Trump clemency recipient arrested for allegedly punching father-in-law
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(NEW YORK) — A Staten Island man who ran a large-scale marijuana smuggling operation and whose 10-year federal prison sentence was commuted by then-President Donald Trump has been arrested for domestic assault in Atlantic Beach.
Jonathan Braun, 41, is charged with punching his father-in-law Tuesday after the elderly man came to the assistance of Braun’s wife, whom he was chasing after an argument, according to prosecutors.
Braun pleaded not guilty. The judge released him on his own recognizance over the objection of the Nassau County District Attorney’s office, which requested bail.
At the time Trump granted Braun clemency, on his last day in office, the White House said Braun “will seek employment to support his wife and children.” Braun has assaulted his wife numerous times since his release, according to court records.
Braun also has a history of violence and threats.
At the time of his clemency, Braun still faced investigations related to his role in an operation that made predatory loans to small-business owners.
According to a lawsuit by the New York attorney general’s office, Braun called business owners and insulted, swore at and bullied them, demanding payment and making threats.
“You have no idea what I’m going to do,” the lawsuit quoted Braun as allegedly saying. “I will take your daughters from you.”
Braun also threatened that he would come to one merchant’s synagogue in Brooklyn and physically beat him and “publicly embarrass him,” stating, “I am going to make you bleed.”
He threatened another, “Be thankful you’re not in New York, because your family would find you floating in the Hudson,” according to the lawsuit.
Braun was granted clemency, along with dozens of others, on Jan. 19, 2021, his last day in office before Joe Biden took over as president.
(WASHINGTON) — House Republicans on Monday released the results of a sweeping three-year investigation they say is the most detailed public accounting yet of the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that left behind hundreds of Americans and thousands of allies, some so desperate they clung to U.S. planes as the last military aircraft departed Kabul in 2021.
The report by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul — which relied on interviews with 18 top officials and 20,000 pages of documents — blames the White House, its National Security Council and the State Department for being slow to listen to military generals who warned the security situation would deteriorate quickly once U.S. troops began to depart.
The investigation did not, however, find evidence that Vice President Kamala Harris played any role in the planning or execution of the evacuation, although she expressed public support for President Joe Biden’s decision at the time.
Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have suggested Harris is culpable, noting past comments by the vice president that she was the “last person in the room” when Biden decided to leave Afghanistan.
“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump told National Guard members and their families in Detroit last month on the anniversary of the 2021 suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport during the evacuation, which killed 13 U.S. service members and some 170 Afghans.
The Biden administration pushed back on the findings by Republicans, calling it a partisan effort that sought to cherry-pick facts ahead of an election.
The Republican probe also is being released ahead of the first political debate between Harris and Trump, which ABC News is hosting on Tuesday night in Philadelphia. Trump and GOP loyalists are expected to hammer the Democratic administration for failing to prepare for a Taliban takeover once U.S. troops began to depart.
“The chaos and devastation that took place in August of 2021 has forever damaged U.S. credibility in the eyes of our allies, while emboldening our adversaries like China, Russia and Iran,” said McCaul, R-Texas. “Yet, not a single person was fired and, to this day, no one was ever held accountable by President Biden or Vice President Harris.”
Last week, McCaul issued a subpoena for Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s testimony on the withdrawal, threatening to hold him in contempt if he doesn’t testify on Sept. 19. In a written statement, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller noted that Blinken has already testified on Afghanistan and the State Department provided the 20,000 pages of documents the committee was relying on to inform its investigation.
“Though the secretary is currently unavailable to testify on dates proposed by the committee, the State Department has proposed reasonable alternatives to comply with Chairman McCaul’s request for a public hearing,” Miller said. “It is disappointing that instead of continuing to engage with the Department in good faith, the committee instead has issued yet another unnecessary subpoena.”
On the investigation, Miller accused Republicans of politicizing the war and “presenting inaccurate narratives.”
“The State Department remains immensely proud of its workforce who put themselves forward in the waning days of our presence in Afghanistan to evacuate both Americans and the brave Afghans who stood by our sides for more than two decades,” he said.
While many of the details included in the Republican investigation have already become public through media reports and internal government reviews, among the more interesting details come from inside-the-room accounts of U.S. Embassy personnel.
At one point, according to Republicans, staff grew so panicked at the rushed evacuation that they began filling Tupperware containers with passports and visa foils to burn as Taliban forces arrived outside their building. Classified documents were eventually left behind in the scramble, according to the report, although the report doesn’t say how many or what type.
Meanwhile, the NSC was slow to establish criteria for who was eligible for evacuation, a standard the report says changed hourly. At one point, electronic visa letters known as “hall passes” were given to eligible Afghans, but the documents were so easily replicated that bootleg copies began circulating and the U.S. quickly scrapped the plan, according to the report.
The report also paints a picture of a State Department and NSC slow to understand the danger U.S. personnel were in as the Afghanistan government collapsed and the Taliban took control.
Ambassador Ross Wilson, who was brought out of retirement in the Trump administration to serve in Afghanistan and was the top American diplomat in Kabul at the time of the withdrawal, was allegedly reluctant to trigger a military-led evacuation, according to the report. Wilson has spoken publicly before that his staff worked feverishly in those final days to try to process as many travel documents as possible to help qualified people evacuate.
Biden has defended the State Department’s handling of the evacuation in the wake of the operation.
“In the 17 days that we operated in Kabul after the Taliban seized power, we engaged in an around-the-clock effort to provide every American the opportunity to leave. Our State Department was working 24/7 contacting and talking, and in some cases, walking Americans into the airport,” Biden said in 2021 in the wake of the withdrawal.
Biden and other Democrats have also defended the decision to pull out U.S. troops and shutter the embassy after 20 years in the country, saying their options were limited after Trump struck a deal with the Taliban to depart by May 1, 2021.
Trump’s agreement with the Taliban included the departure of U.S. troops and the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters from Afghan prisons so long as the Taliban promised not to collaborate with al-Qaeda or engage in “high-profile” attacks.
Wanting to bring an end to the war and concerned that Taliban fighters might target American service members if the U.S. reneged on the deal, the Biden administration stayed the course but amended the U.S. withdrawal deadline to Aug. 31, 2021.
“He could either ramp up the war against a Taliban that was at its strongest position in 20 years and put even more American troops at risk or finally end our longest war after two decades and $2 trillion spent,” said Sharon Yang, the White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations. “The President refused to send another generation of Americans to fight a war that should have ended long ago.”
Military generals in charge at the time have previously testified that their recommendation to Biden earlier that year was to maintain some 2,500 troops beyond that date regardless of what Trump had agreed to.
“At the end of 20 years, we the military helped build an army, a state, but we could not forge a nation. The enemy occupied Kabul, the overthrow of the government occurred and the military we supported for two decades faded away,” Gen. Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the withdrawal, testified last March.
“That is a strategic failure,” he said.
ABC News’ Emily Chang, Matthew Seyler and Shannon Kingston contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — A California man convicted of carrying out some of the most extended and brutal assaults against police during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was sentenced to 20 years in prison Friday.
The 20-year prison term for David Dempsey, handed down by senior D.C. District Judge Royce Lamberth, marks the second longest sentence yet for a defendant convicted in connection with the Capitol assault.
With several of Dempsey’s victims from the Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police in attendance in the courtroom during the trial, prosecutors played multiple videos showing Dempsey at one of the most violent exchanges of the riot near the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol — repeatedly striking, kicking, and throwing object after object at the police line trying to prevent the pro-Trump mob from swarming into the building.
In one video clip, Dempsey repeatedly swung a stolen metal crutch down onto an officer’s helmet, cracking the face shield.
One officer who Dempsey struck testified that he believed he was going to die and that his thoughts began drifting to his family.
Judge Lamberth described Dempsey’s offenses as “exceptionally egregious” before handing down the sentence, which he said was further warranted due to Dempsey’s lengthy criminal history and past instances where he had attacked political opponents during protests in 2019 and 2020.
The judge, a Reagan appointee, said that “fortunately” Dempsey’s efforts to break through the police line were not fruitful, as it would likely have resulted in a “bloodbath” for lawmakers sheltering inside the building.
“David Dempsey is political violence personified,” a prosecutor said in making the case for Dempsey’s harsh sentence.
Prior to receiving his sentence, Dempsey addressed the court and spoke of his “profound sense of regret” for his actions, issuing a personal apology to the police gathered in the room.
After receiving the sentence, however, Dempsey — as he was escorted out by the bailiff — made a hand sign in the air that is commonly associated with “white power” or the white supremacist Groyper movement.
Federal prosecutors have charged more than 1,265 defendants and secured prison sentences for more than 460 people involved in the Capitol attack, according to figures released early this year by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C.
(NEW YORK) — A prominent Latino voting organization is calling on the Justice Department to investigate a series of raids held across Texas last week as part an ongoing election fraud investigation led by the state’s controversial attorney general, Ken Paxton.
The raids targeted prominent Democrats and election volunteers — including some in their late 80s — according to a spokesperson for the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, at a press conference on Monday.
Investigators allegedly confiscated cellphones, computers, and other records, according to LULAC officials.
“I call upon the appropriate federal authorities to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the factors that led Texas Attorney [General] Ken Paxton to order these armed raids,” Lupe Torres, a LULAC leader, said.
Among those targeted in the raids was Lydia Martinez, an 80-year-old retired teacher who lives in San Antonio, who “was removed from her home in her night gown and made to wait outside in full view of her neighbors and the general public, causing great humiliation and discomfort,” said LULAC president Roman Palomares at the Monday press conference.
“Lydia’s devices, personal calendar, and voter registration materials were confiscated, and she was coerced into providing her passwords under the threat of delayed return of her property,” LULAC said in its letter to the Justice Department.
Speaking to ABC News on Tuesday, LULAC CEO Juan Proaño called the raids “baseless.”
“There’s no merit to it at all. There’s no evidence that was actually provided, even to the judge when they received these warrants. They’re baseless,” Proaño said of the allegations. “We know for a fact, certainly as it relates to our members, that there is nothing at all to substantiate any voter harvesting, any voter fraud at all.”
Paxton said in a statement last week that his office had uncovered “sufficient evidence” of election fraud to justify the search warrants executed during the raids. A county prosecutor outside San Antonio referred the alleged “election fraud and vote harvesting” to the attorney general’s office in 2022, according to Paxton’s statement.
The raids also coincided with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement this week that the state, since 2021, had purged more than a million people from the state’s voter rolls, including nearly half a million deceased people and over 6,500 noncitizens. State election officials frequently update voter rolls to remove deceased individuals or those who have moved out of the state.
Proãno told ABC News that the small fraction of noncitizens make up only half of a percentage point of the registrants removed, which he believes is proof that widespread voter fraud among noncitizens is not a systemic issue in the state of Texas.
“It’s almost half a percent. We’re not saying that it doesn’t exist. We’re not saying that there are folks that are not U.S. citizens who are registered. Sometimes they register by accident. Sometimes they get bad information and they do register. But there is not systemic voter harvesting going on there, not systemic voter fraud,” Proãno said on ABC News Live with Kyra Phillips.
Abbott said his office had referred “any potential illegal voting” activity to Paxton’s office for investigation.
A Justice Department spokesperson told ABC News it had received a letter from LULAC, but would not comment on whether they plan to take any investigative steps.
Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
