Sorted by date Results 1 - 19 of 19
WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Merrick Garland named a special counsel on Friday to oversee the Justice Department's investigation into the presence of classified documents at former President Donald Trump's Florida estate as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election. The appointment of veteran prosecutor Jack Smith, announced just three days after Trump formally launched his 2024 candidacy, is a recognition of the unmistakable political implications of two i...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Fourteen of the 15 boxes recovered from former President Donald Trump's Florida estate early this year contained classified documents, many of them top secret, mixed in with miscellaneous newspapers, magazines and personal correspondence, according to an FBI affidavit released Friday. No space at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate was authorized for the storage of classified material, according to the court papers, which laid out the FBI's rationale for searching the property this month, including "probable cause to believe that e...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is asking a federal court to unseal the warrant the FBI used to search the Mar-a-Lago estate of former President Donald Trump, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday, acknowledging extraordinary public interest in the case about classified records. The request is striking because such documents traditionally remain sealed during a pending investigation. But the Justice Department appeared to recognize that its silence since the search had created a vacuum for bitter verbal attacks by Trump and h...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump said in a lengthy statement Monday that the FBI was conducting a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and asserted that agents had broken open a safe. A person familiar with the matter said the action was related to a probe of whether Trump had taken classified records from his White House tenure to his Florida residence. The action, which the FBI and Justice Department did not immediately confirm, marks a dramatic escalation in law enforcement scrutiny of Trump and comes as he has been laying the g...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Intelligence reports compiled by the U.S. Capitol Police in the days before last year's insurrection envisioned only an improbable or remote risk of violence, even as other assessments warned that crowds of potentially thousands of pro-Trump demonstrators could converge in Washington and create a dangerous situation. The documents, obtained by The Associated Press, underscore the uneven and muddled intelligence that circulated to Capitol Police officers ahead of the Jan. 6 riot, when thousands of Donald Trump loyalists s...
WASHINGTON (AP) — As officials seek clues about what prompted a Georgia man to fatally stab a Pentagon police officer, details of the suspect's troubled past emerged Wednesday through interviews and court records. Austin William Lanz, 27, was arrested last April for a break-in at a neighbor's home and drew police attention months earlier for an ongoing harassment campaign involving sexually explicit photos and messages, according to interviews and records obtained by The Associated Press. Investigators have not revealed a motive in the a...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's acting defense secretary during the Jan. 6 Capitol riots plans to tell Congress that he was concerned in the days before the insurrection that sending troops to the building would fan fears of a military coup and could cause a repeat of the deadly Kent State shootings, according to a copy of prepared remarks obtained by The Associated Press. Christopher Miller's testimony is aimed at defending the Pentagon's response to the chaos of the day and rebutting broad criticism that military forces were too s...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The question of whether to serve a search warrant for Rudy Giuliani's records simmered inside the Justice Department in the waning months of the Trump administration, dividing officials in New York and Washington and remaining unresolved for a new leadership team to sort out. The new crowd resolved it this week in dramatic fashion. On Wednesday, federal agents raided the home and office of former President Donald Trump's personal attorney, collecting phones and computers as part of their probe into whether he broke U.S. l...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Ethics Committee announced an investigation into Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as federal prosecutors probing sex trafficking allegations against him are also scrutinizing the actions of some of his political allies and fellow Florida Republicans as part of a broader public corruption inquiry. Federal agents have, in recent months, been examining Gaetz's connections to several other influential Florida political figures. They include Florida state senator Jason Brodeur; Halsey Beshears, the state's former top business r...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Joe Biden has selected Merrick Garland, a federal appeals court judge who in 2016 was snubbed by Republicans for a seat on the Supreme Court, as his attorney general, two people familiar with the selection process said Wednesday. In picking Garland, Biden is turning to an experienced judge who held senior positions at the Justice Department decades ago, including as a supervisor of the prosecution of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The pick will force Senate Republicans to contend with the nomination of s...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department's investigation scrutinizing Hunter Biden's taxes has been examining some of his Chinese business dealings, among other financial transactions, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The investigation was launched in 2018, a year before his father, Joe Biden, announced his candidacy for president, but it isn't clear which entities might be tied up in the probe, and the inquiry was not disclosed to Hunter Biden until Tuesday. The younger Biden has a history of i...
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal prosecutor who was helping lead the investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe has resigned from the Justice Department, a spokesman said Friday. Nora Dannehy was a top prosecutor on a team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut, who was appointed last year to lead an investigation into how the FBI and other federal agencies set out to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether the Trump campaign had coordinated with the Kremlin. A spokesman for the U.S. A...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General William Barr says he doesn't expect a criminal inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation to target former President Barack Obama or Joe Biden, the former vice president and President Donald Trump's Democratic opponent. But that doesn't mean the investigation, led by U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut, doesn't carry its own political consequences. The inquiry could conclude this summer, meaning fresh revelations might be exploited by Trump in the heat of the election season to damage Biden o...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says he didn't know the Justice Department was planning to drop its case against his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. But it didn't really matter. The extraordinary action underscored the extent to which Trump and Attorney General William Barr have been in sync in their views on the federal Trump-Russia investigation — with or without communicating about it. Barr himself has openly challenged the decisions of predecessors and his own prosecutors. He's launched internal probes to inv...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Four members of the Chinese military have been charged with breaking into the computer networks of the Equifax credit reporting agency and stealing the personal information of tens of millions of Americans, the Justice Department said Monday, blaming Beijing for one of the largest hacks in history to target consumer data. The hackers in the 2017 breach stole the personal information of roughly 145 million Americans, collecting names, addresses, Social Security and driver's license numbers and other data stored in the c...
WASHINGTON (AP) — FBI Director Chris Wray said Tuesday that he does not consider court-approved FBI surveillance to be "spying" and said he has no evidence the FBI illegally monitored President Donald Trump's campaign during the 2016 election. His comments at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing broke from Attorney General William Barr, who has described as "spying" FBI surveillance during its investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Barr has not said such surveillance was necessarily improper, b...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The email caught the executive at a small company by surprise one morning in 2016. The company's owner, or so he thought, was requesting a money transfer to pay for supplies from a new vendor. It wasn't until that night when the executive, hours after the money had been transferred and still puzzled by the out-of-the-blue demand, texted the owner to make sure he'd heard the request correctly. The befuddled reply was disheartening: "I just saw your message about a wire transfer today. What is that about?" It was all part of a...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Jeff Sessions was pushed out Wednesday after enduring more than a year of blistering and personal attacks from President Donald Trump, who inserted in his place a Republican Party loyalist with authority to oversee the remainder of the special counsel's Russia investigation. The move has potentially ominous implications for special counsel Robert Mueller's probe, given that the new acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, until now Sessions' chief of staff, has questioned the inquiry's scope and spoke public...
WASHINGTON (AP) — In the hours before his arrest, as federal authorities zeroed in and secretly accumulated evidence, Cesar Sayoc was in his element: spinning classic and Top 40 hits in a nightclub where he'd found work as a DJ. As he entertained patrons from a dimly lit booth overlooking a stage at the Ultra Gentlemen's Club, where Halloween decorations hung in anticipation of a costume party, he could not have known that investigators that very evening were capitalizing on his own mistakes to build a case against him. He almost certainly h...
