Amid Adams scandal, former city hall official arrested, charged with witness tampering and destroying evidence

(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump has ambitious plans to utilize U.S. federal lands for the extraction of natural resources.

But Trump – who promised at the Republican National Convention in July to “drill, baby, drill” if he were to be reelected – may not be able to accomplish the vast majority of his plans due to existing protections and the way federal lands are defined, environmental law experts told ABC News.

Trump won’t be able to “just turn on the spigot” for new oil and gas drilling on day one of his administration, Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, told ABC News.

“Every administration gets to the place where they have to differentiate between the rhetoric that they use in the campaign and the actual challenges when it comes to actually governing,” Stan Meiburg, executive director of Wake Forest University’s Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability, told ABC News.

National parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, military reservations and public-domain lands are owned and managed by the federal government.

Public land is intended to be used for public benefit, but for the last century or so, that definition has sometimes been conflated to also include the extraction of natural resources, such as oil, gas, minerals and timber, according to Peter Colohan, director of federal strategies at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a nonpartisan think tank.

Federal lands are “for the benefit and enjoyment of all people,” Colohan told ABC News, evoking the famous phrase by former President Teddy Roosevelt that’s inscribed on the arch at north entrance of Yellowstone National Park.

Trump carried out what environmentalists widely regarded as an anti-environmental policy regime during his first term, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement to address climate change upon taking office in 2016 – which he has said he plans to do again, reversing President Biden’s Jan. 20, 2021 action to rejoin the agreement – removing clean water and air pollution protections, and fast-tracking environmental reviews of dozens of major energy and infrastructure projects, such as drilling and fuel pipelines, which Trump has said would help boost American energy production and the economy.

During his next term, Trump also has promised to drastically increase fossil fuels production in the U.S., despite the U.S. already producing and exporting a record amount of crude oil under the Biden administration.

“I think it’s an absolute certainty that Trump is going to push to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 19.3 million acres in northeastern Alaska that provides critical habitat to several species, to unfettered oil drilling, as well as areas outside of the refuge along the Alaska coast,” Kierán Suckling, executive director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told ABC News. “He’s been gunning for that for years.”

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to an ABC News request for comment on this story.

Regulatory challenges

The president and the executive branch may have a “great deal of discretion” over control of public lands and monuments, but existing laws to protect lands like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will be difficult to overturn, Suckling said.

Since the 1970s, a slew of environment regulations have been put in place to protect the U.S. landscape, such as the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, followed by the Clean Water Act in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The Clean Air Act was established in 1963 and has been amended several times since, the first time in 1970.

Because of this legal environmental infrastructure, it would be virtually impossible for Trump to easily or unilaterally change these protections, the experts said. In order for the Trump administration to overturn regulations against use of protected lands for energy production, he would have to present evidence to demonstrate that the proposed actions would not violate existing environmental laws, Suckling said.

“You have to use the best science available and if the science does not support your policy, the law is not going to permit you to do it,” Suckling said.

The day after Trump won reelection, President Joe Biden moved to narrow the scope of the lease in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, signed by Trump in 2017, to limit oil drilling. The Biden administration found “legal deficiencies” in the leases that would have made it possible for the Trump administration to expand fossil fuel production, Colohan said.

The biggest roadblock to Trump’s plans to drill on federally protected lands is whether or not those areas are actually economically competitive, compared to places where people are drilling on private land using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, Meiburg said.

However, most federal lands are not protected, Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation at Earthjustice, told ABC News. For such unprotected lands, it’s possible for Trump to issue an executive order to lease them for energy production. Even so, whenever a decision is being made to lease public land, “there will be a legal battle for sure,” Colohan said, adding that executive orders are “more reversible” than an existing statutory regulation.

Environmental activist resistance

In order for Trump to open federal land for leasing, his administration is required by law to notify the public, with environmental lawyers certain to be ready to challenge him.

“Environmental laws are carefully designed to produce a stable, democratic, scientific outcome,” Suckling said. “You can’t just get in and jump around and do whatever you want, and that’s why the United States has one of the best-protected environments – one of the cleanest, healthiest environments of any nation on earth,”

During Trump’s first term, the Biological Center for Diversity sued his administration 266 times and won about 90% of those actions, Suckling said. Earthjustice filed about 200 lawsuits against the Trump administration and won about 85% of them, according to Caputo.

“We’re going to have to sue their pants off every chance we get,” the Sierra Club’s Manuel said.

The Trump administration will likely face opposition from other stakeholders as well, such as Native American tribes, which could be impacted should federal land be leased for energy extraction, Meiburg said.

Trump’s loss in the 2020 election may have been the speed bump needed to thwart his agenda for federal lands, some experts also said. Now that he’s been reelected four years later, he’s essentially a one-term president and many of his proposed actions could be tied up in litigation for years, Suckling said.

Conversely, had Trump had eight consecutive years in office, it may have afforded him the continuity to enact more sweeping changes regarding use of federal lands, Caputo said. Should the House or Senate flip to Democratic control after the midterm elections, Trump’s agenda would likely be blunted even more, Manuel said.

However, it’s also challenging for land managers and environmental agencies when there’s constant turnover in the regulatory environment because it can slow progress for environmental protections, Colohan said.

All land is under pressure – whether for development, extraction of resources, agricultural use, climate change or biodiversity loss, Colohan said. But federal lands carry the ideal of conservation for the public benefit, recreation, cultural purposes, and for climate mitigation and resilience, he added.

“Those things are the better, the longer-term benefits that come from conservation,” Colohan said. “And so that’s really a choice that’s made by every administration.”

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(NEW YORK) — Rick Singer, the man convicted of orchestrating the so-called “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal, has continued to advise prospective undergraduates on their college applications while serving his sentence in federal prison in Florida, and now from a California halfway house.

Singer, 64, a one-time college admissions consultant who pleaded guilty in 2019 to facilitating bribes between wealthy parents and elite universities in exchange for their children’s enrollment, told ABC News that he began to counsel students — pro bono — after he was sentenced last year.

Then, this past admissions season, while he was at a federal prison camp in Pensacola, Florida, Singer said, “The coolest thing ever happened.”

“I had a young man send me an email saying, ‘Could you help me with my applications and tell me if I could get into these schools?'” Singer told ABC News during a sit-down interview.

The applicant sent Singer his high school transcript and a list of his credentials. Singer, whose advice was once sought by higher-powered executives and Hollywood actors, wrote back, offering a few pointers. The student was accepted to his top school in March, Singer said. 

This summer, Singer launched a new venture called ID Future Stars, a consulting business that boasts an 80% to 96% acceptance rate into first-choice schools. According to the site, “Our success speaks for itself.”

But his return to the college admissions world could be a challenge. Singer’s reputation unraveled after he pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, money laundering and obstruction of justice charges in the decades-long scheme that federal investigators dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues.” 

Federal prosecutors in Boston said Singer facilitated $25 million changing hands from families to college administrators and athletic coaches, who would dole out spots on their rosters to fulfill their fundraising goals. Singer transferred, spent or otherwise used more than $15 million for his own benefit, they said.

“Everything that the U.S. attorney said, and the FBI said, and everybody else said that I did do, I did it,” Singer told ABC.

Yet even four years later, Singer said the conspiracy amounted to a “victimless crime.” 

News of the admissions scandal broke in 2019, when Andrew Lelling, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, announced the charges against Singer and over 50 others, including college coaches, testing administrators and actors Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman.

The charges led to about 50 convictions and became the subject of at least four books, a Lifetime movie and a Netflix documentary.

In January 2023, a judge sentenced Singer to 42 months in federal prison. This August, he was released to a halfway house near Los Angeles.

For years, Singer said, he had operated a lucrative and legitimate college consulting business. But that changed around 2011, when he realized he could not push some clients through what he called the “front door.” He had become close with the students and their families, and wanted to do whatever he could to help them, so he developed a new admissions scheme: the “side door.”

While Singer said that a majority of his consulting has always been legitimate, he explained that the new scheme began with one student and soon expanded. 

“There was a young man who was super talented, worked his tail off,” Singer said. But the student would always perform poorly on practice SAT or ACT exams.

So he found a way to get the student’s application to the top of the pile: He began to bribe standardized testing proctors to turn a blind eye to permit cheating on the exams, prosecutors said.  

I knew “it was wrong, and I did it anyways,” Singer said. “What’s 10, 12, 13 kids who are good students, quality people, and this one score may screw them out of an opportunity to go to a decent school? I rationalized that to myself.”

Soon after, the stakes grew. Singer was well-known in the world of higher education, and he said presidents of several prestigious universities had contacted him, hoping his clients would donate millions of dollars to their schools.

He said that he began to set up meetings between the presidents and parents to discuss their children enrolling in the university. “The negotiations would go from whether the school was a good fit for the student to, ‘What does the president need? What does the family need? Would there be a chit involved?'” he said, referring to a monetary favor. 

Singer, a former basketball coach, said he was sympathetic to coaches and the pressure they faced to fundraise ahead of their sports seasons. So he said that he began to set up similar meetings between them and his clients. At times, he faked the students’ athletic credentials to push their applications through.

“First I went to three, four coaches. Then the word got out to all the coaches, and coaches started calling me every year,” Singer said.

“If they needed to raise $250,000 or $500,000 for the program, they would call me and say, ‘Hey, I have a spot. Do you have a family that would like to come here?'” he said.

When asked if he thought his scheme may have prevented legitimate recruits from earning their way on a collegiate team, Singer said: “All I’m doing is being the facilitator and providing the coach this choice.”

On March 12, 2019, the day he was charged, Singer said he left John Joseph Moakley Courthouse in Boston and looked down at his phone.

He said he had received 93 text messages in less than an hour. Most, Singer said, were from clients looking for above-board advice and wondering whether he would still be able to meet with them for a consultation. 

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(LOS ANGELES) — One of the four suspects charged in connection to the shooting death of “General Hospital” actor Johnny Wactor has pleaded guilty, a spokesperson for Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón’s office told ABC News.

Leonel Gutierrez, 18, pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges of attempted robbery and grand theft. He was not alleged to have been the one who actually shot Wactor.

He was released on $120,000 bond, and is expected to be sentenced Nov. 1.

Ahead of sentencing, the court will hear victim impact statements, the district attorney’s office said.

Gutierrez could face up to four years and eight months in prison.

Wactor, 37, was fatally shot “without provocation” in the early morning hours of May 25, after he ended his shift at a bar and was walking to his car, according to police. Police said the suspects had his car “raised up with a floor jack and were in the process of stealing the catalytic converter.”

Just before he was shot, Wactor had been with a female co-worker, and he immediately stepped in front of her to try to protect her, according to his family and friends.

“They had a mask on and they pulled out a gun,” Wactor’s friend, Colin Flynn, previously told ABC News. “And from what I understand, Johnny literally stood in between himself and his colleague. And the shooter just pulled the trigger and ran away.”

Gutierrez, along with three other suspects, were charged in August in connection to Wactor’s death. Two of the suspects were charged with murder and could face life in prison if convicted.

At a news conference where the charges were announced, Gascón said he was “committed to seeking justice for Mr. Wactor and ensuring that those responsible are held accountable for their actions.”

“The loss of this talented young actor, who was in the prime of his life and had so much to offer the world, is deeply felt by all of us,” Gascón said. “Mr. Wactor’s work and presence touched the lives of many, and our hearts go out to his family, friends and the entire community who mourn this devastating loss.”

All four suspects have “very lengthy criminal records” and were allegedly affiliated with a gang, Los Angeles Police Department Lt. Ryan Rabbett said at the press conference.

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