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US

Club Q shooting suspect Anderson Aldrich appears in court, charged with 12 new counts

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CNN
 — 

The suspected gunman accused of killing five people in a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last November is facing an additional 12 counts, raising the total to 317.

Anderson Lee Aldrich appeared in court in person Friday, where Colorado’s Fourth Judicial District Attorney Michael Allen announced the new felony charges, including four attempted murder charges and two hate crimes.

Aldrich, 22, was initially charged in December with 305 counts, including charges of first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, assault and bias-motivated crimes causing bodily injury.

The new charges were added for two additional victims present at the nightclub during the shooting at Club Q, Allen told District Judge Michael McHenry.

Aldrich – whose attorneys say identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns – faces up to life in prison without parole if convicted on the first-degree murder charges.

The suspect allegedly entered Club Q late November 19 with an AR-style weapon and a handgun and opened fire, killing Daniel Aston, Raymond Green Vance, Kelly Loving, Ashley Paugh and Derrick Rump. At least 19 others were injured, police have said, most of whom suffered gunshot wounds.

The attack was halted by two patrons who took down and contained the suspect until police arrived at the club, which was seen as a safe space for the LGBTQ community in Colorado Springs.

Ahead of an earlier hearing, Aldrich’s attorneys said the suspect identified as nonbinary and would be addressed as Mx. Aldrich – a distinction Allen said would have “no impact” on his office’s prosecution of the case.

A neighbor of the accused shooter who said he sometimes played video games with Aldrich told CNN the suspect never mentioned they were nonbinary.

Aldrich’s next court appearance is a preliminary hearing on February 22.

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World

‘Every house a fortress’: Wagner leader counts cost as Russia stalls in Bakhmut | Ukraine

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The head of the Russian Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has said his fighters have sometimes spent weeks attempting to capture a single house in the key contested Donbas city of Bakhmut, in the latest evidence of how the Kremlin’s efforts there have stalled.

In a grim video released over new year, Prigozhin – a key ally of Putin – was filmed visiting a basement near the eastern front filled with the bodies of his fighters, many of them convicts, who had been killed during the bitter fighting for the city, a key Russian objective since the summer.

In the makeshift morgue, Prigozhin is seen being shown bodies on stretchers and in body bags. One pile of bagged bodies can be seen stacked shoulder-high in the corner of one of the rooms.

“Their contract has finished, they will go home next week,” Prigozhin can be heard saying, adding: “These are getting ready to be sent. We all work during New Year’s Eve.

“Here lie Wagner fighters who died at the front. They are now being put in zinc coffins and they will return home.”

As more bodies are seen being taken off a truck, Prigozhin can be heard offering new year greetings.

Map of Ukraine war

Wagner has played a key role in the Russian offensive against Bakhmut, with Ukrainian soldiers interviewed by the Guardian saying Wagner fighters were often used as shock troops in frontal assaults on their positions, while recently mobilised Russians are deployed in more defensive roles.

While it has long been suggested by Ukrainian sources, and Russian military blogs, that Wagner has suffered heavy losses in the months-long assault, the footage – and Prigozhin’s commentary – have underlined the heavy scale of the attrition.

In a second clip of footage from his visit to the eastern front, Prigozhin confirmed the difficulties his forces were encountering. “Everyone wants to know when we will capture [Bakhmut],” he explains, using the Russian name for the city, Artemovsk.

A screengrab of Yevgeny Prigozhin addressing inmates in a Russian prison offering them freedom in return for fighting with Wagner group mercenaries in Ukraine. Photograph: Twitter

“In Artemovsk, every house has become a fortress. Our guys sometimes fight for more than a day over one house. Sometimes they fight for weeks over one house. And behind this house, there is still a new line of defence, and not one. And how many such lines of defence are there in Artemovsk? Five hundred would probably not be an exaggeration.”

An unnamed Wagner soldier whom Prigozhin meets complains about the difficulties they are facing there. “We don’t have enough equipment, not enough BMP3 [armoured cars] and shells,” he says.

In separate footage from Bakhmut filmed on 2 January, a Ukrainian soldier named Kiyanyn describes the continuing combat. Amid the sound of shelling, he describes how fighters in his sector of the city have repelled several large-scale attacks against the city he calls “the fortress”.

“They were coming like insects. We had to resupply with ammo several times … The defence line is standing and holding.”

The latest fighting in the east came as Ukraine’s president, Volodomyr Zelenskiy, said Russia was preparing to step up its attacks on the country using Iranian-made exploding drones.

“We have information that Russia is planning a prolonged attack by Shaheds [exploding drones]” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address late on Monday.

He said the goal was to break Ukraine’s resistance by “exhausting our people, [our] air defence, our energy”, more than 10 months after Russia invaded its neighbour.

Zelenskiy was speaking after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, appeared to be exploring ways to regain momentum in his flawed war effort, which in recent months has been frustrated by a Ukrainian counteroffensive backed by western-supplied weapons.

In the latest embarrassment for the Kremlin, Ukrainian forces fired rockets at a facility in the eastern Donetsk region where Russian soldiers were stationed, killing 63 of them, according to Russia’s defence ministry. Other, unconfirmed reports put the death toll much higher.

It was one of the deadliest attacks on the Kremlin’s forces since the war began more than 10 months ago.

In the attack, Ukrainian forces fired six rockets from a Himars launch system, and two of them were shot down, a Russian defence ministry statement said.

However, the strategic communications directorate of Ukraine’s armed forces claimed on Sunday that about 400 mobilised Russian soldiers were killed in a vocational school building in Makiivka, and about 300 more were wounded. That claim could not be independently verified.

The Russian statement said the strike occurred “in the area of Makiivka” and did not mention the vocational school.

Many of the conscripts killed and wounded in the attack came from the country’s south-western Samara region, according to governor Dmitry Azarov, who told families to call the local military offices for more information.

An Orthodox commemorative service was held in the centre of Samara on Tuesday morning and flowers were laid at a Soviet-era war memorial in the city.

On several social media groups used by locals in Samara, relatives of the conscripts were continuing to search for information about their whereabouts.

“No one is picking up the phone at the enlistment office. How do I find out if my son is still alive,” one woman wrote.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

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World

China shifts how it counts Covid deaths as crematoriums fill up

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Beijing
CNN
 — 

For much of the pandemic, images of overflowing hospitals and busy funeral homes from the United States have featured heavily on China’s state-controlled television, where the deaths of over a million Americans from Covid is depicted as a gross failing of Western democracy.

Now, as an unprecedented wave of infections rips through China, its state media is deliberately ignoring scenes of crowded hospital wards and packed crematoriums unfolding at home, while officials insist that by the government’s own count, few people are dying of Covid.

For nearly three years, China’s hardline zero-Covid policy shielded its population from the kind of mass deaths that haunted Western nations – a contrast repeatedly driven home by the Communist Party to illustrate the supposed superiority of its rule.

But as China abruptly abandoned that strategy, with little warning or apparent preparation, the prospect of surging deaths – projected by some studies to be as high as one million – has become a thorny issue for a government that staked its legitimacy on “saving lives.”

Officially, China reported only eight Covid deaths this month – a strikingly low figure given the rapid spread of the virus and the relatively low vaccine booster rates among the vulnerable elderly.

The official tally has been met with disbelief and ridicule online, where posts mourning loved ones dying of Covid abound. Caixin, a Chinese financial magazine known for its investigative pieces, reported on the deaths of two veteran state media journalists infected with Covid, on days the official toll stood at zero.

Other social media posts have described the frustration experienced by many in attempting to obtain a hearse and the difficulty of securing a slot for cremation at a funeral home.

When CNN visited a major crematorium in Beijing on Tuesday, the parking lot was completely packed, with a long line of cars snaking around the cremation area waiting to get in. Smoke billowed constantly from the furnaces, while yellow body bags piled up inside metal containers.

Grieving family members waiting in line clutched photos of the deceased. Some told CNN they had been waiting for more than a day to cremate their loved ones, who died after contracting Covid. One man told CNN the hospital where his friend passed away was too full to keep the body, because so many people had died there. His friend’s body was left on the hospital floor, he said.

In the nearby shops selling funerary items, a florist said she was running out of stock, and a convenience store owner said business had never been so busy.

In many parts of the country, crematoriums are struggling to keep up with an influx of bodies too, according to social media footage.

Outside a Beijing hospital designated for Covid patients, a steady stream of elderly patients in wheelchairs entered the facility when CNN visited on Tuesday. A man outside the hospital said space is running out, and he had to go the night before to register his elderly family member for a bed.

A hazmat-suited worker, who was sorting through yellow bags of medical waste, said he had been working extra hours in the evening to deal with the surge of Covid patients. “There is a lot of old people particularly,” he said.

Elderly Covid patients with underlying conditions were dying every day, the worker said.

– Source:
CNN
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China’s reported less Covid deaths since scrapping zero-Covid. CNN is seeing a different story

Facing growing skepticism that it is downplaying Covid deaths, the Chinese government defended the accuracy of its official tally by revealing it had updated its method of counting fatalities caused by the virus.

According to the latest guidelines from the National Health Commission, only those whose death is caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure after contracting the virus are classified as Covid deaths, Wang Guiqiang, a top infectious disease doctor, told a news conference Tuesday.

Those deemed to have died due to another disease or underlying condition, such as in the event of a heart attack, will not be counted as a virus death, even if they were sick with Covid at the time, he said.

Commenting on China’s criteria of counting Covid deaths on Wednesday, the World Health Organization’s emergencies chief Michael Ryan said the definition was “quite narrow.”

“People who die of Covid die from many different (organ) systems’ failures, given the severity of infection,” Ryan said. “So limiting a diagnosis of death from Covid to someone with a Covid positive test and respiratory failure will very much underestimate the true death toll associated with Covid.”

According to Wang, the Chinese doctor, the change in the definition was necessitated by the mild nature of Omicron, which is different from the Wuhan strain at the start of the pandemic, when most patients died from pneumonia and respiratory failure.

But Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, pointed out this is more or less the same strict criteria Chinese authorities have used to tally Covid deaths all along.

The definition was only slightly broadened in April this year to include some Covid patients who died of underlying conditions during the Shanghai lockdown in order to justify the draconian restrictions, Jin said.

During Shanghai’s outbreak from March to May, city officials reported 588 Covid deaths from some 600,000 infections. But once the city’s lockdown lifted, the nationwide death toll remained at zero for the next six months, despite the number of infections reaching into the hundreds of thousands. Then, in late November, Beijing announced three octogenarians had died of underlying conditions with Covid, just as the city ramped up its own Covid restrictions amid a widening outbreak.

According to Jin, these inconsistencies reveal China’s method of counting Covid deaths to be “entirely subjective.” “The death data has been misleading from the start,” he said.

Counting deaths from Covid versus deaths with Covid has been a topic of debate worldwide since the start of the pandemic, said Ben Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong.

Most countries, including the United States, decided it’s too difficult to evaluate every single death to know whether Covid was a factor, and counted deaths with Covid in their official death tolls, Cowling said.

But he pointed out the debate over how to count Covid deaths would be overshadowed by a bigger issue in China – namely, there is very little PCR testing being done after the government rolled back mass testing.

“We know there’s many, many Covid deaths already occurring. And those are not being counted with the Chinese method or with the American method, because the testing is not being done,” he said.

“The substantial reduction in testing would have a greater effect on the death statistics that we’re going to see in the coming one to two months.”

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US

Trump Organization found guilty on all counts of criminal tax fraud

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CNN
 — 

A Manhattan jury has found two Trump Organization companies guilty on multiple charges of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records connected to a 15-year scheme to defraud tax authorities by failing to report and pay taxes on compensation for top executives.

The Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp. were found guilty on all charges they faced.

Donald Trump and his family were not charged in this case, but the former president was mentioned repeatedly during the trial by prosecutors about his connection to the benefits doled out to certain executives, including company-funded apartments, car leases and personal expenses.

The Trump Organization could face a maximum of $1.61 million in fines when sentenced in mid-January. The company is not at risk of being dismantled because there is no mechanism under New York law that would dissolve the company. However, a felony conviction could impact its ability to do business or obtain loans or contracts.

The guilty verdict comes as Trump is under scrutiny by federal and state prosecutors for his handling of classified documents, the effort to overturn the 2020 election results, and the accuracy of the Trump Organization’s business records and financial statements. He is also facing a $250 million civil lawsuit from the New York attorney general alleging he and his adult children were involved in a decade long fraud. The attorney general is seeking to permanently bar them from serving as an officer or director of a company in New York state, among other penalties.

“This was a case about greed and cheating,” said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. “The Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation got away with a scheme that awarded high-level executives with lavish perks and compensation while intentionally concealing the benefits from the taxing authorities to avoid paying taxes. Today’s verdict holds these Trump companies accountable for their long-running criminal scheme.”

CNN senior legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elie Honig said Bragg’s approach has been vindicated.

“Obviously, this is a setback for the Trump Org. – a major setback for the Trump Org. They’ve now been found guilty of criminal conduct, criminal tax fraud,” Honig told CNN’s Victor Blackwell on “Newsroom.”

“It’s also a victory of sorts for the Manhattan district attorney,” Honig said. “Their theory, now, that part of the income for employees, including Allen Weisselberg, was paid through fringe benefits in order to avoid tax liability – that theory has been vindicated.”

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told the jury in closing arguments that Trump “explicitly sanctioned” tax fraud and urged them to reject the defense’s argument that former Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg was a rogue employee motivated by his own personal greed.

“This whole narrative that Donald Trump is blissfully ignorant is just not true,” Steinglass said.

The jury heard that Trump agreed on a whim to pay the private school tuition for his Weisselberg’s grandchildren and signed a lease for a Manhattan apartment to shorten the executive’s commute. Trump personally signed his employees’ bonus checks at Christmas time and he initialed a memo reducing the salary of another top executives, which prosecutors said suggested he knew all along about the fraudulent scheme.

Prosecutors alleged for years top executives reduced their reported salaries by the amount of company-issued fringe benefits to avoid paying the required taxes.

Weisselberg, who is on paid leave from the company, spent three days on the witness stand. He pleaded guilty to 15 felonies for failing to pay taxes on $1.76 million in income. As part of his plea deal, he will be sentenced to five months in jail if the judge finds that he testified truthfully.

In his testimony Weisselberg admitted he should have paid taxes on compensation, totaling roughly $200,000 in one year, which included a luxury Manhattan apartment overlooking the Hudson River, two Mercedes Benz car leases, parking, utilities, furniture and private school tuition for his grandchildren. He also testified that he paid himself and other executives’ bonuses as though they were independent consultants – enabling the Trump companies to evade paying taxes on them.

Weisselberg testified that he pulled off the scheme with the help of his underling, Trump Organization controller Jeffrey McConney. McConney, who received immunity for testifying before the grand jury, admitted to some of the illegal conduct in his testimony.

After Trump was elected president, Weisselberg testified, there was a “clean up” and many of the illegal practices stopped.

He revealed conversations he had with Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., but told the jury when questioned by the Trump attorneys that he did not scheme or conspire with anybody in the Trump family.

Weisselberg became emotional at times, telling the jury he was “embarrassed” by his conduct and that he “betrayed” the Trump family, who has been his employer for 49 years.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys called out Weisselberg’s split loyalties – wanting to live up to his plea deal and serve a lower jail sentence and his loyalty to the Trump family, who could pay him $1 million in compensation this year.

To prove the company’s guilt, prosecutors needed to demonstrate that Weisselberg or McConney was a “high managerial agent” who committed the crimes in the scope of his employment and “in behalf of” the company.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers went in circles arguing over what “in behalf of” meant.

Judge Juan Merchan also struggled over how to explain the phrase to the jury and turned to two legal treaties to fashion a definition.

The judge explained it to the jury, saying, “Under the definition of ‘in behalf of,’ it is not necessary that the criminal acts actually benefit the corporation. But an agent’s acts are not ‘in behalf of’ a corporation if they were undertaken solely to advance the agents own interest. Put another way, if the agent’s acts were taken merely for personal gain, they were not ‘in behalf of’ the corporation.”

Weisselberg walked a fine line in his testimony, telling the jury he never wanted to hurt the company, he was driven by greed and mainly wanted to pay less in taxes. But, he also said, he knew at the time the company would benefit to some degree from his schemes.

In his testimony Weisselberg said, “It was a benefit to the company but primarily it was due to my greed.” He told the jury that the company saved money by paying less taxes on his off-the-books compensation and acknowledged when asked by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger if, while his primary goal was to avoid taxes, it also created a benefit to the company.

“To some degree, yes,” Weisselberg testified.

Weisselberg said he and McConney knew at the time that the company would pay less payroll taxes through the scheme although he said they never discussed it explicitly.

The Trump attorneys argued, repeatedly, to the jury that “Weisselberg did it for Weisselberg” to emphasize that he was motivated solely by his personal greed.

On cross examination, Weisselberg agreed that the decision to not pay taxes was his and made solely to benefit himself.

“That was my intent,” Weisselberg said when questioned by the Trump attorneys, “to benefit myself.”

The lawyers for the Trump entities called just one fact witness, the real estate companies’ long-time accountant Donald Bender from Mazars USA, which dropped Trump as a client earlier this year.

Trump attorneys said Bender was either aware of the off-the-books compensation or should have caught the tax fraud and they accused him of lying on the stand.

When questioned by prosecutors Bender testified that he trusted and relied on Weisselberg, who testified that he hid the illegal scheme.

Steinglass, the prosecutor, told the jury the Trump companies were guilty, and the illegal scheme was concocted “so the employees can get more net pay while costing the Trump Corporation less. It’s a win-win – unless you’re the tax authorities.”

This story has been updated with additional details.

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US

As Arizona counts votes, Republicans seize on Election Day glitches

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PHOENIX — Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, seized on technical glitches at dozens of polling locations in a key county to call Thursday for a special legislative session to overhaul the state’s voting system, which she would have the power to do if elected.

Lake has yet to say that the election results can’t be trusted, as she did in 2020 when President Biden won the state, but her assertion that the system needs immediate change came as officials continued to count votes, a process they have warned could take up to 12 days. The results released so far show Lake, a former television news anchor, locked in a close contest with her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state.

Hobbs, meanwhile, wrote on Twitter: “This election will be determined by the voters, not by the volume at which an unhinged former television reporter can shout conspiracy theories.”

On Tuesday, nearly a third of polling locations throughout Maricopa County — home to Phoenix and more than 60 percent of the state’s voters — had problems with the printers that produce ballots on demand for individual voters. Starting early Tuesday morning, printers at 70 of the county’s 223 polling sites produced ballots with ink that was too light to be properly read by vote-counting machines, causing the ballots to be rejected, according to county officials. These officials had previously said that a smaller number of sites had problems.

Issues with some voting machines in Maricopa County, Ariz. sparked unfounded claims about election fraud. Democracy reporter Yvonne Wingett Sanchez explains. (Video: Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Casey Silvestri/The Washington Post)

The officials said they had yet to determine the cause of the printer problems; they said the printers passed required logic and accuracy tests ahead of Tuesday and had been used during the August primary election and the 2020 elections with the same settings, with no problems.

Voters had the options of waiting for the problems to be fixed, going to different polling locations, or dropping their ballots into secure boxes that were transferred to downtown Phoenix and counted there. Voters placed about 17,000 ballots in the secure boxes, a higher number than in previous elections, county officials said. They said all votes will be counted, that all voters who wanted to cast a ballot were allowed to do so and that the printer problems will not affect the counting of votes.

Maricopa’s problems remained a mystery Thursday to officials in Washington, who have been disappointed since Election Day by the lack of a clear explanation communicated to both voters and the agencies charged with election oversight, said two people tracking the developments. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Kari Lake wants to upend how Arizonans vote, how their votes are counted

In a state central to widespread conspiracy theories after President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020, some Republicans leveraged the problems in Maricopa County to call for elimination of early voting and machines that count votes. Though early voting has long been popular in Arizona, ballots returned in the days leading up to Election Day and on Election Day, always take time to process, and ballots are processed in the order they are received. To post results more quickly, county leaders for weeks urged voters to return their ballots — which had more races than ever before — as quickly as possible.

Election workers were working through about 400,000 ballots in Maricopa County as of Thursday night. Officials here said they always expected the count to take as many as 12 days, though they had expected to report at least 95 percent of results by Friday. On Thursday, county officials said that it would take longer to meet that goal and that they are working through the Veterans Day federal holiday and the weekend.

Voters dropped off about 290,000 ballots on Election Day, the highest number ever released. The high volume of late drop-offs suggests many voters may have acted on instructions from Republican leaders and candidates who urged people to either vote in person or hand-deliver early ballots at polling locations.

Some Republicans claimed, without evidence, that the drip-drip release of results — which happens during every election here — suggested county officials wanted to delay what they asserted would be a win by Lake, and perhaps other Republican candidates.

Officials in Pima County, home to Tucson, swatted away such allegations. Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, the county recorder, said it was taking time to process the high volume of early ballots that didn’t arrive until Election Day. “We are following the law,” she said.

Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates (R) noted that it routinely takes days to complete tabulation in the county, a pattern that has recently drawn national attention because of Arizona’s swing-state status and the tight margins in statewide contests. Gates, who twice ran the state GOP’s Election Day integrity efforts, said Lake might not be familiar with the county’s tabulation process.

“Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say these people behind me are slow rolling when they’re working 14 to 18 hours,” he said, gripping a lectern at times during a 45-minute news conference. “I really hope this is the end of that now. We can be patient and respect the results.”

Gates said it is important that Arizonans don’t think “that we’re picking and choosing which ballots to tabulate. We use an accounting concept: first in, first out.”

Researchers examining attempts on social media to delegitimize election results said fraud narratives had gotten less traction in the immediate aftermath of the vote. But others warned that a prolonged count in Arizona could create an opportunity for misleading narratives to take hold or for rogue actors to try to disrupt the process.

Most immediately, Republican candidates and their allies in Arizona seized on the mechanical issues to prime the public for sweeping legislative changes. Lake ran on a platform during the primary election to count millions of votes not by machines, but by hand, a method that election experts say is less accurate. She favors “one-day voting,” where ballots are cast in assigned precincts. Arizona allows people to vote by mail, and in Maricopa County, they can vote at any voting location.

Lake was notably vaguer in the final days of campaigning about her plans for electoral reform.

At a stop southeast of Phoenix on the Sunday before Election Day, she told reporters simply that she planned to “work with our wonderful lawmakers, and we’ll come up with great laws that secure the vote.”

Her most hard-line allies also seemed to be equivocating. Wendy Rogers, a far-right state senator who has pushed for “decertification” of the 2020 election, a process that experts say is not possible under state or federal law, refused to commit to a system that would only allow voting on a single day — an idea that has been pushed by far-right activists here. When asked at the same event whether she favored such a proposal, she replied, “Essentially.”

But the problems in Maricopa County gave Lake and her supporters a fresh target for their ire. In an appearance on a radio show hosted by Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Phoenix-based Turning Point USA, Lake called for a “task force to investigate what went wrong, how these anomalies happened.”

“That’s either maladministration, incompetency, we don’t know what it is,” she added.

Kirk went further, arguing without evidence, “I believe it was a traffic jam by design.”

How a pro-Trump youth group remade the Arizona GOP, testing democracy

But that belief wasn’t echoed by Lake, who had a delicate dance to pull off — railing against the administration of an election that, she told her supporters, will place her in the governor’s office.

“It’s a messed-up election system,” she said. “We knew we had to trudge through it to get to victory.”

That message left fellow Republican candidates in a difficult position. Other campaigns took their cues from Lake about how to respond to the uncertainty in the days after the election, according to a Republican familiar with the discussions. Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Arizona, suggested on Tuesday that something nefarious was occurring, but he fell mostly silent on social media as Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) gained an edge over him in incomplete results.

A fundraising appeal from Masters’s campaign on Thursday did not allege impropriety but argued that “some of the issues we’ve see occur during this election are troubling.” It added, “We’re expecting a contested road forward and legal battles to come.”

Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican nominee for attorney general, attacked Maricopa County but did not argue that the vote, which was showing him neck-and-neck with Democrat Kris Mayes, was fraudulent.

The exception was Mark Finchem, the GOP candidate for secretary of state, who was trailing Democrat Adrian Fontes in preliminary results. Finchem speculated on Twitter that Fontes and other Democrats could be “in the back room with ballots.” Fontes fired back that he was “having coffee with an old friend,” adding, “Stop with this conspiracy garbage.”

More broadly, the state’s top Democratic candidates urged patience, with Hobbs writing on Twitter, “Accurate election results take time.” Kelly thanked his supporters on social media, writing, “I’m confident we’re going to win. But we don’t have the final results yet.”

Lake was holed up Wednesday in meetings with advisers, outside allies and people who may ultimately serve in her administration. Among them was Floyd Brown, a longtime conservative operative and founder of the news and opinion website the Western Journal, according to two people familiar with the discussions, one of whom said it was an advisory meeting. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about private discussions. Brown, who did not respond to a request for comment, suggested on social media that the mechanical issues in Maricopa County were an “effort to stop” Lake.

Lake also met with Eileen Klein, the former chief of staff for former Arizona governor Jan Brewer, a Republican; Danny Seiden, who heads the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and previously worked for Gov. Doug Ducey (R); and Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer of the political arm of Kirk’s Turning Point USA. None commented on the meetings.

Maricopa officials said that while they did not yet know the underlying cause of the faint printing on some ballots, the problem appeared to be fixed by late Tuesday afternoon when technicians changed a setting to allow for a heavier kind of paper.

Printers like those used by the county contain “fusers” — heated rollers that melt toner and make it stick to paper. Different weights of paper require different temperatures for the toner to adhere properly.

The county has about 760 printers for printing ballots on demand, according to Megan Gilbertson, communications director for the county’s elections department. About 600 of those were made by Oki, a corporation headquartered in Japan, which discontinued all sales of its printers in the United States in March 2021. Oki has said it continues to supply parts, software updates and other services. Gilbertson said those printers are the ones that had problems.

“It is standard practice to continue to use equipment if an organization can continue to maintain it,” Gilbertson said. Dennie K. Kawahara, the president and chief executive of Oki Data Americas, said in an email that the firm had received no inquiries or customer service requests relating to the problem in Maricopa County. “The printers were tested prior to the election and were working fine,” Kawahara wrote.

Maricopa’s 2022 elections plan said each of the county’s 223 polling places would have two or three printers and that this would provide enough capacity in case some malfunctioned.

Gilbertson said each ballot printer was linked only to a laptop and that they were not connected to one another or to the internet. The printers’ settings could only be changed manually and changes require a password, she said.

Swaine and Davis reported from Washington. Cat Zakrzewski in Washington contributed to this report.

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US

Jury finds Trump friend Thomas Barrack not guilty on all counts in foreign lobbying trial

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A New York jury Friday found Trump confidant and billionaire Thomas Barrack not guilty of all charges in his trial on federal foreign lobbying allegations.

Barrack, a 75-year-old investor who was an adviser to former President Donald Trump and chair of his Inaugural Committee, was accused of using his connections to Trump’s administration to try to sway U.S. foreign policy for a client, the United Arab Emirates.

Outside the Brooklyn federal courthouse Barrack lauded the jury and invoked “Lady Justice.”

“The system is amazing. People are amazing. I have no hostility, I’m just proud to be an American,” Barrack said, adding later that he is “done with politics.” 

“Let’s stop fighting with each other. Let stop all the politicalization of everything, whoever the president is,” Barrack said to reporters before teens playing music on handheld speakers walked by. Barrack stopped talking briefly, put his hands in the air, and danced.

Prosecutors portrayed Barrack as a businessman “campaigning for cash,” out to use his White House ties to add a lucrative client to his investment portfolio. Barrack’s defense said he was using his ties to the Middle East and the presidential administration to try to mediate disputes in a volatile but crucial region, an attempt to cap off a storied international investment career.

The jurors, impaneled since Sept. 19, deliberated for two days before reaching their verdict.

Barrack pleaded not guilty to charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the UAE, obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI.

Prosecutors showed the jury text messages and emails sent during in 2016 and 2017, during the presidential campaign and the early days of the Trump administration, in which Barrack and an employee of his firm, Colony Capital, appeared to relay talking points related to a “wish list” of UAE priorities. Barrack and the employee, Michael Grimes, communicated through a middleman with Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a sheik who is the UAE’s national security advisor, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said Barrack’s and Grimes’ efforts garnered $374 million in new investments from a UAE sovereign wealth fund for their firm. Their defense said there was nothing illegal about their efforts to attract new investments, and noted that figure represented just 1% of the investment portfolio managed by Barrack’s former company, which is now known as DigitalBridge.  

Grimes, 29, was also charged in the case. The jury found him not guilty of charges he acted as an unregistered foreign agent. 

The alleged middleman, an Emirati citizen who had been living in California, Rashid al Malik, was also charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Al Malik has not been located by authorities.

After the verdict, Grimes said he felt “grateful” to the jurors and his parents, who attended the trial daily and “who stood by me every single day.”

“I’m grateful to live in the United States to have the opportunity to stand before a judge who’s fair and impartial and a jury of my peers who reached the conclusion of what it should be. And that is the truth,” Grimes said.

Asked what’s next, he said, “offense,” without elaborating.

Outside the courtroom, prosecutors walked by without comment.

Barrack spent the final six days of the trial on the stand, testifying in his own defense. He described his communications with UAE officials about the Trump administration as “puffery” and attempts to mediate disputes.

The jury also heard testimony from two Trump administration officials, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, called by Barrack’s defense, and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, called by the government.

Graham Kates

Graham Kates is an investigative reporter covering criminal justice, privacy issues and information security for CBS News Digital. Contact Graham at KatesG@cbsnews.com or grahamkates@protonmail.com



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US

Jury finds Trump friend Thomas Barrack not guilty on all counts in foreign lobbying trial

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A New York jury Friday found Trump confidant and billionaire Thomas Barrack not guilty of all charges in his trial on federal foreign lobbying allegations.

Barrack, a 75-year-old investor who was an adviser to former President Donald Trump and chair of his Inaugural Committee, was accused of using his connections to Trump’s administration to try to sway U.S. foreign policy for a client, the United Arab Emirates.

Outside the Brooklyn federal courthouse Barrack lauded the jury and invoked “Lady Justice.”

“The system is amazing. People are amazing. I have no hostility, I’m just proud to be an American,” Barrack said, adding later that he is “done with politics.” 

“Let’s stop fighting with each other. Let stop all the politicalization of everything, whoever the president is,” Barrack said to reporters before teens playing music on handheld speakers walked by. Barrack stopped talking briefly, put his hands in the air, and danced.

Prosecutors portrayed Barrack as a businessman “campaigning for cash,” out to use his White House ties to add a lucrative client to his investment portfolio. Barrack’s defense said he was using his ties to the Middle East and the presidential administration to try to mediate disputes in a volatile but crucial region, an attempt to cap off a storied international investment career.

The jurors, impaneled since Sept. 19, deliberated for two days before reaching their verdict.

Barrack pleaded not guilty to charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the UAE, obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI.

Prosecutors showed the jury text messages and emails sent during in 2016 and 2017, during the presidential campaign and the early days of the Trump administration, in which Barrack and an employee of his firm, Colony Capital, appeared to relay talking points related to a “wish list” of UAE priorities. Barrack and the employee, Michael Grimes, communicated through a middleman with Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a sheik who is the UAE’s national security advisor, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said Barrack’s and Grimes’ efforts garnered $374 million in new investments from a UAE sovereign wealth fund for their firm. Their defense said there was nothing illegal about their efforts to attract new investments, and noted that figure represented just 1% of the investment portfolio managed by Barrack’s former company, which is now known as DigitalBridge.  

Grimes, 29, was also charged in the case. The jury found him not guilty of charges he acted as an unregistered foreign agent. 

The alleged middleman, an Emirati citizen who had been living in California, Rashid al Malik, was also charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Al Malik has not been located by authorities.

After the verdict, Grimes said he felt “grateful” to the jurors and his parents, who attended the trial daily and “who stood by me every single day.”

“I’m grateful to live in the United States to have the opportunity to stand before a judge who’s fair and impartial and a jury of my peers who reached the conclusion of what it should be. And that is the truth,” Grimes said.

Asked what’s next, he said, “offense,” without elaborating.

Outside the courtroom, prosecutors walked by without comment.

Barrack spent the final six days of the trial on the stand, testifying in his own defense. He described his communications with UAE officials about the Trump administration as “puffery” and attempts to mediate disputes.

The jury also heard testimony from two Trump administration officials, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, called by Barrack’s defense, and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, called by the government.

Graham Kates

Graham Kates is an investigative reporter covering criminal justice, privacy issues and information security for CBS News Digital. Contact Graham at KatesG@cbsnews.com or grahamkates@protonmail.com



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US

Arizona AG gives county OK for full ballot hand counts

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PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona’s Republican attorney general has issued an opinion saying county officials can hand-count all ballots in at least five races from the Nov. 8 election, a move that gives a green light to GOP officials in at least two counties who have been clamoring for hand counts.

The efforts to hand-count ballots are driven by unfounded concerns among some Republicans that problems with vote-counting machines or voter fraud led to former President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat.

The new attorney general opinion led the two Republicans on the three-member Cochise County board of supervisors to boost their plan to hand-count some races in both early and Election Day ballots. They had pledged to pare back the effort on Wednesday.

Under state law, the local leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties would have to provide hundreds of volunteers to do the counts.

At a fiery meeting Friday, Democratic Supervisor Ann English said she’ll do everything she can to stop the county Democratic Party chair from providing those workers.

“It would be my fondest hope, that if I have any authority, any way that I can convince the chair of the Democratic party in Cochise County not to provide people for this fiasco that will be my intent,” English said. “Because I think that every day that we’re discussing this, then people are wondering ‘what’s wrong with our elections.’ ”

That comment came after GOP Supervisor Peggy Judd said she wanted to move ahead, and Republican Supervisor Tom Crosby pushed back strongly on English’s opposition and effort to halt the full count.

“I’m OK talking about how this will be done, but all you want to do is make it not get done,” Crosby said. “So, I’m not interested in that discussion — I’m interested in the discussion of how it will get done.”

The Cochise County Democratic Party referred inquiries about whether they would send volunteers for the expanded hand count to the state party on Saturday. Arizona Democratic Party spokeswoman Morgan Dick said party officials are consulting with their attorneys on the issue.

The county party did post on its Facebook page Saturday, saying they were “beyond disappointed in yesterday’s circus of a meeting.”

“Judd, Crosby and (county Recorder David) Stevens are hell bent on appeasing MAGA election deniers instead of doing what’s right for our county,” the post continued.

The hand count would take place along with the machine count, and the machine count will be used for the legal results.

The informal opinion issued Friday by Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office came as the board has been battling with Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. She warned officials there not to expand the required small hand count to all races because it was illegal. Hobbs is the state’s top election official and is running for governor.

Hobbs did give them the OK to hand-count all Election Day ballots in four races, but she said it would be illegal to do so for early votes, which make up more than 80% of ballots in the state. Normal hand-count audits required under law to ensure accuracy of ballot counting machines cover only a small percentage of ballots.

The opinion from Brnovich’s deputy solicitor general said the county may hand-count all the ballots in as many as five races.

Hobbs’ office said they disagreed and that the law does not allow it for early ballots.

“With early voting well under way and less than two weeks from election day, these antics are doing nothing more than creating chaos and confusion around the election and tabulation of ballots, which is wildly irresponsible,” a statement from Hobbs’ office said.

Supervisors in Pinal County, a much larger and growing suburban area just south of metro Phoenix’s Maricopa County, also have been considering a hand count. Both boards have meetings planned for next week to discuss the issue.

The elected Republican county attorneys in both jurisdictions have warned their respective boards there is no legal authority to expand a hand-count of ballots.

“It would be illegal at this point to do a full hand count,” Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer told his board on Wednesday.

Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre has told the board he also believes a full hand count is illegal and said the board and county Recorder David Stevens would need to find outside attorneys if they went ahead. He repeated that Friday, after Supervisor Judd said Brnovich had given the go-ahead.

He also noted that the effort runs afoul of a legal doctrine set up by the U.S. Supreme Court that says election rules and procedures can’t be changed close to an election.

An effort to hand count ballots in rural Nevada’s Nye County has been beset with issues, including slow counts and a legal challenge that forced the effort to halt on Thursday night. Officials in the GOP-led county pledged to restart their effort as soon as they can.

____

Follow AP’s coverage of the elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections

Check out https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections to learn more about the issues and factors at play in the 2022 midterm elections.

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US

3 accused of hoarding nearly 200 cats in Connecticut home each charged with over 100 counts of animal cruelty

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Three adults have been charged with more than 100 counts of animal cruelty each after close to 200 cats were found in a home in Winchester, Connecticut, back in June, authorities reported Thursday.  

Sixty-one-year-old James Thomen Jr., 53-year-old Laura Thomen and 30-year-old Marissa O’Brien were arrested Oct. 19 on 106 counts of animal cruelty each, the Winchester Police Department said. They were also each charged with two counts of risk of injury to a minor.

Investigators also have an arrest warrant out for a fourth individual, police said. 

Authorities first learned about the hoarded animals when they responded to the home, located in the community of Winsted, on June 13, after receiving an anonymous call about a sick cat. When they arrived, they “noticed a strong odor of urine” coming from the home, police said in a news release. 

In addition to finding the animals, police found eight people living in the home, including the three suspects and two young children. The children, a 6-year-old girl and 10-year-old boy, were immediately removed by the state Department of Children and Families and placed with relatives, according to police.

Winchester Town Manager Josh Kelly, who helped organize a rescue of the hoarded animals, said on Facebook that a total of 189 cats, two dogs and one ferret were removed from the home. After receiving veterinary examinations, all of the animals were either adopted or relocated to shelters and rescues a little more than one month after they were found in the home.

Thinking about adopting a pet? There are over a hundred cats from Winsted’s recent animal hoarding situation that are…

Posted by Town of Winchester/Winsted, CT on Wednesday, July 20, 2022

At the time authorities found and rescued the animals, the home’s residents told police that they were trying to help the cats, but that things got out of hand, Winchester Police Chief William Fitzgerald said in a press conference in June.

“The owners stated that they were just trying to help the animals from freezing outside, and one (cat) led to another, and (they) started feeding them, and (it) suddenly got out of control,” Fitzgerald said.

The suspects who were taken into custody are scheduled to be arraigned Nov. 1. 



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Entertainment

R. Kelly convicted of six counts in federal trial in Chicago; co-defendants acquitted

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Disgraced singer R. Kelly on Wednesday was convicted of multiple child pornography charges accusing him of sexually abusing his 14-year-old goddaughter on video nearly 20 years ago, but jurors acquitted him of charges he conspired with two associates to cover up the tapes and to obstruct justice in his 2008 child pornography trial in Cook County.

Kelly, 55, was found guilty of three child pornography counts, and three counts of enticing minors for sex, but acquitted of seven other charges, including obstruction of justice, and conspiracy to receive child pornography. Each of the child pornography counts carries a sentence of up to 20 years, and the enticement charges each carry a sentence of up to 10 years.

Co-defendants Derrell McDavid and Milton “June” Brown were acquitted of all charges.

Jurors deliberated for about 11 hours over two days before delivering their verdict.

Kelly was convicted of three of four counts accusing him of producing child pornography by filming himself having sex with his underage goddaughter, who testified against him under the pseudonym “Jane.” Jurors saw parts of those three videos in court. Jurors acquitted him of a fourth child pornography charge involving a tape that Jane and prosecutors said showed Kelly having a threesome with Jane and his ex-girlfriend, Lisa Van Allen, but that tape was not shown in court. Prosecutors had argued that’s because Kelly and his team successfully covered it up.

Jurors acquitted Kelly and McDavid, his former business manager, of a conspiracy to obstruct justice charge that accused them of rigging his 2008 child pornography trial in Cook County by covering up incriminating sex tapes, and intimidating and paying off Jane and her parents to keep his abuse of her secret.

Kelly, McDavid, and Brown also were acquitted of a conspiracy to receive child pornography charge accusing them of trying to retrieve and cover up three sex tapes involving Jane. Kelly and McDavid also were acquitted of two charges of receiving child pornography, involving further claims they tried to retrieve and cover up other videos involving Jane. The government’s case on those charges rested in large part on testimony from Charles Freeman and Lisa Van Allen, who defense attorneys described as liars out to extort Kelly for money.

Finally, Kelly was convicted of three of five charges accusing him of enticing minors to engage in sexual activity, but acquitted of two other charges. Jurors convicted him of enticement charges involving Jane, and two other accusers testifying under the pseudonyms “Nia” and “Pauline,” while acquitting him of enticement charges involving accusers “Tracy” and “Brittany.”

Jane had accused Kelly of sexually abusing her hundreds of times after becoming her godfather when she was only 14 years old. Prosecutors showed the jury three videos that they said showed Kelly having sex with Jane, including one that showed him telling her to lay on the floor while he urinated on her.

Nia had testified she first met Kelly in 1996, when she was only 15 years old, and that they had two sexual encounters, one at a hotel during his concert tour in Minnesota, and another later that year at his music studio in Chicago.

Pauline testified that Jane introduced her to Kelly when she was only 14 years old, and the three soon started having threesomes, before Pauline started her own sexual relationship with Kelly alone when she was 15. She estimated she had sex with Kelly more than 80 times and had 60 threesomes with Kelly and Jane between the ages of 14 and 16.

Tracy testified that she met Kelly in 1999 when she was an off-the-books intern for an Epic Records executive, and claimed that, when she was only 16, Kelly “forced himself” on her at a downtown Chicago hotel. She said the two later developed a sexual relationship that continued beyond her 17th birthday. But defense attorneys cast doubts on her claims, pointing to a past lawsuit she filed against Kelly in which she claimed they met and started having sex in 2000, when she was 17 years old.

Brittany did not testify at trial, and while both Jane and Pauline testified to having threesomes with Kelly and Brittany when they were just girls, defense attorneys seized on the fact Brittany didn’t testify herself, asking jurors in closing arguments “Where is Brittany!”

Before the jury began its deliberations, Kelly’s lead defense attorney asked jurors to set aside what they knew about the singer before the trial, acknowledging most of it probably wasn’t favorable, and to treat him as a “John Doe.” Bonjean said the jury must make their decision based only on the evidence they heard in the courtroom, not what they might know about Kelly through the media, or what they’ve heard about him elsewhere.

Bonjean said no matter what jurors might decide, Kelly did some beautiful things when it came to making music, and he shouldn’t “be stripped of every bit of humanity he has.”

However, in the prosecution’s rebuttal argument, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeannice Appenteng said the evidence was clear that Kelly sexually abused girls, and his co-defendants helped him cover it up.

“What R. Kelly wanted was to have sex with young girls,” Appenteng said. 

Appenteng said when the jury reflects on the case, they should consider who is at the center of it: Kelly’s victims. She said they were children when Kelly began sexual relationships with them, and the jury should find him guilty.

“The defendants are guilty of each count in the indictment. Hold them accountable,” Appenteng said.  

Jurors heard four weeks of testimony from more than 30 witnesses, and saw clips from three sex tapes that prosecutors say show Kelly sexually abusing his 14-year-old goddaughter.    

During the trial, four women accused Kelly of sexually abusing them when they were girls, including the state’s star witness, who testified under the pseudonym “Jane,” and told jurors that Kelly began abusing her after becoming her godfather when she was only 14, and had sex with her hundreds of times between the ages of 14 and 18.

Jane had denied for years that Kelly abused her, but now says Kelly intimidated her and her family, and paid them off to keep his abuse secret. She now says she was the person in the video at the center of Kelly’s 2008 child pornography trial in Cook County, and has told the jury Kelly recorded her on other videos shown in court.

McDavid was the only defendant to testify at the trial, spending three days on the witness stand repeatedly telling jurors that he believed Kelly when he denied sexually abusing girls in the early 2000s, but said he began to have doubts about Kelly’s innocence after learning new things during the ongoing federal trial.

Kelly already has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after he was convicted last year of racketeering and sex trafficking charges in federal court in New York.

Kelly also is still awaiting trial in Cook County in sexual assault and sexual abuse cases involving four women, three of whom were girls at the time of the abuse. He also faces charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution in Minnesota.

Read more about the response to Wednesday’s verdict below.

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