Opening statements in the trial of the “ComEd Four” — who are accused of illegally currying favor with former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan — began Wednesday.
FBI
The trial of the “ComEd Four” — ex-CEO Anne Pramaggiore, ex-ComEd lobbyist Mike McClain, retired ComEd executive John Hooker and ex-City Club of Chicago president and former ComEd consultant Jay Doherty — will begin this week.
The U.S. Department of Energy and the FBI both assess that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Yet the Energy Department has “low confidence” in its assessment, while FBI director Christopher Wray said the agency has “moderate confidence” in its.
U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Ill., did not say why the FBI may have searched his name in information collected under a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act known as Section 702, and a spokesman for the lawmaker did not respond to a request for further clarification.
Mike Pence is the latest in a string of former top U.S. officials who have been found in possession of sensitive records after leaving the White House — including former President Donald Trump and former Vice President, now President, Joe Biden.
The search, the third of a Biden site in less than two months, follows the 13-hour, Jan. 20 top-to-bottom check of his Wilmington, Delaware, home, where agents located documents with classified markings and also took possession of some of his handwritten notes.
The records “appear to be a small number of documents bearing classified markings that were inadvertently boxed and transported to the personal home of the former vice president at the end of the last administration,” Pence’s lawyer, Greg Jacob, wrote in the letter shared with The Associated Press.
The independent arbiter tasked with inspecting documents seized in an FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home said Tuesday he intends to push briskly though the review process and appeared skeptical of the Trump team’s reluctance to say whether it believed the records had been declassified.
The Justice Department said Thursday that it was appealing a judge’s decision granting the appointment of an independent arbiter to review records seized by the FBI from former President Donald Trump’s Florida home.
The filing offers yet another indication of the sheer volume of classified records retrieved from Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida. It shows how investigators conducting a criminal probe have focused not just on why the records were improperly stored there but also on the question of whether the Trump team intentionally misled them about the continued, and unlawful, presence of the top secret documents.
The filing from the department follows a judge’s weekend order indicating that she was inclined to grant the Trump legal team’s request for a special master who would oversee the review of documents taken during the Aug. 8 search of the Mar-a-Lago estate.
The directive from U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart came hours after federal law enforcement officials submitted under seal the portions of the affidavit that they want to keep secret as their investigation moves forward. The judge set a deadline of noon Friday for a redacted, or blacked-out, version of the document.
The FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate marked an unprecedented escalation of the law enforcement scrutiny of the former president, but the operation is just one part of one investigation related to Trump and his time in office.
After hearing more than seven hours of testimony from investigators and witnesses, a Leflore County grand jury last week determined there was insufficient evidence to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham on charges of kidnapping and manslaughter.
The head of Chicago’s FBI office is retiring after 30 years of service. Special Agent in Charge Emmerson Buie Jr. has been running the Midwest’s largest FBI field office since 2019.
Former President Donald Trump said in a lengthy statement Monday that the FBI was conducting a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate. A person familiar with the matter said the action was related to a probe of whether Trump had taken classified records from his White House tenure to his Florida residence.
