A former FBI informant accused of falsely claiming that President Biden and his son Hunter accepted bribes has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges, according to court papers filed Thursday.
As part of the plea deal with Justice Department special counsel David Weiss, California resident Alexander Smirnov will admit he fabricated the story that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.
The plea agreement comes just weeks after prosecutors filed new tax evasion charges against Smirnov. The two sides will recommend a sentence of at least two years behind bars and no more than six years, according to the agreement.
Attorneys for Smirnov didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Thursday.
Smirnov was arrested in February on allegations that he falsely reported to the FBI in June 2020 that executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Hunter Biden and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016. Smirnov told his handler that an executive claimed to have hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” according to court documents.
Prosecutors said Smirnov had contact with Burisma executives, but it was routine and actually took place in 2017, after President Obama and Biden, his vice president, had left office — when Biden would have had no ability to influence U.S. policy. Prosecutors said he made the bribery allegations after he “expressed bias” against Biden while he was a presidential candidate.
He repeated some of the false claims when he was interviewed by FBI agents in September 2023 and changed his story about others and “promoted a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian officials,” prosecutors said.
Smirnov has agreed to plead guilty to charges of tax evasion and causing a false FBI record, according to court papers.
A valued FBI informant for the last 13 years, Smirnov, 43, lived much of this time in a quiet, seemingly unremarkable life in the suburbs of Los Angeles with a long-term girlfriend 15 years his senior, calling Calabasas, Woodland Hills and Orange County home.
Smirnov’s tenure as a confidential source for the FBI ended in spectacular fashion in February, with a grand jury in L.A. charging him with obstructing justice and lying to federal agents.
Smirnov is being prosecuted by the same special counsel who brought federal gun and tax charges against Hunter Biden. Hunter was supposed to be sentenced this month on his convictions in those cases until he was pardoned by his father.
Richer writes for the Associated Press. Los Angeles Times staff writer Matt Hamilton contributed to this report.
Star Tribune is reporting Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has vetoed the $1.9 billion budget passed Tuesday by the City Council due to “serious concerns over fiscal responsibility.” This comes after the council approved a levy increase smaller than the 8.1% proposed by Frey in August. They also made changes to Frey’s proposed budget by directing funding to public safety initiatives and “specific nonprofits and projects, including the Latino Center for Community Engagement, Mercado Central economic development project, One Southside Clinic project and Mni Sota Fund Indigenous Wealth Building Center.”
“Frey said the council’s budget would increase property taxes for years to come and cuts essentials like police recruitment, in favor of ‘pet projects.’”
Fox9 reports Steven Bailey, the alleged drunk driver who crashed into Park Tavern in St. Louis Park over Labor Day weekend, has plead not guilty to charges of third-degree murder, criminal vehicular homicide and driving under the influence. A trial date is set for May.
St. Cloud Live reports the number of families in ISD 742 experiencing homelessness has more than doubled. “Bynum began the 2024-25 academic year helping 300 families. As of Dec. 6, she and other Transitional Education Services staff areworking with more than 600 families. She estimates that number could grow to around 1,000 by February.”
Also from the Star Tribune: MyPillow is suing Cobalt Funding Solutions alleging a 409% interest rate on a loan made in September.
Axios reports Cub Foods is lowering prices after a “soft couple of years.” “On Tuesday, parent company UNFI confirmed during an earnings call that the reductions are part of a strategy to be more competitive.”
KSTP reports residents of the Lowry Apartments in downtown St. Paul say they had little warning before the building was condemned by the city Monday. The city issued a statement saying all 71 occupants have been connected with temporary housing in nearby hotels.
Moments after the Dec. 6 broadcast of “Almanac,” as the production crew began to relax at the end of yet another successful live show, waiters milled about with trays of champagne glasses for the audience.
Still on their studio couch, hosts Cathy Wurzer and Eric Eskola celebrated the 40th anniversary of Minnesota’s beloved Twin Cities PBS (TPT) variety and politics show.
“It was like three or four or five general managers in a row that tried to boot me out,” reminisced Eskola.
“We persist, and we persevere,” Wurzer replied as she toasted to the show’s audience. “The reason that we are here is because [of] viewers like you – that’s the be all and the end all.”
“Almanac” is a unique success story in public television. Started as an underdog attempt to create a PBS show that wasn’t boring, “Almanac” made its name by mixing serious political discussion with live music and animals, illustrated essays, field reports and comedic setups.
At the core of the show is the unique chaotic energy that only comes from being live.
“It is terrifying, but fun,” said Kari Kennedy, the show’s supervising producer, who started working on “Almanac” in 1994. “I literally didn’t eat on Fridays past about noon for the first decade I worked on the show because I was sick to my stomach.”
The show broadcasts every week on Friday evening for an hour – well, technically 56 minutes and 40 seconds, Kennedy said.
No matter what happens, “Almanac” has to stick to that window while coordinating a hopefully invisible (to the audience) dance between the hosts and the producer in their earpiece counting down time.
“We always tell people, if you want to have a perfect event or a perfect wedding – or at least have people think it’s perfect and not know something went wrong – hire a live TV producer, because we have 25,000 backup plans, because something always goes wrong,” Kennedy said.
Calm in the storm
All those backup plans may come in handy: Even as “Almanac” celebrated 40 years of resilience, it faces a host of looming challenges.
Like the rest of the TV news and public broadcast industry, “Almanac” is now in a world where viewership is on the decline, Americans and TV news are extremely polarized, and a fractured social media landscape makes accessing audiences harder than ever.
Still, for the moment, “Almanac” is a steady ship.
The show’s viewership on linear TV has held at 1 million to 1.3 million viewers each year since 2018, according to analytics provided by TPT.
In that same period, between 37,000-47,000 viewers annually have streamed Almanac (the show is available for free on TPT’s website and on the PBS app).
“The show is the ultimate ‘steady eddie,’ thanks largely to its consistency in format and its time slot on Friday evenings,” said Jess Bellville, TPT’s director of marketing strategy.
“Like ‘PBS NewsHour,’ which is another top program in this market, ‘Almanac’ is also a live broadcast,” she said, “and there might still be some stronger interest in tuning in as an evening ritual on Fridays.”
Meanwhile, Kennedy is laser focused on maintaining “Almanac’s” hard-earned trust in today’s hyper partisan environment.
“We care very deeply about being nonpartisan and about treating all of our guests, from every corner of the political spectrum, with respect,” she said.
Kennedy sees Minnesota politics, though more divisive than they were a decade ago, as being less vitriolic than national politics. Perhaps the most important barometer for Almanac is that both Democrats and Republicans continue to seek out the show.
“People get heated and come and argue, but they also, at least for the most part, figure out how to talk to each other, and they appreciate that too,” Kennedy said. “Increasingly, there’s nowhere to go for that.”
Democratic U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the opening guest on the 40th anniversary show, also commended “Almanac’s” political stage. In a post-show toast, she referenced the last part of the broadcast, which featured a sit down with all four state Democratic and Republican legislative leaders.
“To be able to have a show like this where you see all the [legislative] leaders go on is…a treasure for our politics in Minnesota, because it means they’re on there together,” Klobuchar said. “They’re debating issues. There’s some civility.”
Asked if “Almanac’s” approach is sustainable as polarization only seems to worsen, Kennedy said she hopes it can be.
An illustrated essay by reporter David Gillette during “Almanac’s” 40th broadcast made the same case to viewers.
“Almanac” state capitol reporter Mary Lahammer shaking hands with sports commentator Larry Fitzgerald Sr. during the broadcast. Credit: MinnPost photo by Lev Gringauz
“Is ‘Almanac’ flashy? No. Is ‘Almanac’ intentionally argumentative? Not very often…I bring up these examples because they represent the ever present temptations of the television industry,” he said.
“If you want to go viral, book an argument. If you want to improve your ratings, embrace partisan talking points. If you want to move through society like a wrecking ball, well, basically, just do everything Almanac doesn’t.
“We’re celebrating 40 years of listening, 40 years of thoughtfulness and 40 years of resisting temptation.”
Catching audiences on the open social sea
Like many media organizations, TPT is in the middle of figuring out its social media strategy, which will also define how “Almanac” reaches younger and more diverse audiences.
But these days it’s not easy to navigate the ebb and flow of algorithms, user behaviors and changing platforms.
Take Twitter, now known as X, which used to be a regular watering hole for journalists and policymakers.
“For a while, my team did live tweeting during the Almanac shows before the [COVID-19] pandemic,” said Bellville, the director of marketing strategy.
But in the early days of the pandemic, people stopped engaging with those posts, so the team decided to stop live tweeting and stick to resharing clips. In time, Twitter was bought, and arguably degraded, by billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Now, Bellville expects that TPT will start to migrate off of X entirely. She’s keeping an eye on Bluesky, the latest Twitter clone experiencing a surge in popularity.
Bellville’s team already has a Bluesky account for TPT and “Almanac,” but they don’t plan to jump in quite yet.
“We’ll start posting there more consistently once we start to see a little bit more of a balanced representation of both Democrats and Republicans, in terms of what we cover locally,” she said.
Meanwhile, on popular video platforms like Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube, TPT has a complex balancing act.
As a television station, it makes sense to repackage broadcast clips, like those from “Almanac,” to reach new audiences.
But that doesn’t automatically mean TPT benefits from doing so. Relying on social platforms is an uneven and, at times risky, path to sustainability.
Someone isn’t “going to go from engaging with us in a couple of social media posts, or watching a few pieces of content on YouTube, to becoming a supporter overnight,” Bellville said. “That’s just not how it works.”
Still, Bellville thinks investing in vertical video for platforms is “mission critical” for TPT.
A new social media manager and a digital producer, hired only a few months ago, are already seeing success with creative history videos and guides for voters – including some videos done in collaboration with “Almanac” staff.
At the leadership level, Nick Kereakos, a former Minnesota Public Radio executive, joined TPT at the beginning of the year as chief content officer. Kereakos is helping to cement “Almanac’s” social media approach.
“We know that audiences are consuming more media in more places than ever before, and we view that as an opportunity for TPT to serve more people,” Kereakos said in a statement to MinnPost.
“That certainly means having a presence across both more media platforms, as well as in-person experiences and convenings within the community,” he said.
But for all the talk of social media, “Almanac” does have other ways of attracting younger and more diverse audiences.
Some viewers will come back to the public television station they watched as kids once they have their own children, and happen to catch “Almanac.” Some will continue a watching tradition they started with parents and grandparents on Friday nights.
Others may come because of the changing face of Almanac’s bread and butter: local politics.
The Minnesota Legislature “has never been younger and never been more diverse…we’re a place they can come to hear more about that,” Kennedy said.
“I think there are people that would look at [these lawmakers] and say, ‘You’re too young to watch PBS. You would never do that. You’re not a politician’ – but they are, and I think that makes a difference,” she said. “The people that they serve see that, and say, ‘Well, maybe [‘Almanac’] is something that matters in my life.’”
WASHINGTON — Minnesota’s mining industry is looking forward to president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next month, which will usher in a reversal of policies that will allow Twin Metals to renew efforts to mine copper, nickel and other precious minerals in what opponents call environmentally sensitive land.
For years, Twin Metals has strived to locate its mine on federal land in the Superior National Forest. But it had to mothball its plans after the Biden administration — citing environmental concerns — canceled its leases and put a 20-year moratorium on underground mining in the forest, which is a watershed for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Trump has vowed to reverse the Superior National Forest moratorium as a priority after he’s sworn in, which he can do under his executive authority.
Earlier this year, Twin Metals also conducted exploratory drilling southwest of the federal site on state land.
It’s not only Twin Metals that is expected to benefit from a change of administration; other mining projects in the state are likely to benefit, too.
Bird’s-eye view of the Superior National Forest. Credit: Photo by Flickr user Phil and used under Creative Commons license
In 2017, the last time Trump was in the White House, he signed an executive order directing agencies to identify critical minerals essential for national security and the economy. The order also encouraged reducing permitting delays for mining projects involving these minerals.
And the next Congress is expected to be far friendlier than the current one when it comes to the concerns of mining interests.
For instance, legislation proposed by Rep. Pete Stauber, R-8th District, and other lawmakers that would streamline federal permitting and make it harder to halt or slow the development of new mines in court now has a better chance of becoming law.
That legislation was never considered by the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate and was always vulnerable to a Biden veto threat. But Republicans wrested control of the chamber from Democrats in November’s elections, the GOP maintained its majority in the U.S. House and Trump is expected to back legislation that helps U.S. mineral production.
“Because of the balance in the House and the Senate, we’re going to be playing a lot of defense,” predicted Ingrid Lyons, executive director of Save the Boundary Waters, one of the many environmental and conservation groups that have battled sulfide ore mining on the Iron Range.
Twin Metals spokeswoman Kathy Graul declined to be specific about her company’s plans but provided a statement that said “we are committed to advancing our project in a bipartisan manner to ensure Americans can benefit from the much-needed copper, nickel and cobalt resources that are abundant in northeast Minnesota.”
Julie Lucas, executive director of the trade organization Minnesota Mining, was more blunt. “The company is ready to go whenever they have the opportunity to go again,” she said of Twin Metals, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining company Antofagasta.
Saying there is no safe way to mine for copper, environmentalists, including a group called Save the Boundary Waters, have tried to derail the Twin Metals proposed mine for nearly 10 years and say they are ready to renew their efforts in court.
“The protections that were put in place by the Biden administration went through a formal process by which public comments were taken and a science-based determination made from that,” said Chris Knopf, the executive director of Friends of the Boundary Waters. “And so if the Trump administration were to haphazardly and quickly undo that work, we would challenge that.”
‘An appetite’ to make changes
The election and the political change it ushered in may also benefit Talon Metals, which is navigating the permitting process to build a nickel mine near the town of Tamarack, about 50 miles west of Duluth.
Because nickel is a critical mineral in the production of EV batteries and the Pentagon’s arsenal, Talon has already been given grants by the Department of Energy and Department of Defense to pursue its goal.
Location of the Tamarack North Project Credit: Source: Talon Metals Corp.
Talon also has an agreement to supply electric car-maker Tesla with 165 million pounds of nickel. That agreement with Trump pal Elon Musk is thought to be beneficial for the company, as is its decision to ship its ore for processing to a facility in North Dakota, where its governor, Doug Burgum, is Trump’s choice to head the Interior Department.
Burgum is a proponent of increased oil and natural gas production on federal land and supports domestic production of clean technologies.
Paula Maccabee, advocacy director and legal counsel for WaterLegacy, another group fighting copper and nickel mining, said she’s skeptical of the plan to send raw ore to North Dakota for processing.
“Usually, the processing is done on site, and what a company sends for the next stage is concentrate, which is about a 30th of the size and scale to the ore. So it is a really important issue for Minnesota,” Maccabee said. “Is Talon’s plan to ship all the ore, rather than all the concentrate, to North Dakota feasible? Or is some sort of processing and tailings facility going to come back to Minnesota?”
Paula Maccabee
Maccabee said that “locking that down and preventing that from happening, I think, is a really big question.”
Talon’s proposed mine, which needs to be given a green light by the state, is in its scoping phase, meaning there’s an effort to identify potentially significant environmental and socioeconomic issues and determine whether those can be mitigated.
Talon Metals spokesman Todd Malan said the company is in close communication with the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, which has voiced concerns about the impact of the proposed mine — which would be located less than two miles from its reservation — on the tribe’s land, fish, water and people.
Malan said “there is an appetite to make some careful and prudent changes” to the company’s plans and he’s optimistic about the future of the project.
“At the end of the day, Americans and the U.S. government need nickel,” Malan said.
Lawsuits ‘a fact of life’
A much larger project called NewRange Copper Nickel, which proposes building a $1 billion open pit mine near Babbitt and Hoyt Lakes, has been beset by legal and regulatory setbacks.
The NewRange copper nickel joint venture Credit: NewRange
The project needs both federal and state permits to move forward and its federal permit from the Army Corps of Engineers has been revoked because of concerns over the mine’s potential impact on a federally protected wetland.
But the prospect of a more mining-friendly administration could help the mine, a 50-50 joint venture between Swiss commodities giant Glencore and Canada-based Teck Resources that is still widely known by its old name, PolyMet.
NewRange spokesman Bruce Richardson said his company will reapply for a Clean Water Act “Section 404” wetlands permit. “We have every intention to do that,” he said.
Leftover structures from an old LTV Steel taconite facility that NewRange hopes to refurbish and reuse for the copper-nickel mine it plans to build. Credit: MinnPost file photo by Walker Orenstein
Knopf said he fears the Trump administration will reissue the permit for that project, which the Army Corps of Engineers had ruled would violate water quality standards.
Richardson also said he hoped a key state license that has been stalled will move forward. Called a “permit to mine,” it was put on hold when a state administrative law judge recommended that the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources not reissue the permit originally given to PolyMet because of concerns to store waste tailings in a giant basin. Richardson said the company is modifying its plans to address concerns and the DNR said that is why the permit is on hold until next August.
“The scope of potential changes could have a direct impact on specific issues under consideration in the contested case hearing process,” DNR spokeswoman Gail Nosek said in an email. “DNR’s final decision-maker ordered the stay to prevent significant expenditure of time and resources in the contested case process for a project design that may become moot if the company seeks to modify its project in ways that would require a permit amendment and/or additional environmental review.”
While it’s difficult to predict how the conflict between the state’s mining interests and environmental advocates will play out, the change in the direction of political winds are certain to reignite debate and court battles.
“Lawsuits are a fact of life if you want to build a mine,” said New Range’s Richardson.
The shift toward the GOP in the state House (which is now evenly divided between DFL and Republican lawmakers) also makes it tougher for environmental allies to win approval of legislation that would impede state permitting of mines.
While the state has a law prohibiting mining in the Boundary Waters, some legislators have sought to expand that to its headwaters, an effort that failed and now seems further out of reach.
Lucas, the Mining Minnesota official, said she understood the concerns of those who are fiercely opposed to mining for critical minerals in Minnesota because of fears of pollution of the Boundary Waters and other waters and land.
“They are not bad people for being scared,” she said. “They are just scared.”
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Earth has often been described by astronauts as a glistening marble floating in a black void, but the planet has lost some of its sheen in recent decades, especially with the well-documented decline of ice and snow in polar and mountain regions. New research published today shows the planet is also dulling from a steady decline of low-elevation clouds over some ocean regions.
And a duller planet absorbs more incoming solar radiation, said
Helge Gössling, a climate researcher at the Alfred Wegener Center and lead author of the Science paper linking the overall decline of the planet’s reflectivity in 2023 with a simultaneous surge of the global average temperature.
The findings, Gössling said, suggest that the sharp drop of low-elevation cloud cover over some ocean regions could account for most of the sudden spike of global temperatures in 2023, when the Earth’s fever jumped 0.17 degrees Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above the previous temperature record set in 2016.
Several factors are driving the decline of the Earth-cooling low marine cloud layers, he said, including climate cycles like El Niño, as well as a drop of sulfate aerosol emissions from shipping and other industrial sources. But he said he was most worried that the study affirms other research showing that global warming itself is driving the loss of clouds by diffusing distinct layers of the atmosphere that promote the formation and persistence of low-elevation marine clouds.
If the drop in the proportion of solar radiation being reflected back to space—called albedo—is due to feedbacks between global warming and low clouds, “we should expect rather intense warming in the future,” Gössling said. “We could see global long-term climate warming exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius sooner than expected.”
Up to now, climate models have been highly uncertain about the feedback between warming temperatures and changes in cloud cover, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate researcher with Berkeley Earth who was not involved in the new study.
He said the paper provides a useful assessment of measured changes in cloud cover, but still “raises as many questions as it provides answers.”
“We still do not know for sure that these changes in cloud behavior are not due to short-term variability,” Hausfather said, “or if they represent a new ongoing change to the climate system.”
If the cloud cover decline measured in the new study represents an ongoing change, “it remains difficult to disentangle how much might be due to changing human aerosol emissions versus a feedback from human greenhouse gas emissions. But in either of those cases, it is not good news,” he said, because it would suggest that the climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than widely thought.
Not the First Warning
The research led by Gössling is not the first warning about accelerated warming, and it’s not the first to suggest strong links between reductions of shipping emissions and regional global warming hotspots. A study published last May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences described how a reduction of industrial aerosol emissions in China worsened ocean heat waves in the Pacific.
Another study published in Earth System Dynamics last week specifically modeled how changes to rules on shipping emissions in 2020 help explain the anomalous 2023 warming, concluding that the significant reductions in sulfate aerosol emissions from ships “have been a major contributing factor to the monthly surface temperature anomalies during the last year.”
When famed climate scientist James Hansen warned of that effect in 2021 and projected a steep acceleration of warming, his findings were criticized by some other scientists as over-emphasizing the role of sulfate aerosols. But aerosol-focused research since then, as well as continued warming into 2024, seems to support his conclusions.
This animation shows variations in Earth’s reflection of sunlight, called albedo, from month to month, based on NASA satellite measurements over a 12-year period.
In any case, the big temperature jump that began in 2023 and continued through much of 2024 still can’t be fully explained, even with the new study, said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In a November editorial in The New York Times, Schmidt and Hausfather wrote that the recent warming “appears to be higher than our models predicted (even as they generally remain within the expected range).” The continued lack of a consensus explanation for the spike is making scientists uneasy, they wrote, because the implications of faster warming include more deadly climate extremes.
Schmidt said the new study helps explain, and fills in some of the knowledge gaps, about the recent warming by linking it with Earth’s dwindling reflectivity.
“But we still aren’t able to say why the albedo has been changing so much,” he said. “Is it aerosols, cloud feedbacks or volcanoes? So there is still more to do before we can say what this means going forward.”
Gössling said the “explanation gap” for 2023 remains “one of the most intensely discussed questions in climate research.” His study combined satellite data from NASA with climate reanalysis data, in which a range of observational data is combined with a complex weather model, to make a detailed analysis of how the global energy budget and cloud cover at different altitudes have changed since 1940.
Co-author Thomas Rackow, with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said both datasets showed Earth’s record dullness in 2023, following an observed trend of declining reflectivity in recent years. But dwindling polar ice only accounts for about 15 percent of that decline, so they zeroed in on the loss of low-level marine clouds in the northern mid-latitudes and the tropics.
The Atlantic Ocean, where the most unusual temperature records were observed in 2023, really stood out, the researchers said. The ocean surface temperatures in the eastern North Atlantic were one of the “main drivers of the latest jump in global mean temperature,” Gössling said, and the warming correlated with areas where cloud cover also declined significantly.
The fact that mainly low clouds are responsible for the reduced albedo, rather than higher-altitude ones, has important consequences, he said. High-elevation clouds contribute to warming by keeping the warmth emitted from the surface in the atmosphere. That’s “essentially the same effect as greenhouse gases,” he said.
“But lower clouds don’t have that same effect,” he added. “If there are fewer low clouds, we only lose the cooling effect, making things warmer.”
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A Southern California man punched an Asian American woman in the head and shouted slurs at her as she lay injured in the street. Now he has pleaded guilty to a federal hate crime.
The victim, who is unnamed in the plea agreement, was walking to work in Culver City at 1 a.m. on June 14, 2021. Jesse Lindsey, 38, described as a homeless man who last lived in Fontana, approached the victim, whom he perceived to be Asian, prosecutors said.
“You can’t say hi to a motherf— white boy?” he reportedly yelled, before punching the victim and knocking her down.
According to prosecutors, Lindsey shouted, “You hear what I said?” and referred to the woman using the N-word. “I said good morning, b—.” The victim received 11 stitches for her injuries after hitting her head on the street when she fell.
“Hate-fueled acts of violence have no place in our society,” said U.S. Dist. Atty. Martin Estrada in a release. “Enforcing civil rights goes to the core of my office’s mission and we will continue to prosecute hate crimes, especially those committed by individuals whose bigotry results in physical harm to victims.”
Lindsey pleaded guilty last month. According to the agreement, he admitted to investigators that he attacked the victim and said he was afraid of her attacking him.
He made racist connections between her and Jet Li, an Asian actor known for his martial arts prowess, saying the victim might have pulled “some Jet Li s—,” along with other racially charged statements about Asian people, court documents said.
“The facts of this case shock the conscience,” Akil Davis, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said in the release. “Mr. Lindsey’s actions were heinous, despicable, and inhumane. Violating the civil rights of others by engaging in racial violence is antithetical to our values as Americans.”
A sentencing hearing is scheduled for March. Lindsey faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.
Over the phone, Lena Gonzalez’s voice had the patient but proud tone of a lawyer charged with defending the damned.
Her metaphorical client: The California Latino Legislative Caucus, which the Long Beach-area state senator heads.
At 38 members strong, it’s one of the largest groups of its kind in the United States and has long served as the tip of California’s progressive spear. Members helped transform the state within a generation from a place that birthed the notorious anti-immigrant Proposition 187 into one where undocumented people can apply for driver’s licenses, health insurance, get in-state college tuition and more.
Then the 2024 elections happened.
Latinos shifted toward Donald Trump nationwide in numbers that continue to make headlines and confound Democratic leaders. It happened in deep-blue California too. In the blue-collar, overwhelming Mexican Anaheim precinct where my father lives, support from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris dropped from 73% in 2020 to 60% this year. Trump nabbed 36% of the vote — though not from my father, who thinks he’s a “loco” — despite the former and future president’s promise to deport as many undocumented immigrants as he can.
Eight Latino Republicans now serve in the state Legislature, doubling the former record set just two years ago. Their districts span California from the border to the Sierra, the Central Valley to Orange County, as do their life stories: children of immigrants, multiethnic, multigenerational.
They make up 18% of all California Latino legislators, in a state where a survey released this year by the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials — headed by a Downey Latina Republican council member — found 16% of Latinos are registered as Republicans.
This new reality is why I was calling Gonzalez.
Since it started in 1973, the Latino Legislative Caucus has excluded GOP members. The ban was easy to justify, I told Gonzalez, when there were only a few raza Republicans in Sacramento and they were seen as little better than vendidos — sellouts.
But given how Latino voters shifted this election day, is it time for the caucus to roll out the red carpet for their Republican colleagues?
“That is a good question,” Gonzalez responded. “We’re obviously racking with this in our brains. This year is very different. We saw a flip in the Imperial Valley that we thought we’d get.”
Republican freshman Assemblymember Jeff Gonzalez, center, watches the Assembly’s organizational session in Sacramento in November.
(Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press)
She was talking about Assembly District 36, where newbie Jeff Gonzalez (no relation to Lena) triumphed over a candidate supported by the Coachella Valley Latino political machine that has dominated elected office out there for a generation.
She also mentioned the Inland Empire’s 58th Assembly District, where first-time candidate Leticia Castillo beat Clarissa Cervantes, the sister of state senator and former Latino Legislative Caucus chair Sabrina Cervantes, by just 596 votes.
“I have to talk to our caucus,” Gonzalez continued. She said some members are considering admitting Latino Republicans, while “others have said, ‘Absolutely not.’”
It’s weird times for Latino politics in California, even as Democrats still hold a supermajority in both legislative chambers, one of our U.S. senators is Pacoima native Alex Padilla and Latino caucus members Robert Rivas and Gonzalez are, respectively, speaker of the Assembly and Senate majority leader. Pundits long predicted that the template Latino Democrats created in California in the wake of Proposition 187 for electoral success — align with labor, grow government and advocate for undocumented residents — would spread nationwide and secure the future of the Democratic Party as this nation turns more Latino.
Now, Gonzalez admits, Latino Dems can no longer shun their GOP cousins like the weirdo branch of the family at a carne asada.
“It may not be in the caucus,” she said, “but we’re going to have to work with them in other capacities, clearly.”
For decades, Latino Republicans have lambasted the Latino caucus for not letting them in, sparking attempts to create their own group (it went nowhere) and a state investigation into whether a partisan ethnic caucus was even legal in the first place (it was).
Now, giddily thinking about what’s next for them, the Latino Republicans I talked to have adopted the old Groucho Marx adage of not wanting to belong to a club that would have them as a member.
Abel Maldonado, a former Santa Maria Assembly member and state senator who was one of the last Republicans to hold statewide office when he served as lieutenant governor in 2010, dismissed the Latino caucus as little better than a party crew.
“It’s great to go have dinner with the caucus and have a glass of wine,” he said, half-serious and half-not. “I miss going with Fabian [Nuñez] and Antonio [Villaraigosa] and — en paz descanse [may he rest in peace] — Marco Firebaugh,” the late southeastern L.A. County Assembly member.
“It was fun to go out in nighttime,” Maldonado continued, “but during the day, their policies hurt Latinos. They’ll tell you they’re for the poor, but they fail to tell you they keep you poor.”
His advice to Republican Latinos: “Don’t be part of this caucus that caused” California’s current problems.
They talk about a lot about diversity, but they’re not interested in diversity of thought, in differing political opinions.
— Assemblymember Josh Hoover on Latino Democratic legislators
Assemblymember Josh Hoover, who represents a Sacramento-area district, said his fellow Latino GOP legislators have a text thread on which they trade ideas and wonder whether they should start their own group. (That’s what Latino Republicans did in Congress, forming the Congressional Hispanic Conference in 2003 to distinguish themselves from the heavily Democratic Congressional Hispanic Caucus.)
About a third of all California Republican legislators are now Latino. “That’s a big deal,” he said. “It shows that the Republican Party is not the party that has been painted by the left.”
Hoover said the caucus’ rejection of people like him showed “they talk about a lot about diversity, but they’re not interested in diversity of thought, in differing political opinions. That’s something that needs to change in California.”
State Sen. Robert Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys) talks with state Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh (R-Yucaipa) at the Capitol in Sacramento in 2022.
(Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press)
Inland Empire Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh, the daughter of immigrants from the Mexican state of Yucatán, became California’s first Latina Republican state senator when she was elected in 2020; now, there are three. She remembered running into Latino Legislative Caucus members at a dinner her first year in office and initially being upset that she couldn’t join them.
“Like in high school when you’re not part of a group — you know how you felt like the outsider, but you felt like you belonged?” Ochoa Bogh said. “Then I thought about it and felt it wasn’t right. I thought, ‘I’m more Latina than many of these folks!’”
She acknowledged that the caucus had a good reason to form 51 years ago “because they probably felt they didn’t have a voice then.” Now, Latinos make up a plurality of Californians — and Ochoa Bogh argued that an ethnic caucus makes no sense.
“I think California, as a whole in this election, really conveyed a strong message that they’re done with creating all of these segments instead of uniting us all together,” she said. “Besides, if the Latino population aren’t getting their needs met right now, it’s Latino Democrats in charge, not the Republicans.”
The odds of the Latino caucus reexamining its Democrats-only rules shrank dramatically, however, after the special session called by Gov. Gavin Newsom this month to prepare California for an expected onslaught of Trump legal actions against the state.
On the first day, Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil — a former caucus member who switched her party registration last year from Democrat to Republican — took to social media to call Gonzalez “the grand wizard of the Latino KLAUCUS” after Alvarado-Gil claimed Gonzalez tried to kick her out of a break room.
Gonzalez declined to discuss the matter. “We have work to do, and I don’t want us to be distracted by what someone said to someone else,” said Gonzalez of Alvarado-Gil, whose office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Democrats eventually passed a bill that would set aside a $25-million anti-Trump legal fund, including protecting undocumented residents.
“One thing that we [the Latino caucus] stand united for is against mass deportation,” said Gonzalez, who just introduced a bill that would establish a state agency to help immigrants and refugees. “Not one Republican supported the bill.” It’s hard to endorse caucus membership, she said, for those unwilling to support “a very basic value of the Latino caucus.”
When I pointed out that anti-immigrant sentiment among Latinos in California is higher than ever before and maybe her Latino Republican colleagues were onto something, Gonzalez cut right to the proverbial point.
“We’ve got a lot to work on ourselves, but we got to work on ourselves before letting them in.”
The senior in San José suspected something was amiss when the woman who’d supposedly helped him buy $170,000 worth of cryptocurrency had asked for twice as much money to pay overseas taxes.
He called the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, which led to criminal charges against two Southern California residents accused of helping run a “pig butchering” scam — a scheme designed to con victims out of their life’s savings.
The district attorney’s office announced Wednesday the arrests of Liu Hong, a 40-year-old man from Rosemead, and Yalin Li, a 23-year-old woman from El Monte. Authorities allege that the pair are part of a larger criminal organization operating outside the United States.
Prosecutors said the scammers spent about three months persuading a 66-year-old man to invest in cryptocurrency. The man, prosecutors said, invested $170,000 but became suspicious when the scammers sought $348,000 for overseas taxes related to his investment.
“This is the same tactic ‘pig butcher’ scammers use to trick victims into sending them money,” said James Gibbons-Shapiro, assistant district attorney. “Pig butchering illustrates how the scammers slowly, methodically steal as much as possible of a victim’s money.
“They take everything from a person, from the tip of their nose to the end of their tail. That’s where the phrase comes from.”
He said the scams cost Americans about $1 billion a year.
Prosecutors said the district attorney assigned the case to the office’s High Tech Crime team, which convinced the scammers to collect the money at the parking lot of a bank in San José. The two suspects were taken into custody when they came looking for the money.
Gibbons-Shapiro said arrests in such cases are rare because victims are often too embarrassed to report the scams to law enforcement; or when they do, it’s after scammers have gotten what they want and cut off communication with the victims.
“What happened in this case, the victim realized they were being scammed while they were still in communication with the scammers,” he said. “And that gave law enforcement the ability to do some trickery of their own.”
Dist. Att. Jeff Rosen hopes publicizing the case will force scammers to pause and think: “Is my scam working, or am I talking to a cop?”
Gibbons-Shapiro said the San José case began in May when a woman reached out to the man through Facebook. The conversation, which often starts romantically in such scams, changed direction when the woman said her aunt Amelia, who knew about investing, was helping her make a lot of money. She then introduced her aunt to the victim and began to trick him into investing money.
Gibbons-Shapiro said in many cases, the scam involves multiple people, many of them from Southeast Asia where human trafficking victims are also forced to ensnare victims through texting and fake financial websites.
“The scams are certainly happening overseas, but where they [have] partners in the United States we want to find them, prosecute them and send them to jail,” he said. “And if possible, we want to identify people overseas and extradite them.”
Santa Clara prosecutors said people who fear they’ve been caught up in a scam should understand they are not alone and that the best and brightest have fallen victim to such crimes.
As part of announcing the arrests and charges, prosecutors released tips for victims, which can be viewed on the district attorney’s website. Among other suggestions, prosecutors say, victims should be wary of people who try to move conversations to encrypted instant messaging apps such as Whatsapp, Signal and others.
Most law enforcement agencies are not familiar with pig butchering and may claim it’s a civil case, the D.A.’s website says, so it urges victims to report their problem to a detective who specializes in financial crimes, as well as the FBI. They say victims can also reach out to Advocating Against Romance Scammers, a nonprofit, for support.
Prosecutors said they were unable to recover the $170,000 the San José man lost in the scam, but they aim to bring a measure of justice to the victim by prosecuting the two suspects.
Steven Backstrom was struggling to stay awake during his shift in the prison shoe factory. The machines could be dangerous if you weren’t paying attention, and he’d slept about 3½ hours.
Activity at the Clements Unit, a state prison in Amarillo, Texas, was always churning. Night after night, doors slammed and people yelled. Sometimes, staff delivered medications at 2 a.m. Many nights officers forced him to come to the front of his cell for a security check. The sleepless nights made him feel like a scum had settled over his brain.
But he didn’t have the choice to skip work. The job didn’t pay, and if he didn’t show up, he could be punished.
That morning, he pushed the wrong button on a machine, and the equipment, meant to mold the shape of the shoe, clamped down on Backstrom’s right hand. The pain was excruciating. When he lifted his hand, his fingers were so badly mangled, he thought it looked like they were wobbling in the air. Backstrom later described the injuries in a handwritten grievance he sent to prison officials in 2011: stitches and metal pins in his pinky and ring finger.
Backstrom sued the prison system over the accident the following year, blaming the injury on sleep deprivation, but a federal judge dismissed the suit. More than a decade later, Backstrom still cannot close his hand. He still can’t get a decent night’s sleep because relentless interruptions and noise remain a part of the nightly routine at the Clements Unit where he remains incarcerated.
The Marshall Project and Los Angeles Times have identified more than 30 lawsuits regarding sleep deprivation behind bars over the last three decades — including one that ended in a settlement requiring changes at a San Francisco jail three years ago. More than two dozen interviews with incarcerated people, guards and oversight officials from Georgia to Texas to California show that extreme lack of sleep continues to be a problem in prisons and jails.
Sleep may seem like a trivial issue, one of comfort. But lack of sleep can cause serious mental and physical ailments and even lead to early death. U.S. and international courts have recognized sleep deprivation as cruel and unusual punishment.
Poor sleep can also cause broader institutional problems; a community where no one is adequately rested may be more likely to have conflicts and fights. Sharon Dolovich, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, has been researching sleep deprivation in prisons and jails for a forthcoming academic paper and said she was surprised at the paucity of studies on the topic, considering that it affects almost every aspect of the corrections system, from security to mental and physical health.
“It is a deep and pervasive and serious problem,” Dolovich said. “And the attention that is being paid to it … across the board is so minuscule compared to the scale of the problem.”
The reasons people can’t sleep behind bars can vary widely. Sometimes, the prisons are too cold in the winter or too hot in the summer. Sometimes, the lights never go off, or there aren’t any mattresses, or the facilities are just too loud.
In Los Angeles, jail officials have a long history of failing to provide the men and women in their care with bedding, sheets or a place to sleep. In the 1970s, after several people incarcerated in the downtown jails filed a class-action lawsuit over poor conditions there, a federal judge ordered the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to provide better sleeping conditions. But the department failed to consistently do so, and more than three decades later another judge found officials guilty of “deliberate indifference” for failing to provide bunks.
“Quite simply, that a custom of leaving inmates nowhere to sleep but the floor constitutes cruel and unusual punishment is nothing short of self-evident,” U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson wrote in 2007.
Before Pregerson issued his ruling, one man testified that he’d been forced to sleep under another man’s bunk in a five-person cell, where he’d eventually developed a staph infection from the mold and mildew.
“Prisons may not deprive those in their care of a basic place to sleep — a bed,” Pregerson said. “For, like wearing clothing, sleeping in a bed identifies our common humanity.”
This year, when oversight inspectors with the county’s Sybil Brand Commission visited Men’s Central Jail, they noticed some of the mattresses were moldy. After they visited the Twin Towers Correctional Facility across the street, they laid out their concerns in a lengthy report.
“Most people in the areas we visited do not have sheets or pillows,” they wrote. “A couple of people reported they were cold because they did not have enough blankets to cover themselves.”
A few months later, commissioners returned to Men’s Central Jail and noted that many of the mattresses “were ripped or had chunks of the mattress missing,” and the men incarcerated there couldn’t formally complain because there were no grievance forms or pencils to fill them out.
Detainees sleep on the floor while waiting to be processed at Men’s Central Jail in downtown L.A.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
In an emailed statement this month, the Sheriff’s Department said it gives out mattresses that are “clean and intact” but that they are sometimes “intentionally damaged” by people using them.
The department also said that “a lot” of reforms have taken place since 2007 and that the jails “have not had floor sleepers due to a lack of housing in many years.” In response to a follow-up question, the department said that now, when people are forced to sleep on the floor, it is due to processing delays and not overcrowding.
However, an October oversight report contradicted that point, noting that people held at the county’s largest jail still report they are sometimes forced to sleep on floors due to lack of space.
In some jails and prisons, guards check on each prisoner once — or several times — per hour, clanging cellblock doors and shining lights in everyone’s faces to make sure they haven’t escaped and are still alive. A man in prison in Georgia, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said his unit has “huge lights” and frequent middle-of-the-night emergency counts at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. “I wear earplugs and skip breakfast,” he said.
But in many facilities, it’s not just the doors and the lights. In 2013, Michael Garrett sued Texas prisons, alleging that meal, work, headcount and medication times started so early in the morning it was impossible to get more than 2½ hours of uninterrupted sleep. The state nearly succeeded in fending off the case; but this year, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Garrett, saying his suit should move ahead. The case is pending.
This year, Steven Baughman, who is incarcerated in a different Texas prison, told The Times and the Marshall Project that he usually gets up just after 2 a.m. to make it to the medical wing for his 3 a.m. insulin shot. Then he goes to the chow hall for breakfast and goes about his day, which he said doesn’t end until the last count at around 11 p.m.
An employee at another unit described a similar schedule there. The employee asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak on the record and feared retaliation. They provided records this year showing that the unit’s last standing count takes place just before midnight, and the prisoners working first shift start their day at 2 a.m. Breakfast is served two hours later.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice refused to release daily schedules for other units in response to a records request, but officials said they adjusted schedules statewide in 2022 to cut the number of daily prisoner counts from eight to six.
“This reduction increased operational efficiencies, improved staffing challenges and allowed inmates more uninterrupted time,” prison spokeswoman Amanda Hernandez wrote in an email, adding that the prison system also now uses night lights instead of overhead lighting for middle-of-the-night counts.
According to the National Institutes of Health, sleep deprivation is linked to a myriad of problems, including heart disease, diabetes and stroke, as well as mental health issues, such as depression and suicide. And there are unique risks in a carceral setting. According to filings in one lawsuit, people awaiting trial in two different San Francisco County jails were so cognitively impaired from sleep deprivation that they were unable to adequately participate in their defense at court.
Maureen Hanlon, a civil rights attorney with ArchCity Defenders, saw something similar with clients jailed in the St. Louis area. “It shows up in how they’re able to cooperate, how they’re able to understand, how they’re able to rationally think through things,” Hanlon said. She believes sleep deprivation is a hidden contributing factor to people taking bad plea deals.
John Thompson was incarcerated for more than 37 years at prisons in Pennsylvania. He spent some of that time in solitary confinement, where he said the lights were on around the clock. He tried stretching out his socks and wrapping them over his eyes to block out the light, but it wasn’t enough.
“It feels like your body can never rest. Like it’s always daytime. So when you try to go to sleep, sleep don’t come,” he said.
Thompson remembers watching one of the men in a cell next to him deteriorate after experiencing intense sleep deprivation. When he first arrived he seemed fine, Thompson said. But after weeks of complaining he couldn’t sleep under the bright lights, the man began describing voices no one else could hear. He grew combative, flooding his cell with water and screaming through the night, which in turn made it difficult for others to sleep.
Thompson was released from prison in 2017 and now works at the Abolitionist Law Center, which files lawsuits over poor conditions behind bars. One of those suits — filed this year — complains of continuing issues with sleep deprivation due to the constant illumination in solitary confinement cells in Pennsylvania prisons. Pennsylvania officials declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
Because there are many problems that lead to sleep deprivation, fixing it requires many solutions. Prison officials can provide cleaner and better quality bedding and make sure facilities are not too cold or hot. They can dim lights in the evening and adjust schedules and protocols so people aren’t awakened throughout the night for meals, medicine or security checks. They can release people at low risk of re-offending so facilities are less crowded, which could allow beds to be farther apart in dorms and decrease noise.
Around-the-clock checks and 24/7 lighting are ostensibly security measures, but Dolovich is skeptical that such measures actually help prevent suicides or escapes. The time between checks, she reasons, is more than sufficient to attempt suicide, and nighttime escapes from locked facilities are extremely unlikely. The problems created by sleep deprivation can hinder the very things officials say they want. Suicide is correlated with lack of sleep. Dolovich says prison officials are trying to prevent people from being able to kill themselves while not considering the factors that might contribute to why they are suicidal, such as sleeplessness.
“Decisions that are made about how the facilities are going to be run reflect an inability to recognize the humanity of the people inside,” she said.
She makes a similar argument about security: Sleep-deprived people are more likely to get in fights, so security measures that make sleep worse can backfire.
A man who was recently incarcerated at Florence State Prison Complex in Arizona said he has observed how poor sleep can lead to violence. He is not named out of concern for his safety.
“It’s like a bubble: Everything builds up and builds up and builds up. And then if you have enough of those individuals in the same environment, it’s eventually gonna pop,” he said.
This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.
