Category: US

FBI chief Christopher Wray has criticized “deplorable” and “dangerous” threats circulating online against federal agents and the Justice Department after the agency’s raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.

“I’m always concerned about threats to law enforcement,” Mr Wray said. “Violence against law enforcement is not the answer, no matter who you’re upset with.”

As the fallout from the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago continues with rumors of a Trumpworld informant tipping off authorities, Mr Trump yesterday pleaded the fifth amendment in his sworn deposition to the long-running New York State probe into his real estate dealings.

Mr Trump has repeatedly condemned the investigation as a politically motivated “witch hunt”. His children Ivanka and Donald Jr both recently gave depositions in the civil investigation after months fighting against subpoenas for their testimony.

Meanwhile, reports have revealed that before its raid on Monday, the FBI had already obtained surveillance tapes from Mar-a-Lago via a subpoena to the Trump Organization. The former president has claimed without providing proof that agents may have planted evidence at his home.

In a revised playbook guiding University of California admissions, the system’s nine undergraduate campuses accepted a record number of California first-year students for fall 2022, while significantly narrowing entry to out-of-state and international applicants amid widespread demands to preserve coveted seats for state residents, according to preliminary data released Wednesday.

The UC system admitted 85,268 California first-year applicants — a 1.2% increase of 1,045 students over last year. Offers to out-of-state applicants declined by 19%, or 5,359 students, and those to international students decreased by 12.2%, or 2,442 students.

Campuses also set records for diversity, as students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups increased to 43.8% of the admitted first-year class. For the third straight year, Latinos were the largest ethnic group at 37.3%, followed by Asian Americans at 35%, white students at 18.6% and Black students at 5.7%. Overall, both applications and admission offers increased for Latino, Asian American, Black and Native American students and declined among white and Pacific Islander students.

“The University’s enduring dedication to California’s young people and its partnership with the state continue to attract unprecedented numbers of talented Golden State students,” UC President Michael V. Drake said in a statement. “It is our privilege to be able to offer admission to the state’s largest-ever class of California students.”

The rollback in out-of-state and international students represents a significant policy shift years in the making. The public research university system began aggressively recruiting and enrolling higher-paying nonresident students as a source of additional tuition revenue after the 2008 recession when the state slashed its UC funding by one-third.

UCLA and UC Berkeley, for instance, increased the share of nonresidents among undergraduates from about 9.5% in fall 2008 to about 24% in 2021.

The growing number of nonresident students sparked a public outcry and a 2016 state audit, which found that UC admission practices were harming California students. UC sharply disagreed, arguing that the extra nonresident tuition dollars allowed it to pay for more California students and that state budget cuts had forced its hand. Eventually, the state economy recovered, funding for higher education began to rebound, and state elected leaders made clear that UC should increase California student enrollment as their constituents were demanding.

This year, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature provided $82.5 million to enroll an additional 5,632 California students in 2022 and 2023. That includes $31 million to replace 902 nonresidents with in-state students at UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego — funding set for annual renewal over at least four more years.

UC admission directors hail the growing access to California students but also note that those from other states and countries greatly enrich the learning and social environment for all.

“It’s important that we do all we can to ensure that California residents have access to a UC campus,” said Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, UCLA vice provost for enrollment management. “But having students learn in classrooms that resemble the state, nation and world enhances their educational experience. It’s a tough balancing act.”

UCLA drew 91,544 first-year applications from California residents for fall 2022, as the campus and UC system shattered their own previous records. The Westwood campus admitted 8,423 of those applicants, an increase of only 54 over last year, but plans to enroll an additional 400 first-year students and about 400 more transfer students. Because more students offered admission are accepting it — about 54% in 2021 compared with 44% in 2011 — UCLA does not need to make as many admission offers to hit its enrollment targets as in the past, Copeland-Morgan said.

Admitted students had near-perfect grades, and UCLA looked for evidence that they had taken full advantage of the opportunities available to them to stretch themselves with challenging courses and extracurricular activities, she said.

Five of the nine UC undergraduate campuses admitted fewer California first-year applicants compared with last year in the first round of offers — mainly cautious about overenrolling. After monitoring the number of acceptances, campus officials then sent out additional offers to students on the waitlist.

UC Santa Barbara, for instance, offered first-round admission to 273 fewer California first-year students than last year — but increased its waitlist offers by nearly 700. Among the 2,792 waitlisted students offered admission, 633 accepted. Overall, the campus plans to enroll about 4,000 California students, an increase of about 350 over last year. UCSB hopes to educate some of them off campus in study abroad or Washington DC programs or enroll more in summer sessions.

“We couldn’t risk overenrolling even a single student,” said Lisa Przekop, the campus admission director. “We’re at capacity and didn’t want to experience any housing issues.”

Last year, UC Santa Barbara scrambled to house students in hotels after a last-minute crunch in housing requests and shortages of off-campus rentals due to an influx of nonstudents who wanted to work remotely in the scenic coastal city during the pandemic. Przekop said all student housing requests have been accommodated this year.

At UC Irvine, the calculation of admission targets was a bit more complex. Offers to California first-year applicants declined by a few hundred students, or 1.6%, but significantly dropped by 39% for out-of-state students and 37% for international students.

Dale Leaman, Irvine’s executive director of undergraduate admissions, said the campus was “trying to be responsive” to the state’s expectations to decrease nonresidents. At the same time, the number of out-of-state students accepting UC Irvine admission offers increased last year and might do so again this year.

“We’re being very careful about overadmitting nonresidents,” Leaman said, adding that Irvine also used the waitlist more robustly this year than in the past. “It’s complicated calculus.”

UC Berkeley faced an unprecedented admissions season marked by a lawsuit and subsequent court ruling that would have forced the campus to slash fall 2022 admission offers by one-third without a state rescue effort. The campus ultimately was able to meet its planned targets, admitting 10,518 California students for fall 2022, about the same as last year, and reducing offers to out-of-state students by about 33% and to international students, by 26%.

Admission rates for California first-year students declined at UC Berkeley to 14.5% this year from 16.9% last year. They dropped even lower at UCLA, to 9.2% from 9.9% during that same period. Systemwide, admission rates for California students declined to 64.4% this year from 65.7% last year.

UC Santa Cruz cut back its admission offers for fall 2022 because it enrolled two large classes of Californians the previous two years, said Michelle Whittingham, associate vice chancellor of enrollment management. The campus expects to enroll about 700 fewer new undergraduates this fall. Although the first-year class was larger than expected because about 250 more computer science majors accepted their admission offer than predicted, that was offset by a smaller transfer class, enabling Santa Cruz to hit its lower enrollment target for new undergraduates.

“We’re really trying to balance access with quality,” she said, noting that the campus faces housing, curricular and classroom constraints.

Whittingham added that Santa Cruz is still trying to increase out-of-state and international students, whose share of undergraduates fell during the pandemic to about 9.2% last fall from 12% in 2019.

UC Davis also admitted fewer students this year, to offset overenrollment last year, according to a campus statement by Robert Penman, executive director of undergraduate admissions. The campus plans to reduce the size of its new fall 2022 class of first-year and transfer students by about 750 but still enrolls the largest number of in-state undergraduates in the UC system.

Davis admitted 21,139 California first-year applicants, an 11% decline over last year, while offers to out-of-state students were down 16.4% and those to international students fell 29% during that same period. The campus increased offers to transfer applicants.

Two campuses with plenty of room for California students are UC Riverside, which admitted 1,600 more applicants, and UC Merced, which increased offers by about 2,000. UC Riverside plans to enroll about 600 more first-year and transfer students this fall than last.

UC San Diego led all campuses in admitting transfer students. Systemwide, however, admission offers to California Community College transfer applicants declined to 25,253 this year compared with 28,453 last year — due to fewer applications from fewer students at the system’s 116 campuses. Several admission directors expressed concern about the declining enrollment, which complicates UC’s obligation to enroll one community college student for every two first-year students.

About 47% of admitted California first-year students are low-income, and 44% would be the first in their families to earn a bachelor’s degree.

Trump world is no stranger to being deeply suspicious, even conspiratorial. But the speculation sparked by the FBI search has taken on a different scope, coming amid a combination of anxiety — that the so-called Deep State is out to get the former president — and a death of public information about the bureau’s actions.

“I can tell you all of us agree this is corrupt,” said Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump confidante whose service in the Trump administration was marked by attacks he waged on career officials and an acrimonious exit. “Many people in Trump world agree with me that this is a theater and this is designed to harm the president, this is designed to harm Republicans in the midterms and it is designed to advance the interests of the Democratic Party. And you know what, they completely failed.”

There is no evidence that the Department of Justice did anything improper, and it in fact obtained approval from a federal court to obtain its search warrant. Trump himself could answer some of the lingering questions. He is at liberty to disclose the warrant — though he has not been provided the underlying affidavit — and to describe the files that were confiscated by the FBI. But so far he has opted against doing so. Only two of his attorneys of him were present during the search, and they say they were barred from supervising while the agents retrieved files.

More information may soon be available, however. Judge Bruce Reinhart, the federal magistrate who signed the search warrant last week, on Wednesday ordered the Justice Department to respond by Monday to efforts by media outlets and advocacy groups to unseal the document.

In the absence of that information, however, Trump allies have begun pushing conspiracies to explain away the probe.

The chatter was fed, in part, by two articles, one in Axios the other in Newsweek, that suggested someone high up within Trump’s orbit had flipped and was cooperating with the government and that detailed the belief among some Trump hands that they had a mole . By late Wednesday afternoon, it had become an openly discussed topic on Fox News. And a story in The Wall Street Journal indicated that, in fact, a witness had been aiding investigators, telling the FBI that not all classified records had been disclosed during early negotiations and helping investigators pinpoint the location of missing records.

But the more aggressively pushed theory by Trump allies, at least in public, was the idea that evidence might have been planted by the FBI on the premises. Trump himself floated the idea in a post on his social media site about him, and it was amplified by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), as well as Fox News hosts like Jesse Watters, and even Trump’s own lawyer.

“I’m concerned that they may have planted something,” Trump attorney Alina Habba said Tuesday on Fox News. “At this point, who knows? I don’t trust the government, and that’s a very frightening thing as an American. This is Third World stuff. This is Cuba. This is not our country.”

Trump and his advisers have worked to use the FBI’s search for their political advantage, too. In the aftermath, the former president took calls from allies and lawmakers on Capitol Hill who encouraged him to expedite his jump into the 2024 presidential race. And on Monday night, Trump met with the Republican Study Committee at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, where he talked about his outrage over the events and hinted at what he would do next.

“He left me a little room for doubt that he’d be running again, and he received substantial encouragement in the room to run again,” Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) told POLITICO. “And his campaign activity leading up to the midterm helps turn out voters.”

In the 48 hours since the search, Trump’s Save America PAC released a new political ad linking the search to New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil investigation of Trump and to the Jan. 6 investigations. And Trump has been aggressively fundraising off the search, sending out emails and text messages decrying the FBI’s actions and asking for contributions.

Republican lawmakers, ranging from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to Rep. elise sefanik (RN.Y.), have vowed to make investigations into why federal agents issued the search warrant a political issue moving into the midterms and beyond.

“I will be shocked if a Republican majority doesn’t pursue a 21st century Church Committee out of this, that’s where I think this is going,” said one Republican consultant close to Trump world, referring to 1970s congressional hearings on intelligence activities. “I do think there have been enough examples of politicization in institutions that this is where Republican voters are. Republicans have been there for a bit of time — but a lot of Republican politicians have gotten the message.”

Olivia Beavers contributed to this report.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that pharmacy giant Walgreens could be held liable for fueling the opioid epidemic in San Francisco by shipping and dispensing hundreds of thousands of “suspicious orders” of prescription drugs, the latest legal reckoning over America’s prescription drug crisis.

More than 100 million prescription opioid pills were dispensed by Walgreens in the city between 2006 and 2020, and during that time, the pharmacy giant failed to investigate hundreds of thousands of orders deemed suspicious, US District Judge Charles Breyer wrote in his 112-page opinion in a lawsuit filed by San Francisco against major prescription drug sellers.

“Walgreens has regulatory obligations to take reasonable steps to prevent the drugs from being diverted and harming the public,” Breyer wrote. “The evidence at trial established that Walgreens breached these obligations.”

The judge’s decision in the nonjury trial opens the door to a trial on the extent of the financial liability the company would face.

The public nuisance lawsuit, filed by the city in 2018, also included claims against Johnson & Johnson, Allergan, Purdue Pharma, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and Endo International, as well as McKesson Corp., AmerisourceBergen Corp. and Cardinal Health — three of the biggest drug distributors in the country.

Walgreens was the only company that didn’t reach a settlement with the city before the ruling. Johnson & Johnson and the three drug distributors were part of a $26-billion nationwide settlement earlier this year.

The opioid crisis has ravaged San Francisco in recent years. Emergency because visits of opioids have spiked from 886 in 2015 to 2,998 in 2020, according to court filings. In 2019, about 40,958 city residents out of about 860,000 San Franciscans suffered from opioid addiction. In 2019, about 1,939 city residents overdosed on opioids, averaging to about 5.3 overdoses a day.

Peter Mougey, one of the attorneys representing the city, said the verdict sheds a light on the negligence Walgreens displayed in failing to stop the opioid epidemic in San Francisco.

“The sun has set on Walgreens’ attempt to hide the evidence of its nonexistent opioid compliance program while it instead focused on profits by flooding San Francisco with a tsunami of pills,” he said.

The company expressed its disappointment with the decision and said it’s planning to appeal, according to Walgreens spokesperson Fraser Engerman.

“As we have said throughout this process, we never manufactured or marketed opioids, nor did we distribute them to the ‘pill mills’ and internet pharmacies that fueled this crisis,” he said in a statement.

Daniel Ciccarone, a professor of addiction medicine at UC San Francisco, said that companies turning a blind eye to the oversupply of opioid prescriptions has led to the rise of heroin and fentanyl addiction by increasing the pool of people dependent or addicted to opioids.

“Most of them migrated to safety, but 4% to 6% of this population migrated over to heroin because they were no longer having their addiction or pain needs fulfilled through pills,” he said. “For a while, the pills were available on the street, but even that pill supply dried up and what you’re left with is plentiful heroin on American streets. For unclear reasons, fentanyl has been a substitute or a contaminant of the heroin supply and now we see the third wave of the opioid crisis, which is the historically unseen rise of overdose deaths due to fentanyl.”

Walgreens distributed prescription opioids to its San Francisco pharmacies until 2014 without investigating orders or maintaining “an effective system for identifying suspicious orders,” Breyer said. The US Drug Enforcement Administration shut down one of the company’s three controlled substance distribution centers in 2012 because of the center’s failure to surveil suspicious orders. Walgreens stopped distributing controlled substances in 2014 and started outsourcing to third-party distributors.

Federal regulations require companies to investigate “red flag” prescriptions and verify that the opioid prescriptions are medically legitimate before dispensing them. Walgreens dispensed hundreds of thousands of “red flag” opioids without investigating them; Tens of thousands of the prescriptions were “written by doctors with suspect prescribing patterns” and hundreds of thousands were written by doctors who would later have their licenses suspended or go to prison, according to Breyer’s ruling.

The company also didn’t give pharmacists enough staffing, time or resources to adequately review the prescriptions, Breyer wrote. Pharmacists said they endured “constant pressure to fill prescriptions as quickly as possible.”

Pharmacists testified that they were aware they dispensed opioid prescriptions that they knew shouldn’t have been filled. One said that after he filled a prescription at a San Francisco pharmacy, he saw it was being sold in the parking lot.

Breyer also ruled that Walgreens filled prescriptions from prescribers who were blocked from other pharmacy chains or were deemed suspicious. In one instance, after a Walgreens pharmacy in San Francisco refused to fill prescriptions for a “suspicious” doctor, other Walgreens pharmacies dispensed 86,904 opioid pills for his prescriptions.

The pharmacy giant reached a $683-million settlement earlier this year with the state of Florida over claims of dispensing millions of opioids that worsened the crisis.

In November, a federal jury in Ohio found that Walgreens, along with CVS and Walmart, recklessly distributed pills that resulted in hundreds of overdose deaths and cost two Ohio counties about $1 billion each.

Ciccarone said that he hopes the money obtained through the lawsuits and settlements will be used to help reduce the risk of opioid overdoses and provide resources for treatment.

“This is a crisis and there’s a huge, vulnerable population in need,” he added.

For those involved in addiction, the ruling felt like a victory, even for those without a direct connection to Walgreens.

Laurie Steves’ daughter Jessica DiDia lives on the streets of San Francisco and is addicted to fentanyl and crack cocaine. Steves said she drove from Tacoma, Wash., to San Francisco last summer to try to get DiDia to get clean, but to no avail.

“Her addiction is so bad that she actively seeks fentanyl every day,” Steves said. “She lost her partner to a fentanyl overdose about three months ago. I was hoping that it would be a wake-up call for her but it wasn’t.”

Tom Wolf lived in a home in Daly City with his wife and two children and worked as a child support officer for the city. But in early 2015, he underwent foot surgery and was prescribed 10 milligrams of oxycodone by his doctor.

Wolf was given a 30-day supply but he started taking three pills at a time. When his supply ran out, he went through withdrawal and started buying drugs off the street in San Francisco until his wife gave him an ultimatum: Go to rehab or leave the house.

Wolf chose the drugs, living on the streets and getting arrested six times in 2018 before getting sober through a drug treatment program. Wolf said that when he was buying pills in San Francisco, his main dealer was getting oxycodone through legal prescriptions from the local Veterans Affairs hospital.

“That was the benchmark,” he said. “I took those 30 milligrams and I felt euphoria. Any marital or financial problems went away for three to four hours and I liked that feeling and I wanted to keep having that feeling.”

Having been sober for four years and reconciled with his family, Wolf said he was glad about the Walgreens ruling.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Wolf said. “It’s 10 years too late but I’m glad they’re being held accountable. I’m also sad because that by overprescribing, they contributed to millions of Americans struggling with addiction and the rise of illicit fentanyl in this country.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday pushed back on social media threats made against him and other law enforcement officers, following his agency’s unprecedented search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

On Monday, the FBI executed a “raid” on Trump’s Florida home and by that night droves of social media posts criticized the incident and accused the bureau of being politicized in nature. Some messages also called for violence towards Wray, a massive uprising, and even a civil war.

“I’m always concerned about threats to law enforcement,” Wray said Wednesday, condemning the posts. “Violence against law enforcement is not the answer, no matter who you’re upset with.”

He called the threats “deplorable and dangerous.”

TRUMP FBI RAID: AGENTS SEIZE MAR-A-LAGO DOCUMENTS IN UNPRECEDENTED MOVE

The comments were made after a news conference at the agency’s field office in Omaha, Nebraska, where Wray provided comments about the FBI’s focus on cybersecurity.

At the presser, Wray declined to comment further or answer any questions about why FBI agents spent hours on Monday searching Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida resort. This was the first time in US history that the FBI has conducted such a search on the residence of a former president.

Since Monday, scores of messages have been seen on Twitter, Gab, and TRUTH Social calling for violence across the country.

Authorities monitoring these posts spotted a significant increase in death threats aimed toward Attorney General Merrick Garland, Wray, and FBI agents, sources told Fox News.

Both Garland and Wray travel with armed security.

A post on Gab said, “All it takes is one call. And millions will arm up and take back this country. It will be over in less than 2 weeks.”

Another said, “Lets get this started! This unelected, illegitimate regime crossed the line with their GESTAPO raid! It is long past time the lib socialist filth were cleansed from American society!”

FBI AGENTS, GARLAND AND WRAY SEE INCREASED DEATH THREATS AFTER TRUMP SEA-A-LAKE RAID: SOURCES

Trump and several top Republicans have demanded an answer from the FBI and the Justice Department on why the search was conducted and what property was seized.

“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, was raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said Tuesday in an email sent by Trump’s Save America political action committee.

“The country deserves a thorough and immediate explanation of what led to the events of Monday,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Tuesday. “Attorney General Garland and the Department of Justice should already have provided answers to the American people and must do so immediately.”

TRUMP DENOUNCES FBI FOR COURT-APPROVED MAR-A-LAGO RAID, AND GARLAND’S MAJOR MISTAKE

Republican Sen. Rand Paul said the “raid” could lead to Garland’s impeachment, should an investigation find he misused his office.

“Without question, I think the order to allow the raid on Mar-a-Lago on Trump’s house has to be revealed. It’s going to have to wait until November till there’s a full investigation,” Paul said on “Fox & Friends.” “And I’ve never been a fan of overusing impeachment, but I think there has to be an investigation. And if it warrants it, there’s going to have to be a look at whether or not the attorney general has misused his office for political purposes. Have they gone after a political opponent? I mean, this is beyond the pale.”

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“No one would have ever imagined before that we would be using or one political party would be using the FBI to attack their political opponents. Now, this is really something that’s going to require an investigation. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the investigation leads to abuse of power that this could even lead to an impeachment of the attorney general,” he added.

The raid was part of an investigation into whether Trump took classified documents to Mar-a-lago, according to people familiar with the matter.

Fox News’ David Spunt and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

A federal judge ruled this week that Walgreens can be held responsible for contributing to San Francisco’s opioid crisis.

US District Judge Charles Breyer on Wednesday upheld a city attorney’s claim that the pharmacy chain had not exercised proper oversight with prescriptions, including over-dispensing addictive substances and failing to report suspicious orders.

“Walgreens pharmacies in San Francisco dispensed hundreds of thousands of red flag opioid prescriptions without performing adequate due diligence,” the judge wrote. “Tens of thousands of these prescriptions were written by doctors with suspect prescribing patterns.”

“The evidence showed that Walgreens did not provide its pharmacists with sufficient time, staffing, or resources to perform due diligence on these prescriptions,” Breyer added.

SAN FRANCISCO ISSUES WARNING AMID FENTANYL OVERDOSE DEATHS

To Walgreens in San Francisco. (Google Maps)
(Google Maps)

The judge noted that the influx of red-flag opioid prescriptions led to San Francisco hospitals being overwhelmed, children’s playgrounds being littered with drugs and even city libraries being forced to close due to syrine-clogged toilets.

Walgreens released a statement denying the city’s claim.

VIRGINIA COUNTY REPORTS PRESENCE OF OPIOID MORE DEADLY THAN FENTANYL

“We never manufactured or marketed opioids, nor did we distribute them to the ‘pill mills’ and internet pharmacies that fueled this crisis,” Walgreens spokesman Fraser Engerman said.

Homeless people consume illegal drugs in an encampment along Willow St. in the Tenderloin district of downtown on Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022 in San Francisco, CA.
(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Engerman also claimed that ruling was an “unprecedented expansion of public nuisance law” and called the attempt “misguided and unsustainable.”

A ruling on monetary damages has yet to be determined.

MICHIGAN OFFICER DETAILS HARROWING MOMENT HE COLLAPSED FROM FENTANYL EXPOSURE

The Golden Gate city has been hit especially hard by the opioid crisis. According to the city’s health department, 474 people died in San Francisco last year from fentanyl-related overdoses.

Last week, San Francisco’s new district attorney announced that she would revoke former DA Chesa Boudin’s policy of offering lenient plea deals for drug offenders.

People sleep near discarded clothing and used needles on a street in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco, on July 25, 2019.
(AP)

The new policy prevents serious offenders from being referred to San Francisco’s community justice court (CJC). The CJC is a “progressive reform” program that addresses “the primary issues facing the individual and not just their crime of her,” according to the Superior Court of San Francisco.

Under DA Brooke Jenkins’ new policy, dealers arrested with an excess of five grams of drugs can no longer be referred to CJC.

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“The previous administration’s policy had no weight limit threshold, was not adhering to CJC guidelines, and allowed drug dealers, arrested with as much as 500 grams of fentanyl, and who had multiple open fentanyl cases, to be referred to CJC,” according to Jenkins’ office.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.