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      What the ‘Rust’ Trial Says About the Case Against Alec Baldwin

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      The trial of the “Rust” armorer offered a preview of the case against Mr. Baldwin, who is set to stand trial on an involuntary manslaughter charge in July.The trial of the armorer on the film “Rust,” who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter this week for putting live ammunition into a gun that went off on the set and killed the cinematographer, offered a preview of the criminal case prosecutors are building against Alec Baldwin, who was handling the gun when it fired.A grand jury indicted Mr. Baldwin in January on a charge of involuntary manslaughter, which carries up to 18 months in prison. He pleaded not guilty; his trial is set for July.Mr. Baldwin was practicing drawing an old-fashioned revolver when the gun fired on Oct. 21, 2021, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounding its director. He has denied responsibility from the beginning, telling investigators that he had been told the gun did not contain live ammunition, and noting that live ammunition was supposed to be banned on the set. He also denied pulling the trigger, saying that the gun went off after he pulled its hammer back and released it; a forensic analysis commissioned by prosecutors found that he must have pulled the trigger for it to go off.Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Baldwin failed to observe firearms safety measures.“Alec Baldwin’s conduct and his lack of gun safety inside that church on that day is something that he’s going to have to answer for,” Kari T. Morrissey, the lead prosecutor in the case, said during the closing arguments in the trial of the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. “That’ll be with another jury on another day.”Some of the evidence and testimony presented at the trial of Ms. Gutierrez-Reed could help Mr. Baldwin’s case; other things that emerged in court could undermine it. Here’s a look at evidence that could play a role at his trial.Jurors at Hannah Gutierrez-Reed’s trial watched video of Mr. Baldwin shooting blanks from a revolver on the set of “Rust.”Gabriela Campos/Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesWe 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

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      Chinese National Accused of Stealing AI Secrets From Google

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      Linwei Ding, a Chinese national, was arrested in California and accused of uploading hundreds of files to the cloud.A Chinese citizen who recently quit his job as a software engineer for Google in California has been charged with trying to transfer artificial intelligence technology to a Beijing-based company that paid him secretly, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday.Prosecutors accused Linwei Ding, who was part of the team that designs and maintains Google’s vast A.I. supercomputer data system, of stealing information about the “architecture and functionality” of the system, and of pilfering software used to “orchestrate” supercomputers “at the cutting edge of machine learning and A.I. technology.”From May 2022 to May 2023, Mr. Ding, also known as Leon, uploaded 500 files, many containing trade secrets, from his Google-issued laptop to the cloud by using a multistep scheme that allowed him to “evade immediate detection,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California.Mr. Ding was arrested on Wednesday morning at his home in Newark, Calif., not far from Google’s sprawling main campus in Mountain View, officials said.Starting in June 2022, Mr. Ding was paid $14,800 per month — plus a bonus and company stock — by a China-based technology company, without telling his supervisors at Google, according to the indictment. He is also accused of working with another company in China.Mr. Ding openly sought funding for a new A.I. start-up company he had incorporated at an investor conference in Beijing in November, boasting that “we have experience with Google’s 10,000-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it,” prosecutors said in the indictment, which was unsealed in San Francisco federal court.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

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      Ex-FBI Informant, Accused of Biden Lies, Said He Had Russian Contacts

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      Federal prosecutors portrayed the former informant, Alexander Smirnov, 43, as a serial liar incapable of telling the truth about even the most basic details of his own life.A former F.B.I. informant accused of making false bribery claims about President Biden and his son Hunter — which were widely publicized by Republicans — claimed to have been fed information by Russian intelligence, according to a court filing on Tuesday.In the memo, prosecutors portrayed the former informant, Alexander Smirnov, 43, as a serial liar incapable of telling the truth about even the most basic details of his own life. But Mr. Smirnov told federal investigators that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.Those disclosures, including Mr. Smirnov’s unverifiable claim that he met with Russian intelligence officials as recently as three months ago, made him a flight risk and endangered national security, Justice Department officials said. Mr. Smirnov had been held in custody in Las Vegas, where he has lived since 2022, since his arrest last week.He was released from custody on Tuesday on a personal recognizance bond after a detention hearing, said his lawyers, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld.Prosecutors did not specify which story Russian intelligence is said to have been fed to Mr. Smirnov, an Israeli citizen. But they suggested they could not believe anything he said. And they had many tales to choose from.The memo describes Mr. Smirnov as a human hall of mirrors: He fed the F.B.I. bogus information about the Bidens and misled prosecutors about his wealth, estimated at $6 million, while telling them he worked in the security business, even though the government could find no proof that was true.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

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      Special Counsel in Biden Documents Case Is Expected to Release Report Soon

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      Most of the work by Robert K. Hur appears to have wrapped up after President Biden sat down with investigators in October, according to people in Mr. Biden’s orbit.Robert K. Hur, the special counsel investigating President Biden’s mishandling of documents retained from his vice presidency, is expected to release his report soon, according to people with knowledge of the situation.The imminent release of the report suggests that Mr. Hur is nearing the end of an investigation that began just over a year ago.It is expected to criticize Mr. Biden and his aides for sloppy record-keeping and storage, according to people in Mr. Biden’s orbit, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. But those people have long believed he will not be charged with any crime, judging from the lines of inquiry prosecutors have pursued in their interviews with witnesses and the president’s cooperation with investigators.Most of Mr. Hur’s work was completed in the final days of 2023, and appears to have wrapped up after Mr. Biden sat down with investigators in October, those people said. He also conducted interviews with several longtime advisers in the Biden administration, including the former chief of staff Ron Klain, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Steve Ricchetti, his counselor.Former President Donald J. Trump, who was charged over the summer with obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim classified materials at his resort in Florida, is likely to seize on the report to downplay his own legal woes — and to claim the Justice Department has targeted him politically while letting Mr. Biden escape punishment.But Mr. Hur’s investigation does not appear to be comparable in scope or seriousness to Mr. Trump’s retention of sensitive government documents.Mr. Biden’s lawyers immediately notified the National Archives and Records Administration upon discovering a cache of classified documents in late 2022 when they were closing an office in Washington he occupied after leaving the vice presidency in 2017. They have since cooperated with the Justice Department, and gave the F.B.I. access to his house in Wilmington, Del., where they discovered more material.Mr. Trump, by contrast, repeatedly resisted requests from the National Archives, which is responsible for storing sensitive White House documents, initially turned over only a portion of what he had taken when he left office in January 2021. He failed to fully respond to a subpoena to return the rest and ultimately was subjected to a search of his home and office by F.B.I. agents with a warrant.Last January, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Mr. Hur, a veteran prosecutor who worked in the Trump administration, to examine “the possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records discovered” after Mr. Biden left the Obama administration.With the exception of President Barack Obama, every occupant of the Oval Office since Watergate has confronted a special prosecutor scrutinizing him or members of his staff, sometimes for relatively narrow matters but at other times for issues that have mushroomed into the threat of impeachment. More

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      Pelosi Wants F.B.I. to Investigate Pro-Palestinian Protesters

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      The former House speaker suggested without offering evidence that some protesters calling for a cease-fire in Gaza had financial ties to Russia and Vladimir V. Putin.Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and the former House speaker, on Sunday called for the F.B.I. to investigate protesters demanding a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, suggesting without evidence that some activists may have ties to Russia and President Vladimir V. Putin.“For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message,” Ms. Pelosi said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see. Same thing with Ukraine. It’s about Putin’s message. I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia.”When pressed on whether she believed some of the demonstrators were “Russian plants,” Ms. Pelosi said: “Seeds or plants. I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the F.B.I. to investigate that.”Ms. Pelosi, who was first elected speaker in 2007 and again in 2019, led House Democrats for 20 years before stepping aside for Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader. Still, she remains influential among congressional Democrats. Her remarks appear to be the first time a prominent U.S. politician has publicly suggested Russia may be backing cease-fire protests to help foment division among Democrats.The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned Ms. Pelosi’s comments as “an unsubstantiated smear” and “downright authoritarian.”“Her comments once again show the negative impact of decades of dehumanization of the Palestinian people by those supporting Israeli apartheid,” Nihad Awad, the group’s national executive director, said in a statement. “Instead of baselessly smearing those Americans as Russian collaborators, former House Speaker Pelosi and other political leaders should respect the will of the American people by calling for an end to the Netanyahu government’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza.”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?  More

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      Authorities Investigate Threats to Democratic Lawmakers

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      The inquiry by the Capitol Police and the F.B.I. came after a website released a recording that it said captured Roger J. Stone Jr. in 2020 expressing a desire for the deaths of two Trump critics.The Capitol Police and the F.B.I. are investigating remarks reported to have been made by Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime Republican operative and informal adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, in which he expressed a desire for the deaths of two Democratic lawmakers in the weeks before the 2020 election, a government official familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.The investigation into Mr. Stone was opened shortly after the website Mediaite released an audio recording in which someone sounding like him can be heard discussing Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York and Representative Eric Swalwell of California, who are among Mr. Trump’s most vocal congressional critics.“It’s time to do it,” the speaker can be heard saying. “Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Swalwell or Nadler has to die before the election. They need to get the message.”An article by Mediaite accompanying the recording claimed that Mr. Stone made the remarks to an associate, Salvatore Greco, a former New York City policeman, at a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. But the recording itself does not make clear whom the speaker was addressing.Mr. Stone has denied making the comments, calling the recording “a deep fake.” He repeated that denial on Tuesday, claiming that “forensic examinations” had shown the recording to be fake. He did not respond to a question about the F.B.I. and Capitol Police investigation.Both agencies declined to comment on the inquiry.Mr. Greco, who was dismissed from the Police Department in 2022 after an internal inquiry into his relationship with Mr. Stone, responded to the initial release of the recording on Friday by calling it “political fodder.” Neither he nor his lawyer responded on Tuesday to a message seeking comment about the investigation.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?  More

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      Court Papers Offer Glimpse of Trump’s Defense in Classified Documents Case

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      The former president’s lawyers may question whether the documents he took from the White House were related to national defense and whether the country’s security was damaged.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump on Friday told the federal judge overseeing his prosecution on charges of mishandling classified documents that they intended to ask the government for new information, including assessments of any damage to national security.The lawyers also told the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, that they planned to ask prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, for additional information about how the documents at issue were related to national defense — a requirement of the Espionage Act, one of the statutes that Mr. Trump has been accused of violating. In addition, they said they wanted “tracking information” concerning the classified records.Mr. Trump’s legal team is poised to make the requests on Tuesday, when it files motions asking for additional discovery evidence. This is a standard part of the pretrial process in which the defense seeks to get as much information about the case out of the government as it can. Discovery motions often indicate how lawyers intend to attack charges before a trial begins or how they plan to defend against them once the case goes in front of a jury.The papers filed on Friday suggest Mr. Trump may be planning to attack the multiple Espionage Act counts he is facing by, among other things, questioning whether the documents he took from the White House were actually related to national defense. They also suggest he may seek to downplay how damaging their removal from the White House was to the country’s security.The papers themselves were not discovery motions, but rather a more simple request to use more pages than normal when the motions are due next week. But they did mention the broad categories of information that Mr. Trump’s legal team will seek.Mr. Smith’s team filed its own set of court papers on Friday, telling Judge Cannon that they intended to call several F.B.I. agents to testify at trial concerning data extracted from cellphones and other devices seized from Mr. Trump’s two co-defendants in the case. They are Walt Nauta, a personal aide who served the former president at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, and Carlos De Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago’s property manager.Some of the data, the papers said, will be used to track for the jury the movements of Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira during key moments of the investigation. Both men have been charged along with Mr. Trump in a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to retrieve the classified materials.Mr. Smith also told Judge Cannon about some expert witnesses who will testify about classified material, but that section of the filing was submitted under seal.Until the two sets of papers were filed on Friday, the classified documents case has been relatively quiet in recent weeks and attention has been focused on the other case Mr. Smith has brought against Mr. Trump — one accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. Last week, Mr. Trump asked a federal appeals court in Washington to toss out the election interference charges, arguing that he was immune to them because they arose from actions he took while in office.The documents case has largely been bogged down in arguments involving a host of classified materials discovered or generated during the investigation that Mr. Smith’s prosecutors believe Mr. Trump should not have access to as part of the discovery process. Mr. Trump’s lawyers responded with a highly unusual request to see a motion that prosecutors filed under seal to Judge Cannon explaining their reasons for keeping that material from Mr. Trump.The case is headed toward an inflection point on March 1, when Judge Cannon has scheduled a hearing in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., to discuss when the trial will begin. It is currently set to start on May 20, but late last year Judge Cannon expressed concern that the proceeding might “collide” with the election interference trial, which is set to begin in early March in Washington but could well be delayed.Finding time for all four of Mr. Trump’s criminal trials — there are two more, in New York City and Atlanta — has been a logistical headache. The proceedings need to be scheduled not only in relation to each other, but also against the backdrop of an increasingly busy presidential campaign in which Mr. Trump is the current front-runner to become the Republican nominee.Mr. Trump has consistently sought to delay the trials, hoping he can postpone them until after the election is decided. If he can pull that off and win the race, he could seek to have the federal charges against him dropped and could try to complicate the efforts of local prosecutors to bring him to trial while he is in office. More

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      In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

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      Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.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?  More