At least 2 dead after shooting during party at LA strip mall: Police
At least two people were killed in a shooting at a strip mall near Cal State Northridge on Oct.2, 2026. LAPD responded to a call about a large party at The Artists Lounge when officers heard gunshots on arrival. (KABC)
At least two people were killed Friday in a shooting at a Los Angeles strip mall, according to police.
The Los Angeles Police Department responded to a 911 call about a large party at the mall near Cal State Northridge around 11 p.m. when officers heard gunshots, ABC local station KABC reported.
Two people were killed, and it was not immediately clear if there were other injuries, authorities said.
Officers were seen placing several people in handcuffs and taking them away after the shooting. Police hadn’t announced any arrests or released a suspect description as of early Saturday.
U.S. President Donald Trump addresses the nation from the East Room of the White House on July 16, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Saul Loeb/Pool – Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Newly-declassified documents touted by President Donald Trump during his address on election security Thursday cast doubt on some of his claims about “shocking vulnerabilities” in the country’s election infrastructure.
While Trump claimed during his address that the nation’s election systems are vulnerable to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference,” the intelligence reports released by the White House concluded overall that the main infrastructure used to conduct elections in the United States “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”
“Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost,” Trump said, without providing evidence.
‘Difficult to manipulate at scale’
The documents noted that although some internet-connected election infrastructure — like voter registration databases and pollbooks — are vulnerable to cyberattacks, the systems used to tabulate, transmit, and display election results cannot be manipulated on a wide scale, and audits and paper trails “would uncover such efforts in the nearly all U.S. states.”
“We assess that hostile actors could also manipulate systems that count or tabulate votes — such as voting machines — on a localized basis, but it probably would be difficult to coordinate a campaign to alter voting results on a wide scale,” said an August 2020 report from the National Intelligence Council. “Similarly, foreign actors would have difficulty coordinating a large scale campaign to manipulate mail-in voting, and robust postal tracking probably would detect any large-scale effort.”
The report concluded that cyber attacks could potentially delay voting but “probably would not affect the integrity of certified results.”
While another report said that foreign adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea “have the capability to access and potentially manipulate data in U.S. election-related computer systems,” the report did not identify “specific plans to interfere with the functioning of these systems” or past instances when results were changed due to the actions of foreign actors.
“We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” said a January 2020 report from the National Intelligence Council.
“Although an adversary could manipulate voting results across multiple jurisdictions and enough states to influence a presidential election, we judge that conducting such a campaign would be difficult and that postelection audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort,” that report said.
According to the August 2020 report from the National Intelligence Council, the only country that was observed attempting to target or manipulate election systems during the 2020 election was Russia, which used “a range of measures primarily to denigrate former Vice President Biden” and share largely favorable information about President Trump.
‘Delays on Election Day’
According to the National Intelligence Council’s January 2020 report, the systems vulnerable to disruption are official election websites or registration databases — which are often publicly accessible — or poll books, which are used by election officials to look up eligible voters.
The report said that bad actors could “alter data to potentially prevent individual voters or groups of voters from voting, causing delays on Election Day or forcing voters to use provisional ballots” — but those actions wouldn’t affect the votes themselves.
“We assess that cyber operations targeting the electronic tabulation of results could delay results reporting from affected jurisdictions, potentially creating public uncertainty but probably not affecting the integrity of certified results,” the report noted.
According to a 2026 report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, election-related software is “subject to the same security concerns as most other software systems.” The report called for election officials to be transparent about issues to improve public trust.
“By openly acknowledging incidents and describing mitigation steps, vendors and localities can show that they are proactively defending critical infrastructure rather than obscuring vulnerabilities. This transparency encourages continuous improvement, drives investment in stronger defenses, and reinforces that protecting elections is a collective national priority,” the report said.
‘Russia, China, Iran’
A January 2020 memo from the National Intelligence Council warned that countries like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea “have the capability to access and potentially manipulate data in U.S. election-related computer systems” — but a subsequent report said such manipulation would be hard to do on a widespread basis.
“We judge that Russia, China, Iran, as well as many nonstate actors, have the capability to conduct such activities, although it would be difficult for them to manipulate voting processes at scale and without detection,” the report said.
Russia and China have pushed back against those claims.
The January 2020 report noted that Russia “almost certainly” surveyed election networks in 2016, accessed election infrastructure in two states, and exfiltrated voter data from one state.
According to the August 2020 report, Russia sought to amplify discord in the United States ahead of the 2020 election, spread false claims about then-candidate Joe Biden, and boost positive information about Trump.
The 2020 CIA memo noted that China probed presidential campaigns in every election since 2008 to get insights on U.S.-China issues.
According to the memo, the intelligence community detected Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors specifically targeting the Biden campaign “to gather intelligence that could enable future operations.”
“The IC assesses that China does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of the election, although this activity could enable such operations,” the report said.
An August 2020 report from the National Intelligence Council concluded that China “did not intend to try to affect the election” though it “prefers that President Trump be defeated.”
“We assess that China prefers that the President whom Beijing sees as unpredictable and tough on China does not win reelection,” the report said.
However, an October 2020 memo noted the overall intelligence community believed that China considered but did not deploy influence efforts for the upcoming 2020 election. The memo said that Chinese leadership believed Trump appeared likely to lose and that “there is little point to taking the risk of an influence effort because they believe their preferred outcome is probable.”
“As early as [REDACTED] this year, Chinese [REDACTED] assessed that the pandemic and economic downturn had diminished the President’s reelection prospects and since then Beijing has been planning for either electoral outcome and conducting outreach to both candidates and their campaigns, [REDACTED],” the memo said.
The August 2020 report noted that Iran “is conducting an influence campaign to undermine the current President and US democratic institutions, and to divide the country in advance of the 2020 elections.”
However, the report noted that Iran is focusing on covert online influence — such as sharing memes and recirculating news reports that are critical of Trump.
“Iran could attempt to manipulate or attack election infrastructure as it has in elections in the Middle East and South Asia — but we do not have any information indicating that it intends to do so in the United States,” the report said.
‘An election outside of Venezuela’
The release of documents included a CIA assessment from June 2026 summarizing the last two decades of intelligence related to Venezuela’s manipulation of voting systems, following longstanding claims by Trump’s far-right supporters of Venezuela’s involvement in 2020 election interference.
The memo said that Venezuelan government officials developed the capability to manipulate electronic voting systems in their own elections, including replicating and overwriting voting data to make fraudulent votes legitimate.
However, the report noted that the intelligence “did not definitively confirm that large-scale electronic fraud was successfully executed in specific Venezuelan elections.”
Notably, the report noted that there was no evidence that the Venezuelan government was able to manipulate election results outside of their own country, because their ability to rig elections “rested in part on its ability to control every stage of the electronic voting process.”
“Neither [the voting machine company] Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan Government had the capability — that is the level of control or access required — to manipulate the outcome of an election outside of Venezuela in a predictable fashion,” the report said.
‘False narratives’
In addition to assessing technological vulnerabilities in the election system, a newly-declassified memo from the National Intelligence Council explicitly raised concerns about adversaries exploiting most Americans’ lack of knowledge about voting systems to “undermine confidence in U.S. democratic processes.”
“Much of the voting public probably knows little about the process of administering U.S. elections, which could allow false narratives to gain traction,” said the January 2020 memo.
The memo noted that efforts to “publicly invalidate such claims could take weeks or months” and that “disproving claims would also be impossible if adversaries evaded U.S. intelligence collection.”
“A widely publicized compromise of election infrastructure probably would undercut public confidence in the election, even if the compromise was not used to manipulate election-related data or systems,” the memo said.
Kevin Reddington appears on “Good Morning America,” Sept. 8, 2026. (ABC News)
(NEW YORK) — Lindsay Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington said he is hopeful for an agreement between the defense and the district attorney after Clancy’s trial ended last week in a hung jury.
Reddington also said he hopes President Donald Trump would consider a pardon for his client.
“Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady and the person she is, what she’s been through, and consider a pardon,” Reddington said Tuesday in an interview on “Good Morning America.”
Clancy pleaded not guilty to three murder charges for the deaths of her 5-year-old daughter Cora, 3-year-old son Dawson and infant son Callan at the family’s home in Duxbury, a Boston suburb, on Jan. 24, 2023.
Clancy’s five-week trial ended in a mistrial on Sept. 4, after a jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict following over a week of deliberations.
When asked about the trial on the day the mistrial was declared, the president told reporters that he was following it, saying, “It’s on television so much, it’s hard not to follow it.”
“Look, she did a horrible, horrible thing. Can’t be worse,” he said of Clancy. “But you’ll find out what the price to pay is. There’ll be a price. It’s going to be mental institution or jail or something, but I guess they’re going to go through another trial. It’s too bad.”
When asked for comment on Reddington’s remarks, the White House pointed back to Trump’s comments Friday.
The president has broad authority to issue pardons and commutations, but the power is strictly limited to federal offenses. In her trial, Clancy faced state offenses in being charged with three counts of first-degree murder and was not convicted, therefore she is not eligible for a pardon by the president. Instead, she would need to appeal to state authorities in Massachusetts, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
When it comes to the prospect of beginning a retrial for Clancy, Reddington said he hopes he and Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz are able to come to an agreement.
“He’s a very hard-charging prosecutor, a conservative gentleman,” Reddington said of Cruz. “I hope however after sitting through this trial and seeing the evidence that was presented from the government as well as from the defense, that he would revisit that issue and hopefully would be able to work something out that would be acceptable to both sides.”
In remarks on Sept. 4 after the mistrial was declared, Cruz declined to announce an immediate decision about retrying Clancy.
“I appreciate the fact that there are strong feelings and opinions tied to this case,” Cruz said outside the courthouse. “However, our job is to set aside our feelings and focus solely on the facts. The facts are Lindsay Clancy killed her three children and the evidence suggested to us that she was in control of her actions when she committed those homicides.”
The two sides are scheduled to be in court on Sept. 29 to determine next steps following the mistrial.
Reddington said he was “upset” with the mistrial because of information he said the jury foreperson provided about the lone juror holdout, whom Reddington has said was a male juror.
“He had agreed, according to the note from the forelady, that he had doubt but he would not present the law of reasonable doubt as presented by the judge,” Reddington said. “That’s not right and that’s why I was upset.”
Throughout Clancy’s trial, much of the testimony centered on whether or not Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis — considered a psychiatric emergency, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — when she strangled her children and attempted to take her own life, and whether she should be held criminally liable for the killings.
Jurors in Massachusetts are instructed that in order to prove a defendant is criminally responsible for their conduct, prosecutors must “prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not suffer from a mental disease or defect at the time of the alleged offense,” according to the Massachusetts Court System.
Reddington said that critics who call the so-called insanity defense a rationalization don’t understand what he says Clancy went through.
“These people don’t understand,” he said. “They don’t know what she went through. They didn’t see her text messages. They didn’t see her journal. They didn’t see the notes that she wrote.”
He continued, “She reached out to everybody and anybody that would listen to it and kept saying, ‘I am not good. I am not well,’ and it wasn’t good.”
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Luigi Mangione appears at an evidence suppression hearing at Manhattan Supreme Court on May 18, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Jeenah Moon-Pool/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Accused killer Luigi Mangione is due back in Manhattan federal court Monday after talks to resolve his case with a guilty plea stopped without a deal.
Mangione, who has pleaded not guilty to federal charges he stalked UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson before shooting and killing him in December 2024 in Midtown Manhattan, is scheduled to stand trial in federal court in early 2027.
Ahead of Monday’s hearing, defense attorneys and federal prosecutors discussed a possible plea deal, sources told ABC News, but the talks stopped without one. It’s not clear how close to a deal they came or whether they will try again. Criminal defendants can change their plea before or during trial.
On Monday, the parties are expected to discuss plans for a trial, including the questionnaire prospective jurors will complete before in-person voir dire questioning.
Mangione has also pleaded not guilty to state charges he murdered Thompson and is scheduled to stand trial in New York State Supreme Court in September.
Defense attorneys recently gave notice that they intended to mount a psychiatric defense to the state charges, arguing Mangione experienced an extreme emotional disturbance prior to shooting Thompson, but they quickly withdrew the notice before a deadline to turn over his psychiatric records.
