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Donald Trump ’s near assassination presents the biggest crisis for the Secret Service in decades. How was a 20-year-old lone shooter able to take up an exposed firing position on an open rooftop not much more than a football field away from the former president? Scrutiny will focus on the Secret Service’s advance work to secure buildings near the Butler, Pa., including one belonging to American Glass Research where Thomas Matthew Crooks was perched when he shot at Trump, reports the Wall Street Journal.  “The reality is there’s just no excuse for the Secret Service to be unable to provide sufficient resources to cover an open rooftop 100 yards away from the site,” said Bill Pickle, a former deputy assistant Secret Service director. “And there’s no way he should’ve got those shots off.” A Secret Service sniper shot and killed Crooks moments after he filed multiple rounds. Crooks used an AR-style rifle that had been purchased by his father. Authorities found explosive devces in the car he had been driving. One spectator was killed and two were critically injured. The gunman acted alone and wasn’t on the FBI’s radar before the shooting, said FBI agent Kevin Rojek. Investigators were trying to determine Crooks' ideology. They were working to gain access to his cellphone and other electronic devices . In advance of events, the Secret Service visits nearby businesses and buildings and works with local law-enforcement officials to monitor and safeguard structures outside the security perimeter. On Saturday, four counter-sniper teams—two from the Secret Service and two from local law enforcement—were deployed at Trump’s rally. Robert Pugar, an off-duty police officer who attended the rally, said that with all the top-notch security technology available today, “how did somebody get 130 yards away without being recognized? “We couldn’t even park within a mile. So how does somebody get on the very first building away from the stage, on the rooftop?” The Secret Service plans to “participate fully” in an independent review of the assassination attempt, Director Kimberly Cheatle said Monday, reports The Hill. Cheatle said the agency would also work with Congress “on any oversight action” committees plan to take. “The Secret Service is working with all involved Federal, state and local agencies to understand what happened, how it happened, and how we can prevent an incident like this from ever taking place again,” Cheatle said. The Secret Service regularly trains for a variety of scenarios, “including the worst-case scenario of an assassination attempt against one of its protectees,” said Charles Marino, who served as a supervisory agent on President Biden’s Secret Service detail during his vice presidency. Donald Mihalek, a retired senior Secret Service agent, called the attempted assassination historic, drawing parallels to the 1912 shooting of Theodore Roosevelt in Milwaukee. Roosevelt, then a former president who was running for a third term in the White House, was shot while heading to a campaign event. He survived. Former Secret Service agent Melanie Burkholder, told Scripps News that, "The question becomes how did this person penetrate a perimeter? Why wasn't that building secure? Why wasn't it swept and maintained secure throughout the event, knowing a rifle could potentially assassinate a former president?" She added, "That's the biggest question. Were the resources requested? Were they denied? Did they go unregarded? What happened? And then how was it communicated to the counter snipers to train on him? How did that get communicated? That is a missing piece ... I think we have basic questions that need to be answered, and someone needs to be held accountable." . She added that the Secret Service relies on local partners to do some of that work. "There's only about 7,500 Secret Service agents, that's not enough to fulfill our mission. So, we rely heavily on local law enforcement, sheriff's departments, military to supplement our security details," she said. Trump allies accused President Biden  and his supporters of using rhetoric that led to the assassination attempt . The Washington Post  quoted Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as saying, "The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs, “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Sen. Tim Scott  (R-SC), another Trump ally, said, "Let’s be clear: This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse. Chris LaCivita, a top adviser to Trump’s campaign, blamed the attack on efforts by Trump’s political enemies to disrupt his candidacy. “[W]ell of course they tried to keep him off the ballot, they tried to put him in jail and now you see this …” LaCivita wrote on X before deleting the post. LaCivita pointed to words Biden used earlier in the week when he told donors about shifting his campaign to attack Trump’s policy record, including his record on abortion  and Project 2025, a document drafted by some former Trump advisers. “So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye,” Biden told donors. LaCivita told the Post   he doesn’t think Biden “or anyone else” should use words like that.

Detectives in Columbus, Ohio, were investigating the death of a woman who was fatally struck by her own vehicle while trying to stop a carjacking that occurred with her 6-year-old son in the car. Alexa Stakley, 29, was carjacked last Thursday while picking up her son at the home of a babysitter after a shift waiting tables. After putting the sleeping boy inside her Honda SUV, Stakley walked back toward the babysitter’s house to retrieve an item, and saw her car moving. She was seen “running toward her Honda and was heard screaming for her child,” police said, the New York Times reports. Moments later, Stakley was struck by the vehicle, suffering a fatal wound to the head. Two men were seen running away from the area, abandoning the vehicle nearby. Police officers found the child inside the car unharmed. Carjackings have been called “an important public safety threat” by the Department of Justice , which has established 11 task forces to combat the crime in areas of particular concern, like Philadelphia, Chicago and Tampa, Fla. Carjacking has been challenging to track because police departments do not report that type of crime in a consistent manner, said criminologist Alex Piquero pf the University of Miami, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Carjackings soared in many cities during the pandemic. Since then, they have declined in some cities, like Washington, D.C., but climbed in others, like Milwaukee. The FBI says 25,400 carjackings were reported in 2022, an 8.1 percent increase over the year before. Piquero said that data from cities that make crime data available in real time suggests carjackings have become less common in much of the U.S. in the past two years. Push-button ignitions have made it easier for criminals to start vehicles without snatching keys from a driver. Pandemic-era supply chain disruptions made used cars more valuable. Because many of the carjackers who have been arrested in recent years are juveniles, their punishments are often lax and some have gone on to commit new crimes. In Milwaukee, hosting the Republican National Convention this week, reported carjackings have increased 29 percent since 2019. Police chief Jeffrey Norman urged residents and the tens of thousands of people who will be attending the convention starting Monday to be on alert.

The second phase of the National Rifle Association corruption trial in New York, where a judge will determine whether the group's former leadership should face any non-monetary penalties for misspending the prominent gun rights organization’s money, is set to begin Monday. A jury found that longtime NRA head Wayne LaPierre squandered millions of dollars of the organization’s money to fund his lavish lifestyle. He was ordered to pay the organization $4.35 million in damages.  Now, Judge Joel Cohen will decide whether any other relief against LaPierre, the NRA and another executive should be awarded, reports The Hill.   New York Attorney General Letitia James, who sued the NRA and tits op leadership in 2020, has asked the judge to install an independent monitor who would oversee the organization’s administration of its charitable assets. James also wants to bar LaPierre from serving in leadership positions at any New York charitable organization and to ban the NRA and general counsel John Frazer from collecting funds from any charitable organizations in the state.  A third executive, ex-chief financial officer Woody Phillips, was found liable for violating the law and ordered to pay $2 million but settled with the attorney general’s office, allowing him to dodge the trial’s second phase. He was banned for 10 years from managing money for any New York nonprofit in a deal that was made public last week. “New Yorkers deserve to know that when they support a not-for-profit, those donations are being used to advance its mission, not squandered on lavish perks for staff or cronies,” James said. In court filings, the NRA warned that such penalties could imperil the gun rights organization’s future, describing the attorney general’s request as “expensive” and “redundant.” The NRA has struggled with shrinking membership and financial woes, including an attempt at bankruptcy in 2021. The group’s membership fell to 3.8 million by the end of 2023, some 1.35 million down from its 2018 peak.

Federal Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents case of former President Trump on Monday, siding with defense lawyers who said the special counsel who filed the charges was illegally appointed. The decision brings a stunning and abrupt conclusion to a criminal case that was widely regarded as the most perilous of all the legal threats that the Republican former president confronted, reports the Associated Press. Trump faced dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., and obstructing FBI efforts to get them back. Defense lawyers asserted that special counsel Jack Smith had been illegally appointed under the Constitution’s Appointments Clause and that his office was improperly funded by the Justice Department. Cannon, whose handling of the case had drawn scrutiny since before the charges were filed, said, “The Framers gave Congress a pivotal role in the appointment of principal and inferior officers. That role cannot be usurped by the Executive Branch or diffused elsewhere — whether in this case or in another case, whether in times of heightened national need or not.” Smith’s team vigorously contested the argument during hearings before Cannon last month and told Cannon that even if ruled in the defense team’s favor, the proper correction would not be to dismiss the entire case.

A trend toward a less generous executive has emerged in U.S. clemency history. So far, President Biden has been no exception. Biden has utilized the unilateral clemency authority of the executive branch in mass pardons that could potentially affect thousands, Axios reports. Beyond sweeping proclamations Biden has used his pardon power more sparingly than his modern predecessors on ordinary pardon cases, according to Justice Department data. The Office of the Pardon Attorney's statistics do not record clemency granted through proclamations or executive orders. Biden used them to pardon prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession and veterans convicted and forced out of the milit because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. Experts point to structural and political reasons for the shift toward a generally more restrained approach to clemency petitions. Throughout U.S. history, the system has become deeply entangled in bureaucratic process, leading to a backlog of ordinary petitions, said Mark Osler, a legal scholar who advocates for sentencing and clemency reform. What "Biden seems to be stuck with is a system of analysis that doesn't work and hasn't worked for his predecessors either," Osler said. He pointed to a series of seven valves of review a petition must pass through — a pipeline Osler said lengthened under the Biden administration with additional input from the Domestic Policy Council. Frank Bowman, a legal historian who has written extensively about the pardon power, cited the "nasty politics of our era" as one driving factor. “Presidents have become hyper-cautious about making sure that they don't create the grist for the opposition mill," Bowman said. President Obama granted the most acts of clemency — 1,927 pardons and commutations combined — dating back to Harry Truman. That was just over 5% of the petitions Obama received. As of May 2024, Biden had formally granted 153 petitions for clemency — that's 1.6% percent of all requests. Biden's clemency record is likely far from closed — whether he wins the 2024 election or not. DOJ data show that every president between Ford and Trump used his clemency power during his final days in office. Obama issued 1,185 clemency actions in just over three months in 2017 before he left office. That's just over 61% of all of the petitions he approved. Presidents don't always align pardons with their departures: Reagan issued around 8% of his pardons during his final three and a half months in the White House, granting over half of his pardons and commutations in his first four years.

Until recently, federal appellate courts limited how far cities could go to clear homeless encampments. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that they could remove homeless residents sleeping outdoors, a decision that has already begun to reshape how they deal with homelessness, reports the New York Times. Three days after the decision, police in Folsom, Calif., announced they would start citing recalcitrant illegal campers, though they also would team up with nonprofits to provide more homeless outreach. In the two weeks since the Supreme Court decided that the city of Grants Pass, Ore., could penalize sleeping and camping in public places, city leaders across the U.S. have responded by revising local ordinances and preparing to take a harder line on homeless encampments. Nowhere has the crisis been more severe than in Western states, where tent communities have proliferated since the pandemic. Some cities are particularly eager to get moving. “I’m warming up the bulldozer,” said Mayor R. Rex Parris of Lancaster, Calif., 62 miles north of Los Angeles. “I want the tents away from the residential areas and the shopping centers and the freeways.” Shelter populations increased last year in the Antelope Valley, which includes Lancaster, but unsheltered homelessness rose more, with more than 5,500 people sleeping unhoused in a stretch of high desert prone to extreme cold and heat. “I get that some of these people have fallen on hard times,” the mayor said, “and we have a state-of-the-art shelter with beds available. But the population we’re talking about doesn’t want a bed.” In San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed has faced a tough fight for re-election, businesses have waged a furious campaign to eliminate homeless encampments even as civil liberties groups have sued the city over enforcement. “My hope is that we can clear them all,” Breed said. She has said that homeless people who refuse services are partly to blame for the city’s economic struggles downtown. Some communities, like Grants Pass itself, have hit legal snags. Homeless people in Grants Pass continue to seek refuge in dozens of tents spread across the city’s parks. A court injunction remains in place for the time being, although officials in the community of 40,000 people expect it to lift soon.

A federal bankruptcy court judge tossed Rudy Giuliani's Chapter 11 bankruptcy case, paving the way for two Georgia election workers Giuliani defamed to collect their $148 million judgment against him. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane wrote that dropping the case and putting a one-year ban on refiling is “in the best interest of creditors.” Lane panned Giuliani for his “troubling” trend of submitting incomplete financial reports to the court, reports Courthouse News Service. “The lack of financial transparency is particularly troubling given concerns that Mr. Giuliani has engaged in self-dealing and that he has potential conflicts of interest that would hamper the administration of his bankruptcy case,” Lane said. The judge said that getting an accurate peek into Giuliani’s finances has proven to be an “elusive goal” throughout the six-month proceedings. “The debtor has not even retained an accountant, which is the most rudimentary of steps,” Lane wrote. The ruling will allow Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the mother-daughter pair of Georgia election workers who won a defamation suit against Giuliani last year, to pursue that award. The bankruptcy previously kept the duo from collecting the judgment and froze other lawsuits Giuliani faces. Those proceedings can be resumed now. A federal judge in Washington D.C. ruled that Giuliani falsely accused them of mishandling ballots to steal the 2020 election for President Biden, claims parroted by his longtime ally and former client Donald Trump.  Giuliani was ordered to pay the $148 million to Freeman and Moss, who said they were subjected to a relentless wave of hateful, violent and racist harassment by Trump supporters. The former New York City mayor filed for bankruptcy in late 2023, citing nearly $153 million in liabilities that included the trial judgment, unpaid taxes and legal fees.

An 18-year-old New Jersey man allegedly en route to join a paramilitary force in Ukraine was arrested at an airport after sharing with an undercover law enforcement operative a plan to destroy an electrical substation as part of his white supremacist ideology, according to federal prosecutors. Andrew Takhistov instructed the officer to destroy a New Jersey energy facility with Molotov cocktails while he was overseas, detailing how to evade surveillance cameras and use discreet parking locations, USA Today reports. He spent months discussing steps to achieve "white domination" and encouraged violence against ethnic and religious minorities. Takhistov was allegedly planning to join the Russian Volunteer Corps, a Russian militia fighting for Ukraine. “Imagine the chaos and number of life-threatening emergencies if a large population of people in New Jersey lost power in the middle of the current heat wave,” said FBI agent James Dennehy . The foiled plot in New Jersey is the latest to sweep the nation amid concerns about attacks on U.S. power grids. Several states, including Florida, Oregon and the Carolinas have faced targets on electric infrastructure in recent years. In May, a Maryland woman pleaded guilty to plotting to destroy the Baltimore power grid as part of a white supremacist ideology that promotes government collapse. In the New Jersey case, court documents detail months of messages Takhistov sent glorifying past violence against racial and religious minorities. He praised the murder of George Floyd because it got "more white people to wake up." He also glorified mass shooters, including those that attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The first messages were sent around January 2023, when Takhistov asked others on the platform about how to configure his body armor vests to hold the largest amount of ammunition, and later shared manuals on constructing homemade firearms. . Takhistov was arrested Wednesday at Newark Liberty International Airport as he was planning to travel Ukraine via Paris.

A judge rejected a lawsuit against a GOP Arizona ballot referral that would make it a state crime for migrants to cross the southern border and empower local police officers to arrest them, clearing it to go before voters in November, the Arizona Mirror reports. Late Friday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Minder threw out the legal challenge against the “Secure the Border Act” that sought to keep it off the ballot, writing that the act complies with the Arizona Constitution’s single subject rule. Arizona Republicans have repeatedly touted the “Secure the Border Act,” as a solution in an election year when the border has risen to the top of voter concerns for the first time in five years.  Arizona ballot measures can only be challenged on their form before voters consider them in an election. A violation of the single-subject rule was among the few legal avenues to prevent the act from making it onto the ballot. Challenges based on the act’s content can’t be launched until after voters have had a say.  That includes a lawsuit over the act’s lack of allocated funding. The Arizona Constitution requires ballot proposals that are likely to incur state spending to make up for that cost. Despite law enforcement and government officials warning of just that during the act’s passage through the legislature, GOP lawmakers refused to account for it. Alejandra Gomez of a Latino advocacy group denounced the act as “stop and frisk on steroids” and said Minder’s ruling sets a “dangerous” precedent. She warned that if the act, titled Prop. 314, makes it onto the November ballot, "many Arizonans will be disproportionately targeted and subjected to suspicion and persecution. This discriminatory legislation will lead to over-policing in every community across our state ... Arizonans, even those hundreds of miles from the border, will be under the intense scrutiny of law enforcement. A routine traffic stop could quickly escalate into an inquiry about citizenship status and possible detainment based solely on the color of your skin and your last name.” Critics have compared the act to SB1070, Arizona’s notorious “show me your papers law” that led to rampant racial profiling after it empowered local police officers to question the citizenship status of Arizonans during routine traffic stops.

Parents in the village of Mount Horeb, Wi., got a terrifying alert in May: There was an active shooter at their children's school. Police were able to stop the shooting before it started. They fatally shot an armed boy outside the school, and no one else was injured. The close call is among dozens of "active shooter incidents." The FBI says that though such episodes declined slightly in 2023 from the previous year, more people were killed by active shooters than in 2022, reports USA Today. There were 48 active shooter incidents in the U.S. in 2023, down from 50 in 2022. Active shooters killed 105 people in 2023, compared to 100 such killings in 2022. California experienced the most active shootings in the U.S., followed by Texas. The FBI defines an active shooter is defined as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.," Twenty-six states reported active shootings last year. Eight were reported in California , with 47 people killed. Maine had the highest number of casualties in its one incident last year; 18 people were killed and 13 others were injured. The FBI's list of active shootings does not involve self-defense, gang violence, drug-related violence, residential or domestic disputes or hostages. The FBI found that 28 of the 48 active shootings occurred in open spaces such as urban spaces or parks. More people were killed in active shootings that occurred in commerce spaces, such as malls, compared to any other location. About 130 people were killed or wounded in 14 shootings that took place in a commerce space in 2023. The definition of mass shootings varies and other groups have death counts that veer wildly from the FBI's. The agency said active shooter incidents killed 103 people in 2021. The independent Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as involving four or more victims, found that 706 people were killed in such attacks in 2021.

A federal judge reined in Baton Rouge, La.'s use of police strip searches by police, saying that performing such searches on people who haven’t been arrested is “unconstitutional on its face.” U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick’s order came in suits alleging police abuses, including severe beatings and invasive searches of people detained at an obscure warehouse called the “Brave Cave.” The lawsuits led to an ongoing federal civil rights investigation. The search policy allowed officers to perform strip searches on “non-arrestees based on individualized articulable reasonable suspicion” that they might be armed or carrying illegal material, reports the Associated Press. Citing Supreme Court precedent, Dick said a higher standard — probable cause — is needed for a search involving more than a pat-down or frisk. “In no way does the Court wish to reduce the tools available to police officers to achieve this safety,” Dick wrote. “However, these tools must be used and applied in a constitutional manner.” After the first of the abuse complaints was filed last year, the city ordered the warehouse facility closed and the police department disbanded its street crimes unit. One police officer resigned and was arrested on a simple battery charge. Last month, four officers associated with the now-disbanded unit were indicted on charges alleging that they covered up the beating of a suspect in custody.