A U.S. House of Representatives committee has obtained Donald Trump’s tax returns, following a years-long court fight with the Republican former president who has accused the Democratic-led panel of being politically motivated.

“Treasury has complied with last week’s court decision,” a Treasury Department spokesperson said in an emailed statement late on Wednesday.

The Ways and Means Committee obtained the tax returns following a Supreme Court decision clearing their release. It has been seeking the returns spanning 2015 through 2020, which it says it needs to establish whether the Internal Revenue Service is properly auditing presidential returns and whether new legislation is needed.

The panel will have little time to do its work, with Republicans poised to take the House majority in January.

Trump, who on Nov. 15 began his third consecutive run for the presidency, fought the committee tooth and nail to avoid releasing them.

He was the first president in four decades not to release his tax returns as he sought to keep secret the details of his wealth and the activities of his real estate company, the Trump Organization. It had long been customary, though not required, for major party presidential candidates to release their returns.

Trump, who served as president from 2017 to 2021, reported heavy losses from his business enterprises over several years to offset hundreds of millions of dollars in income, according to news media reporting and trial testimony about his finances. That allowed him to pay very little in taxes.

A major question hanging over the committee’s work is what will happen to the returns when Republicans take control of the House from the Democrats. The committee first requested Trump’s returns in 2019.

Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, the counterpart to the Ways and Means Committee, were considering their options on any action relating to Trump’s tax returns, according to an aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. Democrats held their Senate majority in November’s midterm elections.

(NewsNation) — The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has diverted U.S. air marshals to the southern border to support overwhelmed federal agents but some fear the move will endanger the skies during the nation’s holiday travel season.

“The DHS Secretary is taking hundreds of FAMs (federal air marshals) out of the skies during the busiest travel season and during a time when terrorists have attempted to attack the homeland no so long ago,” David Londo, the president of the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden earlier this month.

Londo said air marshals — many of whom are being asked to perform non-law enforcement duties at the border — already face an arduous flight schedule that has contributed to some of the highest rates of divorce and suicide across law enforcement.

The Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) was created in 1961 to counter hijackers, but the program was significantly expanded after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

On 9/11, there were just 33 air marshals operating on U.S. flights. Today, there are an estimated 3,000, although the exact number is unknown.

“These ground-based duties that they’re pulling us out of the sky to go to the border are just demolishing our chances at stopping another 9/11,” Sonia Labosco, the executive director of the AMNC, said in an interview with Fox News this week.

Each day there are about 45,000 flights handled by the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) air traffic controllers, and Labosco said air marshals are now on less than 1% of them because of the border policy.

Under normal circumstances, Labosco said air marshals are on “at least 5% of flights.”

In an email to NewsNation, DHS rejected the assertion that flights are being left unprotected, calling it “completely false.”

“Federal Air Marshals have long supported various Departmental operations on a regular basis across Democratic and Republican administrations alike,” a DHS spokesperson said via email. “There is nothing new or unique about this.”

A separate NewsNation source within the FAMS said the 1% claim “seems a little extreme.” DHS did not answer a question regarding what percentage of flights have air marshals on them.

DHS pointed out that the Trump administration also temporarily deployed federal air marshals to the southern border back in 2019.

There’s some evidence to support the argument that flights have become more chaotic in recent years.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of unruly passengers reported to the FAA has skyrocketed. In 2021, the FAA investigated 1,099 incidents compared to just 146 in 2019.

This year, the FAA has initiated 767 investigations with one of the busiest travel months still to come.

Last week, a Utah man on a JetBlue flight from New York to Salt Lake City was arrested after holding a straight-edge razor blade to a woman’s neck.

In a separate incident earlier this month, a Frontier Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing after a passenger was found in possession of a box cutter.

But it’s not clear whether having more air marshals helps curb misbehavior since the federal agents are primarily concerned with terrorist threats and are strategically deployed on routes deemed high risk.

DHS did not respond to a question asking how many arrests air marshals make in a given year.

The diversion to the southern border comes after Customs and Border Protection logged a record-breaking 2.3 million encounters with illegal migrants in the 2022 fiscal year. 

Many fear that the situation is about to get worse now that Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that allowed agents to turn away migrants, is set to end.

Biden has not declared a national emergency at the border after terminating former President Donald Trump’s emergency declaration on his first day in office.

When the Combat Antisemitism Movement held its inaugural summit for mayors last year, it created a website listing boldname speakers — including the leaders of Toronto, Frankfurt and Pittsburgh — and livestreamed the event from a television studio.

But the lead-up to this year’s conference, which convenes in Greece Wednesday, was far quieter — even with heightened concerns about rising antisemitism. Organizers recruited mayors, but in contrast to last year, gave little notice to the public that it was taking place. There was virtually no mention of the conference online and the first press release about the event came Monday, two days before the meeting was set to begin in Athens, announcing that New York City Mayor Eric Adams would be speaking at the event.

The Anti-Defamation League, which announced a partnership to address “hate and extremism” with 150 mayors through the U.S. Conference of Mayors in September, said this week that it was unaware that the conference was taking place.

Why the difference between last year’s summit and this year’s? It could relate to rising tensions within the Jewish community over how to confront antisemitism. Establishment groups — including organizations like the American Jewish Committee and Jewish Federations of North America, which is co-sponsoring the Greek summit — have called for addressing antisemitism across the political spectrum and see activism aimed at Israel as a particular cause for concern.

They are enjoying wins with this approach at the municipal and local levels. But at the same time, opposition is mounting from progressive critics who argue that politicians should focus on antisemitic white supremacy, and draw a clear distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, which they argue is legitimate political speech.

Sacha Roytman, director of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, said the “summit is not secret” but that he intentionally avoided publicizing it in advance.

Eric Adams, mayor of New York, traveled to Greece Wednesday for a mayoral summit on antisemitism. Photo by Getty Images

“We will have a lot of media around it but not ahead of the summit which isn’t helpful to facilitate a deep conversation between municipality leaders to exchange and discuss solutions to fight antisemitism on a local level,” Roytman said in an email to the Forward.

The organizers

The two-day conference is closely aligned with the establishment approach toward antisemitism, and the Combat Antisemitism Movement has close ties to both conservative political figures and the Israeli government. Organizers, keeping the conference’s profile low before it begins, may have succeeded in shielding it from unwanted criticism over its embrace of Israel, although at least one left-wing group managed a dig at the event’s sponsors.

“Greece is a beautiful place to travel to, who wouldn’t want to go?” Audrey Sasson, the director of New York-based Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, said in a statement. “But unlike Mayor Adams, most New Yorkers can’t just take all-expenses-paid trips funded by conservative lobbyists and the well-connected.”

Mayors in North America were recruited with the assistance of the Israel Action Network, a project of the Jewish Federations of North America, which began asking its member federations to invite local mayors to the summit last summer. The sample invitations for officials that were shared with local federations did not mention Israel, or concerns around anti-Zionism, instead referring to “contemporary” and “modern-day manifestations of antisemitism.”

But the ask came from Adam Teitelbaum, who oversees the organization’s Israel advocacy. A Jewish Federations of North America spokesperson said that the organization routed its work on antisemitism through the Israel Action Network because it sees significant overlap between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

The conference appeared to frame “contemporary manifestations” of antisemitism as progressive attacks on the Jewish state. A session on Thursday morning, the first full day of the conference, about “concepts and definitions” is being led by Sima Vaknin-Gill, a former director of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, which has overseen the country’s opposition to boycotts and other left-wing activism.

Vaknin-Gill wrote an op-ed last year in which she claimed that progressives believed it was “offensive” to express sympathy for Jews experiencing antisemitism and that, by calling for equal concern over the treatment of Palestinians, they were “doing the work for the racists.”

The guest list

Twenty-five mayors and roughly an equal number of other government officials, including deputy mayors and some national representatives, are planning to attend the meeting. Adams, the New York mayor, is the most prominent American official attending the meeting and he has two speaking slots. But the conference is missing representatives from some of the larger cities that attended last year when the leaders of Toronto, Pittsburgh, Buenos Aires and Amsterdam were among the speakers.

This year, aside from Adams the largest of the 10 American cities that sent mayors to the conference are Albuquerque, New Mexico; Richmond, Virginia; Jackson, Mississippi, and Hialeah, a Miami suburb. Los Angeles sent its Jewish liaison. In addition to Kostas Bakoyannis, the mayor of Athens, several midsize European cities sent their mayors: Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus; Malmo, Sweden; Kishinev, Moldova; and Bialystok, Poland.

Mayors often face more immediate pressure from constituents than national officials to address various issues, and in recent years have begun participating in more international summits on topics like climate change and migration.

While many have praised these partnerships, some have raised concerns that cities may have more trouble vetting international opportunities than national governments.

“There’s certainly a difference between the level of capacity that local governments have — especially at the smaller, midsize level — just in terms of staff time and expertise,” said Tony Pipa, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies city diplomacy.

More than two dozen mayors gathered in Athens, Greece this week for a summit on how to combat antisemitism. Photo by Getty Images

Pipa said that most of the pressure on cities to engage in international partnerships comes organically from constituents, as opposed to outside advocacy organizations like those organizing the summit in Greece, which he noted he was not familiar with.

The meeting, officially called the Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism, will also promote the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which has been widely adopted by governments but harshly criticized by progressive activists and academics for the manner in which, they argue, it unfairly shields Israel from criticism.

While at least 27 states and a growing number of American cities have adopted the IHRA definition in some form, it has started receiving vocal resistance in recent months. Maryland’s Montgomery County, outside of Washington, D.C., delayed a vote on the definition this summer after opposition from activists and there was pitched debate about its adoption by Los Angeles City Council this fall. Both jurisdictions ultimately unanimously approved use of the definition.

Organizers declined a request by the Forward to attend the conference.

Hate groups leave coalition

The Combat Antisemitism Movement, which is sponsoring the Athens conference alongside the Center for Jewish Impact and the Jewish Federations of North America, was founded in 2019 and has close ties to Adam Beren, a Republican megadonor from Kansas. The organization is focused on building a coalition of Jewish and non-Jewish organizations to support its mission of promoting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and it previously partnered with a nonprofit designated as an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement’s leadership previously defended the inclusion of that group, the Clarion Project, it is no longer listed as a partner on the organization’s website. Nor is Americans for Peace and Tolerance, another controversial former coalition member that has assailed the ADL for supposedly prioritizing Arabs and Muslims over Jews.

It is not clear whether the Combat Antisemitism Movement removed them, or whether they left voluntarily, or when they were taken down from the website. Roytman, the group’s director, did not respond to a request for comment about their removal.

The Clarion Project responded to an inquiry about the work with the coalition, but did not say how their partnership ended. “We have been honored to take part in the past,” a representative said in a brief email.

Americans for Peace and Tolerance did not respond to a request for comment.

Beren, an energy magnate based in Wichita, had previously donated to the Clarion Project. The two organizations were glaring outliers in a coalition of several hundred organizations that included some mainstream conservative groups alongside establishment stalwarts like the American Jewish Committee — whose new chief executive, Ted Deutch, is speaking at the Athens event — Hadassah, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Jewish Federations of North America and scores of smaller nonprofits.

The Center for Jewish Impact, which is also organizing the conference, is an Israeli organization that seeks to “elevate the relationships and status of Israel within and in relation to the global diplomatic community and world Jewry,” according to its website. A representative said it helped connect Greek and Israeli officials with the conference.

The conference includes panels where officials will discuss local strategies to stop antisemitism, a visit to the Athens Holocaust memorial and the signing of a joint declaration.

The post Why didn’t organizers of mayoral summit on antisemitism tell the public about it? appeared first on The Forward.

Moderna Inc’s top scientist said on Tuesday that the vaccine maker has learned how to better recruit from diverse populations for its clinical trials from running its COVID-19 vaccine studies.

Moderna Chief Medical Officer Paul Burton, speaking at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York, said that in 2020 the company needed to slow enrollment in its initial COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial in order to include more people in communities of color.

“We recognized that to get good uptake to get real acceptance, you need to have representation of all sorts of people from different communities,” Burton said, noting that the company was eventually able to enroll 37% of its 35,000-person trial from communities of color.

Moderna has worked to match that diverse enrollment in its other ongoing trials, Burton said. He said enrollment of people of color in its Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and Cytomegalovirus (CMV) vaccine trials was probably over 35%.

Burton also said the company had used new technologies to allow people to take part in studies from home, which he said could help democratize research by reaching even further flung populations.

 To view the Reuters NEXT conference live on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, please click here.

Prosecutors secured a victory when two key figures in last year’s U.S. Capitol attack were convicted of seditious conspiracy. But the acquittal of three co-defendants on this rarely used criminal charge shows that challenges remain for the Justice Department, according to legal experts.

A jury in Washington found Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the right-wing Oath Keepers militia group, and Kelly Meggs, the group’s Florida chapter leader, guilty, determining that they plotted to use force to block Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory over Republican then-President Trump.

It marked the first time in nearly three decades that federal prosecutors won a conviction for seditious conspiracy.

At the same time, co-defendants Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Harrelson and Thomas Caldwell were acquitted of seditious conspiracy, and the verdict was mixed on two other conspiracy charges. All five were convicted of obstruction of an official proceeding – the congressional certification of the election results. The obstruction and the seditious conspiracy charges each carry potential 20-year prison sentences.

“This is an overwhelming win for American democracy,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches law at the University of Minnesota. Using the initials of the Department of Justice, Rozenshtein added, “It’s a half-win for the DOJ.”

The Justice Department had not prosecuted a seditious conspiracy case in more than a decade heading into the trial arising from the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, rampage by Trump supporters who attacked police at the Capitol and sent lawmakers fleeing for their safety.

The trial’s outcome raises questions about how the Justice Department will fare in two more trials scheduled to begin in December involving defendants charged with seditious conspiracy. In those cases, the defendants are other members of the Oath Keepers as well as members of another right-wing group the Proud Boys.

Four other Oath Keepers members – David Moerschel, Joseph Hackett, Roberto Minuta and Edward Vallejo – are due to go to trial starting with jury selection on Dec. 5. None of them played leading roles in the organization. Three of the four entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, while Vallejo is accused of staying back at a hotel where weapons were stored.

The third trial is scheduled to begin later in December with seditious conspiracy charges against Proud Boys founder Enrique Tarrio and co-defendants Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola.

Tarrio was not physically in Washington on the day of the Capitol attack and the Proud Boys defendants are not accused of carrying or storing weapons. The Oath Keepers were accused of gathering weapons and storing them at a hotel just outside Washington ready to bring them into the city on Jan. 6, if requested.

Prosecutors in court filings have argued that the “tools” the Proud Boys used to exert force against the government consisted of “Proud Boys members and affiliates whom the defendants recruited and led to the Capitol” as well as other rioters who surged toward the building after Nordean and Biggs allegedly helped destroy a metal barricade.

One of Rhodes’ attorneys, James Lee Bright, told reporters on Tuesday that the two sedition convictions may signal “that the DOJ is going to go full steam ahead in like fashion on all the others.”

Some defense lawyers said the prosecution’s evidence in the two upcoming trials may be viewed as weaker. For example, the four defendants in the next Oath Keepers trial played secondary roles similar to the defendants acquitted of seditious conspiracy in the Rhodes trial.

This could prompt defense lawyers to consider seeking a bench trial with a judge deciding the verdicts rather than a jury.

“It would be very likely they will try to take a bench trial because the jury has set the baseline,” one attorney involved in the seditious conspiracy cases said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I could not see a judge exceeding the jury’s findings.”

At the same time, however, the across-the-board convictions in the Rhodes trial on obstruction of an official proceeding could prompt defendants to seek plea agreements.

“Even if you are acquitted of sedition, the obstruction of a proceeding … carries a long term of imprisonment,” said Brandon Fox, a former federal prosecutor now with the law firm Jenner & Block. “The prosecution, on the other hand, needs to be thinking about this – and everybody’s reading tea leaves as to why they didn’t win their sedition charges.”

Russian forces tried to advance in eastern Ukraine and trained tank, mortar and artillery fire on Kherson in the south, the Ukrainian military said, as Western allies sought to buttress Ukraine and its neighbours against Moscow.

In Washington, a $1.2 billion contract for six National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) for Ukraine was awarded to Raytheon, the Pentagon said.

On Wednesday Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba had said his country needed U.S.-made Patriot missile defence systems to protect its civilian infrastructure, which has been under heavy attack by Russia at the start of winter.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Russian President Vladimir Putin had focused “his ire and his fire” on Ukraine’s civilian population and warned Russia that its strategy would fail to divide Ukraine’s supporters.

“Heat, water, electricity … these are President Putin’s new targets. He’s hitting them hard. This brutalisation of Ukraine’s people is barbaric,” Blinken told a news conference in Bucharest following a two-day NATO meeting.

At the NATO foreign ministers meeting, allies on Wednesday pledged to help Moldova, Georgia and Bosnia-Herzegovina as they face pressure from Russia, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and ministers said.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the outcome showed NATO was “absolutely not interested in a political and diplomatic solution in Ukraine”.

Russia invaded Ukraine nine months ago in what it calls a “special military operation” to rid Ukraine of nationalists it considers dangerous. Ukraine and Western allies accuse Russia of an unprovoked, imperialist land grab.

In Spain, media cited police sources as saying that weapons company Instalanza in Zaragoza, which makes the C90 rocket launcher that Spain donates to Ukraine, received a suspicious package. A security officer at Ukraine’s embassy in Madrid was injured earlier on Wednesday when he opened a letter bomb addressed to the ambassador, leading Kyiv to order greater security at all its representative offices abroad.

In the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, site of the heaviest fighting, Russian forces tried to make further advances and shelled several towns, including Bakhmut and nearby Soledar and Opytne, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said in a Wednesday night statement.

It said that on the southern front, Russian forces took up defensive positions and trained tank, mortar and artillery fire on Ukrainian positions and on the regional capital of Kherson, abandoned by Russian troops earlier in November.

Other battleground activity was reported in northeastern and central Ukraine, the military said.

Reuters was not able to verify battlefield reports.

“We are analysing the intentions of the occupiers and preparing counter-measures – tougher countermeasures than is now the case,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a Wednesday evening address.

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential administration, said electricity had been restored to 65% of consumers in Kherson.

Nearly six million customers in a majority of Ukraine’s regions and in Kyiv had no electricity, Zelenskiy said on Wednesday night.

Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuriy Ignat said defence forces had shot down 340 of the roughly 400 Iranian drones that Russian had launched during the war.

“We haven’t seen these Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles for about two weeks … the first batch has probably already run out,” he told Ukraine’s main television network.

On the economic front, a deal was close on resuming Russian ammonia exports through a pipeline to a Ukrainian Black Sea port, U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths said.

“I think we’re quite close, we’re edging towards it this week,” Griffiths told a Reuters NEXT event.

A deal aimed at easing global food shortages by helping Ukraine export its agricultural products from Black Sea ports was extended on Nov. 17 for four months, though Russia said its own demands were yet to be fully addressed. The agreement was initially brokered in July by the United Nations with the help of Turkey.

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(NewsNation) — It has been a “worrying time” on campus after the stabbing deaths of four students at the University of Idaho, especially as the suspect has still not been caught, Dean of Students Blaine Eckles told NewsNation.

“I’m scared, too,” he said in an interview Wednesday, adding: “This is just another example that crime happens and it can happen anywhere.”

Ethan Chapin, 20; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20 and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, were found dead in an off-campus rental home Nov. 13. Preliminary findings by a county coroner show the four died from stab wounds, and were likely asleep at the time of the attack.

From friends, Eckles said, he has heard the victims were full of joy, laughter, love and fun.

“It’s heartbreaking when lights are extinguished like that,” he said. “You can see the impact it has on their close friends that have lost someone that’s close to them.”

The campus — and city of Moscow — have been tense, as the killer is still at large.

One student who spoke to NewsNation said at the end of the semester, the university is typically full of people and lively. But now, “I’m only seeing a handful of students walking around,” she said.

Something NewsNation has heard from students is that they are even scared to go to a candlelight vigil set for Wednesday night in honor of the victims.

Eckles said while safety is always a concern, there will be precautions the university plans to take.

“There are metal detectors that we’re going to have, security will obviously be present,” Eckles said. “We have a clear bag policy, too.”

After the stabbings, there was an increased Idaho State Police presence at the university. The University of Idaho upped its own security force, as well.

While the university has briefings with the police every day, Eckles said they don’t have any inside information on the case. The meetings, he said, are so university officials can help law enforcement as they conduct the investigation.

“They’re not giving us information on, ‘Hey, this is who we’re thinking about, or this is what we found’ — and appropriately so, because we don’t want the investigation to be screwed up,” Eckles said. “We want whoever did this to be brought to justice.”

Students were given the option to go to class online if they didn’t feel safe coming back after Thanksgiving break.

Eckles doesn’t have hard numbers on how many students returned, but said they do know almost two-thirds of students in the residence halls did.

“It’s encouraging to see them back here on campus, but we also recognize why students chose not to return,” he added.

Still, he said, the community has come together during a difficult time.

“The beautiful part is we’re doing it together, and we’re supporting one another as we do it,” he said. “So it’s helpful to have that support.”