Attempted rapist told victim he was an ICE agent: Police sources
The NYPD is searching for a man who allegedly tried to rape a woman in Brooklyn on Feb. 11, 2025. NYPD
(NEW YORK) — Authorities in New York City are searching for a man who allegedly impersonated a federal immigration enforcement agent before trying to rape a 51-year-old woman in broad daylight, according to police sources.
The victim was waiting for a cab outside a Brooklyn CityMD just before 11 a.m. Tuesday when the suspect approached and said he was an ICE agent and needed to talk to her, according to police sources.
The man allegedly forced her into a basement stairwell, punched her and tried to rape her, the NYPD said.
He took her phone, her purse and a chain before fleeing the scene, police said.
The woman suffered lacerations to her face, bruising and scratches, and was hospitalized in stable condition, police sad.
The suspect never showed any identification, according to police sources.
(WASHINGTON) — The judge who dismissed former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case should have the final say about the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on the case, lawyers for Trump’s former co-defendants told a federal appeals court Wednesday afternoon.
The attorneys asked the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to defer their decision to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who could hold a hearing over whether to release the report.
“This reflects an improper attempt to remove from the district court the responsibility to oversee and control the flow of information related to a criminal trial over which it presides, and to place that role instead in the hands of the prosecuting authority — who unlike the trial court has a vested interest in furthering its own narrative of culpability,” lawyers for Trump aide Walt Nauta and staffer Carlos De Oliveria argued.
The arguments came a day after Cannon temporarily blocked the release of Smith’s final report in order to prevent “irreparable harm,” while the matter is considered by the Eleventh Circuit.
Earlier Wednesday, attorneys in the U.S. attorney general’s office said in a filing that Attorney General Merrick Garland does not intend to publicly release the portion of the report related to the classified documents case, though the volume will be available to the ranking members and chairs of the House and Senate Judiciary committees.
Defense lawyers argued in their afternoon filing that the limited disclosure of the full report to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees would imperil the case through possible leaks, calling the prosecution a “political case.”
“The functioning of the political press depends on leaks, and if such leaks occur here, there will be no recourse for the defendants whose due process rights are at stake,” the filing said. “The concern about leaks cannot be overlooked; Congress is a political body; its individual members have political aims; and this is a political case.”
Though the defense lawyers acknowledged the politics related to the report in their filing, they accused prosecutors of creating “fake urgency” related to the timing of the report’s release.
“The only counsel in this case now claiming urgency is the Attorney General, but the government’s brief does not explain this urgency,” lawyers wrote in papers filed less than two weeks from Trump’s inauguration. “The Attorney General is an office and not an individual: It will continue in perpetuity. The urgency of political activity is a fake urgency.”
Prosecutors in their filing also indicted that Garland intends to publicly release the portion of the report related to his federal election interference case against Trump.
They argued in their filing that Garland has the “inherent” authority to release the report, and they asked the Eleventh Circuit to vacate Judge Cannon’s order and deny the request from Trump’s former co-defendants, Nauta and De Oliveira, to block the release of the report.
Prosecutors argued that because Smith already transmitted his report to Garland, the argument made by Trump’s former co-defendants about the legitimacy of Smith’s appointment is “moot.”
“The Attorney General is the Senate-confirmed head of the Department of Justice and is vested with the authority to supervise all officers and employees of the Department. The Attorney General thus has authority to decide whether to release an investigative report prepared by his subordinates,” prosecutors said in their filing.
“That authority is inherent in the office of Attorney General; it does not depend on the lawfulness of the Special Counsel’s appointment to take actions as an inferior officer of the United States or on the Department’s specific regulations authorizing the Attorney General to approve the public release of Special Counsel reports,” the filing said.
While defense attorneys had sought to block the release of Volume Two of the report related to the classified documents case — and not Volume One, which covers Trump’s election interference case — Judge Cannon’s order referred only to the “final report,” and not the two volumes within, suggesting that the entire report was blocked from release.
Prosecutors asked the appeals court to “make clear that there is no impediment to the Attorney General allowing for limited congressional review of Volume Two as described above and the publicly release of Volume One.”
The filing makes clear that the decision by Garland to not release the volume of the report involving the classified documents investigation was recommended by Smith himself when it was transmitted to Garland Tuesday evening.
“Because Volume Two discusses the roles of defendants Nauta and De Oliveira, and because those matters remain pending appeal before this Court, the Special Counsel explained in his cover letter to the Attorney General that, “consistent with Department policy, Volume Two should not be publicly released while their case remains pending,”” the filing says.
Trump pleaded not guilty in June 2023 to 37 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials, after prosecutors said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information ranging from U.S. nuclear secrets to the nation’s defense capabilities, and took steps to thwart the government’s efforts to get the documents back.
The former president, along with Nauta and De Oliveira, also pleaded not guilty in a superseding indictment to allegedly attempting to delete surveillance footage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Smith has been winding down his cases against the former president since Trump was reelected in November, due to a longstanding Department of Justice policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president.
(NEW YORK) — Though Jimmy Carter was a U.S. president, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the founder of a global organization, The Carter Center, to his more than one dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he was a grandfather first and foremost, his grandson Jason Carter told “Good Morning America.”
“He’s an interesting guy, but he really was a grandfather to me first,” Jason Carter said in a live interview Tuesday on “GMA,” just days after the former president’s death on Dec. 29, at age 100.
“He was my grandfather so I have a lot of memories, like others do, of him taking me fishing or sitting around and talking about what I should do in my life,” Jason Carter continued. “When I graduated from college, he and I sat down and I said, ‘What would you do if you were me?,’ and he said, ‘I would go to Africa and join the Peace Corps,’ and so I did that.”
Jimmy Carter is survived by four children and around two dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren, according to the Jimmy Carter Library.
He was preceded in death by his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, who died on Nov. 19, 2023, at age 96.
Jason Carter, the son of the Carters’ eldest child, John William “Jack” Carter, described his grandparents’ decades-long marriage as “one of the great American love stories.”
He said a photo of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter kissing each other amid the backdrop of the U.S. presidency shows who they really were at heart, two people who remained in love after meeting in the small town of Plains, Georgia.
“He spent eight years in politics, and the other 92 years he spent at home in Plains, Georgia,” Jason Carter said of his grandfather. “Obviously, working around the world, doing things for The Carter Center and otherwise, but really, he was a small-town guy who lived out that faith that is reflected in that picture and the love that is reflected in that picture.”
Jason Carter, who plans to deliver a eulogy at his grandfather’s funeral on Jan. 9, said he sees his grandfather’s legacy as one of someone who stayed true to himself even while reaching the highest heights of power.
During his own political career, including a run for Georgia governor in 2014, Jason Carter said he tried to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps in that way.
“He’s one of those people who demonstrates that you can be in politics and not change who you are, that you can be an honest person, a person who lives out his faith and love in the real world, and still be in politics, and I think that was my hope,” he said. “Our politics is messy, and he was always one of those rare people who was able to reach the highest levels of it without compromising who he was, and we talked about that aspect of it a lot.”
Now, as his family moves forward after the death of their patriarch, Jason Carter said they are reflecting on the annual New Year’s family vacation that Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter hosted every year and sharing memories of sipping champagne together on New Year’s Eve.
As they look ahead to the new year, Jason Carter said he and his family want to continue their grandfather’s work at The Carter Center, which describes itself as a “nongovernmental organization that helps to improve lives by resolving conflicts; advancing democracy and preventing diseases.”
“He built this remarkable organization over 40 years that’s really been his life’s work,” Jason Carter said of The Carter Center, of which he has served as chair of the board. “There’s 3,000 employees that work all over the world … and of those 3,000 employees, only a couple hundred are in the U.S., and the rest are in Ethiopia or Sudan or Mali or Chad or Bangladesh, the places where the center can do the most good for the most people.”
(NEW YORK) — President-elect Donald Trump is asking a federal appeals court to reconsider overturning a jury’s verdict that found he sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and awarded her $5 million in damages.
After the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit determined last month that Trump failed to prove he deserved a new trial, lawyers for Trump on Tuesday requested an en banc hearing, in which the full court would hear the case rather than a select panel.
A New York jury in 2023 awarding Carroll $5 million in damages after it found Trump liable for sexually abusing her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s, and for defaming her in 2022 when he denied the allegations.
Last year, another jury ordered Trump to pay an additional $83 million in damages for his defamatory statements about Carroll.
Trump argued the trial court in 2023 erred when it allowed two women to testify about Trump allegedly assaulting them, as well as permitting Carroll’s lawyers to show the jury part of the now-infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasted about grabbing women.
“To have any chance of persuading a jury, Carroll’s implausible, unsubstantiated allegations had to be — and repeatedly were — propped up by the erroneous admission of highly inflammatory propensity evidence,” wrote Trump’s lawyers Todd Blanche, Emil Bove, and D. John Sauder, who have all been picked by Trump for top Justice Department posts in his incoming adminstration.
Trump’s lawyers argued that the trial court’s decisions, if left uncorrected, could set a damaging precedent of allowing “inflammatory propensity evidence in a wide range of future cases.”
Trump’s request for an en banc hearing is his final appellate option before possibly turning to the Supreme Court.
