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      U.S. Charges Ex-Syrian Prison Official With Torture

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      The indictment was the second time in a week that the Justice Department announced that it had charged top Syrian officials with human rights abuses.A federal grand jury in Los Angeles charged a former Syrian government official on Thursday with torturing political dissidents at a notorious prison in Damascus.The former official, Samir Ousman al-Sheikh, 72, ran Adra prison, according to federal prosecutors, where he was personally involved in torturing inmates in a bid to stifle opposition to its recently deposed authoritarian president, Bashar al-Assad.Prosecutors said Mr. al-Sheikh ordered prisoners to be taken to a part of the prison known as the “punishment wing,” where they were beaten while hanging from the ceiling. Guards would forcibly fold bodies in half, resulting in terrible pain and fractured spines.The indictment was the second time in a week that the Justice Department announced that it had charged top Syrian officials with human rights abuses. The moves underscore its efforts to hold to account the top reaches of the government for a brutal system of detention and torture that flourished under Mr. al-Assad.The charges against Mr. al-Sheikh on Thursday add to earlier charges in July that accused him of attempted naturalization fraud in his effort to seek U.S. citizenship, according to a criminal complaint. He was arrested attempting to fly to Beirut.The U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, Martin Estrada, cast the new charges against Mr. al-Sheikh in a grim light. “The allegations in this superseding indictment of grave human rights abuses are chilling,” he said.Mr. al-Sheikh was charged with three counts of torture and one count of conspiracy to commit torture.Mr. al-Sheikh immigrated to the United States in 2020 and applied for U.S. citizenship in 2023, lying on federal forms about the abuses, the authorities have said.Prosecutors said he was appointed governor of the province of Deir al-Zour by Mr. al-Assad in 2011. Mr. al-Assad’s authoritarian government crumbled over the weekend after rebels routed his forces and took control of swaths of the country.On Monday, federal prosecutors unsealed charges against two top-ranking Syrian intelligence officials, accusing them of war crimes. The pair, Jamil Hassan and Abdul Salam Mahmoud, oversaw a prison in Damascus during the Syrian civil war, prosecutors said.That indictment signaled the first time the United States had criminally charged top Syrian officials with human rights abuses used to silence dissent and spread fear through the country.Mr. Hassan was the head of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, and Mr. Mahmoud served as a brigadier general in the Air Force’s intelligence unit. Their location is unknown. More

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      Trump Picks Strident Supporter for Civil Rights Post at Justice Dept.

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Monday that he would nominate Harmeet K. Dhillon, a California lawyer who has long championed Mr. Trump in public, in court cases and on social media, to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.In declaring his choice on social media, Mr. Trump said Ms. Dhillon “has stood up consistently to protect our cherished civil liberties.” He praised her legal work targeting social media companies, restrictions on religious gatherings during the pandemic and “corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.”Ms. Dhillon has been a conservative activist so devoted to Mr. Trump that she was willing to attack not only Democrats but also fellow Republicans, including her ultimately unsuccessful challenge last year to the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee at the time.She was also the co-chairwoman in 2020 of a group, Lawyers for Trump, that challenged the results of that year’s presidential election.It is not unusual for Republican administrations to significantly scale back the work in the Civil Rights Division. In Ms. Dhillon, however, Mr. Trump has chosen a lawyer active in the culture wars whose firm specializes in championing the right’s causes.“I’m extremely honored by President Trump’s nomination to assist with our nation’s civil rights agenda,” Ms. Dhillon posted on social media. “It has been my dream to be able to serve our great country, and I am so excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers led by” Pam Bondi, Mr. Trump’s choice for attorney general.The division, which enforces voting rights laws, investigates police departments and brings charges for violations of people’s civil rights, is spending the final days of the Biden administration finishing as much work as possible on cases involving patterns or practices of police misconduct.Earlier on Monday, the division announced findings highly critical of the police department in Worcester, Mass. Such findings, however, may not amount to much, given that those investigations will soon be handed over to the Trump administration.During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department walked away from several high-profile cases involving misconduct by major city police departments, and lawyers who specialize in such cases have said they expect the second Trump administration to do much the same. More

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      House Blocks Release of Matt Gaetz Ethics Report as Republicans Close Ranks

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      The House on Thursday night blocked the release of a damaging Ethics Committee report about former Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, as Republicans voted to bury it, an expected move that makes it less likely the materials will ever be made public.Republicans closed ranks to turn back two nearly identical Democratic-written resolutions that would have forced the release of the report on the ethics panel’s yearslong investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use by the former congressman.They did so by moving to refer both measures back to the committee, which has so far refused to make public its conclusions.The vote on the first resolution was 206 to 198, almost entirely along party lines, with nearly all Republicans voting to block the report’s release and Democrats voting to make it public. The vote on the second measure, which included language about preserving the records but also demanded their release, was 204 to 198, also almost all along party lines.Just one Republican, Representative Tom McClintock of California, sided with the Democrats.Democrats have continued to press for the release of the ethics report, even though Mr. Gaetz has resigned from Congress and removed himself as President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for attorney general, at least in part because the ethics report was complicating his confirmation process.Speaker Mike Johnson has said that because Mr. Gaetz is no longer a sitting member of Congress, the release of the report would set a bad precedent in the House and has urged the Republican-led committee not to release its findings.Democrats have argued that burying the report is concealing credible allegations of sexual misconduct.“No workplace would allow that information to be swept under the rug simply because someone resigned from office,” Representative Sean Casten, the Illinois Democrat who has spearheaded the move to release the report, told ABC News.Mr. Gaetz has denied all of the allegations.Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority leader, called the question of releasing the report “moot” since Mr. Gaetz has resigned.Tom Brenner for The New York Times“The member being referenced in the resolution has actually resigned from the House of Representatives; therefore, the question is moot,” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority leader, said on the floor Thursday night, moving to refer the resolution back to the committee.Since 2021, the House Ethics Committee has been investigating allegations about Mr. Gaetz. That year, it opened an inquiry into sexual misconduct allegations as well as claims that Mr. Gaetz misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, accepted impermissible gifts under House rules, and shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, among other transgressions.The secretive, bipartisan committee met earlier on Thursday for close to three hours to discuss the report, but all of its members were mum as they left the meeting.After the session, the committee issued a terse statement saying that it “met today to discuss the matter of Representative Matt Gaetz. The committee is continuing to discuss the matter. There will be no further statements other than in accordance with committee and House rules.” More

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      Read the Justice Department’s Report

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      E. MPD Unnecessarily Escalates Encounters with Children.
      We have serious concerns about MPD’s treatment of children and the lasting impact of
      police encounters on their wellbeing and resilience. 42 During interactions with children
      regarding minor issues, MPD officers escalate the encounters with aggressive and
      demeaning language and, at times, needless force.
      At times, MPD aggressively escalates encounters with children who have committed no
      crime or where the child is a victim. In one incident, officers handcuffed and used force
      against a 16-year-old Black girl who called MPD to report she had been assaulted.
      Before arriving at the precinct to give a statement, officers handcuffed the girl after she
      refused to give them her phone. When she became agitated and reactive, the officers
      responded with insults and threats, telling her, “When [the handcuffs] do come off . . .
      Ooh, I’m itching,” “I leave my gloves on when I fight,” and “If I gotta whip your ass, I will.”
      After three hours, officers removed the handcuffs to reposition them. As she complained
      that her hands were hurt and swollen and tried to move her wrists, the officers grabbed
      her and pushed her face down onto the ground to handcuff her again. The girl was then
      arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.
      MPD has escalated interactions when enforcing laws that are intended to keep children
      safe. After two Black boys (ages 15 and 16) ran from an officer who was citing them for
      a curfew violation, officers demeaned the boys and threatened violence. When one boy
      asked if they were going to jail, the officer responded, “If it’s my decision, hell yeah . . .
      I’d have so much damn fun rolling your ass down to jail. I’d love doing that shit.” Another
      officer threatened to assault the boys when he worried that he may have lost his MPD
      mobile device during the foot pursuit: “I am fucking these little kids up, man… I am
      fucking you all up, I just wanted to let y’all know that.”
      MPD officers have mistreated children in crisis, even when it is clear the child has
      significant disabilities. In one incident, a CIT officer threatened to take a 14-year-old
      Black boy to adult jail because the boy ran away from home. The boy was diagnosed
      with autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and developmental delays and had the intellectual
      functioning of a four-year-old. The boy’s mother had called the police after the boy, who
      had been released from a mental health facility that day, got upset at bedtime, threw a
      garbage can and a chair, and ran from home. After the boy was found, a CIT officer
      raised his Taser toward the boy, who was calm and compliant, and told him, “I don’t
      want to use it on you, but if you don’t listen to me, I can.” Officers planned to take the
      boy to the hospital for psychiatric treatment. But the CIT officer continued to threaten
      him, saying that he would take the child to jail “with the big boys,” and “If I have to come
      42 Interactions with the police can lead to damaging and lasting outcomes for children, especially Black
      and Latinx teens, including post-traumatic stress, increased levels of depression, diminished academic
      performance, and increased chances that a child will engage in delinquent behavior in the future.
      56 More

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      How Biden Changed His Mind on Pardoning Hunter: ‘Time to End All of This’

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      The threat of a retribution-focused Trump administration and his son’s looming sentencings prompted the president to abandon a promise not to get involved in Hunter Biden’s legal problems.A dark sky had fallen over Nantucket, Mass., on Saturday evening when President Biden left church alongside his family after his final Thanksgiving as president.Inside a borrowed vacation compound earlier in the week, with its views of the Nantucket Harbor, Mr. Biden had met with his wife, Jill Biden, and his son Hunter Biden to discuss a decision that had tormented him for months. The issue: a pardon that would clear Hunter of years of legal trouble, something the president had repeatedly insisted he would not do.Support for pardoning Hunter Biden had been building for months within the family, but external forces had more recently weighed on Mr. Biden, who watched warily as President-elect Donald J. Trump picked loyalists for his administration who promised to bring political and legal retribution to Mr. Trump’s enemies.Mr. Biden had even invited Mr. Trump to the White House, listening without responding as the president-elect aired familiar grievances about the Justice Department — then surprised his host by sympathizing with the Biden family’s own troubles with the department, according to three people briefed on the conversation.But it was Hunter Biden’s looming sentencings on federal gun and tax charges, scheduled for later this month, that gave Mr. Biden the final push. A pardon was one thing he could do for a troubled son, a recovering addict who he felt had been subjected to years of public pain.When the president returned to Washington late Saturday evening, he convened a call with several senior aides to tell them about his decision.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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      Analysis: In Pardoning Hunter, Biden Sounds a Lot Like Trump

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      President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.In pardoning his son Hunter Biden on Sunday night, the incumbent president sounded a lot like his successor in complaining about selective prosecution and political pressure, questioning the fairness of a system that Mr. Biden had until now long defended.“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Mr. Biden said in the statement announcing the pardon. “Here’s the truth,” he added. “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”Mr. Biden’s decision to use the extraordinary power of executive clemency to wipe out his son’s convictions on gun and tax charges came despite repeated statements by him and his aides that he would not do so. Just last summer, after his son was convicted at trial, the president rejected the idea of a pardon and said that “I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process.” The statement he issued Sunday night made clear he did not accept the outcome nor respect the process.The pardon and Mr. Biden’s stated rationale for granting it will inevitably muddy the political waters as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office with plans to use the Justice Department and F.B.I. to pursue “retribution” against his political adversaries. Mr. Trump has long argued that the justice system has been “weaponized” against him and that he is the victim of selective prosecution, much like Mr. Biden has now said his son was.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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      Kash Patel Would Bring Bravado and Baggage to F.B.I. Role

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to run the F.B.I. has a record in and out of government that is likely to raise questions during his Senate confirmation hearings.Few people tapped for any top federal post, much less a job as vital as F.B.I. director, have come with quite so much bravado, bombast or baggage as Kash Patel.On Saturday, Mr. Patel, 44, a Long Island-born provocateur and right-wing operative, was named by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead the F.B.I., an agency he has accused of leading a “deep state” witch hunt against Mr. Trump. The announcement amounted to a de facto dismissal of the current director, Christopher A. Wray, who was appointed to the job by Mr. Trump and still has almost three years left on his 10-year term.Mr. Patel’s maximum-volume threats to exact far-reaching revenge on Mr. Trump’s behalf have endeared him to his boss and Trump allies who say the bureau needs a disrupter to weed out bias and reshape its culture.But his record as a public official and his incendiary public comments are likely to provoke intense questioning when the Senate weighs his nomination — and determines whether he should run an agency charged with protecting Americans from terrorism, street crime, cartels and political corruption, along with the threat posed by China, which Mr. Wray has described as existential.Here are some of the things Mr. Patel has said and done that could complicate his confirmation.He was accused of nearly botching a high-stakes hostage rescue.In October 2020, Mr. Patel, then a senior national intelligence official in the Trump administration, inserted himself into a secret effort by members of SEAL Team Six to rescue Philip Walton, an American who was 27 at the time and had been kidnapped by gunmen in Niger and taken to Nigeria.Mr. Patel, whose involvement broke with protocol, assured the State and Defense Departments that the Nigerian government had been told of the operation.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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      Trump Says He Will Nominate Kash Patel to Run F.B.I.

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump turned to a firebrand loyalist to become director of the bureau, which he sees as part of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy against him.President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that he wants to replace Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, with Kash Patel, a hard-line critic of the bureau who has called for shutting down the agency’s Washington headquarters, firing its leadership and bringing the nation’s law enforcement agencies “to heel.”Mr. Trump’s planned nomination of Mr. Patel has echoes of his failed attempt to place another partisan firebrand, Matt Gaetz, atop the Justice Department as attorney general. It could run into hurdles in the Senate, which will be called on to confirm him, and is sure to send shock waves through the F.B.I., which Mr. Trump and his allies have come to view as part of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.Mr. Patel has been closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s belief that much of the nation’s law enforcement and national security establishment needs to be purged of bias and held accountable for what they see as unjustified investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Trump and his allies.Mr. Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice in a social media post.He called Mr. Patel “a brilliant lawyer, investigator and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American people.”Mr. Patel, a favorite of Mr. Trump’s political base, has worked as a federal prosecutor and a public defender, but has little of the law enforcement and management experience typical of F.B.I. directors.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