WASHINGTON — Less than a week before eight people — including six Asian women — were killed in the Atlanta-area shootings congressional Democrats introduced legislation that would bolster the Department of Justice’s ability to address COVID-19 hate crimes.
The bill, introduced by U.S. Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), has been co-sponsored by more than 60 lawmakers and on Friday was endorsed by President Biden, who condemned the “ongoing crisis of gender-based and anti-Asian violence” and urged Congress to “swiftly pass the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act.”
“It’s time for Congress to codify and expand upon these actions — because every person in our nation deserves to live their lives with safety, dignity and respect,” Biden said.
The bill would require at least one Department of Justice employee to facilitate fast reviews of federal, state and local COVID-19 hate crimes for at least a year, according to a draft provided by a Hirono spokeswoman.
It would also require the department to issue guidance to state and local law enforcement agencies on how to establish an online hate crime reporting system in multiple languages.
The system would “allow more victims to come forward,” A.B. Cruz III, president of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Assn., said in a statement.
The bill would also require Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to work with the COVID–19 Health Equity Task Force and advocates to give guidance on how to discuss the pandemic without using incendiary language.
The bill would not drastically change the legal landscape as it relates to hate crimes but would spotlight how it intersects with COVID-19, said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University College of Law.
Since virus-fueled lockdowns went into effect last March, thousands of Asian Americans have reported having faced racist verbal and physical attacks or have been shunned by others, according to a report by Stop AAPI Hate. The group, whose acronym stands for Asian American and Pacific Islander, received reports of 3,795 incidents over the last year, with 68.1% involving verbal harassment and 11.1% involving physical assaults.
Among the incidents, Asian Americans reported being punched while riding the subway in Washington, taunted with racial slurs in New York and coughed on while being blamed for the novel coronavirus in Dallas.
Then-President Trump last year said little to discourage the attacks but often used racist language to describe the deadly virus, calling it “kung flu” and the “China virus,” even after being warned that his rhetoric was incendiary. Meng said many Republican lawmakers “trafficked racist, bigoted terms to describe COVID-19.”
“In doing so, their language stoked people’s fears and created an atmosphere of intolerance and violence, which persists even today,” Meng said.
The bill would define COVID-19 hate crimes as violent offenses motivated by the real or perceived relationship to the spread of the coronavirus and the real or perceived background of a person, including their ethnicity and national origin.
Kreis said it’s unclear how adding a COVID-19 distinction to a federal hate crime would benefit existing law. The law, in practice, draws connections between current events and discrimination. For example, the law can already be used to prosecute crimes against LGBTQ people whose attackers express anti-HIV/AIDS sentiments, he said.
Kreis said that though anti-Asian slurs are seen as an expression of hate by the American public and, by extension, juries, anti-Asian imagery is not as noticeable in American society. This often requires prosecutors to handhold juries to connect the dots to understand what hate crimes against Asian Americans look like, he said.
“We need a lot more cultural competency in the ways in which anti-Asian stereotypes can manifest,” Kreis said. “That’s a hard endeavor we as a society need to tackle.”
Times staff writer Chris Megerian contributed to this report.
In June of last year, 66-year-old Walter and one of his holding companies, TWG Global, purchased a controlling interest in the Lakers for $10 billion, only to sell the franchise to Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger for $12.5 billion this month.
Since then, questions have swirled about whether Walter will put other assets on the market in his fundraising bid, including the Dodgers, which he purchased as chief executive of Chicago investment firm Guggenheim Partners for $2.15 billion in 2012. Sources close to Walter say he’s not likely to sell.
To better understand this tangled story, we spoke with Times sports reporter Steve Henson about why he thinks Walter won’t put the Dodgers up for sale.
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These dealings are “between entities with business or personal ties, including loans, sales and other transactions that can have legitimate reasons but pose potential conflicts of interest and typically require extra scrutiny,” Darmiento wrote.
More than $1 billion in financing to buy the Dodgers in 2012 came from insurance companies managed by Guggenheim Partners. The purchase was later vetted by state insurance regulators.
More on the related-party transactions
Investigators are checking whether billions of dollars’ worth of similar loans made by Walter’s companies were properly disclosed and that insurance companies were not over-leveraged.
Approximately $21 billion in loans not disclosed to state insurance regulators were made by two Delaware insurers Walter owns, according to ratings agency Fitch. The loans reportedly were made to companies with ties to Walter or his TWG Global holdings company.
The issue with these loans is they raise suspicions, according to Bruce Dubinsky, a forensic accountant who spoke with Darmiento. Dubinsky worked on the Enron and Madoff cases.
Dubinsky said that from an audit standpoint, these types of transactions “are always more suspect to fraud” and manipulation since repayments can be delayed indefinitely.
The insurance industry’s tight regulations for money collected from premiums exists so that money is available for future claims. Regulators believe related-party transaction are a threat to that guarantee.
Henson reported that Walter owns a broad series of sports interests: English soccer Premier League team Chelsea, the Los Angeles Sparks WNBA team, the Cadillac Formula 1 racing team; a premier women’s tennis competition, the Billie Jean King Cup, and the entire Professional Women’s Hockey League.
He already sold the Lakers and Henson noted that there have been reports he’s putting his shares of Chelsea on the market.
So, why keep the Dodgers?
“No MLB team has ever been run as boldly as this team,” Henson said. “And the revenue from the Dodgers is relentless, from ticket sales, to international merchandise and including friendly [player] salary deferments that help keep money in-house.”
Since Walter and Co.’s takeover, the Dodgers have won three of the last six World Series and 12 division titles after he and partners rescued the franchise from bankruptcy.
Walter noted that a sale of the Lakers, a franchise he’d barely owned for more than a year, was easier than one he’s already helmed for nearly 15 years.
“His identity is totally wrapped up with the Dodgers and this success saga,” Henson said. “It’s dear to his heart and having them to sell them would just tear him up.”
Amid all of this speculation, the boys in blue are attempting to become the first National League team (and third overall) to win three consecutive World Series titles this year.
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Today’s recipe
The San Juan Islands off Washington state has a much-loved clam chowder served at La Conner Brewing Co. in the tiny picturesque town of La Conner, Wash. The dish is spicy enough and not so thick with cream or flour and is a standout in the clam chowder world, according to Times reader Mary Ann Mollenkamp.
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Lawrence Mayor Brian DePena, 61, was charged with wire fraud and money laundering for allegedly using $1.,5 million in COVID loans for small businesses to fund his campaign, pay personal taxes and pay off other loans. DePena applied for pandemic relief loans in 2020 and 2021 to support Tenares Tire Services, an auto shop he owned in Lawrence. Photo courtesy of U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts
Aug. 14 (UPI) — A Massachusetts mayor was arrested Friday on charges of fraudulently obtaining more than $1.5 million in COVID loans for small businesses, federal prosecutors said.
Lawrence Mayor Brian DePena, 61, was charged with wire fraud and money laundering for allegedly using the loans to fund his campaign, pay personal taxes and pay off other loans.
DePena applied for pandemic relief loans in 2020 and 2021 to support Tenares Tire Services, an auto shop he owned in Lawrence.
Prosecutors say he used nearly $900,000 of the loans to pay off mortgages, $85,000 for personal tax debts and at least $130,000 to fund his campaign.
“This was emergency financial assistance meant to be a safety net for struggling businesses, not Mr. Depena’s own personal ATM,” said Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, in a statement.
DePena was first elected mayor of Lawrence in 2021 and was reelected last November.
If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison for each charge.
“Mayor DePena was elected to be a leader for the City of Lawrence,” U.S. Attorney Leah Foley said in a statement. “He was looked up to and trusted by his constituents, but he betrayed that trust through his alleged corruption and lies,”
Washington, DC – A Senate committee hearing this week has once again shone a spotlight on the political divisions over the United States government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wednesday’s hearing, held by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, continued years of criticism, mainly from Republicans, against immunologist Anthony Fauci, who led the government’s response to the pandemic.
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Spearheaded by committee chair Rand Paul, several Republicans rehashed claims that the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, emerged from an infectious disease lab in Wuhan, China, and did not naturally transfer from animals to humans.
Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the hearing was a reflection of the deep, enduring partisan divides over the issue.
But he added that the meeting with Fauci did little to shed new light on the pandemic after years of investigation, hearings and political posturing.
“There’s no space for any civil discussion around any of these issues. There’s no desire really,” Morrison told Al Jazeera.
“So, what’s the lasting impact of this? I mean, it continues to impose unconscionable pain and suffering on [Fauci] and his family. It doesn’t advance the debate one inch on the whole question of COVID origins and what was past US policy and what should US policy be going forward.”
Wuhan lab leak theory
Wednesday’s hearing was based largely on a previous 520-page report from 2024, created by the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
That report claimed it was likely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese research facility. Senator Paul has embraced this viewpoint, as has President Donald Trump.
In April of last year, shortly after Trump took office for his second term, the White House launched a webpage purporting to reveal “the true origins of COVID-19”, largely based on the report.
The site highlighted several claims that experts say pave over the nuanced scientific debate about the origins of the virus.
Drawing on the 2024 report, the White House asserts that SARS-CoV-2 “possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature” and that “data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans”, setting it apart from previous natural pandemics.
Joel Wertheim, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego, told Factcheck.org that both claims were false.
Senator Rand Paul questions Anthony Fauci during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on Wednesday [AFP]
While COVID does contain a characteristic to enter cells that is not found in its closest coronavirus relatives, that quality does exist in other coronaviruses more broadly. As Wertheim put it, “It is most certainly found in nature.”
Meanwhile, a pair of studies released in 2022 found at least two unique paths through which initial human infection occurred, contradicting the White House’s claim that the pandemic arose from a “single introduction into humans”.
The White House webpage also focuses on Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until 2022 and served as the chief medical adviser to former US President Joe Biden, Trump’s election rival.
Biden pre-emptively pardoned him in January 2025, fearing the physician might be arrested under the second Trump administration.
Ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, Trump took the opportunity to renew his derision of Fauci, writing on Truth Social that the medical expert’s “ideas were CRAZY”.
Trump also accused Fauci, without evidence, of orchestrating a cover-up for China, where COVID was first documented. The Republican leader was serving his first term as president when the pandemic began.
Ongoing debate
To be sure, there has been criticism from within the international scientific community that the lab leak theory was discounted too swiftly in the early days of the pandemic, as it became seen as political.
Trump and other world leaders had been quick to use anti-China rhetoric when discussing the virus.
There currently remains no conclusive evidence proving either the lab leak theory or that the virus had a natural origin. The vast majority of infectious disease scientists, including Fauci, have said neither possibility can be ruled out.
Still, a preponderance of experts say evidence indicates that the virus was most likely transferred from an animal, likely a bat, to humans, in a process called zoonotic spillover.
A 2024 survey of virologists and other scientists, conducted by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI), found most respondents believed natural transmission was considerably more likely than a lab leak, although most acknowledged it was impossible to definitively dismiss the theory.
Following three years of research, a World Health Organization (WHO) advisory board released a report in 2025 that also concluded “the weight of available evidence … suggests zoonotic spillover”.
Still, WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cautioned, “As things stand, all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and lab leak.”
Inside Fauci’s diary
Fauci has long argued the scientific evidence indicates that the virus emerged from natural animal transmission, but he has repeatedly rejected the notion that he has outright dismissed the lab leak theory.
In a 2024 letter to the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, his lawyers maintained (PDF) it was “completely wrong” to say that Fauci had ever called the possibility a “conspiracy theory”.
Instead, they said Fauci and his allies rejected an array of conspiracy theories that have been tied to the lab leak theory, including the idea that he had “sneaked unnoticed into the CIA headquarters to try to convince CIA officials to debunk the lab leak theory”.
Wednesday’s hearing was preceded by the release of entries from Fauci’s private diary, stored on a government computer drive.
They were obtained through Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic and Fauci critic, who passed them along to Senator Paul.
In one entry, Fauci described a claim that he “deliberately” worked with the Chinese to create the virus as a “way-out conspiracy theory”.
He and his legal team have also repeatedly rejected Republican claims that he leveraged millions in grant money to compel scientists to change their views about COVID’s origins.
The White House website, for instance, asserts that Fauci “prompted” an early study on COVID origins to downplay the lab leak theory. No evidence has been presented to support those claims, which have also been rejected by the scientists involved.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, talks with President Donald Trump in March 2020 [Evan Vucci/AP Photo]
Did Fauci mislead?
On Wednesday, several Senate Republicans charged that Fauci’s diary entries showed he had intentionally misled the public by downplaying the possibility the virus had emerged from the Wuhan lab.
Fauci’s supporters, however, have said the diary fails to prove any deliberate attempt to mislead. They argue his public and private statements were consistent in the early days of the pandemic, when scientists’ understanding of the virus was shifting daily.
Fauci’s diary entries indicated he met with a group of experts in February 2020, noting “there was not total agreement” on the likelihood the virus had been created via human manipulation. Senator Paul and others said Fauci did not adequately reflect that view in his public statements.
Republicans also seized on a January 26, 2020, entry in which Fauci wrote that initial data suggests “the first infection was in early December and was not connected” to the wet market in Wuhan.
“Now we know the market was not the source but the amplifier,” he wrote.
During the hearing, Senator Paul said the diary revealed that Fauci was “repeatedly saying in public something different than what he believes in private”.
Fauci’s defenders have pointed to a USA Today interview he gave shortly after the diary entry, floating the idea that the market could have been an “amplifier”. Others have argued the diary entries do not contradict the view that the virus was of natural origins.
Public restrictions
Republicans on Wednesday also focused heavily on Fauci’s role in issuing public guidance about how to slow the spread of the COVID virus.
Several states saw schools close and businesses shutter amid social-distancing recommendations.
But those closures became a political lightning rod and featured prominently in the 2020 presidential elections and 2022 midterm races.
Indeed, new studies have cast doubt on the effectiveness of social distancing rules. Others indicate mask mandates may have been less effective than previously presented, although research still generally supports that masks may slow the spread of the disease.
As NIAID director, Fauci had no direct authority to impose public health mandates, which were typically introduced by state and local officials. While he had a role in issuing federal guidance, his work was part of a wider government effort involving other agencies and officials.
Speaking on Wednesday, Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the Senate panel, accused Republicans of “relitigating history” and seeking to “turn one person into a scapegoat for a crisis that hundreds of officials across the Biden and Trump administrations were responsible for handling”.
Still, Fauci’s diary does contain uncomfortable revelations about how he wielded his high-profile position. In one instance, he recounted how he offered then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio encouragement to close city schools. He did the same with an aide to California Governor Gavin Newsom.
“I advised De Blasio to go ahead and do it,” he recounted. “I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC… He said that he would base this on my recommendation.”
Why now?
During the Wednesday hearing, Fauci invoked his constitutional right to remain silent roughly 100 times, drawing significant public scrutiny.
The 85-year-old Fauci, who enjoyed bipartisan support as NIAID director throughout much of his 38 years in the role, decried the hearing as an attempt to entrap him with perjury.
Critics, including several Democrats on the committee, have also questioned the timing of Wednesday’s hearing, which comes just three months before November’s midterm elections.
Republicans are expected to face an uphill battle in maintaining control of the House of Representatives, and they also risk losing their slim control of the Senate in the vote. A defeat in either chamber would serve as a major setback to Trump in his final two years in office.
The party has struggled to find a defining issue to campaign on, amid affordability woes fuelled by the ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran.
The hearing also comes at a time when polls have shown public trust in federal health agencies has plummeted since Trump took office.
For instance, a June poll conducted by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation’s Public Health Listening Lab suggests that just 50 percent of respondents said they trusted recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
That marks a decline from 77 percent in the spring of 2025.
About 69 percent also felt that federal health agencies’ recommendations were too influenced by their leaders’ public opinions.
But Morrison, the health policy expert, saw the hearing as a personal attack on Fauci, with Senator Paul and Secretary Kennedy pursuing an ideological “vendetta”.
Fauci, he said, has come to represent for some Republicans the “iconic embodiment of everything that they have come to believe is craven and corrupt in the US government response” to COVID.
He warned that their approach, though, could chill any desire for top scientists to wade into government.
“People will say Tony Fauci could have done things a little differently, he made a few mistakes, and he could have admitted those,” Morrison said.
“But the ‘big but’ is certainly none of that warrants what’s happening here.”
