Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images
(LONDON) — U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is apologizing again after initial findings of an investigation found that he and his staff showed “failures of leadership and judgment” for allegedly hosting parties during lockdown.
Johnson and his staff have been under fire in recent weeks for holding a number of parties last year — including a Christmas gathering as the country was sent back into lockdown — in alleged breaches of his own government’s lockdown rules.
The extent to which the report would lay blame at the feet of Johnson had been the subject of intense speculation, with the prime minister facing down a barrage of calls to resign from opposition lawmakers and even disgruntled members of his own party.
In a statement following the publication of the report, authored by Sue Gray, a civil servant appointed to lead the investigation, Johnson said he “accepted the general findings in full.” He apologized “for the things we simply didn’t get right… [and] the way this matter has been handled.”
Responding to criticisms in the report about accountability measures in different government departments, Johnson said, “I get it, and I will fix it,” prompting jeers from opposition lawmakers in the House of Commons.
The scandal has dominated British politics in recent weeks. The intervention of the Metropolitan Police, which is now carrying out a criminal investigation into at least eight of the gatherings, meant the report has not been published in full, which some critics have said granted the prime minister a short-term reprieve.
Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, who has called for the prime minister to resign since the beginning of the crisis, described the interim report as “damning.”
Gray said she was only able to “make minimal reference” to the gatherings under police investigation. At the time of these alleged get-togethers, breaches of lockdown rules were punishable by fixed penalty fines. Restrictions were also in place at the time on hospital and care home visits and funerals, prompting fury from victims and the bereaved, represented by organizations such as the COVID Bereaved Families for Justice.
Johnson apologized in the House of Commons earlier this month but denied breaching any rules. At a gathering in the Downing Street gardens in May of last year, which Johnson himself attended and over 100 staffers were invited to despite social distancing rules, Johnson said he believed it was a “work event.”
While the interim report is lacking in detail over what exactly took place at the gatherings in question — which reports in the U.K. media said included leaving parties for departing staff — the update was critical of numerous “failures of leadership” at various levels of the government.
“Some of the events should not have been allowed to take place,” Gray wrote. “Other events should not have been allowed to develop as they did.”
Meanwhile, Gray said “steps needed to be taken” to ensure that government departments had clearer policies covering the drinking of alcohol.
“The excessive consumption of alcohol is not appropriate in a professional workplace at any time,” she said in the report.“Against the backdrop of the pandemic, when the government was asking citizens to accept far-reaching restrictions on their lives, some of the behavior surrounding these gatherings is difficult to justify.”
The full report may not be published until after the Metropolitan Police have completed their investigation.
Senate pages carry the Electoral College ballot boxes on Jan. 7, 2021 at the Capitol, in Washington. – Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — With voting rights legislation all but dead in the Senate, and the former president now openly suggesting he tried to use a vaguely-worded 19th-century law to try to manipulate the last presidential election, a growing group of bipartisan lawmakers is backing the idea of changing how Congress tallies presidential election results by reforming the 1887 Electoral Count Act.
The law was intended to set up a peaceful transfer of power after an election dispute, but it’s one former President Donald Trump and his allies sought to exploit in a scheme to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump made his clearest statement yet this week that he believed Pence could and should have simply overturned the results himself, responding to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who was asked about efforts to reform the law on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos.
He said, “…how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election?”
“Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power. He could have overturned the Election!” Trump falsely claimed in a statement late Sunday.
By pressing then-Vice President Mike Pence to interfere with the ceremonial counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, as well as outlining how states could — and several would — send conflicting slates of electors to Congress, and urging lawmakers to object to results, to which 147 Republicans followed, Trump took advantage of ambiguities in the law’s language.
Republican leaders have signaled an openness to amending the text, but Democrats argue the effort, while potentially bipartisan, does not address what they call state voter suppression tactics they say will be felt in the midterms and could be a distraction from larger voting reform.
Addressing reforms to the law, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the White House has “been open to and a part of conversations about the Electoral Count Act,” but that it shouldn’t be a “replacement” for larger voting reforms. She also called attention to Trump’s statement as representing a “unique and existential threat to our democracy.”
Some scholars warn that if lawmakers don’t join together to reform the process, it will be weaponized again.
“There’s enough focus now on the ambiguities of this statute that if it isn’t Donald Trump in 2024, you could easily imagine a number of other actors taking a page from his playbook,” Rebecca Green, co-director of the election law program at William and Mary Law School, told ABC News. “But the ECA is not just specific to one presidential election or one person. It’s just become a more apparent problem to address after Jan 6.”
Here’s a look at the Electoral Count Act and why people are calling for it to be reformed:
What is the Electoral Count Act?
The Electoral Count Act is the law that governs how Congress counts electoral votes following a presidential election.
It essentially sets up a timetable for when different parts of the counting process must take place and sets up a dispute resolution process for how Congress will resolve irregularities in accepting electoral slates from states.
How did the law come about?
The law was crafted in response to a contested presidential election in 1876, when several states under the control of Reconstruction governments sent multiple slates of electors to Congress post-Civil War.
Samuel Tilden, a Democrat, had won the popular vote, but after Congress created an ad hoc commission to deal with the dispute, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was ultimately declared the winner.
Democrats refused to accept the results until the Compromise of 1877, which called for an end to Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from former Confederate states. A decade later, Congress passed a law that lawmakers hoped would prevent a future process from being upended.
But it has presented problems.
What problems does it present?
While there are several proposals for ways to reform the law, such as changing the timeline for “safe harbor” status — when electoral votes are considered “conclusive” — or resolving questions around judicial review following election disputes, there are two glaring areas that Green told ABC News lawmakers need to address.
The role of the vice president is unclear
The vice president’s role in what usually is a ministerial proceeding — simply counting and announcing the votes — is extremely unclear.
The Constitution dictates that the president of the Senate, or the vice president, open the certificates of electoral votes from each state. Additionally, under the current Electoral Count Act, the president of the Senate carries over the proceedings and calls for objections.
The act says, in long, convoluted language, the each state’s slates or “all such returns and papers shall be opened by him” — the vice president, or president of the Senate — “in the presence of the two houses when met as aforesaid, and read by the tellers, and all such returns and papers shall thereupon be submitted to the judgment and decision…”
“Does this run-on sentence mean that Mike Pence shall open only the ballots that he wants? Or does he have to open if there’s more than one slate from a state — how does he know which ones to open?” Green posed. “None of those questions are answered by the face of the statute.”
She added, “Those vagaries produced the mischief that we saw in the 2020 election,” she added.
ABC News Senior Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl reported in his book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show that then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows emailed to Pence’s top aide a detailed plan penned by Trump’s campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis outlining how Pence was to send back the electoral votes from six battleground states that Trump falsely claimed he had won.
Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa also revealed in their book, Peril, a memo written by John Eastman, whom Trump introduced at the Jan. 6 rally as “one of the most brilliant lawyers in the country,” outlined another plan for how Pence would hand the election back to Trump on Jan. 6.
According to their reporting, Eastman instructed Pence to say, at the conclusion of counting, “because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States.” Then, Pence “gavels President Trump as reelected.”
Pence would have declared the seven states that submitted the alternate slates of electors as being in dispute, and ultimately hand the election to Trump in the alleged plot. However, Pence rejected the pressure to do so, sticking to his strictly ceremonial role, and the National Archives never accepted the uncertified documents for congressional counting.
Despite all the manipulation, scholars argue it isn’t reasonable to suggest the vice president would have been granted such interference.
“There has never been the kind of pressure that Mike Pence experienced on Jan. 6, 2021, before,” Green said, “but it would be extremely illogical for the system to instill that much power in sitting vice presidents, particularly since sitting vice presidents are so regularly on the presidential ballot.”
Additionally, the Justice Department and lawmakers on the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 are looking into those individuals who falsely signed on as alternate electors to declare Trump the winner in states he actually lost to Biden.
It’s ‘too easy’ for lawmakers to object to a state’s slate.
The law allows one congressman paired with one senator to object to the results submitted by each state — which last year, made way for a long, drawn-out process as Republican after Republican, including several freshmen, contested results. Eight senators and 139 representatives, all Republicans, voted to sustain one or both objections to electoral votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
If a congressman finds a senator to join in their objection, both the House and Senate chambers are forced back to their chambers for two hours of debate and a vote, which some argue is an invitation for political grandstanding.
The objection tool was used only once in its first 100 years. In all three recent cases, the attempts have failed.
In 2001 and 2017, no senator would join with a representative to object. (Biden, then serving as vice president, was the one to gavel out a handful of Democrats’ challenging Trump’s electors.) In 2005, a representative and a senator objected to counting Ohio’s electoral votes cast for George W. Bush, but the challenge was not successful.
Some lawmakers are now coalescing around the idea of raising the threshold for objections beyond just a single senator and representative — or to creating a list of valid ground for objecting results.
One proposal raises that at least one-third of each chamber would be needed for an objection to be heard — or more than 30 senators and 140 House members.
“The idea is that the current process is too easy and that perhaps it should be made a little bit harder to object, so that there’s more consensus required and a couple of people can’t kind of gum up the works as easily,” Green said.
Collins, who is leading discussions with a group of 16 senators to reform the law, said she’s hopeful it can be done on an “overwhelming” bipartisan basis.
“I’m hopeful that we can come up with a bipartisan bill that will make very clear that the vice president’s role is simply ministerial, that he has no ability to halt the count, and that we’ll raise the threshold from one House member, one senator, for triggering a challenge to a vote count submitted by the states,” she told ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos. “This is no small thing. I think it is really important that we do this reform.”
Why act now?
Earlier this month, a Democratic-led committee released a 31-page report on potential reforms to the Electoral Count Act.
“As the events leading up to the violent attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, demonstrated, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 is in dire need of reform. It is antiquated, incomplete, vague, and open to exploitation,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., chairperson of the Committee on House Administration. “But to be clear — reforming the Electoral Count Act, necessary as it is, would not restrain the erosion of democracy or the dishonest efforts across the nation to diminish and impede the equal freedom to vote.”
Key Republicans including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have expressed a willingness to back reforms, but Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has argued the reforms don’t go far enough in addressing threats to democracy and restrictions to the vote in elections beyond the race for president.
As the movement gains new bipartisan traction, election experts are calling for lawmakers to keep the momentum up.
“If these disputes aren’t resolved, then partisan actors are going to act a certain way and try to exploit ambiguities to their favor whereas if you sort of close those gaps prior to the election, then you’re more likely to have a fair process that produces an outcome without dispute that it’s legitimate,” Green said.
Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — After months of tensions over Russia’s massive troop buildup on Ukraine’s borders, the United Nations Security Council met Monday to discuss the situation for the first time — adjourning after over two hours of open debate.
The meeting didn’t yield any action or even a joint statement, but ambassadors from the U.S. and Russia sparred in dueling remarks, trading blame for escalating the crisis.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin has amassed over 100,000 troops and heavy equipment and weaponry on three sides of Ukraine, including in Russian-annexed Crimea and in Belarus, Kyiv’s northern neighbor and a close Kremlin ally.
At first, Russia, backed by China, tried to block the session from moving forward by calling a vote among Security Council’s 15 member states. Russia and China opposed it, three countries abstained, but ten voted to move ahead with it.
“You heard from our Russian colleagues that we’re calling for this meeting to make you all feel uncomfortable. Imagine how uncomfortable you would be if you had 100,000 troops sitting on your border in the way that these troops are sitting on the border with Ukraine,” said U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield. “This is not about antics. It’s not about rhetoric. It’s not about ‘U.S. and Russia.’ What this is about is the peace and security of one of our member states.”
In her remarks, she accused Russia of “the largest — hear me clearly — mobilization of troops in Europe in decades” and threatening military action should its concerns about Ukraine joining NATO and NATO’s troop deployments in Eastern European member states not be addressed.
“If Russia further invades Ukraine, none of us will be able to say we didn’t see it coming, and the consequences will be horrific,” she added.
But Russia’s envoy again denied that the Kremlin is planning to attack its neighbor, a former Soviet state and now a growing democracy — telling the Security Council there is “no proof confirming such a serious accusation whatsoever,” defending troop movements within Russia’s borders as a domestic issue, and then denying there are 100,000 as U.S. and other Western officials have said.
“They themselves are whipping up tensions and rhetoric and are provoking escalation,” Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said of the U.S. and its NATO allies. “The discussions about a threat of war is provocative in and of itself. You are almost calling for this. You want it to happen. You’re waiting for it to happen.”
Thomas-Greenfield requested to speak again to respond, saying, “I cannot let the false equivalency go unchecked, so I feel I must respond. … The threats of aggression on the border of Ukraine — yes on its border — is provocative. Our recognition of the facts on the ground is not provocative.”
Ukraine — which is not a member of the Security Council, but was invited to participate — urged Russia to respect its “sovereign right” to choose which countries it partners with.
“Ukraine will not bow to threats aimed at weakening Ukraine, undermining its economic and financial stability, and inciting public frustration. This will not happen. And the Kremlin must remember that Ukraine is ready to defend itself,” Ukrainian Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya told the council.
In a sign of their increasing alignment, China was the only country to back Russia’s effort to squash the public meeting. Its ambassador Zhang Jun said they oppose “microphone diplomacy of public confrontation” and believed the open discussion of the issue would add “fuel to the tension.”
While the session didn’t yield any results, it marks the start of another week of diplomacy between Russia and the U.S. and its allies over Ukraine.
“Russia heard clearly a united position from the vast majority of the council, and I hope that that will lead to a diplomatic solution,” Thomas-Greenfield, a member of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, told reporters after the meeting.
Biden himself hailed the meeting as “a critical step in rallying the world to speak out in one voice: rejecting the use of force, calling for military de-escalation, supporting diplomacy as the best path forward.”
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will speak with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the State Department and Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed Monday — the first conversation after the U.S. responding in writing last week to Russia’s demands about Ukraine and NATO.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to speak to Putin this week, days after the U.K. said it could deploy troops to protect NATO allies if Russia invaded Ukraine. Biden announced a similar position last week, putting 8,500 U.S. troops on “heightened alert” and adding Friday he could do so in the “near” future.
In a potential positive sign for diplomacy, Russia said some of its forces had pulled back from the border areas after a “preparedness check,” according to the Russian Armed Forces’ Southern Military District.
But it’s not yet clear if the U.S. had confirmed any troops were withdrawn from the border region, and Thomas-Greenfield warned the U.S. has evidence Russia intends to expand its presence in Belarus to more than 30,000 troops — putting them less than two hours north of Kyiv. Those deployments include short-range ballistic missiles, special forces, and anti-aircraft batteries, she added — all of which Russia and Belarus have said are for military exercises.
(NEW YORK) — After managing to avoid the same level of scrutiny as fellow tech giants such as Twitter and Facebook for years, streaming service Spotify has now found itself at the center of a scandal involving the platform it gives to those disseminating misinformation about COVID-19.
The saga stems from episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, which critics said peddled dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines to his millions of listeners. Spotify made headlines back in 2020 for reportedly licensing a $100 million deal to exclusively host Rogan’s often controversial namesake podcast.
Following immense backlash that included artist Neil Young yanking his music from the platform and a petition demanding action from Spotify signed by hundreds of doctors, scientists and public health professionals, Spotify responded late Sunday by saying it will add a “content advisory” label to any podcast episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19 and directs listeners to its “COVID-19 Hub” for up-to-date information on the virus as shared by public health authorities.
The streaming service, however, stopped short of removing any podcast episodes that have been criticized for spreading misinformation about the virus. A contrite Rogan said he supports Spotify’s decision in a 10-minute video posted to Instagram on Sunday, and he promised to add more guests with “differing opinions.”
While experts say Spotify’s actions are a good starting point, many say they remain skeptical of how effective these advisory labels will ultimately be at undoing or curbing the real-world damage caused by virus misinformation online.
“What we know is that it’s not going to have a strong effect in terms of changing people’s minds,” Ellen Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law School whose research focuses on information policy law, free speech and media policy, told ABC News of adding fact-checking labels to misinformation. Goodman stressed that most of the research on this topic, however, looks at traditional social media platforms versus streaming services like Spotify.
Goodman said that existing research on this topic has shown that it is unlikely people’s opinions are going to be changed by something like a fact-checking label, especially for content on “something as polarizing as vaccines.”
“The evidence shows that it probably doesn’t do a huge amount to dissuade people from their priors,” she added. “But, also, the evidence shows that if they’re not coming into it with a prior, like they’re not in one camp or the other — it’s hard to imagine that there are people like on the fence about this issue — but if there are such people, then disclaimers can be effective.”
In a company blog post on Sunday announcing the updates, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said, “Personally, there are plenty of individuals and views on Spotify that I disagree with strongly.”
“We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users,” Ek added. “In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.”
Goodman, meanwhile, told ABC News that she thinks it’s “nonsense to say that they don’t want to censor.”
“It’s not censorship, it’s making choices,” she said. “They are exercising editorial control when they decide what to put on their platforms and whatnot, and what to promote, and obviously this was a huge business deal for Spotify.”
“They are making their choices; they have a right to make those choices,” Goodman added, saying that having decided to host Rogan’s podcast, the company likely knew the kind of content moderation challenges this could present, adding, “but those are the kinds of editorial decisions that media platforms make all the time.”
Another problem many platforms have had with the labeling approach to misinformation is that it can open a whole can of worms for companies then deciding what rises to the level of meriting a label and what doesn’t, Goodman added, saying navigating these tripwires has proven especially difficult for social media giants in recent years.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology similarly warned on a 2020 study that putting warning labels on fake news can carry a catch of making people more readily believe other false stories that aren’t tagged, and that there is no way fact-checkers can keep up with the stream of misinformation to combat this so-called “implied truth effect” caused by the addition of just some labeling.
Epidemiologist Dr. John Brownstein, the chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor, was one of the signatories of the headline-grabbing petition from scientists and doctors slamming an episode of Rogan’s podcast that featured a doctor who has been banned from Twitter for COVID-19 misinformation.
“It’s a good starting point,” Brownstein said of Spotify’s response, but he expressed frustration at how rapidly a public health campaign can be “undermined by a very, very small minority.”
“We’ve seen this movie play out before, where you can undo massive amounts of public health advance through even the smallest amount of objection,” he added. “We saw this with the linkage between vaccination and autism, where even though that research in itself was debunked, that that false linkage still persists today.”
“Regardless of a warning, I think people will ultimately still listen,” Brownstein said of content advisory labels. “A warning won’t necessarily have a major impact necessarily on how people absorb the information.”
He said he believes tech platforms bear a “massive responsibility” in figuring out “how not to provide equal footing” to false information about science and in quelling its spread, especially during a public health crisis.
“They need to find ways to not perpetuate rumors or misinformation about vaccines that ultimately cost lives,” Brownstein said. “There’s a responsibility, because these are not just sort of online chats, this is information that translates to someone’s decision about getting a vaccine.”
(NEW YORK) — A U.S. District Court judge rejected on Monday a plea deal that would have allowed the white Georgia man and his father convicted in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery to serve a large part of their sentences in federal prison.
Judge Lisa Godbey Wood’s decision to turn down Travis McMichael and Gregory McMichael’s plea agreements with federal prosecutors came after Arbery’s parents and two aunts gave emotional statements asking the judge to reject the deal and proceed with a federal trial next week.
“All they would have to do is stand up and say that they were motivated by hate and then this court will concede to their preferred conditions of confinement,” Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, told the judge. “I do not need to hear them say they were motivated by hate. That does me no good. It does my family no good.”
She added, “It is not fair to take away this victory that I prayed and I fought for. It is not right. It is not just. It is wrong. Please listen to me. Granting these men their preferred conditions of confinement would defeat me. It gives them one last chance to spit in my face after murdering my son.”
Following Travis McMichael’s hearing on Monday, a second hearing was to schedule on the plea deal the government’s attorneys negotiated with 66-year-old Gregory McMichael. However, Godbey Wood said her decision would be the same in the case of the elder McMichael, whose attorney agreed to cancel the hearing.
Both men and their neighbor, 52-year-old William “Roddie” Bryan, were convicted on state murder charges in Arbery’s 2020 death. They were sentenced to life in prison. Travis and Gregory McMichael were sentenced without the possibility of parole.
A federal prosecutor told the judge during Monday’s hearing that the agreement called for the men to immediately be turned over the Federal Bureau of Prisons to serve 30 years in a federal penitentiary before being returned to the Georgia Department of Corrections to serve the remainder of their sentence.
Godbey Wood gave both men the option to go forward with their guilty pleas and risk her giving them a harsher sentence than what they agreed to, or to withdraw their pleas and go to trial starting on Monday.
The judge gave them until Friday to decide.
Prior to the judge’s decision, federal prosecutor Tara Lyons touted the plea deal as one that “powerfully advances the larger interest of justice.”
“Through this resolution, the defendants will accept responsibility for the full nature of their crime, admitting publicly in front of the nation that this offense was racially motivated,” Lyons said.
Federal prosecutors filed notices of plea agreements for Travis McMichael, 35, and Gregory McMichael, on Sunday in U.S. District Court in Brunswick, Georgia, and requested Monday’s hearing for Godbey Wood to review the deal.
No plea agreement was announced for Bryan.
In announcing her decision, Godbey Wood said the plea agreement would lock her into a sentence of 30 years or 360 months.
“Here in this relatively early stage in the case, I can’t say that 360 months is the precise, fair sentence in this case,” Gobey Wood said. “It could be more, it could be less, it could be that. But given the unique circumstances of this case and my desire to hear from all concerned regarding sentencing before I pronounce sentence, I am not comfortable accepting the terms of the plea agreement.”
Prior to Monday’s hearing, Arbery’s relatives slammed the plea deal, alleging it was done behind their backs. But Lyons said her office was in frequent communication with attorneys for Arbery’s family and that they assured prosecutors the family would not oppose the plea arrangement.
“We respect the court’s decision to not accept the sentencing terms of the proposed plea and to continue the hearing until Friday,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement. “The Justice Department takes seriously its obligation to confer with the Arbery family and their lawyers both pursuant to the Crime Victim Rights Act and out of respect for the victim.”
Clarke added, “Before signing the proposed agreement reflecting the defendants’ confessions to federal hate crimes charges, the Civil Rights Division consulted with the victims’ attorneys. The Justice Department entered the plea agreement only after the victims’ attorneys informed me that the family was not opposed to it.”
Arbery was out for a jog on Feb. 23, 2020, in the Satilla shores neighborhood near Brunswick, Georgia, when the McMichaels assumed he was a burglar, armed themselves and chased him in their pickup truck. Bryan joined the five-minute pursuit, blocking Arbery’s path with his truck and recorded video on cellphone of Travis McMichael fatally shooting Arbery with a shotgun during a struggle.
Arbery’s parents, Cooper-Jones and Marcus Arbery, asked the federal court to be allowed to assert their right under federal law to oppose the plea deal directly before the court.
“The DOJ has gone behind my back to offer the men who murdered my son a deal to make their time in prison easier for them to serve,” Cooper-Jones said in a statement before Monday’s hearing. “I have made it clear at every possible moment that I do not agree to offer these men a plea deal of any kind. I have been completely betrayed by the DOJ lawyers.”
When Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted on state charges of murdering George Floyd, reached a plea agreement on federal charges that he violated Floyd’s civil rights, he asked to be sent to federal prison even though he is expected to serve more time than the 22 years he was sentenced to in state court.
In response to Chauvin’s plea deal, legal experts told ABC News that federal penitentiaries run by the Bureau of Prisons tend to better than state prisons. The experts said federal prisons have fewer overcrowding issues, more comfortable bunks and even better food and educational resources than often cash-strapped state prisons. High-profile inmates, especially former law enforcement officers like Chauvin and Gregory McMichael, tend to also get greater protection in federal prison, the experts said.
The federal Bureau of Prisons estimated that the annual cost of housing an inmate in a federal facility in 2020 was a little over $39,000.
The annual cost of housing an inmate in a Georgia state prison is roughly $20,000, according to a 2015 study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and policy organization.
“Federal prison is going to be a lighter sentence for these men,” Lee Merritt, an attorney for Cooper-Jones said during a news conference prior to the Monday’s hearing.
Merritt also cited an ongoing investigation by the Department of Justice into conditions at Georgia state prisons that was launched in September.
The DOJ said in a statement that the investigation is primarily focused on whether Georgia provides inmates reasonable protection from physical harm at the hands of other prisoners and staff.
Cooper-Jones said at Monday’s news conference that she found the plea deal “disrespectful.”
MORE: Travis McMichael testifies in his own defense in Ahmaud Arbery case
She said she learned of the deal on Sunday and has had discussions with DOJ attorneys since.
“I told them very, very adamantly I wanted them to go to state prison and do their time,” Cooper-Jones said.
In a separate news conference, Marcus Arbery said that finding out about the deal made him “mad as hell.”
He said his son’s death was a racially-motivated murder and “we want 100% justice, not half justice.”
He added, “I don’t want no chance of trying to make their lives easy.”
ABC News’ Janice McDonald and Alexander Mallin contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe, more than 5.6 million people have died from the disease worldwide, including over 885,000 Americans, according to real-time data compiled by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
About 63.8% of the population in the United States is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Latest headlines:
-Only 5 states reporting jump in cases
-Moderna gets full FDA approval for vaccine
-Prime Minister Trudeau tests positive
-‘Partygate’ report finds ‘failures of leadership and judgement’ by UK leaders
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern.
Jan 31, 5:00 pm
Pediatric cases drop for 1st time since Thanksgiving
New COVID-19 cases among children dropped last week for the first time since Thanksgiving, according to a new report by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association. About 808,000 children tested positive last week, down from a peak of 1,150,000 cases reported the week ending Jan. 20.
However, the organizations warn that pediatric cases remain “extremely high,” still triple the peak level of the delta surge in the summer of 2021.
AAP and CHA noted there is an “urgent” need to collect more age-specific data to assess the severity of illness related to new variants as well as potential longer-term effects. The two organizations note in their report that a small percentage of pediatric cases have resulted in hospitalization and death.
More than 28 million eligible children remain completely unvaccinated, according to federal and census data.
ABC News’ Arielle Mitropoulos
Jan 31, 3:30 pm
Novavax asks FDA for emergency use authorization for its vaccine
Novavax on Monday submitted a request to the FDA for emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine.
Novavax uses a more traditional protein-based vaccine platform, which is different from Pfizer and Modena’s mRNA technology and Johnson & Johnson’s viral vector technology.
Novavax’s vaccine exposes a person to a lab-based piece of coronavirus to build immunity.
Novavax’s studies — conducted before the omicron variant — showed an approximately 90% efficacy.
Novavax was one of the early contenders for a COVID-19 vaccine; Operation Warp Speed allocated $1.6 billion for 100 million doses if the vaccine was authorized by the FDA.
ABC News’ Eric M. Strauss
Jan 31, 12:00 pm
Only 5 states reporting jump in cases
After weeks of surging cases, many U.S. states continue to see impressive declines in their national case averages.
The U.S. is reporting an average of about 543,000 new cases per day, down by about 32.2% in the last two weeks, according to federal data. Two weeks ago the nation was reporting more than 800,000 new cases every day.
Only five states are seeing at least a 10% increase in new cases: Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, Montana and Washington.
But case levels still remain much higher than the nation’s previous surges. Experts point out that many Americans who are taking at-home tests are not submitting their results, and thus, case totals may be higher than reported.
Alaska now leads the nation in new cases per capita followed by Washington state, Kentucky and Oklahoma, according to federal data.
ABC News’ Arielle Mitropoulos
Jan 31, 11:30 am
Moderna gets full FDA approval for vaccine
Moderna has now received full FDA approval for its COVID-19 vaccine, the second vaccine maker to be granted full approval, after Pfizer.
All three vaccines currently available in the U.S. were granted emergency authorization based on large clinical studies and at least two months of safety data.
Moderna said the full approval was “based on a comprehensive submission package including efficacy and safety data approximately six months after second dose.”
(NEW YORK) — For the second time this month, at least six historically black universities and colleges have received bomb threats.
Howard University, Bowie State University, Bethune-Cookman University, Southern University, Delaware State University and Albany State University have all reported potential threats Monday.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is aware of the series of bomb threats and is working with law enforcement to address potential threats.
“As always, we would like to remind members of the public that if they observe anything suspicious to report it to law enforcement immediately,” the FBI said in a statement to ABC News.
The acting deputy director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, Thomas Chittum, also said that agents from the bureau are responding to the reports.
“We can confirm that ATF has responded,” Chittum told reporters on a call Monday. “Of course, it is a federal crime to use interstate facilities to make a bomb threat, and so ATF will provide our investigative expertise and support to that investigation, but obviously, the facts are preliminary and unfolding.”
Albany State University in Georgia received notice of a bomb threat to the academic buildings of its campus. As local law enforcement officials investigate, all ASU campuses remained closed and employees and students were told not to report to campus.
Bowie State University in Maryland is also investigating a bomb threat with bomb technicians from the Maryland State Fire Marshal. The campus remains closed as K9s conduct sweeps of university buildings.
“OSFM Bomb Technicians and explosive detection K9s are assisting @BowieState PD with a telephonic bomb threat,” a tweet from the agency read. “Maryland State Police are on the scene. The investigation is active. Prince George’s County Police Department is also on the scene.”
Southern University and A&M College also received a bomb threat Monday and went into lockdown. The university told students classes were canceled and that they should remain in their dorm rooms until an all-clear was issued.
Delaware State University told ABC News that University Police are investigating and that employees and commuter students have been instructed not to report to the campus until further notice. Residential students have also been asked to remain in their dorm rooms.
Howard University and Bethune-Cookman University also report potential bomb threats to their campuses, according to ABC-affiliate ABC7 News.
Judson Bible College, which is not an HBCU, was also targeted.
On Jan. 4, at least seven historically Black colleges and universities received bomb threats, according to school officials.
However, no bombs were found on the campuses of Florida Memorial University, North Carolina Central University, Prairie View A&M University, The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Florida Memorial University, Norfolk State University and Xavier University of Louisiana.
The threats forced campuses to lockdown or evacuate and local law enforcement was alerted.
Editor’s note: ABC News incorrectly listed the HBCUs targeted with bomb threats Monday. Judson Bible College was included but it is not an HBCU, however it was also targeted.
(NEW YORK) — Two Bridgeport, Connecticut, detectives involved in the case of Lauren Smith-Fields, who was found dead in her apartment after a date last month, have been placed on administrative leave and are being investigated by the police department’s internal affairs office, according to the mayor.
Disciplinary actions may also be taken against Bridgeport Police detectives Kevin Cronin and Angel Llanos, due to a “lack of sensitivity to the public and failure to follow police policy” in the handling of the two cases, according to a statement from Joseph P. Ganim, the city’s mayor.
“It is an unacceptable failure if policies were not followed,” Ganim said. “To the families, friends and all who care about the human decency that should be shown in these situations in this case by members of the Bridgeport Police Department, I am very sorry.”
The detectives are also being investigated for their handling of the case of Brenda Lee Rawls, who was found dead and alone in her home on Dec. 12.
Smith-Fields was found dead in her apartment that same day, shortly after meeting a man on a dating app.
The families of Smith-Fields, 23, and Rawls, 53, claim the police failed to notify them of the deaths and say they learned of the deaths from others. Both women are Black.
The supervisory officer who was in charge of overseeing these investigations retired from the department on Friday, the mayor said, adding that the cases are both under active investigation and have been reassigned.
Both cases are both under active investigation and have been reassigned.
The news comes just days after the Connecticut chief medical examiner’s office announced that Smith-Fields’ cause of death was “acute intoxication due to the combined effects of fentanyl, promethazine, hydroxyzine and alcohol” and the medical examiner ruled the manner of death an “accident.”
The cause and manner of death in Rawls’ case are still undetermined, the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner reports.
The Bridgeport Police Department said it was unable to respond to ABC News’ request for comment and union Council 4 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees did not respond. It is unclear if Cronin and Llanos have legal representation.
Smith-Fields’ family announced earlier this month it plans to file a lawsuit against the city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, as well as the Bridgeport Police Department, alleging that police haven’t properly investigated her death and have violated their civil rights.
“The way they handled her investigation was literally disgraceful, disgusting, horrible. It was not even human,” Lakeem Jetter, Smith-Fields’ brother, said in an interview with Good Morning America.
(NEW YORK) — A plea deal that would have allowed a white man convicted in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery to serve a large part of his sentence in federal prison was rejected by a U.S. District Court judge on Monday.
Judge Lisa Godbey Wood’s decision to turn down Travis McMichael’s plea agreement with federal prosecutors came after Arbery’s parents and two aunts gave emotional statements asking the judge to reject the deal and proceed with a federal trial next week.
A second hearing on a plea deal the government’s attorneys negotiated with McMichael’s father, 66-year-old Gregory McMichael, was also scheduled to occur on Monday. However, since Godbey Wood said her decision would be the same in the elder McMichael’s case, Gregory McMichael’s lawyer said there was no need for a hearing.
Both men and their neighbor, 52-year-old William “Roddie” Bryan, were convicted on state murder charges in Arbery’s 2020 death. They were sentenced to life in prison. Travis and Gregory McMichael were sentenced without the possibility of parole.
A federal prosecutor told the judge during Monday’s hearing that the agreement called for the men to immediately be turned over to the Federal Bureau of Prisons to serve 30 years in a federal penitentiary before being returned to the Georgia Department of Corrections to serve the remainder of their sentence.
Godbey Wood gave both men the option to go forward with their guilty pleas and risk her giving them a harsher sentence than what they agreed to, or to withdraw their pleas and go to trial starting on Monday.
The judge gave them until Friday to decide.
Federal prosecutors filed notices of plea agreements for Travis McMichael, 35, and Gregory McMichael, on Sunday in U.S. District Court in Brunswick, Georgia, and requested Monday’s hearing for Godbey Wood to review the deal.
No plea agreement was announced for Bryan.
Prior to Monday’s hearing, Arbery’s relatives slammed the plea deal, alleging it was done behind their back.
“This proposed plea is a huge accommodation to the men who hunted down and murdered Ahmaud Arbery,” the family’s attorney, Lee Merritt, said in a statement. “The family is devastated at this development, their wishes are being completely ignored and they do not consent to these accommodations.”
Arbery was out for a jog on Feb. 23, 2020, in the Satilla shores neighborhood near Brunswick, Georgia, when the McMichaels assumed he was a burglar, armed themselves and chased him in their pickup truck. Bryan joined the five-minute pursuit, blocking Arbery’s path with his truck and recorded Travis McMichael fatally shooting Arbery with a shotgun during a struggle on his cellphone.
Arbery’s parents, Wanda Cooper-Jones and Marcus Arbery, asked the federal court to be allowed to assert her right under federal law to oppose the plea deal directly before the court.
“The DOJ has gone behind my back to offer the men who murdered my son a deal to make their time in prison easier for them to serve,” Cooper-Jones said in a statement. “I have made it clear at every possible moment that I do not agree to offer these men a plea deal of any kind. I have been completely betrayed by the DOJ lawyers.”
During a news conference in Georgia on Monday, Merritt said Cooper-Jones and Arbery’s father will be allowed to speak at the hearing scheduled for 2 p.m. on Monday. Merritt said the parents plan to ask a federal judge to reject the plea deal.
When Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted on state charges of murdering George Floyd, reached a plea agreement on federal charges that he violated Floyd’s civil rights, he asked to be sent to federal prison even though he is expected to serve more time than the 22 years he was sentenced to in state court.
In response to Chauvin’s plea deal, legal experts told ABC News that federal penitentiaries run by the Bureau of Prisons tend to better than state prisons. The experts said federal prisons have fewer overcrowding issues, more comfortable bunks and even better food and educational resources than often cash-strapped state prisons. High-profile inmates, especially former law enforcement officers like Chauvin and Gregory McMichael, tend to also get greater protection in federal prison, the experts said.
The federal Bureau of Prisons estimated that the annual cost of housing an inmate in a federal facility in 2020 was a little over $39,000.
The annual cost of housing an inmate in a Georgia state prison is roughly $20,000, according to a 2015 study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and policy organization.
“Federal prison is going to be a lighter sentence for these men,” Merritt said.
Merritt also cited an ongoing investigation by the Department of Justice into conditions at Georgia state prisons that was launched in September.
The DOJ said in a statement that the investigation is primarily focused on whether Georgia provides inmates reasonable protection from physical harm at the hands of other prisoners and staff.
Cooper-Jones said at Monday’s news conference that she finds the plea deal “disrespectful.”
“I fought so hard to get these guys in state prison,” Cooper-Jones said.
She said she learned of the deal on Sunday and has had discussions with DOJ attorneys since.
“I told them very, very adamantly I wanted them to go to state prison and do their time,” Cooper-Jones said.
In a separate news conference, Marcus Arbery said that finding out about the deal made him “mad as hell.”
He said his son’s death was a racially-motivated murder and “we want 100% justice, not half justice.”
He added, “I don’t want no chance of trying to make their lives easy.”
(NEW YORK) — The Midwest is bracing for a storm that could bring major snowfall and leave dangerous ice on roadways.
The storm is set to strike Tuesday through Thursday. A winter storm watch has been issued from Colorado to Michigan, including Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis and Detroit.
More than 1 foot of snow is possible between Chicago and Indianapolis and also near Detroit.
This storm is expected to drop freezing rain and sleet — leaving dangerous, icy roads — in a huge part of the country, especially in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
By Thursday morning the wind chill — what temperature it feels like — is forecast to drop to 14 degrees in St. Louis, 0 degrees in Chicago, minus 25 degrees in Minneapolis, minus 17 degrees in Amarillo, Texas, and minus 16 in Denver.
Meanwhile, by the end of the week the Northeast will be thawing out, with temperatures rising to the mid 40’s in New York City and Boston.
