

The government has not disclosed the content of the classified documents under investigation, but news reports have suggested that among the records recovered from Trump was sensitive information about China and Iran’s missile program.

CNN reported this week that the 10 documents found in Biden’s office included “intelligence memos and briefing materials” about Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom.

What criminal charges could Biden and Trump face?

Under the Presidential Records Act, presidential records belong to the government and must be handed over to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of a president’s term in office.

What is more, the Espionage Act of 1917 prohibits the improper disclosure, publishing or mishandling of classified information.

Inadvertently taking classified documents home or to another unauthorized location doesn’t always result in a criminal penalty.

From prosecutors’ perspectives, far more important is what someone does when they find documents that they are not authorized to keep.

In Biden’s case, his lawyers say they turned over the documents to the government without delay and that they’re cooperating with the National Archives and the Justice Department.

In Trump’s case, the FBI executed a search warrant of Mar-a-Lago for documents in his possession after he failed to turn them over in response to a May 2022 subpoena.

Strauss said the Justice Department investigation of Trump’s handling of classified documents appears to be more focused on “what the former president’s actions were after receiving the demand and the subpoena.”

With the investigation into the Biden documents case, “it’s too early to know exactly what the focus will be on President Biden,” Strauss said.

“Depending on how this is handled, can be anything from a simple security violation all the way up to a much more serious crime, and that’s all very fact dependent,” Strauss said.

Who are the special counsels?

Citing “extraordinary circumstances,” Garland has appointed separate special counsels to investigate the Trump and Biden documents cases.

Jack Smith, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, is leading the investigation of Trump’s handling of documents.

Robert Hur, a former U.S. Attorney and Justice Department official under Trump, is heading the Biden probe.

A special counsel is a quasi-independent prosecutor appointed when a perceived conflict of interest might cast doubt on the integrity of a Justice Department investigation.

While the appointment of a semi-independent prosecutor will shield the investigations from any perception of undue political influence, it is ultimately the attorney general who will decide whether to file any criminal charges against either Trump or Biden, Stimson said. 

“And so that process has to play out.”

Complicating any decision by Garland is a long-standing Justice Department legal opinion that states a sitting president can’t be indicted.

“So it definitely makes things harder for the Justice Department, particularly for a Justice Department that is so publicly committed to restoring faith in the rule of law,” Strauss said.
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With rain-soaked California expected to see more stormy weather over the weekend and into next week, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and other state and federal officials pleaded with residents Friday to stay alert to possibly more flooding and damage.

A series of storms has walloped the state since late December, leaving at least 19 people dead. On Friday, 6,000 people were under evacuation orders and another 20,000 households were without power, said Nancy Ward, the director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

Homes have flooded, levees breached and topped, and mudslides and hurricane-force winds have slammed parts of the state, including a tornado touchdown in Northern California, she said at a press briefing with Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who was in California to tour damage.

“People will become complacent, but the ground is saturated. It is extremely, extremely dangerous,” Ward said. “And that water can continue to rise well after the storms have passed.”

The ongoing atmospheric river pattern brought showers to Northern California early Friday, and additional surges of moisture, which will be even stronger, are expected to again spread rain and snow elsewhere in the state over the coming days.

In the last 18 days, a state plagued by drought has averaged more than 23 centimeters of rainfall a day — a remarkable amount that has seen some locations meet their average annual rainfall already, said David Lawrence, meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

A Saturday storm will bring widespread, powerful rainfall and heavy mountain snowfall — with wind gusts of up to 97 kph and the possibility of more trees falling and power outages, he said.

There have been at least 19 storm-related deaths, and half of those have involved motorists, with some of the deaths preventable if drivers had heeded road closure signs, said Sean Duryee, acting commissioner of the California Highway Patrol.

On Friday, Newsom visited the upscale community of Montecito in Santa Barbara County — which had been evacuated earlier in the week — on the fifth-year anniversary of the mudslide that killed 23 people and destroyed more than 100 homes in the coastal enclave.

He thanked members of the California National Guard for clearing debris out of a catch basin that was constructed after the mudslide in order to divert rain. He also asked residents to exercise caution, and to heed warnings from public safety and law enforcement.

“I know how fatigued you all are,” Newsom said. “Just maintain a little more vigilance over the course of the next weekend.”

On Monday, President Joe Biden issued an emergency declaration to support storm response and relief efforts in more than a dozen counties, but Newsom is still waiting on the White House to declare a major disaster declaration that would provide more resources.

Flood warnings were in effect for the Salinas River in an agricultural valley about 145 kilometers south of San Francisco. At least 8,094 hectares of farmland were at risk of flooding, the National Weather Service said.

In some parts of Northern California, cars were submerged, trees uprooted, and roofs blown off homes.

In Southern California, authorities determined that a storm-related sewage spill into the Ventura River was much bigger than initially thought. Two Ojai Valley Sanitary District sewer lines damaged on Jan. 9 spilled more 53 million liters, the Ventura County Environmental Health Division said Thursday. Warning signs have been placed along the river and beaches.

East of Los Angeles, Santa Anita Park proactively canceled Saturday’s horse-racing event, an eight-race card, due to the rain forecast. Those races will be run as extras on three subsequent days, the track said.

Damage assessments, which have already started, are expected to surpass $1 billion. 
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An upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case that asks whether tech firms can be held liable for damages related to algorithmically generated content recommendations has the ability to “upend the internet,” according to a brief filed by Google this week.

The case, Gonzalez v. Google LLC, is a long-awaited opportunity for the high court to weigh in on interpretations of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. A provision of federal law that has come under fire from across the political spectrum, Section 230 shields technology firms from liability for content published by third parties on their platforms, but also allows those same firms to curate or bar certain content.

The case arises from a complaint by Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter was killed in an attack by members of the terror group ISIS in Paris in 2015. Gonzales argues that Google helped ISIS recruit members because YouTube, the online video hosting service owned by Google, used a video recommendation algorithm that suggested videos published by ISIS to individuals who displayed interest in the group.

Gonzalez’s complaint argues that by recommending content, YouTube went beyond simply providing a platform for ISIS videos, and should therefore be held accountable for their effects.

Dystopia warning

The case has garnered the attention of a multitude of interested parties, including free speech advocates who want tech firms’ liability shield left largely intact. Others argue that because tech firms take affirmative steps to keep certain content off their platforms, their claims to be simple conduits of information ring hollow, and that they should therefore be liable for the material they publish.

In its brief, Google painted a dire picture of what might happen if the latter interpretation were to prevail, arguing that it “would turn the internet into a dystopia where providers would face legal pressure to censor any objectionable content. Some might comply; others might seek to evade liability by shutting their eyes and leaving up everything, no matter how objectionable.”

Not everyone shares Google’s concern.

“Actually all it would do is make it so that Google and other tech companies have to follow the law just like everybody else,” Megan Iorio, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told VOA.

“Things are not so great on the internet for certain groups of people right now because of Section 230,” said Iorio, whose organization filed a friend of the court brief in the case. “Section 230 makes it so that tech companies don’t have to respond when somebody tells them that non-consensual pornography has been posted on their site and keeps on proliferating. They don’t have to take down other things that a court has found violate the person’s privacy rights. So you know, to [say] that returning Section 230 to its original understanding is going to create a hellscape is hyperbolic.”

Unpredictable effects

Experts said the Supreme Court might try to chart a narrow course that leaves some protections intact for tech firms, but allows liability for recommendations. However, because of the prevalence of algorithmic recommendations on the internet, the only available method to organize the dizzying array of content available online, any ruling that affects them could have a significant impact.

“It has pretty profound implications, because with tech regulation and tech law, things can have unintended consequences,” John Villasenor, a professor of engineering and law and director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, told VOA.

“The challenge is that even a narrow ruling, for example, holding that targeted recommendations are not protected, would have all sorts of very complicated downstream consequences,” Villasenor said. “If it’s the case that targeted recommendations aren’t protected under the liability shield, then is it also true that search results that are in some sense customized to a particular user are also unprotected?”

26 words

The key language in Section 230 has been called, “the 26 words that created the internet.” That section reads as follows:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher of or speaker of information provided by another information content provider.”

At the time the law was drafted in the 1990s, people around the world were flocking to an internet that was still in its infancy. It was an open question whether an internet platform that gave individual third parties the ability to post content on them, such as a bulletin board service, was legally liable for that content.

Recognizing that a patchwork of state-level libel and defamation laws could leave developing internet companies exposed to crippling lawsuits, Congress drafted language meant to shield them. That protection is credited by many for the fact that U.S. tech firms, particularly in Silicon Valley, rose to dominance on the internet in the 21st century.

Because of the global reach of U.S. technology firms, the ruling in Gonzalez v. Google LLC is likely to echo far beyond the United States when it is handed down.

Legal groundwork

The groundwork for the Supreme Court’s decision to take the case was laid in 2020, when Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in response to an appeal that, “in an appropriate case, we should consider whether the text of this increasingly important statute aligns with the current state of immunity enjoyed by internet platforms.”

That statement by Thomas, arguably the court’s most conservative member, heartened many on the right who are concerned that “Big Tech” firms enjoy too much cultural power in the U.S., including the ability to deny a platform to individuals with whose views they disagree.

Gonzalez v. Google LLC is remarkable in that many cases that make it to the Supreme Court do so in part because lower courts have issued conflicting decisions, requiring an authoritative ruling from the high court to provide legal clarity.

Gonzalez’s case, however, has been dismissed by two lower courts, both of which held that Section 230 rendered Google immune from the suit.

Conservative concerns

Politicians have been calling for reform of Section 230 for years, with both Republicans and Democrats joining the chorus, though frequently for different reasons.

Former President Donald Trump regularly railed against large technology firms, threatening to use the federal government to rein them in, especially when he believed that they were preventing him or his supporters from getting their messages out to the public.

His concern became particularly intense during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when technology firms began working to limit the spread of social media accounts that featured misinformation about the virus and the safety of vaccinations.

Trump was eventually kicked off Twitter and Facebook after using those platforms to spread false claims about the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, and to help organize a rally that preceded the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Major figures in the Republican Party are active in the Gonzalez case. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Texas Senator Ted Cruz have both submitted briefs in the case urging the court to crack down on Google and large tech firms in general.

“Confident in their ability to dodge liability, platforms have not been shy about restricting access and removing content based on the politics of the speaker, an issue that has persistently arisen as Big Tech companies censor and remove content espousing conservative political views,” Cruz writes.

Biden calls for reform

Section 230 criticism has come from both sides of the aisle. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden published an essay in The Wall Street Journal urging “Democrats and Republicans to come together to pass strong bipartisan legislation to hold Big Tech accountable.”

Biden argues for a number of reforms, including improved privacy protections for individuals, especially children, and more robust competition, but he leaves little doubt about what he sees as a need for Section 230 reform.

“[W]e need Big Tech companies to take responsibility for the content they spread and the algorithms they use,” he writes. “That’s why I’ve long said we must fundamentally reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from legal responsibility for content posted on their sites.”
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The U.S. Department of the Interior will reform its regulations for the development of wind energy facilities on the country’s outer continental shelf to help meet crucial climate goals, it said in a statement on Thursday.

The proposed rule changes would save developers a projected $1 billion over a 20-year period by streamlining burdensome processes, clarifying ambiguous provisions, and lowering compliance costs, , the statement said.

“Updating these regulations will facilitate the safe and efficient development of offshore wind energy resources, provide certainty to developers and help ensure a fair return to the U.S. taxpayers,” U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in the release.

The reforms come days after the department named Elizabeth Klein, a lawyer who worked in the Obama and Clinton administrations, to head its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), overseeing offshore oil, gas and wind development.

As part of its offshore clean energy program, the BOEM has over the past two years approved the first two commercial scale offshore wind projects in the United States, held three lease auctions including the first-ever sale off the coast of California, and explored extending offshore wind to other areas like the Gulf of Mexico.

The department expects to hold as many as four more auctions and review at least 16 new commercial facilities by 2025, adding more than 22 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy.

In September last year, President Joe Biden’s administration set a goal of having 15 GW of floating offshore wind capacity by 2035 to accelerate development of next-generation floating wind farms in line with its target of permitting 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030.
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The U.S. Justice Department announced on Friday a new rule targeting pistol attachments known as “stabilizing braces,” implementing a key move in the Biden administration’s efforts to beef up gun control regulations.

A stabilizing brace is an attachment to a pistol that functionally turns it into a short-barreled rifle, similar to a sawed-off shotgun. Such weapons are considered particularly deadly as they offer the power of a traditional rifle but are much easier to conceal.

For decades, short-barreled rifles have been subject to strict regulations, including a law known as the National Rifle Act, which requires additional taxation and background checks for private transfers, among other provisions.

The new rule clarifies that pistols modified by a stabilizing brace are subject to those additional requirements, department officials said.

“This rule enhances public safety and prevents people from circumventing the laws Congress passed almost a century ago. In the days of Al Capone, Congress said back then that short-barreled rifles and sawed-off shotguns should be subjected to greater legal requirements than most other guns,” said Steven Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Last year, President Joe Biden and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced they were planning measures to tackle stabilizing braces as well as “ghost guns” — a type of firearm that is assembled by users and practically untraceable.

While Democrats in Congress have pushed aggressively for new regulations of stabilizing braces, most Republicans have opposed such measures, portraying them as an infringement on Americans’ constitutional gun rights.

The new rule gives owners, manufacturers and distributors 120 days to report their stabilizing braces to the ATF tax-free. They may also remove the stabilizing brace or turn in any pistol modified by a stabilizing brace to the ATF.

It goes into effect once it is published in the Federal Register, likely next week, department officials said.
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The Biden administration is sending its first representative to Africa since promising in December that several high-level officials would visit in 2023. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s three-stop visit is aimed at strengthening economic ties with the continent. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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At least one administrator at the Virginia school where a 6-year-old boy shot a teacher last week was aware the boy might have had a gun, but no weapon was found when the boy’s backpack was searched before the shooting, school officials said Friday. 

Superintendent George Parker told parents at Richneck Elementary School during a virtual meeting Thursday that a school administrator learned the boy might have had a gun, according to Michelle Price, a spokesperson for Newport News Public Schools. Virginia’s WAVY-TV first reported the information.  

The administrator has not been identified, nor is it clear how the person learned the boy might have had a gun.  

Once alerted, school officials searched the boy’s backpack but did not find the gun. Why the gun was not ultimately found at the time has not been explained. The shooting took place about 2-1/2 hours after the boy’s backpack was searched.  

Teacher Abigail Zwerner, 25, was shot a week ago by the young student. Police hailed the teacher as a hero earlier this week for managing to evacuate students from her classroom even after she had been shot. Police said Friday that Zwerner’s last known condition was stable.  

The boy who shot Zwerner was in the custody of the Newport News Department of Human Services, police said. 

Police said the investigation was continuing and that once the prove was  complete, they would present the findings to the commonwealth’s attorney in Newport News, who would make any decision regarding possible charges against the boy’s mother. 

The mother legally purchased the 9 mm Taurus handgun, police have said, but could face misdemeanor charges if it’s found she did not properly secure the weapon in her home. 

The boy took the handgun from his home, placed it in his backpack and removed it while Zwerner was teaching class, Newport News Police Chief Steve Drew said earlier this week. The boy pointed the gun at the teacher and fired once. Zwerner was shot through the hand and into the chest. 

After the shot, another woman who works at the school rushed into the classroom and held the boy down while Zwerner escorted the estimated 16 to 20 students out, Drew said. When the police arrived, they found the gun on the floor. 

Parker previously told reporters the school was unprepared for a 6-year-old bringing a gun to school and firing it, saying this marked only the third time since 1970 that a child age 6 or younger had discharged a weapon at a U.S. school. 

The Newport News school board announced Thursday that metal detectors would be installed in every school in the city following the shooting.
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen notified Congress on Friday that the U.S. is projected to reach its debt limit on Thursday and will then resort to “extraordinary measures” to avoid default.

In a letter to House and Senate leaders, Yellen said her actions will buy time until Congress can pass legislation that will either raise the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing authority or suspend it again for a period — but, she said, it’s “critical that Congress act in a timely manner.”

“Failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans and global financial stability,” she said.

“In the past, even threats that the U.S. government might fail to meet its obligations have caused real harms, including the only credit rating downgrade in the history of our nation in 2011,” she said. Yellen was referring to the debt ceiling impasse during Barack Obama’s presidency, when Republicans had also just won a House majority.

Possible showdown

In this new Congress, the debt ceiling debate will almost certainly trigger a political showdown between newly empowered GOP lawmakers, who now control the House and want to cut spending, and President Joe Biden and Democrats, who had enjoyed one-party control of Washington for the past two years.

The White House has insisted that it won’t allow the nation’s credit to be held captive to the demands of GOP lawmakers.

“We have seen both Republicans and Democrats come together to deal with this issue,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Friday. “It is one of the basic items that Congress has to deal with, and it should be done without conditions.”

House Republican leaders liken the debt ceiling to a credit card limit and have said they would only raise the statutory ceiling if doing so also secures a spending overhaul. In an interview this week on Fox News Channel, new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy stopped short of saying House Republicans would go so far as to refuse to pass the annual spending bills needed to fund the government, as happened more than a decade ago during an earlier debt ceiling showdown in Congress.

“We’re going to look at every single dollar spent,” he said.

But any effort to compromise with House Republicans could force Biden to bend on his own priorities, whether that’s money for the IRS to ensure that wealthier Americans pay what they owe or domestic programs for children and the poor.

Yellen said that while Treasury can’t estimate how long the extraordinary measures will allow the U.S. to continue to pay the government’s obligations, “it is unlikely that cash and extraordinary measures will be exhausted before early June.”

‘Not the time for panic’

Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told reporters Friday that “this is not the time for panic, but it’s certainly a time for policymakers to begin negotiations in earnest.”

“Most policymakers agree that we have a major fiscal challenge. As a country, our debt is unsustainable,” he said, and “there’s no reason why we couldn’t agree on measures to improve our fiscal outcome and also ensure that we are paying all of our bills in full and on time.”

The Treasury first used extraordinary measures in 1985 and has used them at least 16 times since, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog. But the extraordinary measures only work for so long and would probably run out — and put the U.S. at risk of default.

Those measures include divesting some payments, such as contributions to federal employees’ retirement plans, to provide some headroom to make other payments that are deemed essential, including those for Social Security and debt instruments.

Past forecasts suggest a default could instantly bury the country in a deep recession right at a moment of slowing global growth as the U.S. and much of the world face high inflation due to the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The financial markets could crash, and several million workers could be laid off.

The aftershocks could be felt for years. Moody’s Analytics called this risk “cataclysmic” in a 2021 forecast before the previous debt ceiling increase, suggesting that the resulting chaos would be due to government dysfunction rather than the underlying condition of the U.S. economy.
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Donald Trump’s company was fined $1.6 million Friday as punishment for a scheme in which the former president’s top executives dodged personal income taxes on lavish job perks — a symbolic, hardly crippling blow for an enterprise boasting billions of dollars in assets.

A fine was the only penalty a judge could impose on the Trump Organization for its conviction last month for 17 tax crimes, including conspiracy and falsifying business records.

The amount imposed by Judge Juan Manuel Merchan was the maximum allowed by law, an amount equal to double the taxes a small group of executives avoided on benefits including rent-free apartments in Trump buildings, luxury cars and private school tuition.

Trump himself was not on trial and denied any knowledge of his executives evading taxes illegally.

The Trump Organization was charged through its subsidiaries Trump Corp., which was fined $810,000; and Trump Payroll Corp., which was fined $800,000.

While the fines — less than the cost of a Trump Tower apartment — aren’t big enough to impact the company’s operations or future, the conviction is a black mark on the Republican’s reputation as a savvy businessman as he mounts a campaign to regain the White House.

Neither the former president or his children, who helped run and promote the Trump Organization, were in the courtroom for the sentencing hearing.

In a statement released after sentencing, the Trump Organization said it did nothing wrong and would appeal the verdict.

“New York has become the crime and murder capital of the world, yet these politically motivated prosecutors will stop at nothing to get President Trump and continue the never-ending witch-hunt which began the day he announced his presidency,” the statement said.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said the fines constitute “a fraction of the revenue” of the Trump Organization and called the scheme “far-reaching and brazen.”

“All of these corrupt practices were part of the Trump Organization executive compensation package, and it was certainly cheaper than paying higher salaries to those executives,” he said.

Defense attorneys had argued that the fine should be slightly lower because, they said, state law bars fines on multiple counts of the same charge. They estimated the penalty should have been $750,000 or less for each of the two Trump entities.

Because the Trump Organization is a corporation and not a person, a fine is the only way a judge can punish the company after its conviction last month for 17 tax crimes, including charges of conspiracy and falsifying business records.

The company asked for 30 days to pay the fine; the judge ordered it to pay in 14 days.

By law, the maximum penalty that can be imposed by Merchan is around $1.6 million, an amount equal to double the taxes a small group of executives avoided on benefits including rent-free apartments in Trump buildings, luxury cars and private school tuition.

Trump himself was not on trial and denied any knowledge of his executives evading taxes illegally.

While a fine of that amount isn’t likely to affect the company’s operations or future, the conviction is a black mark on the Republican’s reputation as a savvy businessman as he mounts a campaign to regain the White House.

Besides the company, only one executive was charged in the case: former Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty last summer to evading taxes on $1.7 million in compensation.

He was sentenced Tuesday to five months in jail.

Trump has said the case against his company was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” waged against him by vindictive Democrats. The company’s lawyers have vowed to appeal the verdict.

The criminal case involved financial practices and pay arrangements that the company halted when Trump was elected president in 2016.

Over his years as the company’s chief moneyman, Weisselberg had received a rent-free apartment in a Trump-branded building in Manhattan with a view of the Hudson River. He and his wife drove Mercedes-Benz cars, leased by the company. When his grandchildren went to an exclusive private school, Trump paid their tuition.

A handful of other executives received similar perks.

When called to testify against the Trump Organization at trial, Weisselberg testified that he didn’t pay taxes on that compensation, and that he and a company vice president conspired to hide the perks by having the company issue falsified W-2 forms.

Weisselberg also attempted to take responsibility on the witness stand, saying nobody in the Trump family knew what he was doing. He choked up as he told jurors, “It was my own personal greed that led to this.”

Trump Organization lawyers repeated the mantra, “Weisselberg did it for Weisselberg,” contending that he had gone rogue and betrayed the company’s trust.

Assistant district attorney Joshua Steinglass attempted to refute that claim in his closing argument, showing jurors a lease Trump signed himself for Weisselberg’s apartment.

“Mr. Trump is explicitly sanctioning tax fraud,” Steinglass argued.

A jury convicted the company of tax fraud on December 6.

The company’s fine will be barely a dent in the bottom line for an enterprise with a global portfolio of golf courses, hotels and development deals. It could face more trouble outside of court due to the reputational damage, such as difficulty finding new deals and business partners.

The Trump Organization’s sentencing doesn’t end Trump’s battle with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who said the sentencing “closes this important chapter of our ongoing investigation into the former president and his businesses. We now move onto the next chapter.”

Bragg, a Democrat who took office in January, was referring to a related investigation of Trump that began under his predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr.

At the same time, New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing Trump and the Trump Organization, alleging they misled banks and others about the value of its many assets, a practice she dubbed the “art of the steal.”

James, a Democrat, is asking a court to ban Trump and his three eldest children from running any New York-based company and is seeking to fine them at least $250 million. A judge has set an October trial date. As a preliminary measure, he appointed a monitor for the company while the case is pending.

Trump faces several other legal challenges as he looks to retake the White House in 2024.

A special grand jury in Atlanta has investigated whether Trump and his allies committed any crimes while trying to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.

Last month, the House January 6 committee voted to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department for Trump’s role in sparking the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The FBI is also investigating Trump’s storage of classified documents.
…

An American citizen who had been detained in Russia for nearly a year was released Thursday.  

Taylor Dudley, who is 35, was detained when he crossed from Poland into Kaliningrad, near Moscow, last year in April.  

CNN reports the Michigan resident’s detention was not widely reported because his family wanted the negotiations for his release to remain private.

He was attending a music festival in Poland, but it is not clear why he crossed the border into Russia.  

It appears that no exchange was made for Dudley on the U.S. side.  

Negotiations for Dudley’s release were headed up by former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. 
…

Annual tributes and commemorations of the life and legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which begin nationwide on Friday, typically include a mix of politics, faith and community service.
For this year’s celebration, the 37th since its federal recognition in 1986, a descendant of King hopes to spur progress by helping more Americans personalize the ongoing struggle for racial equity and harmony. Bernice King, daughter of the late civil rights icon, said people must move beyond platitudes and deepen their own commitments to the needed progress.

“We need to change our thinking,” said King, who is CEO of The King Center in Atlanta.

Under the theme “It Starts With Me,” the center launched its slate of Martin Luther King Jr. Day events on Thursday with youth and adult summits to educate the public on ways to transform unjust systems in the U.S.

The summits were streamed online and are available for replay on the center’s social media accounts.

“It seems like we’re going through these cycles, because we’re trying to approach everything with the same mindset that all of this (racial inequity) was created,” King told The Associated Press.

“Change can be very small,” she said, “but transformation means that now we changed the character, form, and nature of something. That’s something we have not seen yet.”

Other King holiday weekend events include a statue unveiling in Boston, a symposium on police brutality in Akron, Ohio, and community service projects in many U.S. cities. The holiday kicks off another year of advocacy on a racial justice agenda — from police reforms and strengthening voting rights to solutions on economic and educational disparities — that has been stymied by culture wars and partisan gridlock in Washington and nationwide.

On Sunday morning, President Joe Biden is due to speak at a commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the historic Atlanta house of worship where King preached from 1960 until his assassination in 1968. The church is pastored by the Rev. Sen. Raphael Warnock, who recently won election to a full term as Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator.

And on Monday, the federal observance of the King holiday, commemorations continue in Atlanta, as well as in the nation’s capital and beyond.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who got his start as a civil rights organizer in his teens as youth director of an anti-poverty project of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, will hold his annual King holiday events in Washington, D.C. and New York on Monday. Martin Luther King III, son of the civil rights icon, is expected to attend Sharpton’s breakfast gala in Washington with his wife, Drum Major Institute president Arndrea Waters King, who will be honored alongside former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Monday afternoon in New York City, Sharpton, the founder and president of the National Action Network, is scheduled to convene more than 30 prominent state and local elected officials for a public policy forum at the House of Justice, his organization’s headquarters in Harlem.

In the decades since its establishment, the King holiday has become an opportunity for elected officials and candidates seeking office to establish their civil rights and social justice credentials. Bernice King said partisanship among politicians has been a major obstacle to legislative solutions on civil rights.

Overcoming that is “going to require elevating to a place where your loyalty is to humanity, not to party,” she said.

“If we don’t find humane ways to create policies and implement practices out of those policies, we’re going to continue in this vicious cycle of a downward spiral towards destruction and chaos.”

Outside of establishment politics, many King holiday weekend events are opportunities for Americans to give back, reflect on the civil right icon’s legacy or deal locally with racial discrimination in their own communities.

A massive monument to Martin Luther King Jr. is scheduled to be dedicated Friday in Boston, where the leader first met his wife, Coretta Scott King. In the early 1950s, he was a doctoral student in theology at Boston University and she was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music.

The $10 million sculpture called “The Embrace” consisting of four intertwined arms was inspired by a photo of the Kings embracing when King Jr. learned he had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. It was designed byHank Willis Thomas and MASS Design Group and was selected out of 126 proposals.

Imari Paris Jeffries, executive director of EmbraceBoston, the organization behind the memorial, noted the significance of the sculpture’s placement at the Boston Common, America’s oldest public park and a high traffic area with millions of city residents and visitors walking its paths every year.

“I think Boston has this reputation of being this city of heroes and abolitionists, like W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglas, simultaneously with this reputation of not being friendly and in some cases being described as racist. So there’s this tension between these two images of Boston. Having the memorial there is part of our intention to transform our city’s perspective.”

In Akron, Ohio, the family of Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old Black man killed after police officers shot at him 46 times as he fled last July, will hold a symposium on public safety and mental health with local civil rights leaders on Saturday. Walker’s case received widespread attention from activists, including from the King family.

And for the seventh year, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation will mark a post-King holiday National Day of Racial Healing. On Tuesday, communities nationwide are scheduled to hold town halls to continue dialog on healing that the foundation says is needed to achieve racial equity.

“Regardless of who you are, there’s a journey of healing that everyone must consider,” said La June Montgomery Tabron, CEO of the Kellogg Foundation. “We’ve all been impacted by racism.”
…

A giant storm system billowing across the South on Thursday killed at least six people in central Alabama, where a tornado ripped roofs off homes and uprooted trees in historic Selma, while another person was killed in Georgia, where severe winds knocked out power to tens of thousands of people.

In Autauga County, Alabama, 66 kilometers northeast of Selma, at least six fatalities were confirmed, and an estimated 40 homes were damaged or destroyed by a tornado that cut a 32-kilometer path across two rural communities, said Ernie Baggett, the county’s emergency management director.

Several mobile homes were launched into the air and at least 12 people were injured severely enough to be taken to hospitals by emergency responders, Baggett told The Associated Press. He said crews were focused Thursday night on cutting through downed trees to look for people who may need help.

“It really did a good bit of damage. This is the worst that I’ve seen here in this county,” Baggett said.

In Georgia, a passenger died when a tree fell on a vehicle in Jackson during the storm, Butts County Coroner Lacey Prue said. In the same county southeast of Atlanta, the storm appeared to have knocked a freight train off its tracks, officials said.

Officials in Griffin, south of Atlanta, told local news outlets that multiple people had been trapped inside an apartment complex after trees fell on it. Firefighters also cut a Griffin man loose who had been pinned for hours under a tree that fell on his house. A high school was damaged, and students were held at four middle schools for parents to pick up after officials determined it was unsafe to run buses. The city of Griffin imposed a curfew from 10 p.m. Thursday to 6 a.m. Friday.

School systems in at least six Georgia counties on the southern fringes of metro Atlanta canceled classes on Friday. Those systems enroll a total of 90,000 students.

Nationwide, there were 33 separate tornado reports Thursday from the National Weather Service as of Thursday evening, with a handful of tornado warnings still in effect in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. However, the reports were not yet confirmed and some of them could later be classified as wind damage after assessments are done in coming days.

In Selma, a city etched in the history of the civil rights movement, a tornado cut a wide path through the downtown area, where brick buildings collapsed, oak trees were uprooted, cars were on their side and power lines were left dangling. Plumes of thick black smoke rose over the city from a fire burning. It wasn’t immediately known whether the storm caused the blaze.

Selma Mayor James Perkins said no fatalities have been reported, but several people were seriously injured. First responders were continuing to assess the damage and officials hoped to get an aerial view of the city Friday morning.

“We have a lot of downed power lines,” he said. “There is a lot of danger on the streets.”

With widespread power outages, the Selma City Council held a meeting on the sidewalk, using lights from cellphones, to declare a state of emergency. A high school was opened as a shelter, officials said.

Mattie Moore was among Selma residents who picked up boxed meals offered by a charity downtown.

“Thank God that we’re here. It’s like something you see on TV,” Moore said of all the destruction.

A city of about 18,000 people, Selma is about 80 kilometers west of the Alabama capital of Montgomery. It was a flashpoint of the civil rights movement and where Alabama state troopers viciously attacked Black people advocating for voting rights as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.

After the tornado passed, Krishun Moore emerged from her home to the sound of children crying and screaming. She and her mother encouraged the kids to keep screaming until they found the two of them on top of the roof of a damaged apartment.

She estimated the kids were about 1 and 4 years old. Both of them are OK, she said through Facebook messenger.

Malesha McVay drove parallel to the tornado with her family. She said it got less than 2 kilometers from her home before suddenly turning.

“We stopped and we prayed. We followed it and prayed,” she said. “It was a 100% God thing that it turned right before it hit my house.”

She took video of the giant twister, which would turn black as it swept away home after home.

“It would hit a house, and black smoke would swirl up,” she said. “It was very terrifying.”

About 40,000 customers were without power in Alabama on Thursday night, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide. In Georgia, about 86,000 customers were without electricity after the storm system carved a path across a tier of counties just south of Atlanta.

The storm hit in Griffin, south of Atlanta, with winds damaging a shopping area, local news outlets reported. A Hobby Lobby store partially lost its roof, and at least one car was flipped in the parking lot of a nearby Walmart.

Damage was also reported west of downtown Atlanta in Douglas County and Cobb County, with Cobb County government posting a damage report showing a crumbled cinderblock wall at a warehouse in suburban Austell.

In Kentucky, the National Weather Service in Louisville confirmed that an EF-1 tornado struck Mercer County and said crews were surveying damage in a handful of other counties.

Three factors — a natural La Nina weather cycle, warming of the Gulf of Mexico likely related to climate change and a decades-long shift of tornadoes from the west to east — came together to make Thursday’s tornado outbreak unusual and damaging, said Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University who studies tornado trends.

The La Nina, a cooling of parts of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide, was a factor in making a wavy jet stream that brought a cold front through, Gensini said. But that’s not enough for a tornado outbreak. What’s needed is moisture.

Normally the air in the Southeast is fairly dry this time of year but the dew point was twice what is normal, likely because of unusually warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, which is likely influenced by climate change. That moisture hit the cold front and everything was in place, Gensini said.
…

A New York man pleaded guilty Thursday to a hate-crime manslaughter charge for beating a Chinese immigrant who was collecting cans to earn money.

Jarrod Powell, 51, is expected to get a 22-year prison sentence for the 2021 death of Yao Pan Ma. The killing drew national attention as part of a rise in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in New York and around the country.

“This unprovoked attack took the life of Yao Pan Ma and took away a sense of security for so many in the AAPI community in New York,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement Thursday.

A message seeking comment was left for Powell’s attorney.

Ma was abruptly attacked from behind, knocked to the ground and kicked and stomped in the head on an East Harlem street on April 23, 2021, authorities said. His attacker fled and left him unconscious; a nearby bus driver flagged down an ambulance.

Ma, 61, suffered a traumatic brain injury and never regained consciousness. He died from his injuries eight months later.

Powell was arrested four days after the assault. In pleading guilty, he acknowledged that he targeted Ma because the victim was Asian, according to Bragg’s office.

Ma’s loved ones approved of the plea agreement, family spokesperson Karlin Chan said.

“While this will not bring back Mr. Yao Pan Ma, it is a significant sentence that we can accept,” Chan said, noting that the plea spares the family the pain of a trial.

Ma and his wife immigrated to the U.S. in October 2018 from China, where Ma was a dim sum chef, according to Chan. He has said Ma and his wife both lost their jobs — his as a kitchen worker, hers as a home care attendant — during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, and the couple then started collecting cans and bottles to return for refunds.
…

A top U.S. intelligence official on Thursday urged Congress to renew sweeping powers granted to American spy agencies to surveil and examine communications, saying they were critical to stopping terrorism, cyberattacks and other threats.

The remarks by Army General Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency, opened what’s expected to be a contentious debate over provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that expire at year’s end. The bipartisan consensus in favor of expanded surveillance powers in the years after September 11 has given way to increased skepticism, especially among some Republicans who believe spy agencies used those powers to undermine former President Donald Trump.

The new GOP majority in the U.S. House has already formed a panel on the “weaponization of the federal government.” And progressive Democrats have pushed for more curbs on warrantless surveillance.

The NSA and other spy agencies use authorities under FISA’s Section 702 to collect huge swaths of foreign communications, which also results in the incidental collection of emails and calls from Americans. The law prohibits spy agencies from targeting Americans and requires the FBI to seek a court order to access a U.S. citizen’s communications.

Section 702 was first added to FISA in 2008 and renewed for six years in 2018, when Trump originally tweeted opposition to the program but then reversed himself.

Nakasone argued the law “plays an outsize role in protecting the nation” and generates “some of the U.S. government’s most valuable intelligence on our most challenging targets.”

‘We have saved lives’

He gave several broad examples of that work, including the discovery of attempts to steal sensitive U.S. technology, stopping the transfer of weapons components, preventing cyberattacks and “understanding the strategic intentions” of China and Russia.

“We have saved lives because of 702,” Nakasone told a virtual meeting of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

The general said he could not publicly share more details about the impact of that surveillance, acknowledging that also limited his ability to make his case. Civil liberties advocates have long criticized the secrecy of intelligence court proceedings and the power that agencies have to collect years of incidental data on Americans.

Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Congress had created an effective “national security exception to the U.S. Constitution.”

“The American people and indeed people all around the world have lost the ability to have a private conversation over digital networks,” she told the board. Section 702, Cohn said, “was a mass monitoring infrastructure that subjects people’s communications to NSA review.”

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and other national security hawks are expected to push GOP colleagues to support a renewal this year accompanied by still unspecified changes.

“We’ve got to have a discussion within our own caucus, but I feel good about the groundwork we’ve laid,” said Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who will lead the House’s new select committee on China, in an interview this week. “There’s serious and legitimate concern. And so part of the process of getting renewal is to put in place reform that gives people confidence that there won’t be abuses in the future.”

In December 2019, the Justice Department’s inspector general found the FBI had withheld key information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as it applied for warrants to monitor the communication of Carter Page, a Trump campaign aide. But the inspector general did make clear the extent to which agents relied during that process on uncorroborated allegations compiled by a former British spy.

The chief judge of that court would issue an unusual rebuke to the FBI, saying it had made “unsupported” representations as it submitted the eavesdropping applications and had failed to provide other information that would have weakened the government’s case for surveillance.

Responding to the scrutiny, the FBI announced a series of changes designed to ensure that its applications to the court, which approves warrants to eavesdrop on American soil on people suspected of being agents of a foreign power, are more accurate.

Congress in 2020 let expire three provisions of the Patriot Act that the FBI and Justice Department had said were essential for national security, including one that permits investigators to surveil subjects without establishing that they’re acting on behalf of an international terrorism organization. A bill renewing those authorities passed the Senate, but Democrats pulled legislation from the House floor after Trump and House Republicans turned against the measure and ensured its defeat. 
…

As one of the most high-profile trials to stem from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack got under way, U.S. prosecutors on Thursday accused leaders of the far-right Proud Boys group of plotting an assault on American democracy.

In an opening argument, federal prosecutor Jason McCullough told jurors that Proud Boys chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and four other leaders engaged in sedition by using force to try to keep Donald Trump in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election. 

“On January 6, they took aim at the heart of our democracy,” McCullough told jurors. 

Defendants’ lawyers said it was Trump, not the Proud Boys, who spurred thousands of supporters to attack the Capitol. 

“He’s the one that told them to march over to the Capitol and fight like hell. Enrique didn’t say that,” said Sabino Jauregui, a lawyer for Tarrio. 

‘These men did not stand back’

The case marks the third time the U.S. Justice Department has charged members of extremist groups with the rarely prosecuted crime of seditious conspiracy after Trump supporters invaded the Capitol in a failed bid to prevent lawmakers from certifying his November 2020 election loss to Biden. 

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and another chapter leader of the far-right militant group were found guilty of seditious conspiracy in November, and another trial is pending against four more members. 

The Civil War-era law, which prohibits people from plotting to overthrow or destroy the U.S. government, carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. 

When it became clear that Trump would not win re-election, “these men did not stand back. They did not stand by. Instead, they mobilized,” McCullough said, paraphrasing a comment Trump made in a debate before the election that the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.” 

All five Proud Boys defendants have pleaded not guilty and their attorneys will argue that they did not plot to block the peaceful transfer of power. 

Prosecutors have brought criminal charges against more than 950 people following the assault. Four people died during the chaos, and five police officers died of various causes after the attack. 

Trump allies also under scrutiny

Under Special Counsel Jack Smith, the Justice Department is also investigating efforts by Trump’s advisers to overturn his election defeat. 

In the Proud Boys case, the government accuses Tarrio and four other group members, some of whom led state chapters, of purchasing paramilitary gear for the attack and urging members of the self-described “Western chauvinist group” to descend on Washington. 

They say Tarrio directed the attack from Baltimore because he had been ordered to stay out of Washington after being arrested on January 4 for burning a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic African-American church in December 2020. 

Prosecutors say Tarrio met with Rhodes, the Oath Keeper founder, at an underground parking garage after being released from custody. 

Prosecutors accuse the four other defendants – Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola – of being among the first members of the crowd to charge past the barricades that had been erected to protect the Capitol. 

A fifth member of the group, North Carolina chapter leader Charles Donohoe, pleaded guilty to other charges in April 2022 and could potentially be called as a witness in the case. 

Biggs and Nordean are accused of tearing down a black metal fence that separated the crowd from police, Donohoe of throwing water bottles at police, and Pezzola with grabbing an officer’s riot shield. 

The indictment said Pezzola used the stolen shield to break a window, allowing members of the mob to enter the Capitol.  
…

The Biden administration plans to send a delegation to Havana this month to restart U.S.-Cuba talks on law enforcement issues that were halted under former President Donald Trump, the U.S. State Department said Thursday. 

U.S. concerns about counterterrorism will be among the subjects addressed, a State Department spokesperson said. Trump placed Cuba on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism shortly before his term ended in January 2021, and the Biden administration has been reviewing this since taking office. 

The meeting will be the first of its kind since the law enforcement dialogue, which began in 2015 under former President Barack Obama, was stopped in 2018 under Trump as he rolled back his predecessor’s historic detente with Communist-ruled Cuba. 

President Joe Biden has begun reversing some of Trump’s policies but has maintained others, insisting the Cuban government must improve its human rights record. 

“This type of dialog enhances the national security of the United States through improved international law enforcement coordination, which enables the United States to better protect U.S. citizens and bring transnational criminals to justice,” the State Department spokesperson said in a statement. 

But the official added that “this dialogue does not impact the administration’s continued focus on critical human rights issues in Cuba.” 

A person in Washington familiar with the matter said the talks were expected to take place next week. The Cuban government did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

U.S. and Cuban officials last year held rounds of talks in Washington and Havana focused on migration as Washington sought to stem the flow of Cubans to the United States by land and sea. 

The talks are expected to focus on combating cybercrime, terrorist threats and drug trafficking, among other issues, according to the source familiar with the matter. 

U.S. officials did not immediately respond to Reuters’ questions on whether the discussions were expected to include whether Cuba could be removed from the sponsors of terrorism list, which includes Iran, Syria and North Korea. 

Cuba has called the U.S. designation a “slander” and a false pretext to continue punishing the island nation economically.  

The Biden administration last May kept Cuba on a short list of countries the United States says are “not cooperating fully” in its fight against terrorism. 

The State Department spokesperson said the coming discussion “provides a forum to raise difficult matters and convey our concerns directly to the Cuban government.” 

The U.S. delegation, expected to be “working level” officials, will have representatives from the State Department, National Security Council and Justice Department, including the FBI, according to the person familiar with the matter.
…

Documents with classified markings from U.S. President Joe Biden’s time as vice president have been found in the garage of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, the White House said Thursday, days after it confirmed that other sensitive material had been discovered at the Washington think tank where he had an office before running for president in 2020.

In the latest disclosure, Richard Sauber, a special counsel to Biden, said that after the initial documents were found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, his lawyers searched other locations where records might have been shipped, rather than to the National Archives as required by U.S. law, when Biden’s vice-presidential term ended in early 2017.

Sauber, in a statement, said Biden’s lawyers searched his Wilmington home in the eastern U.S., as well as his vacation retreat near the Atlantic Ocean in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

“The lawyers discovered among personal and political papers a small number of additional … records with classified markings” in the garage, he said, adding that another one-page classified document was found in an adjacent room.

The papers were from Biden’s vice presidency under former President Barack Obama. No classified documents were found at his vacation home.

Sauber said the Department of Justice was “immediately notified” after the documents were found in Wilmington and that department lawyers took custody of the records.

Biden, speaking to reporters on Thursday, attempted to minimize the discoveries in an apparent effort to contrast it with a months-long dispute between former President Donald Trump and the Archives over hundreds of classified documents that were transferred to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in early 2021.

A special counsel is investigating whether Trump committed a criminal offense in failing to turn over the classified material when he left Washington or later, in response to repeated requests from the Archives for their return.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland selected U.S. Attorney John Lausch in Chicago, a holdover Trump appointee, to review the circumstances of how the classified material linked to Biden ended up at one of the president’s offices and in a box beside his Corvette in a locked garage.

“As I said earlier this week, people know I take classified documents and classified material seriously,” Biden told reporters on Thursday, adding that his administration is “cooperating fully … with the Justice Department’s review.”

Some Republicans have called for Garland to name a special counsel to investigate Biden’s retention of classified documents from his vice-presidential years, just as Garland named long-time federal prosecutor Jack Smith to investigate Trump in connection with the classified papers and his attempts to upend the results of the 2020 election to remain in power.

New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, at a news conference in the U.S. Capitol, said, “I think Congress has to investigate this. I do not think any American believes that justice should not be equal to all.”
…

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration reported Thursday that air traffic in the United States was largely back to normal one day after a faulty file in a computer system triggered an outage affecting more than 11,000 flights through delays or cancellations.

The flight-tracking website FlightAware.com also reported delays and cancellations were back to normal levels for Thursday.

FAA officials said they traced the outage to a damaged database file, affecting the Notice to Air Missions System — or NOTAMs, a crucial part in the process of every flight that departs an airport in the United States.

Pilots are required to consult NOTAMS before taking off. The system lists potential adverse impacts on flights, from runway construction to the potential for icing. The system once was telephone-based, with pilots calling dedicated flight service stations for the information, but it has since moved online.

FAA reports say the system stopped working at 8:28 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday, but because there weren’t many departures at that hour, pilots were able to get the information verbally. By dawn Wednesday, the system was still out, and there were too many flights leaving to brief pilots individually.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said it is likely that the main system had a problem, and the backup didn’t work correctly. He said the FAA rebooted the main system around 5 a.m., but it took a while to verify that all the information was validated and available.

Buttigieg said the FAA ordered all flights grounded Wednesday morning and planes were stuck for hours “to make absolutely sure the messages were moving correctly and the information for safety purposes” was “working the way it should.”

The FAA said it is taking steps to ensure a similar failure does not happen again.

Some information for this report came from Reuters and The Associated Press.
…

Air traffic control operations are returning to normal across the United States after thousands of flights were canceled or delayed by a malfunction in the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration system that left pilots, airlines and airports without crucial safety information for hours. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
…

Aides to U.S. President Joe Biden have discovered at least one more batch of classified documents in a location separate from a think tank office he used after serving as vice president, news outlets reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed sources. 

Biden aides have been searching for additional classified materials that might be in other locations since a set of classified documents was found in November at the Washington-based think tank, according to a report in NBC News, which first broke the news, and CNN. 

The NBC News report said the classification level, number and precise location of the additional documents was not immediately clear. It also said it was not clear when the additional documents were discovered and whether the search for any other classified materials Biden may have from his time as vice president is complete. 

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters. 

Senator Mark Warner, the Intelligence Committee’s Democratic chairman, has asked for a briefing on the first Biden document discovery, he said Tuesday.  

A spokesperson for Senator Marco Rubio, the committee’s Republican vice chair, said Rubio and Warner had written to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, asking for access to the classified documents.  

The two senators also requested a damage assessment by the intelligence community and a briefing on the retention of classified documents by both Biden, a Democrat, and Republican former President Donald Trump.  

The request echoed a similar one sent to Haines on Tuesday by Republican Representative Mike Turner of the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. 

The reports come two days after a White House lawyer said classified documents from Biden’s days as vice president had been discovered in November by the president’s personal attorneys at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement think tank. 

Biden’s attorneys discovered fewer than a dozen classified records inside the office at the center, and informed the U.S. National Archives of their discovery, turned over the materials, and said they were cooperating with the Archives and the Justice Department. The president said on Tuesday that he and his team were cooperating fully with a review into what happened. 

The Justice Department is separately probing Trump’s handling of highly sensitive classified documents that he retained at his Florida resort after leaving the White House in January 2021.  

Trump kept thousands of government records, a few hundred of which were marked as classified, inside his personal residence in Florida for over a year after departing the White House and did not return them immediately or willingly despite numerous requests by the National Archives. 

When he finally handed over 15 boxes of records in January 2022, the Archives discovered more than 100 were marked as classified. It referred the matter to the Justice Department in the spring.  

FBI agents carried out a court-approved search on Aug. 8 of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. About 100 documents marked as classified were among thousands of records seized. 
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A congressional reassessment of American policy towards China is expected to get underway in earnest early next month.  

In a 365-65 vote, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution Tuesday creating a special Select Committee on China. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has tapped Republican Representative Mike Gallagher to chair the committee’s work.  

“A lot of people are interested. I spoke to the Republican caucus this morning and a lot of people have expressed interest. I’m optimistic that we’re going to have a pretty serious group of members with a broad range of experience that’s relevant to the issues we’re facing right now,” said Gallagher in an interview with VOA Mandarin.   

Gallagher told VOA the committee expects to hold its first hearing in early to mid-February and will be comprised of a bipartisan group of lawmakers.  

“The Democrats who have expressed interest in joining me are people I respect and have experience that would be a good fit for this committee,” he said. 

In a floor speech ahead of the vote, McCarthy said, “We spent decades passing policies that welcomed China into the global system. In return, China has exported oppression, aggression, and anti-Americanism. Today, the power of its military and economy are growing at the expense of freedom and democracy worldwide.”

He said the committee will be scrutinizing policies which should be changed. 

“It didn’t start under this administration, but the current administration has clearly made it worse. Their policies have weakened our economy and made us more vulnerable to threats from the CCP. But here’s the good news – there is bipartisan consensus that the era of trusting Communist China is over.”   

A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry had a muted response to the creation of the committee Wednesday. Wang Wenbin told reporters at a routine news conference that he hopes U.S. politicians will view relations with Beijing “in an objective and rational way” and will work on policies benefiting both countries.

A commentary published Wednesday in the state-backed Global Times newspaper took a more skeptical view, accusing the committee of having a “strong ideological undertone” and worried it could stoke “anti-China public opinion.”

Bipartisan support for China Committee

The new speaker said the idea for a bipartisan committee to investigate all aspects of the U.S. relationship with China — from economics to COVID — came to him while on a diplomatic trip commemorating the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, a key turning point in World War II.   

The resolution creating the committee passed with significant support from Democrats. 

“House Democrats will work in a serious, sober and strategic manner to evaluate our relationship with the Chinese government and to address the rise of authoritarianism globally. House Democrats will firmly speak out against xenophobic rhetoric and conspiracy theories should this committee devolve into extreme MAGA Republican talking points that further anti-Asian hate crimes in this country,” Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement after the vote.

Jeffries succeeded former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as leader of House Democrats at the start of the 118th Congress.

In a statement Tuesday, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul said the committee would build on the work undertaken by Republicans during the 117th Congress on the House China Task Force.  

“The Republican House is laser-focused on the CCP as an existential threat to our nation. The Select Committee is also an opportunity for House Democrats to finally join bipartisan efforts to counter the CCP, which they declined to do on the China Task Force,” said McCaul  

VOA Mandarin journalist Yi-Hua Lee contributed to this report.
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The U.N.’s top human rights official warns the U.S. government’s new border enforcement measures risk undermining peoples’ basic rights to seek asylum.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk says he fears the new border policy will undercut the basic foundations of human rights and refugee law to protect the lives of people fleeing for safety.

Türk’s spokeswoman, Ravina Shamdasani, tells VOA the High Commissioner is concerned the measures will lead to an increase in collective expulsions without having protection needs assessed individually.

She adds that people who undertake these dangerous journeys are fleeing very difficult circumstances in their home countries.

The new U.S. policy would allow some 30,000 individuals from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua to come to the United States every month for a limited period of two years. Shamdasani says the High Commissioner welcomes measures that would create and expand regular safe pathways for migration.

“However, we are worried that these are very restrictive and that those who are most vulnerable, and those who are most in need of asylum, are unlikely to meet the requirements to be granted this humanitarian parole,” said Shamdasani. “For example, one of the requirements is that you have to have a financial sponsor in the U.S. Now, obviously, those who are most vulnerable would not be in a position to provide that.”

Shamdasani says the announced changes to the so-called public health order known as Title 42 are also of concern. That policy, she says, will be expanded to include increased use of expedited removals of migrants from the United States.

She says Title 42 will permit the fast-track expulsion to Mexico of some 30,000 Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans, and Nicaraguans each month.

“You may be aware that Title 42 has already been used some 2.5 million times at the southern border of the United States to expel people to Mexico go back to their home countries without an individualized assessment of their protection needs. This is of obvious concern to us,” she said.

High Commissioner Türk reiterated his call for the human rights of all refugees and migrants to be respected and protected at international borders. While there is a great deal of talk about migration crises, he says, the reality is that it is those who are migrating who often are the ones truly in crisis.
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