Guilty plea expected in secret Chinese police station case
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(NEW YORK) — A guilty plea is expected Wednesday in the case of a secret Chinese police station operating in lower Manhattan.
The suspects in the case, Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping, were accused by prosecutors last year of working on behalf of China’s Ministry of Public Security in violation of the Espionage Act.
Chen is expected to plead guilty to a charge of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government. Lu is due in court next in February.
At the time the case was charged in April 2023, the FBI called it in an example of China’s “audacious activities” on U.S. soil.
The location in Chinatown claimed to be a nonprofit organization helping Chinese-Americans but federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, who brought the case, said it “appears to have had a more sinister use.”
Prosecutors said the secret police station was set up by Chinese counterintelligence operatives to harass and intimidate dissidents living in the United States.
(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Justice is continuing its push to release the remaining volume of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report to select members of Congress.
In an overnight court filing, Justice Department attorneys pushed back on Trump’s former co-defendants in his classified documents case, saying their argument seeking to block the release of that portion of Smith’s report “rests entirely on conjecture.”
Last week, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — who last year dismissed the classified documents case — temporarily blocked Attorney General Merrick Garland from making the volume available to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, and on Monday set a hearing for this Friday to consider Trump’s former co-defendants’ argument that the limited release would be prejudicial to their case as the government appeals Cannon’s dismissal.
Lawyers for the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe argued in the filing that co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira have failed to show how a federal judge in Florida has the right “to intrude on the Attorney General’s prerogative to manage the Justice Department’s interactions with Congress.”
Lawyers for Nauta, a longtime Trump aide, and De Oliveira, a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago staff, have claimed that they would be harmed by leaks of the report, but prosecutors highlighted that the few members of Congress permitted to see the report would be bound by confidentiality, and would be limited to an on-camera review of the report in which they would be prohibited from taking notes.
“[T]his argument rests entirely on conjecture and disregards the options available to the Court to protect the Defendants from prejudice were this speculative chain of events to come to pass,” the filing said.
Prosecutors added that similar precautions were used successfully when members of Congress reviewed FBI reports referenced in special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. They also argued that the defense arguments about the constitutionality of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment would not impact Garland’s ability to release the report.
“The Attorney General thus has authority to decide whether to release an investigative report prepared by his subordinates,” the filing said.
The Justice Department on Tuesday released the first volume of Smith’s report covering his election interference case against Trump, after Cannon ruled that its contents have no bearing on the evidence or charges related to Nauta and De Oliveira in their ongoing case.
Trump pleaded not guilty in 2023 to 40 criminal counts related to his retention of classified materials after leaving the White House. The former president, along with Nauta and De Oliveira, pleaded not guilty in a superseding indictment to allegedly attempting to delete surveillance footage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Trump later pleaded not guilty to separate charges of undertaking a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election in an effort to subvert democracy and remain in power.
Both cases were dismissed following Trump’s reelection in November due to a longstanding Justice Department policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president.
Smith, in his final report on the Jan. 6 probe, expressed his certainty that Trump would have been convicted on multiple felonies for his alleged efforts to unlawfully overturn the results of the 2020 election, had voters not decided to send him back to the White House in 2024.
Police investigate a mass shooting that erupted on June 2, 2024, that left one man dead and 28 people injured at a large street party in Akron, Ohio. (ABC News/WEWS)
(NEW YORK) — Homicides across the United States are poised to plummet for the third straight year as 2024 winds down, driving the nation’s annual murder toll down to levels not seen since before the pandemic, according to preliminary data from cities both large and small.
Based on available crime statistics from U.S. law enforcement agencies, the year is expected to end with a nearly 16% drop in homicides nationwide and a 3.3% decline in overall violent crime, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.
The dramatic drop in homicides surpasses a 13% decline in 2023, then the largest decrease on record until now. In 2022, the number of murders across the country fell 6%, according to the FBI.
The three consecutive years of declining homicides come in the wake of 30% jump in murders between 2019 and 2020, the largest single-year increase in more than a century.
“Considering where we were just three or four years ago, we’re basically looking at 5,000 fewer murder victims than in 2020, 2021 and 2022 having occurred in 2024,” said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department.
In contrast, a dozen major U.S. cities broke annual homicide records in 2021.
Philadelphia — which recorded an all-time high of 562 homicides in 2021, 516 in 2022 and 410 last year — has seen a 40% drop in homicides in 2024.
Other major cities seeing precipitous reductions in homicides this year are New Orleans, down 38%; Washington, D.C., down 29%; Memphis, Tennessee, down 23%; Baltimore, down 24%; Kansas City, Missouri, down 20%; and Los Angeles, down 15%.
New York City, the nation’s largest city, had recorded 357 homicides through Dec. 15, a 7.3% drop from 2023, according to New York Police Department crime statistics. The city — which tallied 442 murders in 2020, a 45% jump from 2019 — has seen homicides fall 15% over the past two years.
Chicago has recorded a 7% decline in homicides as of Dec. 15, down from 603 murders at this time last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s crime data. Over the past three years, homicides in Chicago have fallen 29% after skyrocketing 55% between 2019 and 2020 to 769 murders.
Homicides this year in 63 cities with populations of more than 250,000 declined by at least 15% and murders were down at least 19% in 246 cities with populations under 250,000, Asher’s research found.
“It’s a tremendous achievement in terms of how far murder has fallen in just really two straight years,” Asher said.
Property crime plummets
In addition to violent crime falling, property crime is also poised to finish the year down 8.6% nationwide, mostly due to a 21.4% decrease in motor vehicle theft, Asher said.
“Auto thefts went up 12% last year. They’re coming down more than 20% this year,” said Asher, who added that the 2023 spike in car thefts appears to be tied to social media instruction videos on how to steal certain models of Kias and Hyundais.
Crunching the numbers
Since 2016, Asher has crunched the numbers for an end-of-the-year report on crime trends. This year, his report is based on preliminary crime statistics from 309 U.S. law enforcement agencies, the most data he has ever received.
Asher’s analysis aligns closely with data released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing murders down 14%. The Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks all shootings across the nation, shows homicides are down around 11%.
“We kind of put all those together and we see a very large decline in murder, a very large decline in gun violence happening in the U.S. in 2024 on top of what was a very large decline in murder and a very large decline in gun violence in 2023,” Asher said.
Referring to overall violent crime, Asher said, “You’re probably looking at, if not the lowest violent crime rate since 1970, certainly at or around where we were pre-pandemic.”
Besides homicide, rape was down 4.5% from 2023, robberies fell 1.1% and aggravated assaults declined 3.7%, according to Asher.
The falling numbers come amid a backdrop of high-profile violent crimes in 2024, including more than 400 mass shootings, two assassination attempts on President-elect Donald Trump and the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by 26-year-old Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, who police suspect was out to strike fear in the insurance industry.
The numbers also come just days after a 15-year-old girl allegedly carried out a shooting rampage at her Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, killing a teacher and a classmate, and injured six other students before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
The Wisconsin shooting came three months after a 14-year-old boy allegedly killed two students and two teachers, and injured nine others at his high school in Winder, Georgia, with an AR-style weapon police alleged his father gave him as a Chrismas present.
‘We have turned the tide against violent crime’
During a Dec. 10 briefing of the Justice Department’s Violence Crime Reduction Steering Committee meeting, Attorney General Merrick Garland said preliminary crime data showed significant declines in violent crime in 85 cities in 2024, including a 17.5% drop in homicides nationwide.
“Over the past two years, we have turned the tide against the violent crime that spiked during the pandemic,” Garland said.
He said the numbers build on the historic drop in homicides nationwide last year, which he said was the lowest level of violent crime in 50 years.
Merrick attributed the tumbling violent crime rate partly to the DOJ’s Violent Crime Reduction Roadmap, a one-stop-shop created to assist local jurisdictions in developing, implementing and evaluating the strategies to prevent, intervene and respond to acts of community gun violence.
President Joe Biden’s administration has also sought to curb gun violence in recent years through executive actions and signing into law in 2022 the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which enhanced background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21, allocated $750 million to help states implement “red flag laws” to remove firearms from people deemed dangerous to themselves and others.
Biden also established the in 2023 the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention to focus on ways to assist states and cities reduce the nation’s epidemic of gun violence.
Some cities such as Philadelphia have credited the work of violence interrupter programs, community-based initiatives that use peacebuilding methods to head off incidents of violence before they occur.
In Philadelphia, city leaders also pointed to a $184 million investment in gun violence initiatives in 2022, including one that attempts to identify people who are at risk of being involved in violence to provide them with mental health services or job placement. While the city also boosted the Philadelphia Police Department’s budget that year by $30 million, it instituted a violence prevention plan that emphasizes a combination of law enforcement strategies, environmental improvements and youth programs to reduce its homicide numbers.
“We need to continue pressing forward with our comprehensive approach, which is prevention, intervention and enforcement,” Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said at a Nov. 1 news conference on the city’s falling homicide numbers.
In October, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed six bills to strengthen New York’s gun laws, including one requiring gun sellers to post tobacco-style safety warnings and another that cracks down on illegal devices called “switches” that convert semiautomatic handguns into automatic weapons.
Asher said that in 2020 and 2021 when violent crime rose to alarming levels, programs such as community violence interruptors didn’t exist and the budgets of many police departments were getting slashed in the defund-the-police movement stemming from nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Asher said states and local governments, as well as philanthropies, are pumping money into programs to bring down violent crime.
“Some of that is undoubtedly contributing to what we’re seeing now,” Asher said. “I’m not naïve enough to suggest that that’s the entire explanation. There are undoubtedly a multitude of factors that help to explain this complex problem.”
ABC News’ Calvin Milliner contributed to this report.
In this screen grab from a video, a drone is shown near Bedminster, New Jersey, on Dec. 3, 2024. Obtained by ABC News
(NEW YORK) — The Pentagon shot down a congressman’s claim that an Iranian “mothership” is behind large drones spotted over New Jersey in recent weeks, while officials in the state are demanding a stronger federal response and transparency in connection with the mysterious, unexplained sightings.
Since mid-November, large drones of uncertain origin have been repeatedly spotted in the sky at night over central and northern New Jersey, including near a military installation.
State and local officials convened at a closed-door meeting Wednesday morning at the New Jersey State Police headquarters with representatives from the Department of Homeland Security to address the matter, according to several officials in attendance.
It remains unclear who is operating the drones, according to a DHS handout released by Montvale Mayor Mike Ghassali, who attended the meeting.
“At this time, according to the FBI, there are no known specific or credible threats related to these sightings,” the handout stated.
There have been reports ranging from four to 180 sightings per night, according to New Jersey Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia, who attended the meeting. The drones “operate in a coordinated manner” and have not been identified as hobbyist drones or ones related to DHS, she said.
Several officials said following the meeting that they were not assuaged by the DHS response.
Ghassali said it has only “heightened my apprehensions regarding the federal government’s approach to this critical issue.”
“The message conveyed was that there is no credible threat, yet they are flying over critical infrastructure, and their point of origin and destination remain unidentified,” he said in a statement. “They will eventually find out but for now, we don’t know anything else.”
New Jersey state Sen. Holly Schepisi called the DHS response “abysmal.”
“[It] actually made me feel less confident in our federal government’s reaction to this issue rather than more,” she said in a statement. “For the federal government to not dedicate every defense resource needed to identify the origin and purpose of these drones in the most densely populated state in the nation is inexplicable and completely unacceptable.”
Fantasia said “we know nothing” and to “state that there is no known or credible threat is incredibly misleading, and I informed all officials of that sentiment.”
Following the meeting, New Jersey state Sen. Jon Bramnick urged the Department of Defense to investigate and reiterated his call for a limited state of emergency in the state.
“The Department of Defense must investigate and until that occurs we must shut down the airspace to drones. That would require a limited state of emergency and FAA cooperation,” he said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the FBI, which is the leading agency investigating the sightings, said it is “doing all we can [to] figure out what’s going on.”
“The public can continue to call our 800 line, or submit a tip online, we are acting on every substantive lead that we get,” the FBI spokesperson said.
The Federal Aviation Administration has imposed flight restrictions over Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County and Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in Somerset County in response to the drone activity.
“Safely integrating drones into the National Airspace System is a key priority for the FAA,” the agency said in a statement earlier this month. “We look into all reports of unauthorized drone operations and investigate when appropriate.”
New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew criticized the FAA for its inability to locate the drones during a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s hearing earlier Wednesday.
“We have a serious problem with our aerospace. The recent sightings of unidentified drones in the state of New Jersey, my home state, is justifiably causing tremendous public concern,” he said.
Van Drew said the drones are “large” and “sophisticated” and alleged the presence of an “Iranian mothership” responsible for them, though he did not provide evidence to support his claims.
“I’ve learned, for real, that there is circumstantial evidence that there’s an Iranian mothership off the East Coast of the United States, and that’s launching these drone incursions,” he said.
He said he is concerned at this time with identifying his sources but said they are “individuals who are reputable, individuals who speak with authority.”
The Pentagon shot down Van Drew’s claim.
“There is not any truth to that — there is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters Wednesday.
Singh said there is no evidence the drone activity is coming from any foreign entity or is the work of an adversary.
“We’re going to continue to monitor what is happening,” she said, adding, “At no point were our installations threatened when this activity was occurring.”
Van Drew doubled down in an interview with ABC News following the Pentagon’s briefing, saying there is a “real possibility that it is a foreign entity.” He said his “well-placed” sources believe there is a possibility the drones are Iranian, and that there could be a mothership hundreds of miles off the U.S. coast.
“They say to us there’s nothing to fear, but we have no idea who it is, where it comes from, what it’s about and what it can do,” he said.
Van Drew proposed that flight restrictions be placed over the New Jersey airspace “and an order be given to neutralize any drone aircraft in violation of those restrictions” in a letter addressed to President Joe Biden on Wednesday.
“In neutralizing these drones we must ensure the safety of people on ground and should also attempt to keep the drones intact so that we may study their capabilities,” he wrote.
New Jersey Rep. Chris Smith has called on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to help identify and address the widespread drone activity over the state.
“As you no doubt are also aware, there have been numerous instances of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) flying over New Jersey, including in close proximity to sensitive sites and critical infrastructure, to include military installations located in my district,” he stated in a letter to Lloyd on Tuesday.
He noted that Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst (JBMDL) possesses the capability to identify and take down unauthorized unmanned aerial systems.
“I urgently request all capabilities possessed by the Department of Defense, especially those in use by JBMDL to be immediately deployed to identify and address the potential threats posed by UAS over the state of New Jersey,” he said.
During a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Smith said an officer saw “50 drones” coming in off the ocean earlier this week in Ocean County. He has also said that a U.S. Coast Guard commanding officer stationed in Barnegat Light reported that “between 12 and 30” drones were following a USCG motor lifeboat over the weekend.
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker has called for greater transparency from federal authorities on the unexplained drone activity in a letter on Tuesday to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
“I recognize the need to maintain operational security of ongoing investigations and that this situation requires complex interagency coordination. However, there is a growing sense of uncertainty and urgency across the state — from constituents and local officials alike — despite assurances that the drones pose no known threats to public safety,” he stated in the letter. “As such, I urge you to share any relevant information about these drone sightings with the public. Without transparency, I believe that rumors, fear, and misinformation will continue to spread.”
The public should be “immediately briefed” by federal agencies, including the FBI, FAA and DHS, on what they know, New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer said.
“I think people have a right to know what’s going on,” he told ABC News Live anchor Kayna Whitworth on Wednesday.
Gottheimer, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, noted he is “not concerned there’s any imminent threats to security” in New Jersey or D.C. based on the briefings he’s had.
“That said, you can’t just fly drones anywhere,” he said. “This can’t just be game on. We need to know who these drones belong to, where they’re coming from. And if they’re not welcome, we’ve got to take them out.”
Police in Warren County, New Jersey, have also expressed frustration at the “lack of transparency” over the drone activity.
“We are shocked by the lack of response or update from Federal and State officials,” Chief Scott D. Robb, president of the Warren County Police Chief’s Association, said in a statement Wednesday. “We do not agree with their response that there is no known threat to the public at this time. It is our stance that just the unidentified drone flying over us is a threat in itself.”
DHS said in its handout on the New Jersey drones that there have been other drone sightings “of this type” both nationally and internationally.
Biden has been briefed on the drones and is “closely tracking the activity” and “coordinating closely” with DHS and the FBI to continue investigating these incidents, the White House said Tuesday.
“This is something that DHS and FBI are tracking very, very closely,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday.
The U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) is also monitoring reports of “unauthorized drone flights in the vicinity of military installations in New Jersey,” a spokesperson said.
“Local law enforcement and the FBI are currently investigating,” the spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that at this time NORTHCOM has not been requested to assist with the events but is prepared to respond “when asked or should the situation escalate to threaten any DoD installations.”
ABC News’ Jay O’Brien, Alexandra Faul, Ayesha Ali and Matthew Seyler contributed to this report.
