(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Justice failed to count nearly 1,000 deaths in U.S. prisons during the 2021 fiscal year, according to a new report released by the Senate subcommittee on investigations.
States that accept certain federal funding are required under the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 (DCRA) to report to the DOJ who is dying in prisons and jails.
The law is intended to collect data on the scope of prison deaths in an effort to curb them.
But the Senate committee report, released Tuesday, alleges that the DOJ failed to properly implement reporting requirements — leading to ineffective and unfulfilled collection of the death data.
The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News; bureau personnel were scheduled to testify before Congress later Tuesday afternoon.
The subcommittee said in its report that the DOJ will be eight years late on providing Congress with a report on how deaths in custody can be reduced. The report was supposed to be sent in 2016, but it’s not expected to be finished until 2024.
The DOJ failed to identify at least 990 prison and arrest-related deaths in the 2021 fiscal year alone, the report found. It also found that 70% of the data the DOJ collected was incomplete and that the DOJ has no plans to publicly publish any of the data from recent years.
“DOJ’s failure to implement DCRA has deprived Congress and the American public of information about who is dying in custody and why,” the report states.
It continued, “This information is critical to improve transparency in prisons and jails, identifying trends in custodial deaths that may warrant corrective action—such as failure to provide adequate medical care, mental health services, or safeguard prisoners from violence—and identifying specific facilities with outlying death rates.”
The report stated that the DOJ’s data on prisons can be collected but that department officials chose not to. The Senate subcommittee called the failure to implement DCRA “a missed opportunity to prevent avoidable deaths.”
(ATLANTA) — Former President Donald Trump’s legal team is urging the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to reject the Justice Department’s request for a partial stay of a district judge’s ruling that has effectively paused the government’s investigation into Trump’s potential mishandling of classified records after leaving office.
The DOJ had filed a motion Friday with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for a partial stay of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s order requiring a special master to review items with classification markings seized at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last month.
The government has said Trump was improperly keeping highly classified and sensitive materials that he took with him after leaving the White House. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Tuesday’s new filing from Trump’s attorneys calls the DOJ’s investigation into Trump “both unprecedented and misguided,” and repeats their claim that it is merely “a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control.” The Justice Department has said that characterization ignores the fact that documents possibly containing some of the nation’s highest protected secrets were found inside Trump’s private club in apparent defiance of a grand jury subpoena.
“The District Court did not err in temporarily enjoining the Government’s review and use of records bearing classification markings for criminal investigative purposes because the merits support that narrowly tailored injunction,” Trump’s lawyers argue in the new filing.
Cannon’s order effectively froze the government’s ability to use the contents of the seized records, including classified documents, as part of its criminal investigation.
DOJ officials also said the order has effectively halted a separate assessment by the intelligence community as to whether any classified information in the documents has been compromised or whether other materials may still be missing.
Cannon also rejected the DOJ’s request to allow investigators to continue reviewing the government records taken from Mar-a-Lago for its probe. Instead, she ruled those records had to be given to a special master for review to consider claims for return of personal property and assertions of attorney-client or executive privilege.
The special master appointed by Cannon, U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie, has called for lawyers representing both Trump and the DOJ to appear in his Brooklyn courtroom Tuesday afternoon.
In a filing on Monday evening, Trump’s legal team stated it was objecting to a request from Dearie for more information regarding whether Trump ever claimed to have declassified any of the documents at issue while he was president — noting it could end up serving as one of their defenses if Trump is ever indicted.
While Trump has repeatedly claimed he declassified all documents in his possession, his legal team has never made such an assertion in any of the court proceedings surrounding the search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden’s contention in a recent interview that the “pandemic is over” is complicating Senate Democrats’ efforts to secure needed Republican support for COVID-19 relief funding that had been requested by Biden’s administration.
“COVID is not over,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Monday when asked about Biden’s remarks, made during a 60 Minutes appearance that aired the previous day. “I don’t know what he meant — some people use ‘pandemic’ or ‘epidemic’ or other phrases. And he said that COVID isn’t over, the pandemic is over. But the way I look at it, COVID isn’t over.”
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin agreed.
“The variants are still out there. We are all hoping that it’s over [but] nobody is going to predict with certainty that it is. I’m not,” Durbin, D-Ill., told ABC News on Monday.
When pressed on the fact that the president twice resolutely stated that he believed the pandemic had ended, Durbin shrugged: “Maybe he knows something I don’t.”
“The president has asked in the past not just for pandemic funds for COVID-19 but to prepare for what might be next. And I think that’s always obvious and fair to do that,” Durbin said. “Maybe that’s his approach to it, I’d have to ask him.”
Biden on Sunday told CBS’ 60 Minutes that “the pandemic is over,” adding that “we still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over.”
His comments soon became fodder for Republicans who already opposed the additional $22 billion COVID funding for testing and vaccine development that the White House sought.
The administration’s efforts to get lawmakers on Capitol Hill to approve more money have been repeatedly blocked by Republicans. Currently, the White House hopes to have the $22 billion included in a must-pass government funding bill.
But at least 10 Republicans would need to support that move.
“It makes it eminently harder for sure,” Republican Minority Whip John Thune said Monday.
The top Republican on the Senate’s health committee, North Carolina’s Richard Burr, wrote in a Monday letter to the president that he “watched with great interest” Biden’s 60 Minutes interview.
In the letter, Burr asked for more information about how Biden’s view that the “pandemic is over” might influence some of the administration’s policies, including its request for more COVID-19 funding.
“Despite Americans having largely returned to normal life, which you acknowledged when you noted that attendees at the Detroit Auto Show were not wearing masks, your Administration continues to request un-offset emergency funding from Congress, enforce vaccine mandates, and maintain federal emergency declarations that cost taxpayers billions of dollars,” Burr wrote in the letter.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., called Biden’s request for additional money “crazy” since he has now said the pandemic is ended.
“The president saying the pandemic is over is … just kind of mind-boggling,” said Cassidy, who previously worked as a doctor. “He wants tens of billions for COVID and he says the pandemic is over?”
When asked if Biden’s comments meant there was no need for further funding, Cassidy was brief: “Sounds like it to me,” he said.
But some Democrats defended the president. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Monday that Biden’s comments were consistent with the changing needs of addressing COVID-19.
“What he’s saying reflects reality. People are not acting like we are in the same kind of crisis we were two years ago,” Murphy said. “It would not be consistent with reality if President Biden was out there suggesting what we’re living through today is the same thing as what we’re living through two years ago.”
(WASHINGTON) — There’s a tension between voter access and voting security, but that balance has been tipping decidedly one way in the recent political environment in which false claims that Donald Trump didn’t lose the 2020 election have muddied the waters, according to many experts who are raising alarms about proposed election-related laws.
Since the last presidential election, conservative state legislators across the country have enacted or introduced a flurry of bills that would increase restrictions to the election system — with a focus, in 2022, on changing how races are run and regulated — according to several nonpartisan organizations who describe themselves as advocating for democracy.
Experts from the States United Democracy Center, the Brennan Center for Justice and other groups who spoke with ABC News tied this growing amount of legislation to the false election fraud allegations that Trump and his supporters’ have been spreading since Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.
Since Trump was defeated by Biden, Trump has continued to claim — without evidence — that his election was marred by ineligible voters, fake votes cast by mail and other problems.
The pro-democracy groups told ABC News that hundreds of GOP-authored bills on voting and elections have already been considered during the 2022 legislative sessions in various states, consistent with a similar trend seen in 2021.
The measures from the past two years would purge some people from voter rolls, restrict mail-in ballot access and early voting — which was heavily emphasized by many states during the COVID-19 pandemic — as well as tighten ID requirements to vote, allow politicians to oversee local election boards and more, according to pro-democracy watchdogs.
The bills introduced at the state level would generally make it harder for eligible Americans to register to vote, cast their ballots and stay on voter rolls in comparison to existing laws, according to the Brennan Center. Joanna Lydgate, the co-founder and CEO of the States United Democracy Center, also specified that restrictive bills introduced over the past two years touch every aspect of current voting systems.
“Through these bills, legislators are kind of trying to take control over practically every step of the electoral process,” she said.
Only a fraction of proposed legislation typically gets signed into law, according to experts. But the “political bluster” of bills churning through statehouses will have an impact on expert-run elections systems that have successfully operated for decades, Lydgate told ABC News.
“In a lot of cases these are really poorly designed bills … it can lead to a lot of really unworkable situations. It can lead to confusion and chaos,” Lydgate said.
Fair Fight Deputy Executive Director Esosa Osa said that in her group’s view, there was a “new dynamic of shifting power over election administration from state and local election officials to more partisan actors, and there’s hyper criminalization of voting.” Fair Fight was founded by Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in 2014.
“If you consider the ability to vote, the ability to register to vote, to cast a ballot, and to have that ballot counted fairly — we are seeing all three aspects of that attack,” Osa told ABC News.
But John Fortier, a voting and elections expert for the conservative-aligned American Enterprise Institute, noted that some of the election bills come with nuance such as attempts to return elections back to in-person models after the COVID-19 pandemic rather than to create entirely new sets of restrictions.
“Do I think that some of the major bills that are being considered and passed through are really aimed at cutting down turnout? I don’t think they are aimed that way,” he told ABC News.
State legislatures are “not as interested in moving to kind of a Washington state, Oregon, 100% voting-by-mail model,” Fortier said.
In his view, increasing election security doesn’t always involve tightening access to elections themselves.
“I think it is true that Republicans have a lens of looking at elections where they prioritize more integrity issues,” he said. “You can imagine cases where that gets in the way of access, but I don’t think they’re always as contradictory as one thinks.”
For example, Georgia enacted a sweeping 2021 election bill that was criticized by some advocates for increasing regulations on mail voting. But the law also imposed requirements to try and keep poll lines shorter and increase the availability of poll workers.
By the numbers
Fair Fight said that in 2022 they have counted almost triple the amount of election-related legislation they’d tallied during 2011, the last year they marked a highpoint for restrictions on who can vote and how.
In the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 — before the crescendo of unsupported claims by Trump and his allies about problems with elections — the Brennan Center had tallied more pro-voter reforms than anti-voter restrictions.
In 2018, the Brennan Center counted at least 12 states that advanced a combined total of at least 20 bills expanding voting access in comparison to five states that advanced a combined total of at least six bills restricting voting access.
In 2019, 46 states introduced or carried over 688 bills expanding access compared to 29 states introducing or carrying over at least 87 bills restricting voting access.
And in 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and with many people in isolation, the Brennan Center counted 57 restrictive bills before state legislatures, while 29 states had introduced at least 188 bills to expand access.
Another report, published through a partnership between the nonpartisan voter organizations States United Democracy Center, Law Forward and Protect Democracy, echoed what Fair Fight and the other groups assessed as increasing restrictions on elections.
This new report tallied at least 244 bills introduced in 33 states that would interfere with election administration as of July 31. Twenty-four of those bills have become law, or adopted, across 17 states. That’s up from 229 bills identified in May and 216 bills spanning 41 states during the entirety of the 2021 legislative year.
Arizona and Wisconsin were the two states identified in the report with more than 30 anti-democratic bills introduced or under consideration, according to the report. Every other state
An additional analysis, published in May 2022 from the Brennan Center, reported similar findings for 2022 but tallied additional bills in 2021 — 440 in 49 states — that carried provisions to restrict voting access during the legislative sessions.
“The sheer volume and certainly the growth of the trend is cause for concern,” Lydgate, with the States United Democracy Center, said. “This is a national trend.”
These bills, Osa said, “highlight the broader political ecosystem that we are in following the 2020 election and the big lie” about Trump’s loss.
Opposing views
Simple conclusions about the entire country are hard to draw, however. Despite the influx of restrictive voting legislation moving through Statehouses across the country, there are some efforts to expand voting access as well.
Many state legislatures this year also took steps to broaden voting rights and election access, according to the Brennan Center. The group counted at least 596 of what they termed “expansive” bills in 44 states and Washington, D.C. Most of those proposals would allow for easier voter registration, a process to seek voting rights restoration for those convicted of crimes and easier mail-in voting in states like Arizona, Connecticut, New York and Oregon.
Elsewhere, however, some states have tightened their regulations — though supporters of such moves say it’s about security and smooth election administration.
In 2021, states like Georgia, Florida and Iowa passed sweeping omnibus bills that included election measures like shortening the period for requesting an absentee ballot or adding ID requirements for absentee ballots.
After Georgia saw record-breaking turnout during the March 2021 primary elections — the first test of Democratic predictions that the heightened requirements would actually turn people away from the polls — members of the GOP denounced the attacks as so much smoke.
“[Stacey] Abrams and President Biden lied to the people of Georgia and the country for political gain,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said. “From day one, I said that Georgia’s election law balanced security and access, and the facts have proved me right.”
Osa from Fair Fight, and the Brennan Center, however, said that as primary turnout grew in Georgia, so did the turnout gap between white and Black voters.
What worries experts now
The experts who spoke with ABC News called attention to certain kinds of standalone state bills being proposed this year: those that would shift election oversight to partisan legislatures instead of nonpartisan election officials; those that would require political reviews of elections that might delay their certifications; and those that would create “unworkable burdens” or even threat of criminal penalties for election officials.
The democracy experts who spoke with ABC News also expressed concern over the rise of 2020 election deniers — including those, as state legislators, who spearheaded new voting rules — who are now high-profile GOP candidates in the 2022 midterms.
In Arizona, for example, state Rep. Mark Finchem introduced a bill to decertify Arizona’s 2020 election, which Biden won. Finchem also introduced legislation to require hand tabulation of ballots and audits of election systems. He’s now the Republican nominee for secretary of state, Arizona’s highest elections post.
In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, now the Republican gubernatorial nominee, previously introduced legislation that would replace the current groups that oversee election administration and establish a commission that would strip away the election powers of the department of state and the secretary of the commonwealth.
A number of the bills moving through Arizona and Rhode Island would require or authorize additional audit processes for future elections. In Arizona, there are also bills that would allow citizens conduct their own reviews of voted ballots.
“This legislation uniformly lacks basic security, accuracy, and reliability measures for these suspect reviews, bestowing inordinate discretion on individuals, imposing no transparency requirements, or failing to mandate clear guidelines for how results are reviewed,” according to a review from the Brennan Center’s February 2022 roundup of voting laws.
Voting-related prosecutions are also cause for worry in some cases, the experts said, as some states aim to crack down on their vanishingly small numbers of verified cases of voter fraud, especially in contrast to the number of overall votes. Florida lawmakers created a new law enforcement entity within the Florida Department of State that is tasked with investigating voter fraud. And in Georgia, a bill signed into law this spring grants the Georgia Bureau of Investigation authority to investigate and prosecute election crimes.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, said in April that “this new law will allow us to engage highly-qualified personnel from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to assist in ensuring our elections are secure and fair.” Last month, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the arrests of 20 people on suspicion of illegally voting — touting accountability for wrongdoing.
But subsequent news reports and comments from the accused in Florida, however, suggested they thought they had been given permission to vote — casting the issue as a confusing bureaucratic mix-up, not deliberate criminal conduct.
There are also legislative efforts to increase the requirements of election administration, like an Arizona bill that election officials should document “voting irregularities” — or possibly face a criminal penalty. The legislation never defines the term “voting irregularities,” however.
“This is a highly coordinated and connected effort,” said Lydgate of the push to restrict voting access. “And that’s part of why we think it’s so important for voters to pay attention.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden spoke Monday with Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi about the federal government’s support after the island territory was hit this weekend by deadly Hurricane Fiona.
According to the White House, Biden — who spoke by phone with Pierluisi from Air Force One while returning from the state funeral for Queen Elizabeth II — discussed his administration’s support for Puerto Rico’s emergency and recovery efforts in the aftermath of Fiona, which killed at least one person in Puerto Rico and one person in the French territory of Guadeloupe.
The hurricane also left the entire island of Puerto Rico without power, which a major local energy company said would take days to resolve.
The White House said that Biden told Pierluisi the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Deanne Criswell, will go to San Juan on Tuesday to meet with local and state officials and affected citizens to assess urgent needs.
The White House said the president described “the surge of Federal support to the island, where more than 300 Federal personnel are already working to assist with response and recovery.”
With Puerto Rico still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Maria almost exactly five years ago — a disaster that led to intense scrutiny of the federal government’s response under then-President Donald Trump — Biden insisted he will ensure federal officials remain on the job to get it done, the White House said.
According to the Government Accountability Office, FEMA efforts supporting Puerto Rico after Maria were the biggest and longest in the agency’s history.
As of April 2018, $12 billion had been committed by FEMA for response and recovery.
(NEW YORK) — This is part of an ongoing series from ABC News reporting in battleground states across the country, as voters share their personal views on major issues.
Voters have said they have some key topics on their minds in the months before November’s midterms — issues like the economy and high inflation, gun violence and abortion access after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
ABC News recently spoke with some voters in various battleground states, including Arizona, Florida, Ohio and Texas, for their personal views. The voters’ perspectives are not conclusive but do offer a window into individual opinions on subjects that ABC News/Ipsos polling shows is of importance ahead of the election.
Republicans hope to seize on President Joe Biden’s general unpopularity and low marks on the economy.
Democrats — especially after Roe and a string of economic and social spending wins in Congress — have focused on the GOP’s position on banning abortion while defending their record while in power.
Inflation
An inflation report released last week sent stocks tumbling as it showed still-high prices — more than 8% growth year-over-year — and all but ensured the Federal Reserve would consider again hiking the interest rate to cool demand, which has been a months-long problem that the White House insists is a major priority.
Voters said that they have felt the effects of inflation on their wallets.
“A loaf of bread is like $1.50 more. I’m definitely noticing prices at the gas, but it’s not only the gas — it’s the food. And we need food. We need gas, and we are wondering when is this going to let up,” said Phoenix native Karla Terry.
Terry said that she blames Congress for the high prices.
“It’s coming from the top and trickling down to the bottom,” she said. “But what can we do but go to the pump and pay for gas, go to the store and pay for bread? We don’t have a choice. We’re rolling with the punches.”
Miami resident Daniel Demillais said that he blames President Biden and Democratic leadership.
“We moved from the incredibly high cost, incredibly badly run state of California to the great state of Florida where we can at least still live decently thanks to the great [Gov.] Ron DeSantis and the Republican party,” said Demillais.
Stock trader Jorge Martinez lives with his fiancé in Miami and said that inflation is affecting what he buys, but his biggest problem is with rent.
“I think it’s gone up like $1,000 in one year,” he said.
“I normally buy like thin sliced chicken breast, but now I’m buying like straight-up whole chickens and just kind of spending an hour at home just cutting them on my own cause I’m not gonna pay an extra $15,” Martinez said.
Across the Gulf in Texas, one couple said that they were shopping with their parents at different stores to keep costs low.
“We are still backed up from all of the things that we’ve seen from all the delays in 2020. That didn’t just fix magically because we are two years out,” Katy Forbes said, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic that experts say has been one major factor in inflation, along with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other developments.
“We stopped house-hunting,” said Forbes’ partner, Chris Wyant. That puts them in something of a bind.
“We just continue to rent while our rent just increases,” Forbes said.
Abortion
Echoing what ABC News/Ipsos polling has showed, some voters said that the reversal of Roe by the Supreme Court, allowing individual states to ban abortion, impacted their choices. Gwenda Gorman, a Diné woman who works for the intertribal council of Arizona, said she had a difficult time putting her feelings about abortion into words.
“[Navajo Nation citizens] consider all our children as a gift from a creator,” said Gorman. “It’s really hard to say how people feel about that, especially depending on who you talk to you.”
Others did not share Gorman’s struggle on the topic.
“How can somebody be 100% pro-life?” said Ohio farm owner Deb Boyer. “They don’t care if a child is raped.”
“Democrats are on the right side of the issue this year. I think the proposals coming out of the other side are a lot more extreme — and I think that our state is a lot more moderate,” said Phoenix resident Ginger Sykes-Torres.
Trump under investigation
Some voters wanted to talk less about the 2022 candidates than about 2024 — and a potential presidential candidate: Donald Trump.
“I don’t think that any presidential election has ever been fair,” said 19-year-old Ohio State University student Kendall Mungo. “The Electoral College is bull—-.”
Mungo said that she feels like the nation is more divided than ever before. One of the reasons some feel that division is the FBI raid of Trump’s residence at Mar-A-Lago over what the government says were highly classified and sensitive documents that were improperly stored.
Trump supporter Jennifer Sledge, from Queens, insisted that she became a supporter even though she did not vote for him in the last election because she “saw the tactics that the left would use.”
Other voters like Susan Connors, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, said that she does not know why Trump is not behind bars. (He denies wrongdoing.)
“My husband used to be the mayor of Scranton,” Connors told ABC. “I said, ‘If you ever did that, you’ve probably already been in jail.'”
ABC News’ Libby Cathey, Miles Cohen, Abby Cruz and Paulina Tam contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Two senior members of the Jan. 6 select committee have introduced a bipartisan bill to reform the counting of presidential electoral votes to prevent another riot at the Capitol over disputed results.
The Presidential Election Reform Act from Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., targets some of the perceived nuances in 135-year-old Electoral Count Act that former President Donald Trump and his supporters attempted to exploit to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.
“Our proposal is intended to preserve the rule of law for all future presidential elections by ensuring that self-interested politicians cannot steal from the people the guarantee that our government derives its power from the consent of the governed,” Cheney and Lofgren wrote in a joint Wall Street Journal column last week.
The full House could vote on the proposal as early as Wednesday.
It would reaffirm the vice president’s ceremonial role over the count, after then-Vice President Mike Pence was pressured by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, according to the legislative text and summary of the proposal obtained by ABC News.
The bill would make it more difficult for lawmakers to raise objections to electors from each state, by requiring at least one-third of the members from each chamber to support an objection, rather than one House member and a single senator.
It would also clarify ambiguities in the Electoral College process by requiring governors to transmit state results to Congress and prohibit election officials from refusing to certify their state’s election results. In either case, the law would allow a presidential candidate to go to court to force compliance with the law.
The proposal would also prevent state legislators from undoing the election results in their states – and require that elections are carried out under the state rules on the books on Election Day.
“The Constitution assigns an important duty to state legislatures, to determine the manner in which the states appoint their electors. But this shouldn’t be misread to allow state legislators to change the election rules retroactively to alter the outcome,” Cheney and Lofgren wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
In July, a bipartisan group of senators including Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, proposed their own reforms to the Electoral Count Act.
While their proposal also affirms the vice president’s limited role in proceedings, it sets a different threshold requirement for electoral challenges, among other differences.
(WASHINGTON) — Mark Frerichs — the last-known American hostage being held by the Taliban — has been released in a prisoner exchange, President Joe Biden confirmed in a statement on Monday.
“His release is the culmination of years of tireless work by dedicated public servants across our government and other partner governments, and I want to thank them for all that effort,” Biden said.
The Taliban confirmed at a press conference in Kabul, Afghanistan on Monday that Frerichs from Lombard, Illinois, was released in a prisoner swap for a senior Taliban detainee and notorious drug lord Bashir Noorzai. Administration officials said Noorzai had been held in a federal prison in the United States but not at Guantanamo Bay as had been reported.
Without getting into the specifics of the negotiations, Biden acknowledged, “Bringing the negotiations that led to Mark’s freedom to a successful resolution required difficult decisions, which I did not take lightly.”
The 60-year-old U.S. Navy veteran and contractor, who had been “in Afghanistan for over a decade working on a variety of civil engineering projects,” was abducted in Kabul in January 2020 after being lured to what he thought was a new business meeting — but which turned out to be a horrific ruse, family members and officials have said. He’s been held in Afghanistan for 31 months.
“I spoke with Mark’s sister today to share the good news and express how happy I am for Mark’s family,” Biden said.
Charlene Cakora, Frerichs’ sister, has long made desperate pleas to Biden on behalf of her brother’s release.
“I don’t think anybody can come home with their head held high until every stone has been turned,” she told ABC in an exclusive interview in June 2021, when the U.S. military completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan and Frerichs was the man left behind.
On Monday, Cakora said that despite “some folks arguing against the deal that brought Mark home,” her brother was back alive because “President Biden took action.” She also credited Illinois Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin for his successful return.
Duckworth and Durbin have not yet released statements about their constituent’s release.
“We are grateful to President Biden, Secretary Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Senators Duckworth and Durbin for their efforts to free Mark. Senator Duckworth got personally involved – advocating tirelessly within our government to get him home,” Cakora said.
“President Biden did what was right. He saved the life of an innocent American veteran,” she said.
“My Administration continues to prioritize the safe return of all Americans who are held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad, and we will not stop until they are reunited with their families,” Biden said in his statement. “We have much more work to do in many other cases, but Mark’s release demonstrates our enduring commitment. Like our work to free Americans held in Burma, Haiti, Russia, Venezuela, and elsewhere, it is our duty to do all we can to bring our people home.”
(NEW YORK) — Jury selection begins Monday in the trial of Tom Barrack, the billionaire fundraiser for former President Donald Trump who is charged with illegally lobbying for the United Arab Emirates while seeking investments in two UAE sovereign wealth funds.
Barrack chaired Trump’s 2016 inaugural fund, a position federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have said he used to influence U.S. foreign policy while Trump was a candidate and in the early days of the administration.
He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, which include acting as an agent of a foreign government and obstruction of justice.
Barrack was arrested in California in July 2021, accused of using his connection to Trump to surreptitiously promote UAE interests. The trial is expected to last five weeks, attorneys said during a hearing earlier this year.
According to the indictment, The UAE worked through Barrack “to influence United States foreign policy in the first 100 days, 6 months, 1 year and 4 years of the Trump administration.”
Barrack, prosecutors said, “allegedly took numerous steps in the United States to advance the interests of the UAE,” without notifying the Attorney General, a violation of federal law.
During an initial conversation with an Emirati national security official in 2016, the indictment quoted Barrack touting his access to Trump: “In his response, Barrack wrote that Emirati Official 2 should know that Barrack had been a thirty-year partner with the Candidate and that Barrack had staffed the Campaign.”
At the same time, Barrack and a co-defendant “also made numerous and concerted efforts … to solicit the assistance of United Arab Emirates officials … in obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars in investments,” according to charging documents.
The UAE funds committed nearly $400 million to Barrack’s investment management firm, the indictment said, though it did not make clear whether Barrack’s firm ever received the money.
Barrack founded Colony Capital but U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan has limited the ability of prosecutors to make Barrack’s wealth an issue. For example, they cannot show photos of his luxury properties and a plane, Cogan ruled last week.
“There is little if any probative value in admitting these photographs and a high potential for unfair prejudice. Admitting generic photographs of three lavish properties does not provide any helpful context here,” Cogan said.
The indictment released last July also charged Barrack with obstruction of justice and making multiple false statements during a June 20, 2019, interview with federal law enforcement agents.
(NEW YORK) — President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden on Sunday paid their respects to Queen Elizabeth II as world leaders gathered in London ahead of the late monarch’s state funeral.
The Bidens gave tribute to the queen as her coffin lie in Westminster Hall, with the president putting his hand over his heart. He and the first lady are also signing separate condolence books.
The two are also attending King Charles III’s reception at Buckingham Palace.
“It’s a loss that leaves a giant hole and sometimes you think you’ll never, you’ll never overcome it,” Biden told the press, echoing a frequent refrain he tells grieving relatives. “But, as I’ve told the king, she’s gonna be with him every step of the way, every minute, every moment and a reassuring notion. So, it’s all the people of England and all the people of the United Kingdom, our hearts go out to you and you were fortunate to have had over 70 years. We all were. The world’s better for her.”
The president also said Queen Elizabeth reminded him of his mother and praised her commitment to service.
“I think what she gave is a sense of, maybe, above all, the notion of service. We all owe something. There’s something within our capacity to do that can make things, not just the world better but your neighborhood better, your household better, your workplace better and that’s what she communicated to me, anyway, and it was an honor to meet her, an honor to meet her,” he said.
The Bidens left for the United Kingdom on Saturday and will attend the state funeral for the queen on Monday.
The trip comes at a time of political change in the U.K., where Prime Minister Liz Truss just took office. She and President Biden will hold their first bilateral meeting in New York on Wednesday when both are there for the U.N. General Assembly.
The queen died at age 96 after serving as head of state for 70 years, a record tenure for a British monarch that spanned 14 U.S. presidencies. Buckingham Palace announced on Sept. 8 that she “died peacefully” at Balmoral Castle, her Scottish estate.
