One person was killed and others wounded midday Monday from gunfire outside a funeral home in St. Paul, where services were about to be held for a man who was fatally shot in the city early this month, authorities said.
The shooting occurred about 11:20 a.m. on the West Side in the 400 block of Humboldt Avenue near the Bradshaw Funeral Home’s Simple Traditions location, where services for 26-year-old Casanova Carter had been scheduled.
“Multiple people shot, one died from injuries,” according a police statement on Twitter.
There was no word yet on arrests or a motive for the shooting.
There have been eight homicides in St. Paul so far this year.
Carter, of St. Paul, was shot on the night of Feb. 1 in the 700 block of Winslow Avenue. He died at the scene. Among his survivors are three children.
Carter’s father, Rheuben Johnson, said Monday he was at the funeral home when the shots were fired, but otherwise, “I don’t want to talk about that.”
Police have yet to announce any arrests in connection with Carter’s death. Police said they do not believe this shooting was random.
The shooting is the latest to occur at a Twin Cities funeral or vigil, which can often become targets for gang violence. Last June, Dontevius Ahmad Catchings was shot and killed outside Shiloh Temple in north Minneapolis while attending the funeral for Christopher Robert Jones Jr., — one of two men killed outside the Monarch nightclub in downtown Minneapolis on May 22 in a mass shooting that also left several wounded.
In 2019, two men were shot and wounded while attending a wake and services at Estes Funeral Home in north Minneapolis. The year before, a suspect opened fire on a group standing around a makeshift memorial for shooting victim Nathan Hampton at Minneapolis’ North Commons Park.
Anyone with information about either shooting is urged by police to call them at 651-266-5650.
Star Tribune staff writer Libor Jany contributed to this report.
Teachers and staff members of her school district in Bethalto, Illinois, a small town outside of St. Louis, were suddenly worried that they would not be paid. They had seen videos posted online in which a parent who objected to the district’s Covid mask mandate said that she had filed a claim against the district’s insurance, causing the schools to lose all federal funding.
Griffin, the Bethalto schools superintendent, has spent weeks dealing with the fallout.
“You have district officials who are spending time on things like this, rather than on what we need to be spending time on — making sure that our classrooms are covered right now in the middle of a pandemic,” Griffin said.
The parent’s claims were baseless. She had no ability to use the mask mandate to file a claim against the district’s insurance policy, or affect its federal funding in any way.
But the scare tactic has become a familiar one. A growing number of school districts across the country are facing similar challenges from parent activists who have adopted strategies and language that are well known to law enforcement and extremism experts who deal with far-right “sovereign citizen” groups in the U.S. The Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League call it “paper terrorism.”
The parents’ strategy is simple: Try to use obscure and often inapplicable legal claims to force a school district to make a policy change. And while the claims have no legal standing, they have been effective at spreading confusion and wasting school districts’ resources, even though the paperwork doesn’t require a formal legal response.
The parents and activists have organized through a new group called Bonds for the Win, which is named for a financial instrument at the heart of the pseudo-legal effort. The group’s members have spent the past two months bombarding school administrators with meritless claims over Covid policies and diversity initiatives. These claims allege that districts have broken the law and therefore owe parents money through what are called surety bonds, which government agencies often carry as liability insurance.
Bonds for the Win’s claims are not legitimate, according to education officials, insurance companies and the FBI. But even though the group has won no legal battles, it has already celebrated some successes in overwhelming districts with paperwork, intimidating local officials and disrupting school board meetings.
“There is a lot of misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the purpose of a local school governing board,” said Julie Cieniawski, president of the Scottsdale Unified Governing Board in Arizona, which was one of Bonds for the Win’s first targets. “I do believe it has kind of become a central meeting point for people to share their grievances and not specifically about our district. It’s almost like living in a reality TV show when you’re experiencing it.”
In at least 14 states, Bonds for the Win activists attempted to serve sham paperwork to school districts, in several cases causing commotions that required police intervention. And the number of people joining their cause is quickly growing as misinformation about the strategy’s effectiveness circulates.
On the chat app Telegram, where the activists organize, Bonds for the Win’s main channel grew from 700 subscribers to nearly 20,000 in the past month. Its members focus on schools, but they have also served paperwork to a handful of county commissioners and discussed plans to go after other local officials, judges and sheriffs with similar claims.
Bonds for the Win did not respond to requests for comment.
The new strategy comes as school boards across the U.S. continue to serve as the front lines of a broader culture war that began in the midst of the 2020 presidential election and debates over pandemic-related safety measures. Parents have targeted school boards with activism ranging from recall petitions to criminal complaints over books available in school libraries. Bonds for the Win is using these battles as a way of drawing in followers, demonstrating how quickly a faulty fringe tactic can generate momentum as frustrated parents join forces with conspiracy theorists.
Miki Klann, a QAnon adherent in Scottsdale, Arizona, who has said she believes AIDS is a hoax and that the Earth is flat, founded Bonds for the Win in December. She did not respond to requests for comment, but has described her goals in numerous videos posted online.
“We’re hoping that the parents start standing up and calling these people out for the crimes against humanity that they’ve been coerced to commit,” Klann said in a recent video uploaded to BitChute. “We want the people to understand their sovereignty.”
The group’s strategy of intimidating government bodies with paperwork has been used in the past by sovereign citizens, loosely affiliated right-wing anarchists who believe federal and local governments are operating illegitimately.
“During the pandemic, you saw more and more of these pseudo-legal statements from people proclaiming that they didn’t have to wear a mask, citing various federal laws that just were not applicable at all,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “Whether it’s connected with the sovereign citizen movement or not, it is a form of paper terrorism.”
“Paper terrorism” is a well-known tactic among anti-government extremist movements. The term originates from terminology that law enforcement officials used to describe the tactics of the Montana Freemen, an anti-government, self-described “Christian Patriot” militia that illegally declared its township in Montana outside the authority of the U.S. government.
For years, the group “buried local judges, sheriffs and county attorneys in a forest of paper,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, assailing local government offices with baseless lawsuits and fake court judgments. After an armed standoff in 1996 in which the Freemen refused to leave their foreclosed land, the group surrendered to authorities.
Bonds for the Win doesn’t explicitly describe itself as part of the sovereign citizen movement. However, it is taking a route similar to that of many anti-mask and anti-vaccine movements that have grown during the pandemic by borrowing tactics and faux-legal verbiage from sovereign citizens to fit their own purpose.
The faulty insurance claims focus on surety bonds, which school districts and other government agencies often carry as liability insurance in case an employee commits a crime like embezzling money. Typically, only the district — not private citizens — can file a claim, according to insurance companies, but parents following Bonds for the Win apparently believe they, too, can file claims over Covid precautions and other complaints. Activists say that once they file these claims, either the insurance company or school officials will have to pay a financial penalty to parents. This is not the case, insurance companies and districts say.
The claim letters cite various state, federal and international laws that schools have supposedly violated by imposing Covid precautions and diversity initiatives, including distributing obscene material to minors, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child and the Nuremberg Code, a guideline for ethical medical research that many anti-vaccine mandate efforts have cited.
The FBI calls this general tactic “bond fraud,” cautioning in broader guidance that the “scheme frequently intermingles legal and pseudo legal terminology in order to appear lawful.”
Still, school districts say the claims are causing distress and commotion.
In North Carolina, police turned off the lights and escorted a group of adults out of the Iredell-Statesville school board meeting on Feb. 7 when the group attempted to serve paperwork demanding an end to all Covid mitigation measures, videos posted to Telegram show. The school district in Ankeny, Iowa, requested an extra police presence at its board meeting this month after a man, who attempted to serve notice of insurance claims to school officials for allegedly violating international law by requiring masks in schools, posted on a conservative website that “good men may have to do bad things.”
The school board in Loudoun County, Virginia, briefly shut down its Feb. 8 meeting when a group of parents and children tried to serve paperwork on board members. The paperwork included notarized letters with a lengthy list of complaints — including alleged discrimination against white students and unvaccinated children — and said if the board didn’t respond within three days, the district would have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution that couldn’t be appealed in court.
Each of these incidents was celebrated on the Bonds for the Win Telegram channels, where the activists circulate draft claim letters and videos of members serving their demands to local officials. But there’s no evidence that the group’s efforts led schools to lift mask mandates or make other policy changes.
Based on these videos, some of the Bonds for the Win activists appear to believe that their legally dubious claims could succeed, while other organizers have at times signaled that the true intention is to cause disruption.
“We have people from all over the country submitting videos of them serving their school boards and it’s hilarious,” Klann, the Bonds for the Win founder, said in a video this week. “These insurance companies are not ready for the thousands of claims we’re about to file.”
Klann has raised over $14,000 for Bonds for the Win on PayPal, according to public transaction records. Klann has said she got the bond claims idea from a post on SGT Report, a website that publishes conspiracy theory videos.
SGT Report uploaded a video interview late last year with an Ohio man named Steven Socha, who said his threat at an Indian Creek Local Board of Education meeting to file claims against a district’s bonds caused it to drop a mask mandate. Socha said he got the idea from a Telegram channel that frequently discusses supposed legal loopholes people can use by acting as their own lawyer.
The Indian Creek school board president and district superintendent said Socha’s threat did not cause the school board to vote against extending its mask mandate. Socha did not respond to requests for comment.
“Truthfully, I don’t think the board members even understood what he was talking about,” said T.C. Chappelear, the district’s superintendent. “You know, there was nothing given to us in writing.”
But that didn’t stop Socha’s idea from becoming a model. After the Bonds for the Win website launched in December, Klann and her followers began setting up Telegram channels to organize, including separate ones for all 50 states.
Klann then tried the strategy on Jan. 25, when she and the internet forum operator Ron Watkins threatened to file claims against the Scottsdale Unified School Board’s surety bonds if the board didn’t address their demands — including closing all vaccine clinics and removing books that “promote pedophilia” — within five days.
Klann passed out paperwork to the board members at the meeting while Watkins — who has been prominently accused of being the “Q” behind the QAnon conspiracy movement, though he has denied it — promoted his nascent congressional campaign. Watkins did not respond to a request for comment.
The Scottsdale Unified school board members do not have surety bonds, and they are not required to do so under Arizona law. The Scottsdale Unified School District said in a statement it does not consider Klann’s paperwork to be “a legally recognized document.”
For Scott Menzel, the Scottsdale Unified superintendent, the claim letters are the latest instance of misinformation he’s had to deal with over the past two years, which he attributes to the convergence of sharp political divides and anxiety around Covid that resulted in unparalleled hostility toward school officials.
“I think we are at risk in terms of the future of our country,” Menzel said. “The truth has been obfuscated. People have bought into conspiracy theories that aren’t based in reality, and that creates a problem for all of us who are trying to educate our students and prepare them for the future.”
In Bethalto, the Bonds for the Win push was led by Trisha Stilwell, a local mother. In videos posted by the group, she said that claims she had filed against the district objecting to mask mandates caused the town’s schools to lose all federal funding and resort to asking parents to volunteer as teachers. Neither was true, but the claims quickly spread on social media, said Griffin, the superintendent.
Griffin wrote a letter to dispel the rumors, and devoted a half hour of a recent board meeting to addressing the misinformation, highlighting documents that showed the district’s funding had not been interrupted.
The U.S. Department of Education said in a statement that it has never suspended access to federal funds after a claim was filed against a school district’s surety bond.
Stilwell, who appeared in the videos using the pseudonym “Violet,” did not respond to a request for comment.
“The facts do matter,” Griffin said. “She created uncertainty and fear within some of our staff and community around her accusations in those videos, and the host nor anyone else involved did anything to validate her claims.”
Liberty Mutual, the district’s insurer, sent a letter to Stilwell on Feb. 7 stating that she had no standing to bring a claim, according to a copy obtained by NBC News. The same day, Griffin received a call from another superintendent in Illinois asking for advice on how to deal with activists attempting to file claims against their bonds. She couldn’t believe the tactic was spreading.
“It’s hard to wrap your head around,” Griffin said. “When things like this occur, it just makes it a little bit more challenging for all of us. It takes the focus off what the focus should be on, and that’s our students.”
Pitcavage, of the Anti-Defamation League, said taking up time and resources is often the goal for groups like these — “clogging up the system, so that the system doesn’t work.”
“At some point, because they’re doing all this, the party on the other side could decide it’s not worth the effort to fight it,” he said. “And the next time this issue comes up, they don’t do that thing. They just let it go down. Then the people haven’t just lost the battle — they lost the war.”
Blizzard conditions are even possible early this week in the Dakotas and parts of Minnesota.
To the south and southeast of the wintry weather, a pulse of warm air surging ahead of the cold air will trigger heavy rain and severe thunderstorms in parts of the South, Tennessee Valley and Southeast. Some areas could see flooding and damaging winds, and a few tornadoes cannot be ruled out.
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Not until the weekend will the Lower 48 see a pause from the extreme weather. And, even then, it will be much chillier than normal over much of the country as winter refuses to give into spring.
The frigid air, set to enter the northern Plains and Upper Midwest on Monday and Monday night, will bring temperatures about 20 to 40 degrees below normal from Montana through the Southern Plains. In some places, the cold could threaten records, according to the National Weather Service.
Single-digit and subzero high temperatures are forecast across much of Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas on Tuesday with lows of minus-15 to minus-20. Wind chills could dip as low as minus-40.
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That cold will penetrate as far south as central and northern Texas by Wednesday. Subfreezing highs are forecast to reach as far south as the Texas Panhandle.
A second, reinforcing blast of cold will dive through the northern Plains on Thursday into Friday. Unlike the first blast, it will penetrate somewhat farther east, spilling toward the Ohio Valley, northern Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. That will set the stage for a mix of wintry precipitation in these areas as a storm system rides up the Arctic front pressing eastward.
An extended period of wind-driven snow is forecast in parts of Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota and the northern Great Lakes through Tuesday night. Winter storm warnings and winter weather advisories cover a large part of this area.
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“Snowfall rates will likely exceed 1″/hr at times which when combined with increasing wind may produce near blizzard conditions with considerable blowing and drifting,” wrote the National Weather Service. “Travel is discouraged.”
Some of the heaviest snow is predicted just north of Minneapolis, where up to a foot could fall. Minneapolis is under a winter storm warning through Tuesday, with 4 to 8 inches predicted, which, combined with winds of 20 to 25 mph, is expected to limit visibility.
Just to the south and east of where snow is forecast, in a zone from eastern Iowa through Milwaukee and into northern Michigan, a mix of sleet and freezing rain is forecast to produce icy conditions. Milwaukee is under a winter weather advisory for ice accumulation from 11 p.m. Monday to 6 p.m. Tuesday.
A second storm will develop on Wednesday as the second pulse of Arctic air arrives in the central United States. While details still need to come into focus as to the exact location, it could produce a swath of icy precipitation from parts of Oklahoma through southern Ohio into Wednesday night.
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By Thursday, icy precipitation could develop in northern Maryland, Pennsylvania and southern New York.
Mostly snow is probable to the north of the icy zone, probably stretching from northern Oklahoma, through St. Louis and toward Columbus and Cleveland on Wednesday into Thursday. By Thursday night and Friday, substantial snow will become possible from through much of the Northeast north of southern New York State.
Heavy rain and severe storms
With mild air surging north ahead of the Arctic blast, heavy thunderstorms could develop Monday in parts of the southern Plains and Midwest from northern Texas to southern Missouri. These areas, which include Oklahoma City and Springfield, Mo., are in an elevated risk zone for severe weather.
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“Severe thunderstorms will be possible mainly this evening and overnight, in a corridor from north Texas to the Ozarks and vicinity,” the Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center writes. “Damaging winds, hail, and a few tornadoes are possible.”
This risk zone will shift east on Tuesday, stretch through eastern Arkansas, much of Mississippi, southeast Missouri, southern Illinois, and western Kentucky and Tennessee.
In addition to winter-related impacts, flooding will also be a concern this week. Moderate Risks, and a broader Slight Risk, are in effect Tuesday for portions of the Mid-Miss/Tenn/Ohio Valleys where 1.5″ per hour rain rates over saturated soils may lead to flash flooding. pic.twitter.com/t1R0vYd5gX
— NWS Weather Prediction Center (@NWSWPC) February 21, 2022
The potential for heavy rain also means the possibility of flooding Monday and Tuesday. On Monday and Monday night, the zone at greatest risk of flooding spans from eastern Oklahoma through southern Illinois. That area shifts toward Kentucky, Tennessee and northern Alabama from Tuesday into Wednesday.
The threat of flooding may increase in the Tennessee Valley, in particular, on Thursday and Friday, as the week’s second storm system brings the potential for more heavy rainfall. The National Weather Service predicts five-day rainfall totals of 3 to 6 inches in this zone, and locally higher amounts cannot be ruled out.
Twitter banned Trump last year from the social media platform, citing the “risk of further incitement of violence,” following the Jan. 6 insurrection repeatedly encouraged by the former president.
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Numerous user accounts had emerged by Monday had reported delays or errors setting up the account. A Washington Post reporter early Monday was able to download the app and submit an email address to create an account, but a verification email was not immediately received.
Reuters reported that the app was set to be released in full on Monday, Presidents’ Day, according to an executive’s posts on a beta version of the platform.
The Post reported in January that it could be months after launch before the app is fully functional. Trump has been frustrated with the pace of the network’s development, people familiar with the matter told The Post at the time.
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Trump announced the development of the network in October, saying, “We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced.” He added, “This is unacceptable.”
Following the insurrection by a pro-Trump mob at the U.S. Capitol last year, Facebook and Twitter booted Trump from their platforms. He and other conservative politicians have long charged that popular social networks were trying to censor them.
After Trump’s new network was announced in October, a version of the site briefly became accessible to the public, allowing people to create accounts and claim usernames. One account under the handle “donaldjtrump” posted a photo of a pig defecating.
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A representative for Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the timing of the app’s official launch.
Truth Social was listed in the top charts for downloads on the App Store Monday morning, ahead of HBO Max and TikTok.
Users signing up to Truth Social are greeted by a sign-up email that describes the platform’s clientele as “Truth Sayers.” “Share your unique opinion by posting a Truth, Re-Truth, photo, news story, or video link … Don’t be shocked if they take your Truth viral!,” a welcome message states.
The most recent news release on the firm’s website is a statement from Trump — in the style of his old tweets — about the “Freedom Convoy” protests against pandemic restrictions in Canada and elsewhere. He opined in the Feb. 4 statement that tech firms were targeting the protesters and that “TruthSocial is announcing today that we are welcoming the Freedom Convoy with open arms to communicate freely on TruthSocial when we launch — coming very soon!”
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Purported screenshots of the Truth Social beta site show a platform similar to Twitter’s, including “Truths” and “Likes,” instead of tweets and likes.
After he lost his online platform in the spring, Trump launched a blog called “From the Desk of Donald Trump.” But as The Washington Post and others reported, the site had low readership.
ALBANY PARK — The extra-alarm fire that destroyed two beloved neighborhood businesses and left several people without homes Monday started in a building owned by a landlord with a history of building violations and problematic properties, a state representative and neighbors said.
The fire broke out about 3:30 a.m. in a multi-unit residential building in the 4300 block of North Richmond, according to the Chicago Fire Department. Neighbors said the fire started in a three-story building on the corner and quickly spread to the Twisted Hippo brewpub, 2925 W. Montrose Ave. and the Ultimate Ninjas Gym.
Neighbors reported hearing explosions in the brewery as the fire raged inside. One side of the building collapsed, dropping bricks atop parked cars and crushing them.
Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago
A 60-year-old man suffering from smoke inhalation was taken to Swedish Hospital in serious-to-critical condition, according to the Fire Department. No other injuries were reported.
Resident Joe Bradtke said the fire started in a building owned by landlord Gary Carlson that neighbors the brewery. Carlson owns at least 60 buildings with more than 500 apartments in and around Albany Park and Irving Park, including the Lawndale Avenue building, according to a 2016 investigation by the Sun-Times and the Better Government Association.
Carlson’s buildings have logged hundreds of code violations over the years and more recently have been the sites of deadly shootings and other issues.
Bradtke said residents of Carlson’s building were known for partying, drug use and throwing trash onto the roof of his building.
State Rep. Jaime Andrade also confirmed the fire started in the building owned by Carlson.
“You had a bad feeling that something was going to happen with that building … and it did,” he said.
Andrade said Carlson’s properties have been an issue in the neighborhood and the landlord is currently tied up in court cases regarding these issues.
Albany Park resident Brian Pudil said he woke to shouting and went to his living room to see an orange hue from the huge blaze across the street. He saw the fire starting to spread to Twisted Hippo and within 30 minutes heard explosions and saw the side of the building collapse, crushing cars on Richmond Avenue.
“It was really intense,” Pudil said. “We were getting ready to leave our building because the windows were cracking and the vinyl siding on the garage next door was melting.”
About 150 firefighters were on the scene battling the blaze. As of 8:30 a.m., crews had the fire under control. It was put out by 9:20 a.m.
Marilee Rutherford, owner of Twisted Hippo, said she got a call from a neighbor about the fire around 4 a.m. Monday.
“You know, we’ve worked so hard to to be a part of the community and give the space to the community,” she said. “[I] just literally don’t know what the future is going to look like. But I will say this: I’m so grateful for everything we have been able to build here. … And it’s all gonna be okay. We don’t have problems. We have solutions waiting to happen. So we’ll see how it all goes.”
Andrade said he’s been getting calls all morning from neighbors devastated by the fire.
“It’s very devastating for the community,” he said. “Yes, insurance is gonna cover everything but it’s just it’s a complete loss. … It’s just that we’re in disbelief. Everyone’s in disbelief.”
Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club ChicagoCredit: Colin Boyle/Block Club ChicagoCredit: Colin Boyle/Block Club ChicagoCredit: Colin Boyle/Block Club ChicagoCredit: Colin Boyle/Block Club ChicagoCredit: Chicago Fire DepartmentTwisted Hippo brewery burns on Feb. 21, 2022.Credit: Chicago Fire DepartmentTwisted Hippo brewery burns on Feb. 21, 2022.Credit: Chicago Fire DepartmentTwisted Hippo brewery burns on Feb. 21, 2022.Credit: Chicago Fire DepartmentTwisted Hippo brewery burns on Feb. 21, 2022.
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Donald Trump’s new social media venture, Truth Social, has launched on Apple’s App Store, marking the former president’s return to social media after he was banned from several platforms last year.
The app was available to download shortly before midnight eastern time and was automatically downloaded to Apple users who had pre-ordered the app. It was the top free app available on the App Store early Monday.
Some users reported either having trouble registering for an account or were added to a waitlist with a message: “Due to massive demand, we have placed you on our waitlist.”
The app has been available for people invited to use it during its test phase, Reuters previously reported.
Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube after the attack on the US Capitol by his supporters in January 2021, after he was accused of posting messages inciting violence.
Led by the former Republican US congressman Devin Nunes, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the venture behind Truth Social, joins a growing portfolio of technology companies that are positioning themselves as champions of free speech and hope to draw users who feel their views are suppressed on more established platforms.
So far none of the newer companies, which include the Twitter competitors Gettr and Parler and the video site Rumble, have come close to matching the popularity of their mainstream counterparts.
“This week we will begin to roll out on the Apple App Store. That’s going to be awesome, because we’re going to get so many more people that are going to be on the platform,” Nunes said in a Sunday appearance on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.
“Our goal is, I think we’re going to hit it, I think by the end of March we’re going to be fully operational at least within the United States,” he added.
Truth Social’s app store page detailing its version history showed the first public version of the app, or version 1.0, was available a day ago, confirming a Reuters report. The current version 1.0.1 includes “bug fixes”, according to the page.
On Friday, Nunes was on the app urging users to follow more accounts, share photos and videos and participate in conversations, in an apparent attempt to drum up activity, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Among his posts, he welcomed a new user who appeared to be a Catholic priest and encouraged him to invite more priests to join, according to the same person.
Even as details of the app begin trickling out, TMTG remains mostly shrouded in secrecy and is regarded with scepticism by some in tech and media circles. It is unclear, for example, how the company is funding its growth.
TMTG is planning to list in New York through a merger with blank-check firm Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC) and stands to receive $293m in cash that DWAC holds in a trust, assuming no DWAC shareholder redeems their shares, TMTG said in press release last year.
Additionally, in December TMTG raised $1bn committed financing from private investors; that money also will not be available until the DWAC deal closes.
Digital World’s activities have come under scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, according to a regulatory filing, and the deal is likely to be months away from closing.
After four days of testimony from 21 witnesses — only one for the defense — the government and defense teams rested their cases Friday, with several prosecution witnesses testifying the defendants used racist language in messages and conversation.
Travis McMichael; his father, Gregory McMichael; and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were convicted in a state court in November of felony murder and other charges for the February 2020 killing of Arbery, a Black man, after they chased him in a neighborhood outside Brunswick, Georgia.
The jury in the federal trial in Brunswick will decide whether Arbery was killed because of the color of his skin. The three men are each charged with interference with rights — a hate crime — and attempted kidnapping. The McMichaels also face charges related to the use of firearms during a violent crime.
The defendants, who pleaded not guilty in this trial, are already serving life sentences in prison for the murder convictions, though Bryan is eligible for parole after serving 30 years, and each plan to appeal the verdicts. Convictions in this trial could bring steep fines and more life sentences.
Federal prosecutors and Arbery’s family have said he was out for a jog when he was killed. Defense attorneys in the state trial contended the McMichaels, suspecting Arbery of trespassing multiple times at an under-construction home, pursued him through neighborhood streets to conduct a citizen’s arrest. Travis McMichael argued he shot Arbery in self-defense as they wrestled over McMichael’s shotgun.
Bryan had pursued Arbery with his own vehicle and recorded video of the pursuit and shooting.
Prosecutors at the state trial said Arbery was at the construction site several times including the day of the shooting, but always without breaking in or taking anything. They argued the pursuers acted on rumors of wrongdoing; that White people visited the site apparently without being chased; and that the pursuers did not actually see Arbery at the site that day and had no immediate knowledge he’d committed a crime.
Prosecution witnesses testified about racial slurs from defendants
In the hate crimes trial, prosecutors called several witnesses last week who testified the men had used racial slurs in dialogue or in texts and social media.
One witness testified that Gregory McMichael, in talking about Black people in 2015, said “I wish they’d all die,” and “all these Blacks are nothing but trouble.”
The witness said this was followed by an “angry rant” against Black people lasting about two minutes, which she described as “really shocking.”
An FBI intelligence analyst testified texts and social media messages taken from the phones of Travis McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan included racist insults about African Americans.
One witness was so upset recalling her interactions with the McMichaels, she left the stand in tears.
The defense’s only witness last week was a resident of the Satilla Shores neighborhood where Arbery was killed and where the defendants lived. The witness said she had lived in the neighborhood for 48 years but had never met the McMichaels or Bryan.
Her testimony was connected to a nonemergency call Gregory McMichael made about a White man possibly living under a bridge near the neighborhood — a defense effort to show the elder McMichael was worried about anyone, regardless of race, who may have been a threat to his neighborhood.
The defense has argued while the men may have used racist language, Arbery’s race was not a motivation in the fatal incident.
The panel is made up of eight White jurors, three Black jurors and one Hispanic juror, according to details provided in court. Three White people and one Pacific Islander have also been selected as alternates.
Prosecution argues defendants followed Arbery because of perceptions about Black people
The defense argued at the state murder trial that the pursuit began when the elder McMichael saw Arbery running from the direction of the under-construction home, and that he believed he matched the description of someone who’d been recorded there previously — and of someone Travis McMichael had encountered and called police about 12 nights earlier.
Unbeknownst to the McMichaels on the day of the shooting, a neighbor had just called police to report that Arbery was at the construction site alone, and that Arbery ran as the neighbor called, according to testimony.
The prosecution in the murder trial conceded surveillance videos did show Arbery at the construction site multiple times, including the day he was killed, but said that he never broke in or took anything.
During the murder trial, witnesses testified that the McMichaels did not know for certain that Arbery was at the site that day, or whether the man in the videos had ever taken anything.
In opening statements for the hate crime trial, a prosecutor said the defendants previously used racist language and followed Arbery because of their perceptions of Black people.
“At the end of the day, the evidence in this case will prove that if Ahmaud Arbery had been White, he would have gone for a jog, checked out a cool house under construction, and been home in time for Sunday supper,” Assistant US Attorney Barbara Bernstein told the jury last week. “Instead, he went out for a jog and ended up running for his life.”
The defendants’ attorneys, making separate opening statements last week, acknowledged the men had used racist language — but said that their actions toward Arbery were not related to race.
“Greg and Travis McMichael followed Ahmaud Arbery not because he was a Black man, but because he was the man who had been illegally entering the house that was under construction,” A.J. Balbo, Gregory McMichael’s defense attorney, said last week.
CNN’s Pamela Kirkland, Alta Spells, Kevin Conlon and Nick Valencia contributed to this report.
NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) – Gun violence claimed the lives of two men and left two others wounded in three overnight shootings across New Orleans, police said early Monday (Feb. 21).
The first fatal shooting was reported Sunday at 7:03 p.m., when a 44-year-old man was killed in the parking lot of the New Orleans Costco warehouse store.
The NOPD said the alleged shooter in the incident has been brought to police headquarters for questioning, but the department has released no additional information about the victim or suspect. The fatal shooting appears to have stemmed from a domestic dispute, police said, based upon preliminary findings in their investigation.
A second homicide investigation launched Monday around 1 a.m., when officers responding to reports of a shooting in New Orleans East found one man dead and a second man wounded in the 7900 block of Chef Menteur Highway.
Police have provided no additional details of this incident, except to say the surviving victim is being treated at a hospital. Authorities offered no update on his condition.
A third shooting reported at 2:25 a.m. involved a motorist traveling westbound on US Highway 90 B — the Pontchartrain Expressway — at the Tchoupitoulas Street exit. Police said a man “sustained multiple gunshot wounds to his body” while in a vehicle, but did not say whether he was a driver or passenger.
Police have not disclosed the victims’ names or ages in the latter two shootings, nor identified the victim killed in the Costco parking lot as a store employee or customer.
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NEW YORK CITY (WABC) — Mayor Eric Adams’ new subway safety plan goes into effect today.
That means police will start to issue summonses for fare-beaters.
They’ll stop people from sleeping across multiple seats.
There will also be more homeless outreach teams underground.
It comes after another violent weekend on the subway where police reported at least five assaults.
In one of the attacks over the weekend, a woman was beaten with a metal pipe in the Bronx.
Police still looking for the suspect in that case.
That is in addition to multiple other attacks over the weekend including Sunday evening after 6 p.m., when a 31-year-old man was stabbed in the arm and back on the 6 train at Canal Street in a unprovoked attack.
As part of the mayor’s new subway safety plan, he will sent up to 30 teams onto the subway, many that include extra NYPD officers to crack down on people sleeping on trains and carrying piles of trash.
Those who don’t get off the train at the end of the line will be escorted off.
“The NYPD will join clinicians, social workers and our other partners to link people to the services they desperately need. We will canvass high priority areas on the trains, inside stations and at the end of certain lines,” New York City Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said.
This plan also includes adding psychiatric beds in hospitals as well as private rooms in shelters.
The plan will start by targeting the A, E, 1, 2, N and R subway lines.
Charlton D’Souza, with a volunteer group called United Pasengers has been patrolling the subway stations through the city, and is eagerly waiting to see how Mayor Adams’ plan works.
“Let’s give it three weeks, and let’s see how it works out,” he said.
“Eric was a transit police lieutenant when I was chief of transit police in 1990,” former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said on Up Close. “In 1990-1991 we cleaned up the mess in the subway with 5,000 in that system, several hundred living in the tunnels. Rampant fare evasion and disorder and we kept it straight for 28 years.”
RELATED | Man stabbed inside Kew Gardens, Queens subway station during attempted robbery
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Last September, Donald Trump released a statement through his Save America website. “It is my great honor to endorse a true warrior,” he proclaimed, “a patriot who has fought for our country, who was willing to say what few others had the courage to say, who has my Complete and Total Endorsement.”
Former US presidents usually reserve their most gushing praise – replete with Capital Letters – for global allies or people they are promoting for high office. A candidate for the US Senate, perhaps, or someone vying to become governor of one of the biggest states.
Trump by contrast was heaping plaudits on an individual running for an elected post that a year ago most people had never heard of, let alone cared about. He was endorsing Mark Finchem, a Republican lawmaker from Tucson, in his bid to become Arizona’s secretary of state.
Until Trump’s endorsement, Finchem, like the relatively obscure position for which he is now standing, was scarcely known outside politically informed Arizona circles. Today he is a celebrity on the “Save America” circuit, one of a coterie of local politicians who have been thrown into the national spotlight by Trump as he lays the foundations for a possible ground attack on democracy in the 2024 presidential election.
The role of secretary of state is critical to the smooth workings and integrity of elections in many states, Arizona included. The post holder is the chief election officer, with powers to certify election results, vet the legal status of candidates and approve infrastructure such as voting machines.
In short, they are in charge of conducting and counting the vote.
About three weeks after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election – and on the same day that Joe Biden’s 10,457-vote victory in Arizona was certified – Finchem hosted Rudy Giuliani at a downtown Phoenix hotel. Giuliani, then Trump’s personal lawyer, announced a new theory for why the result should be overturned: that Biden had relied on fraudulent votes from among the 5 million undocumented immigrants living in the state – a striking number given that Arizona only has a total of 7 million residents.
Two weeks after that, Finchem was among 30 Republican lawmakers in Arizona who signed a joint resolution. It called on Congress to block the state’s 11 electoral college votes for Biden and instead accept “the alternate 11 electoral votes for Donald J Trump”.
Finchem was present in Washington on 6 January 2021, the day that hundreds of angry Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, resulting in the deaths of five people with 140 police officers injured. He had come to speak at a planned “Stop the Steal” rally, later cancelled, to spread the “big lie” that the election had been rigged.
Communications between Finchem and the organizers of the “Stop the Steal” rally earned the lawmaker a knock on the door from the January 6 committee this week. The powerful congressional investigation into the insurrection issued a subpoena for him to appear before the panel and to hand over documents relating to the effort to subvert democracy.
Finchem will have to answer to the committee for what he did in the wake of the 2020 election, or face legal consequences. But there’s a more disconcerting question thrown up by his candidacy for secretary of state: were he to win the position, would he be willing and able to overturn the result of the 2024 presidential election in Arizona, potentially paving the way for a political coup?
“Someone who wants to dismantle, disrupt and completely destroy democracy is running to be our state’s top election officer,” said Reginald Bolding, the Democratic minority leader in the Arizona House who is running against Finchem in the secretary of state race. “That should terrify not just Arizona, but the entire nation.”
Trump has so far endorsed three secretary of state candidates in this year’s election cycle, and Finchem is arguably the most controversial of the bunch. (The other two are Jody Hice in Georgia and Kristina Karamo in Michigan.)
Originally from Kalamazoo in Michigan, he spent 21 years as a public safety officer before retiring to Tucson and setting up his own small business. In 2014 he was elected to the Arizona legislature, representing Oro Valley.
Even before Finchem was inaugurated as a lawmaker, he was stirring up controversy. On the campaign trail in 2014, he announced that he was “an Oath Keeper committed to the exercise of limited, constitutional governance”.
The Oath Keepers are a militia group with a list of 25,000 current or past members, many from military or law enforcement backgrounds. They have been heavily implicated in the January 6 insurrection.
Reginald Bolding speaks during a voting rights rally at the White House in August. Photograph: Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock
The founder of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, and nine co-defendants are facing trial for seditious conspiracy based on allegations that they meticulously planned an armed attack on the heart of American democracy.
Finchem entered the Arizona legislature in January 2015 and soon was carving out a colourful reputation. With his bushy moustache, cowboy hat and boots, and offbeat political views, his hometown news outlet Tucson Weekly dubbed him “one of the nuttier lawmakers” in the state.
Bolding, who entered the legislature at the same time as Finchem, remembers being called into his office soon after they both started. “He wanted to show me a map of how Isis and other terrorist groups were pouring over the border with Mexico to invade the United States,” Bolding told the Guardian.
One of the first measures sponsored by Finchem reduced state taxes on gold coins on the basis that they were “legal tender”. He then introduced legislation that would have imposed a “code of ethics” on teachers – a “gag law” as some decried it – that would have restricted learning in class.
The nine-point code was later revealed to have been cut and pasted from a campaign calling itself “Stop K-12 Indoctrination” backed by the far-right Muslim-bashing David Horowitz Freedom Center.
“In essence he wanted a pledge of fealty from teachers that they wouldn’t discuss ‘anti-American’ subjects,” said Jake Dean, who has reported on Finchem for the Tucson Weekly.
It was not until Trump began to fire up his supporters with his big lie about the 2020 election that Finchem truly found his political voice. The state lawmaker was a key advocate of the self-proclaimed “audit” of votes in Maricopa county carried out by Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company that spent six months scavenging for proof of election fraud and failed to produce any.
To this day no credible evidence of major fraud in the 2020 election has been presented, yet Finchem continues to beat that drum. Last month he told a Trump rally in Florence, Arizona: “We know it, and they know it. Donald Trump won.”
In his latest ruse, Finchem this month introduced a new bill, HCR2033, which seeks to decertify the 2020 election results in Arizona’s three largest counties. There is no legal mechanism for decertifying election results after the event.
As the August primary election to choose the Republican and Democratic candidates for secretary of state draws closer, attention is likely to fall increasingly on Finchem’s appearance in Washington on the day of the insurrection. Allegations that he played a role in inciting the Capitol attacks led to an unsuccessful attempt to have him recalled from the legislature, as well as a motion by Arizona Democrats to have him expelled from the chamber.
“The consensus in our caucus was that individuals who participated in the January 6 insurrection do not belong serving as members of the legislature,” Bolding said.
Finchem has responded to claims that he helped organize the insurrection by threatening to sue. Through lawyers he has denied that he played any role in the violent assault on the Capitol building, saying that he “never directly witnessed the Capitol breach, and that he was in fact warned away from the Capitol when the breach began”.
In his telling of events, he was in Washington that day to deliver to Mike Pence an “evidence book” of purported fraud in the Arizona election and to ask the then vice-president to delay certification of Biden’s victory. For Finchem, January 6 remains a “patriotic event” dedicated to the exercise of free speech; if there were any criminality it was all the responsibility of anti-fascist and Black Lives Matter activists.
The Guardian reached out to Finchem to invite him to explain his presence and actions in Washington on January 6, but he did not respond.
Finchem at Arizona’s capitol in Phoenix in 2018. Photograph: Bob Christie/AP
He has repeatedly insisted that he never came within 500 yards of the Capitol building. But photos and video footage captured by Getty Images and examined by the Arizona Mirror show him walking through the crowd of Trump supporters in front of the east steps of the Capitol after the insurrection was already under way.
At 3.14pm on January 6, more than two hours after the outer police barrier protecting the Capitol was overcome by insurrectionists, Finchem posted a photograph on Twitter that he has since taken down. It is not known who took the photo, but it shows rioters close to the east steps of the building above the words: “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud. #stopthesteal.”
Finchem’s campaign to become the next secretary of state of Arizona is going well. Last year his campaign raised $660,000, Politico reported – more than three times Bolding’s haul.
Bolding sees that as indicative of a fundamental problem. On the right, individuals and groups have spotted an opportunity in the secretary of state positions and are avidly targeting them; on the left there is little sign of equivalent energy or awareness.
“The public in general may not understand what’s at stake here. All Democrats, all Americans, should be concerned about this and what it could do to the 2024 presidential election,” he said.
Dean agrees that there is a perilous void in public knowledge. “What’s so insidious about the Trump plan is that it is focusing on state-level races where voters know very little about what the secretary of state does. That’s a danger, as it gives Finchem a realistic path in which he could win – and Finchem will do what Trump wants.”
