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WHITE HOUSE TRYING ITS BEST TO STAY MUM ON CASE AGAINST TRUMP

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is refusing to give straight answers to questions about the federal case against Trump.

Jean-Pierre was asked Tuesday if President Joe Biden agrees with his wife, first lady Jill Biden, who has already said that it was a “little shocking” that Trump maintained large support from the Republican Party.

“I’m just not going to comment on anything that’s related to the indictment,” Jean-Pierre responded.

The president’s chief spokesman also dodged a question about whether Biden would ever consider pardoning Trump. “No comment,” Jean-Pierre said, although she laughed slightly.

It is all part of the White House’s policy to not comment on ongoing criminal matters. In the meantime, they’ve only invoked Biden’s predecessor at strategic points.

Jean-Pierre did stress Tuesday that Biden was categorically not involved in any decision by the Justice Department to indict Trump and that he is focusing on restoring integrity to the department.

“That is why we have been very, very consistent,” Jean-Pierre said. “When it comes to criminal cases, we just do not comment.”

At a reception honoring U.S. State Department chiefs of mission, Biden declined to comment on Trump’s arrest when asked by reporters.

During his formal remarks at that event, Biden referred to simultaneous interpretation during his lengthy meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and then quipped: “I turned all my notes in.”

Trump was known to have confiscated an interpreter’s notes after a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. After prompting hearty laughter from the crowd, Biden insisted he was not talking about Trump.

“That’s not a reference to the president, the former president,” Biden said. “Look, no. It really isn’t.”

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What to know:

— What to expect when Trump appears in federal court to face charges

— Journalists so far outnumber protesters outside courthouse where Trump will appear

— A timeline of events leading to Trump’s indictment in the classified documents case

— Trump’s GOP defenders in Congress leap into action after months of preparation

— Who is Walt Nauta, the latest Trump loyalist to face potential jail time?

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SUPPORTERS GATHER AT NEW JERSEY GOLF CLUB

Trump’s supporters have begun to arrive at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club, where he’s planning to deliver remarks responding to the charges after returning from his arraignment Tuesday night.

Dozens of white wedding chairs have been set up on the club’s stone patio before a stage decorated with American flags and red, white and blue bunting.

Guests as Trump’s Bedminster event include former Department of Justice official Kash Patel, Bernie Kerik and MyPillow conspiracist Mike Lindell.

Lindell says he’s here “to support our real president, Donald Trump.” He called on Ron DeSantis to drop out of the presidential race and endorse Trump tomorrow.

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TRUMP GOES FROM COURT TO CUBAN EATERY

Trump’s first stop after court was the iconic Versailles restaurant and bakery in the Little Havana neighborhood.

Inside, a group of people greeted him and laid hands on him in prayer. Those in the room also sang “Happy Birthday” to Trump, who will turn 77 Wednesday.

“Some birthday. Some birthday,” he said. “We’ve got a government that is out of control.”

Versailles is a landmark that is a required stop for politicians visiting Miami. Cuban exiles gathered there to celebrate Fidel Castro’s death in 2016.

Trump’s aide and co-defendant, Walt Nauta, joined him at the eatery, helping people take selfies with Trump.

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SPECIAL COUNSEL SEES TRUMP IN COURT

The special counsel who brought charges against Trump attended the former president’s first court appearance in person.

Jack Smith sat in the first row behind the prosecution’s table at Tuesday’s hearing in Miami federal court, where Trump pleaded not guilty to charges that he hoarded classified documents.

Smith spoke briefly Friday about the indictment but has otherwise remained out of public view.

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TRUMP RELEASED WITHOUT BOND

Trump was released without having to pay a bond after pleading not guilty Tuesday to federal charges that he hoarded classified documents and refused government demands to give them back.

Trump leaned over to whisper to his attorneys before the hearing began in a federal courtroom in Miami but did not speak during the proceedings.

He remained seated while lawyer Todd Blanche stood up and entered the plea on his behalf. “We most certainly enter a plea of not guilty,” he told the judge.

Trump scowled at times during the 50-minute hearing but was otherwise expressionless. He also crossed his arms, fiddled with a pen and crossed his fingers back and forth as he listened.

Blanche objected to barring the former president from talking to witnesses including Nauta, a Navy veteran who fetched Trump’s Diet Cokes as his valet at the White House before joining him as a personal aide at Mar-a-Lago. Blanche said that they work for Trump and he needs to be able to communicate with them.

After some back and forth, Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman said Trump cannot talk to them about the case except through his lawyers, but he can talk to them about their jobs.

“There will be no communication about the case with fact witnesses who are on a list provided by the government,” Goodman said.

Nauta, who was indicted alongside the former president, did not enter a plea because he does not have a local attorney. He will be arraigned June 27 before Chief Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres, but he does not have to be present.

The former president will not have to surrender his passport or restrict his personal travel. Trump is expected to return later Tuesday to New Jersey, where he’s scheduled a press event to publicly respond to the charges.

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TRUMP PLEADS NOT GUILTY TO FEDERAL CHARGES

Trump has pleaded not guilty to federal charges alleging that he hoarded classified documents detailing sensitive military secrets and schemed to thwart government efforts to get them back.

Trump appeared before a judge in Miami’s federal courthouse Tuesday in a stunning moment in American history days after he became the first former president charged with federal crimes.

Trump aide Walt Nauta, who was indicted alongside the former president, did not enter a plea because he does not have a local attorney. He will be arraigned June 27 before Chief Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres, but he does not have to be present.

Authorities say Trump schemed and lied to block the government from recovering the documents concerning nuclear programs and other sensitive military secrets stored at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

It’s the second criminal case Trump is facing as he seeks to reclaim the White House in 2024. He’s also accused in New York state court of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in both cases and slammed the prosecutions as politically motivated. He’s expected to return later Tuesday to New Jersey, where he’s scheduled a press event to publicly respond to the charges.

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TRUMP’S INITIAL APPEARANCE UNDERWAY

Trump’s initial court appearance is underway on charges that he mishandled classified documents.

Trump appeared Tuesday in Miami federal court with aide Walt Nauta, who is charged as a co-conspirator.

Authorities say Trump schemed and lied to block the government from recovering the documents concerning nuclear programs and other sensitive military secrets stored at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

It’s the second criminal case Trump is facing as he seeks to reclaim the White House in 2024. He’s also accused in New York state court of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in both cases and slammed the prosecutions as politically motivated. He’s expected to return later Tuesday to New Jersey, where he’s scheduled a press event to publicly respond to the charges.

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TRUMP RODE TO COURT WITH HIS SON ERIC

Trump rode to court with his son Eric, who accompanied the motorcade from the former president’s Doral resort to the federal courthouse in Miami.

CNN aired footage of Trump walking to a line of SUVs with his son by his side while someone yelled, “Let’s go Trump!”

The former president could be seen stopping and waving at supporters, as well as chatting with staff members. Eric Trump appeared to clap his father on the back just before he climbed in a vehicle.

As he rode to court, Trump posted on his social media site that the case against him was a “witch hunt.”

Later, outside the courthouse Trump lawyer Alina Habba said, “Today is not about President Donald J. Trump, who is defiant.”

“It is not about the Republican Party, it is not about the 2024 election,” Habba added. “It is about the destruction of longstanding principles that have set this country apart.”

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TRUMP, AIDE BOOKED AT COURTHOUSE

Trump and an aide charged as a co-conspirator have gone through the formal booking process at the Miami federal courthouse.

That’s according to the U.S. Marshals Service, which said Trump and Walt Nauta had been booked shortly after they arrived Tuesday afternoon.

Both men are expected to appear at the defense table shortly on charges that they wrongly held onto classified documents.

The two men were seen arriving at court together.

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TRUMP ARRIVES AT MIAMI COURTHOUSE FOR HISTORIC APPEARANCE

Trump has arrived at the federal courthouse in Miami to formally surrender to authorities ahead of his court appearance on charges accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Trump’s motorcade arrived Tuesday afternoon at the courthouse shortly before he’s scheduled to appear before a magistrate judge, a stunning moment in American history days after he became the first former president charged with federal crimes.

It’s the second criminal case Trump is facing as he seeks to reclaim the White House in 2024. He’s also accused in New York state court of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing, saying he’s being unfairly targeted by political opponents who want to hurt his campaign. After his court appearance, Trump will return to New Jersey, where he’s expected to hold a press event to publicly respond to the charges.

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TRUMP HEADS TO MIAMI COURTHOUSE FOR APPEARANCE

Trump is on his way to the federal courthouse in Miami to face dozens of charges that he illegally hoarded classified documents.

Trump departed his Doral golf course Tuesday afternoon en route to the courthouse, where he is expected to surrender to federal authorities and face a judge.

The former president is not expected to have his mugshot taken but will have his digital fingerprints taken.

Trump was indicted last week on 37 felony charges accusing him of willfully retaining classified documents and obstructing justice.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are kicking off the Juneteenth holiday early by celebrating Black Excellence at The White House on Tuesday night.

A concert scheduled to stream live on YouTube at 7 p.m. ET will feature performances and appearances by EGOT winner Jennifer Hudson, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, hip-hop superstar Method Man, Grammy winner Ledisi and gospel group Maverick City Music.

Also slated to appear on the South Lawn are Emmy Award winner Colman Domingo, the Broadway Inspirational Voices choir, the Step Afrika! dance troupe and marching bands from historically black colleges and universities in Maryland and Tennessee.

Juneteenth — also known as Emancipation Day — honors June 19, 1865, when federal troops brought the news of freedom to a group of enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Juneteenth was officially made a Texas state holiday on Jan. 1, 1980. However, it wasn’t recognized as a federal holiday until 2021 when Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, alongside Vice President Kamala Harris — the first woman, Asian-American and Black person to serve as VP.

“Throughout history, Juneteenth has been known by many names: Jubilee Day, Freedom Day, Liberation Day, Emancipation Day, and today, a national holiday,” Harris said during the White House East Room signing ceremony.

“We are gathered here in a house built by enslaved people. We are footsteps away from where President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation,” she continued. “We have come far, and we have far to go. But today is a day of celebration. It is not only a day of pride. It’s also a day for us to reaffirm and rededicate ourselves to action.”

All federal buildings, banks and legitimate businesses honor their employees and mark Juneteenth as a paid holiday.

Donald Trump made an first appearance in federal court in Miami on Tuesday facing 37 counts related to the mishandling and retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Here’s a look at the charges, the special counsel’s investigation and how Trump’s case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

What happened in court?

Trump’s lawyer entered a not-guilty plea for him, and the former president was released on his own recognizance without having to pay bond. He will not have to surrender his passport or have his personal travel restricted.

He scowled at times during the 50-minute hearing, but was otherwise expressionless. He also crossed his arms, fiddled with a pen and crossed his fingers back and forth as he listened.

Trump leaned over to whisper to his attorneys before the hearing began but did not speak during the proceedings. He remained seated while his lawyer Todd Blanche stood up and entered the plea on his behalf. “We most certainly enter a plea of not guilty,” he told the judge.

Blanche objected to barring the former president from talking to witnesses, including his co-defendant, valet Walt Nauta, saying that they work for him and he needs to be able to communicate with them. After some back and forth, Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman said Trump cannot talk to them about the case except through his lawyers, but he can talk to them about their jobs.

Nauta was granted bond with the same conditions as Trump. He did not enter a plea because he does not have a local attorney. He will be arraigned June 27 before Chief Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres, but he does not have to be present.

Unlike Trump’s arraignment in New York, no photographs were taken because cameras aren’t allowed in federal court. There were, however, sketch artists, and theirs will be the only images from the actual courtroom appearance.

Security remained tight outside the building, but there were no signs of significant disruptions despite the presence of hundreds of protesters. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said on Fox News that there were no arrests or “major incidents.”

What happens next?

After the hearing, Trump is flying back to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. He plans to hold a fundraiser and give a speech later Tuesday night.

Before heading to the airport, Trump’s motorcade took a detour to Versailles Restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, where a small crowd of supporters awaited him. Posing for photos and saying “food for everyone,” Trump commented briefly on his case.

“I think it’s going great,” he said. “We have a rigged country. We have a country that’s corrupt.”

Several religious leaders at the restaurant prayed over him for a moment.

What are the charges?

Trump faces 37 counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, including 31 counts under an Espionage Act statute pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information. The charges also include counts of obstructing justice and making false statements, among other crimes.

Trump is accused of keeping documents related to “nuclear weaponry in the United States” and the “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” along with documents from White House intelligence briefings, including some that detail the military capabilities of the U.S. and other countries, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors allege Trump showed off the documents to people who did not have security clearances to review them and later tried to conceal documents from his own lawyers as they sought to comply with federal demands to find and return documents.

The top charges carry penalties of up to 20 years in prison.

How did this case come about?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Trump in spring 2021 when they realized that important material from his time in office was missing.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the U.S. government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trump’s Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained “a lot” of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trump’s possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trump’s lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings — including some at the top secret level — have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.

Didn’t President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence have classified documents, too?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from those involving Trump.

After classified documents were found at Biden’s think tank and Pence’s Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorized other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Biden or Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. That’s important because the Justice Department historically looks for willfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Biden’s Delaware home and former office. But even if the Justice Department were to find Biden’s case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

What about Hillary Clinton?

In claiming that Trump is the target of a politically motivated prosecution, some fellow Republicans have cited the Justice Department’s decision in 2016 not to bring charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in that year’s presidential race, over her handling of classified information.

Clinton relied on a private email system for the sake of convenience during her time as the Obama administration’s top diplomat. That decision came back to haunt her when, in 2015, the intelligence agencies’ internal watchdog alerted the FBI to the presence of potentially hundreds of emails containing classified information.

FBI investigators would ultimately conclude that Clinton sent and received emails containing classified information on that unclassified system, including information classified at the top secret level. Of the roughly 30,000 emails turned over by Clinton’s representatives, the FBI has said, 110 emails in 52 email chains were found to have classified information, including some top secret.

After a roughly yearlong inquiry, the FBI closed the investigation in July 2016, finding that Clinton did not intend to break the law. The bureau reopened the inquiry months later, 11 days before the presidential election, after discovering a new batch of emails. After reviewing those communications, the FBI again opted against recommending charges.

At the time, then-FBI Director James Comey condemned Clinton’s email practices as “extremely careless,” but noted that there was no evidence that Clinton had violated factors including efforts to obstruct justice, willful mishandling of classified documents and indications of disloyalty to the U.S.

Does a federal indictment prevent Trump from running for president?

No. Neither the charges nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

Since taking on the role of White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre has become known for frequently dodging questions by citing the Hatch Act. The law bars civil servants from politicking during their day jobs, and Jean-Pierre uses it to deflect reporters’ questions involving campaigns.

But apparently she wasn’t careful enough. The Office of Special Counsel, a government agency that enforces the Hatch Act, said in a recent letter that Jean-Pierre violated the law before last year’s midterm elections.

Her offense: Making frequent references to “MAGA Republicans” during White House briefings.

According to a letter from the Office of Special Counsel, Jean-Pierre “made those references to generate opposition to Republican candidates” and “accordingly, making the references constituted political activity.”

The letter was posted online by The Washington Post. It was first reported by NBC News.

Penalties for Hatch Act violations are uncommon, and the office did not recommend any fines or other punishments for Jean-Pierre.

Violations were much more common under President Donald Trump. The Office of Special Counsel sent an “unprecedented” 15 warning letters to senior Trump administration officials about running afoul of the Hatch Act, and it even recommended the firing of top adviser Kellyanne Conway.

Jean-Pierre faced scrutiny after a conservative organization called Protect the Public’s Trust filed a complaint.

The organization said Jean-Pierre was “disparaging President Biden’s political opponents as ‘mega MAGA Republican officials who don’t believe in the law.’”
Jean-Pierre said the White House counsel’s office was reviewing the letter, adding that “we do everything we can” to comply with the law and take it “very seriously.”

“At the time, I was given the sign off to use that terminology,” she said. Jean-Pierre said the term was used “in the context of talking about their policies, in talking about their values.”

She noted that some reporters often express “friendly consternation” about how often she cites the Hatch Act, and she suggested that she was confused by the violation.

After all, she said, Trump’s White House used the phrase “MAGA” about 2,000 times to describe his administration’s policies.

The company said on its website that the root cause of the issue was tied to a service called AWS Lambda, which lets customers run code for different types of applications.

Roughly two hours after customers began experiencing errors, the company posted on its AWS status page that many of the affected AWS services were “fully recovered” and it was continuing to recover the rest. Soon after 6:30 pm E.T., the company announced all AWS services were operating normally.

Amazon said it had experienced multiple error rates for AWS services in the Northern Virginia region where it clusters data centers. The company said customers may be dealing with authentication or sign-in errors when using some AWS services, and experiencing challenges when attempting to connect with AWS Support. The issue with Lambda also indirectly affected other AWS services.

Patrick Neighorn, a company spokesperson, declined to provide additional details about the outage.

AWS is the market leader in the cloud arena, and its customers include some of the world’s biggest businesses and organizations, such as Netflix, Coca-Cola and government agencies.

Tuesday’s outage was first confirmed shortly after 3 p.m. ET. and it was unclear how widespread the problem extended. But many companies, including news organizations such as The Verge and Penn Live, said they were experiencing issues. The Associated Press was also hampered by the outage, unable to operate their sites amid breaking news that former President Donald Trump was appearing in court in Miami.

Morgan Durrant, a spokesperson for Delta Air Lines, said the company experienced “some slowing of inbound calls for some minutes” on Tuesday afternoon. But he said the outage did not impact bookings, flights or other airport operations.

The episode on Tuesday is reminiscent of a much longer AWS outage in December 2021, which affected a host of U.S. companies for more than five hours.

The outage comes as Amazon is holding a two-day security conference in Anaheim, California to tout its cloud offerings to its clients or other companies that might be interested in storing their data on its vast network of servers around the world. Companies have been cutting back their spending on the unit, causing growth to slow during the most recent quarter.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a Penguin Random House imprint, announced that McCarthy died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“For 60 years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft, and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word,” Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya said in a statement. “Millions of readers around the world embraced his characters, his mythic themes, and the intimate emotional truths he laid bare on every page, in brilliant novels that will remain both timely and timeless, for generations to come.”

McCarthy, raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, was compared to William Faulkner for his expansive, Old Testament style and rural settings. McCarthy’s themes, like Faulkner’s, often were bleak and violent and dramatized how the past overwhelmed the present. Across stark and forbidding landscapes and rundown border communities, he placed drifters, thieves, prostitutes and old, broken men, all unable to escape fates determined for them well before they were born. As the doomed John Grady Cole of McCarthy’s celebrated “Border” trilogy would learn, dreams of a better life were only dreams, and falling in love an act of folly.

“Every man’s death is a standing in for every other,” McCarthy wrote in “Cities of the Plain,” the trilogy’s final book. “And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us.”

McCarthy’s own story was one of belated, and continuing, achievement and popularity. Little known to the public at age 60, he would become one of the country’s most honored and successful writers despite rarely talking to the press. He broke through commercially in 1992 with “All the Pretty Horses” and over the next 15 years won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, was a guest on Oprah Winfrey’s show and saw his novel “No Country for Old Men” adapted by the Coen brothers into an Oscar-winning movie. Fans of the Coens would discover that the film’s terse, absurdist dialogue, so characteristic of the brothers’ work, was lifted straight from the novel.

“The Road,” his stark tale of a father and son who roam a ravaged landscape, brought him his widest audience and highest acclaim. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was selected by Winfrey for her book club. In his Winfrey interview, McCarthy said that while typically he didn’t know what generates the ideas for his books, he could trace “The Road” to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, early in the decade. Standing at the window of a hotel in the middle of the night as his son slept nearby, he started to imagine what El Paso might look like 50 or 100 years in the future.

“I just had this image of these fires up on the hill … and I thought a lot about my little boy,” he said.

He told Winfrey he didn’t care how many people read “The Road.”

“You would like for the people that would appreciate the book to read it. But, as far as many, many people reading it, so what?” he said.

McCarthy dedicated the book to his son, John Francis, and said having a child as an older man “forces the world on you, and I think it’s a good thing.” The Pulitzer committee called his book “the profoundly moving story of a journey.”

“It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, ‘each the other’s world entire,’ are sustained by love,” the citation read in part. “Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.”

After “The Road,” little was heard from McCarthy over the next 15 years and his career was presumed over. But in 2022, Knopf made the startling announcement that it would release a pair of connected novels he had referred to in the past: “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” narratives about a brother and sister, mutually obsessed siblings, and the legacy of their father, a physicist who had worked on atomic technology. “Stella Maris” was notable, in part, because it centered on a female character, an acknowledged weakness of McCarthy’s.

“I don’t pretend to understand women,” he told Winfrey.

His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” — written in Chicago while he was working as an auto mechanic — was published by Random House in 1965. His editor was Albert Erskine, Faulkner’s longtime editor.

Other novels include “Outer Dark,” published in 1968; “Child of God” in 1973; and “Suttree” in 1979. The violent “Blood Meridian,” about a group of bounty hunters along the Texas-Mexico border murdering Indians for their scalps, was published in 1985.

His “Border Trilogy” books were set in the Southwest along the border with Mexico: “All the Pretty Horses” (1992) — a National Book Award winner that was turned into a feature film; “The Crossing” (1994), and “Cities of the Plain” (1998).

McCarthy said he was always lucky. He recalled living in a shack in Tennessee and running out of toothpaste, then going out and finding a toothpaste sample in the mailbox.

“That’s the way my life has been. Just when things were really, really bleak, something would happen,” said McCarthy, who won a MacArthur Fellowship — one of the so-called “genius grants” — in 1981.

In 2009, Christie’s auction house sold the Olivetti typewriter he used while writing such novels as “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” for $254,500. McCarthy, who bought the Olivetti for $50 in 1958 and used it until 2009, donated it so the proceeds could be used to benefit the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research community. He once said he didn’t know any writers and preferred to hang out with scientists.

The Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University-San Marcos purchased his archives in 2008, including correspondence, notes, drafts, proofs of 11 novels, a draft of an unfinished novel and materials related to a play and four screenplays.

McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee for a year before joining the Air Force in 1953. He returned to the school from 1957 to 1959, but left before graduating. As an adult, he lived around the Great Smoky Mountains before moving West in the late 1970s, eventually settling in Santa Fe.

His Knoxville boyhood home, long abandoned and overgrown, was destroyed by fire in 2009.

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Retired AP reporter Sue Major Holmes in New Mexico was the primary writer of this obituary. AP National Writer Hillel Italie reported from New York.

Donald Trump became the first former president to face a judge on federal charges as he pleaded not guilty in a Miami courtroom Tuesday to dozens of felony counts accusing him of hoarding classified documents and refusing government demands to give them back.

The history-making court date, centered on charges that Trump mishandled government secrets that as commander-in-chief he was entrusted to protect, kickstarts a legal process that could unfold at the height of the 2024 presidential campaign and carry profound consequences not only for his political future but also for his own personal liberty.

Trump approached his arraignment with characteristic bravado, posting social media broadsides against the prosecution from inside his motorcade en route to the courthouse and insisting as he has through years of legal woes that he has done nothing wrong and was being persecuted for political purposes. But inside the courtroom, he sat silently, scowling and arms crossed as a lawyer entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in a brief arraignment that ended without him having to surrender his passport or otherwise restrict his travel.

The arraignment, though largely procedural in nature, was the latest in an unprecedented public reckoning this year for Trump, who faces charges in New York arising from hush money payments during his 2016 presidential campaign as well as ongoing investigations in Washington and Atlanta into efforts to undo the results of the 2020 race.

He’s sought to project confidence in the face of unmistakable legal peril, attacking the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case as “a Trump hater,” pledging to remain in the race and scheduling a speech and fundraiser for Tuesday night at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club. He stopped on his way out of Miami at Versailles, an iconic Cuban restaurant in the city’s Little Havana neighborhood where supporters serenaded Trump, who turns 77 years old on Wednesday, with “Happy Birthday.”

Even so, the gravity of the moment was clear.

Until last week, no former president had ever been charged by the Justice Department, let alone accused of mishandling top-secret information. The indictment unsealed last week charged Trump with 37 felony counts — many under the Espionage Act — that accuse him of illegally storing classified documents in his bedroom, bathroom, shower and other locations at Mar-a-Lago and trying to hide them from the Justice Department as investigators demanded them back. The charges carry a yearslong prison sentence in the event of a conviction.

Trump has relied on a familiar playbook of painting himself as a victim of political persecution. But Attorney General Merrick Garland, an appointee of President Joe Biden, sought to insulate the department from political attacks by handing ownership of the case to a special counsel, Jack Smith, who on Friday declared, “We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”

Smith attended Tuesday’s arraignment, sitting in the front row behind his team of prosecutors.

The court appearance unfolded against the backdrop of potential protests, with some high-profile backers using barbed rhetoric to voice support. Trump himself encouraged supporters to join a planned protest Tuesday at the courthouse. Though city officials said they prepared for possible unrest around the courthouse, there were little signs of significant disruption.

While Trump was not required to surrender a passport – prosecutor David Harbach said he was not considered a flight risk, a likely recognition of his status as a presidential candidate – he was directed to not have any personal contact with any witnesses in the case. That includes Walt Nauta, his valet and close aide, who was indicted last week on charges that he moved boxes of documents at Trump’s direction and misled the FBI about it. He did not enter a plea Tuesday because he did not have a local lawyer with him.

The magistrate judge who presided over the arraignment directed Trump not to discuss the case with any witnesses, including Nauta, but said they can discuss work.

Even for a man whose post-presidential life has been defined by criminal investigations, the documents probe had long stood out both because of the volume of evidence that prosecutors had seemed to amass and the severity of the allegations.

A federal grand jury in Washington had heard testimony for months, but the Justice Department filed it in Florida, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located and where many of the alleged acts of obstruction occurred. Though Trump appeared Tuesday before a federal magistrate, the case has been assigned to a District Court judge he appointed, Aileen Cannon, who ruled in his favor last year in a dispute over whether an outside special master could be appointed to review the seized classified documents. A federal appeals panel ultimately overturned her ruling.

It’s unclear what defenses Trump is likely to invoke as the case moves forward. Two of his lead lawyers announced their resignation the morning after his indictment, and the notes and recollections of another attorney, M. Evan Corcoran, are cited repeatedly throughout the 49-page charging document, suggesting prosecutors envision him as a potential key witness.

The Justice Department unsealed Friday an indictment charging Trump with 37 felony counts, 31 relating to the willful retention of national defense information. Other charges include conspiracy to commit obstruction and false statements.

The indictment alleges Trump intentionally retained hundreds of classified documents that he took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office in January 2021. The material he stored, including in a bathroom, ballroom, bedroom and shower, included material on nuclear programs, defense and weapons capabilities of the U.S. and foreign governments and a Pentagon “attack plan,” prosecutors say

Beyond that, prosecutors say, he sought to obstruct government efforts to recover the documents, including by directing personal aide Walt Nauta — who was charged alongside Trump — to move boxes to conceal them and also suggesting to his own lawyer that he hide or destroy documents sought by a Justice Department subpoena.

Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York and Terry Spencer, Kate Brumback, Curt Anderson and Joshua Goodman in Miami, contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Consumer prices in the United States cooled last month, rising just 0.1% from April to May and extending the past year’s steady easing of inflation. At the same time, some measures of underlying price pressures remained high.

Measured year over year, inflation slowed to just 4% in May — the lowest 12-month figure in over two years and well below April’s 4.9% annual rise. The pullback was driven by tumbling gas prices, a much smaller rise in grocery prices than in previous months and less expensive furniture, air fares and appliances.

Tuesday’s inflation figures from the government arrived one day before the Federal Reserve is expected to leave interest rates alone after imposing 10 straight rate hikes dating back to March 2022. After a two-day meeting, the Fed will likely announce that it’s skipping a rate hike but may hint that it will resume raising rates as soon as July.

Last month’s drop-off in overall inflation isn’t likely to convince the Fed’s policymakers that they’re close to curbing the high inflation that has gripped the nation for two years. The central bank tends to focus most closely on “core” prices, which exclude volatile food and energy costs and are considered better able to capture underlying inflation trends. These prices remain stubbornly high.

Core prices rose a sizable 0.4% from April to May, the sixth straight month of increases at that level or higher. Compared with a year ago, core inflation slipped from 5.5% to 5.3% but is still far above the Fed’s target of 2%.

Yet some positive signs, even in the measures of core prices, suggest that underlying inflation pressures may be receding. The outsize increases in core prices were driven mainly by rising rents and by another spike in used car prices. Real-time data suggests that increases in those categories will soon ease and help cool inflation.

“Outside of those two components, the trend has become very encouraging,” Stephen Juneau, an economist at Bank of America, said in a research note. “We should continue to see improvement in core” prices.

Economists say inflation is being driven by a narrower set of goods and services. Excluding housing costs — which include rents and hotel prices, which jumped last month — prices actually dipped 0.1% from April to May. And they’re up just 2.1% from a year ago.

Rents rose 0.5% from April to May, down from the peak gains of 0.7% to 0.8% last year. Used car prices soared 4.4% just from April to May. Those two factors alone drove four-fifths of the monthly increase in core prices, according to Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. And the government said housing costs made up three-fifths of year-over-year core inflation.

Yet it could take months for rising costs in those areas to ease back to pre-pandemic levels. Fed officials will want to see the expected price declines in rents and used cars actually materialize before they extend any pause in rate increases.

“There’s progress, it’s encouraging,” said Eric Winograd, chief economist at asset manager AllianceBernstein. “I think it’s enough for the Fed to pause tomorrow….But I don’t think it is enough that we can sound the all-clear.”

Outside used cars, prices for goods such as furniture, appliances, and computers were unchanged, an encouraging sign that supply chain backups that sent prices soaring two years ago have largely resolved.

Hal Lawton, CEO of Tractor Supply Co., in Brentwood, Tennessee, which sells items like tractors and outdoor grills, said many of his costs are easing. Substantial reductions in freight prices and moderating wage increases are putting less pressure on him to keep raising prices.

His price increases, Lawton said, have slowed to the mid-single digits, and by year’s end, he predicts they’ll level off to the low single digits.

“You can see it coming down in a sustained way, and I’m feeling very good about that, whether it’s freight, whether it’s wages, whether it’s underlying commodity pressure,” Lawton said. “It gives me a positive outlook on the economy because of that.”

Gas prices, adjusted for seasonal patterns, fell 5.6% from April to May; they’re down nearly 20% from a year ago. And grocery prices ticked up just 0.1%, a relief to consumers, though they’re still 5.8% higher than they were a year ago.

With housing making up such a large proportion of inflation, economists are closely tracking real-time measures of rents in new apartment leases. The government’s measure of rents is now incorporating the sharp increases that occurred in 2021 and 2022 as many people moved to gain more space during the pandemic. But as newer leases with much smaller rent increases feed into the government’s measure, rental costs should drop.

According to ApartmentList, which tracks new leases, average rents nationally rose just 0.9% in May from a year earlier. That’s down from a 17.6% spike in 2021. The decline reflects a jump in the construction of apartment buildings at a time when demand for apartments has slowed.

“If you’re a renter out there, you’ve got a lot more vacant units, nationally speaking,” than at any time since the pandemic, said Rob Warnock, senior research associate at Apartment List.

Still, the stubbornness of underlying inflation reflects a fundamental challenge for the Fed: The economy has steadily defied long-standing forecasts for a recession, dating back more than a year. Instead, businesses have kept hiring at a healthy pace, average paychecks are climbing and workers are freely spending their larger wages.

Though a resilient economy is great for households and businesses, it may also be helping fuel chronically high inflation. Some economists argue that many companies are keeping prices artificially high, more than is needed to cover their own higher costs, to drive profit growth. The nation’s consumers might have to pull back, en masse, before most businesses will reduce prices. In the meantime, steadily robust hiring is allowing Americans, as a whole, to keep spending.

The Fed has raised its benchmark rate by a hefty 5 percentage points over the past 15 months — the fastest pace of rate increases in four decades. Those hikes have led to much higher costs for mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and business borrowing. The Fed’s goal is to slow borrowing and spending, cool the economy and tame inflation — without causing a deep recession. It’s a notoriously difficult task.

There are some signs that the Fed’s efforts are having the desired effect. Inflation is expected to take another big step down in the figures for June that will be reported next month. Price growth could slide as low as 3.2% from a year earlier, according to some economists’ estimates. That would be significantly below inflation’s peak of 9.1% in June 2022, the highest level in four decades.

A sharp decline next month as well would reflect the fact that food and gas prices soared in both May and June last year. As those months drop out of the year-over-year inflation calculations, they are replaced with smaller monthly gains. The effect can sharply lower measures of annual inflation.

___

AP Retail Writer Anne D’Innocenzio contributed to this report from New York City.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Much of the theft was brazen, even simple.

Fraudsters used the Social Security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to get unemployment checks. Cheaters collected those benefits in multiple states. And federal loan applicants weren’t cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy borrowers.

Criminals and gangs grabbed the money. But so did a U.S. soldier in Georgia, the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri and a roofing contractor in Montana.

All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the worst pandemic in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall.

An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.

That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes.

How could so much be stolen? Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic’s early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy.

“Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access,” said Dan Fruchter, chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Washington. “Folks kind of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn’t legal.”

The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.

Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Those programs were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic.

The pilfering was wide but not always as deep as the eye-catching headlines about cases involving many millions of dollars. But all of the theft, big and small, illustrates an epidemic of scams and swindles at a time America was grappling with overrun hospitals, school closures and shuttered businesses. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, more than 1.13 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Michael Horowitz, the U.S. Justice Department inspector general who chairs the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told Congress the fraud is “clearly in the tens of billions of dollars” and may eventually exceed $100 billion.

Horowitz told the AP he was sticking with that estimate, but won’t be certain about the number until he gets more solid data.

“I’m hesitant to get too far out on how much it is,” he said. “But clearly it’s substantial and the final accounting is still at least a couple of years away.”

Mike Galdo, the U.S. Justice Department’s acting director for COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement, said, “It is an unprecedented amount of fraud.”

Before leaving office, former President Donald Trump approved emergency aid measures totaling $3.2 trillion, according to figures from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion. About a fifth of the $5.2 trillion has yet to be paid out, according to the committee’s most recent accounting.

Never has so much federal emergency aid been injected into the U.S. economy so quickly. “The largest rescue package in American history,” U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told Congress.

The enormous scale of that package has obscured multibillion-dollar mistakes.

An $837 billion IRS program, for example, succeeded 99% of the time in getting economic stimulus checks to the proper taxpayers, according to the tax agency. Nevertheless, that 1% failure rate translated into nearly $8 billion going to “ineligible individuals,” a Treasury Department inspector general told AP.

An IRS spokesman said the agency does not agree with all the figures cited by the watchdog and noted that, even if correct, the loss represented a tiny fraction of the program’s budget.

The health crisis thrust the Small Business Administration, an agency that typically gets little attention, into an unprecedented role. In the seven decades before the pandemic struck, for example, the SBA had doled out $67 billion in disaster loans.

When the pandemic struck, the agency was assigned to manage two massive relief efforts — the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection programs, which would swell to more than a trillion dollars. SBA’s workforce had to get money out the door, fast, to help struggling businesses and their employees. COVID-19 pushed SBA’s pace from a walk to an Olympic sprint. Between March 2020 and the end of July 2020, the agency granted 3.2 million COVID-19 economic injury disaster loans totaling $169 billion, according to an SBA inspector general’s report, while at the same time implementing the huge new Paycheck Protection Program.

In the haste, guardrails to protect federal money were dropped. Prospective borrowers were allowed to “self-certify” that their loan applications were true. The CARES Act also barred SBA from looking at tax return transcripts that could have weeded out shady or undeserving applicants, a decision eventually reversed at the end of 2020.

“If you open up the bank window and say, give me your application and just promise me you really are who you say you are, you attract a lot of fraudsters and that’s what happened here,” Horowitz said.

The SBA inspector general’s office has estimated fraud in the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program at $86 billion and the Paycheck Protection program at $20 billion. The watchdog is expected in coming weeks to release revised loss figures that are likely to be much higher.

In an interview, SBA Inspector General Hannibal “Mike” Ware declined to say what the new fraud estimate for both programs will be.

“It will be a figure that is fair, that is 1,000% defensible by my office, fully backed by our significant criminal investigative activity that is taking place in this space,” Ware said.

Ware and his staff are overwhelmed with pandemic-related audits and investigations. The office has a backlog of more than 80,000 actionable leads, close to a 100 years’ worth of work.

“Death by a thousand cuts might be death by 80,000 cuts for them,” Horowitz said of Ware’s workload. “It’s just the magnitude of it, the enormity of it.”

A 2022 study from the University of Texas at Austin found almost five times as many suspicious Paycheck Protection loans as the $20 billion SBA’s inspector general has reported so far. The research, led by finance professor John Griffin, found as much as $117 billion in questionable and possibly fraudulent loans, citing indicators such as non-registered businesses and multiple loans to the same address.

Horowitz, the pandemic watchdog chairman, criticized the government’s failure early on to use the “Do Not Pay” Treasury Department database, designed to keep government money from going to debarred contractors, fugitives, felons or people convicted of tax fraud. Those reviews, he said, could have been done quickly.

“It’s a false narrative that has been set out, that there are only two choices,” Horowitz said. “One choice is, get the money out right away. And that the only other choice was to spend weeks and months trying to figure out who was entitled to it.”

In less than a few days, a week at most, Horowitz said, SBA might have discovered thousands of ineligible applicants.

“24 hours? 48 hours? Would that really have upended the program?” Horowitz said. “I don’t think it would have. And it was data sitting there. It didn’t get checked.”

The Biden administration put in place stricter rules to stem pandemic fraud, including use of the “Do Not Pay” database. Biden also recently proposed a $1.6 billion plan to boost law enforcement efforts to go after pandemic relief fraudsters.

“I think the bottom line is regardless of what the number is, it emanates overwhelmingly from three programs that were designed and originated in 2020 with too many large holes that opened the door to criminal fraud,” Gene Sperling, the White House American Rescue Plan coordinator, said in an interview.

“We came into office when the largest amounts of fraud were already out of the barn,” Sperling added.

In a statement, an SBA spokesperson declined to say whether the agency agrees with the figures issued by Ware’s office, saying the federal government has not developed an accepted system for assessing fraud in government programs. Previous analyses have pointed to “potential fraud” or “fraud indicators” in a manner that conveys those numbers as a true fraud estimate when they are not, according to the statement.

Han Nguyen, a spokesman for the SBA, said Monday that “the vast majority of the likely fraud originated in the first nine months of the pandemic programs, under the Trump administration.” For the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program, Nguyen said, SBA’s “working estimate” found $28 billion in likely fraud.

The coronavirus pandemic plunged the U.S. economy into a short but devastating recession. Jobless rates soared into double digits and Washington sent hundreds of billions of dollars to states to help the suddenly unemployed.

For crooks, it was like tossing chum into the sea to lure fish. Many of these state unemployment agencies used antiquated computer systems or had too few staff to stop bogus claims from being paid.

“Yes, the states were overwhelmed in terms of demand,” said Brent Parton, acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration. “We had not seen a spike like this ever in a global event like a pandemic. The systems were underfunded. They were not resilient. And I would say, more importantly, were vulnerable to sophisticated attacks by fraudsters.”

Fraud in pandemic unemployment assistance programs stands at $76 billion, according to congressional testimony from Labor Department Inspector General Larry Turner. That’s a conservative estimate. Another $115 billion mistakenly went to people who should not have received the benefits, according to his testimony.

Turner declined AP’s request for an interview.

Turner’s task in identifying all of the pandemic unemployment insurance fraud has been complicated by a lack of cooperation from the federal Bureau of Prisons, according to a September “alert memo” issued by his office. Scam artists used Social Security numbers of federal prisoners to steal millions of dollars in benefits.

His office still doesn’t know exactly how much was swiped that way. The prison bureau had declined to provide current data about federal prisoners. The AP reached out to the bureau several times for comment, starting June 2. Bureau spokesperson Emery Nelson said on Monday the agency had provided in February and March “all the necessary data” to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Turner is a member of the committee.

Ohio State Auditor Keith Faber saw trouble coming when safeguards to ensure the unemployment aid only went to people who legitimately qualified were lowered, making conditions ripe for fraud and waste. The state’s unemployment agency “took controls down because on the one hand, they literally were drinking from a firehose,” Faber said. “They had a year’s worth of claims in a couple of weeks. The second part of the problem was the (federal government) directed them to get the money out the door as quickly as possible and worry less about security. They took that to heart. I think that was a mistake.”

Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services reported in February $1 billion in fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims and another $4.8 billion in overpayments.

The ubiquitous masks that became a symbol of the COVID-19 pandemic are seen on fewer and fewer faces. Hospitalizations for the virus have steadily declined, according to CDC data, and Biden in April ended the national emergency to respond to the pandemic.

But on politically divided Capitol Hill, lawmakers have not put the pandemic behind them and are engaged in a fierce debate over the success of the relief spending and who’s to blame for the theft.

Too much government money, Republicans argue, breeds fraud, waste and inflation. Democrats have countered that all the financial muscle from Washington saved lives, businesses and jobs.

The GOP-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee is investigating pandemic relief spending. “We must identify where this money went, how much ended up in the hands of fraudsters or ineligible participants, and what should be done to ensure it never happens again,” the panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, said in a statement Tuesday.

Republicans and Democrats did, however, find common ground last year on bills to give the federal government more time to catch fraudsters. Biden in August signed legislation to increase the statute of limitations from five to 10 years on crimes involving the two major programs managed by the SBA.

The extra time will help federal prosecutors untangle pandemic fraud cases, which often involve identity theft and crooks overseas. But there’s no guarantee they’ll catch everyone who jumped at the chance for an easy payday. They’re busy, too, with crimes unrelated to pandemic relief funds.

“Do we have enough cases and leads that we could be doing them in 2030? We absolutely could,” said Fruchter, the federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Washington. “But my experience tells me that likely there will be other priorities that will come up and will need to be addressed. And unfortunately, in our office, we don’t have a dedicated pandemic fraud unit.”

Congress has not yet passed a measure that would give prosecutors the additional five years to go after unemployment fraudsters. That worries Turner, the Labor Department watchdog. Without the extension, he told Congress in a late May report, people who stole the benefits may escape justice.

Sperling, the White House official, said any future crisis that requires government intervention doesn’t have to be a choice between helping people in need and stopping fraudsters.

“The prevention strategy going forward is that in a crisis, you can focus on fast delivery to people in desperate situations without feeling that you can only get that speed by taking down commonsense anti-fraud guardrails,” he said.

___

McDermott reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

Shortly before 5 p.m., a Honda SUV was turning left into a parking lot when it collided with Williams’ motorcycle in the town of Dorset, according to a statement from Vermont State Police.

“Williams was unable to avoid a collision and was thrown from his motorcycle. He suffered critical injuries and was airlifted to Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York, where he was pronounced dead,” according to the statement.

Williams was wearing a helmet, police said.

The SUV’s driver received minor injuries and wasn’t hospitalized. He had signaled the turn and wasn’t immediately detained although the crash investigation continued, police said.

Williams, whose full name was Richard Treat Williams, lived in Manchester Center in southern Vermont, police said.

His agent, Barry McPherson, also confirmed the actor’s death.

“I’m just devastated. He was the nicest guy. He was so talented,” McPherson told People magazine.

“He was an actor’s actor,” McPherson said. “Filmmakers loved him. He’s been the heart of … Hollywood since the late 1970s.”

The Connecticut-born Williams made his movie debut in 1975 as a police officer in the movie “Deadly Hero” and went on to appear in more than 120 TV and film roles, including the movies “The Eagle Has Landed,” “Prince of the City” and “Once Upon a Time in America.”

He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his role as hippie leader George Berger in the 1979 movie version of the hit musical “Hair.”

He appeared in dozens of television shows but was perhaps best known for his starring role from 2002 to 2006 in “Everwood” as Dr. Andrew Brown, a widowed brain surgeon from Manhattan who moves with his two children to the Colorado mountain town of that name.

Williams also had a recurring role as Lenny Ross on the TV show “Blue Bloods.”

Williams’ stage appearances included Broadway shows, including “Grease” and “Pirates of Penzance.”

Colleagues and friends praised Williams as kind, generous and creative.

“Treat Williams was a passionate, adventurous, creative man,” actor Wendell Pierce tweeted. “In a short period of time, he quickly befriended me & his adventurous spirit was infectious. We worked on just 1 film together but occasionally connected over the years. Kind and generous with advice and support. RIP.”

Justine Williams, a writer, director and producer, tweeted that Williams was “the best.” Actor James Woods said, “I really loved him and am devastated that he’s gone.”

The scene outside the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Miami was part Donald Trump campaign rally and part reality TV show featuring celebrity faces and anti-Trump protesters, blistering heat and humidity, and a crowd that included people who’d traveled long distances for a day in South Florida.

There was even — emblematic of Miami — a vendor outside the courthouse selling tubs of sliced fruit for $10.

All were gathered Tuesday because of the historic event inside, the first court appearance for the former president facing federal charges alleging he hoarded classified documents detailing sensitive military secrets and schemed to thwart government efforts to get them back.

The major legal development of the day, as expected, was Trump’s not guilty plea to each of the 37 counts in the federal indictment.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the day was the crowd, which was smaller than the 5,000 to 50,000 that Miami officials said a day earlier they were prepared for. At least 1,000 people gathered at the courthouse, along with hundreds of reporters, photojournalists and TV personalities.

And despite the passions and the heat — and some occasional shouting between Trump friends and foes — there wasn’t any violence, even though several reporters peppered Miami’s mayor and police chief on Monday with ‘what-if’ questions about worst-case scenarios.

26 hours in Miami-Dade

Just before he finished the momentous 26-hour trip to Miami-Dade County, Trump’s motorcade took him to a post-court campaign stop at Versailles, the iconic restaurant in Little Havana.

Just before 5 p.m. Trump’s red, white and blue Boeing 757, emblazoned with his name in gold, took off from Miami International Airport headed to New Jersey, for a scheduled campaign fundraiser and speech at his golf club in Bedminster.

He describes his Mar-a-Lago resort and club in Palm Beach — where the indictment alleges Trump intentionally retained hundreds of classified documents that he took with him from the White House — as his home, but typically doesn’t spend the hot summer season there.

He spent the night at Trump National Doral, his Miami-Dade golf club after arriving at MIA about 3 p.m. Monday.

As a former president, Trump traveled on the ground in a motorcade, with police blocking traffic, including on busy expressways, to expedite his movements. From the SUV on his way to court, Trump told his social media followers that he was “ON MY WAY TO COURTHOUSE. WITCH HUNT!!! MAGA.”

Back in the SUV after court, he posted again on his Truth Social platform: “Thank you Miami. Such a warm welcome on such a SAD DAY for our Country!”

Both posts were unusual in their brevity and lack of attacks on political enemies.

Supporters

Rose Rodriguez, 58, said her parents came to the U.S. from Cuba, and she believes if Trump doesn’t win the 2024 election, communism will come to the U.S. “I know what communism is,” she said.

Rodriguez said she attended Tuesday’s gathering — it wasn’t her first pro-Trump event — to prove he has a support system.

“He’s a man for the people,” she said.

As Trump arrived at the courthouse, supporters cheered, chanting “Trump” and “USA! USA! USA!”

Some Trump supporters expressed their displeasure with President Joe Biden by chanting “No more Biden!” and “Let’s Go Brandon.” That’s a phrase popular among Republicans that directs an obscenity toward the president.

Luimar Zibetti Garza, 60, a longtime Floridian who says she’s homeless, set up on a sidewalk outside the federal courthouse. She had an umbrella with a sign that said, “Homeless 4 Trump.” “I came out to support Trump because I know he’s being railroaded,” Garza said.

Traveling long distance

Some of the people who showed up outside the federal courthouse traveled a long way.

Katie Taylor, 76, traveled from Virginia, stopping in Sanford, N.C., to pick up Gloria Eck.

Eck said the indictment is “just proof to me how corrupt” the Department of Justice is. “If people don’t stand up we’re going to lose our country.”

She said she wasn’t concerned about an unattended item with wires that prompted police to temporarily clear an area near the courthouse. “We can’t be worried (about it). They want to push us out.”

Taylor said she was “not a protester,” instead describing herself  as “a supporter of President Trump.”

Several dozen Trump supporters boarded Miami-bound buses at an Orlando Walmart.

Miriam J. Ramirez, president of the Puerto Rico Republican Assembly, said she and others in the Puerto Rican community are sticking with the former president. “We feel safe, like a daddy who’s taking care of us.”

As they boarded the buses in Orlando, Danette Chialtas offered a different assessment. “Get on the bus, you traitors!” she said. “Your dictator is being arraigned today for espionage. Traitors!”

Opponents

Xavier Presley, 67, of Miami, is a regular fixture at any Trump rally. Despite the heat, he wore his typical outfit Tuesday afternoon outside of the courthouse: a suit jacket that has expletives and Trump’s name written in marker on it.

Presley, who stood alone underneath a palm tree with many neon colored signs with an obscenity and Trump’s name, said he typically attends the rallies alone to avoid any trouble with Trump supporters.

Presley said he’s long been an activist. But he stops short of calling himself political. “Because you can never win,” he said. “You have no winner in politics. Because they all are crooks.”

Even Trump supporters laugh, he said. “They do laugh. A lot of Trump people today, I was surprised, a lot of Trump people took pictures with my signs.”

Disagreements generally were mild. When Trump opponents shouted “Trump’s a dick,” some of his supporters responded with shouts of “We love Trump” then sang “God Bless America.”

Versailles

After court, Trump made a brief stop at Versailles, the iconic Miami restaurant in Little Havana.

Versailles is a must-do photo op for Republican candidates campaigning in Miami and gave Trump a chance to visit with supporters in the Cuban American community, where he developed a loyal following during his presidency.

People cheered and news video showed people laying hands on him in prayer.

“Food for everyone!” Trump declared as he worked the dining room shaking hands. Supporters sang “Happy Birthday” to Trump, who turns 77 on Wednesday.

Trump smiled and gave a thumbs-up sign to people taking pictures. “We have a country that is in decline like never before. We can’t let it happen,” he said.

Domenic Santana, a native New Yorker who now lives in Miami, wore an outfit with prison stripes and held a “lock him up” sign, designed for maximum media attention. He wore the same outfit and carried the same sign on Monday. “Trump is a rat who graduated from the school of rats and wound up in the White House. The New Yorkers know. He should have been locked up a long, long time ago,” Santana said.

Few incidents

Later in the day, a man jumped in front of a vehicle in Trump’s motorcade as it was leaving the courthouse, and was quickly pulled away by law enforcement officers and later taken away by several Miami Police officers.

In the morning, police moved people away from an area near the courthouse after an unattended object was spotted. The suspicious item turned out to be a flat-screen television with wires coming out. It had a statement expressing intense displeasure for what the writer called “the Communist media.”

The area was reopened after it was determined there was no threat.

.⁦@aronberg⁩ providing legal analysis for ⁦@MSNBC⁩ live coverage of Trump federal court day. https://t.co/rIX3qtQvsA pic.twitter.com/pT42cHTvH7

— Anthony Man (@browardpolitics) June 13, 2023

Few newsmakers

Few newsmakers actually appeared outside the courthouse to make news.

Alina Habba, an attorney for Trump, appeared to assert the indictment was not justified, repeating many of the assertions Trump and his supporters have made since the charges came out last week.

“The people in charge of this country do not love America. They hate Donald Trump. What we are witnessing today is a blatant and unapologetic weaponization of the criminal justice system,” she said. “The decision to pursue charges against President Trump while turning a blind eye to others is emblematic of the corruption that we have here.”

Laura Loomer, the internet provocateur and two-time unsuccessful candidate for Congress, led “We want Trump!” outside the courthouse. Kari Lake, the unsuccessful 2022 Republican candidate for Arizona governor, Trump supporter and 2020 election denier, was also present.

Doing business

Miami’s entrepreneurial spirit was on display.

Aldrena Oliveras, 52, of Miami, set up a tent selling tubs of fruit: pineapple, cranberry, kiwi, apples, watermelon, pears, mango. She said the political event was different from her usual days selling on Miami Beach or in Little Havana.

Business, not politics, was on her mind. And it was booming. She said her $500 in sales was much more than usual.

A water vendor invoked the crowd’s interest as he sold from a water cooler. “It’s hot to be a Trump supporter! Get some ice cold water!”

Ronald Solomon, president of the MAGA Mall, was selling $20 hats ($25 for a cowboy hat) and $10 flags. His biggest sellers: the classic, red “Make America Great Again,” “Trump 2024” with an embroidered American flag, and “God, Guns and Trump.”

He said he sold about $4,000 of hats on Tuesday.

Sun Sentinel staff photographers Joe Cavaretta and Mike Stocker and Orlando Sentinel staff writer Skyler Swisher contributed to this report, which contains information from The Associated Press.

Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com, on Twitter @browardpolitics and on Post.news/@browardpolitics

If the latest charges against Trump start to fall apart, it will throw the spotlight back on Democrats and Biden, and confirm what half the country believes – that this is a politically motivated prosecution.

Trump, about to turn 77, is still in a precarious position heading into 2024, with possible indictments related to Jan. 6 and Georgia still to go. Just from a stamina point of view, it will be tough for Trump to survive the heat.

But polls conducted after the 37-count indictment on classified documents was released show the former president is still the frontrunner in the GOP race. A clear majority of Republican primary voters – 81% – say they believe the indictment for illegally keeping secret documents and lying about it is politically motivated.

That’s a clear indication that the charges won’t yet hurt Trump’s cause in the GOP primaries, and may in fact boost him. A new Reuters poll showed 43% of Republicans support Trump, while just 22% picked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

But it’s still early and those numbers could change as more evidence comes back against Trump.

Trump is now in Miami in preparation for his court appearance on Tuesday, but he is already defiant in denying the indictment.

“I HOPE THE ENTIRE COUNTRY IS WATCHING WHAT THE RADICAL LEFT ARE DOING TO AMERICA,” he posted on his Truth Social site.

The question now is, will the spotlight eventually come back to Biden and his own problem with keeping classified documents in his garage?

And will voters blame Biden for bringing the case against Trump, despite the president’s attempts to stay away from it?

It’s pretty hard for Biden to claim he knows nothing about the indictments. Difficult to believe the Department of Justice wouldn’t at least brief the White House about the coming charges. The DOJ is part of the administration, along with the FBI.

If the latest indictment starts to fizzle, it could be bad news for the president and rocket fuel for Trump, much the same way the collapse of the Russian collusion case helped the former president.

Republican voters – and many independents – seem inclined to side with Trump right now in this latest attempt to wound him legally. And they are bound to take it out against Biden.

At the very least, the case against Trump is likely to drag on well past next year’s election, meaning voters will have to decide based on incomplete information.

The 80-year-old Biden – if he really does follow through with his reelection plans – better hope that Americans start to turn against his former rival soon, or there will be a reversal of the 2020 election — no matter how many indictments they bring.

“It’s a disgrace to our country,” Trump said on Howie Carr’s radio show Monday night of the accusations made against him by the Biden administration’s Justice Department.

Trump, the current leading contender for the Republican nomination to the White House in 2024, was indicted on charges he willfully mishandled classified information he apparently admitted he did not have the right to possess and continued to withhold from the government despite numerous attempts by the National Archives and the Department of Justice to secure the nation’s secrets.

The 45th President is due to surrender himself to federal authorities in Miami on Tuesday at 3 p.m. Trump told Carr he would plead “not guilty” to all charges.

“Getting ready to head down to Doral in Miami. We must all be STRONG and DEFEAT the Communists, Marxists, and Radical Left Lunatics that are systematically destroying our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he declared Monday morning, capitalization included.

Trump has maintained his innocence from the moment the FBI raided his Mar-A-Lago resort-turned-residence in August of last year, claiming he had declassified any records in his possession and that the files were of a personal, not presidential, nature. He has responded to the indictment with both shock and anger.

“Hard to believe that the leading candidate, by far, of the opposition party, got indicted. This is strictly Third World. MAGA,” Trump said through his Truth Social media company. He said “we’re like a third-world country” again during his evening interview with Carr.

The former president was not alone in his assertion that the Biden Administration’s Justice Department had gone too far in accusing the ex-command-in-chief of mishandling documents when so many other former government officials have come forward with their own misplaced classified information, including President Joe Biden, and former Vice President Mike Pence.

Scores of Republicans in the House and Senate jumped to his defense over the weekend and after the 49-page indictment was unsealed and made public, a march that continued through Monday. Even Trump’s leading opponent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, questioned whether Trump was getting a fair deal, though he didn’t name his chief rival.

Many Republicans say the charges are an attempt by Democrats to remove Trump from electoral consideration.

“The radical Far Left will stop at nothing to interfere with the 2024 election in order to prop up the catastrophic presidency and desperate campaign of Joe Biden,” U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, the number-four Republican in the House, wrote on Truth Social in a post shared by Trump.

In a post-indictment interview with conservative political activist Roger Stone, the former president called on his supporters to protest his court date.

“Our country has to protest,” the President told Stone, who he pardoned for allegedly lying to Congress.

Officials in Miami, apparently responding to reports that far-right group The Proud Boys would answer Trump’s call to protest his court appearance, were prepared for up to 50,000 protesters to arrive, according to reporting by the Miami Herald.

“Stay strong. Stay very, very strong,” he said to his supporters during Carr’s show.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The driver of a tractor-trailer hauling gasoline lost control on an off-ramp and flipped the tanker truck on its side in a wreck that set it afire and destroyed a section of the East Coast’s main north-south highway, Pennsylvania’s top transportation official said Monday.

In the first official accounting of a wreck that threw hundreds of thousands of morning commutes into chaos and disrupted untold numbers of businesses, state Transportation Secretary Mike Carroll said the driver was northbound “trying to navigate the curve, lost control of the vehicle, landed on its side and ruptured the tank.”

The driver was feared dead, and a relative of a New Jersey truck driver who has not been heard from since Sunday told The Philadelphia Inquirer that investigators had contacted the family in an effort to identify human remains recovered from the wreckage.

Pennsylvania State Police said a body was turned over to the Philadelphia medical examiner and coroner, but did not identify the remains or respond when asked if they belonged to the driver.

Gov. Josh Shapiro, speaking of those on the roadway and not the trucker, said he “found myself thanking the Lord that no motorists who were on I-95 were injured or died.”

Interstate 95 will be closed in both directions for weeks as the summer travel season kicks into high gear. The elevated southbound portion of I-95 will have to be demolished, as well as the northbound side, Carroll said. Motorists should avoid the northeast corner of the sixth-largest city in the country, transportation officials said.

The accident also disrupted the automotive route from Canada to Florida through the Boston, New York and Washington metropolitan areas, increasing Americans’ dependence on air travel and on the interstate rail network.

Videos shared on social media showed a number of close calls around the accident, with people driving through the area as flames licked upward from the fire below.

The National Transportation Safety Board was on the scene Sunday night. Federal investigators have been collecting information about the truck and talking with the company and emergency responders in order to understand the sequence of events. They are expected to make a preliminary report within weeks.

The damaged I-95 segment carries about 160,000 vehicles daily, Carroll said. State police don’t know if the driver was speeding, and no other vehicle has been found. Officials said they had been in contact with the trucking company, but they did not identify it.

Carroll said the highway span was 10 to 12 years old, had appeared sound, and officials blamed the damage on the heat of the fire, which took about an hour to control.

Shapiro signed a disaster declaration Monday, saying it gives state agencies the ability to skip normal bidding-and-contracting requirements so the span can be repaired faster.

He said a flight he took over the area showed “just remarkable devastation.”

High heat from the fire or the impact of an explosion could have weakened the steel beams supporting the overpass, according to Drexel University structural engineering Professor Abi Aghayere. Bridges like the one that collapsed don’t typically have fire protection, like concrete casing, he added. It could have been coated in a fire-retarding paint, but even then the beams could have been weakened.

“It just gives you time,” he said.

Among many transportation changes across the region, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority said it was operating three extra morning and late afternoon trains on its Trenton, New Jersey, line, and adding capacity to regularly scheduled lines during peak hours following the collapse.

The collapsed section of I-95 was part of a $212 million reconstruction project that wrapped up four years ago, state Transportation Department spokesman Brad Rudolph said. PennDOT rated the 104-foot span as in “good” condition earlier this year, with another inspection set for 2025.

Shapiro, a Democrat, said the complete rebuild of I-95 would take “some number of months,” and in the meantime officials were looking at “interim solutions to reconnect I-95 and get traffic through the area.”

Joseph L. Schofer, a retired professor of civil and environmental engineering from Northwestern University, said a big challenge for PennDOT in quickly replacing the bridge could be getting heavy-duty steel beams of a hundred feet or more.

Ensuring the precise length necessary — either by finding the construction records or taking measurements — and finding a fabricator to make them could take time, he said.

“You can’t go online to Amazon and order it and have it delivered the next day,” said Schofer, who also hosts a podcast on infrastructure.

In California, a similar situation happened with a highway ramp in Oakland. It was replaced in 26 days, he said.

“Now that’s almost a miracle,” Schofer said. In Atlanta, an elevated portion of Interstate 85 collapsed in a fire, shutting down the heavily traveled route through the heart of the city in March 2017. It took authorities there 43 days to replace it, Schofer said.

In Pennsylvania, officials were also concerned about the environmental effects of runoff into the nearby Delaware River.

After a sheen was seen in the Delaware River near the collapse site, the Coast Guard deployed a boom to contain the material. Ensign Josh Ledoux said the tanker had a capacity of 8,500 gallons (32,176 liters), but the contents did not appear to be spreading into the environment.

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Catalini reported from Trenton, New Jersey and Levy from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

The FTC’s Monday filing in a federal court in San Francisco seeks a restraining order and injunction to stop Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of the California gaming company behind hit franchises such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.

Microsoft, maker of the Xbox game system, has been struggling to win worldwide approval for the deal with just over a month before the deadline to close it, according to the contract it signed with Activision.

“We welcome the opportunity to present our case in federal court,” said a statement Monday from Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president. “We believe accelerating the legal process in the U.S will ultimately bring more choice and competition to the market.”

The FTC already took Microsoft to court to block the merger, but that was before the U.S. agency’s in-house judge in a trial set to start on Aug. 2. That administrative process doesn’t preclude the parties from closing the deal.

The contract between Microsoft and Activision required the deal to close by July 18, but the FTC’s latest action seeks to stop that from happening.

“Microsoft and Activision Blizzard have represented in the past that they cannot close their deal due to antitrust reviews of the transaction in other jurisdictions,” the FTC said in a statement Monday. “But Microsoft and Activision have not provided assurances that they will maintain that position. In light of that, and public reporting that Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are considering closing their deal imminently, we have filed a request for a temporary restraining order to prevent them from closing while review continues.”

Microsoft’s other main obstacle is in the United Kingdom, where antitrust regulators have also taken action to block the acquisition.

The all-cash deal announced in January 2022 has been scrutinized by regulators around the world over fears that it would give Microsoft and its Xbox console control of Activision’s hit franchises and give it an unfair boost in the emerging business of cloud-based game subscriptions. It could be the priciest tech industry merger in history.

Fierce opposition has been driven by rival Sony, which makes the PlayStation gaming system.

Microsoft sought to counter the resistance by striking a deal with Nintendo to license Activision titles like Call of Duty for 10 years and offering the same to Sony if the deal went ahead.

European regulators representing the 27-nation bloc approved the deal last month on condition that Microsoft make some promises meant to boost competition in the cloud-based gaming market. A number of other countries, including China, Japan, Brazil and South Korea, have also approved it.

Roughly two in three (66%) U.S. adults have a negative view about tipping, according to the survey. Americans said they believe businesses should pay employees better rather than relying so much on tips (41%), they’re annoyed about pre-entered tip screens (32%), they feel that tipping culture has gotten out of control (30%), they’re confused about who and how much to tip (15%), and they would be willing to pay higher prices if we could do away with tipping (16%).

Despite annoyances, people haven’t stopped tipping for everyday services. More than two-fifths (44%) of U.S. adults who dine at sit-down restaurants typically tip at least 20%. But when it comes to many tipped services, such as hair stylists, food delivery, taxis and more, everyone approaches tipping differently. Here’s how people feel about tipping in 2023.

Gen Zers and men tip the least of any demographic

The frequency of U.S. adults tipping has declined steadily since 2019, according to Bankrate. In 2023, fewer people say they always tip workers in every category:

Source: CreditCards.com survey, June 16-18, 2021; CreditCards.com survey, May 11-13, 2022; Bankrate survey, May 3-5, 2023

People who dine at sit-down restaurants say they always tip their servers — more frequently than those who use any other kind of service — but that percentage of people fell from 73% in 2022 to 65% in 2023. Over three-fourths (77%) of people who dine at sit-down restaurants always tipped their server in 2019. Similar trends are true for food delivery workers, taxi or rideshare drivers and other tipped services.

Most significantly, the percentage of people who always tip their hair stylists, hairdresser or barber fell from 66% in 2022 to 53% in 2023.

Nearly two in three diners always tip their waiters at sit-down restaurants

Servers and waitstaff at sit-down restaurants are most likely (65%) to always receive a tip from customers of any tipped service, followed by hair stylists. Additionally, 50% of those who use food delivery services, such as meals from restaurants or groceries delivered through apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash, will always tip:

Source: Bankrate survey, May 3-5, 2023

People who use home services or repair, who pick up takeout food and who receive furniture or appliance delivery are the least likely to say they always tip: One in ten (10%) of those who use home services or repair always tip, as well as 17% of those who receive furniture or appliance delivery and 13% of those who pick up takeout food.

The tendency to tip differs widely between demographics like age, gender and location. Generally, men are less likely to always tip than women are. Most significantly, 60% of women who go to a hair stylist always tip, compared to 46% of men. Men also tip waiters, food delivery workers and other categories less frequently than women:

—Waiters at sit-down restaurants: 70% of women, 60% of men

—Hair stylists/barbers: 60% of women, 46% of men

—Food delivery workers: 54% of women, 45% of men

—Taxi/rideshare drivers: 45% of women, 36% of men

The tendency to always tip for a service increases as people age. Gen Z is generally the least likely to always tip for a service, while baby boomers are generally the most likely.

The difference between generations is largest for those who go to hairdressers, hair stylists or barbers. Only 24% of Gen Z who go to hair stylists always tip, while nearly three times as many baby boomers (70%) who use the service always tip.

Additionally, Gen Zers are significantly less likely than baby boomers to always tip when they eat at a sit-down restaurant (35% compared to 83%), get food delivery (31% compared to 62%) or use taxis or rideshares (22% compared to 56%).

The only exception in generational trends is for home services or repairs. Gen Z is actually the most likely (15%) to always tip for home service or repairs, a tendency that decreases in every generation. Only 6% of baby boomers who use home services or repairs always tip.

Midwesterners are 16% more likely to always tip at a sit-down restaurant than Southerners or Westerners

The Midwestern stereotype of “Minnesota nice” also applies to their tipping habits. Midwesterners are more likely to always tip for several services than people in other regions.

Most significantly, 77% of Midwesterners who dine at sit-down restaurants always tip, compared to 67% of Northeasterners and 61% of both Southerners and Westerners.

However, Northeasterners say they are likely to always tip in two out of the nine total categories. Over one in three (35%) of Northeasterners who use hotel housekeeping always tip, compared to 23% of Westerners, 20% of Southerners and 19% of Midwesterners.

Similarly, 25% of Northeasterners who use furniture and appliance delivery always tip, compared to 18% of Westerners, 16% of Southerners and 10% of Midwesterners.

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans think tipping culture has gotten out of control

Americans can be quite confused about when and how much to tip in 2023. Though more businesses, like coffee shops and food trucks, encourage tipping during payment, not everyone likes being encouraged to tip, especially if the suggestions are a high amount. Around one in three (30%) U.S. adults told Bankrate they think tipping culture has gotten out of control. Older Americans tend to think tipping culture has gotten out of control more frequently than younger generations:

—Gen Z: 22%

—Millennials: 27%

—Gen X: 33%

—Baby boomers: 33%

Tipped workers receive a federal minimum wage of $2.13 per hour, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, amid the expectation they’ll make a higher income through tipping. According to Bankrate, two in five (41%) U.S. adults feel businesses should pay their employees better rather than relying so much on tips, the most common negative feeling about tipping.

In total, 66% of people had at least one negative feeling about tipping. Only 7% of people didn’t agree with any statement on tipping:

Source: Bankrate survey, May 3-5, 2023

Pre-entered tipping suggestions were the second-most common negative feeling for Americans. Nearly one in three (32%) of U.S. adults are annoyed by tip suggestions, and 18% said they tend to tip less, or not at all, when they’re presented with the screens. Only 9% say they tip more.

“Inflation and general economic unease seem to be making Americans stingier with their tipping habits, yet we’re confronted with more invitations to tip than ever,” Bankrate Senior Industry Analyst Ted Rossman said. “It’s a fascinating issue with few clear answers. There is one apparent certainty, though: Tipping doesn’t seem likely to leave American society anytime soon.”

Sixteen percent of U.S. adults say they’re willing to pay higher prices if American culture could do away with tipping. Younger Americans are more likely to say they’re willing to pay more: 21% of millennials and 18% of Gen Zers compared to 13% of Gen Xers and 12% of baby boomers.

Other pain points include being confused about who and how much to tip (15%) and saying that they’re tipping less since COVID-19 (9%).

Not all Americans feel negatively about tipping -— many are still tipping well. Nearly one in two (44%) of U.S. adults who dine at sit-down restaurants say they typically tip at least 20%. Most commonly, 57% of baby boomers typically tip 20%, followed by 50% of Gen Xers, 34% of millennials and 25% of Gen Zers.

Tipping can be a positive emotion, too: 35% of U.S. adults say they feel good when they leave a generous tip. In contrast to those who have been tipping less since the pandemic, 14% of U.S. adults say they’re tipping more since COVID-19.

Guidelines when deciding how much to tip

Tipping can be confusing; it may seem like the suggested guidelines are always changing. Because tipped workers rely on that money to pay their bills, Rossman suggests tipping 20% as a standard practice. But that can be tricky when you’re paying for inexpensive services, such as a coffee, or if you need to pay more than one worker. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

—In personalized services, tip every worker who helps you. Are you at a hair salon, and two different workers cut and dye your hair? Or did you hire three workers to help you move? If you received individual, personalized service from several people, tip each person to thank them for their skilled work.

—Leave at least a small amount for inexpensive services. You probably don’t need to break out a calculator to figure out how to tip for a coffee. Generally, for services around $5 or less, leaving a dollar or your extra change in a tip jar will be plenty.

—Keep some cash on hand — but you may need to pull up an app. Cash is best for some services like valet parking and hotel housekeeping, where tips typically aren’t suggested when you pay for the service. If you pay for a service that doesn’t allow you to tip at the end, ask the worker if you can tip them through a peer-to-peer payment platform like Venmo or Zelle. Some companies don’t allow their workers to receive tips, but it never hurts to ask.

—2023 survey: Bankrate commissioned YouGov Plc to conduct the survey. All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 2,437 U.S. adults. Fieldwork was undertaken May 3-5, 2023.2022 & 2021 surveys: CreditCards.com commissioned YouGov Plc to conduct the survey on tipping habits. CreditCards.com is owned by Bankrate’s parent company, Red Ventures.2022: Total sample size was 2,610 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between May 11- 13, 2022.2021: Total sample size was 2,573 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between June 16- 18, 2021. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all US adults (aged 18+). The survey was carried out online and meets rigorous quality standards. It employed a nonprobability-based sample using both quotas upfront during collection and then a weighting scheme on the back end designed and proven to provide nationally representative results.

©2023 Bankrate.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Trump, 76, of Palm Beach, Florida, is scheduled to surrender himself to authorities in Miami at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, when he is expected to tell U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon he is not guilty of the 37 felony counts leveled against him. A full 31 of those charges pertain to his allegedly deliberate attempts to withhold classified government documents that the National Archives and Department of Justice had both demanded he relinquish after leaving office and which are detailed in a 49 page indictment unsealed ahead of the weekend.

Through his campaign on Sunday, Trump announced he would follow the court date in Florida with an appearance at his property in New Jersey.

“President Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America, will deliver remarks at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in Bedminster, New Jersey on Tuesday, June 13, 2023, at 8:15PM EDT,” his campaign said.

Trump declared himself an “innocent man” in social media postings when the details of his alleged misdeeds were made public. He told crowds in Georgia and North Carolina Saturday during campaign stops that it’s his run for the White House that led to the charges, not his conduct as a private citizen.

“The ridiculous and baseless indictment of me by the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice will go down as among the most horrific abuses of power in the history of our country,” he said in Columbus, Georgia. “In the end, they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you and I’m just standing in their way.”

Trump also vowed Saturday to remain in the race, even if he is convicted in the case.

“I’ll never leave,” he told Politico in an interview aboard his plane after his speech in Georgia.

According to the unsealed indictment, the Trump stored classified documents in a bathroom and a ballroom at his Mar-A-Lago resort-turned-residence where they were accessible by people without the clearance to view them.

Charging documents further allege the former president instructed his lawyers to destroy some classified records he was ordered to return, hid others from his legal team, and kept them despite repeated demands from the government and assertions from records custodians he previously returned everything required.

Trump would often chant “Lock her up” with crowds at 2016 campaign rallies, referring to Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the race, and her alleged mishandling of classified information. After a roughly yearlong inquiry into her use of a private email server, the FBI closed out the investigation into Clinton, finding that she did not intend to break the law.

“Joe Biden is trying to jail his leading political opponent, just like in Stalinist Russia or Communist China. I never thought such a thing could happen in America. No different,” Trump said over the weekend.  “We now have two standards of justice in our country and no criminal is more protected than Crooked Joe Biden.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — An elevated section of Interstate 95 collapsed early Sunday in Philadelphia after a tanker truck carrying flammable cargo caught fire, closing a heavily traveled segment of the East Coast’s main north-south highway indefinitely, authorities said.

Transportation officials warned of extensive delays and street closures and urged drivers to avoid the area in the city’s northeast corner. Officials said the tanker contained a petroleum product that may have been hundreds of gallons of gasoline. The fire took about an hour to get under control.

The northbound lanes of I-95 were gone and the southbound lanes were “compromised” by heat from the fire, said Derek Bowmer, battalion chief of the Philadelphia Fire Department. Runoff from the fire or perhaps broken gas lines caused explosions underground, he added.

Some kind of crash happened on a ramp underneath northbound I-95 around 6:15 a.m., said state Transportation Department spokesman Brad Rudolph, and the northbound section above the fire collapsed quickly.

The southbound lanes were heavily damaged, “and we are assessing that now,” Rudolph said.

Gov. Josh Shapiro, who said Sunday evening he planned to issue a disaster declaration Monday to speed federal funds, said at least one vehicle was still trapped beneath the collapsed roadway.

“We’re still working to identify any individual or individuals who may have been caught in the fire and the collapse,” he said. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

Video from the scene showed a massive concrete slab had fallen from I-95 onto the road below. Shapiro said his flight over the area showed “just remarkable devastation.”

“I found myself thanking the Lord that no motorists who were on I-95 were injured or died,” he said.

Mark Fusetti, a retired Philadelphia police sergeant, said he was driving south toward the city’s airport when he noticed thick, black smoke rising over the highway. As he passed the fire, the road beneath began to “dip,” creating a noticeable depression that was visible in video he took of the scene, he said.

He saw traffic in his rearview mirror come to a halt. Soon after, the northbound lanes of the highway crumbled.

“It was crazy timing,” Fusetti said. “For it to buckle and collapse that quickly, it’s pretty remarkable.”

The collapsed section of I-95 was part of a $212 million reconstruction project that wrapped up four years ago, Rudolph said. There was no immediate time frame for reopening the highway, but officials would consider “a fill-in situation or a temporary structure” to accelerate the effort, he said.

Motorists were sent on a 43-mile (69-kilometer) detour, which was going “better than it would do on a weekday,” Rudolph said. The fact that the collapse happened on a Sunday helped ease congestion, but he expected traffic “to back up significantly on all the detour areas.”

Pennsylvania Transportation Secretary Michael Carroll said the I-95 segment carries roughly 160,000 vehicles per day and was likely the busiest interstate in Pennsylvania. He said work would continue through the night to remove the collapsed section as rapidly as possible.

Shapiro said he had been spoken directly to U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and had been assured that there would be “absolutely no delay” in getting federal funds quickly to rebuild what he called a “critical roadway” as safely and efficiently as possible.

But Shapiro he said the complete rebuild of I-95 would take “some number of months,” and in the meantime officials were looking at “interim solutions to connect both sides of I-95 to get traffic through the area.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a Twitter post that President Joe Biden was briefed on the collapse and that White House officials were in contact with Shapiro and Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s offices to offer assistance. Buttigieg, in a social media post, called it “a major artery for people and goods” and said the closure would have “significant impacts on the city and region until reconstruction and recovery are complete.”

The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to investigate the fire and collapse.

Most drivers traveling the I-95 corridor between Delaware and New York City use the New Jersey Turnpike rather than the segment of interstate where the collapse occurred. Until 2018, drivers did not have a direct highway connection between I-95 in Pennsylvania and I-95 in New Jersey. They had to use a few miles of surface roads, with traffic lights, to get from one to the other.

Officials were also concerned about the environmental effects of runoff into the nearby Delaware River.

After a sheen was seen in the Delaware River near the collapse site, the Coast Guard deployed a boom to contain the material. Ensign Josh Ledoux said the tanker had a capacity of 8,500 gallons, but the contents did not appear to be spreading into the environment.

“As far as waterways go, it’s being contained, and it seems like things are under control,” he said.

Thousands of tons of steel and concrete were piled atop the site of the fire, and heavy construction equipment would be required to start to remove the debris, said Dominick Mireles, director of Philadelphia’s Office of Emergency Management.

The fire was strikingly similar to another blaze in Philadelphia in March 1996, when an illegal tire dump under I-95 caught fire, melting guard rails and buckling the pavement.

The highway was closed for several weeks, and partial closures lasted for six months. Seven teenagers were charged with arson. The dump’s owner was sentenced to seven to 14 years in prison and ordered to pay $3 million of the $6.5 million repair costs, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

More recently in Atlanta, an elevated portion of Interstate 85 collapsed in a fire, shutting down the heavily traveled route through the heart of the city in March 2017. A homeless man was accused of starting the blaze. But federal investigators said in a report that the state transportation department’s practice of storing combustible construction materials under the highway increased the risk of fire.

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Associated Press writers Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Jake Offenhartz in New York contributed to this report.

A report will be released soon on what investigators found at Norfolk Southern after the Feb. 3 derailment — which prompted the evacuation of half of East Palestine, Ohio — and several other recent derailments. That crash near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border sparked intense interest in railroad safety nationwide and prompted proposed reforms in Congress.

The head of the FRA, Administrator Amit Bose, said in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently that in addition to individual reports on Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Kansas City, the agency will also produce an industrywide report on common issues and trends.

Railroad unions have been raising concerns that operating changes the railroads have made over the past six years have made the trains that haul hazardous materials and goods of all kinds across the country more dangerous.

The unions say the deep staff cuts railroads have made, combined with their increasing reliance on longer trains, have increased the chance of safety problems. They say inspections are being rushed, preventative maintenance may be neglected and overworked employees are more likely to be fatigued.

The railroads have defended their practices and said they haven’t sacrificed safety to become more efficient. The industry also emphasizes that it remains the safest way to transport hazardous materials over land. Norfolk Southern and all the major railroads have announced a number of steps they are taking to improve safety though regulators, and lawmakers have called for them to do more.

Federal regulators have said that safety data hasn’t changed enough to show that the railroads’ new operating model is unsafe. The figures do show that the rate of accidents per every million miles freight trains travel increased from 15.572 to 16.695 over the past decade even though the total number of incidents declined as railroads hauled less freight. The rate of accidents inside railyards also worsened from 11.044 in 2013 to 15.517 last year.

There have also been concerns raised about the safety of today’s long trains that routinely stretch more than two miles. Bose said that the FRA recently warned railroads to be careful about the way they assemble long trains to reduce the risk of derailments.

The freight railroads favor longer trains because they allow them to deliver the same amount of freight with fewer crews and locomotives.

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What to know:

— A timeline of events leading to Trump’s indictment in the classified documents case

— Indictment accuses Trump of scheming and lying to keep secret papers

— A look at the charges, the special counsel’s investigation and what’s next

— Trump faces a string of inquiries in various states and venues as he campaigns for a return to the White House

— Does the indictment stand to damage Trump’s standing with voters?

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STANDING OVATION FOR TRUMP AT NORTH CAROLINA GOP DINNER

An indictment by the Department of Justice is an attempt to “thwart the will of the American people,” former President Donald Trump said at a state GOP convention dinner in North Carolina.

“I promise you this: If you put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and American will be a free nation once again,” he said to a standing ovation.

The indictment is an attempt to damage his chances for a second term, he alleged.

Trump is accused of willfully defying Justice Department demands to return classified documents, enlisting aides in his efforts to hide the records and even telling his lawyers that he wanted to defy a subpoena for the materials stored at his residence.

In appearances at Republican state conventions in Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday, Trump sought to frame the 37 criminal charges he’s facing as an attack on not just him but also his supporters.

“In the end they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way,” he said in North Carolina.

___

TRUMP VOWS TO CONTINUE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN EVEN IF CONVICTED

Former President Donald Trump vowed Saturday to continue his bid for a second term even if he is convicted in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

“I’ll never leave,” he told Politico in an interview aboard his plane after speaking at a Republican state convention in Georgia. He further predicted that he will not be convicted and sidestepped questions about whether he would pardon himself if elected.

“I don’t think I’ll ever have to,” Trump said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

The indictment unsealed Friday accuses Trump of willfully defying Justice Department demands to return classified documents, enlisting aides in his efforts to hide the records and even telling his lawyers that he wanted to defy a subpoena for the materials stored at his residence.

___

MIKE PENCE DECLINES TO SHARE REACTION TO TRUMP INDICTMENT

Former Vice President Mike Pence said Saturday that he has read the indictment outlining federal charges against former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

But he declined to share his personal reaction to the content of the indictment, which included photographs of boxes with classified information stacked in a bathroom and on a ballroom stage, or to criticize Trump, whom he is challenging for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024.

“I’ve read the indictment,” Pence said in an interview with The Associated Press in North Carolina, where he addressed state Republicans.

“I also know that every American’s entitled to the presumption of innocence. And as I said today, we now know the Department of Justice’s view of these matters. But the former president is entitled to present his defense. And we don’t know what the facts of that are.”

“That’s why I said today I’m going to urge patience, encourage people to be prayerful for the former president, but also for all those in authority and for the country going forward,” said Pence, who formally launched his 2024 campaign this week.

___

TRUMP SIGNS AUTOGRAPHS AND POSES FOR PHOTOS AT LOCAL WAFFLE HOUSE

After speaking at the Georgia Republican Convention, Trump stopped by a local Waffle House, where he signed autographs, posed for photos and chatted with supporters.

“We did absolutely nothing wrong,” Trump said of federal authorities unsealing a lengthy indictment accusing him of mishandling national security secrets and then covering up his actions.

He is scheduled to speak to another Republican audience in North Carolina later Saturday.

___

TRUMP CALLS INDICTMENT AN ATTACK ON HIS CAMPAIGN

Speaking Saturday at the Georgia Republican Convention, Trump cast his federal indictment as an attempt to hurt his chances of returning to the White House as he campaigns for a second term in office.

In his first public appearance since the 37 felony counts against him were unsealed, Trump blasted the indictment as “ridiculous” and “baseless.”

“They’ve launched one witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement, to thwart the will of the American people,” Trump said, later adding, “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you.”

The strategy is a well-worn one for Trump, who remains the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination despite his mounting legal woes. He is scheduled to speak to another Republican audience in North Carolina later Saturday.

___

TRUMP ARRIVES IN GEORGIA FOR STATE GOP CONVENTION APPEARANCE

Former President Donald Trump arrived Saturday in Georgia to chants of “Four more years! Four more years!” from supporters waving signs that read, “Witch Hunt.”

About 100 eager supporters turned out at Columbus airfield for Trump’s first public appearance since federal authorities unsealed a lengthy indictment accusing him of mishandling national security secrets and then covering up his actions.

He’s headed to Georgia Republicans’ state convention, where he’s expected to blast the prosecution as a political exercise because he’s running for president again.

He doesn’t have to convince his audiences Saturday.

Michael Sellers, a 67-year-old Trump backer who came to the airfield, said he’d read the indictment and was aware of accusations that Trump sought to resist returning classified records, which previous presidents have routinely done when coming across such material in their possession.

“It’s criminal what they’re doing to him,” Sellers said. Asked whether he believes Trump will win another term in 2024, Sellers said, “He won the last time. He will win again.”

___

TRUMP SUPPORTERS CHEER FORMER PRESIDENT IN GEORGIA

Scores of Trump supporters braved the beating sun to cheer the former president’s arrival in Columbus, Georgia, as he prepared to deliver two state GOP convention speeches Saturday in the wake of his federal criminal indictment.

Backers waved “Witch Hunt” signs, unbowed a day after federal authorities unsealed a lengthy charging document that depicted Trump as willfully mishandling national security secrets after leaving office and then covering up his actions.

Jan Plemmons, a 66-year-old Trump supporter, called the charges “absolutely ridiculous” and said she’s ready to hit the campaign trail with Trump as he runs for another term in 2024.

“I was watching Fox News this morning, and it’s just crazy,” Plemmons said, as her oversized foam “Make America Great Again” hat bobbed with each emphasis. “It’s just to divert attention.”

Plemmons said she does not dislike Trump’s primary rivals but sees the former president as “the man to put back in the White House and fix this mess that we’re in now.”

— Bill Barrow

___

INDICTMENT EXPECTED TO ADD FUEL TO GOP CAMPAIGN AGAINST JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

Congressional Republicans have prepared an aggressive campaign against the Justice Department for months, a key part of former Trump’s public defense against this week’s indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents.

The GOP counter-offensive against federal prosecutors and others who have investigated Trump avoids the substance of the charges facing the former president. Instead, they have tried to discredit law enforcement and President Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, for instance, has issued a series of letters to the Justice Department demanding documents related to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump’s handling of classified records. Jordan has also aggressively sought to undercut Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who in April filed charges against Trump in a New York hush money investigation.

Democrats say Republicans are sowing conspiracy theories with potentially dangerous consequences.

___

NOT ALL PLAN WARM WELCOME FOR TRUMP IN GEORGIA

Although most of the GOP activists attending the Georgia Republican Party convention Saturday are voicing support for Trump, some are suggesting his indictment and record make him a bad choice for the party’s presidential nominee in 2024.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who has called for Trump to drop out of the race, got a polite but reserved reception Saturday morning at a party breakfast where Hutchinson touted his bid for the Republican presidential nomination as a “consistent conservative.”

Hutchinson didn’t mention Trump in his speech but told reporters that the Republican Party “should not lose its soul” in defending Trump, saying the evidence so far suggests he treated national secrets “like entertainment tools.”

— Jeff Amy

___

TRUMP HEADED TO GEORGIA, NORTH CAROLINA FOR CAMPAIGN APPEARANCES

Trump is set to campaign in Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday, making his first public appearances since his federal indictment on 37 counts of mishandling classified documents.

Friendly audiences are expected to welcome Trump at the two state party conventions.

“Trump is a fighter, and the kinds of people that attend these conventions love a fighter,” said Jack Kingston, a former Georgia congressman who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020.

A campaign official described Trump’s mood as “defiant” Friday after the indictment was unsealed. Trump has insisted publicly that he committed no wrongdoing and is likely to repeat that theme during Saturday’s appearances.

Trump remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. His rivals have handled news of his indictment cautiously, including former Vice President Mike Pence, who is also scheduled to address North Carolina Republicans on Saturday.

___

DEMOCRATS CALL FOR PEACEFUL PROCESS; GOP SPEAKER SAYS CASE MAY DISRUPT NATION

The Democratic leaders of both congressional chambers are urging supporters and detractors of Trump alike to let the case against him peacefully run its course in court.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries, also from New York, released a statement saying Trump’s indictment must “play out through the legal process, without any outside political or ideological interference.”

“We encourage Mr. Trump’s supporters and critics alike to let this case proceed peacefully in court,” Schumer and Jeffries said.

That was a departure from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, who suggested that the nation’s core legal values were being undermined.

“This is going to disrupt this nation because it goes to the core of equal justice for all, which is not being seen today,” McCarthy said in an interview with Fox News Digital. “And we’re not going to stand for it.”

___

SECRET SERVICE PREPARES FOR TRUMP COURT APPEARANCE

The U.S. Secret Service is preparing for Trump’s appearance at a federal court in Miami on Tuesday after a grand jury indicted him on 37 felony counts related to his handling of classified documents.

Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the agency “will not seek any special accommodations outside of what would be required to ensure the former Presidents continued safety” in connection with Trump’s appearance.

He added: “As with any site visited by a protectee, the Secret Service is in constant coordination with the necessary entities to ensure protective requirements are met. We have the utmost confidence in the professionalism and commitment to security shared by our law enforcement partners in Florida.”

Trump’s April 4 arraignment in his New York case, where he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, attracted a crush of media and protesters, involved multiple street closures, extra security screenings and shut down non-Trump court business for an afternoon.

___

TRUMP KEPT CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS IN BATHROOM, SHOWER OF CLUB, INDICTMENT SAYS

The indictment alleges Trump kept classified documents in the bathroom and shower at his Florida estate, as well as various other locations that included a ballroom, storeroom, office and bedroom.

Prosecutors noted that “tens of thousands of members and guests” visited the “active social club” of Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trump’s presidency in January 2021 through the August 2022 search. They argued that “nonetheless” Trump stored documents “in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.”

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period, some of Trump’s boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lago’s gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballroom’s stage.

The indictment also shows photographs of boxes that spilled over in the storage room, including a document marked SECRET/REL TO USA, FVEY” which means information releasable only to members of the intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the photo the classified document is redacted.

___

LAWYER SAID TRUMP SUGGESTED HE REMOVE DAMAGING DOCUMENTS

The indictment unsealed Friday also says that, unaware of any records being moved, Trump’s attorney on June 2, 2022, identified 38 documents with “classified” markings and placed them in a folder, which he sealed with clear duct tape handed to him by Trump valet Walt Nauta. The valet then took the attorney to see the former president.

“Did you find anything? Is it bad? … Is it good?” the lawyer said Trump asked.

The attorney told federal authorities that he discussed the folder of classified material with Trump and how the material should be handled. The attorney told authorities that as they discussed the attorney taking the materials with him, Trump gestured in a way that suggested he wanted the attorney to identify “anything really bad” and “you know, pluck it out.” The lawyer clarified that Trump did not articulate such instructions beyond making that “plucking motion.”

The attorney told authorities that he did not take anything out of the folder and that he instead immediately contacted the FBI and another Trump attorney. On June 3, according to the indictment, the second Trump attorney acted as the official custodian of records on Trump’s behalf and turned the material to the FBI.

___

INDICTMENT ALLEGES VALET MOVED BOXES AT TRUMP’S DIRECTION

The indictment alleges that Nauta acted “at Trump’s direction” to move move “approximately 64 boxes” of documents from the Mar-a-Lago storage room to the former president’s residence. Nauta’s actions occurred between May 23, 2022, and June 2, 2022, according to the indictment.

That total includes “approximately 30 boxes” Nauta allegedly moved on June 2, the same day Trump’s legal team was expected to examine the cache. Nauta’s actions that day came hours after he talked briefly via phone with Trump, prosecutors allege. Neither Trump nor Nauta, according to the indictment, disclosed to the former president’s attorneys that Nauta had moved any of the storage room contents.

According to prosecutors’ timeline, Trump met later that day with one of his attorneys and Nauta escorted the attorney to the storage room for his review of the documents

The Justice Department said if the airlines get their wish, travelers would miss out on the benefits of restoring competition between the carriers.

In separate filings, the airlines and the government told a federal judge in Boston how he should carry out his ruling last month to break up the partnership. American’s CEO has said his airline will appeal the verdict.

The Justice Department proposed a final judgment that would order American and JetBlue to end most parts of the deal immediately. The government said the airlines should honor existing tickets to avoid hurting travelers, but then quickly wind down their sharing of airport gates and takeoff and landing slots at key airports.

The airlines want to keep selling tickets on each other’s flights — called code-sharing — and offering reciprocal frequent-flyer benefits because those practices “are common in the airline industry.” American and JetBlue also objected to the Justice Department’s request that they be barred from any deals involving revenue-sharing or coordinating routes with each other for 10 years, and with any other U.S. airline for two years.

The airlines call their partnership in New York and Boston the Northeast Alliance, or NEA.

The Justice Department said that by asking to keep elements of the deal, the airlines are trying “to craft a new ‘NEA Lite’ on the fly.”

The airlines launched their partnership after getting approval from the outgoing Trump administration in January 2021. They argued it helped them compete against Delta Air Lines and United Airlines in the Northeast.

The Biden administration sued the airlines in September 2021, arguing that their deal would reduce competition and raise prices for consumers. After a non-jury trial last fall, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin ruled that the NEA violated federal antitrust laws.

On Friday, Republicans and Democrats on the House Transportation Committee released a 773-page proposal to reauthorize FAA programs for the next five years.

Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., described the proposal as a compromise and said many issues could still be fought out when congressional committees begin considering changes in the legislation next week.

The FAA is under fire for a shortage of air traffic controllers, aging technology and close calls between planes. The agency has a new acting administrator with no aviation experience. It has lacked a Senate-confirmed leader for more than a year, since the last one resigned halfway through his term.

One provision of the House bill would let airlines advertise the “base airfare” — excluding taxes and fees — as long as they include a link to the all-in price or disclose it some other way. That would weaken an Obama administration rule that airlines have long fought to kill, and consumer advocates are unhappy about the House move.

“These protections were hard fought and took years to enact,” said William McGee, an aviation expert at the American Economic Liberties Project. “Any consumer can tell you that online airline bookings are confusing enough. The last thing we need is to roll back an existing protection that provides effective transparency.”

The House committee leaders also propose to let people become airline pilots with less time in the cockpit. The bill would not change the requirement for 1,500 hours of training, but it would allow 250 hours — up from the current 100 hours — to occur in simulators rather than flying a plane.

Airlines, particularly the smaller ones that operate regional flights, have long fought against the 1,500-hour rule, which already has exemptions that let military pilots and graduates of some aviation schools qualify with fewer hours. The rule was put in after a 2009 crash that killed 50 people.

Garth Thompson, head of the Air Line Pilots Association unit at United Airlines, said it is “a horrible idea” to weaken the rule.

“That rule, like so many federal aviation regulations, is written in blood, literally,” Thompson said. “That regulation came about because of the Colgan Air crash and other crashes that involved experience issues.”

Asked about changes in airfare advertising and pilot training, Larsen said, “It’s something we can live with.” The change in pilot training rules, he said, is a priority of the Transportation Committee’s Republican chairman, Sam Graves of Missouri, and both sides had to compromise during drafting of the bill.

Elsewhere in the bill, Larsen said, Democrats were able to include provisions they wanted, such as those covering wheelchair accessibility.

The bill also includes provisions aimed at improving airport infrastructure and the supply of sustainable aviation fuel. It would require airline planes to be outfitted with better cockpit voice recorders and, for the first time, cockpit video recorders to improve accident investigations. Pilots have opposed the video recorders.

Some other contentious topics were left out, including raising the mandatory retirement age of 65 for pilots and easing restrictions on flights from Reagan Washington National Airport in northern Virginia.

Branded the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, N.C., Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. A cause of death was not immediately known.

Before his transfer to the prison medical facility, he had been held in the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that set universities nationwide on edge. He admitted committing 16 bombings from 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims.

Years before the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax mailing, the Unabomber’s deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans mailed packages and boarded airplanes, even virtually shutting down air travel on the West Coast in July 1995.

He forced The Washington Post, in conjunction with The New York Times, to make the agonizing decision in September 1995 to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which claimed modern society and technology was leading to a sense of powerlessness and alienation.

But it led to his undoing. Kaczynski’s brother, David, and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, recognized the treatise’s tone and tipped off the FBI, which had been searching for the Unabomber for years in nation’s longest, costliest manhunt.

Authorities in April 1996 found him in a 10-by-14-foot plywood and tarpaper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, that was filled with journals, a coded diary, explosive ingredients and two completed bombs.

As an elusive criminal mastermind, the Unabomber won his share of sympathizers and comparisons to Daniel Boone, Edward Abbey and Henry David Thoreau.

But once revealed as a wild-eyed hermit with long hair and beard who weathered Montana winters in a one-room shack, Kaczynski struck many as more of a pathetic loner than romantic anti-hero.

Even in his own journals, Kaczynski came across not as a committed revolutionary but as a vengeful hermit driven by petty grievances.

“I certainly don’t claim to be an altruist or to be acting for the ‘good’ (whatever that is) of the human race,” he wrote on April 6, 1971. “I act merely from a desire for revenge.”

A psychiatrist who interviewed Kaczynski in prison diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic.

“Mr. Kaczynski’s delusions are mostly persecutory in nature,” Sally Johnson wrote in a 47-page report. “The central themes involve his belief that he is being maligned and harassed by family members and modern society.”

Kaczynski hated the idea of being viewed as mentally ill and when his lawyers attempted to present an insanity defense, he tried to fire them. When that failed, he tried to hang himself with his underwear.

Kaczynski eventually pleaded guilty rather than let his defense team proceed with an insanity defense.

“I’m confident that I’m sane,” Kaczynski told Time magazine in 1999. “I don’t get delusions and so forth.”

He was certainly brilliant.

Kaczynski skipped two grades to attend Harvard at age 16 and had published papers in prestigious mathematics journals. His explosives were carefully tested and came in meticulously handcrafted wooden boxes sanded to remove possible fingerprints. Later bombs bore the signature “FC” for “Freedom Club.”

The FBI called him the “Unabomber” because his early targets seemed to be universities and airlines. An altitude-triggered bomb he mailed in 1979 went off as planned aboard an American Airlines flight; a dozen people aboard suffered from smoke inhalation.

Kaczynski killed computer rental store owner Hugh Scrutton, advertising executive Thomas Mosser and timber industry lobbyist Gilbert Murray. California geneticist Charles Epstein and Yale University computer expert David Gelernter were maimed by bombs two days apart in June 1993.

Mosser was killed in his North Caldwell, New Jersey, home on Dec. 10, 1994, a day he was supposed to be picking out a Christmas tree with his family. His wife, Susan, found him grievously wounded by a barrage of razor blades, pipes and nails.

“He was moaning very softly,” she said at Kaczynski’s 1998 sentencing. “The fingers on his right hand were dangling. I held his left hand. I told him help was coming. I told him I loved him.”

When Kaczynski stepped up his bombs and letters to newspapers and scientists in 1995, experts speculated the Unabomber was jealous of the attention being paid to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

A threat to blow up a plane out of Los Angeles before the end of the July Fourth weekend threw air travel and mail delivery into chaos. The Unabomber later claimed it was a “prank.”

The Washington Post printed the Unabomber’s manifesto at the urging of federal authorities, after the bomber said he would desist from terrorism if a national publication published his treatise.

Patrik had had a disturbing feeling about her brother-in-law even before seeing the manifesto and eventually persuaded her husband to read a copy at the library. After two months of arguments, they took some of Ted Kaczynski’s letters to Patrik’s childhood friend Susan Swanson, a private investigator in Chicago.

Swanson in turn passed them along to former FBI behavioral science expert Clint Van Zandt, whose analysts said whoever wrote them had also probably written the Unabomber’s manifesto.

“It was a nightmare,” David Kaczynski, who as a child had idolized his older brother, said in a 2005 speech at Bennington College. “I was literally thinking, ‘My brother’s a serial killer, the most wanted man in America.’”

Swanson turned to a corporate lawyer friend, Anthony Bisceglie, who contacted the FBI. The investigation and prosecution were overseen by now-Attorney General Merrick Garland, during a previous stint at the Justice Department.

David Kaczynski wanted his role kept confidential, but his identity quickly leaked out and Ted Kaczynski vowed never to forgive his younger sibling. He ignored his letters, turned his back on him at court hearings and described David Kaczynski in a 1999 book draft as a “Judas Iscariot (who) … doesn’t even have enough courage to go hang himself.”

Ted Kaczynski was born May 22, 1942, in Chicago, the son of second-generation Polish Catholics — a sausage-maker and a homemaker. He played the trombone in the school band, collected coins and skipped the sixth and 11th grades.

His high school classmates thought him odd, particularly after he showed a school wrestler how to make a mini-bomb that detonated during chemistry class.

Harvard classmates recalled him as a lonely, thin boy with poor personal hygiene and a room that smelled of spoiled milk, rotting food and foot powder.

After graduate studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he got a job teaching math at the University of California at Berkeley but found the work difficult and quit abruptly. In 1971, he bought a 1½-acre parcel about 4 miles outside of Lincoln and built a cabin there without heating, plumbing or electricity.

He learned to garden, hunt, make tools and sew, living on a few hundred dollars a year.

He left his cabin in Montana in the late 1970s to work at a foam rubber products manufacturer outside Chicago with his father and brother. But when a female supervisor dumped him after two dates, he began posting insulting limericks about her and wouldn’t stop.

His brother fired him and Ted Kaczynski soon returned to the wilderness to continue plotting his vengeful killing spree.

FULL TEXT: Trump Indictment

His 53.2% national average, tallied by Real Clear Politics, is a football field ahead of the 22.4% Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds in second place. All others drop so far behind it doesn’t seem like a race, yet.

DeSantis was quick to blast the Justice Department for targeting the ex-president in a 37-count indictment.

“Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?” tweeted DeSantis, referring to Hillary Clinton and her secret server and presidential trainwreck son Hunter Biden.

The real test will come in the weeks ahead as pollsters chart the fallout from the DOJ’s indictment of Trump. Until then, it’s a game of survival and lukewarm support by other GOP presidential rivals.

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley holds an anemic 4.4% national polling average far back in third place. Former VP Mike Pence, also given the job by Trump, is next with 3.8%.

The rest include: Vivek Ramaswamy (2.6%); South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott (1.6%); former NJ Gov. Chris Christie (1%); with Asa Hutchinson with less than 1%.

Yet, unlike most in his party, Hutchinson wasn’t quick to defend Trump, being quoted as saying: “Donald Trump’s actions—from his willful disregard for the constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law—should not define our nation or the Republican party.”

Christie wants to see “more facts” and Ramaswamy tweeted he’d “pardon” Trump if elected.

As for President Biden, he’s blasting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 59.3% to 16.8%, in a Real Clear Politics national average. But, Kennedy “is doing unexpectedly well in some polls,” the Hill is reporting.

Veteran pollster John Zogby told the Herald Friday night pollsters are just now preparing to “go into the field” to gauge the reaction to Trump’s indictment with results not likely until Sunday.

“There’s no polling data on this right now,” he said, “but there is some data showing Trump’s lead over DeSantis is tightening, especially in Iowa.”

How likely voters digest the allegations against the former president could upend the GOP 2024 race or just pump more contributions into Trump’s war chest making him even more indestructible.

Time will tell.

But, as the saying goes, when it rains it pours.

And it poured all over the FBI when it was announced that former FBI Agent Robert P. Hanssen, 79, “the most damaging spy in (FBI) history,” was found dead in his prison cell at the supermax U.S. Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado Monday.

Hassen had been serving life without parole after pleading guilty in 2001 to selling classified information to the Russians for $1.4 million in cash, bank funds and diamonds.

Among the information he sold was that the U.S. had dug a Cold War tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy in Washington for eavesdropping purposes. Another was that he provided Moscow with the names of three KGB officers who were spying for the U.S., two of whom were later executed.

Paul J. McNulty, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted Hanssen, said Hanssen’s crimes “cannot be overstated. They will long be remembered for being among the most egregious betrayals of trust in U.S. history. It was both a low point and an investigative success for the FBI.”

It was “an investigative success.” But what McNulty failed to add was that Hanssen operated as a Russian spy for 20 years before he was caught. And he was even surprised that he got away with it for so long.

Adding to the fallen image of the FBI was the arrest and indictment earlier this year of one of its former top counterintelligence agents.

That is Charles F. McGonigal, formerly head of the New York counterintelligence office, who was charged with selling access to Russian and Albanian officials in exchange for $240,000.

McGonigal, who is awaiting trial, was once considered an agency rockstar, who had access to some of the most sensitive information in the FBI’s possession.

FBI Director Wray at the time pointed out that like Hanssen, it was the FBI that initiated the McGonigal investigation, even though he did not say for how long McGonigal had been rogue.

Wray said the charges against McGonigal demonstrated “the FBI’s willingness as an organization to shine a bright light on conduct that is totally unacceptable, including when it happens from one of our own people, and to hold those people accountable.”

That “bright light” comment may come as a surprise to former FBI officials who have become persona non grata by the FBI after becoming whistleblowers and testifying on FBI wrongdoing before Congress.

It will also come as a surprise to Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

Both repeatedly pressed Wray to publicly release unclassified documents — including with a subpoena — that allege that Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe from a foreign national to affect public policy when he was vice president.

While Wray provided an hour-long, closed-door briefing for Comer and ranking Democrat committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin, Comer said Wray still refused to turn over the documents to the committee.

However, upon the threat of contempt, Way finally caved.

No matter the outcome, McCarthy, Comer and the Republicans in the House appear determined to punish the FBI by withholding funds from the FBI for its $4 billion proposed new office building complex until it changes its ways, including stopping the politicization of the agency and ending its campaign against conservatives.

McCarthy said that the unwanted proposed structure would even be bigger than the Pentagon.

U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a Republican from Pennsylvania, head of a subcommittee on public buildings, said all agencies that “have been weaponized” against the American people need to be scrutinized.

Republican Rep.  Andy Harris of Maryland, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said, “I think that the FBI building’s funding this year is in definite jeopardy. We should not fund the new FBI headquarters until we get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

If you don’t build it, they will not come.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

MIAMI (AP) — Donald Trump improperly stored in his Florida estate sensitive documents on nuclear capabilities, repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” and classified map, according to a sweeping felony indictment that paints a damning portrait of the former president’s treatment of national security information.

The conduct alleged in the historic indictment — the first federal case against a former president — cuts to the heart of any president’s responsibility to safeguard the government’s most valuable secrets. Prosecutors say the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.

“Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced,” Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case, said in his first public statements. “Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”

Trump, currently the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is due to make his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in Miami. In a rare bit of welcome news for the former president, the judge initially assigned to the case is someone he appointed and who drew criticism for rulings in his favor during a dispute last year over a special master assigned to review the seized classified documents. Meanwhile, two lawyers who worked the case for months announced Friday that they had resigned from Trump’s legal team.

All told, Trump faces 37 felony counts — 31 pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information, the balance relating to alleged conspiracy, obstruction and false statements — that could result in a substantial prison sentence in the event of a conviction. A Trump aide who prosecutors said moved dozens of boxes at his Florida estate at his direction, and then lied to investigators about it, was charged in the same indictment with conspiracy and other crimes.

Trump responded to the indictment Friday by falsely conflating his case with a separate classified documents investigation concerning President Joe Biden. Though classified records were found in a Biden home and office, there has been no indication that the president, unlike Trump, sought to conceal them or knew they were there.

“Nobody said I wasn’t allowed to look at the personal records that I brought with me from the White House. There’s nothing wrong with that,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he has faced, legal experts — as well as Trump’s own aides — had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trump’s attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

The indictment arrives at a time when Trump is continuing to dominate the Republican presidential primary. A Trump campaign official described the former president’s mood as “defiant” and he is expected to deliver a full-throated rebuke of the filing during a speech before Republican Party officials in Georgia Saturday afternoon and will also speak in North Carolina in the evening

Aides were notably more reserved after the indictment’s unsealing as they reckoned with the gravity of the legal charges and the threat they pose to Trump beyond the potential short-term political gain.

The document’s startling scope and breadth of allegations, including a reliance on surveillance video and an audio recording, will almost certainly make it harder for Republicans to rail against than an earlier New York criminal case that many legal analysts had derided as weak.

The documents case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years — as president and private citizen — but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation, to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election. That investigation remains pending.

The 49-page indictment centers on hundreds of classified documents that Trump took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving office in January 2021. Even as “tens of thousands of members and guests” visited Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trump’s presidency and August 2022, when the FBI obtained a search warrant, documents were recklessly stored in spaces including a “ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.”

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period between January and March 15, 2021, some of Trump’s boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lago’s gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballroom’s stage.

Prosecutors allege that Trump, who claimed without evidence that he had declassified all the documents before leaving office, understood his duty to care for classified information but shirked it anyway. It details a July 2021 meeting in Bedminster in which he boasted about having held onto a classified document prepared by the military about a potential attack on another country.

“Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” the indictment quotes him as saying, citing an audio recording. He also said he could have declassified the document but “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” according to the indictment.

Using Trump’s own words and actions, as recounted to prosecutors by lawyers, aides and other witnesses, the indictment alleges both a refusal to return the documents despite more than a year’s worth of government demands but also steps that he encouraged others around him to take to conceal the records.

For instance, prosecutors say, after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the records in May 2022, Trump asked his own lawyers if he could defy the request and said words to the effect of, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” one of his lawyers described him as saying.

But before his own lawyer searched the property for classified records, the indictment says, Trump directed aides to remove from the Mar-a-Lago storage room boxes of documents so that they would not be found during the search and therefore handed over to the government.

Weeks later, when Justice Department officials arrived at Mar-a-Lago to collect the records, they were handed a folder with only 38 documents and an untrue letter attesting that all documents responsive to the subpoena had been turned over. That day, even as Trump assured investigators that he was “an open book,” aides loaded several of Trump’s boxes onto a plane bound for Bedminster, the indictment alleges.

But suspecting that many more remained inside, the FBI obtained a search warrant and returned in August to recover more than 100 additional documents. The Justice Department says Trump held onto more than 300 classified documents, including some at the top secret level.

Walt Nauta, one of the personal aides alleged to have transported the boxes around the complex, lied to the FBI about the movement of the boxes and faces charges that he conspired to hide them, according to the indictment. His lawyer declined to comment.

____

Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Atlanta, Michael R. Sisak in New York, Meg Kinnard in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Gary Fields and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report. Tucker and Whithurst reported from Washington. Colvin reported from Greensboro, North Carolina.

Former President Donald Trump, now facing a federal indictment, was caught on tape admitting he was in possession of a secret military document at a 2021 meeting at his New Jersey golf resort, according to a transcript of the damning audiotape reported on Friday.

“As president, I could have declassified. But now I can’t,” Trump says on the tape, according to the transcript obtained by CNN.

Trump, who on Thursday was reportedly charged with seven counts for taking hundreds of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort after leaving office, was discussing a secret U.S. plan to attack Iran in a meeting with researchers for an unrelated book project at his Bedminster resort.

According to the tape transcript, the former president then flashes a document that he boasts is highly classified.

“It’s, like, confidential. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump adds, according to the transcript. “This was done by the military and given to me.”

The transcript report came hours after Trump announced that he had been indicted on charges stemming from his taking classified documents to his Florida resort after leaving office. It makes Trump the first former president in U.S. history to face federal criminal charges even as he leads the race for the Republican presidential nomination by a wide margin.

He could face a trial in the midst of a 2024 White House campaign and the possibility of a prison sentence if convicted.

The Justice Department did not immediately confirm the indictment publicly and would normally be expected to unveil the charging documents on Tuesday afternoon when Trump says he has been summoned to appear in Miami federal court.

A Trump defense lawyer said the charges include retaining classified documents, obstruction of justice, violations of the espionage act and conspiracy.

Trump shook up his legal team within hours of the indictment. He said Todd Blanche, a veteran and respected white collar defense lawyer, will lead the defense team for the case that will unfold in south Florida starting next week. His previous lawyers, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, resigned Friday.

In a shocking twist, Trump’s case was initially assigned to controversial right-wing federal District Judge Aileen Cannon, ABC News first reported.

It was not immediately clear if Cannon would preside over only the arraignment or the entire case.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, made several pro-Trump rulings that legal experts derided as legally unfounded. Her actions delayed the investigation into the documents until they were overturned by higher courts.

Trump wasted no time lashing out at the indictment filed by special counsel Jack Smith, a dogged former Brooklyn prosecutor.

“I am an innocent man,” Trump declared on his social media site late Thursday night. “This is … a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.”

Republican leaders, including most of his GOP presidential rivals, quickly backed the former president, reflecting his strong grip on the the party. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is a distant second in most polls to Trump, blasted the Justice Department for targeting the ex-president.

“Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?” tweeted DeSantis, referring to GOP bogeymen Hillary Clinton and presidential son Hunter Biden.

President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic candidate in 2024, has not commented on the indictment.

Trump took some 300 classified documents after exiting the White House in January 2021, according to prosecutors.

After months of haggling with federal archives officials, he returned several boxes. But prosecutors demanded the rest of them, prompting them to hit him with a subpoena. Trump lawyers handed over some documents and signed a statement that they conducted a “diligent search” that revealed no additional classified materials.

But prosecutors later became convinced that Trump was hiding even more documents, leading to a bombshell judge-approved search that turned up about more than 100 of the additional classified documents.

The documents found by the feds reportedly include some that described the nuclear capabilities of a foreign power and others that could expose American spies and intelligence methods. Some of the most sensitive documents were found in Trump’s personal office.

The case adds to fast-deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been charged with state crimes in New York related to hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Trump, 77, also faces a separate probe by Smith for his effort to overturn his loss to Biden in the 2020 election that culminated with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

There are also serious civil legal woes like the sprawling fraud case filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James against Trump’s eponymous real estate company.

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©2023 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

That missing ingredient is… Donald J. Trump.

God knows the Democrats and state-run media (but I repeat myself) are thrashing about, trying to find some possible way, no matter how far-fetched, to blame Bad Clouds on POTUS. Thus far they appear to be flailing.

What Trump says in all those Internet memes to Republicans now applies to Democrats as well:

“Do you miss me yet?”

Having a crisis – especially a “climate crisis” – without Trump to blame it on is like having a mocktail instead of a cocktail, a near beer instead of a real beer. For the media, a Trump-less catastrophe is as unsatisfying as “mostly-peaceful rioting” without looting or Molotov cocktails.

The smoke is bad, but seriously, is it any worse than the weed odors wafting up from every bleeping street corner in blue America, puffed out by all the student-loan deadbeats and illegal immigrants loitering while awaiting their next TANF and EBT direct deposits?

These fires started in Canada. But surely that can’t be possible – next thing you know you’ll be telling me that Hillary Clinton paid for the Russian collusion hoax, or that Hunter Biden’s laptop wasn’t “Russian disinformation,” despite what 51 Democrat hacks lied.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might as well be a Democrat – he nationalized the protesting truckers’ bank accounts. He wants to disarm his citizens. He’s never had a real job. His father is rumored to be Fidel Castro or Mick Jagger. He has great hair, better hair than Gavin Newsom.

Obviously, a boy, er man of Trudeau’s stature couldn’t have created this crisis, and may I be the first to suggest that this is indeed an “existential crisis?”

Or it would be, anyway, if Trump were still in the White House.

Without Trump, it’s like hell without the devil. Something big is missing.

Don’t forget that Climate Cult is an organized religion. Democrats used to have newspapers and TV stations. Now they have religious tracts, and dollar-a-holler cable channels like CNN and MSDNC.

Their “journalists,” like the false seers of yore, can see omens and premonitions in the sky. This goes back to ancient times. Right before the Ides of March, Mrs. Julius Caesar foresaw battles “fought upon the clouds … most horrible sights seen by the watch.”

Forget Shakespeare, just go to The New York Times for the most horrible sights seen by the watch.

It’s alarming, the Times screamed in print yesterday, the way these clouds are smothering, billowing, blanketing, choking, suffocating and scorching. Other features of this GOP reign of terror include “stunning” lightning strikes, not to mention forests “turning to tinder.”

I sense another very-fake-news Pulitzer Prize in the works, for overheated rhetoric.

Is the world going to end, I asked our modern Delphic oracle, the Times? Maybe, the sheeple were told. But feareth not, brethren, the end of times will come only in “the not-too-distant future.”

In other words, just distant enough in the future so that we’ll have forgotten this week’s Armageddon.

It’s so terrible, the Times announced, that this spring “scientists announced with uncharacteristic alarm….”

Huh? When was the last time you heard one of their “scientists” speak with anything other than uncharacteristic alarm? If you want to get on state-run media, you’d damn well better be running around shouting “The sky is falling!”

I would describe uncharacteristic alarm among “scientists” quoted on state-run media as a characteristic, a feature, not a bug.

Is there even the slightest chance that this might be another overreaction, you know, like COVID-19, or global cooling?

“Though there is no specific research yet attributing this week’s events to global warming,” the Times grudgingly concedes, “the science is unequivocal.”

Unequivocal science. Just like it was with COVID-19. And vaccines. And global cooling.

Do you want to know who the most superstitious, ignorant rubes in society are? All the Democrats who chant, “Follow the science.”

These are the same Biden-voting boobs who believed Anthony Fauci. They’re still wearing masks outside after all these years. Actually, those may be the people secretly most excited by this week’s sky-is-falling doomsday rhetoric.

Because now they can wear their N95’s again outside proudly and not have normal people staring at them as if they’ve just escaped from a nuthouse.

Another group of deadbeats over the moon about this: the employees who want to continue their three-year paid vacations. You know, the “work-from-home” contingent. In other words, the hippies who get paid for not working, and that’s just fine with them.

And now they have a new excuse. Dude, like we totally wouldn’t mind going back to the office, except, like, we might die, because of what the fascist in the White House is doing to the planet….

Oh wait, like, you mean, Trump’s not the president anymore? Bummer, man! Is that why The Man wants me to start paying back the loans I took out for the queer-studies program at the community college?

This wasn’t a national emergency until airline flights from the three New York airports started getting canceled a couple of days ago. If it were only private jets being grounded, the ones that carry John Kerry and the rest of the Beautiful People to the islands and to the Hamptons, then this would be a comedy rather than a tragedy.

Too bad they don’t teach history anymore. But you can still google “Year without Summer.” That would be 1816. There was a volcano that year. If you think wildfires throw off a lot of smoke, read up on the “Year without Summer.”

But without Donald Trump, something is missing. The corrupt feds are going to have to indict him. Either that, or storm into the dressing rooms at CNN and MSDNC and confiscate all the anchors’ belts and shoelaces.

What if they threw a climate catastrophe and Donald Trump wasn’t there to take the rap? Would anyone still hear it?

You might even say that would be an existential crisis.

MIAMI (AP) — Donald Trump said Thursday that he was indicted for mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate, a remarkable development that makes him the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges by the federal government that he once oversaw.

The indictment carries unmistakably grave legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if he’s convicted.

But it also has enormous political implications, potentially upending a Republican presidential primary that Trump had been dominating and testing anew the willingness of GOP voters and party leaders to stick with a now twice-indicted candidate who could face still more charges. And it sets the stage for a sensational trial centered on claims that a man once entrusted to safeguard the nation’s most closely guarded secrets willfully, and illegally, hoarded sensitive national security information.

The Justice Department did not immediately confirm the indictment publicly. But two people familiar with the situation who were not authorized to discuss it publicly said the indictment included seven criminal counts. One of those people said Trump’s lawyers were contacted by prosecutors shortly before he announced on his Truth Social platform that he had been indicted.

Within 20 minutes of his announcement, Trump began fundraising off it for his 2024 presidential campaign. He declared his innocence in a video and repeated his familiar refrain that the investigation is a “witch hunt.” He said he planned to be in court Tuesday afternoon in Miami, where a grand jury had been meeting to hear evidence as recently as this week.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he faces, legal experts — as well as Trump’s own aides — had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trump’s attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

Appearing Thursday night on CNN, Trump attorney James Trusty said the indictment includes charges of willful retention of national defense information — a crime under the Espionage Act, which polices the handling of government secrets — obstruction, false statements and conspiracy.

The case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years — as president and private citizen — but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

The indictment arises from a monthslong investigation into whether Trump broke the law by holding onto hundreds of documents marked classified at his Palm Beach property, Mar-a-Lago, and whether he took steps to obstruct the government’s efforts to recover the records.

Prosecutors have said that Trump took roughly 300 classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, including some 100 that were seized by the FBI last August in a search of the home that underscored the gravity of the Justice Department’s investigation. Trump has repeatedly insisted that he was entitled to keep the classified documents when he left the White House, and has also claimed without evidence that he had declassified them.

Court records unsealed last year showed federal investigators believed they had probable cause that multiple crimes had been committed, including the retention of national defense information, destruction of government records and obstruction.

Since then, the Justice Department has amassed additional evidence and secured grand jury testimony from people close to Trump, including his own lawyers. The statutes governing the handling of classified records and obstruction are felonies that could carry years in prison in the event of a conviction.

It remains unclear how much it will damage Trump’s standing given that his first indictment generated millions of dollars in contributions from angry supporters and didn’t weaken him in the polls. But no matter what, the indictment — and legal fight that follows — will throw Trump back into the spotlight, sucking attention away from the other candidates who are trying to build momentum in the race.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump opponent in the primary, condemned the indictment on Twitter, saying it represented “the weaponization of federal law enforcement.”

The former president has long sought to use his legal troubles to his political advantage, complaining on social media and at public events that the cases are being driven by Democratic prosecutors out to hurt his 2024 election campaign. He is likely to rely on that playbook again, reviving his longstanding claims that the Justice Department — which, during his presidency, investigated whether his 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia — is somehow weaponized against him.

Trump’s legal troubles extend beyond the New York indictment and classified documents case.

Smith is separately investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And the district attorney in Georgia’s Fulton County is investigating Trump over alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election in that state.

Signs had mounted for weeks that an indictment was near, including a Monday meeting between Trump’s lawyers and Justice Department officials. His lawyers had also recently been notified that he was the target of the investigation, the clearest sign yet that an indictment was looming.

Though the bulk of the investigative work had been handled in Washington, with a grand jury meeting there for months, it recently emerged that prosecutors were presenting evidence before a separate panel in Florida, where many of the alleged acts of obstruction scrutinized by prosecutors took place.

The Justice Department has said Trump repeatedly resisted efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration to get the documents back. After months of back-and-forth, Trump representatives returned 15 boxes of records in January 2022, including about 184 documents that officials said had classified markings on them.

FBI and Justice Department investigators issued a subpoena in May 2022 for classified documents that remained in Trump’s possession. But after a Trump lawyer provided three dozen records and asserted that a diligent search of the property had been done, officials came to suspect even more documents remained.

The investigation had simmered quietly for months until last August, when FBI agents served a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago and removed 33 boxes containing classified records, including top-secret documents stashed in a storage room and desk drawer and commingled with personal belongings. Some records were so sensitive that investigators needed upgraded security clearances to review them, the Justice Department has said.

The investigation into Trump had appeared complicated — politically, if not legally — by the discovery of documents with classified markings in the Delaware home and former Washington office of President Joe Biden, as well as in the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence. The Justice Department recently informed Pence that he would not face charges, while a second special counsel continues to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents.

But compared with Trump, there are key differences in the facts and legal issues surrounding Biden’s and Pence’s handling of documents, including that representatives for both men say the documents were voluntarily turned over to investigators as soon as they were found. In contrast, investigators quickly zeroed on whether Trump, who for four years as president expressed disdain for the FBI and Justice Department, had sought to obstruct the inquiry by refusing to turn over all the requested documents.

_____

Tucker reported from Washington. Colvin reported from Des Moines, Iowa.

They may come in handy this summer, as seen in cities along the East Coast this week with people again putting on masks to deal with the hazardous smoke from the raging Canadian wildfires.

The smoke and haze conditions have drastically improved in Massachusetts since Tuesday, but meteorologists warn that the wildfire smoke could return in waves over the next several weeks.

When those high concentrations of smoke come back, masks will help reduce peoples’ exposure to the PM2.5 air pollution from wildfires, according to John Rogan, professor of geography at Clark University in Worcester.

“If people are outside, wearing masks during those hazardous air quality days will be important,” Rogan, whose recent research projects have involved mapping wildfire burn severity in southern California and southeastern Arizona, told the Herald on Thursday.

He noted that N95 respirator masks offer far greater protection than cloth masks.

Nova Scotia and Quebec have already seen record fires this season, leading to the massive plumes of smoke from up north impacting the U.S. East Coast.

This wildfire anomaly was sparked by a prolonged drought and lightning strikes from storms. More wildfire burning is expected this summer.

“It’s unprecedented what’s going on in Quebec,” Rogan said. “And cities are getting pummeled by these large smoke plumes that are dense on the ground.”

He noted that tall buildings in cities are acting as canyons for that smoke.

“It’s a very serious threat,” he added, emphasizing the impact on those with respiratory conditions.

Many have wondered about the smoke’s impact on dogs and cats. When the poor air quality returns, owners should limit how much time their pets spend outside, said Meg Whelan, chief medical officer of Angell Animal Medical Center.

Owners could also wipe down their pet with a warm washcloth, she added.

Some cats have asthma, and these conditions can be “a trigger for pets that are sensitive,” Whelan said.

As far as the near-term weather forecast, wildfire smoke from Canada will continue to influence fine particle levels in parts of Massachusetts on Friday.

“Fine particle levels will likely average in the Moderate range over much of the State with Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups levels likely in southeast areas of the State,” the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection wrote in an air quality alert.

President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to “offer additional help putting out these fires, particularly those in Quebec that have severe impacts on American communities,” the president tweeted.

Biden also tweeted, “Folks, head to AirNow.gov to stay up-to-date with the air quality in your area and take the right precautions to help keep you and your family safe.”