Trump reacts to tariff ruling and slams Federalist Society in fiery social media post
President Donald Trump wrote a fiery, lengthy post on social media Thursday night in response to the intense legal battle surrounding his proposed tariffs.
On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit allowed Trump’s tariffs to temporarily remain in effect, just one day before the US. Court of International Trade on Wednesday ruled that Trump overstepped his authority over tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
On Truth Social, Trump wrote that the U.S. Court of International Trade “incredibly” ruled against the “desperately needed” tariffs, but the order was stayed by the federal court.
“Where do these initial three Judges come from? How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America?” the Republican’s post read. “Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be?”
TWELVE STATES SUE TRUMP OVER TARIFFS, CLAIMING THEY’RE ‘ILLEGAL’ AND HARMFUL TO US ECONOMY
Trump then took aim at Leonard Leo, a chairman on the Federalist Society’s board of directors. Trump said that he used the conservative legal organization to pick out judges when he was “new to Washington.”
“It was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges,” Trump wrote.
“I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”
Trump added that he was “so disappointed” in the Federalist Society “because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations.”
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“This is something that cannot be forgotten!” the Republican said. “With all of that being said, I am very proud of many of our picks, but very disappointed in others. They always must do what’s right for the Country!”
The president then rounded out his lengthy post by calling attention back to his pending tariffs, which he claimed would lead to a “rich, prosperous, and successful United States of America.”
“The ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade is so wrong, and so political!” Trump said. “Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY.”
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“The President of the United States must be allowed to protect America against those that are doing it Economic and Financial harm. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
WSJ gets last laugh after media viciously attacked its report on Biden’s mental acuity
Nearly a year before books about Joe Biden‘s cognitive decline made headlines, The Wall Street Journal was viciously attacked for its own bombshell reporting at a time when very few in the legacy media dared to broach the subject.
In early June 2024, the Journal published a story titled, “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping,” a months-long investigation by reporters Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes involving more than 45 sources who were either directly involved or briefed on meetings with Biden, who they said “appears slower now, someone who has both good moments and bad ones.”
The report, which dropped just weeks before Biden’s disastrous debate performance, was swiftly met with disdain and indignation, not just by the Biden White House, but by its allies in the media as well.
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Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor who co-authored “Original Sin,” the new Biden bombshell book, framed his coverage of the Journal’s report at the time on the White House’s aggressive response to the “false claims” made by the paper and repeatedly told viewers the report was “mostly based on observations of Republicans.” He had on top Biden surrogate Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who defended the president and attempted to discredit the reporting as agenda-driven.
It wasn’t until after the debate (which Tapper notably co-moderated) that he invited the two Wall Street Journal reporters who authored the report to discuss it on his program.
Several CNN anchors stressed that the Journal’s story heavily relied on Republican criticism of Biden and called out former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who gave the only on-the-record statement, for appearing to flip-flop on Biden’s sharpness in previous comments, something that was later explained as a tactical PR move at the time for McCarthy to bolster cooperation with the Biden White House.
CREDIBILITY CRISIS: PRESS DISMISSED HUR REPORT ON BIDEN’S MEMORY ISSUES LONG BEFORE CONCERNS BECAME UNDENIABLE
CNN’s Boris Sanchez grilled Hughes over Democratic allegations that her story was “slanted,” a question that would be unfathomable to a journalist covering Donald Trump.
Oliver Darcy, CNN’s then-media reporter, erupted at the Journal, insisting its reporting “suffers from glaring problems,” lecturing the paper it “owes its readers — — better.”
“It is difficult to imagine that the newspaper, or any outlet, would run a similar story declaring that Trump is ‘slipping’ behind the scenes based on the word of top Democratic figures — despite the fact that the Democratic leadership has demonstrated a much stronger relationship with the truth in recent years than their Republican counterparts,” Darcy wrote.
“More broadly speaking, The Journal’s piece pointed to a continued problem roiling the news media as it covers the 2024 election. Trump is permitted to fall asleep in court and make nonsensical public statements on a routine basis without any serious questions raised about his mental acuity,” the ex-CNN pundit continued. “Meanwhile, Biden is judged on an entirely different standard.”
CREDIBILITY CRISIS: WHITE HOUSE REPORTERS SPEAK OUT ON WHETHER BIDEN’S MENTAL DECLINE WAS DELIBERATELY HIDDEN
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough declared the report a “Trump hit piece on Biden” as his co-host spouse Mika Brzezinski ridiculed the Republican sourcing.
“Why didn’t they just ask Marjorie Taylor Greene to weigh in? And Lauren Boebert?” Brzezinski sarcastically asked.
“Deadline: White House” host Nicolle Wallace knocked the “highly-criticized” report that “faced blowback” from Democrats and sounded the alarm on how local TV stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group were covering it, suggesting it was a “right-wing disinformation operation.”
Wallace’s then-MSNBC colleague Joy Reid raised a similar panic about Sinclair’s coverage of The Journal while swiping the paper’s “dubious” and “highly problematic” report and suggesting it was “conservative propaganda.” She argued that it’s actually Donald Trump, not Biden, who should face scrutiny over mental acuity.
CNN’s Brian Stelter, then a Vanity Fair correspondent who appeared on Reid’s program as a guest, told the MSNBC host that The Journal’s report “had a lot of flaws” and appeared to agree with Reid’s assertion that it’s Trump who should be more scrutinized, knocking how the media “obsesses” over Biden’s age.
The New York Times elevated the criticism of CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert, who summarized The Journal’s reporting as “old news.” Liberal writer Brian Beutler complained on X the piece was an “egregious hit job.”
SHIELDING BIDEN: JOURNALISTS SHED LIGHT ON THE MEDIA’S COVER-UP OF A WEAKENED PRESIDENT
Jennifer Rubin, at the time a prominent columnist for The Washington Post, slammed the “shoddy front-page Wall Street Journal article,” saying it was “essentially the promotion of a right-wing meme.”
“The Journal’s faceplant should lead to a much larger discussion: . Frankly, it has nothing to do with the sort of factors Biden’s critics obsess over (e.g., verbal slips, how fast he moves),” Rubin told readers. “Does he misspeak? Does he physically stumble? Focusing on such relatively superficial subjects has come to define political journalism.”
“A president’s gait, verbal tics and minor recall errors have virtually nothing to do with the job of being president. The White House occupant is not a “Jeopardy!” contestant, a stand-up comic, a talk-show host or guest; the president is the head of the executive branch and commander in chief,” she later wrote.
Left-wing advocacy group Media Matters For America scoffed at the Wall Street Journal’s “comically weak” report.
“Republicans and their right-wing media propagandists have spent the last four years smearing President Joe Biden as mentally infirm. That argument keeps exploding in their faces when Biden appears before a national audience in debates and speeches, but the president’s mental acuity is a frequent subject of media attention, and polls show voters are concerned about Biden’s age,” Media Matters wrote. “The Journal is perhaps the most credulous of the major newspapers when it comes to the GOP’s campaign to convince the public that Biden’s stammer and occasional verbal stumbles indicate he has dementia.”
The journalism non-profit Poynter Institute attempted to tackle the question of whether the Journal’s report was “fair or foul.”
“Is it a fairly reported story on a pertinent topic? Or is it a pointed piece based pretty much on quotes and opinions from those who don’t want to see Biden elected to a second term? I’d go with the latter — considering the money quote is from McCarthy, another key anecdote was reported by current Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, and other tales suggesting Biden’s decline are flimsy, at best,” Poynter Institute’s Tom Jones ruled.
NYT, MSNBC, PBS JOURNALISTS PRESSED ON HOW THEY COVERED BIDEN’S AGE: WE PROBABLY NEED TO DO ‘SOUL-SEARCHING’
Little did the media know that The Wall Street Journal only scratched the surface of Biden’s cognitive decline, which was on full display at the presidential debate and led to his dramatic ousting from the 2024 race. The Journal stood by its report since it was published and its editor-in-chief Emma Tucker said she felt “very much” vindicated following the debate.
“The reporters took a lot of grief for covering a story that needed to be covered and that no other main stream publishers were willing to touch. I am very proud of them,” Tucker told Semafor.
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Now Democrats and members of the media have been speaking more candidly about Biden since he left office. Some in the media are even singing the praises of the two Wall Street Journal reporters who were once the target of vitriol from their peers in the press.
“I remember when people worked hard to try to discredit these excellent reporters’ groundbreaking reporting on Biden’s decline. And now everyone agrees they were right all along,” CBS News reporter Jan Crawford wrote on X. “Kudos to [Annie Linskey] [Siobhane Hughes] and the @WSJ for never wavering.”
Crawford continued, “And shame on the @PulitzerPrizes for failing to properly honor the most courageous and deeply sourced original reporting of the past year (or years).”
“I said it last year before the election, and I’ll say it again, the journalism you did was vital, and the smear campaign by Democrats against you two is disgraceful,” Tapper told The Journal reporters on his CNN program earlier this month.
“You’re heroic,” Tapper told them.
Marine general warns African terror groups gaining capacity to attack US homeland
A top United States military general warned Thursday that terror groups in Africa are ramping up their ability to conduct attacks in the U.S.
Gen. Michael Langley, the four-star Marine General who leads U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), said the Sahel region of the continent is now the “flashpoint of prolonged conflict and growing instability. It is the epicenter of terrorism on the globe.”
Several terror groups have expanded drastically in the last three years. Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, is three times the size it was in 2022, he said, and has spread across Mali, Burkina Faso, and parts of Niger, which the U.S. military pulled out of last year.
ISIS INCREASINGLY UNOPPOSED FOLLOWING US WITHDRAWAL FROM AFGHANISTAN, COLLAPSE OF SYRIA
Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin, a faction affiliated with Al-Qaeda, is now four times the size it was in 2022, expanding mainly in Burkina Faso.
“We’re keeping a good eye on this because they could have the capacity to attack the homeland,” Langley said in a call with reporters.
“Throughout my travels across West Africa and through dialog here at the conference, the concerns shared by my peers match my own,” he added. “One of the terrorist’s key goals now is access to the west coast of Africa. If they gain access to the vast coastline, they can diversify their revenue streams and evolve their tactics, more easily exporting terrorism to American shores.”
LONE WOLF ATTACKS SURGE IN THE WEST AS TERRORISM INTENSIFIES GLOBALLY
He noted that the terror groups engage in illicit activity like smuggling, human trafficking and arms trading, which fund their nefarious actions and destabilize the region.
U.S. forces over the weekend conducted an airstrike against the al Qaeda-linked al-Shabab in Somalia. The East African country has been wracked for decades by attacks and insurgency from Islamist terrorists, both from ISIS and al-Shabab.
The U.S. is in a race with China and Russia to gain influence and trust with the local governments of several African nations to help protect citizens from terror groups.
Langley said there is an increasing concern about the number of African soldiers going to Beijing for military training and replicating a U.S. International Military Education and Training (IMET) program.
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“They’re trying to replicate what we do best in our IMET program,” said Langley. “And then they also said they’re going to increase security and training in a number of countries. So, they’re trying to replicate what we do.”
Canadian man flips out at Miami airport, attacks TSA agents in violent rampage
A Canadian man’s layover in Florida turned into a federal case after he attacked two Transportation Security Administration officers at Miami International Airport in a chaotic outburst caught on video.
Cameron Dylan McDougall, 28, of Toronto, pleaded guilty in federal court earlier this month to two counts of assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers, according to court records.
The charges stem from a December 2024 incident that left travelers stunned and security personnel injured.
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The trouble began Dec. 27, when McDougall allegedly struck a fellow passenger aboard a Copa Airlines flight traveling from Panama City to Toronto.
According to reporting from Local 10 News, the midair altercation prompted the pilot to divert the flight to Miami, where McDougall was removed from the plane but not arrested.
Instead, he was told he could book another flight back to Canada. McDougall purchased a ticket on Air Canada for the following day.
But as he prepared to board that flight at MIA the morning of Dec. 28, he once again lashed out, this time in the airport.
COUPLE ARRESTED AFTER ALLEGEDLY THROWING COFFEE AT AIRLINE EMPLOYEES, FORCING WAY ONTO CANCUN FLIGHT
Authorities said McDougall had already cleared the TSA checkpoint when, without provocation, he randomly struck another passenger around 6:37 a.m., according to court documents cited by WPLG Local 10.
A security guard who attempted to intervene was also assaulted. Two minutes later, McDougall returned to the screening area and targeted a TSA supervisor, swinging wildly. Though the supervisor dodged the punches, another officer who tried to restrain McDougall was hit in the face at least three times, sustaining minor injuries.
The entire encounter was recorded on airport surveillance and released to the public this week. The footage shows McDougall throwing punches, getting flipped over a screening bin cart and continuing to resist as agents struggled to restrain him.
He was subdued and arrested by officers with the Miami-Dade Police Department.
McDougall pleaded guilty May 19 and is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court May 30. Each federal charge carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison.
He also faces state charges, including three felony counts of battery on a law enforcement officer and one misdemeanor battery charge, according to Miami-Dade court records.
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McDougall is due back in state court June 2.
TSA did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Harvard’s lawsuit against DHS prompts Supreme Court recusal questions
Harvard University’s lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for moving to ban foreign students at the Ivy League school could be on a fast track to the Supreme Court, reviving a longstanding debate over when justices should recuse themselves from cases.
Four Supreme Court justices attended Harvard. While being an alumnus of a university involved in litigation does not typically warrant recusal from a case, other factors, such as deeper involvement with a school, could change matters.
Professor James Sample, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra University, told Fox News Digital recusals from every case involving universities justices attended or were linked to would be “untenable,” but recusals could be appropriate in certain circumstances.
A recusal is “entirely subjectively applied by the justice in his or her own case, and, rightly or wrongly — and I’m among those who have criticized the practice — the practice on the Supreme Court is that only the justice in his or her own case, and no one else, makes that determination,” Sample said.
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Justices Neil Gorsuch and Elena Kagan attended Harvard Law School. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attended Harvard for both their undergraduate and law degrees. Kagan served as dean of Harvard Law School.
Ed Whelan, a legal scholar who clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, told Fox News Digital the fact that a justice “went to Harvard or loved University of Alabama football is never going to be a reason for recusal.”
Jackson’s ties to Harvard run perhaps the deepest though. The justice, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, served a six-year term on the Harvard Board of Overseers through 2022, and one of her daughters is a student there and preparing to graduate next year.
Whether Jackson should recuse herself from Harvard litigation that comes before the high court can, “legally speaking,” only be determined by her, Sample said, pointing to the open-ended language in the statute governing judicial recusal.
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Harvard’s latest lawsuit, filed Friday in Massachusetts, alleges the Trump administration’s decision to ban international students at Harvard by stripping them of their visas is unconstitutional. Harvard’s attorneys made an emergency request for a restraining order, and Judge Allison Dale Burroughs, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, granted the order within hours.
The order brought the DHS’s visa operation against Harvard to a temporary halt and opened the door for the government to turn to higher courts for relief, meaning it could be on an expedited path to the Supreme Court.
In 2023, Jackson recused herself from Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, a landmark affirmative action case, while the three other justices affiliated with Harvard did not.
Some legal experts have said that in that instance it was necessary for Jackson to recuse because her tenure on the board, a governing body at the university, was current when the case hit the high court’s docket. But Harvard’s new cases could be a different story.
“The specificity of the particular nexus that connects the justice to the specific interest at stake in litigation, as that gets more specific, as that nexus gets closer and closer, the potential for an appearance of conflict increases,” Sample told Fox News Digital.
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Harvard’s visa case is one of two lawsuits the school has brought against the Trump administration this year. In the second, brought in April, Harvard alleged the Trump administration improperly froze grant money and contracts totaling more than $2 billion. That case is moving at a slower pace than the visa lawsuit.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s decision to recuse herslef in an unrelated case recently made headlines after the high court issued a deadlocked decision, 4-4, leaving in place a block on the creation of a religious charter school in Oklahoma. If Barrett had weighed in, the case could have had the far-reaching effect of allowing or banning public funding for religious schools across the country.
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Barrett did not explain why she recused herself, and judges are not required to. The Associated Press reported that the justice is close friends with law professor Nicole Garnett, who was connected to the case.
Last week, because of recusals, the Supreme Court declined to take up Baker v. Coates, a copyright case involving plagiarism allegations against activist Ta-Nehisi Coates. The high court noted in an order list that five justices opted not to take part in the case and that it therefore lacked a quorum to consider it. The nonpartisan group Fix the Court speculated that four of the five recused themselves because they had published or plan to publish books with Penguin Random House, whose parent company was named in the suit.
Democrats repeatedly urged conservative Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from Trump’s 2020 election subversion case because of Thomas’ wife’s work attempting to reverse the results of the election in favor of Trump, but the justice ignored those calls.
Gorsuch attended Columbia University, another school under fire from the Trump administration and involved in litigation, but he likely would not step away from cases brought by the school solely because he went there.
20 years after Natalee Holloway’s murder, PI has lingering questions about case
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Twenty years have passed since 18-year-old Natalee Holloway of Alabama disappeared on May 30, 2005, during a senior trip to Aruba with her high school friends, but the Holloway family’s private investigator says there are still many unanswered questions in the case.
In 2023, 36-year-old Dutch national Joran van der Sloot, the primary suspect in Holloway’s disappearance and murder, confessed to bashing the teenager’s head with a brick and dumping her body in the ocean after she refused his advances.
“I smash her head in with it completely,” van der Sloot said in an Oct. 3, 2023, interview with federal authorities. “Her face basically, you know, collapses in. Even though it’s dark, I can see her face is collapsed in.”
TJ Ward, a private investigator hired by Holloway’s family in 2005 and again in 2010, does not believe he acted alone.
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“Twenty years, can you believe that?” he told Fox News Digital in an interview this week, marking two decades since the 18-year-old graduate vanished from Carlos’n Charlie’s, a restaurant and nightclub in Oranjestad, Aruba. “She had a bright future. She got a scholarship to go to college for medical school – unbelievable.”
Ward does work for a voice analysis company based in Israel, which paid the private investigator to travel to Aruba after Holloway disappeared. There, he met with her parents as well as the FBI and Aruba authorities. Ward said he used the voice analysis technology on van de Sloot’s existing interviews at the time and determined that he was lying to authorities and to the public.
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“We knew numerous times along the course of the investigation [and] over the last few years that Joran van der Sloot was not telling the truth,” Ward said. “Thereafter, we started locating witnesses and talking and finding information that was going on with the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, and we knew a lot of the information that Van der Sloot was communicating was not true.”
Holloway was last seen leaving Carlos’n Charlie’s with van der Sloot and two other men, brothers Satish and Deepak Kalpoe, on the evening of May 30, two decades ago as of Friday. The three men were considered early suspects in the case.
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Police arrested van der Sloot but eventually released him due to a lack of evidence. Authorities eyed the same suspects again in 2007 after uncovering “new facts” but wound up releasing them once more.
Holloway’s remains have never been found.
TIMELINE OF ALABAMA TEEN NATALEE HOLLOWAY’S DEATH
Five years to the day after Holloway’s disappearance, van der Sloot killed 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a wealthy Peruvian family who crossed paths with the killer on May 30, 2010.
Van der Sloot later confessed to killing her in a fit of anger after she learned about his connection to Holloway’s disappearance. They had met earlier in her father’s casino in Lima, and he beat her to death in his hotel room the following morning.
JORAN VAN DER SLOOT HAS CONFESSED TO KILLING NATALEE HOLLOWAY
In June 2010, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Alabama announced an indictment on extortion and wire fraud charges against Van der Sloot for allegedly trying to sell information about the whereabouts of her body to her family.
“Joran contacted Natalie’s mother and Natalie’s attorney, John Q. Kelly, in New York and said that for $250,000 he would tell Beth exactly what happened to his daughter,” Ward said. “So John Q. Kelly, along with the FBI, arranged to set up a room in the Marriott with the Aruban authorities … and Joran van der Sloot came in and started telling Beth and John Q. Kelly that Natalie was buried under a house in the concrete. Well, they in turn gave him $25,000 cash, on film, and he then departed. He should have been arrested right then and there for the FBI for trying to extort Natalie’s mother.”
PERU ALLOWS NATALEE HOLLOWAY’S KILLER MULTIPLE CONJUGAL VISITS FOR HIS MENTAL HEALTH, REHABILITATION
He then left the United States and later told Beth Holloway and Kelly that he lied.
Van der Sloot is currently serving prison time in Peru for Flores’ murder. He is expected to be released in 2036, at which point Peruvian authorities will extradite him back to the United States to serve his concurrent 20-year sentence for Holloway’s murder.
AUDIO: LISTEN TO JORAN VAN DER SLOOT’S CONFESSION
“You have brutally murdered, in separate incidents, years apart, two young women who refused your sexual advances,” Judge Anna Manasco told van der Sloot in court in 2023, referencing Flores’ murder.
JORAN VAN DER SLOOT’S WHIRLWIND PLEA DEAL: ‘HE WON THE GAME,’ BUT FAMILY ACCEPTS CLOSURE
Manasco called the extortion and fraud charges “heinous” because the killer knew the information he was selling was a lie to make a profit. However, as part of the deal, she said federal prosecutors have agreed not to use his confession against him for any other purposes.
“After 18 years, Natalee’s case has been solved,” Beth Holloway told reporters outside the courthouse immediately after van der Sloot’s 2023 sentencing hearing in Holloway’s death. “Joran van der Sloot is the killer.”
“You are a killer, and I want you to remember that every time that jail door slams.”
In a victim-impact statement during the hearing, Holloway’s mother tore into van der Sloot, saying he taunted her family and caused indescribable pain before turning to him and saying, “You look like hell.”
Ward told Fox News Digital this week that Beth Holloway feels “kind of satisfied with the fact that he is in prison, and now he’s gotten jail time in the United States, which he’s going to have to do concurrent to the charges in Peru of the 20 years in the United States in the federal penitentiary. “
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The private investigator added that he continues to stay in touch with Dave Holloway to this day and that they have not reached “a finalization of what happened.”
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“Even though Joran van der Sloot confessed in 2023, we’re not convinced that he was alone with what transpired with Natalee Halloway,” Ward said. “But again, our conclusion, as of today, Dave Holloway and I are still looking and trying to gather information, which we believe that there’s other people involved with Joran van der Sloot when she was on the beach in May 30, 2005.”
Ward said he does not believe van der Sloot acted alone, and he is still working to determine if others were involved.
Teen arrested for breaking into 121 cars released quickly as police slam ‘broken system’
A Maryland teen who allegedly broke into 121 cars in a single night was released within five hours of his arrest and local authorities say they are furious because the state considers the crimes to be “lower level,” so consequences are not expected.
The unidentified 16-year-old boy was arrested last week by the Laurel Police Department after it received multiple reports of break-ins on May 4.
The crimes took place in Laurel and nearby Howard County. Surveillance footage captured three teens roving around in a stolen car and smashing the windows of vehicles they came across, police said.
“I have little hope there will be further accountability for him due to this broken system,” Laurel Police Chief Russ Hamill told reporters. “Due to this gap in concern for his safety, and the public’s safety.”
AMERICAN CAR THEFTS SURGE AS TEENAGE BANDITS, INTERNATIONAL CRIME RINGS SHIP STOLEN VEHICLES OVERSEAS
Fox News Digital has reached out to the police department.
At the teen suspect’s home, authorities found nearly 20 sets of car keys, credit cards, and other evidence that linked him to the car break-ins, Hamill said.
Since the teen didn’t have a criminal record, the state Department of Juvenile Services characterized the offenses as lower-level crimes and allowed him to be released, Hamill said.
“I would offer well over 100 cases in one night, gives you a pretty good record,” Hamill said. “These were not violent crimes, as if that lessens the impact on those 121 victims.”
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“Yes, five hours after we were at his house, he was released back into the community, back into the environment that allowed him to be out roaming the streets in all of these counties, late at night and in the early morning, doing these crimes to begin with,” he added.
Two other teens have been identified as the suspect’s accomplices, Hamill said, adding that they were expected to be arrested soon.
“People need to be held accountable for this,” he said.
The night after the teen was released, there were reports of 17 car break-ins, Hamill said, though he stopped short of blaming them on the suspect.
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“We’re not going to lay every theft from auto in the region on him and his group, but I will note we had 17 the next night,” Hamill said.
Bernie Kerik, former NYPD commissioner and Trump ally, dies at 69
Bernie Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who was hailed as a hero after 9/11, has died at 69 years old.
His death was announced by FBI Director Kash Patel on Thursday night, who wrote that Kerik “passed away after a private battle with illness.”
“Rest easy, Commissioner. Your watch has ended, but your impact will never fade,” Patel wrote.
Kerik’s rise to national prominence came during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, where he became a steady figure alongside then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
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Kerik worked to coordinate emergency response in the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Center.
His 35-year career has been recognized in more than 100 awards for meritorious and heroic service, including a presidential commendation for heroism by President Ronald Reagan and two Distinguished Service Awards from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Kerik, who served as the NYPD’s top cop from 2000 to 2001, pleaded guilty in 2009 to eight felonies, including tax fraud and lying to the White House while being vetted for the role of Homeland Security chief in 2004.
He spent nearly three years in prison before transitioning to home confinement and eventually supervised release. In 2020, President Donald Trump pardoned Kerik for his past convictions.
Following his release from prison, Kerik was a vocal critic of the criminal justice system and a staunch ally of Trump.
Kerik later worked with Giuliani to investigate claims of election fraud after the 2020 election and was subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riots.
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Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1955, Kerik dropped out of high school but later earned his GED before joining the U.S. Army.
After returning to civilian life, he entered law enforcement and rose through the ranks, eventually leading the city’s Department of Correction. In 2000, he was appointed NYPD commissioner by Giuliani.