National

(MINNEAPOLIS) — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday said that in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, federal officials issued public statements about the incident based on “the best information” they had at the time and “what we knew to be true on the ground.”

Noem previously suggested on the day of the shooting that the agents’ actions were justified, claiming at a press briefing that Pretti had “attacked” officers and was “wishing to inflict harm” on them. But appearing Thursday on Fox News, Noem offered no evidence to support such claims, saying instead that the scene was “chaotic.”

After her initial statements, Minnesota officials were quick to push back on her public comments, pointing to the multiple videos from witnesses which appeared to tell a different story.

She said the FBI is now leading the investigation, though officials previously said DHS was investigating, with assistance from the FBI.

Noem’s shift in tone comes amid growing criticism of how quickly officials characterized the shooting. Some critics told ABC News that issuing definitive conclusions following immigration enforcement shootings is “incredibly irresponsible” and may undermine the long-term credibility of federal agencies.

The critics warned that rushing to label suspects as “domestic terrorists” — as White House adviser Stephen Miller and Noem did in the aftermath of the shooting deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good — or declaring shootings justified before evidence is reviewed represents a departure from the norm.

“It’s just incredibly irresponsible to rush to conclusions,” said John Sandweg, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama administration.  “When you have a senior adviser to the president and the cabinet secretary saying, ‘These are the facts, this is what happened’ … you’ve now undermined all the credibility and really made it impossible for the public to have confidence in that investigation.”

‘Public trust is everything’
An ABC News review of several recent incidents involving federal immigration agents found a consistent pattern: high-level officials publicized findings within hours of gunfire, only for those initial accounts to be challenged later by body camera footage, witness videos or court filings.

In at least five major cases, officials appeared to make public declarations about the incidents before formal investigations had reached final conclusions about those assertions.

“Public trust is everything to these agencies, and it just destroys them when you tell something that is so visibly and obviously contradicted by the video evidence,” Sandweg said.

Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff under the Biden administration, told ABC News that the rush to conclusions suggests the focus has shifted away from public safety toward a political narrative.

“It just shows that this is about the political debate. It’s not about actually arresting the most convicted criminals,” Houser said. “It should … create a lot of distrust that can tear at the core trust in law enforcement, especially federal law enforcement.”

In response to questions regarding the swiftness of the administration’s public comments and  the information released following major incidents, a DHS spokesperson said, “DHS follows proper legal processes and protocols for all statements disseminated by the Department.”

What Pretti video shows
In the shooting involving Pretti, DHS officials released a detailed statement just two and a half hours after the incident, claiming he “approached” officers with a handgun. Miller labeled Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and a “would-be assassin” on social media less than four hours after the gunfire.

Noem, during her Thursday interview, responded to critics on Capitol Hill calling for her resignation by stating she is “following the law, and enforcing the laws like President Trump promised he would do.”

Video analyzed by ABC News showed agents pinning Pretti down and removing a weapon from his waist before the shooting occurred — contradicting the initial claims from officials. Three days later, Miller issued a statement acknowledging that the initial DHS account was based on “reports from CBP on the ground” and suggested protocol may not have been followed.

“Any experienced law enforcement professional will understand that initial information coming from the scene of a major incident is usually flawed, so you have to sort of take it with a grain of salt,” said John Cohen, an ABC News contributor who served as acting DHS undersecretary for intelligence and analysis under the Biden administration.

During Thursday’s appearance on Fox News, Noem said, “We will continue to follow the investigation that the FBI is leading and give them all the information that they need to bring that to conclusion and make sure the American people know the truth of the situation,” she said.

After announcing on Friday that the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into the shooting Pretti, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters that “a single video should not determine an entire investigation.”

“We have said repeatedly over the past week that of course this is something that we are investigating and that is what we would always do in circumstances like this,” Blanche said. 

Earlier shootings: Renee Good, Marimar Martinez
Following the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, DHS issued a statement within two hours declaring that a “violent rioter” had “weaponized her vehicle” in an “act of domestic terrorism.” According to an ABC News analysis of verified video, Good can be seen turning her steering wheel to the right — away from the ICE agent — just over one second before the first of three gunshots was fired.

In October, less than four hours after Marimar Martinez was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent in Chicago, a DHS assistant secretary posted that law enforcement was “forced” to fire defensive shots. A DHS statement that day labeled Martinez and another individual “domestic terrorists,” while Noem later characterized the incident as a “ten-car caravan” that “ambushed” and “stalked” agents.

During court hearings, an attorney representing Martinez told the court that body-worn camera footage did not align with the government’s allegations. A federal judge later dismissed the indictment against Martinez after the Department of Justice abruptly filed a motion to withdraw the case.

That same month, in an incident in California, DHS issued a statement claiming that during a vehicle stop, an “unknown individual” attempted to “run officers over by reversing directly at them without stopping.” The statement asserted that an ICE officer, “fearing for his life, fired defensive shots.”

However, a lawyer for Carlos Jimenez told ABC News that after an agent pulled out pepper spray, Jimenez began to maneuver his vehicle “to get around” and was shot in his back shoulder through the back passenger window.

Chicago shooting
In another incident in September, an ICE officer shot and killed Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez outside Chicago. According to a lawsuit filed by the state of Illinois, Villegas-Gonzalez, a 38-year-old father, was driving home from dropping his three-year-old son at day care. A DHS statement issued hours after the shooting claimed an officer “fearing for his life” was “seriously injured.”

But the Illinois complaint and body camera video obtained by ABC owned station WLS-TV revealed the agent who fired the weapon described his own injuries as “nothing major.”

“Videos of the incident did not corroborate DHS’s assertion that the shooting officer was ‘seriously injured’ by a ‘criminal illegal alien,'” the lawsuit states.

Cohen, the former DHS official, noted that describing incidents as domestic terrorism before an investigation is complete could later be viewed in court as prejudicial.

“When you make commentary on these types of incidents to advance an ideological or political narrative or objective, you run the risk of putting out inaccurate information and as a result, losing the public’s confidence,” Cohen said.

Sandweg, the former ICE official, told ABC News the only responsible approach for officials is to remain restrained in their public statements until there is reliable information.

“The only approach is … ‘We’re aware, we are conducting a full investigation,'” Sandweg said. “Public trust … is everything to these agencies. Once you destroy that, it bleeds over into everything else they do.”

Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Attorneys for hundreds of Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors told ABC News that names and identifying information of numerous victims appear unredacted in the latest disclosure of files on the late sex offender by the Department of Justice, including several women whose names have never before been publicly associated with the case.

Three million pages from the DOJ’s files on Epstein were being released to the public Friday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press briefing this morning.

Several categories of pages were withheld from the release due to their sensitive nature, Blanche said. These items include personally identifying information of the victims, victims’ medical files, images depicting child pornography, information related to ongoing cases and any images depicting death or abuse.

“We are getting constant calls for victims because their names, despite them never coming forward, being completely unknown to the public, have all just been released for public consumption,” said Brad Edwards, an attorney for some of the victims, in a telephone interview with ABC News.  “It’s literally 1000s of mistakes.”

ABC News has independently confirmed numerous instances of victims’ names appearing in documents included in the latest release.

Shortly after the new material appeared on Friday morning, Edwards said he and his law partner, Brittany Henderson, began receiving calls from clients.

“We contacted DOJ immediately, who has asked us to flag each of the documents where victim names appear unredacted and they will pull them down,” Edwards said. “it’s an impossible job. The easy job would be for the DOJ to type in all the victims’ names, hit redact like they promised to do, then release them. “

“They’re trying to fix it, but I said ‘the solution is take the thing down for now. There’s no other remedy to this. It just runs the risk of causing so much more harm unless they take it down first, then fix the problem and put it back up.'”

ABC News had reached out to the DOJ for comment.

The department has reviewed and redacted “several millions of pages” of materials related to the investigations of Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, and expects to publish “substantially all” of the records “in the near term,” according to a letter filed Tuesday by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence prison.

Blanche said Friday’s release, which follows the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, will include 2,000 videos and 180,000 images related to the Epstein case.

Blanche said in total there were 6 million documents, but due to the presence of child sexual abuse material and victim rights obligations, not all documents are being made public in the current release.

Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations,” using cash payments to recruit a “vast network of underage victims,” some of whom were as young as 14 years old.

Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — New work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are set to go into effect on Feb. 1 and it could mean that millions of Americans lose their benefits.

Nearly 42 million Americans, including low-income families and vulnerable households, rely on the federal program to help pay for groceries or other household essentials.

However, under President Donald Trump’s megabill that was signed into law in July, work requirements were amended for most people to receive benefits for longer than three months over three years.

Under the megabill, the upper age limit for those who need to meet work requirements was raised from age 54 through age 64 for the first time for able-bodied adults without dependents.

Additionally, exemptions were changed for parents or other family members with responsibility for a dependent under 18 years old to under 14 years old.

“Millions of people will unnecessarily be kicked off the rolls,” Joel Berg, CEO of the nonprofit Hunger Free America, told ABC News. “They will lose the food they need, and sometimes family members need. … More Americans will go hungry. Soup kitchens and food pantries and the food banks that supply them will not have the resources to meet this need.”

According to August 2025 estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, about 1.1 million people will lose SNAP benefits between 2025 and 2034, including 800,000 able-bodied adults through age 64 who don’t live with dependents and 300,000 parents or caregivers up to age 64 with children aged 14 and older.

An additional 1 million people who are able‑bodied adults ages 18 to 54 — or 18 to 49 starting in 2031 — who do not live with dependents but would have received a waiver from work requirements could also lose benefits.

Exemptions were also removed for homeless individuals, veterans and young adults who were in foster care when they turned age 18 under the megabill.

Berg said it could be very difficult for these populations to not only get jobs but provide the documentation to prove to the government they are meeting work requirements.

“It will be extraordinarily difficult for them, and they are among the most vulnerable Americans already,” he said. “Some of the most vulnerable populations — homeless people, veterans and young people who just left foster care — are going to lose their food, lose their groceries and there is no plan in place to fix that.”

CBO estimates that while there will be reductions in SNAP participation among these groups, it will be partially offset by the increases in participation among American Indians, who received exemptions under the megabill.

Supporters of the work requirements have said they are necessary to combat waste, fraud and abuse. SNAP benefits are administered under the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) by the Department of Agriculture.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in an interview on Fox Business on Friday that SNAP benefits are meant to be used temporarily and not long-term.

“The American dream is not being on [a] food stamp program,” Rollins said. “The American dream is not being on all these programs. That should be a hand up, not a handout. … As of yesterday, we have moved 1.75 million people off of SNAP. … A stronger economy, higher wages, I mean this is what we’re fighting for every day, not bigger programs, smaller programs. People to have real jobs, real health care, a real opportunity for their children and their grandchildren.”

FNS didn’t immediately respond to ABC News’ request for further comment.

Data from the 2023 American Community Survey shows the majority of American families receiving SNAP benefits had at least one family member working in the past 12 months.

However, work requirements can reduce program participation. A 2021 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research found SNAP work requirements could lead to up to 53% of eligible adults exiting the program within 18 months.

“These work requirements aren’t really about promoting work. They’re about dehumanizing people and attacking the ‘other’,” Berg said. “Most SNAP recipients are pro-work, and most SNAP recipients are already working, or children or people with disability or older Americans. So all this is sort of a diversionary debate.”

Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Three million pages from the Justice Department’s files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are being released to the public today, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press briefing Friday.

Blanche said the release, which follows the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, will include 2,000 videos and 180,000 images related to the Epstein case.

Blanche said in total there were 6 million documents, but due to the presence of child sexual abuse material and victim rights obligations, not all documents are being made public in the current release.

Several categories of pages were withheld from the release due to their sensitive nature, Blanche said. These items include personally identifying information of the victims, victims’ medical files, images depicting child pornography, information related to ongoing cases, and any images depicting death or abuse.

Attorneys for hundreds of Epstein survivors tell ABC News that names and identifying information of numerous victims appear unredacted in this latest disclosure, including several women whose names have never before been publicly associated with the case.

“We are getting constant calls for victims because their names, despite them never coming forward, being completely unknown to the public, have all just been released for public consumption,” attorney Brad Edwards, who has represented Epstein victims for more than 20 years, said in a telephone interview with ABC News. “It’s literally thousands of mistakes.”

ABC News has independently confirmed numerous instances of victims’ names appearing in documents included in the latest release.

Shortly after the new material appeared on Friday morning, Edwards said he and his law partner, Brittany Henderson, began receiving calls from clients.

“We contacted DOJ immediately, who has asked us to flag each of the documents where victim names appear unredacted, and they will pull them down,” Edwards said. “It’s an impossible job. The easy job would be for the DOJ to type in all the victims’ names, hit redact like they promised to do, then release them. “

“They’re trying to fix it, but I said, ‘The solution is take the thing down for now,'” Edwards said. “There’s no other remedy to this. It just runs the risk of causing so much more harm unless they take it down first, then fix the problem and put it back up.

ABC News reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

Blanche also pushed back on the notion that the Justice Department might have protected President Donald Trump from his name appearing in the files.

“We comply with the act, and there is no ‘protect President Trump.’ We didn’t protect or not protect anybody,” Blanche told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas. “I mean, I think that there’s a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents. And there’s nothing I can do about that.”

Blanche said there was “no oversight” by the White House about what the material showed.

He added that if there was evidence in the files that others had abused victims, the DOJ would pursue charges against them.

One document in Friday’s release is a chart showing connections between Epstein and various employees and associates. Many are redacted — but the faces of several remain visible, including Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s associate Jean Luc Brunel, and Epstein’s lawyer,  accountant, and assistant. The chart is followed by a list of individuals broken into three categories: Day of Arrest, Week of Arrest, and Weeks following arrest.

This ties in with internal DOJ communications released earlier that showed a plan to contact potential witnesses following Epstein’s arrest. There are eight persons who are listed in the accompanying spreadsheet as “suspected co-conspirators,” including Maxwell, Brunel, and Epstein’s assistant Leslie Groff. Two of those designated as “suspected co-conspirators” are also identified also as victims.

Groff has never been charged with a crime and said in a statement to ABC News in 2020 that she “never knowingly booked travel for anyone under the age of 18, and had no knowledge of the alleged illegal activity whatsoever.”

An internal FBI document produced created in August 2019, five days after Epstein’s death, shows nine persons listed as family and associates of Epstein, including eight labeled as “co-conspirators,” most with their names and faces redacted with the exception of Maxwell and Brunel. This points to potential continued interest in pursuing further charges after the death of Epstein. In his statement announcing Epstein’s death, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said “our investigation of the conduct charged in the Indictment — which included a conspiracy count — remains ongoing” Maxwell is the only other person to be charged related to Epstein’s crimes.

Among the other new documents released is what appears to be part of the original indictment against Epstein in his 2005 criminal case in Florida. The 100-page charging document contains information on 58 out the 60 charges against Epstein for his behavior towards six alleged victims. This document had never been made public.

Epstein ending up being offered a plea to reduced charges and was offered a non-prosecution agreement, in a deal that was highly controversial.

As of Friday afternoon, the DOJ had uploaded three “data sets” to its public website. Just one of those sets includes, by ABC News’ count, over 300,000 items.

A team of 500 attorneys from the Justice Department worked around the clock to review and redact material, Blanche said at his press briefing.

Friday’s tranche is the latest in a series of Epstein file releases that began last month in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed Congress overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Trump on Nov. 19. The act gave the Justice Department 30 days to make publicly available all unclassified records pertaining to investigations and prosecutions of Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

The bill contains several exceptions that allow for withholding or redacting records, notably to protect the privacy of Epstein’s victims.

Prior to Friday’s release, the DOJ had posted to its online Epstein library roughly 12,000 documents totaling about 125,000 pages — just a small fraction of the millions of records the department has been reviewing.  

Those materials included a record of a complaint to the FBI filed in 1996, years before the disgraced financier was first investigated for child sex abuse. The documents also included new details about the government’s investigation into potential accomplices as well as thousands of photographs of Epstein’s New York and U.S. Virgin Islands properties that were searched by the FBI after Epstein’s arrest in 2019.

The initial release of the files also contained numerous old photos of Epstein traveling with former President Bill Clinton, including pictures of Clinton lounging in a jacuzzi and one of him swimming with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after her 2021 conviction for sex trafficking of minors and other offenses.

The images, which were released without any context or background information, contained little information related to Trump, leading a spokesperson for Clinton to accuse the DOJ of selectively disclosing the pictures to imply wrongdoing on the part of Clinton where he said there is none.

“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” Angel Urena said. “This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be.”

In an interview with ABC News on the day of the initial release, Blanche said that every document that mentions Trump will eventually be released, “assuming it’s consistent with the law.”

“There’s no effort to hold anything back because there’s the name Donald J. Trump or anybody else’s name,” Blanche said.

Both Trump and Clinton have denied all wrongdoing and have denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.

Federal prosecutors have indicated in recent court filings that hundreds of government lawyers have spent weeks reviewing “several millions of pages” of materials — including documents, audio and video files — in preparation for disclosure to the public.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act came after the Trump administration faced months of blowback from its announcement last July that they would be releasing no additional Epstein files, after several top officials — including FBI Director Kash Patel and former Deputy Director Dan Bongino — had, prior to joining the administration, accused the government of shielding information regarding the Epstein case.

The files released thus far have yet to show evidence of wrongdoing on the part of famous, powerful men, against the expectations of many of those who pushed for the files’ release.

Epstein owned two private islands in the Virgin Islands and large properties in New York City, New Mexico and Palm Beach, Florida, where he came under investigation for allegedly luring minor girls to his seaside home for massages that turned sexual. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence for sex crimes charges after reaching a controversial non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami.

In 2019, prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York indicted Epstein on charges that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations,” using cash payments to recruit a “vast network of underage victims,” some of whom were as young as 14 years old.

Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial.

Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Three million pages from the Justice Department’s files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are being released to the public today, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press briefing Friday.

Blanche said the release will include 2,000 videos and 180,000 images related to the Epstein case.

Blanche said in total there were 6 million documents, but due to the presence of child sexual abuse material and victim rights obligations, not all documents are being made public in the current release.

Blanche pushed back on the notion that the DOJ might have protected President Donald Trump from his name appearing in the files.

“We comply with the act, and there is no ‘protect President Trump.’ We didn’t protect or not protect anybody. I mean, I think that there’s a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents. And there’s nothing I can do about that,” Blanche told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.

Blanche said there was “no oversight” by the White House about what the material showed.

He added that if there was evidence in the files that others had abused victims, the DOJ would pursue charges against them.

A team of 500 attorneys from the Justice Department worked around the clock to redact and review material, Blanche said. 

“If any member of Congress wishes to review any portions of the response of production in any unredacted form, they’re welcome to make arrangements with the department to do so, and we’re happy to do that,” said Blanche. 

Friday’s tranche is the latest in a series of releases that began last month in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed Congress overwhelmingly and was signed into law by President Donald Trump on Nov. 19. The act gave the Justice Department 30 days to make publicly available all unclassified records pertaining to investigations and prosecutions of Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. 

The bill contains several exceptions that allow for withholding or redacting records, notably to protect the privacy of Epstein’s victims.

The DOJ to date had posted to its online Epstein library roughly 12,000 documents totaling about 125,000 pages — just a small fraction of the millions of records the department has been reviewing.  

Those materials included a record of a complaint to the FBI filed in 1996, years before the disgraced financier was first investigated for child sex abuse. The documents also included new details about the government’s investigation into potential accomplices as well as thousands of photographs of Epstein’s New York and U.S. Virgin Islands properties that were searched by the FBI after Epstein’s arrest in 2019.

The initial release of the files also contained numerous old photos of Epstein traveling with former President Bill Clinton, including pictures of Clinton lounging in a jacuzzi and one of him swimming with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after her 2021 conviction for sex trafficking of minors and other offenses.

The images, which were released without any context or background information, contained little information related to Trump, leading a spokesperson for Clinton to accuse the DOJ of selectively disclosing the pictures to imply wrongdoing on the part of Clinton where he said there is none.

“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” Angel Urena said. “This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be.”

In an interview with ABC News on the day of the initial release, Blanche said that every document that mentions Trump will eventually be released, “assuming it’s consistent with the law.”

“There’s no effort to hold anything back because there’s the name Donald J. Trump or anybody else’s name,” Blanche said.

Both Trump and Clinton have denied all wrongdoing and have denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.

Federal prosecutors have indicated in recent court filings that hundreds of government lawyers have spent weeks reviewing “several millions of pages” of materials — including documents, audio and video files — in preparation for disclosure to the public.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act came after the Trump administration faced months of blowback from its announcement last July that they would be releasing no additional Epstein files, after several top officials — including FBI Director Kash Patel and former Deputy Director Dan Bongino — had, prior to joining the administration, accused the government of shielding information regarding the Epstein case.

The files released thus far have yet to show evidence of wrongdoing on the part of famous, powerful men, against the expectations of many of those who pushed for the files’ release.

Epstein owned two private islands in the Virgin Islands and large properties in New York City, New Mexico and Palm Beach, Florida, where he came under investigation for allegedly luring minor girls to his seaside home for massages that turned sexual. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence for sex crimes charges after reaching a controversial non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami.

In 2019, prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York indicted Epstein on charges that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations,” using cash payments to recruit a “vast network of underage victims,” some of whom were as young as 14 years old.

Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial.

Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — A massive snowstorm is headed to the Southeast this weekend, with blizzard conditions possible for millions.

Here’s the latest forecast:

The storm begins Friday night, bringing snow to eastern Tennessee, southern Virginia, northern South Carolina, northeastern Georgia and nearly all of North Carolina.

The brunt of the storm will hit on Saturday.

Six to 12 inches of snow is expected in Appalachia along the Tennessee-North Carolina border and in western Virginia.

Norfolk, Virginia, and other cities along the North Carolina and Virginia coast could see 7 to 12 inches of snow on Saturday and Sunday, along with wind gusts up to 70 mph.

In North Carolina, Asheville could get 5 to 7 inches of snow and Raleigh is on alert for 4 to 7 inches of snow.

Wilmington, North Carolina, could see 5 to 8 inches of snow while Charlotte could see 4 to 7 inches along with wind gusts up to 30 mph.

Further south, Charleston, South Carolina, could see get 3 to 5 inches of snow through Sunday morning, while Athens, Georgia, could see 2 to 4 inches with wind gusts up to 35 mph.

The governors of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia have declared state of emergencies.

“The State Emergency Response Team is activated and is positioning resources across the state to quickly respond to any needs,” North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein said on social media. “Starting Friday depending where you are, please stay off the roads if you do not have to travel.”

By Sunday morning, snow may still be falling along the coasts of North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and Massachusetts. By Sunday afternoon, much of the snow will be over, with only Massachusetts’ Cape Cod still getting snow by the evening.

The only real appreciable snow for the Northeast will be on Cape Cod, where 1 to 3 inches is possible. The rest of the Northeast coast will see flurries and likely less than an inch of accumulation.

Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Additional material from the Justice Department’s files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is being released to the public today, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press briefing Friday.

It’s the latest in a series of releases that began last month in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed Congress overwhelmingly and was signed into law by President Donald Trump on Nov. 19. The act gave the Justice Department 30 days to make publicly available all unclassified records pertaining to investigations and prosecutions of Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. 

The bill contains several exceptions that allow for withholding or redacting records, notably to protect the privacy of Epstein’s victims.

The DOJ to date had posted to its online Epstein library roughly 12,000 documents totaling about 125,000 pages — just a small fraction of the millions of records the department has been reviewing.  

Those materials included a record of a complaint to the FBI filed in 1996, years before the disgraced financier was first investigated for child sex abuse. The documents also included new details about the government’s investigation into potential accomplices as well as thousands of photographs of Epstein’s New York and U.S. Virgin Islands properties that were searched by the FBI after Epstein’s arrest in 2019.

The initial release of the files also contained numerous old photos of Epstein traveling with former President Bill Clinton, including pictures of Clinton lounging in a jacuzzi and one of him swimming with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after her 2021 conviction for sex trafficking of minors and other offenses.

The images, which were released without any context or background information, contained little information related to Trump, leading a spokesperson for Clinton to accuse the DOJ of selectively disclosing the pictures to imply wrongdoing on the part of Clinton where he said there is none.

“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” Angel Urena said. “This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be.”

In an interview with ABC News on the day of the initial release, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that every document that mentions Trump will eventually be released, “assuming it’s consistent with the law.”

“There’s no effort to hold anything back because there’s the name Donald J. Trump or anybody else’s name,” Blanche said.

Both Trump and Clinton have denied all wrongdoing and have denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.

Federal prosecutors have indicated in recent court filings that hundreds of government lawyers have spent weeks reviewing “several millions of pages” of materials — including documents, audio and video files — in preparation for disclosure to the public.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act came after the Trump administration faced months of blowback from its announcement last July that they would be releasing no additional Epstein files, after several top officials — including FBI Director Kash Patel and former Deputy Director Dan Bongino — had, prior to joining the administration, accused the government of shielding information regarding the Epstein case.

The files released thus far have yet to show evidence of wrongdoing on the part of famous, powerful men, against the expectations of many of those who pushed for the files’ release.

Epstein owned two private islands in the Virgin Islands and large properties in New York City, New Mexico and Palm Beach, Florida, where he came under investigation for allegedly luring minor girls to his seaside home for massages that turned sexual. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence for sex crimes charges after reaching a controversial non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami.

In 2019, prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York indicted Epstein on charges that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations,” using cash payments to recruit a “vast network of underage victims,” some of whom were as young as 14 years old.

Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial.

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(NEW YORK) — A massive snowstorm is headed to the Southeast this weekend, with blizzard conditions possible for millions.

Here’s the latest forecast:

The storm begins Friday night, bringing snow to eastern Tennessee, southern Virginia, northern South Carolina, northeastern Georgia and nearly all of North Carolina.

The brunt of the storm will hit on Saturday.

Six to 12 inches of snow is expected in Appalachia along the Tennessee-North Carolina border and in western Virginia.

Norfolk, Virginia, and other cities along the North Carolina and Virginia coast could see 7 to 12 inches of snow on Saturday and Sunday, along with wind gusts up to 70 mph.

In North Carolina, Asheville could get 5 to 7 inches of snow and Raleigh is on alert for 4 to 7 inches of snow.

Wilmington, North Carolina, could see 5 to 8 inches of snow while Charlotte could see 4 to 7 inches along with wind gusts up to 30 mph.

Further south, Charleston, South Carolina, could see get 3 to 5 inches of snow through Sunday morning, while Athens, Georgia, could see 2 to 4 inches with wind gusts up to 35 mph.

The governors of North Carolina and South Carolina have both declared state of emergencies.

“The State Emergency Response Team is activated and is positioning resources across the state to quickly respond to any needs,” North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein said on social media. “Starting Friday depending where you are, please stay off the roads if you do not have to travel.”

By Sunday morning, snow may still be falling along the coasts of North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and Massachusetts. By Sunday afternoon, much of the snow will be over, with only Massachusetts’ Cape Cod still getting snow by the evening.

The only real appreciable snow for the Northeast will be on Cape Cod, where 1 to 3 inches is possible. The rest of the Northeast coast will see flurries and likely less than an inch of accumulation.

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(NEW YORK) — A federal judge in New York on Friday dismissed the death-eligible counts from Luigi Mangione’s indictment, clearing the way for his federal trial to begin in October.

“Tortured and strange” though she said her conclusion may be, U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett ruled stalking is not a crime of violence and, therefore, not a predicate to make the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson a capital crime.

“No one could seriously question that this is violent criminal conduct,” Garnett wrote. However, her opinion said that the U.S. Supreme Court requires her to analyze the allegations in a way that is “totally divorced from the conduct at issue.”

Garnett said crimes of violence must, by definition, involve force and, theoretically, stalking could be committed without it.

The defense wanted the death penalty taken off the table, arguing that stalking “fails to qualify as a crime of violence” and therefore cannot be the predicate to make Mangione eligible for the death penalty if he is convicted of the federal charges. The defense also argued that the decision to seek the death penalty was political and circumvented the federal government’s protocols.

Mangione, who is accused of stalking and killing Thompson in Midtown Manhattan in December 2024, has pleaded not guilty to state and federal charges.

With the death penalty off the table, Garnett said Mangione’s federal trial will begin with opening statements on Oct. 13. Garnett said jury selection will begin on Sept. 8. 

The Manhattan district attorney’s office is separately trying to convince a state judge to put Mangione on trial on July 1, before the federal case.

Garnett on Friday also declined to suppress evidence seized from Mangione’s backpack when he was apprehended in Altoona, Pennsylvania. This ruling will allow prosecutors to use key evidence at trial, including the alleged murder weapon and writings that prosecutors say amount to a confession.

Garnett said the search fell within multiple exceptions to the requirements for obtaining a search warrant, including the discovery of the weapon and the likelihood that the evidence would have been discovered inevitably. 

Mangione’s lawyers had argued the backpack search was illegal.

ABC News’ Peter Charalambous contributed to this report.

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(NEW YORK) — Former CNN journalist Don Lemon was arrested early Friday morning in connection with an incident in which anti-ICE protesters disrupted a service at a Minnesota church, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The incident unfolded on Jan. 18, when protesters entered Cities Church in St. Paul. The protesters said one of the pastors is the acting field director of the St. Paul ICE field office.

Bondi said on social media that Lemon and three others were arrested early Friday “at my direction” “in connection with the coordinated attack on Cities Church.”

At least three additional people were previously arrested in connection with the protest.

Lemon’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said last week that a magistrate judge rejected charges against Lemon. A source told ABC News that Bondi last week was “enraged” at the magistrate judge’s decision to not charge the journalist.

Lowell said on Friday that Lemon was taken into custody by federal agents while he was covering the Grammy Awards.

“Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done,” Lowell said in a statement. “The First Amendment exists to protect journalists whose role it is to shine light on the truth and hold those in power accountable.”

“Instead of investigating the federal agents who killed two peaceful Minnesota protesters, the Trump Justice Department is devoting its time, attention and resources to this case,” Lowell said, calling the arrest an “attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration.”

Lowell called Lemon’s arrest an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment” and said the journalist “will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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