DOJ fires members of special counsel Jack Smith’s team who prosecuted Trump
Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department is firing “over a dozen” officials who were part of former special counsel Jack Smith’s teams that prosecuted President Donald Trump, officials confirmed to ABC News Monday.
Acting Attorney General James McHenry transmitted letters to the officials informing them of their termination, officials said, that said given their part in the prosecutions they couldn’t be trusted in “faithfully implementing the president’s agenda.”
It’s not immediately clear the exact number of officials who were fired on Monday, but the move was largely expected after President Trump’s threats leading up to the 2024 election stating he planned to fire Smith “on day one.”
Smith resigned prior to Trump taking office and submitted his final report to former Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland released Vol. 1 of Smith’s final report detailing Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but he was blocked by District Judge Aileen Cannon from sharing with Congress the second volume of Trump’s report detailing his investigation of Trump’s mishandling of classified documents after leaving his first administration.
Separately, an official confirmed to ABC News that the top career official in the Justice Department, Bradley Weinsheimer, was recently informed he was being reassigned out of his role. Weinsheimer was a longtime career public official and gained notoriety last year in exchanges with President Joe Biden’s attorneys as they sought to prevent Special Counsel Robert Hur from releasing portions of his final report that detailed Biden’s diminished capacities.
(WASHINGTON) — The Pentagon and the Director of National Intelligence have released the annual report on UFO sightings and while they still haven’t found any extraterrestrial origin for the more than 700 new reports that came in last year, there are about two dozen that have them really curious.
UAP is the term the Pentagon and the intelligence community use to describe UFOs, which stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. The agency that reviews all of the new incidents being reported by military personnel and now additional federal agencies is the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
From May 2023 to June 2024, AARO received 757 new incident reports, 485 that occurred in that time period and another 272 reports from 2021 and 2022 that had not been previously sent to the agency. That’s a sizable increase from previous reports, for example, last year’s report cited 281 new reports during its review period, something Pentagon officials said Thursday was due to a greater awareness about reporting UAP incidents, not that they have been growing in frequency.
Overall the total number of cases that have been reviewed by AARO since its founding is now 1,652.
AARO has “discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology” according to this year’s report. A small number of this year’s reports had terrestrial explanations and a significant number will be left for further review, but one thing they haven’t found is that some of the reports are attributable to a “breakthrough” technology.
However, during a press briefing Thursday, the head of AARO acknowledged that there are 21 reports over the last year and a half that he can’t really explain.
“There are interesting cases that with my physics and engineering background and time in the I.C. I do not understand, and I don’t know anybody else understands them,” said Dr. Jon Kosloski, the new director of AARO. Kosloski said the 21 incidents occurred near national security sites and were recorded on video, had multiple eyewitnesses or were captured by other sensors.
So what do these unexplainable UAPs look like? “Orbs, cylinders, triangles, in one of the cases, it has been happening over an extended period of time, and it is possible that there’s multiple things happening” Kosloski said, adding that the incidents might include drone activity that’s being conflated with a UAP.
(BALTIMORE) — Deep inside headquarters of the Baltimore Police Department, a vault holds thousands of artifacts from a generation of gun crime and clues to a tide that may be turning.
Most of the firearms lining the vault’s walls have serial numbers indicating origin and ownership, but many of the most recent additions to the collection are homemade and unmarked.
“You can buy the pieces online, put them together and you can have a fully assembled firearm that is untraceable,” said BPD Commissioner Richard Worley, who gave ABC News a rare inside look at the cache.
The number of privately made firearms, or ghost guns, recovered from crime and accident scenes nationwide has exploded into an epidemic in recent years, up nearly 17-fold between 2017 and 2023, according to the Justice Department.
Baltimore has been a microcosm of the problem. Just a dozen of the untraceable weapons were picked up by police in 2018. By 2022, there were more than 500 recovered from homicide scenes, mass shootings, drug busts and traffic stops.
But now, the city is cautiously celebrating a dramatic downward trend of ghost guns and what could be a harbinger of progress in the fight against gun violence across the country.
In 2024, 309 ghost guns without serial numbers were recovered across Baltimore. Eight have been collected so far this year, according to police.
Officials credit a series of federal, state and local restrictions imposed on gun kits in 2022 and 2023 with slowing online sales by requiring background and age checks of buyers and banning some kit sales in Maryland altogether.
“I think it’s made a huge difference for not just Baltimore city but the entire state,” said Worley, who added that the latest data prove that commonsense regulations can have a significant impact.
Daniel Webster, a leading expert on firearm policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said the turnabout has been stunning.
“I want to underscore just how sharp that increase was prior to these policies going into place,” he said. “Now you see an abrupt change in a slope going exactly the other direction.”
Whatever progress is attributable to the regulations may now be at risk, according to some experts.
The gun industry has lobbied the Trump administration to roll back restrictions on gun kit sales and filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging treatment of gun parts the same as fully assembled firearms.
“We don’t sell firearms. So my company will never have a federal firearms license and therefore will never perform the NICS background checks,” said Cody Wilson, owner and founder of Defense Distributed, one of the largest do-it-yourself gun kit and 3D gun blueprint manufacturers.
Wilson is a plaintiff in a Supreme Court case this spring that will decide whether federal restrictions on gun kits, such as requiring background checks and serialization, should be struck down. The justices are expected to rule by the end of June.
“We’ve been developing technology in this direction, digital and physical or mechanical technologies, to help you make firearms, design your own firearms, reproduce your own firearms,” he said, adamant that gun kit manufacturers will continue to push boundaries of the law.
Ghost guns assembled from parts kits purchased online or manufactured by at-home 3D printing have increasingly turned up in high-profile attacks and mass shootings.
Last month, a convicted felon armed with a ghost gun allegedly shot and critically wounded two kindergarten children on a school playground in California. That same day in New York City, a man equipped with a homemade gun allegedly assassinated the UnitedHealthcare CEO on a sidewalk.
“Anyone, a felon, a teenager, anybody could order a kit online and within an hour and some handy instructions from YouTube put together their own working firearm,” Webster said. “It goes around every law, federal and state, that has been designed to keep guns out of people that it’s broadly agreed are too dangerous to have them.”
And it’s not just bad guys.
Until recently, do-it-yourself gun kits have been especially popular among teenagers who are not old enough to buy firearms in stores legally and instead obtain a gun kit online with only a credit card.
“This industry is really undermining parents’ ability to keep their kids safe and arming teenagers in a way that the laws are really set up to prevent,” said Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law, a gun safety advocacy group.
Ghost gun violence has devastated families in nearly every state: a 15-year-old killed at a corner store near Philadelphia by another teenager, two teenagers murdered in Virginia after a fight on social media, a 10th grader nearly killed in a student bathroom at a Maryland high school.
Outside Detroit in May 2021, Guy Boyd was accidentally shot in the face by his then-best friend. He nearly died and lost his eye.
“Ghost guns. It’s in the name. It’s a gun,” Boyd said. “It’s a firearm. It’s projectile. It’s something that can take somebody’s life or almost take somebody’s life, in my scenario.”
Worley, of the BPD, said Baltimore is hopeful that the reduction in ghost gun violence since the recently implemented layers of restrictions won’t be fleeting.
“There were so many on the street that it’s going to take us years to get rid of them,” he said of the untraceable guns. “But our men and women work every single day tirelessly to take them off the street.”
Jamaican born African American nationalist Marcus Garvey, circa, 1920. Image via Library of Congress.
(WASHINGTON) — A group of 21 House Democrats signed a letter urging the president to exonerate former civil rights leader Marcus Garvey, according to a statement sent by the lawmakers to ABC News on Monday.
Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY) led the panel of lawmakers — mostly from the Congressional Black Caucus — to exonerate Garvey on the heels of President Joe Biden’s commutation of 37 sentences from federal death row on Monday.
Garvey, one of the earliest internationally-known Black civil rights leaders, was convicted of mail fraud in 1923 and was given a five-year sentence, according to a letter sent to Biden from the Congress members, obtained by ABC News. President Calvin Coolidge pardoned Garvey two years into his sentence. Garvey was immediately deported to his birth country of Jamaica.
“Exonerating Mr. Garvey would honor his work for the Black community, remove the shadow of an unjust conviction, and further this administration’s promise to advance racial justice,” the lawmakers said in the letter to the president. “At a time when Black history faces the existential threat of erasure by radical state legislatures, a presidential pardon for Mr. Garvey would correct the historical record and restore the legacy of an American hero.”
Congress members have been trying for decades to clear Garvey’s name, according to the congress members. Congressman John Conyers led hearings in 1987 for the House Judiciary Committee on Garvey’s exoneration. Congressman Charles Rangel introduced resolutions, highlighting alleged injustices against the former civil rights leader in 2004.
“Exactly 101 years ago, Mr. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in a case that was marred by prosecutorial and governmental misconduct,” The congress members said in the letter. “The evidence paints an abundantly clear narrative that the charges against Mr. Garvey were not only fabricated but also targeted to criminalize, discredit, and silence him as a civil rights leader.”
The White House did not immediately reply to ABC News’ request for a response.
Garvey, who was born in Jamaica in 1887, was a notable Pan-Africanist, believing that people of African descent around the world should be unified because of their alleged common interests.
Garvey was the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) which was created to challenge racial inequality, according to the lawmakers. The organization championed self-determination and economic independence for Black people at a time when Jim Crow laws oppressed African Americans and colonization subjugated Africans on their own continent.
Garvey also established the Black Star Line, one of the first Black-owned shipping companies in the Western Hemisphere, connecting Black businesses across the Americas, according to the lawmakers. The civil rights leader eventually wanted to route the vessels to Africa for a redemption program, according to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. He wanted to establish a nation for those who were born into slavery or were the descendants of enslaved people, according to The Washington Post.
Garvey also created the Negro World Newspaper which, at its peak, reached a circulation of 200,000 readers weekly, according to the congressmembers.
Garvey shared the segregationist views of the Ku Klux Klan as he sought a separate state for those of the African diaspora, according to The Washington Post.
“I regard the Klan the Anglo Saxon clubs and white American societies as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together,” Garvey said according to The New York Times.
Other Black civil rights activists were outraged. W. E. B. Du Bois said Garvey was the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race and was either “a lunatic or a traitor,” according to PBS. Du Bois also said Garvey “suffered from serious defects of temperament and training.”
The newly formed Bureau of Investigation, later becoming the FBI, and the director of its intelligence division, a-young J. Edgar Hoover, brought mail fraud proceedings against Garvey in connection to the sale of Black Star Line shipping stock, according to The Washington Post. He was sentenced to five years in prison and served two years before his pardon and eventual deportation by Coolidge.
The FBI declined ABC News’ request for a comment.
Garvey never returned to the U.S. again, according to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
“As we approach the conclusion of your administration, this moment provides a chance to leave an indelible mark on history,” the lawmakers told Biden in their letter.
ABC News’ John Parkinson contributed to this report.
