Search for Savannah Guthrie’s mother continues as police suspect possible abduction
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 this morning after the mother of “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie disappeared over the weekend in what authorities believe was a possible abduction early Sunday morning 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.
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 careful 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 would have been 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.
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.
(WEST BLOOMFIELD, Mich.) — A suspect is dead after a shooting and vehicle ramming incident at a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, according to Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard.
The suspect, who is believed to have had a rifle, died after a shootout with security, according to a senior federal law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.
Nobody inside the synagogue was hurt, Bouchard said, and the synagogue noted that all 140 students as well as staff, teachers and “heroic security personnel” are all accounted for.
Eight first responders are being treated at hospitals, Henry Ford Health said.
The sheriff noted that one synagogue security guard was hit by the suspect’s truck and was “knocked unconscious” but is expected to be OK.
Temple Israel in a statement said the security personnel who confronted the suspect are “heroes” and the “teachers followed their training and kept the children safe and calm.”
According to sources, the driver was seen steering around security bollards, and caused a fire when colliding the vehicle into the building’s front doors.
The sheriff said the suspect drove his truck into the building and down the hall.
Rabbi Jennifer Kaluzny told ABC News Live that she was heading to Temple Israel when a staff member texted her saying they were hiding from gunshots under a desk.
Kaluzny said she drove directly to the synagogue and tried to go in the building but was not allowed inside, so she then drove to a reunification site where panicked parents were waiting for their children.
She said of the security guard who was hit by the truck, “This is someone who is not Jewish who is absolutely celebrating his relationship with the Jewish community, and we have embraced him and he has embraced us.”
“We are forever grateful to all of them and everyone who showed up to help us get through this,” she said of the synagogue security guards and the police responders.
Officials with the FBI Detroit field office held an active shooter prevention and preparedness training for the staff and clergy at Temple Israel in January, according to a social media post from the FBI.
“All of the training that we do is, sadly, necessary, but we saw today … that it paid off,” Kaluzny said.
“Everyone knew what to do … the teachers are absolutely heroes,” she added.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement, “This is heartbreaking. Michigan’s Jewish community should be able to live and practice their faith in peace.”
President Donald Trump said he’s been “fully briefed” on the incident.
“I want to send our love to the Michigan Jewish community and all of the people in Detroit, Detroit area, following the attack on the Jewish synagogue,” Trump said during a women’s history month event at the White House.
“It’s a terrible thing,” he said.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said that he spoke with local Jewish leaders in Michigan “to receive an update on the situation and to express our solidarity.”
“I am relieved to hear that there were no casualties,” he said. “This is a grave and serious incident that follows a series of attacks on Jewish institutions around the world. Tonight, we send a message of strength and support from Israel to the Jewish community in Michigan.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Steve Tisch, executive vice president of the New York Giants looks on before pre-season football game against the Carolina Panthers at MetLife Stadium on August 18, 2023 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. (Rich Schultz/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Jeffrey Epstein frequently connected New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch with women, according to dozens of 2013 emails released by the Department of Justice.
In the emails, the late sex offender appeared to be a frequent point of contact for Tisch, coordinating meetings with various women and providing specific details regarding their ages, nationalities, and physical appearances.
Tisch and Epstein discussed specific women, according to the emails, with Tisch frequently inquiring whether they were “pro or civilian” or a “working girl.”
In one April 2013 exchange, Tisch asked Epstein about a woman identified as “M,” writing: “Curious to know about M… pro or civilian?”
Epstein replied that she was a “civilian, but Russian,” and added that she was “fun.” In another exchange in June, Tisch asked if a woman was a “working girl,” to which Epstein replied, “Never.”
In another email, Epstein told Tisch that a Ukrainian woman was “a little freaked by the age difference” but that he would “try to convince her not to return” to her home country.
In another instance, Epstein told Tisch that a microbiology student in Florida was interested in meeting, advising Tisch to “make it clear that you will organize her ticket.”
The documents also indicate that the women were informed of Tisch’s professional background. One woman emailed Epstein in April 2013 stating she had “googled Steve Tisch” and noted he was an “Oscar winner producer, and Giants owner” before agreeing to a meeting.
The communication between the two men often involved invitations to Epstein’s home and sports events. In September 2013, Tisch emailed Epstein to offer “two tickets in my Suite for Sundays game.” Epstein, in an April 2013 email, referred to Tisch as a “new but obviously shared interest friend.”
Tisch has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
In a statement to ABC News provided by a Giants spokesperson, Tisch said on Epstein, “We had a brief association where we exchanged emails about adult women, and in addition, we discussed movies, philanthropy and investments. I did not take him up on any of his invitations and never went to his island. As we all know now, he was a terrible person and someone I deeply regret associating with.”
Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial 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.
