UnitedHealthcare CEO killing latest: Luigi Mangione allegedly wrote about plan to ‘whack’ CEO, sources say
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(NEW YORK) — Fingerprints taken from Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, appear to match fingerprints recovered from items found near the shooting scene, law enforcement sources told ABC News.
The prints recovered from a water bottle and a cellphone were smudged, but the sources said they appear to match the prints sent from Altoona, Pennsylvania, where Mangione was arrested on Monday.
If confirmed by detectives, it would represent the first forensic tie between the murder and 26-year-old Mangione.
Mangione also allegedly had a spiral notebook detailing plans about how to eventually kill the CEO, according to law enforcement officials.
One passage allegedly said, “What do you do? You whack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention,” the officials said.
The writings said using explosives in the attack could “risk innocents,” according to the officials.
Detectives are still examining Mangione’s writings but are considering the contents of the notebook to represent a confession, sources said.
Investigators have started interviewing members of Mangione’s family, according to sources.
Mangione plans to challenge his extradition from Pennsylvania to New York, where he faces a charge of second-degree murder in connection with Thompson’s Dec. 4 shooting death outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel.
“He has constitutional rights and that’s what he’s doing” in challenging the interstate transfer, defense attorney Thomas Dickey told reporters on Tuesday.
Mangione is “taking it as well as he can,” Dickey added.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said it will seek a governor’s warrant to try to force Mangione’s extradition. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement that she’ll sign a request for the governor’s warrant “to ensure this individual is tried and held accountable.”
A judge in Pennsylvania ordered Mangione held without bail on Tuesday.
The Ivy League graduate was arrested on Monday in Altoona and charged in Pennsylvania for allegedly possessing an untraceable ghost gun.
New York police have not said whether the gun recovered in Pennsylvania is considered a match for the one used in the Midtown killing, but said it looks similar and that it would undergo ballistic testing.
Mangione’s attorney told ABC News’ “Good Morning America” on Wednesday that he had “not been made aware of any evidence that links the gun that was found on his person to the crime.”
“A lot of guns look the same,” Dickey said. “If you brought a gun in and said, ‘Well, it looks like that,’ I don’t even know if that evidence would be admissible. And if so, I would argue that it wouldn’t be given much weight.”
Dickey also cautioned that anyone speculating on the case should take the potential evidence “in its entirety,” not taking pieces of writing or other evidence “out of context.”
“People put out certain things, parts of different things,” he said. “I think any lawyer involved in this situation would want to see it all.”
Mangione plans to plead not guilty to the charges in Pennsylvania, Dickey said. Dickey said he anticipates Mangione would also plead not guilty to the second-degree murder charge in New York.
ABC News’ Sasha Pezenik, Mark Crudele, Luke Barr, Peter Charalambous and Josh Margolin contributed to this report.
EA 18-G Growler Navy Jet Fighter. Via Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — The fate of two U.S. Navy pilots remained a mystery Wednesday, a day after their fighter jet crashed during a routine training flight and search-and-rescue crews reported finding no sign of them in the rugged landscape of northeast Washington.
Wreckage of the EA-18G Growler jet was located Wednesday afternoon but the search continues for the two-person crew, military officials said in an update on Wednesday. The crash site is a mountainside east of Mount Rainier, officials said.
“Responders are facing mountainous terrain, cloudy weather, and low visibility as the search is ongoing,” Navy officials said in an earlier statement Wednesday afternoon.
The jet, from Electronic Attack Squadron 130, crashed at about 3:23 p.m. on Tuesday about 30 miles west of Yakima on the eastern side of Mount Rainier, according to the Navy.
The jet crashed after launching a training flight from Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, officials said.
An MH-60S helicopter crew was immediately launched to search for the missing airmen and wreckage, officials said. Additional rescue units from the U.S. Navy Fleet Reconnaissance Squadron One, Patrol Squadron, Naval Air Station Whidbey Island Search and Rescue and the U.S. Army 4-6 Air Calvary Squadron from Joint Base Luis-McChord in Washington were also involved in the search, officials said.
The cause of the crash is under investigation, according to the statement.
The Growler aircraft, which according to the Navy is worth about $67 million, is “the most advanced technology in airborne Electronic Attack and stands as the Navy’s first line of defense in hostile environments.”
The 130 squadron adopted the nickname “Zappers” when it was commissioned as the Carrier Early Warning Squadron 13 in 1959, the military said.
The squadron was most recently deployed to the Southern Red Sea, where it carried out seven pre-planned strikes against Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen, according to a statement.
The Zappers also carried out some 700 combat missions ” to degrade the Houthi capability to threaten innocent shipping,” according to a press release announcing the squadron’s return to Washington in July.
(WASHINGTON) — A Republican president-elect pledges support for expansive tariffs as a means of protecting U.S. businesses and hamstringing global competitors.
That description may conjure up former President Donald Trump, but it also applies to Herbert Hoover, who led the country nearly a century ago during the onset of the Great Depression.
Within months of the stock market crash, Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, a 1930 measure that increased tariffs for a broad swathe of imported goods. In response, several countries imposed retaliatory tariffs and trade plummeted. Many economists view the measure as a factor that exacerbated the nation’s economic downturn.
“A whole generation of Republicans and Democrats after World War II was very much conditioned against tariff hikes because of the experience of the 1930s. Now we have a new generation of leaders who are much more willing to pull the trigger on higher tariffs,” Douglas Irwin, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College and author of “Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression,” told ABC News.
Here’s what to know about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, its economic impact, and what its legacy means for tariffs promised by Trump, according to experts.
What is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act?
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act arrived at a moment of economic crisis.
As the stock market wobbled and financial panic took hold, Congress negotiated a set of tariff increases that initially aimed to protect U.S. farmers from foreign competition but ultimately extended to a wide range of manufactured goods.
The measure is named after its key supporters in Congress: Republican Sen. Reed Smoot of Utah and Republican Rep. Willis Hawley of Oregon. It passed the Senate by a narrow margin of 44 to 42, and sailed through the House of Representatives by a vote of 264 to 147. Hoover signed Smoot-Hawley into law in June 1930.
For products already facing tariffs, the law, on average, raised the import tax from 40% to nearly 60%, making for an increase of roughly 20 percentage points, Kris Mitchener, a professor of economics at Santa Clara University who studies Smoot-Hawley, told ABC News. It also significantly expanded the number of goods subject to a tariff, he added.
“It culminated in a more or less complete rewrite of the tariff schedule,” Mitchener said, referring to the nation’s tariff code.
What happened after Smoot-Hawley took effect, and did it cause the Great Depression?
The Smoot-Hawley tariffs set off a near-immediate trade war, in which several foreign nations responded to tariffs by slapping U.S. imports with taxes of their own.
For instance, Canada placed tariffs on 16 products that accounted for roughly a third of U.S. exports, according to a working paper co-authored by Mitchener in 2021. France and Spain both slapped taxes on imported American automobiles, a major U.S. industry.
“America’s trade partners responded by targeting U.S. exports,” Mitchener said. “The most important declines were in the products that were targeted.”
As a result, trading partners suffered reduced output, but so did the United States, Michener said.
The trade slowdown weakened the economy and exacerbated the nation’s economic downturn, experts said. However, the Great Depression had taken hold before the effects of Smoot-Hawley, ruling it out as a cause of the crisis, they added.
“Smoot-Hawley impacted the U.S. economy at a vulnerable moment,” Irwin said.
What could the legacy of Smoot-Hawley mean for Trump’s tariff proposals?
Smoot-Hawley cast a shadow over tariff policy for decades, Irwin said. “It gave tariffs a bad name,” he added.
For decades, prominent members of both major parties focused on the risks posed by tariffs, occasionally citing Smoot-Hawley, Irwin said.
“The Smoot-Hawley tariff ignited an international trade war and helped sink our country into the Great Depression,” then-president Ronald Reagan said during a radio address in 1986.
The measure also played a key role in shifting tariff authority from Congress toward the executive branch, since lawmakers sought a speedy way to roll back the tariffs, experts said.
In 1934, the Reciprocal Tariffs Act gave the president the power to increase or reduce tariff levels by up to 50%. A series of subsequent laws helped shift additional tariff authority to the president.
“Now, Congress doesn’t have much to do with setting tariffs,” Irwin said.
On the campaign trail, Trump said he could enact tariffs without support from Congress. He is largely accurate in his description of the wide latitude enjoyed by the president in setting and implementing some tariffs, experts previously told ABC News.
“Trump is using the delegated powers to pass tariffs,” Irwin said. “That’s completing the circle of Smoot-Hawley in some sense.”
(NEW YORK) — The prosecution and defense are preparing for Monday’s closing arguments in the Daniel Penny trial as it comes to a close after a break for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Penny put Jordan Neely, 30, a homeless man, in a fatal 6 minute-long chokehold after Neely boarded a subway car acting erratically.
Penny, 25, is charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the May 2023 choking death of Neely on the New York City subway. He pleaded not guilty.
Here are the key takeaways from the trial so far:
The prosecution’s argument
Prosecutors argue that Penny, a former Marine trained in martial arts, should have known that his chokehold maneuver was turning fatal, arguing that Penny held onto Neely “for far too long” — more than 5 minutes after the train pulled into the station and passengers were able to exit.
Neely entered a moderately crowded subway car on an uptown F train at the Second Avenue stop and began yelling and moving erratically, when Penny put Neely in a chokehold. Thirty seconds later, the train arrived at the next station and essentially all the passengers left the train car.
Footage of the interaction between Penny and Neely, which began about 2 minutes after the incident started, captures Penny holding Neely for about 4 minutes and 57 seconds on a relatively empty train with a couple of passengers nearby.
“He was aware of the risk his actions would kill Mr. Neely and did it anyway,” Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran said in her opening statements. “Jordan Neely took his last breaths on the dirty floor of an uptown F train.”
Prosecutors further argued that while Penny may be an “honorable veteran” and “nice young man,” he used too much force for too long and was reckless with Neely’s life because “he didn’t recognize his humanity.”
She later continued, “Under the law, deadly physical force such as a chokehold is permitted only when it is absolutely necessary and for only as long as is absolutely necessary. And here, the defendant went way too far.”
The second-degree manslaughter charge only requires prosecutors to prove Penny acted recklessly, not intentionally, according to prosecutors.
The defense’s argument
Defense attorney Thomas Kenniff countered that Penny sought to protect passengers, claiming he was responding to Neely’s “unhinged rage.”
“This is a case about a young man who did for others what we would want someone to do for us,” Kenniff said. “It doesn’t make him a hero, but it doesn’t make him a killer.”
Penny claims to have heard Neely say “I will kill,” said Kenniff, who has said there was no opportunity for his client to de-escalate or stop Neely from the harm he was threatening.
Borrowing from “a bit” of martial arts training he received in the Marine Corps, Penny put Neely into a chokehold without intending to kill him, the defense said, but to hold him until police arrived.
“His conduct was consistent with someone who values human life and that’s why he was trying to protect it so fiercely,” the defense attorney said.
Kenniff insisted his client “does not want to use any more force than is necessary,” but Neely “aggressively resisted” while in Penny’s grip. He said Penny thought Neely, who police say was unarmed, might have a weapon as he waited for police.
Daniel Penny’s interview with police
Jurors saw body camera video that had not yet been publicly released of Penny’s initial encounter with police, more than 4 minutes after he let go of Neely.
On the first day of the trial, the jury saw the officer’s body-worn camera footage that captured the attempts to save Neely and showed his lifeless body on the subway floor.
When searched for weapons, the only thing officers found in Neely’s pockets was a muffin. Nothing else was found in the jacket, Officer Teodoro Tejada confirmed.
Penny is heard saying, “I put him out,” when the officer asked what happened. To prosecutors, the footage — which had not been seen publicly until the trial — is evidence Penny disregarded Neely’s basic humanity.
The defense used Tejada’s testimony to suggest to the jury Penny did not behave like a criminal by fleeing the scene.
“Did he appear cooperative?” the lawyer asked.
“Yes,” the officer replied.
“It didn’t appear that he had anything to hide?” Kenniff asked.
“No,” Tejada said.
Video of Jordan Neely’s subway chokehold death
In a video taken by then-17-year-old high school student bystander Ivette Rosario, a witness can be heard calling out to Penny, “He’s dying…you need to let him go.” Others are heard yelling on the clip to “get the cops!”
Rosario testified that she did not hear anyone say that Neely is “dying” at the time and it’s not clear whether Penny heard it either.
Man who helped restrain Neely testifies A Bronx man who helped Penny restrain Neely ”jumped in and tried to help” so Penny could release his chokehold, according to the man’s testimony.
Eric Gonzalez, who is seen in video footage holding Neely by the wrist, boarded the subway and noticed Penny holding down Neely “with his legs around his waist and his arm around his neck.” Gonzalez testified he did not know why Penny was restraining Neely but he heard people yelling to call for the police.
Gonzalez said he waved his hands in front of Penny’s face to get his attention.
“I said, ‘I will grab his hands so you can let go,’” Gonzalez told the jury. “Just giving him a different option to hold his arm — well, to restrain him until the police came.”
Prosecutors asked Gonzalez to clarify: “If I held his arm down, he could let go of his neck,” he said.
Gonzalez said he watched Neely’s body go limp and let go of him before Penny did the same.
“I tried to shake Jordan Neely to get a response out of him, feel for a pulse, and then I walked away,” Gonzalez said.
Conflicting testimony about the cause of death
Dr. Cynthia Harris of the city’s Chief Medical Examiner’s Office conducted Neely’s autopsy in 2023 and ruled Neely’s death a homicide, with the cause of death as “Compression of neck (chokehold).”
She testified at the trial that “the consensus was unanimous” in the medical examiner’s office that Neely had died from the chokehold, according to Associated Press reporting: “There are no alternative reasonable explanations,” she said.
Forensic pathologist Satish Chundru disputed that determination in his testimony in defense of Penny, according to the AP, arguing that Neely died from “combined effects” of his schizophrenia, synthetic marijuana, a blood condition and his efforts to struggle against Penny.
“In your opinion, did Mr. Penny choke Mr. Neely to death?” defense lawyer Steven Raiser asked, according to AP.
“No,” replied Chundru.
Prosecutors argued that Chundru’s testimony departed from medical literature and his own opinion in similar cases, but Chundru testified that the cases were not comparable to this one, according to the AP.
Marine Corps instructor who trained Penny testifies
According to the AP, Joseph Caballer, the combat instructor who trained Penny, said that Penny was taught how to knock a person unconscious — but that the technique could kill someone if held too long. He argued that someone performing the technique is supposed to let go when the person is rendered unconscious, and testified that Penny used the chokehold in an “improper” manner when asked by prosecutors.
However, the defense claims Penny did not use a strong enough hold to kill Penny, the AP reports.
