‘Wake-up call’: LGBTQ crisis hotlines see surge of calls amid presidential election

(MOSCOW, Idaho) — The University of Idaho quadruple murder suspect, Bryan Kohberger, will stand trial in the capital city of Boise, Idaho, according to a new ruling from Idaho’s Supreme Court.

With this new venue, a new judge, District Judge Steven Hippler, has been assigned to the case.

The original judge on the case ruled Monday that the case would be moved out of Latah County, where the crime took place, agreeing with the defense who argued that Latah County was tainted by pretrial publicity.

Defense lawyers surveyed Latah County residents and said their results found the “pressure to convict” Kohberger was shown to be “so severe” that the venue couldn’t be impartial.

The defense said one respondent answered they would “burn the courthouse down” if he were not convicted. The same survey, according to the defense, found “much less emotional” responses from people living closer to Boise, which is about 300 miles south of Moscow.

The prosecution has said the case has national and international interest, and that the case has been covered plenty in Boise, so a change of venue would not solve any problem.

The relatives of victim Kaylee Goncalves didn’t want the venue changed, saying they “felt that a fair and impartial jury could be found in Latah County,” and they believed keeping the trial locally would help the community heal.

Kohberger is accused of fatally stabbing four University of Idaho students in an off-campus house in the early hours of Nov. 13, 2022.

Kohberger, a criminology Ph.D. student at nearby Washington State University at the time of the crime, was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. A not guilty plea was entered on his behalf.

The trial is set to begin on June 2, 2025.

If convicted, Kohberger could face the death penalty.

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(WASHINGTON) — A Secret Service agent tasked with protecting former President Barack Obama knowingly and repeatedly breached his duties while trying to woo a love interest — and living a double life, according to a new memoir by the agent’s former girlfriend.

In “Undercover Heartbreak: a Memoir of Trust and Trauma,” Koryeah Dwanyen describes a series of potential security lapses, including a time when she said she was invited to join the senior agent at the Obamas’ beachfront property in Hawaii in 2022 while they were away.

He had already sent her “several photos” of the house a week earlier, and suggested a tour, according to the book.

“No one will know. If anything, I’m the one who could get in trouble,” says the agent in the memoir, where he is given the pseudonym “Dale.”

He then tried to get her to fool around in the first lady’s bathroom, according to Dwanyen.

“We should have sex in Michelle [Obama]’s bathroom, like a mile-high club,” Dwanyen claims he said.

The senior agent’s alleged violations of fundamental regulations prompted an internal investigation by the Secret Service.

The self-published memoir was released on Oct. 28, adding another reputational shiner to the agency after a major security lapse in the summer led to calls for operational reform.

The Secret Service had faced intense scrutiny since a gunman attempted to assassinate Donald Trump while the former president campaigned at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. That incident, which prompted the ouster of the agency’s director, was called a “historic security failure by the Secret Service” in an independent review by the Department of Homeland Security.

“The U.S. Secret Service’s top priority is ensuring the safety and security of our protectees, and any actions that compromise this commitment are addressed with the utmost seriousness,” Anthony Guglielmi, the agency’s chief of communications, told ABC News.

Guglielmi confirmed that an incident matching the book’s Hawaii anecdote had occurred – and that upon finding out, a probe was launched and the agent involved was ultimately fired.

“On Nov. 6, 2022, a Secret Service agent involved in protective functions brought an individual who did not have authorized access into a protectee’s residence without permission,” Guglielmi said. “As soon as the Secret Service became aware of the incident, the agent involved was immediately suspended and after a full investigation, terminated.”

“Although the protectees were not present at the time of the incident, these actions were an unacceptable violation of our protocols, our protectees’ trust and everything we stand for,” he continued.

The former agent and prominent character in the book did not respond to requests for comment from ABC News.

According to her memoir, Dwanyen first met the Secret Service agent while he was assigned to the security detail of the Obama family and while she was vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard in 2022.

He said that he was divorced and had been for nearly a decade, Dwanyen said.

As their relationship developed, the author said, so did her concerns about the man that she had fallen for. She would later come to find out that the agent was still married, according to the book.

“There were major red flags — breaches of trust and of his job,” the author said in a phone interview with ABC News. “One of my friends has joked, ‘You were a walking national security risk.’”

Finally, Dwanyen said, she sent an email to his boss outlining her fears related to the agent’s safety — as well as his family’s and her own.

She wrote that, by then, she had met the agent’s boss “several times” in Hawaii, and she explained that she had his “direct contact information” from emails that the agent had shared with her.

The agent’s boss immediately set up an exhaustive interview with agents in the Inspection Division of the Secret Service’s Office of Professional Responsibility, Dwanyen told ABC. The meeting would last “nearly four hours,” she wrote in her book.

“They realized that not only had ‘Dale’ shared photos of the Obamas’ house, but he had also brought me there,” Dwanyen wrote. She “showed them photos on my phone to corroborate what I was saying,” scrolling through “pictures of Alicia Keys’ house, Steven Spielberg’s boats, Melinda Gates, Tyler Perry and Amal Clooney.”

“He was really oversharing,” Dwanyen recalled one of the agents saying.

The agent told her “personal tidbits he should not have,” Dwanyen said on the phone with ABC News. Those “tidbits” he shared spanned across protectees, she said: ranging from information about background on Mike Pence — whom the agent had been assigned to during his vice presidency under Trump — to details about the Obamas.

“I knew their code names. I knew what day Orange Theory was, what day [Michelle Obama] had private tennis lessons and when her personal trainer came,” Dwanyen said. “Things that I should not have been privy to as a civilian.”

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(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.

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