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July 24 (UPI) — A prominent Supreme Court litigator in Maryland has been sentenced to six years in federal prison for tax evasion and mortgage fraud, prosecutors said Friday.

Thomas Goldstein, who argued some 40 cases in front of the nation’s highest court, was found guilty of eight felonies in a February trial.

Prosecutors say Goldstein, an avid poker player, funneled millions from his law firm to cover gambling debts — and lied to IRS agents to hide them.

“His motivation was singular: pure, unrelenting greed,” prosecutors wrote in court documents. “Whether funneling gambling income through offshore bank accounts, shaving millions off his true law firm income, or lying to his lenders, Goldstein’s crimes always sought to advance and maintain his exorbitant lifestyle, replete with Bentleys, globe-trotting vacations, and a $200,000 watch.”

Goldstein also submitted fraudulent mortgage applications to two lenders, omitting “millions of dollars of liabilities, including more than $14 million he owed for poker-related debts, as well as taxes he owed the IRS,” officials said.

He was approved for a $1.98 million mortgage.

Goldstein, 56, cofounded the widely-popular SCOTUSblog, which follows the Supreme Court.

His trial featured an appearance by Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire, who testified Goldstein assisted him in recovering a gambling debt from a billionaire.

Goldstein was ordered to serve six years in prison, five years probation and pay more than $3.1 million in restitution.

“Thomas Goldstein built a distinguished legal career arguing that the rule of law matters,” said Kelly O. Hayes, the U.S. attorney in Maryland, in a statement. “Yet, as the evidence at trial showed, he repeatedly chose to violate that very principle for his own financial benefit.”

Wilfredo Engalla, a 51-year-old Filipino immigrant, alleged in a medical malpractice case that Kaiser doctors misdiagnosed him with colds and allergies for years before eventually informing him he had terminal lung cancer.

He died before his complaint could be heard by an arbitrator, which his Kaiser policy required. His case prompted a withering rebuke from the California Supreme Court, which said Kaiser’s system of arbitrating legal disputes was subject to long delays and unfair to its members. The year was 1997.

Nearly three decades after the landmark decision, the HMO giant — which made a series of sweeping reforms after the ruling — is once again facing questions over whether its arbitration system is stacked against the interests of its members.

Plaintiffs attorneys, legislators and patients say Kaiser’s private and confidential process for arbitrating legal disputes over medical care still has key flaws that favor Kaiser over patients bringing malpractice cases. The company insures about 25% of Californians, including some employees of the Los Angeles Times.

“Kaiser has really lost its way,” said Assemblyman Robert Garcia (D-Rancho Cucamonga). Garcia, who is a longtime Kaiser member, recently introduced a bill to require the California attorney general to oversee arbitrations mandated by any health plan.

Kaiser defended its arbitration system, saying in a statement that it was fair for both patients and the nonprofit.

Many companies and other organizations, including some hospitals, HMOs and physician groups, require their customers or patients to take their complaints to private arbitration rather than to court.

But unlike most other companies, which send claims to large arbitration firms, Kaiser created its own system back in 1971.

Under Kaiser’s system, once a neutral arbitrator is selected, either party can opt to disqualify that person without cause. There is no limit on the number of disqualifications.

Although the health plan designed the system to be fair, patients and their lawyers have alleged that in reality Kaiser’s greater knowledge of arbitrators’ past rulings and its ability to veto arbitrators give it an advantage to pick favorable judges.

Critics such as Arlan Cohen, a physician and attorney who has brought more than two dozen cases against the health plan, say the system also provides a financial incentive to arbitrators to rule in Kaiser’s favor in order to be selected for future cases.

While Kaiser has access to all the decisions made by arbitrators in its system, the patient’s family gets a more limited disclosure of an arbitrator’s history of cases, lawyers say, adding that it’s not easy to see which arbitrators have ruled frequently for Kaiser.

Kaiser said it disagreed that the system allowed it to select favored arbitrators.

“The appointment process is not influenced by whether the arbitrator has ruled for or against KP or has a record of ruling against Kaiser Permanente,” its statement said.

“As required by law, both parties receive information about potential arbitrators and can decline to move forward with any they are not comfortable,” the statement said.

One problem is what experts call the “repeat player effect,” in which a large company appearing repeatedly before the same panel of arbitrators allegedly gains an advantage over the individual bringing a single complaint.

David Allen Larson, past chair of the American Bar Assn.’s dispute resolution section, said the repeat player effect happens because the patient will likely be choosing an arbitrator on the health plan’s system just once, while “Kaiser is selecting them every single day.”

“They know the system. They know the rules,” Larson said of Kaiser. “The entire process gives them an advantage.”

Alan Kang, a lawyer, in a recent petition filed in L.A. County Superior Court, contends that the fees the arbitrators earn from hearing cases — as much as $2,000 an hour — give them an incentive to rule in Kaiser’s favor so they are chosen to hear more cases.

“When a judge’s future income is at stake, it is impossible to be impartial,” Kang wrote in the petition.

The petition seeks to void the December decision of an arbitrator who ruled against the family of Evangelina Aquino, a Kaiser employee who died of cancer at age 40.

Kang, the Aquino family and the medical experts they hired for the case say her cancer would have been treatable if Kaiser doctors had found it with a test they said her symptoms called for. Kaiser argued it was a different kind of cancer that was aggressive and untreatable. The arbitrator agreed with Kaiser in the December decision.

After the ruling, Kang began analyzing data from Kaiser’s system.

His review of dozens of cases in the last six years found that judges overseeing the most cases nearly always ruled for Kaiser.

“The message is clear: deliver wins for Kaiser and you will get additional business,” Kang wrote in his court petition.

The Oakland-based health plan declined to answer questions about its arbitration system and Kang’s claims, but said in a statement that its “arbitration process is designed to be fair, impartial, and accessible to all members. While some arbitrators may handle multiple Kaiser Permanente-related cases, they are not employed by Kaiser Permanente, and they are selected by both parties, in accordance with the law.”

“We recognize that arbitration cases often involve difficult and deeply personal experiences for patients and families,” the statement said, “and we take all concerns raised through these processes seriously.”

Kaiser’s unique arbitration system

Arbitration can have advantages over the court system, including allowing Kaiser to save on legal costs, which otherwise would raise the price of premiums it charges to families, employers and governments.

Kaiser offers to pay the arbitrators’ fees, which can save families tens of thousands of dollars.

Arbitration may also lead to faster outcomes, possibly avoiding years of litigation. Unlike civil litigation, arbitration decisions are especially difficult to appeal.

After the criticism by the state Supreme Court in 1997, Kaiser reformed the system by creating the Office of the Independent Administrator. The office is funded by a Kaiser trust and the $150 fee each patient filing a claim must pay, said Marcella Bell, who serves as the independent administrator.

Bell said the office works independently from Kaiser.

The office selected 195 retired judges and lawyers to serve on a panel that patients and Kaiser can choose from when selecting a neutral arbitrator to oversee and decide a malpractice case.

Rules written by the independent administrator, in consultation with the health plan and an advisory board, allow Kaiser and the family to cut an arbitrator they don’t like, at multiple steps in the process.

The administrator’s office randomly selects 12 members from its panel. Both sides can each remove any four of those arbitrators. The two sides then rank the remaining arbitrators in order of preference. The administrator selects the top-ranked arbitrator to hear the case.

The two parties then still have the ability to disqualify that selection without cause.

Members of the United Nurses Assns. of California and Union of Healthcare Professionals strike outside Kaiser Permanente in Oakland on Jan. 28.

(Jessica Christian / San Francisco Chronicle)

Last year, Kaiser’s arbitration system closed 529 arbitration cases.

The arbitrators threw out 14% of the cases, ruling in favor of Kaiser’s motion for summary judgment, and dismissed an additional 5% of cases on technical or procedural grounds.

Only 23 cases, or 4% of the total, went to a hearing. Among those, the arbitrator decided for Kaiser in 17, with the patient winning the remaining six.

Patients and their families withdrew their claim in 20% of the cases. About half of those patients did not have a lawyer and had tried to represent themselves.

The parties settled for an undisclosed sum in 57% of the cases. The settlements are confidential.

Patient safety questions

Those who have studied the use of arbitration by Kaiser and other HMOs for medical malpractice claims say the secrecy of the settlements and the closed hearings could keep safety problems from coming to light.

“The secrecy of arbitration proceedings may prevent publicity that could reveal poor doctors,” the California Research Bureau warned in a report in 2000 that analyzed Kaiser’s system. That compares with public court cases that could deter “bad behavior” in the future, the researchers wrote.

In December 2023, 53-year-old Francisco Delgadillo arrived at the Kaiser ER in Vallejo with severe chest pain. After an initial assessment, he waited eight hours for care, according to state regulators.

He died in the lobby. A state and federal investigation found multiple violations, including that Kaiser failed to have a licensed nurse monitoring the dozens of patients in the ER’s waiting room.

The Delgadillo family filed an arbitration claim. Their lawyer Jeff Mitchell said the case settled for a confidential sum and he could not discuss it.

Mitchell agreed that the secrecy raised patient safety concerns.

“They love the system, otherwise they would not be so hellbent to keep it,” Mitchell said of Kaiser’s repeated efforts to dispel criticism. “They don’t want these cases to get in front of juries.”

A licensed practical nurse attends to a patient at a Kaiser Permanente in Culver City in September.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Calls for reform

Despite the changes Kaiser made after the 1997 court decision, patients and their families have continued to complain.

According to the administrator’s 2025 annual report, the “most common” complaint the office heard last year was about the neutral arbitrator.

“Most complained that the arbitrator was biased, partisan, unjust, and in Kaiser’s favor,” the report said.

Stephen Martinez, a retired aerospace engineer from Bellflower, is leading the effort to pass the state bill introduced by Garcia.

At an April hearing in the state Assembly, Martinez spoke about how his wife had found a lump in her breast and asked for an appointment with her longtime caregiver at Kaiser to examine it. Instead she was sent to a physician assistant, who dismissed it, he said.

“The PA prescribed warm compresses, a sports bra, and limited chocolate,” Martinez testified. “We would later find that Lindalee did have breast cancer that had already spread.”

Martinez and his wife said they spent $175,000 on lawyers and medical experts to bring that arbitration case. A chief breast surgeon at Kaiser and another surgeon who had retired from that job both testified that the Kaiser physician assistant failed to follow the health system’s guidelines.

Kaiser’s expert argued that the physician assistant did an appropriate exam and that his low suspicion of breast cancer was reasonable. The neutral arbitrator concurred and ruled against the couple.

After passing the Assembly, Assembly Bill 1770 is now in the state Senate for consideration. The bill lets the attorney general decide what actions they will take to ensure health plan arbitrations are handled fairly and transparently. If the bill passes, the state would add four deputy attorneys general, a legal analyst and three legal secretaries to do that work, according to a legislative analyst’s report.

Kaiser says it has concerns about the bill, including that it would “create overlapping state oversight and duplicative reporting requirements.”

Kaiser Permanente’s corporate offices in downtown Oakland in January 2025.

(Jane Tyska / East Bay Times via Getty Images)

Questions of a missed diagnosis

When Janene Fowler was 22, her body seemed to turn against her. She grew weak, pain shot through her hands and feet, her heart raced. She soon required a wheelchair.

Fowler’s medical chart detailed what could have caused her disabling problems. A test eight years before had found a deficiency of vitamin B12, according to the chart. Over the years, Kaiser doctors noted problems such as depression, unexplained pain, shortness of breath, a sore tongue and an abnormal gait — all possible symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency.

In February 2022, after her family complained about her not being able to see a neurologist, she got an appointment. The specialist noted her vitamin deficiency, telling the nurse to start her on a supplement at once. But the treatment did not begin because the paperwork was lost, her medical records show.

Two weeks later, Fowler left Kaiser to see a doctor at UCLA. A doctor there quickly started injections of B12.

Her symptoms gradually got better, but her new doctors say the years-long deficiency left permanent damage. She still can’t walk without help.

The arbitrator, a retired judge, sided with Kaiser’s doctors and experts, who questioned whether Fowler’s problems were caused by a deficiency of vitamin B12. While one test showed a deficiency, he noted that a second test failed to confirm it. He wrote that Fowler and her lawyers had failed to prove that Kaiser “breached its duty of care.”

Cohen, Fowler’s lawyer, asserted that the retired judge’s decision was contrary to UCLA medical records, which detail her deficiency and treatment.

Fowler now spends most of her time at home. She can’t drive. She often falls when she tries to get around with a cane. She loves to cook, but said she burns herself when she tries.

“My hands don’t really do what I tell them,” she said.

Kaiser declined to answer questions about her case, citing patients’ privacy rights.

Fowler said she’s angry about how the health plan’s doctors and its arbitration system treated her.

“I thought I was going to die, and no one at Kaiser seemed to care,” she said. “What justice can you have in a system that is run by those you are trying to sue?”

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over his leaked tax returns was filed for an “improper purpose,” a judge said Monday in a scathing decision that referred one of his lawyers for discipline and characterized the $10-billion complaint as an exercise in self-dealing.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams accused Trump of having manipulated the court system when he sued a federal agency under his control, bypassing a requirement that parties in a lawsuit must have adverse interests and laying the groundwork for a settlement last spring that granted him immunity from tax audits and created a fund to compensate allies of the president who say they were unjustly persecuted.

Though the practical impacts of the ruling may be limited given the administration’s public pronouncements that the so-called $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund has been abandoned, the judge’s ruling nonetheless amounts to a scathing rebuke of the Trump administration and resurfaces a politically damaging storyline for acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche just as he prepares to face the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing Wednesday.

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” Williams wrote in her ruling.

She added: “The President may be the functional ‘dominus litus’ of the Executive Branch, but as a party to a civil suit, he, as well as all the parties and lawyers before a court, are bound by the rules. Ensuring that our courts are used only for the express purpose created by the Constitution is the obligation of every judge and an obligation that this Court must discharge in light of the matter before it. ”

The judge pointed to Blanche’s congressional testimony in early June in which he revealed that the “anti-weaponization” fund was no longer moving forward amid intense bipartisan backlash. Though nothing had been filed in court, Blanche appeared confident in his testimony that he “could speak for, and bind, both sides of this matter,” the judge wrote.

“Acting Attorney General Blanche’s apparent capacity to speak for both Plaintiffs and Defendants, sign a ‘settlement’ document on behalf of all Parties to this action, and then repudiate part of that agreement, demonstrates that there was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout this case,” the judge wrote.

Tucker and Richer write for the Associated Press. AP writers Fatima Hussein and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.

PROVO, Utah — Lawyers for the man accused of killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk planned to call a final witness Friday as they try to raise doubts about the prosecution’s case before it can go to trial.

A Utah judge is deciding whether prosecutors have enough evidence to put Tyler Robinson on trial on a charge of aggravated murder. Kirk, 31, was killed as he spoke to a crowd of thousands at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10.

One of Robinson’s attorneys, Michael Burt, tried to inject uncertainty into the case Thursday by challenging the reliability of ballistics tests on a bullet fragment recovered from Kirk’s body.

Authorities sought to tie the fragment to the suspected murder weapon, but the results were inconclusive.

“Saying anything but inconclusive was inappropriate,” said Samantha Karner with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Earlier in the week, Robinson’s team questioned the reliability of DNA evidence that investigators said linked Robinson to the scene. Experts say the science behind DNA testing is sound.

Robinson has not entered a plea. He turned himself in a day after the fatal shooting of Kirk, a close ally of President Trump credited with helping galvanize young voters for the Republican in the 2024 election.

At the request of Kirk’s family, State District Judge Tony Graf said he would allow to be shown inside the courtroom an altered version of campus surveillance video that prosecutors said shows Robinson crawling out to a rooftop “sniper’s perch” before shooting Kirk.

The unaltered video was previously shown. The altered version includes footage that zooms in on a figure that prosecutors said was Robinson and red marks that were added to the video.

The weeklong preliminary hearing ends Friday, but a decision won’t come until after Sept. 1, when Graf scheduled oral arguments in the matter.

Prosecutors on Thursday aired portions of a recorded interview with Robinson’s roommate, Lance Twiggs. The day after Kirk was shot in the neck, Robinson allegedly told Twiggs “he wishes he hadn’t done it,” a recording played in court revealed.

Later that same day — and only about an hour before turning himself in — Robinson posted “it was me at UVU yesterday,” in a chat room on the Discord social media platform, according to investigators and messages shown by prosecutors.

Defense attorneys unsuccessfully fought the public release of the statements from Twiggs and the chat room messages. They argued prosecutors would characterize the material as a confession, undermining Robinson’s right to a fair trial.

Prosecutors contend the shooting endangered others at Kirk’s campus event — an aggravating circumstance that could make the crime punishable by death under Utah law. Robinson also faces possible sentence enhancements based on claims by prosecutors that he targeted Kirk because of his political views.

Twiggs said in the April interview with prosecutors and investigators that Robinson sometimes talked about politics, including Trump. But Twiggs said he never heard Robinson talk about Kirk before the shooting. The defendant also did not talk much about gender issues or LGBTQ rights, Twiggs said.

The weeklong preliminary hearing has attracted intense media coverage and spectators who have angled for one of the 14 seats in the courtroom that are reserved for the public.

People have lined up early — sometimes sleeping there overnight — in hopes of getting in.

Schoenbaum and Brown write for the Associated Press. Brown reported from Billings, Montana.

NEW YORK — E. Jean Carroll can be paid the $5.8 million that was set aside after a jury found three years ago that President Trump sexually abused her in 1996 before he became president and defamed her after she publicly revealed the attack, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued an order that says the money can be paid to Carroll, along with interest that has grown since the verdict.

Carroll’s lawyers had requested the disbursement after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the 2023 civil verdict.

Trump had resumed defamatory attacks against Carroll as his lawyers considered asking the high court to reconsider its decision.

Both sides’ attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The jury reached its verdict in a trial that Trump did not attend after Carroll testified that she was sexually abused by him in the dressing room of a Manhattan luxury department store after a flirtatious and friendly chance encounter between them turned violent.

Carroll, 82, first talked about the attack publicly in 2019 in a memoir while Trump was president. He repeatedly insisted that he never knew Carroll. He also accused her of trying to sell books at his expense and having political motives.

Trump is also appealing $83 million in defamation compensation granted to Carroll by a separate Manhattan jury after a January 2024 trial at which Trump briefly testified.

At that trial, Kaplan required the jury to accept the findings of the previous jury and only determine how much money, if any, Trump owed Carroll for comments he made about her as president.

Sisak and Neumeister write for the Associated Press.

JACKSON, Miss. — The former mayor of Mississippi’s capital city and the former City Council president have pleaded guilty in a bribery scheme one week before they were set to face trial.

Former Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and former Jackson City Council President Aaron Banks pleaded guilty Monday to one count of conspiracy. Their pleas came after Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens pleaded guilty last week and resigned. All three are Democrats.

Two other people — Angelique Lee, the Democratic former vice president of the Jackson City Council, and Sherik Marve Smith, a businessman and relative of Owens — had already pleaded guilty to bribery charges.

A November 2024 indictment accused Owens of taking at least $115,000 from two FBI agents posing as real estate developers and facilitating more than $80,000 in bribe payments to Banks, Lumumba and Lee in exchange for their help greenlighting a development project.

Lumumba, Banks and Owens could be sentenced to up to five years in prison. Their sentencing hearings are set for Oct. 15.

Lumumba, who previously called the charges a political prosecution, lost his reelection bid last year. His lawyers did not immediately respond to The Associated Press’ requests for comment.

Banks’ lawyer declined to comment.

Bates writes for the Associated Press.

Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein says the US was founded on the principle that governments exist to protect inalienable rights. He argues expanded presidential powers and unchecked authority represents a step backwards for US democracy.

WASHINGTON — Former CIA Director John Brennan sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, demanding a court order that would require officials to preserve records from investigations that he says are targeting him for “phantom criminal conduct.”

Brennan said in the lawsuit that the records would be essential for him to mount a defense on vindictive prosecution grounds in the event of an indictment brought by the administration. Such a defense, his lawyers said, would be supported by the more than 100 verbal or written statements that President Trump has made since 2017 lambasting Brennan and by the Republican president’s directives to his Department of Justice to initiate cases “without regard to factual or legal justification.”

“To fully consider those motions, the reviewing judge would need to scrutinize the motivations of the Justice Department officials who directed, oversaw, or undertook those actions to determine whether they violated Director Brennan’s rights, and specifically whether they were motivated by a desire to vindictively prosecute him as an act of retribution,” Brennan’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington.

The lawsuit names as defendants Trump and other top law enforcement officials from his administration, including acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and the prosecutors in Florida who have been overseeing investigations related to Brennan and other perceived Trump adversaries.

The lawsuit says Brennan is facing separate investigations in Florida, including one examining whether he made a false statement to Congress related to an assessment by intelligence agencies documenting Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in which Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. The other investigation aims to determine whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired to undermine Trump, including during the course of the Russian interference investigation.

No charges have been brought. The Department of Justice has denied claims of weaponization.

Tucker writes for the Associated Press.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law Thursday to crack down on inflated profits stemming from car crash lawsuits, blessing a hard-fought compromise between Uber and the state’s trial attorneys that averts a November showdown between two of California’s most powerful and moneyed lobbying forces.

The deal, the fruit of months of negotiations, takes aim at the lucrative way doctors can charge for procedures on patients referred to them by personal injury lawyers.

If a law firm has a client who was hurt in a car accident, the lawyer will often send them to a doctor who will perform surgery on a “lien” basis, meaning the doctor will be paid from money that comes from a lawsuit settlement rather than through insurance.

Uber contends this arrangement has created an incentive for doctors and attorneys to collude to dramatically inflate medical bills. The more expensive the bill, they say, the bigger the resulting payout.

The law, SB 623, caps how much these doctors can charge when their patient is involved in a lawsuit against a ride-share company, which are frequent targets of litigation due to their top-of-the-line insurance policies. The new law will also require Uber to ramp up background checks of its drivers.

“We’re going to have a much safer state both for medical patients and passengers in Ubers,” said Nicholas Rowley, a prominent Texas attorney who helped bankroll the fight and took a leading role in the negotiations.

The law only applies to cases that involve ride-share accidents that take place after Jan. 1, 2027.

“This legislation puts meaningful guardrails in place to better protect accident victims, increase transparency and accountability in the medical lien system and strengthen safety,” said Ramona Prieto, Uber’s head of public policy for the Western U.S., in a statement.

For months, Uber and lawyers from across the state poured tens of millions into dueling ballot measures that threatened to devastate the profits of whichever side lost.

Uber fired the first shot with a ballot measure that sought to cap how much attorneys can earn in lawsuits involving auto accidents. The company argued attorneys were swindling their own clients, inflating medical bills of car crash victims to increase the value of the settlement and then pocketing a hefty chunk of the payouts.

The state’s trial attorneys countered that the fee cap would make small or difficult cases a money-losing endeavor and block scores of accident victims from the courts. They shot back with their own ballot measure that would increase legal liability for ride-share companies if a passenger or driver is sexually assaulted while on a ride, seizing on investigative reporting that highlighted assaults in Ubers.

“They were waiting for us to blink and we didn’t,” said Douglas Saeltzer, the head of the Consumer Attorneys of California, the lawyer trade group that pushed for the measure against Uber. “Their starting place, I don’t believe, was in the interest of protecting victims — it was in the interest of protecting Uber.”

With the passage of Thursday’s law, both sides have agreed to pull their respective measures from the November ballot, halting campaigns that had both parties amassing tens of millions in funding and blanketing the airwaves with ads.

“Now we can stop seeing all the commercials,” said Assemblymember Blanca Pancheo (D-Downey) at a Tuesday hearing.

The law, put forward by Assemblymember Diane Papan (D-San Mateo) and Sen. Thomas Umberg (D-Santa Ana), also caps the amount that can be earned by third-party investors who buy out a doctor’s lien in a personal injury case. These companies will purchase a doctor’s stake in the case at a reduced rate, then pocket a share of the payout if the case settles.

“Private equity and hedge funds buy them at a steep discount, then turn around and collect the full inflated amount,” Saeltzer said at a Tuesday hearing on the bill. “That’s money flowing to Wall Street investors, not patients.”

The law will require annual background checks for ride-share drivers and expand the list of offenses that disqualify someone from the job.

In addition to the ballot battle, has Uber sued two of LA’s most well-known personal injury firms — the Law Offices of Jacob Emrani and Downtown L.A. Law Group — accusing them of inflating medical bills and forcing clients to undergo needless and expensive surgeries to inflate the value of the claim. The firms asked the judge to dismiss the case Wednesday, arguing Uber had failed to prove fraud. Both firms have vehemently denied wrongdoing.

The lawsuit, filed last year, has put the plaintiff lawyers in the unusual position of playing defense. Listening in the audience at Wednesday’s hearings were the partners of Downtown L.A. Law Group and Jacob Emrani.

“Let’s be clear about what this Uber case really is,” said John Hueston, outside counsel for Emrani. “It’s brought by a $150 billion dollar company … to intimidate the plaintiff’s bar, exhaust its resources and chill the suits that hold Uber accountable.”

Michael Huston, one of the lawyers who represents Uber, countered that the case is “not an attack on the plaintiff’s bar.”

“We have brought suit against the two in this state … that are engaged in naked fraud,” he said.

NEW YORK — A chief of staff to former New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been charged with accepting more than $100,000 in bribes to steer a lucrative migrant shelter contract to a Queens hotel, according to a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday.

Frank Carone’s arrest Wednesday was the latest in a string of corruption allegations that have rocked the one-term mayor and his inner circle. And it came the same day federal authorities executed search warrants related to a separate bribery investigation involving high-ranking police officials under Adams, the latest sign that prosecutors are continuing to hone in on the previous administration.

In the indictment, returned June 12, prosecutors accused Carone of leveraging his position as Adams’ chief of staff to commit multiple acts of bribery, wire fraud and money laundering. His brother, Anthony Carone, as well as the Queens hotel owner, Yan Po Zhu, and Crystal Chen, an employee of the hotel, were also charged.

They were expected to appear in federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday afternoon.

Prosecutors said Carone accepted a series of bribes from Zhu and Chen in order to steer a multimillion dollar shelter contract to their hotel, which city officials had said was smaller than two other proposed hotels and could house fewer migrants. The contract was awarded amid an influx of migrants to New York that overwhelmed the city’s homeless shelters.

Frank Carone’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, called the new indictment “not worth the paper upon which it is printed.”

“Today’s indictment is a sad day for our criminal justice system,” Aidala said in a statement. “It epitomizes the government first finding a target and then spending three years and enormous taxpayer resources to find a crime.”

Frank Carone known for link to Sabrina Carpenter church controversy

Carone, a longtime Brooklyn power broker, is widely credited as one of the architects of Adams’ political rise. Among the wider public, he is perhaps most notorious for his role in an episode that led to a Brooklyn pastor being stripped of his duties partly for allowing pop star Sabrina Carpenter to film scenes for a provocative music video at his Roman Catholic church.

The church was later subpoenaed by federal investigators seeking information about business dealings between Monsignor Jamie Gigantiello, who approved the video, and Carone.

Adams himself was indicted on bribery charges in 2024 for allegedly accepting illegal campaign contributions from Turkish officials and others in exchange for political favors. The case was tossed by the Justice Department, which said it was distracting Adams from assisting in President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Adams has denied wrongdoing but abandoned his campaign for a second term last year.

The former mayor was not accused of wrongdoing in Carone’s indictment.

A lawyer for Zhu, Stephen Scaring, said the hotel owner “will be entering a plea of not guilty and is anxious to establish his innocence.”

Chen’s lawyer declined to comment. Messages were left for Anthony Carone’s lawyer.

Hotel at center of alleged bribery had been rejected by city

In total, Frank Carone was paid around $120,000 by Zhu and Che for the emergency shelter contract, prosecutors said. The money was passed through a law firm owned by his brother, Anthony Carone, according to the indictment.

The city’s Social Services Department had initially rejected the hotel’s application to house migrants due to growing resistance to the high number of shelters already operating in the neighborhood, the indictment said.

Carone then interceded on the hotel’s behalf, prosecutors allege. In one text exchange in September 2022, Zhu wrote: “Thank you my big guy,” according to the indictment.

The Carones and Zhu socialized frequently and attended gatherings at Zhu’s Long Island home, the indictment said.

In a separate statement, Todd Shapiro, a spokesperson for Adams, said Frank Carone “dedicated decades of his life to public service, the legal profession, and helping countless individuals, businesses, and charitable organizations throughout New York.”

Carone played a key role in Adams’ campaign for mayor in 2021 and served as Adams’ chief of staff in 2022. In 2023, he formed a political consulting firm. He also was a one-time lawyer for the Brooklyn Democratic Party.

Separately Wednesday, federal agents searched the homes of current and former New York Police Department leaders as part of a bribery investigation that grew out of an inquiry into Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department under Adams, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the searches.

As part of that inquiry, the FBI and the NYPD executed warrants on the home of NYPD Chief of Manhattan South James McCarthy and former Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard, according to the person, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.

Maddrey’s home was also searched by federal agents, the person said.

The searches were not related to the arrest of Frank Carone, according to another person familiar with the matter who also spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the case. There is no public indication of any arrests as part of those searches.

Once the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the department, Maddrey resigned in late 2024 over allegations that he demanded sex from a subordinate in exchange for opportunities to earn extra pay.

An inquiry to his attorney was not immediately returned. Attorney information for Sheppard and McCarthy was not immediately available.

Collins, Offenhartz, Sisak and Richer write for the Associated Press. Collins reported from Hartford, Conn., and Richer reported from Washington.

A new commission made up of legislators, public defenders, academics and advocates seeks to push California — one of just two states that don’t pay for basic public defense — to begin providing resources and enforcing minimum standards for county public defender systems.

The California Independent Commission on Public Defense includes three assemblymembers and two senators — among them Jesse Arreguín and Nick Schultz, chairs of the Senate and Assembly Public Safety Committees — as well as chief public defenders from several counties, retired judges, the directors of criminal justice nonprofits, and the heads of organizations representing thousands of defense attorneys in the state.

“We have discussed the problem of our public defense system for years,” said Schultz, a Democrat from Burbank and former prosecutor who has sponsored legislation to improve public defense.

The goal is to “move past discussion and study, and come up with an actionable road map of what we need to do to really build out the robust public defense infrastructure that Californians are rightfully entitled to,” he said.

The commissioners plan to develop a five-year plan to phase in state funding, along with enforceable standards like caseload limits and access to defense investigators.

A CalMatters investigation last year found that criminal defendants across the state are routinely convicted without anyone investigating the charges against them, significantly increasing the likelihood of wrongful convictions. Many California counties do not employ a single defense investigator who can interview witnesses, review police reports, visit crime scenes and retrieve video surveillance footage. CalMatters also found that lawyers in some rural counties are handling caseloads that far exceed even the most permissive standards, making them less likely than other defense attorneys to challenge the prosecution’s evidence in legal motions and take their cases to trial.

But the state has resisted stepping in. After a proposed bill that would have created an official state commission to address the issue was abandoned, two advocacy groups, the Wren Collective and UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center, decided to form an independent commission and began assembling participants who could develop and act on reforms. These types of commissions, which have facilitated significant improvements in other states’ public defender systems, are usually established by the governor.

“It became clear that this was an issue that was not a high priority for Sacramento, especially during a budget crisis,” said Chesa Boudin, the Berkeley center’s founding director and a former San Francisco district attorney. It also became clear, Boudin said, that “there was a tremendous gap between what experts understood to be the crisis and the public perception of California government as a kind of progressive leader in the country.”

In the decades since the U.S. Supreme Court established the right to an attorney in state court criminal proceedings, California has saddled its counties with the responsibility of providing lawyers to poor people accused of crimes. Many of those counties have opted for the cheapest path: paying private lawyers and firms a flat fee to represent indigent defendants, regardless of how many cases they handle or how much time they spend on each case.

“You’ve got some offices that have an incredibly high caliber of representation that they can provide, and you have other offices that are doing these flat-fee contracts where the quality has been documented to be pretty bad,” said Eve Brensike Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan.

Primus is the only member of the new commission from outside of California. She was asked to join because of her extensive research and writing about the structure of indigent defense.

An indigent defense commission in Michigan, which was formed by the legislature in 2013, has led to significant reforms and a substantial influx in state funding.

The California commission’s work, Primus said, can serve “as a catalyst for political actors to do the right thing and start to fund and improve indigent defense delivery, or as fodder for lawsuits that then can try to get the judiciary to push the political actors to do what is necessary to provide for effective representation.”

The commission is scheduled to hold its first in-person meeting, which will be open to the public, in Berkeley in October, with additional meetings planned for Los Angeles, the Central Valley and Northern California over the next 12 months. Commissioners say they will work in subcommittees in between these quarterly sessions to develop a concrete fiscal plan for the state, draft legislative language, and establish minimum standards for how counties should structure their public defender offices, compensate their attorneys, provide access to experts, and report on their work.

Anat Rubin writes for CalMatters.

SHAKIRA has sparked dating rumors with hunky actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo.

The pair were seen leaving a hotel together in Los Angeles on Monday, days after Shakira turned up the heat at the World Cup opening.

Hips Don’t Lie singer Shakira and Manuel, who is known for starring in Lincoln Lawyer, were waiting at a valet stand outside the Sunset Tower Hotel.

As they waited for their vehicle in West Hollywood, the pair were seen smiling and chatting.

The photographs show that once their car arrived, Manuel proved chivalry isn’t dead.

He was ever the gentleman and politely opened Shakira’s door and waited for her to get in before he closed it.

Mexican hunk Manuel then walked around to the driver’s side and got in before driving off.

Shakira, 49, wore a simple outfit comprising of a black tank top with some blue jeans and some black boots.

Meanwhile, 45-year-old Manuel wore blue jeans, a black T-shirt and a matching jacket.

The couple looked incredibly content in one another’s company, and as they drove off they were both beaming.

The snaps were quick to circulate online, with fans rushing to react.

“Truth is, the dude really is hot. Even if it’s casual, I’m glad. Good for Shaki,” said one person on X.

“Omg what an upgrade,” penned a second.

While a third wrote: “The way those photos look like they’re from 2000 omg Shakira ages like wine.”

Someone else then echoed: “If you tell me it’s from 2002, I’ll believe you.”

And a fifth said: “Baby, doesn’t it feel like you’re seeing an old photo? It looks the same.”

Shakira has most recently been romantically linked to Lucien Laviscount.

Back in February, she took to Instagram to hard launch her relationship with the actor.

The relationship began after they met in early 2024 on the set of her music video for Puntería, in which he played her love interest.

But ahead of the World Cup, Shakira noted that she has “no space or time” for a relationship.

“Oh no, no romance for me for now,” Shakira told The Times recently, hinting she and Lucien were no longer an item.

“There’s no space or time in my life for that. My plate is quite full.

“My kids are my priority. And my career. Strangely enough, I’m in love with my career like I’ve never been in my life. I’m enjoying my time alone as well.”

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a Trump administration appeal and decide if “criminal aliens” may be held indefinitely while they fight deportation.

The case to be heard in the fall could give the administration more power to arrest and hold immigrants, including green card holders, who have criminal records.

The government’s lawyers say immigration laws call for deporting non-citizens with “aggravated felonies” on their records. And in such cases, they say these people may be held for months or even years while their claims are before the immigration courts.

Judges have been split on whether non-citizens fighting deportation have a right to a bond hearing and a chance to go free if they pose no risk to public safety.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled for a pair of green card holders who faced deportation to the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Both had been convicted of assaults that were characterized as aggravated felonies under the immigration laws.

However, the appeals court said their “prolonged detention” was unconstitutional if they were given no bond hearing and no chance to go free.

They were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawyers urged the court to turn down the appeal.

“For the first time in this litigation, the government argues that civil detention ‘does not implicate any fundamental rights’ and so the Due Process Clause affords the detained men no protections—substantive or procedural,” they wrote.

In the past, they said the Supreme Court had accepted the “bedrock principle” that detained persons may have a right to seek their release on bond.

One of the two men had left this country and returned to Jamaica, the ACLU lawyers said. But Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer urged the court to rule on the issue.

The detained men “have no procedural due-process right to a bond hearing on whether they are a flight risk or danger to the community,” he told the court. “Individualized findings about flight risk and danger are irrelevant” under the immigration laws which called for “mandatory detention based on their aggravated-felony convictions alone.”

Golf legend Phil Mickelson is refuting an accusation that he inappropriately touched a female employee at a prestigious golf club in Southern California a few months ago.

According to Golf Digest, Mickelson allegedly approached the worker at Farms Golf Club in Rancho Santa Fe and made “nonconsensual and inappropriate physical contact.” After she rejected him, she reported to her supervisors and accused him of sexual misconduct.

Mickelson hired Tom Clare, a top defamation attorney, who said video evidence contradicted the allegations.

“There is a great deal of misinformation circulating and, while Phil’s full attention is devoted to a private family health matter, he has retained defamation counsel and is determined to hold accountable any publication or individual trafficking in speculation or false rumors,” Clare said in a statement to Golf Digest.

Clare did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office said it investigated but found no evidence of an assault. However, the allegation resulted in the immediate removal of Mickelson from the golf grounds and revocation of his longtime membership at the club.

Farms Golf Club said in a statement to the golf magazine that it conducted a thorough investigation before confronting Mickelson and stood by its decision to end his membership. Farms also said no video cameras were in the area where the alleged misconduct occurred.

“Following a staff member report of member misconduct, the club provided immediate and ongoing support to the staff member, conducted a thorough independent investigation of the incident and took decisive action,” the statement read. “This individual is no longer a member of The Farms Golf Club.

“To protect the safety and privacy of our staff and member, we are unable to speak further on the matter.”

Mickelson, who turns 56 next week, withdrew from professional golf this year because of family health reasons, last playing at the LIV Golf South Africa in March. A married father of three, Mickelson won six major tournaments on the PGA Tour — three Masters, two PGA Championships and one British Open — before he left the tour in 2022 for the upstart LIV Golf League, which will lose the financial backing of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund this fall.

His estimated career earnings exceed $1 billion, including $97 million in PGA Tour prize money, a reported $200 million signing bonus to join LIV Golf and an estimated $800 million from endorsements and business ventures.

Mickelson was one of the most popular players on the PGA Tour before his controversial move to LIV and comments about his Saudi backers, and his career survived some unsavory headlines, several of which pertained to gambling.

The Detroit News obtained federal court records that claimed a mob-connected bookie handled bets for Mickelson and was accused of cheating the golfer out of $500,000 in 2007.

Mickelson was accused by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2016 of getting an insider trading tip and buying $931,000 of stock from sports gambler Billy Walters. Mickelson was not charged and agreed to pay back the amount.

Federal auditors investigating Mickelson’s role in the scheme found that his gambling losses totaled more than $40 million from 2010 to 2014, according to an unauthorized biography of Mickelson.

New surveillance footage and other evidence from Southern California Edison confirms that a century-old, idle transmission line that the utility failed to remove ignited last year’s deadly Eaton wildfire, lawyers for insurers said in a court filing.

Video obtained from a surveillance camera at Gerrish Swim & Tennis Club in Pasadena shows two bright flashes occurring in the location of the tower holding the idle line at 6:11 p.m. on Jan. 7, 2025.

The flashes correspond to the time that Edison recorded two faults, three seconds apart, on another transmission line more than five miles away, the lawyers said in the filing, citing new data provided by the utility.

Soon after the faults, residents nearby recorded videos of a fire burning at the base of the tower, which is known as M16T1.

“Southern California Edison has spent the last sixteen months attempting to forestall the inevitable legal consequences of razing a large swath of the communities of Altadena and Pasadena to the ground,” the lawyers wrote in the filing.

“The Eaton Fire could not have occurred if SCE had simply disassembled and removed Structure M16T1,” the lawyers added.

The lawyers filing the May 18 motion represent property insurers that paid tens of millions of dollars to residents who lost their homes. Their motion asks the judge to order a judgment in the insurers’ favor that would make Edison liable for the damage under inverse condemnation, a legal doctrine in the state constitution.

Courts have ruled that the doctrine requires private utilities such as Edison to pay for property they destroy, even if they haven’t been found to have acted negligently.

Kathleen Dunleavy, a spokeswoman for Edison, said the company did not learn about the existence of the swim club video until the lawyers submitted it in court with their filing.

“It’s very disappointing and inappropriate that this video was not produced in discovery,” she said. “We hope that video has been turned over to the appropriate authorities.”

Dunleavy said the company believes the lawyers’ motion “is wrong on the facts and the law.”

“We’ll respond more fully in our own court filing,” she said.

Attorneys for the insurers did not respond to requests for comment.

In a February 2025 letter to state regulators, Edison said it had detected a single fault on a line more than five miles away from Altadena about 6:11 p.m. on the night the fire ignited. It said the fault caused a brief surge of electricity on its four live transmission lines in Eaton Canyon.

The company said in the letter that it was looking into whether the power surge could have caused electricity to jump to the idle line that runs parallel to the live wires through a process called induction.

Pedro Pizarro, chief executive of Edison International, later said that a leading theory of the fire’s ignition was that the idle line became energized briefly through induction, sparking the fire.

At the same time, the company has not accepted blame for the fire, saying repeatedly that its own confidential investigation into the cause, as well as a separate inquiry by Los Angeles County and state fire officials, is continuing.

According to the court filing, evidence obtained by the lawyers shows that the company stopped using the transmission line in 1971 and designated it as “out-of-service.”

“The declaration of Out of Service shall only be used when the line … or piece of equipment is expected to remain permanently out of service,” Edison stated in an internal document known as a system operating bulletin, according to the filing.

Edison executives told The Times last year that they left the line in place because they believed it might be needed in the future.

“We have these inactive lines still available because there is a reasonable chance we’re going to use them in the future,” Shinjini Menon, Edison’s senior vice president of system planning and engineering, said then.

Dunleavy said Friday that the idle lines are kept in place for a variety of reasons, including to preserve the right of way Edison had obtained to construct them and to support future needs for more electricity as the state aims to meet its clean energy goals.

Last year, The Times reported that state regulators, knowing old electric lines posed hazards, proposed a rule in 2001 that would have forced Edison and other utilities to remove idle lines unless they could prove they would use them in the future.

Under pressure from Edison and the other companies, the rule was weakened to allow utilities to keep the unused lines in place until executives decided they were “permanently abandoned.”

In their May 18 filing, the lawyers said Edison executives had known about the risk of induction for more than 100 years. They cited a 1923 contract between Edison and Pacific Electric Railway Co. that said that “leakage of electricity or induction from or between” conductors was an inherent risk of operating multiple electrical circuits in proximity.

“That’s why SCE grounds idle lines and inspects them,” Dunleavy said of the risk.

Copies of Edison’s fault records from that night, its operating bulletin and thousands of other documents, including depositions, are sealed from public view under a protective order that Edison and lawyers for the victims asked the judge to approve last year.

The L.A. County district attorney is investigating whether Edison should be criminally prosecuted for its actions in the fire, the company said in an investor filing this year.

The fire killed at least 19 people and left thousands of families homeless.

A hearing on the lawyers’ motion is scheduled for Aug. 11 in L.A. County Superior Court.

Edison has offered to compensate victims of the fire who give up their right to sue the utility.

The company said last week that it had so far received more than 3,500 claims from about 10,000 people. It said it had extended nearly 1,900 offers to those people, totaling more than $650 million.

Many victims have refused the offers, saying they don’t fully cover their losses from the devastating blaze.

Edison has told its investors it expects to actually pay little or nothing for the fire because of a 2019 state law. The company anticipates that it will be reimbursed for its payments to victims by a $21-billion fund created by the law known as
Assembly Bill 1054.

The law shields utilities from the damages of fires sparked by their equipment as long as they follow certain requirements, including submitting a plan to state regulators for reducing the risk that their equipment sparks fires. Regulators review the plan and track whether the utilities are making progress in reducing the fire risk.

Since 2019, Edison has spent billions of dollars on making its lines safer, including by undergrounding them and installing insulated wires. Those costs continue to raise customer electric bills.

In the last 10 years, Edison’s rates increased by 101%, according to an April report by the public advocates office at the California Public Utilities Commission.

Despite the spending, Edison’s electric lines sparked more fires in 2024 than in 2019. The company blamed the increase on erratic weather that created more dried vegetation.

An acclaimed biopic about Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel, who has dedicated her life to representing Palestinian defendants charged by Israeli authorities, has been shortlisted for an Oscar.

“Advocate” is one of 15 films shortlisted in the Documentary Feature category, out of an original 159 submissions. The final five contenders will be announced next month.

The award-winning documentary, co-directed by Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche, has been vociferously attacked by right-wing Israeli groups and Israel’s Culture Minister Miri Regev.

READ: Israel’s flirtation with football stars won’t stop cultural boycott

When “Advocate” won Best Picture at the DocAviv festival in Tel Aviv, Regev condemned “the choice to make a movie focusing on a lawyer who represents, supports and speaks in the name of many who undermine the State of Israel’s existence, [and] use terrorism against its soldiers and people”.

In awarding the film, DocAviv judges wrote that “Advocate” is “a thought-provoking project that addresses an important subject and demonstrates impressive cinematic skills, especially the innovative and intelligent use of animation… [It] sketches out a complex portrait of a strong and inspiring woman who believes in the justness of her path with all her heart.”

The award was greeted with outrage, and following an organised campaign, Israel’s state lottery company subsequently announced “it would be pulling its funding for future grants given to best picture winners at Tel Aviv’s documentary film festival”.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has opened an investigation into whether E. Jean Carroll, the longtime advice columnist who has said Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in a New York department store 30 years ago, lied during the course of civil litigation against the Republican president, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The person who confirmed the existence of the investigation was not authorized to publicly discuss an ongoing inquiry and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The perjury investigation is being led by the federal prosecutors’ office in Chicago, and acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche has had no involvement because of his prior work as Trump’s personal attorney, the person said.

Lawyers for Carroll did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Associated Press on Thursday.

It’s the latest in a series of investigations the Trump administration Justice Department has opened into perceived adversaries of the president. The actions, including securing an indictment last month against former FBI Director James Comey, have raised alarm from Democrats and former officials that an institution meant to make prosecutorial decisions independent of the White House is being weaponized.

Carroll has said a flirtatious, chance encounter with Trump in 1996 at Bergdorf Goodman’s Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan ended violently. She said Trump slammed her against a dressing room wall, pulled down her tights and forced himself on her. Trump has called the allegations a “made-up scam,” and he has attacked her motivations, saying they were politically driven or arose from a desire to promote her memoir.

A jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, awarding her $5 million. The following year, another jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in a defamation case related to Trump’s social media attacks on her.

The Justice Department is scrutinizing a statement Carroll made in the course of the civil litigation that no one else was paying her legal fees. It later became public that a Chicago-based organization backed by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, had helped fund Carroll’s case. Trump’s lawyers in the civil case accused Carroll of concealing that information, which they said called into question whether the case was politically motivated.

A court entry earlier this month said Trump won’t have to pay the award until the U.S. Supreme Court gets a chance to review the case or reject an appeal. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to a request by one of Trump’s lawyers that it let the president delay the payment to Carroll, though it required that he post a $7.4 million bond to cover any additional interest costs, a request Carroll’s attorney had made.

The Carroll investigation was first reported by CNN.

Richer and Tucker write for the Associated Press.

Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs has been released from a Wisconsin jail a day after being arrested in relation to an alleged incident over the weekend. He still faces the possibility of being charged with several crimes, including some related to domestic abuse, pending further investigation.

“After reviewing the available evidence in this case, the Brown County District Attorney’s Office is not yet prepared to make a formal charging decision,” Dist. Atty. David Lasee said Wednesday in a news release. “Our office has requested additional investigation, as there is reason to believe that additional evidence may exist that would impact whether criminal charges are appropriate, and what charges would be issued.

“Mr. Jacobs will be released from custody at this time, and a final charging decision will be made by our office at a later date.”

Jail records show that Jacobs, 28, was released at 12:20 p.m.

Jacobs’ lawyers — David Chesnoff, Richard Schonfeld, and Clarence Duchac — said in a joint statement Wednesday that they remain confident their client ultimately will not be charged in the matter.

“We are extremely pleased that Josh has been released from custody and that no criminal charges have been filed against him,” they said. “As we previously stated, we encourage everyone to keep an open mind while the matter is fully reviewed. We remain confident that, once all of the evidence is gathered and evaluated, it will confirm that no charges should be brought against Josh in the future.”

According to the Hobart/Lawrence Police Department, officers were dispatched to a complaint involving Jacobs on Saturday at 8:37 a.m. He was arrested Tuesday on allegations that included strangulation and suffocation, battery-domestic abuse, criminal damage to property-domestic abuse, disorderly conduct-domestic abuse and intimidation of a victim.

Jacobs’ lawyers said in a statement Tuesday that he “vehemently denies the allegations.”

A three-time Pro Bowl selection, Jacobs spent the first five years of his NFL career with the Raiders, leading the league with 1,653 rushing yards in 2022, and the previous two seasons with the Packers.

“We are aware of the matter involving Josh Jacobs,” a Packers spokesman said Tuesday. “As it is an ongoing legal situation, we will withhold further comment.”

Speaking to reporters Wednesday at the team’s voluntary workouts, Coach Matt LaFleur said, “I know there’s going to be a lot of questions about Josh. I’m going to stick with the statement that we put out as an organization and just let the process play out.”

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said Tuesday that the league is “aware of the report and have been in contact with the club.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — A Justice Department indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center is part of a “top-down” campaign of retribution against President Trump’s perceived political enemies and constitutes a vindictive prosecution that must be dismissed, lawyers for the nonprofit argued Tuesday in urging a judge to toss out the case.

The Alabama-based nonprofit was indicted in April on fraud and money laundering charges that accuse it of misleading donors by paying informants inside white supremacist and other extremist organizations to obtain inside information about their activities.

Lawyers for the SPLC already argued that law enforcement agencies have long known that the nonprofit paid informants to report on the movements of hate groups. They also said acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche made a false statement at a news conference and in interviews when he said the organization had not shared with law enforcement information it learned from informants. Blanche later appeared to walk back that claim in a television interview, saying it was true that the SPLC “selectively” shared information with law enforcement over the years.

The attorneys for the center expanded on those arguments Tuesday, saying in a motion to dismiss the case that the prosecution was the “culmination of a top-down, retributive campaign” in which Trump pushed the Justice Department “to go after those individuals and groups he deemed his political enemies, including the SPLC.”

Defense says indictment fits broader retaliation campaign

The motion was filed against the backdrop of other politically charged prosecutions that have raised concerns that the Justice Department is operating as a weapon to target Trump’s opponents. It aims to draw a parallel between the SPLC indictment and the human smuggling prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which was dismissed Friday on similar vindictive prosecution grounds by a judge who called the case an “abuse of prosecuting power.”

The SPLC has said its now-defunct program of paying informants to infiltrate hate groups was developed to glean key insights into their activities so that potential victims could be protected. An earlier federal investigation into the practice was closed without charges, but the motion paints the current Justice Department as pursuing the case with renewed — and rushed — vigor.

The department decided to pursue the indictment without interviewing any current SPLC employees and did not seek any documents from the group until after it told defense lawyers that criminal charges were coming, the defense motion states. During a meeting requested by defense lawyers who hoped to avert to indictment, Justice Department officials informed them that the decision already had been made to pursue charges, according to the motion.

“These procedural irregularities show that the charges against the SPLC were a foregone conclusion based on prosecutorial vindictiveness — driven by the White House and FBI leadership’s retribution campaign — rather than the result of a good faith examination of the evidence,” the motion states, saying the indictment was “premised on conclusory accusations but devoid of provable facts or a proper statement of the law.”

The motion also cites whistleblower accounts that accused top Justice Department officials of rushing forward with an indictment despite internal concerns about the merits of the case and the strength of the evidence.

“For weeks, we have been arguing against these false allegations levied against the SPLC — an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multiracial democracy where we can all live and thrive,” Bryan Fair, the interim president and chief executive officer of SPLC, said in a statement. “The government can’t prosecute the SPLC as payback for its protected speech — it violates basic constitutional rights.”

The administration has painted SPLC as partisan

Founded in 1971 as a civil rights organization, the SPLC over the decades has used litigation to fight white supremacist groups. It also tracks the activities and locations of domestic extremists. But its work has made it a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.

The center, for instance, received fresh attention last year after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk because the SPLC had included a section on the group that Kirk founded and led, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024.”

FBI Director Kash Patel announced in October that the bureau would be severing its relationship with the SPLC, saying it had turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged antigovernment and hate groups inside the United States.

The defense motion says “animus” from senior levels of the administration helped shape the indictment.

It cites, among other comments, a statement from Trump deriding the SPLC as “a total scam run by the Democrats,” as well as a news media interview in which Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, said the indictment was “personal” to her because she had “a lot of journalist friends … and groups that I’ve represented who have been targeted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

Tucker writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Last June 16, armed immigration agents broke the locks to forcibly enter an Oxnard auto body shop. Juan Carlos Ramirez, a U.S. citizen, filmed as they arrested his father.

Then the agents pepper-sprayed Ramirez, slammed him onto the hoods of two vehicles, punched his face and kneed him in the side, according to a legal claim he later filed against the federal government.

Local attorney Vanessa Valdez denounced Ramirez’s arrest at an Oxnard City Council meeting the next day. The following month, Valdez found herself in a similar situation when agents raided the cannabis company Glass House Farms.

Despite identifying herself as a legal observer, she said, agents — or possibly National Guard — deployed tear gas and shot her six times with rubber bullets. She ran and then, unable to see, crawled on all fours to escape.

Vanessa Valdez, a Ventura-based attorney, has filed a claim against the federal government, alleging she was hit with tear gas and six rubber bullets during the Glass House Farms raid last July.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“They were just shooting aimlessly, it seemed like,” she said. “I thought maybe they had fractured a rib because that’s how painful it was. I couldn’t sleep face down for three weeks.”

Ramirez and Valdez are among the dozens of U.S. citizens and immigrants who are seeking financial compensation for damages they say they suffered during President Trump’s immigration dragnet. For Valdez, that includes the cost of hospital visits, lost wages as she recovered, anxiety medication and seeing a therapist.

After reviewing public accounts and legal documents and interviews with more than a dozen lawyers and immigrants, The Times found that claimants from across the country are seeking at least $260 million.

In a statement, Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis wrote that ICE officers are held to the highest professional standard and receive regular training. Bis said that when agents are faced with danger, they use their training to protect themselves and the public.

“The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force. It’s a pattern of violent agitators attacking our law enforcement,” she wrote.

Asked about Valdez, Bis said law enforcement deployed chemical irritants including pepper balls, but not rubber bullets, after agitators attempted to breach the perimeter at Glass House Farms. She said Ramirez refused officer’s commands and physically attacked them, so they pepper-sprayed him in self-defense.

Lawyers who are experts in tort claims said the bureaucratic process is lengthy and complex, and any damage award would likely be lower than what a claimant is seeking.

Still, seeking redress through the Federal Tort Claims Act is one of the few legal remedies available for those seeking financial compensation for deaths, physical injuries, emotional trauma, unlawful detention or property damage caused by federal employees.

The number of claims is expected to rise.

Federal agents, some wearing street clothes and some wearing uniforms and protective gear, form a defensive line against hundreds of protesters outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles on Jan. 30.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

In recent months, advocacy organizations have prepared practice advisories for attorneys interested in filing tort claims, and law groups across the country have begun holding training sessions on the process.

“There is no question in my mind that a lot of people — hundreds, thousands — have been harmed significantly and will be legally entitled to large damages payouts, which are going to come from the federal government,” said Jonathan Feinberg, a Philadelphia-based attorney.

Feinberg, who specializes in cases involving excessive use of force by police and abuses of detained immigrants, is president of the board of directors for the National Police Accountability Project, which focuses on law enforcement misconduct.

“We’re going to be talking about Minneapolis in 2030,” he added.

Before they can sue in federal court, individuals must first request a review by the agency that they say is responsible, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection. The agency has six months to respond and deny the claim or offer a settlement.

If the agency doesn’t respond or denies a claim, the claimant can then file suit.

Unlike civil rights lawsuits, in which juries decide the verdict, in tort cases, judges make that call. Only the agencies are named as defendants, not individuals.

The Times reviewed the claims of nearly 80 people filed since the start of 2025. The vast majority remain in the review stage. Lawyers anticipate most will not be settled, unleashing a flood of lawsuits starting this summer.

Federal law since 1871 has established that people can sue state and local officials for violating their constitutional rights. But the law left out federal actors.

One hundred years later, the Supreme Court allowed for damages lawsuits against federal officials who violate a person’s civil rights, though decisions in recent years have substantially narrowed that ability.

Democrats in California are pursuing legislation that would make it easier for residents to seek financial damages for constitutional violations committed by federal agents. Similar laws were already enacted in Maryland, Illinois and Connecticut, though the Trump administration has sued to block the latter two.

But there is a different route — tort claims.

Tort cases can be difficult to win, in part because the government can claim a “discretionary function exception,” which shields the agency from liability when the situation involves a policy-driven judgment call.

“So that’s what a lot of plaintiff’s lawyers are really anxious about, that the Trump administration is going to say, ‘Well, we’ve got our own immigration policies. Of course a lot of people disagree with them, but the statute is designed to give us the right to make those policy judgments,’” said Benjamin Zipursky, a Fordham University law professor who studies torts.

“Now, if I were the plaintiff’s lawyer, I would say, ‘Yeah, but shooting somebody in cold blood because you’re just mad about their political views, and they’re not really threatening your life at all — that’s not a policy judgment,’” he said.

The law office of John Burris, an Oakland-based attorney who represented Rodney King after he was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, has taken on damages clients in Minnesota. He said he anticipates filing around 80 tort claims stemming from the immigration enforcement actions there.

A memorial for Renee Good at the location where she was fatally shot in Minneapolis.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Burris said the experience has given him flashbacks to the period before King’s beating and the subsequent protests over police brutality, when officers felt they could act with impunity.

“There’s 1779798656 a more fundamental understanding that bad stuff does happen,” he said. “Everyday people are not as willing as they once were to just accept a police officer’s perspective.”

Public disapproval over immigration enforcement rose after federal immigration agents in Minneapolis shot and killed two 37-year-old U.S. citizens, Renee Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, in separate incidents.

Other deaths took place before the Minnesota operation: 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez, who was killed by an ICE agent in Texas who fired repeatedly through the open window of his car; Keith Porter, 43, who was killed in Los Angeles by an off-duty ICE agent after shooting his gun into the air on New Year’s Eve; and Jaime Alanis Garcia, 57, who fell 30 feet from atop a greenhouse while fleeing agents at the Glass House Farms site in Camarillo.

Lawyers for the families of Good, Martinez and Garcia confirmed they are pursuing tort claims. Lawyers for the other families did not respond to requests for comment.

Additional highly publicized cases have also resulted in tort claims: Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent in Chicago; Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist who spent 104 days detained after the administration labeled him a national security threat; Aliya Rahman, a disabled woman on her way to a doctor’s appointment in Minneapolis who blacked out at a detention facility after ICE agents detained her.

New claims appear to be filed weekly. Seventeen men, women and children who were detained in a military-style raid at a Chicago apartment complex filed claims this month seeking about $5 million each.

In many of the cases, Bis said, the claimants impeded or assaulted agents. Pretti’s death remains under investigation, she said.

Willy Wender Aceituno stands in the parking lot where he was arrested last November by ICE agents in Charlotte, N.C.

(Jesse Barber / For The Times)

Willy Wender Aceituno was already a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU of North Carolina challenging the policy allowing warrantless immigration arrests after he was stopped twice in a span of minutes by immigration agents last November. In March, he also submitted a tort claim.

Aceituno is a Honduran-born U.S. citizen who voted for Trump. On the day he was arrested, a group of masked agents checked his identification and left. Aceituno then filmed as a second group surrounded his red truck.

“If you break it, you will pay for it,” he tells them in Spanish seconds before one agent smashes the window with a baton. “Why did you do that, sir?”

Aceituno suffered cuts when agents threw him to the ground, which was covered in shattered glass. They placed him in an SUV with other detainees and drove him around Charlotte, N.C., before releasing him, still bleeding, more than 2 miles from his vehicle.

The moment brought back Aceituno’s childhood memory of watching his father be arrested by the Honduran military and disappeared.

“I remember they broke down the door, entered, put him in handcuffs and threw him to the ground,” he said. “I thought, ‘It’s happening again.’ To see the other Hispanics in the car made it feel like this is racial persecution. This is about skin, not criminality.”

Bis, the Homeland Security spokesperson, said Aceituno acted erratically, escalated the situation and refused to comply with officers’ commands.

Lawyers said many people, especially immigrants, who have viable claims have chosen not to pursue them out of fear of being targeted for deportation. Some were deported before they could sue.

“Even now, our clients wake up some days thinking, ‘What am I doing suing the federal government?’” said Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Lawyers for Civil Rights. “You have to have a lot of courage to be able to stand up against an administration that has put a bull’s-eye on you and that has targeted you based on your identity.”

Others have turned to mutual aid or online fundraisers to pay for medical bills or to repair property damage. On the website GoFundMe, donation campaigns describe shattered car windows, broken limbs, head trauma and mounting bills.

Some damage can’t be fully recompensated, Espinoza-Madrigal added.

Members of the Haitian community hold signs in support for the extension of Temporary Protected Status during a rally last month in Miami.

(Carl Juste / Miami Herald / Getty Images)

One of the organization’s clients is Jose Pineda, a Salvadoran man with Temporary Protected Status. A year ago, Pineda was stopped by ICE officers on his way to work in East Boston as a landscaper. They wouldn’t accept his Social Security and work authorization cards as proof enough that he was not deportable, and detained him without explanation, according to his tort claim.

So Pineda spent nearly two days in a holding cell at the ICE Boston Field Office with around 50 other people. He couldn’t sit or sleep and received minimal water and food.

Bis said agents “briefly questioned” Pineda because he matched the description of the subject of an operation, and that he was released after being identified.

When he was released, the claim alleges, his documents were returned but $600 in cash that he was saving to pay rent was not. The incident left him with frequent headaches, anxiety and memory loss, and exacerbated his gastritis. His absence from work resulted in a demotion from lead foreman to an assistant role.

“Whenever I drive, if someone stays behind me for three, four or five minutes, I start to imagine that it’s them again,” he said in an interview.

Pineda’s arrest also caused recurring nightmares that leave him shouting and thrashing around in bed. Out of fear that he could inadvertently harm his wife, they now sleep in separate beds.

Sometimes it seems as though the only thing that stands between a functioning democracy and a full-on Trump autocracy is a thin, black-robed line.

Although the Supreme Court, in general, and conservative appellate courts, in particular, have bowed and granted President Trump permission to do pretty much anything he wants, they haven’t thoroughly capitulated to his endless grasping for ever more power. (The way invertebrate congressional Republicans have.)

At the lower-court level, judges have repeatedly ruled in ways intended to check Trump, most notably when it comes to violating civil and constitutional rights in pursuit of his indiscriminate immigration dragnet.

The tendency to slow-walk his administration’s response to those rulings — and ignore others that Trump thinks he can safely snub — only contribute to the perception of presidential lawlessness and a sense that our judicial system is being strained to something approaching a breaking point.

Go ahead, if you’d like, and dismiss those concerns as just so much overwrought hand-wringing, or the mindless anti-Trump blathering of your friendly political columnist. A new survey of legal experts — including federal judges, top-tier lawyers and scores of professors from some of the country’s leading law schools — finds widespread concern about the brittle state of our legal system.

And it’s not just the fears of a lot of shaggy-thinking liberals.

“The nation is strong as is its commitment to the rule of law,” said one appellate judge, a Republican appointee. “The current president presents the greatest threat in decades.”

The survey was conducted by Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan academic group that monitors the health and resilience of American democracy, in conjunction with the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA’s School of Law.

Conducted between mid-February and early March, the poll anonymously surveyed 21 federal judges, 113 lawyers, 193 law professors, 652 political scientists and a nationally representative sample of 2,750 Americans.

What leapt out to UCLA’s Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, was that “across the ideological spectrum and across judges, lawyers and law professors, there was considerable agreement that the rule of law in the U.S. is under tremendous stress.” That consensus, he said, suggests “a real risk to democracy.”

Most legal experts agreed that Trump is using executive power excessively, with a majority doubting the conservative-leaning Supreme Court would handle cases involving the Trump administration impartially. The experts also expressed concern about politicized law enforcement — Trump seeking to persecute his perceived enemies — executive branch overreach, and the failure of Congress or the Supreme Court to do more to rein in the rogue president.

Eight in 10 of those surveyed said federal officials fail to comply with court orders somewhat or very often, and nearly 9 in 10 said political appointees in Trump’s Justice Department mislead federal judges somewhat or very often.

Talk about contempt of court — not to mention our vital system of checks and balances.

There was, unsurprisingly, a split among conservatives and liberals who took part in the survey. (The study defined legal conservatives as those saying the Supreme Court should base rulings on its understanding of what the Constitution meant as originally written. Liberals, who made up most of the respondents, were defined as those saying the court should base its rulings on what the Constitution means in current times.)

Conservatives, for instance, were more likely than liberals to see former President Biden as a greater threat to the rule of law than Trump. Liberals were more likely than conservatives to see evidence of Trump politicizing the Justice Department.

There were also differences between legal experts — those most intimately involved in the judicial system — and the public at large. The experts were more concerned about Trump’s excesses and threats to the rule of law, which, Hasen said, stands to reason.

The legal system is not something most people encounter daily in the same way they do, say, gasoline prices or the cost of groceries. “Yet,” Hasen said, “it’s one of these background things that really matters.”

Why?

Hasen put it this way: “Imagine that a person had a dispute with their neighbor and it ended up in small claims court before a judge and the judge made the decision not based on the merits of the case but based on whether he was friends with one of the parties, or didn’t like people who were similar to one of the parties.”

Now imagine that kind of corrupted, perverted system of justice writ large.

If, for instance, “people know that the government can successfully seek retribution from people who criticize it, people will be less likely to criticize the government,” Hasen said, leaving the country worse off by muzzling those who would hold their elected leaders to account.

Or if, say, rioters overran the U.S. Capitol and tried to steal an election and, instead of being punished, received cash payouts from the federal government, what incentive would there be to follow the law?

Happily — and who couldn’t use a bit of good cheer right about now — all is not lost.

People “can demand that their elected representatives take steps to assure that the rule of law will be followed,” Hasen said, and can insist “that the government [not] play favorites or seek retribution against perceived enemies.”

That’s the power people have, come election time. That’s why voting matters.

There are lots of things riding on the outcome in November, not least the sanctity and integrity of our legal system.

Bear that in mind when you cast your ballot.

NEW YORK — Former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene after a federal appeals court on Friday declined to reconsider a decision that put the government a step closer to deporting him, the pro-Palestinian activist’s lawyers said.

Judges on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia voted 6-5 against having the court’s full complement of judges review the ruling. In January, a three-judge 3rd Circuit panel found that a federal judge in New Jersey who had sided with Khalil and ordered his release last year from immigration detention didn’t have jurisdiction to decide the matter.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is involved in representing Khalil, said his lawyers will ask the 3rd Circuit for an order preventing the decision from taking effect — and barring Khalil from being detained or deported — while it asks the Supreme Court to take up the case.

An appeal to the high court is expected in the coming months, possibly in late summer.

“Today’s decision is not the final word, and we still strongly believe in our arguments going forward,” ACLU senior counsel Brett Max Kaufman said in a statement.

In its January ruling, the 3rd Circuit found that Khalil’s lawsuit challenging his detention and U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz’s subsequent rulings in the case were premature because federal law requires that such challenges first move through the separate immigration court system. That system is part of the Justice Department, not the judicial branch.

The decision didn’t decide the key issue in Khalil’s case: whether the Trump administration’s effort to throw Khalil out of the U.S. over his campus activism and criticism of Israel is unconstitutional.

Judge Cheryl Ann Krause, who had voted for the 3rd Circuit to review the decision, wrote in a dissent that the court was “abdicating our duty to meaningfully review Khalil’s constitutional claims. The Judicial Branch, she wrote, cannot fulfill its role as a check on the other branches of government, “if we write ourselves out of relevance and leave the Executive Branch to check itself.”

Khalil, 31, has also appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Louisiana, where he was detained, after the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld his removal order.

Through his lawyers, Khalil argued that the immigration judge who issued the order failed to consider relevant evidence and wrongly upheld a charge that he had misrepresented information on his application for legal permanent resident status. That charge, Khalil’s lawyers said, was brought in retaliation for his protest activity.

The immigration judge suggested Khalil could be deported to Algeria, where he maintains citizenship through a distant relative, or Syria, where he was born in a refugee camp to a Palestinian family. Khalil’s lawyers have said he would face mortal danger if forced to return to either country.

An outspoken leader of the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia, Khalil was arrested in March 2025. He then spent three months detained in a Louisiana immigration jail, missing the birth of his child.

Federal officials have accused Khalil of leading activities “aligned to Hamas,” though they have not presented evidence to support the claim and have not accused him of criminal conduct. They also accused Khalil of failing to disclose information on his green card application.

Khalil has dismissed the allegations as “baseless and ridiculous,” framing his arrest and detention as a “direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

The government justified the arrest under a seldom-used statute that allows for the expulsion of noncitizens whose beliefs are deemed to pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. In June 2025, Farbiarz ruled that justification would likely be declared unconstitutional and ordered Khalil released.

President Trump’s administration appealed that ruling, arguing the deportation decision should fall to an immigration judge, rather than a federal court. The 3rd Circuit ruled 2-1 in the administration’s favor.

Judge Emil Bove, who was involved in investigating student protesters while a top Justice Department official, did not participate in the 3rd Circuit vote on whether to review the decision. He later issued an order denying a request by Khalil’s lawyers that he step aside from the matter, calling it moot.

Sisak writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.