Ex-husband charged in double murder waives extradition to Ohio

(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 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.

Blanche pushed back on the notion that the DOJ 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. 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 told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.

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.

A team of 500 attorneys from the Justice Department worked around the clock to redact and review material, Blanche said. 

“If any member of Congress wishes to review any portions of the response of production in any unredacted form, they’re welcome to make arrangements with the department to do so, and we’re happy to do that,” said Blanche. 

Friday’s tranche is the latest in a series of releases that began last month in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed Congress overwhelmingly and was signed into law by President Donald 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.

The DOJ to date 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.

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(CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas) — Deliberations are underway in the trial of former Uvalde schools police officer Adrian Gonzales on Wednesday after prosecutors and defense lawyers delivered their closing arguments.

Before jurors were sent to deliberate, District Attorney Christina Mitchell gave an impassioned plea, saying, “I know this case is difficult, and it has been difficult. But we cannot continue to let children die in vain.”

“What happened to Uvalde on May 24 can happen anywhere, at any time,” she said. “If it’s going to happen, and if we have laws mandating what the responsibility of a law enforcement peace officer is for a school district, then we better be ready to back it up.”

At issue is whether Gonzales — one of the first officers to arrive at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022 — ignored his training and endangered dozens of students when he responded to the shooting, which became one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history.

Nineteen students and two teachers died, with police officers waiting 77 minutes to confront the gunman. While the shooting response has been the subject of hearings and investigations, the case against Gonzales marks the first criminal trial related to the shooting and the delayed police response.

Prosecution’s closing argument

The jury has an opportunity to “set the bar” for how officers should respond to school shootings, prosecutor Bill Turner said on Wednesday.

“If it’s appropriate to stand outside hearing [hundreds of] shots while children are being slaughtered, that is your decision to tell the state of Texas,” Turner said.

While teachers and students were sheltering in their classrooms — doing exactly what their training taught them to do in an active shooter scenario — the police officer trained to help them failed to act, Turner said. Turner argued that each gunshot fired at Robb Elementary was “notice to Adrian Gonzalez to advance toward the gunfire,” but he failed to follow his training and act in the crucial first minutes of the shooting. 

“If you have a duty to act, you can’t stand by while the child is in imminent danger,” Turner said.

Turner pointed jurors to the testimony of teaching aide Melodye Flores, a key prosecution witness who said she pleaded with Gonzales to intervene. Turner argued that the warning from Flores and the clear sound of gunfire should have triggered Gonzales to act.

“The training is, you hear shots, you go to the gunfire. He heard shots, and Melodye Flores was pointing where to go to the gunfire. There’s nothing complicated about that,” Turner said. 

Defense’s closing argument

Convicting Gonzales will send a clear message to officers who respond to this country’s next mass shooting, defense attorney Jason Goss said.

“What you tell police officers is, ‘Don’t go in. Don’t react. Don’t respond,'” Goss warned jurors. “We cannot have law enforcement feel that way.”

Goss argued that prosecutors tried to “massage the facts” of the case and
“twist them all into a pretzel” to argue Gonzales failed to act. According to Goss, Gonzales did the best he could with the information he had when he arrived at Robb Elementary. While other officers arrived within the same timeframe, only Gonzales is being penalized for attempting to take action that day, he argued. 

Goss attempted to empathize with the jurors and the families of victims, arguing he understood the desire for criminal accountability. But he reminded jurors, “The monster who hurt those kids is dead.”

But convicting Gonzales, Goss argued, would do “an injustice” for the victims of the shooting. 

“You do not honor their memory by doing an injustice in their name,” he said.

What is he charged with?

Gonzales was charged with 29 felony counts of abandoning/endangering children — one count for each of the 19 students who died in the shooting and the 10 children who survived in classroom 112.

Each count carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison, and Gonzales could spend the rest of his life in prison if he is convicted. While juries in Texas sometimes determine criminal sentences, Gonzales has opted to be sentenced by Judge Sid Harle if he is convicted.

What happened to the police chief’s case?

Along with Gonzales, prosecutors also charged former Uvalde schools Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was the scene commander during the Robb shooting. His case has been indefinitely delayed due to a pending civil lawsuit involving the tactical unit that ultimately breached the classroom and killed the shooter.

Are there any comparable cases?

According to Phil Stinson — a professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who maintains a database of police officers who have been arrested — the case against Gonzales is uncommon but not unprecedented.

Prosecutors in Florida attempted to similarly charge a law enforcement officer for his response to the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen were killed when a gunman opened fire that day, Feb. 14, 2018, in Parkland.

A jury in 2023 acquitted Scot Peterson, the former Broward County sheriff’s deputy, after he was charged with child neglect and culpable negligence for his alleged inaction following the shooting.

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(SANTA MONICA, Calif.) — Federal officials opened an investigation after a Waymo self-driving vehicle struck a child near an elementary school in California, resulting in minor injuries.

The incident occurred on Jan. 23 in Santa Monica, within two blocks of an elementary school during school drop-off hours, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The vehicle was being operated by its automated driving system and there was no safety operator in it at the time, according to the agency.

The child “ran across the street from behind a double parked SUV towards the school and was struck by the Waymo AV,” the NHTSA said in a statement.

Other children and a crossing guard were in the area at the time, as well as several double-parked vehicles, the agency said.

“Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle,” Waymo said in a statement, adding that the autonomous driver “braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made.”

After the vehicle made contact, the child stood up and walked to the sidewalk, according to Waymo. The company said it called 911 and the vehicle “remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene.”

Waymo reported that the child, whose age was not released, sustained minor injuries, according to the NHTSA.

Waymo said it reported the incident to the NHTSA the day it occurred and will “cooperate fully with them throughout the process of its investigation.”

The investigation will look into whether the self-driving vehicle “exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users,” the NHTSA said.

Waymo and the NHTSA did not release any details on where the vehicle was traveling and if it had any passengers at the time of the collision.

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