Video and audio evidence from the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband was released Friday, showing for the first time the sequence of events that ended with 82 year-old
Paul Pelosi
being knocked unconscious with a hammer as police officers tackled his assailant.
Some of the evidence was previously shown in court proceedings in the case against David DePape, who is being held without bond on charges of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and elder abuse in the Oct. 28 attack on Mr. Pelosi. Mr. DePape has pleaded not guilty.
The evidence released Friday, which includes police body-camera footage, is the first opportunity for the public to see and hear in detail the events leading up to and including a predawn assault, which focused attention on violence aimed at politicians in the U.S.
Its release came after a coalition of news organizations filed a motion earlier this month requesting to see the evidence, which prosecutors had previously withheld. Judge Stephen Murphy of San Francisco Superior Court granted the motion Wednesday.
Adam Lipson, a San Francisco deputy public defender representing Mr. DePape, said it was, “a terrible mistake to release this evidence, and in particular the video. Releasing this footage is disrespectful to Mr. Pelosi, and serves no purpose except to feed the public desire for spectacle and violence.”
He also said the release would make it hard for his client to get a fair trial.
Mrs. Pelosi, who was speaker of the House of Representatives until earlier this month, said Friday that she had no intention of watching the newly released evidence and thanked people for their prayers.
The video begins with footage from a Capitol Police camera trained on the Pelosi home in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood; it shows Mr. DePape—wearing shorts and a jacket—walking up to a rear entrance at 3:04 a.m., taking out a claw hammer from a bag and putting on gloves.
After looking around several times, he initially pushed the head of the hammer against the glass in a set of french doors. When it wouldn’t open, he swung with full force 16 times until the glass shattered and then pushed his way through, shoulder first.
The next evidence released is audio of Mr. Pelosi’s call to 911 a few minutes later, in which he tried to convey to a dispatcher that he needed help.
Mr. Pelosi told Mr. DePape he had to use the bathroom and called 911 from a phone charging there, a person with knowledge of the incident previously said.
“I guess I called by mistake,” Mr. Pelosi said at first to the operator. After she asked if he needed help, he told her, “There’s a gentleman here just waiting for my wife to come back,
Nancy Pelosi.
She’s not going to be here for days, so I guess we’ll have to wait.”
When asked by the 911 operator if he knew the man, Mr. Pelosi said he didn’t. Mr. DePape can then be heard saying, “My name is David. I’m a friend of theirs.”
Mr. Pelosi then hung up after saying, “He wants me to get the hell off the phone.”
Body camera footage of two San Francisco police officers dispatched to the home subsequently show them knocking on the front door. Mr. Pelosi opened the door, looking disheveled and not wearing pants, with his hand on a hammer that Mr. DePape is holding. After an officer asks, “What’s going on, man?”, Mr. DePape answered “Everything’s good.”
An officer then ordered him to “drop the hammer,” after which the suspect answered “Um, nope” and began struggling with the smaller Mr. Pelosi for control. He quickly pinned the older man’s right arm to free the hammer and then raised it over his head to strike Mr. Pelosi.
A door obscures Mr. Pelosi at this point, but the footage then shows the officers tackling Mr. DePape and handcuffing him as he lies on the floor, partially atop Mr. Pelosi, who appears to be unconscious.
Mr. Pelosi was treated at a local trauma center and later released home, where his wife said he faced a long recovery. Mrs. Pelosi said Friday that her husband is making progress on his recovery, but it will take more time.
apologized in court this week as she pleaded guilty to fraud and other offenses, telling a judge that she and others conspired to steal billions of dollars from customers of the doomed crypto exchange while misleading investors and lenders.
“I am truly sorry for what I did,” Ms. Ellison, the former chief executive of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, said in a New York federal court, according to a transcript of the hearing made available Friday. “I knew that it was wrong.”
Ms. Ellison, 28 years old, and former FTX chief technology officer
Gary Wang,
29, pleaded guilty Monday during separate hearings in sealed courtrooms. Both agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation in exchange for the prospect of lighter sentences.
Ms. Ellison, a former romantic partner of Mr. Bankman-Fried, pleaded guilty to seven criminal counts, including fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. During her hearing, she admitted to conspiring to use billions of dollars from FTX customer accounts to repay loans Alameda had taken out to make risky investments.
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FTX executives had enacted special settings that granted Alameda access to an unlimited line of credit without having to post collateral, pay interest on negative balances or be subject to margin calls, she said.
“I also understood that many FTX customers invested in crypto derivatives and that most FTX customers did not expect that FTX would lend out their digital asset holdings and fiat currency deposits to Alameda in this fashion,” she said.
Ms. Ellison also said she and Mr. Bankman-Fried worked with others to conceal the arrangement from lenders, including by hiding on quarterly balance sheets the extent of Alameda’s borrowing and the billions of dollars in loans that the firm had made to FTX executives and associates. Mr. Bankman-Fried was among the executives who received loans from Alameda, she said.
Under questioning from the judge, Ms. Ellison said she knew what she was doing was illegal.
She said that since FTX’s implosion, she has worked hard to assist in the recovery of customers’ assets and aid the government’s investigation.
At the hearing, U.S. District Judge
Ronnie Abrams
granted the request of federal prosecutors to temporarily seal all documents connected to Ms. Ellison’s plea agreement. At the time, Mr. Bankman-Fried was in a jail in the Bahamas after the Justice Department requested local police arrest him, and he had not yet formally consented to his transfer to U.S. custody.
“We’re still expecting extradition soon, but given that he has not yet entered his consent, we think it could potentially thwart our law enforcement objectives to extradite him if Ms. Ellison’s cooperation were disclosed at this time,” Assistant U.S. Attorney
Danielle Sassoon
told Judge Abrams.
A lawyer for Ms. Ellison declined to comment. Ms. Ellison was ordered released on $250,000 bond at her plea hearing. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.
John J. Ray III, the new chief executive of FTX, testified in front of a House committee Tuesday on the collapse of the crypto exchange. His testimony came less than a day after the company founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was arrested in the Bahamas. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News
Mr. Wang pleaded guilty in front of the same judge. He told Judge Abrams he knew what he was doing was illegal and wrong. “As part of my employment at FTX, I was directed to and agreed to make certain changes to the platform’s code,” he said, adding that he executed the changes knowing they would give Alameda Research special privileges on the FTX platform.
A lawyer for Mr. Wang declined to comment. He has previously said that Mr. Wang takes his responsibilities as a cooperating witness seriously.
The Justice Department charged Mr. Bankman-Fried earlier this month with eight counts of fraud and conspiracy connected to the implosion of his company. He was released from custody on a $250 million bond on Thursday after making his first court appearance in New York following his extradition from the Bahamas. A federal magistrate judge set strict restrictions on Mr. Bankman-Fried, including ordering him to stay in his parents’ Palo Alto, Calif., home and be under electronic monitoring.
Mr. Bankman-Fried has said he made mistakes that contributed to FTX’s demise, but he has denied engaging in fraud.
Write to Corinne Ramey at corinne.ramey@wsj.com and James Fanelli at james.fanelli@wsj.com
JACKSON, Miss.—State officials and some residents in Mississippi’s capital are at odds over how to address rampant violent crime, causing tensions to escalate in a city already rife with arguments over who was responsible for a breakdown that left many without clean drinking water.
Mississippi officials are planning to more than double the size of the police force that protects the Capitol and state office buildings to 170 officers by the end of next year. They gave the police force power to patrol a larger area of Jackson, which has one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the U.S. The Jackson Police Department, which has about 250 officers, will continue to oversee the remaining 92% of the city.
Officials in the state government, dominated by Republicans, say the move will make state buildings and the areas around them safer for workers and visitors. Some residents in the predominantly Black city say the mostly white Mississippi leadership is essentially creating a bubble around where they work and neglecting poorer communities with more violence.
“It’s like poor people are left out when it comes to fighting crime,” said
Willa Womack,
the president of the Battlefield Park Neighborhood Association, representing an area that isn’t part of the Capitol Police expansion plan.
Memorial murals in Jackson, Miss., which has one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the U.S.
Sean Tindell,
commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Capitol Police, said he has started meeting with local residents to hear their concerns.
“Sometimes it can be tense,” he said. “But really all we are trying to do is make the city of Jackson safer.”
Jackson, population 150,000, reported 154 homicides last year, up from 128 in 2020 and 82 in 2019. As of Oct. 26 this year, 114 homicides were reported—a rate of 76 per 100,000 residents. That compares with a homicide rate in Chicago of about 21 per 100,000 for the same period.
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State and local officials in Jackson have been divided for years, often over the city’s failing water infrastructure, which left many residents without drinking water in late August and early September. The two sides have argued over whether the problems were caused by local mismanagement or inadequate state funding. The Environmental Protection Agency recently said it was investigating a complaint that state agencies discriminated against the city, which is more than 80% Black.
A spokeswoman for the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said that the complaint filed by the NAACP contains inaccuracies, but that she couldn’t provide details for legal reasons.
State leaders have raised the possibility in recent years of taking over city operations including the airport.
While Mississippi’s Republican-led legislature and GOP Gov.
Tate Reeves
gave the Capitol Police expanded authority last year, the department is still adding officers. Its budget grew to $11 million in the current fiscal year from $6.6 million in the fiscal year that ended in June, according to a spokeswoman.
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves at a press conference last month.
Photo:
Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press
New areas the Capitol Police are patrolling include downtown, universities and the affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods of Belhaven and Fondren. Before the expansion plan, the department was primarily responsible for the Capitol and other state office buildings.
Andy Frame
of the nonprofit Jackson Association of Neighborhoods said he has seen little cooperation between the city and state on law enforcement.
“There’s no real coordinating effort,” said Mr. Frame. “The state has a negative view of how the city runs things, and neither side trusts the other.”
Jackson Democratic Mayor
Chokwe Antar Lumumba
declined to be interviewed through a spokeswoman, as did the city’s police chief.
In May, Mr. Lumumba said at a press conference that his administration was working to reduce violent crime, but that requests for state funding to supplement Jackson’s approximately $37 million police budget to add technology and new programs were rejected.
“We’ve asked for millions and millions of dollars, and the city of Jackson’s police department has not received any of it,” he said.
A spokesman for the governor said that the state has worked to support Jackson in its fight against crime and that the Capitol Police expansion is a one way it is doing that.
Maati Jone Primm, a Jackson bookstore owner, says she believes white Republican state politicians want to take over the city.
Jackson’s police department, like many across the country, is struggling with staffing shortages. It currently has about 100 fewer officers than its budget allows. The City Council recently voted to increase starting salaries for officers, but pay remains below that of nearby departments.
Lacey Glencora Loftin,
who analyzes crime statistics for the Jackson Police Department, provided data showing that the area to be overseen by the Capitol Police is wealthier and has less violent crime than other sections of the city.
Mr. Tindell, the state public-safety official, said the Capitol Police expansion is intended to protect the areas around state buildings better and make it safer for people to visit them. He said he hoped his department’s expansion would allow Jackson police to focus on more- troubled neighborhoods.
Maati Jone Primm,
a 61-year-old Jackson bookstore owner, said she believes white Republican state politicians want to take over the city, rather than cooperating with its leaders and Black residents.
“The message is, ‘I’m going to command all of your resources,’” she said.
Dane Lott,
29 years old, saw a shooting in 2019 near the coffee shop and bookstore she manages, which is located in the new Capitol Police zone. She said Jackson needs additional officers, and she doesn’t care whether they work for the city or state.
“More presence is the most helpful thing,” she said.
Dane Lott, who manages a coffee shop and bookstore in Jackson, says she doesn’t care whether additional officers work for the city or the state.
Photo:
Timothy Ivy for The Wall Street Journal
Write to Cameron McWhirter at Cameron.McWhirter@wsj.com
The U.S. housing market slowed for a seventh straight month in August, the longest stretch of declining sales since 2007, as higher mortgage rates continued to undercut buyer demand.
Home sales look poised to decline further in the coming months, economists say, as mortgage rates recently topped 6% for the first time since 2008, when the U.S. was in a recession. Many first-time buyers have been priced out of the market, and existing homeowners are opting to stay put rather than give up their current low rates.
“As long as mortgage rates remain elevated, sales will remain depressed,” said
Daryl Fairweather,
chief economist at real-estate brokerage
Redfin Corp.
The decrease in home sales is rippling through the economy. Consumers are spending less on housing-related items such as furniture and appliances, while construction of new single-family homes has also slowed.
Sales of previously owned homes dropped 0.4% in August from July to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.8 million, the weakest rate since May 2020, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. August sales fell 19.9% from a year earlier.
The housing market has softened in recent months as the Federal Reserve aggressively raises interest rates to cool the economy and bring down high inflation. The Fed approved raising its benchmark federal-funds rate by 0.75 percentage point Wednesday.
The Fed’s interest-rate moves have led to higher mortgage-interest rates and increased borrowing costs for home buyers by hundreds of dollars a month, pushing many out of the market. The average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 6.02% in the week ended Sept. 15, up from 2.86% a year earlier, according to housing-finance agency
Freddie Mac.
The pandemic-fueled housing market activity in mid-2020 when many Americans moved to larger houses with more outdoor space while spending greater time at home. Bidding wars were widespread, and homes were often snapped up in a matter of days.
The recent increase in mortgage rates is expected to further weigh on home sales this month and next. Homes typically go under contract a month or two before the contract closes, so the August data largely reflect purchase decisions made earlier in the summer. Mortgage rates rose to 5.81% in June, then pulled back for much of the summer.
Economists have long said that renting and investing in the stock market is a better investment than owning a house, and in 2022 that could be especially true. WSJ’s Dion Rabouin explains. Photo illustration: Elizabeth Smelov
The drop in demand is reducing buyer competition, and home-price growth has slowed from last year’s rapid pace. But prices remain above where they stood a year ago, because the number of homes for sale is still below normal levels.
The median existing-home price rose 7.7% in August from a year earlier to $389,500, NAR said. Prices fell month-over-month for the second straight month after reaching a record high of $413,800 in June. While prices typically decrease in the late summer, the monthly declines have been bigger than normal, said
Lawrence Yun,
NAR’s chief economist.
The combination of high prices and rising interest rates has pushed home-buying affordability near its lowest level in decades. General economic uncertainty is also keeping buyers on the sidelines, said Odeta Kushi, deputy chief economist at
First American Financial Corp.
“To make the biggest financial decision of your life, you need to have some confidence in the economy, in your job, in the labor market,” she said.
Consumer sentiment toward the housing market fell in August to the lowest level since 2011, according to
Fannie Mae.
Many buyers rushed to purchase in the first few months of the year, because they expected mortgage rates to rise, reducing the number of buyers left in the market today, said Redfin’s Ms. Fairweather. “We’re experiencing an especially cold fall and winter, because the spring was so hot,” she said.
Philip Natale went under contract to buy a new home in Henderson, Nev., in December. By the time he locked in an interest rate this spring, rates had climbed from around 3% to above 5%, pushing up his monthly payment by several hundred dollars.
Philip Natale, with his mom, Michelle, in hat, says rising interest rates pushed up his monthly payment on a new Henderson, Nev., home. Charlie and Ashley Richards bought their first home in Charleston, S.C., in September.Philip Natale; Sandra Dawson
“It’s horrible,” he said, but he hopes to refinance the loan at a lower rate within the next year or two. “The first 12 to 18 payments are probably going to be a big bummer,” he added.
To save on costs, Mr. Natale is eating out less and has decided to delay buying a car. “I just don’t want to feel the stress of adding a car at the same time as I’m buying a home,” he said.
In the four weeks ended Sept. 11, 7.2% of homes on the market each week had a price drop, up from 3.8% a year earlier, according to Redfin. Homes on average sold for 0.5% below their final list price, compared with 1.1% above list price a year earlier.
Nationally, there were 1.28 million homes for sale or under contract at the end of August, down 1.5% from July and unchanged from August 2021, NAR said.
“Home-price growth is likely to continue to decelerate,” Oxford Economics—which forecasts that existing-home sales will fall further through the end of the year—said in a note to clients. “But the limited supply of homes for sale will likely prevent too steep a decline.”
Charlie and Ashley Richards, who are both 29, started shopping for the first home in Charleston, S.C., in June after they found out their rent was going up by $800 a month.
“We got into the market at the right time. Stuff was starting to slow down a bit,” Mr. Richards said. “There were a handful of houses that we looked at that had been on the market for 30 to 60 to even 90 days.”
They bought a house this month for about 3% below the asking price. “I’m very excited,” Mr. Richards said.
Write to Nicole Friedman at nicole.friedman@wsj.com
The new home market, which accounts for about 10% of home sales, has also shown signs of weakness. A measure of U.S. home-builder confidence fell for the ninth straight month in September to the lowest level since May 2020, the National Association of Home Builders said this week. About one-fourth of builders surveyed said they had reduced prices in the past month, NAHB said.
Residential permits, which can be a bellwether for future home construction, also fell 10%, though housing starts rose 12.2% in August from July, the Commerce Department said this week.
News Corp,
owner of The Wall Street Journal, also operates Realtor.com under license from NAR.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols ruled for the companies in an opinion that he kept under seal for now because he said it “may contain competitively sensitive information.” The judge said he would release a redacted public version of the ruling in the coming days. In a one-page public order, he denied the Justice Department’s request to block the companies from completing the deal.
The court ruling represents an early blow to stepped-up antitrust enforcement by the Biden administration, which sued in February to block the deal. The Justice Department’s top antitrust official,
Jonathan Kanter,
said the department disagreed with the decision and was considering its next steps.
“Protecting competition and access to affordable healthcare is of the utmost importance to the antitrust division and the Department of Justice,” Mr. Kanter said.
The decision is a triumph for UnitedHealth, which owns the largest U.S. health insurer and a healthcare operation that comprises thousands of doctors as well as clinics, surgery centers and other assets, along with a powerful conglomeration of health data.
In a statement, a UnitedHealth spokesman said, “We are pleased with the decision and look forward to combining with Change Healthcare as quickly as possible so that together we can continue our work to make the health system work better for everyone.”
Change provides services related to payment processes for healthcare systems, analytics for financing and billing and tools that help hospitals make decisions about patient care.
UnitedHealth had agreed to divest business assets related to claims-processing to address competition concerns, an offer the Justice Department had dismissed as insufficient.
Judge Nichols in his order required UnitedHealth to make that divestiture.
UnitedHealth’s deal for Change, announced in January 2021, will bring the health-technology company under the company’s Optum health-services arm. UnitedHealth had argued that its combination with Change could help improve care by getting better information to doctors, and reduce waste. It agreed to pay nearly $8 billion for Change and assume about $5 billion in debt.
The Justice Department had argued that the deal would give UnitedHealth a virtual monopoly on an important tool that health insurers use to determine when a claim should be paid. And it said the company shouldn’t be allowed to own Change Healthcare’s data clearinghouse, which rival insurers use to compete with UnitedHealth.
The judge, an appointee of former President
Donald Trump,
signaled his skepticism of the lawsuit in a hearing earlier this month. A trial took place in August.
The lawsuit was part of an early batch of antitrust cases brought by the Justice Department under President Biden, a Democrat, that were designed to take a harder line on corporate deal activity. Among other cases, the department is waiting on a ruling in its challenge to a major publishing industry deal, Penguin Random House’s planned acquisition of Simon & Schuster. And it is preparing to go to trial next week in its lawsuit challenging a partnership between
American Airlines Group Inc.
and
JetBlue Airways Corp.
The current crop of antitrust officials, backed by calls from Democrats for a more aggressive approach, have sought to set new court precedents that would steer the law in a broader direction, after years of rulings in which the judiciary has tended to read the antitrust laws more narrowly than a generation ago. Monday’s decision served as a reminder that the Justice Department’s goals are dependent on proving their cases in front of a judge.
The Federal Trade Commission, which shares antitrust authority with the department, also is facing hurdles. It recently lost a ruling from its own in-house administrative law judge, in a case where it was challenging
Illumina Inc.’s
acquisition of cancer-testing developer Grail Inc.
Monday’s decision comes as UnitedHealth and its rivals have continued to move more deeply into vertical integration of health assets, spanning insurance and healthcare provider businesses, as well as pulling together ever-larger troves of health data.
Even after the Justice Department filed suit to block the Change deal, UnitedHealth moved ahead with other acquisitions, including a $5.4 billion takeover of home-health company
LHC Group Inc.
announced last March.
Earlier this month,
CVS Health Corp.
—the parent of health insurer Aetna, a pharmacy-benefit operation and its eponymous drugstores—announced an $8 billion deal to take over home-healthcare company Signify Health Inc. CVS has said it wants to get deeper into the business of primary care.
Write to Anna Wilde Mathews at anna.mathews@wsj.com and Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@wsj.com
California’s Legislature passed a bill Monday to create a government panel that would set wages for an estimated half-million fast food workers in the state, a first-in-the-U.S. approach to workplace regulation that labor union backers hope will spread nationally.
The bill, known as the Fast Act, would establish a panel with members appointed by the governor and legislative leaders composed of workers, union representatives, employers and business advocates. They would set hourly wages of up to $22 for fast food workers starting next year and can increase them annually by the same rate as the consumer-price index, up to a maximum of 3.5%.
A previous version of the bill passed by the state Assembly in January also allowed the council to oversee workplace conditions such as scheduling and made restaurant chains joint employers of their franchise’s employers, potentially opening them to liability for labor violations.
Representatives for companies including
McDonald’s Corp.
,
Yum Brands Inc.
and
Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc.
succeeded in having those provisions removed in the state Senate via amendments over the past week, though they still oppose the bill.
“This is the biggest lobbying fight that the franchise sector has ever been in,” said
Matthew Haller,
president of the International Franchise Association, a trade group whose members own many fast food restaurants.
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A University of California, Riverside School of Business study commissioned by the franchisee association found that setting minimum wages between $22 and $43 would generate a 60% increase in labor costs and raise fast-food prices by about 20%.
California’s current minimum wage is $15 and is set to increase by 50 cents on Jan. 1.
The final version of the Fast Act passed both houses of the Democratic-controlled state Legislature on Monday. In both the Assembly and the Senate, all of the “yes” votes came from Democrats and every Republican who voted opposed the bill.
Democratic Gov.
Gavin Newsom
now has until Sept. 30 to decide whether to sign or veto the bill.
Mr. Newsom hasn’t taken a public stance on the current version of the bill, but his Department of Finance opposed the original version.
Labor unions backing the measure have long struggled to organize fast food workers, in part because the industry’s franchise model means there are so many different employers.
California lawmakers first floated the bill last year, with proponents arguing that tighter regulations were needed to protect fast food workers, who are overwhelmingly Black or Latino and who they say experience unpaid overtime and other labor violations.
The average U.S. home earned more last year than the average American worker. Prices for homes, groceries and gas are rising faster than Americans’ wages and that may be why sentiment and confidence have been so low recently. WSJ’s Dion Rabouin explains. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Despite the recent changes, proponents said the bill is still a significant step forward. Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, a former Democratic legislator who introduced the bill when she was in the Assembly, said it moves California closer to a labor model used in Europe where unions negotiate for wages and work conditions in an entire sector, rather than company-by-company.
“It’s still a big bold idea. And just the notion of giving workers a voice at the table will be fundamentally different for those workers,” said Ms. Gonzalez Fletcher, who now leads the California Labor Federation, the state’s largest union umbrella group.
The recent amendments call for the council to shut down in 2028 unless it is renewed, though inflation-adjusted wage increases for workers would continue.
The bill covers fast food restaurants that are part of a chain, that have limited or no table service and where customers order their food and pay before eating. The chain must have 100 or more locations nationally, up from 30 in a previous bill version.
California accounts for around 14% of total U.S. restaurant sales, and policy in the state tends to affect the rest of the sector, Citigroup Global Markets Inc. analysts wrote in a client note earlier this month.
Service Employees International Union President
Mary Kay Henry
said she hoped the bill would be a catalyst for similar movements across the country.
Investors have begun to ask about the act’s potential implications for restaurant chains at a time when companies are struggling with high food and labor costs, Wall Street analysts said.
“Obviously, we think it’s problematic on many, many fronts,” said
Paul Brown,
chief executive of Dunkin’ and Arby’s owner Inspire Brands Inc., in an interview. “I think it’s actually trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”
have together spent more than $1 million to lobby lawmakers between 2021 and June 30 of this year, primarily on the Fast Act, state records show.
The International Franchise Association, which represents some 1,200 franchise brands, has spent $615,000 lobbying against the Fast Act and other legislation in that time.
Disclosures for lobbying spending since July 1 aren’t due until later this year, but industry advocacy against the bill has ramped up considerably during that time, people familiar with the effort said.
Labor unions have collectively spent more than $5 million to lobby the Legislature since the beginning of 2021, mostly on the Fast Act, state records show.
McDonald’s has encouraged franchisees around the country to email California lawmakers urging them to vote against the bill, according to a message viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
State Sen. Shannon Grove, a Republican, said on the Senate floor Monday that McDonald’s representatives told her that if the Fast Act becomes law, the company could stop expanding in California or leave altogether.
“Could we really survive without the golden arches?” Ms. Grove said.
Write to Heather Haddon at heather.haddon@wsj.com and Christine Mai-Duc at christine.maiduc@wsj.com
Jack Cronin found San Francisco-area homes too expensive or too far from the city center to buy when he lived there in 2020. The tech worker still wanted a piece of the hottest housing market of his lifetime, so he started looking farther afield.
Last year, the 28-year-old used a website called Roofstock, which provides listings and data for investors interested in rental properties, to buy a three-bedroom home outside Jackson, Miss., for $265,000. Mr. Cronin, who now lives in New York City, has never visited Jackson nor met the tenants in his home, lightly landscaped with bushes and crepe myrtle trees. It’s enough to know that a management company collects $2,300 a month in rent for him.
Mar-a-Lago home Monday removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities, according to a search warrant released by a Florida court Friday.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally
Roger Stone,
a list of items removed from the property shows. Also included in the list was information about the “President of France,” according to the three-page list. The list is contained in a seven-page document that also includes the warrant to search the premises which was granted by a federal magistrate judge in Florida.
The list includes references to one set of documents marked as “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” an abbreviation that refers to top-secret/sensitive compartmented information. It also says agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents. The list didn’t provide any more details about the substance of the documents.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers argue that the former president used his authority to declassify the material before he left office. While a president has the power to declassify documents, there are federal regulations that lay out a process for doing so.
Former President Donald Trump said FBI agents “raided” his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Monday and broke into a safe. The search was part of an investigation into his handling of classified information, said people familiar with the matter. Photo: Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/Shutterstock
“They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes long ago. All they had to do was ask,” Mr. Trump said in a statement issued Friday.
On Friday afternoon, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart issued an order making the warrant and inventory list public, after the Justice Department said in a court filing that Mr. Trump’s lawyers told federal prosecutors they didn’t object to the government’s request to unseal the information.
The search and seizure warrant, signed by Judge Reinhart, shows that FBI agents sought to search “the 45 Office,” as well as “all storage rooms and all other rooms or areas within the premises used or available to be used by [the former president] and his staff and in which boxes or documents could be stored, including all structures or buildings on the estate.”
They didn’t seek access to search private guest rooms, such as those of Mar-a-Lago members, according to the document.
The former president and his team don’t have the affidavit, which would provide more detail about the FBI’s investigation, according to people familiar with the process. An affidavit would explain what evidence, including witnesses, the government had collected and describe why investigators believe that a crime may have been committed. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for a more specific account of what was removed from Mar-a-Lago.
The disclosure of the warrant and the inventory marks the culmination of an extraordinary week, which began last Friday at 12:12 p.m., when the judge signed off on the unprecedented warrant to search a former president’s home. Three days later, at 6:19 p.m., a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Christina Bobb, signed a receipt for the items the FBI took that day.
Former President Donald Trump, departing Trump Tower in New York Wednesday, has said he wouldn’t oppose releasing the search warrant.
Photo:
Julia Nikhinson/Associated Press
To the Justice Department, the search was the result of a monthslong effort to get the classified documents remaining in Mr. Trump’s possession after at least two prior attempts. They were at first primarily interested in securing the documents, but pursued a criminal investigation as they began to doubt that Mr. Trump’s team was being forthright about the documents still in their possession, people familiar with the matter said.
To Mr. Trump’s allies, the search was a heavy-handed approach to obtaining documents they say Mr. Trump was willing to return and was in the process of negotiating the return.
It is unclear how the investigation may progress and whether prosecutors are considering bringing any charges against Mr. Trump or others in connection with the investigation now that the documents have been recovered.
Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.)—who sits on the House Intelligence Committee and has questioned the need for the search by federal agents—said Attorney General
Merrick Garland
should brief the Intelligence Committee. “It’s a high threshold to say it was an immediate national security threat, if it wasn’t an immediate national security threat then I think there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered,” he said.
The warrant said investigators were seeking all records that could be evidence of violations of laws governing the gathering, transmitting or losing of classified information; the removal of official government records; and the destruction of records in a federal investigation.
Attorney General Merrick Garland in a briefing said the Department of Justice is asking a Florida judge to unseal the warrant FBI agents used to search former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
The U.S. government has three main levels of classification. In ascending order, the levels are confidential, secret and top secret. They are designed to reflect how sensitive a document’s underlying contents are considered, meaning that a breach of a higher classification level could potentially cause more damage to national security.
SCI documents are typically reserved for military, civilians with special clearance, and contractor personnel who work in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, including those who are responsible for the security of a SCIF.
As the investigation progressed, someone familiar with the stored papers told investigators there may still be more sensitive documents on the premises beyond what they had already received in January and June, people familiar with the matter have said.
It is not known when the documents stored at Mar-a-Lago arrived there, during Mr. Trump’s presidency or as he left office.
Mr. Stone didn’t immediately respond for comment.
Mr. Trump, while in office, would regularly feud publicly with French President
Emmanuel Macron
over
Twitter
about various policy disagreements, particularly trade and Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement. Privately, Mr. Trump used to tell aides that he believed Mr. Macron to be a “leaker” and untrustworthy, according to several former officials. The French embassy didn’t immediately respond for comment.
The search, while Mr. Trump was in New York, stoked a political firestorm with Republican lawmakers demanding an explanation for the unprecedented search of a former president’s home. The showdown began after the National Archives in January retrieved more than a dozen boxes of White House documents from the resort earlier this year, some of which officials deemed classified national-security information.
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Mr. Garland and FBI officials deliberated for days about whether to respond to the criticism of the search and how much to say, people familiar with discussions said. The attorney general ultimately decided to let the Justice Department’s work speak for itself and directed the agency to request the warrant be unsealed.
Millions of people in the U.S. hold some level of clearance that grants them access to classified documents, though far fewer have access to the highest levels. While intelligence agencies can declassify information and release it to the public, the process for doing so is often slow and may require multiple intelligence agencies to sign off.
A list of documents recovered from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., cites 20 boxes of items, binders of photos and a handwritten note.
Photo:
giorgio viera/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
A sitting president generally has the authority to unilaterally declassify any material of his or her choosing, but such a privilege is rarely used. Mr. Trump at times did disclose classified information during his time in office, including when he tweeted a surveillance satellite image showing damage at an Iranian space facility.
While a president has the power to declassify documents, federal regulations lay out a process for doing so. Those rules must be followed for a declassification to become legally effective, said Dan Meyer, a national-security lawyer at Tully Rinckey in Washington.
Once Mr. Trump left office on Jan. 20, 2021, he became bound by the same rules as other private citizens, Mr. Meyer said.
—Vivian Salama and Dustin Volz contributed to this article.
Write to Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com, Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com
The U.S. has reported more than 3,400 confirmed or suspected monkeypox cases, federal data showed, becoming the country with the most known infections since the onset of the global health emergency.
The rise in cases comes as the U.S. expands testing capacity, broadening the ability to spot new infections, but also as the global outbreak continues to grow. Some public-health experts said rising transmission heightens the chances a broader population will face the risk of infections as the opportunity to slow and potentially stop the outbreak is fading.
The outbreak has largely been recorded among men who have sex with men, as the virus exploits social networks among people in close contact. This is already a concern, but spreading more broadly means the potential added challenge of trying to educate and protect a broader population, health experts said.
“We are at a very critical juncture in the outbreak,” said Jay Varma, a physician and epidemiologist who directs Weill Cornell Medicine’s Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response in New York City.
The continuing spread of monkeypox has prompted the World Health Organization to declare a global health emergency. WSJ’s Denise Roland explains what you need to know about the outbreak. Photo: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images
The U.S. surpassed the reported case count in Spain after recently surpassing other European countries, including Germany and the U.K. There are now at least 17,852 cases in nearly 70 countries where the viral disease doesn’t typically occur, including at least 3,487 in the U.S., which has a significantly larger population than European countries that also have outbreaks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The true case count is likely significantly higher than the known count, in part due to more limited testing early on in the outbreak, and completely beating back the virus is already unlikely, Dr. Varma said. But there is still a chance through vaccinations, education and treatment to hem the virus in, slowing transmission enough to make it a very rare disease, he said.
The World Health Organization on Saturday said monkeypox is a public-health emergency of international concern, marking the first such declaration since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in January 2020.
Another risk from a growing outbreak is that the virus will reach a U.S. animal population, creating a reservoir where it could be passed back to people, said Aileen Marty, a distinguished professor of infectious disease and outbreak response at Florida International University.
“The last thing we need is for our animals to get infected,” Dr. Marty said.
Classic monkeypox starts with flulike symptoms including fever and aches, with the later appearance of a rash usually starting on the face. In the current outbreak, doctors have described some cases in which the rash appears before a fever and other cases in which the rash remains concentrated in the genital area, for example.
Health authorities have been focusing vaccination and outreach efforts among gay and bisexual men, since the outbreak thus far has been heavily concentrated in that population. But there are also two known pediatric infections in the U.S., one in a California toddler and the other in an infant in Washington, D.C., according to the CDC.
The two cases are likely the result of household transmission and aren’t related, a CDC spokeswoman said Monday. The cases are under investigation, and both children, though symptomatic, were in good health and receiving treatment medication, she said. In the case of children, monkeypox could spread through activities like holding, cuddling, feeding and shared items like towels and bedding, the CDC said.
The virus requires close contact to spread. Health authorities haven’t reported deaths beyond Africa in the current outbreak, but there have been several deaths in two African countries since the start of the year, WHO data show.
Although there are available vaccines to combat the monkeypox outbreak they have been in short supply.
Photo:
EDUARDO MUNOZ/REUTERS
Because some countries such as the U.S. have invested in adding defenses against smallpox, which is related to monkeypox, there are already available vaccines to combat the current outbreak. Still, the vaccines have been in short supply as gay and bisexual men clamor for shots.
U.S. health authorities, criticized by some activists for not moving faster to bolster the vaccine stockpile, have said the numbers are growing. The Department of Health and Human Services says it has shipped more than 300,000 doses of the two-dose Jynneos vaccine, made by
Bavarian Nordic
A/S, to jurisdictions around the U.S. The government said it accelerated inspection for another 800,000 doses coming this summer and that there are millions of shots that are set for delivery by mid-2023, HHS said.
Supply constraints have improved, but demand still seems to be outpacing available shots, said Amanda Babine, executive director with the advocacy group Equality New York.
New York City, which recently counted more than 1,000 confirmed and presumed cases, said there are likely many more cases that haven’t been diagnosed.
Meanwhile, testing capacity, another bottleneck, has improved. With private laboratories now online, U.S. capacity recently reached 80,000 tests a week, up from 6,000 a week at the start of the outbreak, HHS said.
Covid-19 is circulating widely as the BA.5 Omicron subvariant elevates the risk of reinfections and rising case counts, spoiling chances for a summer reprieve from the pandemic across much of the U.S.
Covid-19 levels are high in a fifth of U.S. counties, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s metric based on case and hospital data, a share that has been mostly rising since mid-April. BA.5 is estimated to represent nearly two in three recent U.S. cases that are averaging just more than 100,000 a day, CDC data show. The true number of infections may be roughly six times as high, some virus experts said, in part because so many people are using at-home tests that state health departments largely don’t track.
“We think we’re in a very high level of community transmission, second only to the Omicron peak from the wintertime,” said
Jeffrey Duchin,
health officer for the public-health agency covering Seattle and King County, Wash.
Biden Administration health officials said Tuesday that BA.5 has the potential to push the number of infections higher in the coming weeks. They urged eligible people to get vaccine booster shots to lower the risk of hospitalization and death, and not to wait for potential updated boosters targeting Omicron subvariants.
Getting a booster now “does not preclude your also doing it in the fall,” said
Anthony Fauci,
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a White House briefing. “If the risk is now, address the current risk.”
Nationally, wastewater data tracking the prevalence of the Covid-19 virus through July 6 has recently trended up, according to Biobot Analytics. Such data can provide clues about the pandemic’s trajectory.
Covid-19 hospital admissions are going up in Los Angeles County, and local authorities have said they might impose a mask mandate.
Photo:
caroline brehman/Shutterstock
New York City last week urged people to resume masking in public, indoor settings and around crowds outside. Los Angeles County’s public health department said rising Covid-19 hospital admissions mean that the county also could soon reach high community prevalence and that officials would reinstate a mask mandate if the county stayed at that level for two weeks.
Signs of acute illness remain muted, continuing a hallmark of the spring surge, as treatments plus immunity from vaccines and previous infections reduce risks for many people. But the high prevalence of infection in many areas continues to cause disruptions, including canceled flights and spoiled travel plans, sick children sidelined from camp and child care and hospital employees who can’t report to work.
BA.5’s mutations make it particularly adept at causing repeat infections, even in people who had the version of Omicron that caused the largest recorded spike in cases last winter. There is no evidence to suggest BA.5 causes more severe disease, CDC Director
Rochelle Walensky
said.
Ashish Jha,
the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, noted some mixed signals from overseas. Portugal, where vaccine and booster coverage is robust, experienced a sizable wave of serious illness and death after BA.5 hit there recently, Dr. Jha said over the weekend. South Africa, on the other hand, recorded a low rate of deaths after BA.5 surged there this spring, he said.
The BA.5 Omicron subvariant surged in South Africa in the spring, and the death rate was low.
Photo:
Denis Farrell/Associated Press
In addition to vaccines, health officials urged people to use treatment medications such as
Pfizer Inc.’s
Paxlovid. They encouraged people to test before gatherings and use high-quality masks in crowded, indoor spaces.
The pace of hospital admissions for Covid-19-positive patients has recently sped up, federal data indicate. The seven-day moving average for confirmed Covid-19 patients in hospitals has topped 33,000, federal data show, up from a low near 10,000 in April but far below January’s record peak topping 150,000.
Many of the hospitalizations are cases where patients test positive after being admitted for other reasons. Data indicate the portion of Covid-19 patients who need intensive care remains low. Deaths are hovering around 300 to 350 a day, Dr. Jha said Tuesday. This is much closer to historic lows than highs, though he called the current level unacceptable.
Couples whose weddings were cancelled or diminished because of Covid-19 participated in a symbolic ceremony Sunday in New York City, one sign that many people are less shy about crowds at this point in the pandemic.
Photo:
Julia Nikhinson/Associated Press
The reduced threat is one reason a pandemic-fatigued populace is less likely to change behavior when cases are high, said
Robert Wachter,
chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Crowds are once again common, from concerts to restaurants to airport terminals. Mask use is scattered, while mandates remain rare.
“Part of what motivated people to be super careful for a long time was the fear that I’m going to die of this thing,” Dr. Wachter said. “I think people have less fear of that, and that’s not inappropriate.”
He and other health experts said they continue to take precautions in their own lives because of the risk of developing long Covid symptoms after an infection. Persistently high levels of infections in communities can also leave elderly people and those with compromised immune systems more exposed, according to epidemiologists. Tamping down on the spread of the virus also gives it less chance to mutate, Dr. Fauci said.
As a surge that started in early spring grinds along through the summer, some health officials are thinking about the fall. U.S. health authorities are planning a fall booster campaign to protect against a potential winter surge, and vaccine makers are racing to update their vaccines to target Omicron subvariants, including BA.5.
Public-health officials and experts hope modified shots will help get some booster-hesitant people off the fence. “With a good public-health campaign behind the rollout of the vaccine, we can shift the scales of that trajectory of people getting both their boosters and vaccinated,” said
Debra Furr-Holden,
dean of New York University School of Global Public Health.
Dr. Duchin, in Seattle, said he hoped communities would head toward the fall at a low level of Covid-19 transmission to ease pressure on health systems. He said he was worried about the consequences if instead Covid-19 is circulating widely at what is traditionally a more intense time for respiratory illnesses generally.
“This virus is relentless in the way it’s challenging us in unexpected ways,” he said.
Write to Jon Kamp at jon.kamp@wsj.com and Jared S. Hopkins at jared.hopkins@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications The BA.5 subvariant is estimated to represent nearly two in three recent U.S. Covid-19 cases. An earlier version of this article misstated the portion as more than one in three cases. (Corrected on July 12)
