Battle over US attorneys continues as DOJ fires new prosecutor in Northern New York
U.S. President Donald Trump gaggles with reporters while aboard Air Force One on February 6, 2026 en route to Palm Beach, Florida. Samuel Corum/Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — The fight over the Trump administration’s appointment of U.S. attorneys has taken another turn with the Justice Department’s firing of a newly appointed U.S. attorney in Northern New York.
After the DOJ’s appointment of acting U.S. Attorney John Sarcone III ran out, a court on Wednesday appointed Donald Kinsella to lead the U.S. attorney’s office in that district, according to a notice from the court.
But just hours after Kinsella’s appointment, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche fired him.
The ongoing battle centers on who has the right to select the prosecutors who lead the nation’s U.S. attorneys offices, with the Justice Department appointing a series of acting attorneys general despite laws that don’t allow those positions to be filled by consecutive interim nominees without either Senate confirmation or appointment by the federal judiciary.
“Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys. @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired, Donald Kinsella,” Blanche tweeted Wednesday, hours after Kinsella’s appointment by the court.
The head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Dan Scavino, tweeted that Kinsella should “check your email.”
Last fall a court found that Lindsey Halligan, a former White House aide who was appointed by President Donald Trump as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had been unlawfully appointed because the law doesn’t allow the position to be filled by two interim nominees in a row, in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Appointments Clause.
After a federal judge threw out the indictments Halligan obtained against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Attorney General Pam Bondi filed an appeal this week arguing that she has the authority to address U.S. attorney vacancies.
Trump’s former personal attorney, Alina Habba, was disqualified in December from serving as interim U.S. attorney in New Jersey after the Trump administration sought to extend her appointment, and courts in Nevada and California have made similar rulings involving the appointments of acting U.S. attorneys in those districts.
People walk through Grand Central Terminal on November 4, 2025, in New York City. (Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Police shot and killed a knife-wielding man on a subway platform at Grand Central Station in New York City on Saturday after he stabbed at least two people, according to the NYPD.
Officers were called to the scene shortly after 9:30 this morning.
Police said the man had been acting erratically on the train and slashed at least two people on the 4/5/6 platform. The slashing wounds are severe but the victims are stable in the hospital.
The suspect refused repeated commands to drop what police described as a machete before an officer opened fire, killing him, according to the NYPD.
There is no connection to terrorism, police said.
The identity of the knife-wielding suspect was not immediately released.
The NYPD will hold a news conference at the scene.
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.
(NEW YORK) — This year began with a deadly New Year’s Day car-ramming terrorist attack in New Orleans and is finishing with a flurry of horrific shootings, including a mass shooting at Brown University, but 2025 is also poised to end with the largest one-year drop in U.S. homicides ever recorded, according to data from cities both large and small.
Based on a sampling of preliminary crime statistics from 550 U.S. law enforcement agencies, the year is expected to end with a roughly 20% decrease in homicides nationwide, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.
“So, even taking a conservative view, let’s say its 17% or 16%, you’re still looking at the largest one-year drop ever recorded in 2025,” said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department.
Experts say crime levels appear “back to normal” after a pandemic surge.
The dramatic drop in homicides surpasses a 15% decline in 2024, which was then the largest decrease on record, according to Asher. In 2023, the number of homicides across the country fell 13% and 6% in 2022, according to the FBI.
The number of homicides nationwide is expected to be the lowest since the FBI began keeping such records in 1960, Asher said.
Asher said his assessment is based on the Real-Time Crime Index, which he founded and is a collection of monthly crime data from 550 law enforcement agencies nationwide.
The FBI’s official annual report on crime isn’t expected to be released until the second quarter of 2026, leaving Asher and other experts to rely on preliminary data from a sampling of law enforcement agencies.
Preliminary data the FBI made public earlier this year showed that homicides across the country fell 18% between September 2024 and August 2025. The FBI data also showed an overall 9% decline in violent crime during the same time period and a 12% reduction in property crime.
“You’ve got places like Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore that are on track to have the fewest murders since the 1960s. New Orleans, in spite of the terrorist attack on January 1, is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1970,” Asher said. “San Francisco is on track to see the fewest number of murders since 1940.”
Homicides in Chicago are down 30% this year from 2024, according to crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department (CPD). The number of homicides this year is down 49% since 2021, when the city recorded nearly 800 homicides, the CPD data shows.
And it’s not just homicides that are plummeting to record lows in 2025, according to Asher.
“We’re seeing across-the-board drops in every type of reported crime, which happened in 2024 and we’re seeing again in 2025,” said Asher, adding that aggravated assaults across the country are down 8% this year and motor vehicle theft has fallen 23%.
My son was innocent Despite the plunge in violent crime this year, the perception for some is that crime was rampant at certain points in a number of major cities.
The falling homicide numbers offered little solace to Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym, whose 21-year-old son, Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, was killed on June 30 when he was caught in the crossfire of a shooting in Washington, D.C., less than a mile from the White House.
“You can skew data any way you want,” Tarpinian-Jachym of Massachusetts told ABC News. “I believe that there’s more crime, violent crime, especially in our major cities.”
Three teenagers, including two brothers, were arrested on murder charges and are being prosecuted as adults in federal court in the death of Tarpinian-Jachym’s son, a University of Massachusetts student who, at the time he was killed, was a Congressional intern for Rep. Ron Estes, R-Kan. One of the suspects charged in his death was also charged in a separate homicide of a 17-year-old girl in Washington, D.C.
All three defendants charged in Tarpinian-Jachym’s homicide have pleaded not guilty.
“My son was innocent. Others were innocent victims of this crime. If more people died, it would have been a mass shooting. But my son was the only one who died,” Tarpinian-Jachym said.
Citing her own experience, Tarpinian-Jachym said blanket homicide statistics don’t take into account the suffering of family members like her left to grieve.
“It tears the family apart. You never have inner peace,” Tarpinian-Jachym said. “My heart goes out to all murder victims this year.”
Tarpinian-Jachym told ABC News that she agreed with President Donald Trump’s decision in August to deploy National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., and several other large cities to help combat crime. The decision followed a May 21 shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., that killed two staff members of the Israeli Embassy and came even as crime was already down, according to the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPD) preliminary crime data posted online.
Homicides in Washington, D.C., as of Dec. 30, are down 31% compared to 2024, according to the MPD’s online data.
However, a lawsuit filed against the District of Columbia in 2020 by a former MPD sergeant-turned-whistleblower claimed the MPD routinely “misclassified crimes and that districts compete against each other to get the largest reduction in the crime statistics.” The lawsuit was settled out of court this past August. According to court documents, the District of Columbia agreed to dismiss the case “without any admission of any liability.”
On Dec. 14, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released an interim staff report alleging that its investigation found MPD Chief Pamela A. Smith, who announced this month that she is stepping down, “pressured and at times directed commanders to manipulate crime data in order to maintain the appearance of low crime in the nation’s capital.”
In a Dec. 15 interview with NBC Washington, D.C., station WRC-TV, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser responded, saying, “I don’t see any evidence of that.”
Mass shootings drop in 2025 According to the Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks shootings across the country, this year is poised to end with mass shootings down 22% from the 503 committed in 2024. The website defines a mass shooting as at least four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including the shooter.
Among the nearly 400 mass shootings across the country this year, two of the most devastating occurred at churches.
On Aug. 27, two children, ages 8 and 10, were killed and 21 people were injured at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis when a 23-year-old shooter opened fire through the windows of the school’s church during a service, police said. The suspect, Robin Westman, whose mother once worked at the church, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.
On Sept. 28, four people were killed and eight others were injured in a mass shooting at a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints chapel in Grand Blanc, Mich., according to the FBI. The suspect, 40-year-old Thomas Sanford of Burton, Mich., allegedly set fire to the chapel after crashing his truck into the building, authorities said.
Sanford, who served as a Marine sergeant and was deployed in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2007, was killed in a shootout with police.
And on Dec. 13, a gunman opened fire in a lecture hall at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, killing two students and injuring nine others. Following a weeklong search, the suspect, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown graduate student, was found dead at a New Hampshire storage facility from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.
Neves Valente is also suspected of killing MIT professor Nuno F.G. Laureiro two days after the Brown University shooting, according to federal prosecutors.
‘I’m seeing now that we’re back to normal.’ Despite the string of high-profile killings and attacks this year, Robert Boyce, a retired chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, said the dramatic drop in 2025 homicides is real.
Boyce said that when he retired from the NYPD in 2018, the city had fewer than 300 homicides that year.
But when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, homicides across the country soared 30%, according to the FBI.
“Courts were being shut down, and schools were being shut down. We couldn’t do our job in the police department like we did in previous years,” said Boyce, adding that the police-involved killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis also led to mistrust of law enforcement and prompted calls to defund police departments.
Homicides in New York City went from 317 in 2019 to 462 in 2020, a 44% increase, according to NYPD crime statistics. Homicides jumped another 4% in 2021 to 488.
During the pandemic, which wasn’t declared over until May 2023, homicides dramatically increased in other major cities.
Chicago recorded 769 homicides in 2020, which was 274 more than the previous year, and jumped to 797 in 2021, according to Chicago Police Department data.
Philadelphia saw a 40% increase in homicides in 2020 compared to 2019, according to Philadelphia Police Department data. In 2021, homicides continued to climb, hitting a record high of 562.
“We fought back. We completely redid our police department to be more narcotics-focused and increased our narcotics division. And we saw the gradual decreases,” Boyce said of the NYPD.
As of Dec. 28, homicides are down in New York City by 21% this year compared to 2024. Earlier this month, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced that in the first 11 months of 2025, the nation’s largest city saw the fewest shooting incidents and shooting victims in recorded history.
Boyce said the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies also worked with federal prosecutors to target gang members, who Boyce said were a major driver of violent crime during the pandemic and continue to be now. The federal government also strengthened partnerships with local police agencies and provided grants to support programs to reduce violent crime.
“I’m seeing now that we’re back to normal. The reset is here. That’s great news,” Boyce said.
Asked if the country is back to pre-pandemic crime levels, Boyce said, “We’re just a little above and not much.”
