Appellate court judges expressed broad skepticism Thursday over President Donald Trump’s legal rationale for his most expansive round of tariffs.
Members of the 11-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington appeared unconvinced by the Trump administration’s insistence that the president could impose tariffs without congressional approval, and it hammered its invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to do so.
“IEEPA doesn’t even mention the word ‘tariffs’ anywhere,” Circuit Judge Jimmie Reyna said, in a sign of the panel’s incredulity to a government attorney’s arguments.
Brett Shumate, the attorney representing the Trump administration, acknowledged in the 99-minute hearing “no president has ever read IEEPA this way” but contended it was nonetheless lawful.
The 1977 law, signed by President Jimmy Carter, allows the president to seize assets and block transactions during a national emergency. It was first used during the Iran hostage crisis and has since been invoked for a range of global unrest, from the 9/11 attacks to the Syrian civil war.Trump says the country’s trade deficit is so serious that it likewise qualifies for the law’s protection.
In sharp exchanges with Shumate, appellate judges questioned that contention, asking whether the law extended to tariffs at all and, if so, whether the levies matched the threat the administration identified.
“If the president says there’s a problem with our military readiness,” Chief Circuit Judge Kimberly Moore posited, “and he puts a 20% tax on coffee, that doesn’t seem to necessarily deal with (it).”
Shumate said Congress’ passage of IEEPA gave the president “broad and flexible” power to respond to an emergency, but that “the president is not asking for unbounded authority.”
But an attorney for the plaintiffs, Neal Katyal, characterized Trump’s maneuver as a “breathtaking” power grab that amounted to saying “the president can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, for as long as he wants so long as he declares an emergency.”
No ruling was issued from the bench. Regardless of what decision the judges’ deliberations bring, the case is widely expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump weighed in on the case on his Truth Social platform, posting: “To all of my great lawyers who have fought so hard to save our Country, good luck in America’s big case today. If our Country was not able to protect itself by using TARIFFS AGAINST TARIFFS, WE WOULD BE “DEAD,” WITH NO CHANCE OF SURVIVAL OR SUCCESS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!’'
In filings in the case, the Trump administration insists that “a national emergency exists” necessitating its trade policy. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade, a specialized federal court in New York, was unconvinced, however, ruling in May that Trump exceeded his powers.
The issue now rests with the appeals judges.
The challenge strikes at just one batch of import taxes from an administration that has unleashed a bevy of them and could be poised to unveil more on Friday.
The case centers on Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs of April 2 that imposed new levies on nearly every country. But it doesn’t cover other tariffs, including those on foreign steel, aluminum and autos, nor ones imposed on China during Trump’s first term, and continued by President Joe Biden.
The case is one of at least seven lawsuits charging that Trump overstepped his authority through the use of tariffs on other nations. The plaintiffs include 12 U.S. states and five businesses, including a wine importer, a company selling pipes and plumbing goods, and a maker of fishing gear.
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the authority to impose taxes — including tariffs — but over decades, lawmakers have ceded power over trade policy to the White House.
Trump has made the most of the power vacuum, raising the average U.S. tariff to more than 18%, the highest rate since 1934, according to the Budget Lab at Yale University.
Lori Vallow Daybell, already serving life sentences in Idaho in the killings of her two youngest children and a romantic rival, will be sentenced Friday on two murder conspiracy convictions in Arizona, signaling an end to a winding legal saga for the mother with doomsday religious beliefs who claimed people in her life had been possessed by evil spirits.
In separate trials this spring in Arizona, Vallow Daybell was convicted of conspiring to murder her estranged husband, Charles Vallow, and her niece’s ex-husband, Brandon Boudreaux. Authorities say she carried out the plots with her brother Alex Cox, who acknowledged killing Vallow in July 2019 and was identified by prosecutors as the person who shot at Boudreaux months later but missed.
Prosecutors say Vallow Daybell conspired to kill Vallow so she could collect on his $1 million life insurance policy and marry her then-boyfriend Chad Daybell, an Idaho author of several religious novels about prophecies and the end of the world. They say Boudreaux suspected Vallow Daybell and Cox were responsible for Vallow’s death. Boudreaux then went into hiding with his children because he feared Cox would kill him, prosecutors said.
Public interest in Vallow Daybell, 52, grew as the investigation into her own missing children — 7-year-old Joshua “JJ’ Vallow and 16-year-old Tylee Ryan — took several strange and unexpected turns. Their bodies were found buried in rural Idaho on Chad Daybell’s property on June 9, 2020.
Chad Daybell was sentenced to death in the killings of the children and his wife, Tammy, the romantic rival. Vallow Daybell was convicted of conspiring to kill Tammy.
Prosecutors in Arizona are seeking life sentences on each of Vallow Daybell’s latest convictions. Once sentenced in Arizona, Vallow Daybell will be sent back to prison in Idaho.
Charles Vallow was fatally shot in 2019
Charles Vallow filed for divorce four months before he died. He said Vallow Daybell became infatuated with near-death experiences and claimed to have lived numerous lives on other planets. He told police she threatened to kill him and he was concerned for his children.
Vallow was shot when he went to pick up his son at Vallow Daybell’s home outside Phoenix, police said. Vallow Daybell’s daughter, Tylee, told police the sound of yelling woke her up, and she confronted Vallow with a baseball bat to defend her mother. Vallow managed to take the bat from her.
Cox told police that he shot Vallow after he refused to drop the bat and came after him.
Cox died five months later from a blood clot in his lungs. His self-defense claim was later called into question, with investigators saying Cox and Vallow Daybell waited more than 40 minutes before calling 911.
Right before his death, Vallow and his wife’s other brother, Adam Cox, planned an intervention to try to bring Lori back into the mainstream of their shared faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Adam Cox, a witness for the prosecution, testified his sister claimed to be in the process of “translating from being a mortal human to an immortal human being, a celestial being.” He also said she told people that Vallow was no longer living and that a zombie was inside her estranged husband’s body.
Someone shot at Brandon Boudreaux months later
Almost three months after Vallow died, someone fired a shot at Boudreaux from an open window of a Jeep as he was driving up to his home in Gilbert, another Phoenix suburb. It narrowly missed Boudreaux, the ex-husband of Vallow Daybell’s niece, Melani Pawlowski.
Boudreaux said Pawlowski aspired to be like her aunt. The two started attending religious meetings together in 2018. Soon after, Pawlowski said they should stockpile food for the end of the world.
Prosecutors tied the Jeep to Vallow Daybell and said she loaned it to Alex Cox. The two bought a burner phone used to carry out the attack and tried to concoct an alibi for Cox to make it seem like he was in Idaho at the time, prosecutors said.
Vallow Daybell is representing herself
Unlike her Idaho case, Vallow Daybell chose to represent herself at both Arizona trials, even though she isn’t a lawyer.
At her first trial, she argued her brother Alex Cox acted in self-defense when killing Vallow. She struggled with legal duties that most lawyers consider routine, such as lining up witnesses to testify.
She argued at the second Arizona trial that no evidence established that she conspired with Cox to kill Boudreaux.
“I’m not defensive,” Vallow Daybell told jurors. “I’m not angry.”
She clashed with Judge Justin Beresky and tried to get him removed from the case, arguing he was biased against her. She insisted on exercising her speedy trial rights yet complained she didn’t have enough time to prepare.
During jury selection in the case involving Boudreaux, Vallow Daybell said she was sick and couldn’t go to trial. Beresky pushed ahead, saying there was no objective evidence to support her claim.
As President Donald Trump focuses on global trade deals and dispatching troops to aid his immigration crackdown, his lawyers are fighting to erase the hush money criminal conviction that punctuated his reelection campaign last year and made him the first former — and now current — U.S. president found guilty of a crime.
On Wednesday, that fight landed in a federal appeals court in Manhattan, where a three-judge panel heard arguments in Trump’s long-running bid to get the New York case moved from state court to federal court so he can then seek to have it thrown out on presidential immunity grounds.
It’s one way he’s trying to get the historic verdict overturned.
The judges in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals spent more than an hour grilling Trump’s lawyer and the appellate chief for Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case and wants it to remain in state court.
At turns skeptical and receptive to both sides’ arguments on the weighty and seldom-tested legal issues underlying the president’s request, the judges said they would take the matter under advisement and issue a ruling at a later date.
But there was at least one thing all parties agreed on: It is a highly unusual case.
Trump lawyer Jeffrey Wall called the president “a class of one” and Judge Susan L. Carney, noted that it was “anomalous” for a defendant to seek to transfer a case to federal court after it has been decided in state court.
Carney was nominated to the 2nd Circuit by Democratic President Barack Obama. The other judges who heard arguments, Raymond J. Lohier, Jr. and Myrna Pérez were nominated by Obama and Democratic President Joe Biden, respectively.
The Republican president is asking the federal appeals court to intervene after a lower-court judge twice rejected the move. As part of the request, Trump wants the court to seize control of the criminal case and then ultimately decide his appeal of the verdict, which is now pending in a state appellate court.
Trump’s Justice Department — now partly run by his former criminal defense lawyers — backs his bid to move the case to federal court. If he loses, he could go to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Everything about this cries out for federal court,” Wall argued. Wall, a former acting U.S. solicitor general, argued that Trump’s historic prosecution violated the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, which was decided last July, about a month after the hush money verdict. The ruling reined in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricted prosecutors from pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.
Trump’s lawyers argue that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, and that they erred by showing jurors evidence that should not have been allowed under the ruling, such as former White House staffers describing how Trump reacted to news coverage of the hush money deal and tweets he sent while president in 2018.
“The district attorney holds the keys in his hand,” Wall argued. “He doesn’t have to introduce this evidence.”
Steven Wu, the appellate chief for the district attorney’s office, countered that Trump was too late in seeking to move the case to federal court. Normally, such a request must be made within 30 days of an arraignment, but a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. recently ruled that exceptions can be made if “good cause” is shown. Trump hasn’t done that, Wu argued.
While “this defendant is an unusual defendant,” Wu said, there is nothing unusual about a defendant raising subsequent court decisions, such as the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling for Trump, when they appeal their convictions. That appeal, he argued, should stay in state court.
Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denies her claim and said he did nothing wrong. It was the only one of his four criminal cases to go to trial.
A Georgia appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling that said county election officials in the state must vote to certify results according to deadlines set in law.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney had ruled in October that “no election superintendent (or member of a board of elections and registration) may refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance.” The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by Republican Fulton County election board member Julie Adams, who abstained from certifying primary election results last year.
A three-judge panel of the Georgia Court of Appeals last week upheld McBurney’s ruling, saying “Adams’ contention that the trial court erred by declaring she had a mandatory duty to certify election results is without merit.”
Certification, an administrative task that involves certifying the number of votes, became a political flashpoint when President Donald Trump tried to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 general election. Republicans in several swing states refused to certify results during primary elections last year, and some sued to try to keep from being forced to sign off on election results.
In the run-up to last year’s presidential election, Democrats and some voting rights groups worried that Trump-allied election officials could refuse to certify election results if he were to lose to then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump ended up beating Harris.
Georgia law says county election superintendents, which are generally multimember boards, shall certify election results by 5 p.m. on the Monday after an election, or the Tuesday after if Monday is a holiday.
McBurney had written in his order that Georgia law allows county election officials to examine whether fraud has occurred and what should be done about it. They should share any concerns with the appropriate authorities for criminal prosecution or use them to file an election challenge in court, but cannot use their concerns to justify not certifying results, the judge wrote.
The Court of Appeals opinion echoed McBurney’s ruling.
The appeals court also noted that state law limits county election officials’ review of documents to instances when the total number of votes exceeds the total number of voters or ballots and also limits the review to documents related to the relevant precinct. To the extent that McBurney’s ruling allows a more expansive review, the judges sent it back to him for reconsideration.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose mistaken deportation has become a flashpoint in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, pleaded not guilty Friday to human smuggling charges in a federal court in Tennessee.
The hearing was the first chance the Maryland construction worker has had in a U.S. courtroom to answer the Trump administration’s allegations since he was mistakenly deported in March to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have characterized the smuggling case as a desperate attempt to justify the mistaken deportation. The investigation was launched weeks after the U.S. government deported Abrego Garcia and following a Supreme Court order and mounting pressure to return him.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers told a judge Friday that some government witnesses cooperated to get favors regarding their immigration status or criminal charges they were facing. A federal agent acknowledged during his testimony that one witness was living in the U.S. illegally with a criminal record and is now getting preferred status.
“He sounds like the exact type of person this government should be trying to deport,” Federal Public Defender Dumaka Shabazz said. “They’re going to give all these other people deals to stay in the country just to get this one other person.”
Most of Friday’s hearing focused on whether Abrego Garcia should be released as he awaits trial. U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes said she will write her decision “sooner rather than later.”
The smuggling charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop for speeding in Tennessee during which Abrego Garcia was driving a vehicle with nine passengers. While officers suspected possible smuggling, Abrego Garcia was allowed to go on his way with only a warning.
Body camera footage shows a calm exchange between officers and Abrego Garcia. The officers then discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling before letting him go. One of the officers says, “He’s hauling these people for money.” Another says Abrego Garcia had $1,400 in an envelope.
The federal indictment accuses Abrego Garcia of smuggling throughout the U.S. hundreds of people living in the country illegally, including children and members of the violent MS-13 gang.
In briefings before Friday’s hearing, U.S. attorneys described Abrego Garcia as a danger to the community and a flight risk. They also accused him of trafficking drugs and firearms and of abusing the women he transported, among other claims, although he is not charged with such crimes.
Rob McGuire, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, told the judge Friday that “migrant transportation is inherently dangerous.”
The prosecutor also presented two orders of protection that Abrego Garcia’s wife sought in 2020 and 2021 against him for domestic violence. Jennifer Vasquez Sura said this spring that the couple had worked things out “privately as a family, including by going to counseling.”
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys rejected the prosecution’s assertions that he was a danger, while arguing the charges aren’t serious enough for detention.
A federal judge on Friday blocked President Donald Trump’s attempt to overhaul elections in the U.S., siding with a group of Democratic state attorneys general who challenged the effort as unconstitutional.
The Republican president’s March 25 executive order sought to compel officials to require documentary proof of citizenship for everyone registering to vote for federal elections, accept only mailed ballots received by Election Day and condition federal election grant funding on states adhering to the new ballot deadline.
The attorneys general said the directive “usurps the States’ constitutional power and seeks to amend election law by fiat.” The White House defended the order as “standing up for free, fair and honest elections” and called proof of citizenship a “commonsense” requirement.
Judge Denise J. Casper of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts said in Friday’s order that the states had a likelihood of success as to their legal challenges.
“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” Casper wrote.
Casper also noted that, when it comes to citizenship, “there is no dispute (nor could there be) that U.S. citizenship is required to vote in federal elections and the federal voter registration forms require attestation of citizenship.”
Casper cited arguments made by the states that the requirements would “burden the States with significant efforts and substantial costs” to update procedures.
The ruling is the second legal setback for Trump’s election order. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., previously blocked parts of the directive, including the proof-of-citizenship requirement for the federal voter registration form.
The order is the culmination of Trump’s longstanding complaints about elections. After his first win in 2016, Trump falsely claimed his popular vote total would have been much higher if not for “millions of people who voted illegally.” Since 2020, Trump has made false claims of widespread voter fraud and manipulation of voting machines to explain his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
He has said his executive order secures elections against illegal voting by noncitizens, though multiple studies and investigations in the states have shown that it’s rare and typically a mistake. Casting a ballot as a noncitizen is already against the law and can result in fines and deportation if convicted.
The order also would require states to exclude any mail-in or absentee ballots received after Election Day and puts states’ federal funding at risk if election officials don’t comply. Currently, 18 states and Puerto Rico accept mailed ballots received after Election Day as long they are postmarked on or before that date, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Oregon and Washington, which conduct their elections almost entirely by mail, filed a separate lawsuit over the ballot deadline, saying the executive order could disenfranchise voters in their states. When the lawsuit was filed, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs noted that more than 300,000 ballots in the state arrived after Election Day in 2024.
Trump’s order has received praise from the top election officials in some Republican states who say it could inhibit instances of voter fraud and will give them access to federal data to better maintain their voter rolls. But many legal experts say the order exceeds Trump’s power because the Constitution gives states the authority to set the “times, places and manner” of elections, with Congress allowed to set rules for elections to federal office. As Friday’s ruling states, the Constitution makes no provision for presidents to set the rules for elections.
During a hearing earlier this month on the states’ request for a preliminary injunction, lawyers for the states and lawyers for the administration argued over the implications of Trump’s order, whether the changes could be made in time for next year’s midterm elections and how much it would cost the states.
Justice Department lawyer Bridget O’Hickey said during the hearing that the order seeks to provide a single set of rules for certain aspects of election operations rather than having a patchwork of state laws and that any harm to the states is speculation.
O’Hickey also claimed that mailed ballots received after Election Day might somehow be manipulated, suggesting people could retrieve their ballots and alter their votes based on what they see in early results. But all ballots received after Election Day require a postmark showing they were sent on or before that date, and that any ballot with a postmark after Election Day would not count.
Congressional Republicans are investigating Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s response to federal immigration arrests during hundreds of traffic stops over several days in May.
Rep. Andy Ogles is leading the charge, pitting the Republican who represents part of the Democratic-leaning city against a progressive mayor who has criticized immigration officials after they arrested nearly 200 people in the greater Nashville area.
The dayslong presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents sent chills through well-known Nashville immigrant neighborhoods. Many Republicans, meanwhile, applauded ICE’s enforcement focus in the city.
Republicans have criticized Nashville officials for publicly documenting interactions between local authorities and federal immigration agents on an official city government website. Some of the entries included authorities’ names before city officials removed them. They have also blasted O’Connell for promoting a fundraiser for families affected by the ICE activity.
O’Connell has said the arrests caused long-lasting trauma for families and were led by people who don’t share Nashville’s values of safety and community.
ICE has said that it arrested 196 people alongside the Tennessee Highway Patrol during a weeklong effort in and around Nashville. ICE said 95 had criminal convictions, were facing criminal charges or both, but didn’t provide a more detailed breakdown, including the type of crimes. It said about 30 had entered the country after previously being deported, some of whom are included in the 95.
The Highway Patrol said it made more than 580 traffic stops in the joint operation with ICE. ICE highlighted seven cases, including two gang members, one of whom was wanted in an El Salvador killing, and people with convictions such as drug offenses, rape or assault.
Lisa Sherman Luna of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition criticized the effort as “at a scale we’ve never seen before.” She said officers were arresting some people who were going home to their children or heading to work.
Early into ICE’s operation in Nashville, the mayor held a news conference to assure that Nashville’s police force was not involved in the immigration crackdown.
He said the immigration enforcement approach “is not our understanding of what a Nashville for all of us looks like.”
At the news conference, the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee also announced the fundraising effort to provide child care, transportation, housing aid, food and more for families impacted by the ICE activity.
O’Connell’s administration has sent letters asking Tennessee Highway Patrol and ICE to identify those arrested and their charges. He told the Nashville Rotary Club this week he still hasn’t received that information.
O’Connell is facing particular scrutiny because of a policy requiring city agencies to report communications with federal immigration authorities to the mayor’s office. Nashville has had similar orders under two prior mayors, and O’Connell added quicker reporting deadlines last month. He said the goal is transparency.
Congressman Ogles declared that House committees would be investigating O’Connell during a Memorial Day news conference at Tennessee’s Capitol in Nashville — a venue that raised eyebrows because it’s closed to the public on the holiday. Noise from protesters carried from outside the building.
A subsequent letter signed by Ogles and three other House committee and subcommittee chairmen requests documents and communications about O’Connell’s executive order and the ICE enforcement efforts. Ogles and others have also cried foul that the names of some immigration officials in the Nashville operation were made public. The agents’ names were removed, with O’Connell saying it wasn’t the intent of the executive order to release them.
O’Connell has said Nashville isn’t trying to obstruct federal or state laws, and has no reason to be concerned about the congressional investigation.
An appeals court has cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at ending collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of federal employees while a lawsuit plays out.
The Friday ruling came after the Trump administration asked for an emergency pause on a judge’s order blocking enforcement at roughly three dozen agencies and departments.
A split three-judge panel in the nation’s capital sided with government lawyers in a lawsuit filed by unions representing federal employees. The majority ruled on technical grounds, finding that the unions don’t have the legal right to sue because the Trump administration has said it won’t end any collective bargaining agreements while the case is being litigated.
Judge Karen Henderson, appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush, and Justin Walker, appointed by Trump, sided with the government, while Judge Michelle Childs, appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden, dissented.
The government says Trump needs the executive order so his administration can cut the federal workforce to ensure strong national security. The law requiring collective bargaining creates exemptions for work related to national security, as in agencies like the FBI.
Union leaders argue the order is designed to facilitate mass firings and exact “political vengeance” against federal unions opposed to Trump’s efforts to dramatically downsize the federal government.
His order seeks to expand that exemption to exclude more workers than any other president has before. That’s according to the National Treasury Employees Union, which is suing to block the order.
The administration has filed in a Kentucky court to terminate the collective bargaining agreement for the Internal Revenue Service, where many workers are represented by the National Treasury Employees Union. They say their IRS members aren’t doing national security work.
Other union employees affected by the order include the Health and Human Services Department, the Energy Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Communications Commission.
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Minnesota asking to revive the state’s ban on gun-carry permits for young adults.
The justices also left in place a ban on guns at the University of Michigan, declining to hear an appeal from a man who argued he has a right to be armed on campus. No justice noted a dissent in either case.
Taken together, the actions reflect the high court’s apparent lack of appetite for cases that further explore the constitutional right to “keep and bear arms.”
The court has repeatedly turned away gun cases since its 2022 ruling that expanded gun rights and a clarifying 2024 decision that upheld a federal gun control law that is intended to protect victims of domestic violence.
The decision not to hear the Minnesota case was somewhat surprising because both sides sought the Supreme Court’s review and courts around the country have come to different conclusions about whether states can limit the gun rights of people aged 18 to 20 without violating the Constitution.
The federal appeals court in St. Louis ruled that the Minnesota ban conflicted with the Second Amendment, which the court noted sets no age limit and generally protects ordinary, law-abiding young adults.
In January, the federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down a federal law requiring young adults to be 21 to buy handguns.
In February, a federal judge declined to block Hawaii’s ban on gun possession for people under 21.
Nadine Menendez, the wife of former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, was convicted Monday of teaming up with her husband to accept bribes of cash, gold bars and a luxury car from three New Jersey men looking for help with their business dealings or legal troubles.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty on all counts in the same federal courthouse in Manhattan where a different jury convicted Bob Menendez of many of the same charges last year. The Democrat is supposed to begin serving an 11-year prison term in June.
Nadine Menendez, who stood but did not appear to react as the verdict was delivered by the jury foreperson, was scheduled to be sentenced on June 12, six days after her husband is expected to report to prison.
Outside the courthouse, she wore a pink mask as she stood next to her lawyer, Barry Coburn, said he was “devastated by the verdict.”
“We fought hard and it hurts,” he said. “This is a very rough day for us.”
The evidence shown to jurors over a three-week trial followed the timeline of the whirlwind romance between the couple that began in early 2018 and continued after criminal charges were brought against them in September 2023. Repeatedly during the trial, prosecutors said they were “partners in crime.”
During a 2022 raid on the couple’s Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home, FBI agents found nearly $150,000 worth of gold bars and $480,000 in cash stuffed in boots, shoeboxes and jackets. In the garage was a Mercedes-Benz convertible, also an alleged bribe.
Both Nadine and Bob Menendez said they are innocent and never took bribes.
Initially, they were to be tried together, along with the three businessmen, but Nadine Menendez’s trial was postponed a year ago after she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery.
Bob Menendez, 71, resigned from the Senate last August following his conviction. Before the charges were brought he had been chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Prosecutors accused Nadine Menendez of starting to facilitating bribes to the senator around the time that they began dating, before they married in the fall of 2020.
At the time, she was in danger of losing her home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, after missing nearly $20,000 in mortgage payments, trial testimony showed. A longtime friend, Wael Hana, provided cash to save the home — and prosecutors said that in return, the senator began helping Hana preserve a business monopoly he had arranged with the Egyptian government to certify that imported meat met religious requirements.
Nadine Menendez also needed a new car after her old one was destroyed when she struck and killed a man crossing a street. (She did not face charges in the crash). Prosecutors said a businessman, Jose Uribe, gave her a Mercedes-Benz, and in return Bob Menendez used his clout to pressure the New Jersey attorney general’s office to stop investigating some of Uribe’s associates.
Prosecutor said more cash and gold bribes were paid to the couple by Fred Daibes, a prominent real estate developer who prosecutors said wanted the senator to protect him from a criminal case he was facing in New Jersey. Prosecutors said Bob Menendez also helped Daibes secure a $95 million investment from a Qatari investment fund.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill is pushing forward with her efforts to force Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson to drop a longtime policy that generally prohibits deputies from directly engaging in federal immigration enforcement within the city’s jail.
In legal filings, Murrill claims that the policy — which the state characterizes as a so-called “sanctuary city” policy — is in direct conflict with a newly passed state law that requires state and local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal immigration agencies.
“The consent decree now sits fundamentally at odds with state law as applicable to immigration detainers,” Murrill said in court documents filed Friday.
A federal court will now determine whether to allow the state of Louisiana to join a 2011 federal suit that resulted in the policy and whether to throw out the policy altogether. A hearing has been set for April 30.
The state’s campaign against “sanctuary” policies comes as President Donald Trump is pushing local law enforcement agencies to join the federal government in his promised immigration crackdown. Since his inauguration, Trump has ordered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to push for more partnerships between local law enforcement units and federal immigration agencies. A few have already signed up. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a longtime immigration hardliner and Trump ally, has worked with Republican lawmakers in the state to enact laws that encourage those collaborations.
As attorney general, Landry criticized a policy adopted by the New Orleans Police Department, under a long-running federal consent decree that blocks officers from enforcing immigration laws.
Neither Murrill’s office nor representatives for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to requests for comment.
In court filings, Murrill said Hutson “does not oppose the (state’s) intervention” in the case.” But a spokesperson for Hutson said that’s not exactly true. “It’s more accurate that we take no position regarding the state intervention,” a Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.
While she has not taken a position for or against increased collaboration with ICE, in an interview with Fox 8 in December, Hutson noted that the jail’s resources were far too stretched to take on immigration enforcement.
The sheriff’s policy stems from a 2013 federal court settlement in a civil rights case involving two New Orleans construction workers picked up on minor charges in 2009 and 2010. Mario Cacho and Antonio Ocampo sued after they were allegedly illegally held in the city’s jail past the completion of their sentences. The two were held at the request of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency issues such “detainer” requests to local law enforcement agencies, asking them to hold onto arrestees who are suspected of immigration violations. Local agencies are only supposed to honor the hold requests for 48 hours, after which they should let detainees free. But in 2009 and 2010, then-Sheriff Marlin Gusman detained Cacho and Ocampo for months, according to legal filings in their case against the office.
Ocampo and Cacho settled the case with the Sheriff’s Office in 2013, and Gusman agreed to adopt a new policy on immigration investigations. The resulting policy blocks the agency from investigating immigration violations and from detaining immigrants for ICE without a court order, except in certain cases where they are facing charges for a small number of serious violent crimes.
North Carolina appeals court judges listened to arguments Friday about whether votes on tens of thousands of ballots in an unsettled state Supreme Court election from November should remain in the tally or could be discarded.
A three-judge panel of the intermediate-level Court of Appeals will decide if the State Board of Elections in December properly dismissed the formal protests of those ballots by Republican Jefferson Griffin. A trial judge upheld the board’s actions last month.
After two recounts, Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs leads Griffin by 734 votes from more than 5.5 million ballots cast in the Supreme Court race. Griffin’s lawyers have cited more than 65,000 ballots from three categories they argued came from ineligible voters. Removing them from counts could flip the vote advantage to Griffin.
No immediate ruling was issued Friday after 90 minutes of arguments before the panel, which is composed of two registered Republicans and one Democrat. There’s no date set on when the panel will act. But there is pressure to act quickly. The eight-year term on the highest court in the ninth-largest state was supposed to begin in early January. Riggs has meanwhile remained serving in her seat. And Griffin is in his current job as one of the 15 Court of Appeals judges.
While The Associated Press declared more than 4,400 winners in the 2024 general election, the state Supreme Court election is the only race that is still undecided.
However Judges John Tyson, Fred Gore and Toby Hampson rule, their decision will likely be subject to more appeals to the state Supreme Court on which the two candidates are fighting to serve, as well as potentially federal courts.
While Griffin has recused himself from Court of Appeals deliberations in his case, having the three judges rule in a matter directly affecting a colleague and Riggs — herself a Court of Appeals judge briefly in 2023 — is extraordinary.
The panel’s judges asked many questions about the three categories of ballots Griffin challenged.
The largest category covers ballots cast by voters whose registration records lacked either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. Other votes being challenged were cast by overseas voters who have never lived in the U.S. and military or overseas voters who did not provide copies of photo identification with their ballots.
Griffin’s lawyers have argued that counting the challenged ballots violates state laws or the state constitution, and the state elections board — composed of three Democrats and two Republicans — is to blame by failing to follow them. They want these ballots declared ineligible and ultimately discounted.
Doesn’t the 2005 ruling “say that if a voter relied on board guidance that is contrary to the statute that still is not a reason to excuse the noncompliance?” Tyson asked state attorney Nick Brod, representing the board. Brod disagreed.
Riggs’ allies have held rallies across the state demanding Griffin concede. Before Friday’s hearing, several outside groups filed briefs backing the board’s decisions, including voters whose ballots have been challenged by Griffin.
Court Watch - POSTED: 2025/08/04 20:50
