6.0 magnitude earthquake strikes northwest of Anchorage, Alaska: USGS
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(SUSITNA, Alaska) — A 6.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Alaska early Thursday morning, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The quake struck at 8:11 a.m. local time near Susitna, which is about 30 miles from Anchorage, according to the USGS.
A tsunami is not expected to form as a result of the quake, according to the National Tsunami Warning Center.
There were no reports of damage or fatalities.
Alaska experiences more earthquakes than any other region in the U.S., according to the Alaska Seismic Hazards Safety Commission.
The state is located where two tectonic plates — the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate — meet, which can result in strong earthquakes, according to the Alaska Earthquake Center.
A 9.2 magnitude earthquake, the second-largest ever recorded, occurred in 1964.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a bill signing in the Oval Office of the White House on February 03, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — A federal judge on Wednesday is set to consider moving President Donald Trump’s conviction in his criminal hush money case in New York to federal court, where Trump could try to overturn it.
Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office will argue before U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein over the immunity the U.S. Supreme Court granted Trump for his official acts.
The Supreme Court decided in July 2024 that presidents are entitled to presumptive immunity for acts taken in their official capacity. Trump’s attorneys have argued that ruling means his Manhattan criminal case belongs in federal court.
Hellerstein has already denied them twice, deciding that falsifying business records before the 2016 election in order to conceal a long-denied affair with Stormy Daniels had nothing to do with the presidency.
After Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts, his attorneys went back to Hellerstein, who was still not convinced, writing that “hush-money payments were private, unofficial acts, outside the bounds of executive authority.”
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Hellerstein to take another look.
New York Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump last year to an unconditional discharge without prison, fines or probation. Prosecutors have argued that the “advanced stage” of the case weighs against moving it into federal court.
Trump was found guilty of orchestrating an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 presidential election by directing his personal lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen, to pay $130,000 to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to prevent her from publicly revealing a long-denied sexual encounter with Trump.
Trump is separately pursuing an appeal through the state court system.
A sign marks the location of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) headquarters building on April 30, 2025, in Washington, DC. J. David Ake/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Three million pages from the Justice Department’s files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are being released to the public today, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press briefing Friday.
Blanche said the release, which follows the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, will include 2,000 videos and 180,000 images related to the Epstein case.
Blanche said in total there were 6 million documents, but due to the presence of child sexual abuse material and victim rights obligations, not all documents are being made public in the current release.
Several categories of pages were withheld from the release due to their sensitive nature, Blanche said. These items include personally identifying information of the victims, victims’ medical files, images depicting child pornography, information related to ongoing cases, and any images depicting death or abuse.
Attorneys for hundreds of Epstein survivors tell ABC News that names and identifying information of numerous victims appear unredacted in this latest disclosure, including several women whose names have never before been publicly associated with the case.
“We are getting constant calls for victims because their names, despite them never coming forward, being completely unknown to the public, have all just been released for public consumption,” attorney Brad Edwards, who has represented Epstein victims for more than 20 years, said in a telephone interview with ABC News. “It’s literally thousands of mistakes.”
ABC News has independently confirmed numerous instances of victims’ names appearing in documents included in the latest release.
Shortly after the new material appeared on Friday morning, Edwards said he and his law partner, Brittany Henderson, began receiving calls from clients.
“We contacted DOJ immediately, who has asked us to flag each of the documents where victim names appear unredacted, and they will pull them down,” Edwards said. “It’s an impossible job. The easy job would be for the DOJ to type in all the victims’ names, hit redact like they promised to do, then release them. “
“They’re trying to fix it, but I said, ‘The solution is take the thing down for now,'” Edwards said. “There’s no other remedy to this. It just runs the risk of causing so much more harm unless they take it down first, then fix the problem and put it back up.
ABC News reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
Blanche also pushed back on the notion that the Justice Department might have protected President Donald Trump from his name appearing in the files.
“We comply with the act, and there is no ‘protect President Trump.’ We didn’t protect or not protect anybody,” Blanche told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas. “I mean, I think that there’s a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents. And there’s nothing I can do about that.”
Blanche said there was “no oversight” by the White House about what the material showed.
He added that if there was evidence in the files that others had abused victims, the DOJ would pursue charges against them.
One document in Friday’s release is a chart showing connections between Epstein and various employees and associates. Many are redacted — but the faces of several remain visible, including Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s associate Jean Luc Brunel, and Epstein’s lawyer, accountant, and assistant. The chart is followed by a list of individuals broken into three categories: Day of Arrest, Week of Arrest, and Weeks following arrest.
This ties in with internal DOJ communications released earlier that showed a plan to contact potential witnesses following Epstein’s arrest. There are eight persons who are listed in the accompanying spreadsheet as “suspected co-conspirators,” including Maxwell, Brunel, and Epstein’s assistant Leslie Groff. Two of those designated as “suspected co-conspirators” are also identified also as victims.
Groff has never been charged with a crime and said in a statement to ABC News in 2020 that she “never knowingly booked travel for anyone under the age of 18, and had no knowledge of the alleged illegal activity whatsoever.”
An internal FBI document produced created in August 2019, five days after Epstein’s death, shows nine persons listed as family and associates of Epstein, including eight labeled as “co-conspirators,” most with their names and faces redacted with the exception of Maxwell and Brunel. This points to potential continued interest in pursuing further charges after the death of Epstein. In his statement announcing Epstein’s death, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said “our investigation of the conduct charged in the Indictment — which included a conspiracy count — remains ongoing” Maxwell is the only other person to be charged related to Epstein’s crimes.
Among the other new documents released is what appears to be part of the original indictment against Epstein in his 2005 criminal case in Florida. The 100-page charging document contains information on 58 out the 60 charges against Epstein for his behavior towards six alleged victims. This document had never been made public.
Epstein ending up being offered a plea to reduced charges and was offered a non-prosecution agreement, in a deal that was highly controversial.
As of Friday afternoon, the DOJ had uploaded three “data sets” to its public website. Just one of those sets includes, by ABC News’ count, over 300,000 items.
A team of 500 attorneys from the Justice Department worked around the clock to review and redact material, Blanche said at his press briefing.
Friday’s tranche is the latest in a series of Epstein file releases that began last month in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed Congress overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Trump on Nov. 19. The act gave the Justice Department 30 days to make publicly available all unclassified records pertaining to investigations and prosecutions of Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
The bill contains several exceptions that allow for withholding or redacting records, notably to protect the privacy of Epstein’s victims.
Prior to Friday’s release, the DOJ had posted to its online Epstein library roughly 12,000 documents totaling about 125,000 pages — just a small fraction of the millions of records the department has been reviewing.
Those materials included a record of a complaint to the FBI filed in 1996, years before the disgraced financier was first investigated for child sex abuse. The documents also included new details about the government’s investigation into potential accomplices as well as thousands of photographs of Epstein’s New York and U.S. Virgin Islands properties that were searched by the FBI after Epstein’s arrest in 2019.
The initial release of the files also contained numerous old photos of Epstein traveling with former President Bill Clinton, including pictures of Clinton lounging in a jacuzzi and one of him swimming with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after her 2021 conviction for sex trafficking of minors and other offenses.
The images, which were released without any context or background information, contained little information related to Trump, leading a spokesperson for Clinton to accuse the DOJ of selectively disclosing the pictures to imply wrongdoing on the part of Clinton where he said there is none.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” Angel Urena said. “This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be.”
In an interview with ABC News on the day of the initial release, Blanche said that every document that mentions Trump will eventually be released, “assuming it’s consistent with the law.”
“There’s no effort to hold anything back because there’s the name Donald J. Trump or anybody else’s name,” Blanche said.
Both Trump and Clinton have denied all wrongdoing and have denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
Federal prosecutors have indicated in recent court filings that hundreds of government lawyers have spent weeks reviewing “several millions of pages” of materials — including documents, audio and video files — in preparation for disclosure to the public.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act came after the Trump administration faced months of blowback from its announcement last July that they would be releasing no additional Epstein files, after several top officials — including FBI Director Kash Patel and former Deputy Director Dan Bongino — had, prior to joining the administration, accused the government of shielding information regarding the Epstein case.
The files released thus far have yet to show evidence of wrongdoing on the part of famous, powerful men, against the expectations of many of those who pushed for the files’ release.
Epstein owned two private islands in the Virgin Islands and large properties in New York City, New Mexico and Palm Beach, Florida, where he came under investigation for allegedly luring minor girls to his seaside home for massages that turned sexual. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence for sex crimes charges after reaching a controversial non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami.
In 2019, prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York indicted Epstein on charges that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations,” using cash payments to recruit a “vast network of underage victims,” some of whom were as young as 14 years old.
Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department announced on Sunday that a woman missing in Arizona is the mother of “Today Show” host Savannah Guthrie. (Pima County Sheriff’s Department)
(NEW YORK) — Investigations are continuing on Tuesday after the mother of “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie disappeared over the weekend in what authorities believe was a possible abduction from her Arizona home, police said.
Nancy Guthrie was last seen in the Catalina Foothills area on Saturday night, according to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Her family reported her missing on Sunday around noon local time, authorities said.
Investigators do not believe Nancy Guthrie left her home willingly and that she was abducted in her sleep early Sunday morning, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department told ABC News.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said investigators processed Nancy Guthrie’s home on Sunday and “saw some things at the home that were concerning to us,” and that it is considered a crime scene.
“She did not leave on her own, we know that,” Nanos said during a press briefing on Monday.
DNA samples collected from Nancy Guthrie’s home have been confirmed to belong to her, though authorities have not yet confirmed if they were blood, the sheriff’s department said Tuesday.
The sheriff is planning to hold a briefing on the case at approximately 1:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday.
Nancy Guthrie is described as having some physical ailments and limited mobility, but does not have cognitive issues, her family said, according to the sheriff.
She takes medication that if she doesn’t have in 24 hours, “it could be fatal,” Nanos said Monday.
Authorities said they are reviewing the home’s security cameras and have Nancy Guthrie’s cell phone.
Sources briefed on the probe told ABC News that investigators are focusing on Nancy Guthrie’s electronic devices to see if there is data that could point to an assailant or a specific time when the abduction would have occurred.
Investigators are also paying attention to the condition of the home and whether things were moved or left out of place, which could suggest that someone with greater strength or agility was in the home and when, sources said.
“Right now, we don’t see this as a search mission, as much as we do a crime scene,” Nanos said.
In an Instagram post on Monday night, Savannah Guthrie asked her followers for prayers amid the investigation.
“Thank you for lifting your prayers with ours for our beloved mom, our dearest Nancy, a woman of deep conviction, a good and faithful servant. raise your prayers with us and believe with us that she will be lifted by them in this very moment,” the talk show host wrote, alongside a prayer.
