A 47-year-old woman and a 7-year-old boy drowned after the private boat capsized in July 2022. Prosecutors said the boat was being operated recklessly.Two New Jersey men who owned and operated a 24-foot boat that capsized in the Hudson River, killing two people, including a 7-year-old boy, were arrested and charged on Thursday with misconduct and neglect that prosecutors say caused the deaths.The men, Richard Cruz and Jaime Pinilla Gomez, took paying customers on boat excursions on the vessel despite not having the required credentials and certifications, according to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. Mr. Cruz charged about $200 per hour for the tours, prosecutors said.When the boat capsized, prosecutors said, it had more people on board than was allowed, and was traveling “at a high rate of speed” on a day with high winds and heavy seas.The vessel, called “Stimulus Money,” was carrying 13 people after a trip around the Statue of Liberty on July 12, 2022, when it overturned, throwing all the passengers overboard, according to a criminal complaint. Lindelia Vasquez, 47, and Julian Vasquez, 7, were trapped underneath the boat and drowned, the complaint said. Several others, including a 51-year-old woman, were hospitalized.Lindelia Vasquez, in a family photo.Family photoDamian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement on Thursday that federal regulations and safety protocols exist to protect passengers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The coronavirus has changed everything. Source: Elections – nytimes.com More

A president’scabinet is full of great character witnesses. The president chose them.They said yes. They worked togetherclosely. A president’s cabinet is fullof great character witnesses.The president chose them. They said yes. They worked together closely. These cabinet-level appointeessaw Donald Trump up close. And theydecided they couldn’t stand by him. These cabinet-level appointees saw Donald Trump […] More

The US special counsel who is investigating Donald Trump obtained a search warrant for the former president’s Twitter account, and the social media platform delayed complying, a court filing on Wednesday showed.The delay in compliance prompted a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.The filing says the team of US special counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter, which recently rebranded to X, to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant.The filing says prosecutors got the search warrant after a court “found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses”. The court found that disclosing the warrant could risk that Trump would “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior”, according to the filing.It’s unclear what information Smith may have sought from Trump’s Twitter account. Possibilities include data about when and where the posts were written, their engagement and the identities of other accounts that reposted Trump’s content.Twitter objected to the non-disclosure agreement, saying four days after the compliance deadline that it would not produce any of the account information, according to the ruling. The judges wrote that Twitter “did not question the validity of the search warrant” but argued that the non-disclosure agreement was a violation of the first amendment and wanted the court to assess the legality of the agreement before it handed any information over.The warrant ordered Twitter to provide the records by 27 January. A judge found Twitter to be in contempt after a court hearing on 7 February, but gave the company an opportunity to hand over the documents by 5pm that evening. Twitter, however, only turned over some records that day. It didn’t fully comply with the order until 9 February, the ruling says. The delay in compliance prompted the court to Twitter in contempt, and on Wednesday, the federal court in Washington upheld that decision.Smith has charged Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in an attempt to stay in power in a criminal indictment unsealed last week.Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.Trump says he is innocent and has portrayed the investigation as politically motivated. His legal team has indicated it will argue that Trump was relying on the advice of lawyers around him in 2020 and had the right to challenge an election he believed was rigged.Trump had been a prolific user of Twitter, both before and during his presidency. Amassing more than 88 million followers, he used the platform to attack opponents, promote racist ideology, encourage violence against journalists, and even threaten nuclear war.Trump was banned from the platform following the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol for inciting violence.Trump’s account was reinstated in November 2022, following Tesla billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform. The decision was condemned by online safety and civil rights advocates who say Trump’s online presence has created risks of real-world violence.Trump has yet to tweet after being allowed back on to Twitter, preferring his own platform, Truth Social. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the former president posted to Truth Social on Wednesday that the Justice Department “secretly attacked” his Twitter account, and he characterized the investigation as an attempt to “infringe” on his bid to reclaim the White House in 2024.Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

The far-right political agitator James O’Keefe and the Project Veritas organization he once led have admitted that they had “no evidence” backing up widely spread claims of voter fraud at a Pennsylvania post office during the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden.O’Keefe and Project Veritas made that admission Monday after settling a lawsuit filed against them by Robert Weisenbach, the postmaster of Erie, Pennsylvania, in state court, concluding one of the more prominent legal battles spurred by Republican lies that Donald Trump was defrauded out of another term in the White House.“Neither Mr Weisenbach nor any other [postal] employee in Erie, Pennsylvania, engaged in election fraud or any other wrongdoing related to mail-in ballots,” O’Keefe said in a statement published Monday on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “I am aware of no evidence or other allegation that election fraud occurred in the Erie post office during the 2020 presidential election.”Claims by an Erie mail carrier and Trump supporter named Richard Hopkins thrust his local post office into the center of rightwing conspiracy theories seeking to delegitimize Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Hopkins maintained in a signed affidavit that he had overheard Weisenbach discuss illicitly backdating mail-in ballots, which overwhelmingly favored Biden after Trump urged his supporters to vote in person instead despite vaccines meant to limit the spread of Covid-19 still not being widely available at the time.But Hopkins recanted his sworn allegations after Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator who was then leader of the chamber’s judiciary committee, cited them to support his calls for a federal investigation into ballot tampering.Hopkins sought to cast doubt on his retraction soon after, saying in a YouTube video: “I did not recant my statements.” But Monday, Hopkins confirmed he was wrong to have besmirched Weisenbach.“I only heard a fragment of the conversation [involving] Weisenbach and reached the conclusion that the conversation was related to nefarious behavior,” Hopkins said in a statement released along with O’Keefe’s. “As I have now learned, I was wrong. Mr Weisenbach was not involved in any inappropriate behavior concerning the 2020 presidential election.”Hopkins’s statement alluded to the results of a US post office inspector general’s investigation which cleared Weisenbach and his colleagues of wrongdoing. The statement also apologized to Weisenbach, his family and his post office employees, along with anyone who was “negatively” affected by Hopkins’s falsehoods. “I implore everyone … to leave the Weisenbach family alone and allow them to return to their normal, peaceful lives,” Hopkins’s statement added.Neither Project Veritas nor Weisenbach’s attorney, David Houck, could immediately be reached for comment. But Houck confirmed to NBC News that Monday’s statements from O’Keefe and Hopkins came after they had agreed to settle Weisenbach’s lawsuit.Houck did not elaborate on any other terms of the settlement.“The only comment I’m allowed to make about it is that the case was filed, litigated, and settled to the satisfaction of the parties,” Houck said to NBC.O’Keefe’s and Hopkins’s statements Monday inspired heaps of schadenfreude in some quarters. A comment on X from Bill Grueskin, who spent six years as academic dean of the prestigious Columbia Journalism school, summarized the general reaction.“Sorry to take down a couple of your heroes, but it appears that James O’Keefe and Project Veritas got something wrong,” Grueskin wrote while sharing screencaptures of Monday’s mea culpas.Despite Trump supporters’ claims to the contrary, election integrity experts consider the 2020 race to be the most secure ever. In a rare instance of an improperly reported voting result from the 2020 election, a Virginia county confirmed in January that Trump had been awarded 2,237 ballots more than he should have, and Biden was short changed nearly 1,650.O’Keefe and Project Veritas earned notoriety for video stings – often involving hidden cameras – which targeted progressives. One of his more prominent stings took down the community activism group Acorn, whom O’Keefe duped by posing as a pimp aspiring to establish a brothel.Another aimed at US senator Mary Landrieu during her final term in office saw O’Keefe and three associates plead guilty in 2010 to entering federal property under false pretenses. O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation and a fine of $1,500.O’Keefe resigned from Project Veritas in February 2023 after the group’s governing board found that he had “spent an excessive amount of donor funds in the [previous] three years on personal luxuries” and filed a civil complaint against him.In September, Project Veritas suspended its operations and laid off most of its employees. Then, Hannah Giles resigned as chief executive of Project Veritas in December, alleging that “illegality” and “financial improprieties” in the past had left the nonprofit “an unsalvageable mess”. More