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      Boeing Faces Justice Dept. Review Over Max 9 Incident

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      The department is looking into whether the blowout of a door panel in January violated a 2021 settlement after two fatal plane crashes.The Justice Department is reviewing whether an early January incident in which a part of a Boeing plane blew out in midflight violated a 2021 agreement to settle a criminal charge against the company, according to a person familiar with the review.Boeing agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion to settle the charge, which stemmed from two fatal crashes of its 737 Max 8 planes. The deal, reached in the final weeks of the Trump administration, was criticized at the time as being too lenient on the company.Under the terms, Boeing agreed to compensate the families of the crash victims as well as the airlines affected by the grounding of the planes. The Justice Department agreed to drop a criminal charge that was based on the actions of two employees who had withheld information from the F.A.A.Last month, a panel in the fuselage of a larger Max 9 blew out at an altitude of 16,000 feet shortly after takeoff from Portland, Ore., exposing passengers to deafening wind. There were no serious injuries, but the incident could have been catastrophic had it occurred minutes later, at a higher altitude. The panel is known as a “door plug,” which is used to cover a gap left by an unneeded exit door.The Justice Department review was reported earlier by Bloomberg.The episode in January reignited the intense scrutiny and criticism that Boeing faced after crashes in Indonesia in late 2018 and Ethiopia in early 2019 killed a combined 346 people. The Max 8 and Max 9 were banned from flying globally days after the second crash. Since the jetliners started flying again in late 2020, they have carried out several million flights worldwide.The weight of the crisis appeared to be lifting before the January incident. A preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board suggested that the plane in that episode may have left Boeing’s factory without bolts needed to secure the panel. The Federal Aviation Administration immediately grounded nearly 200 Max 9 jets in the United States, pending inspections. Flights using the plane have since resumed.The F.A.A. also increased inspections of the Washington State factory where Boeing makes the Max. On Wednesday, the agency gave the company 90 days to put together a plan to improve quality control.“Boeing must commit to real and profound improvements,” the F.A.A.’s administrator, Mike Whitaker, said in a statement announcing the deadline. “Making foundational change will require a sustained effort from Boeing’s leadership, and we are going to hold them accountable every step of the way, with mutually understood milestones and expectations.”Earlier in the week, a group of F.A.A. experts released a long-awaited report stemming from the Max crashes, and it found that Boeing’s safety culture was still lacking, despite improvements in recent years. More

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      Memory Loss Requires Careful Diagnosis, Scientists Say

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      A federal investigator said that President Biden had “poor memory” and “diminished faculties.” But such a diagnosis would require close medical assessment, experts said.A lengthy report by the Department of Justice on President Biden’s handling of classified documents contained some astonishing assessments of his well-being and mental health.Mr. Biden, 81, was an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties” who “did not remember when he was vice president,” the special counsel Robert K. Hur said.In conversations recorded in 2017, Mr. Biden was “often painfully slow” and “struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.” So impaired was Mr. Biden that a jury was unlikely to convict him, Mr. Hur said.Republicans were quick to pounce, some calling the president unfit for office and demanding his removal.But while the report disparaged Mr. Biden’s mental health, medical experts on Friday noted that its judgments were not based on science and that its methods bore no resemblance to those that doctors use to assess possible cognitive impairment.In its simplest form, the issue is one that doctors and family members have been dealing with for decades: How do you know when an episode of confusion or a memory lapse is part of a serious decline?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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      Biden Classified Documents Case: Takeaways From the Special Counsel Report

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      The special counsel, Robert K. Hur, concluded that the evidence was insufficient to charge President Biden with a crime, but sharply criticized him.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Thursday released the report by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel Mr. Garland had assigned to investigate how classified documents ended up in an office formerly used by President Biden and in his home in Delaware. Here are some takeaways.The evidence was insufficient to bring criminal charges.Mr. Hur was bound by a Justice Department policy that holds that the Constitution implicitly makes sitting presidents temporarily immune from prosecution, so he could not have charged Mr. Biden even if he wanted to. But Mr. Hur wrote that Mr. Biden should not be charged regardless.“We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” he wrote. “We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.”Mr. Hur wrote that he had found evidence that Mr. Biden had willfully retained and disclosed sensitive information after he left the vice presidency in 2017. But he said the evidence fell short of what would be necessary to “establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”Hur said Biden had “significant” memory problems.Mr. Hur listed various reasons that a jury might reasonably doubt that Mr. Biden had “willfully” retained classified documents after leaving the Obama White House, including that Mr. Biden had reported the problem and invited investigators to search his home. But Mr. Hur cited another reason with potentially explosive political implications for the 81-year-old president as he seeks re-election: that he had memory problems.Mr. Hur wrote that Mr. Biden’s memory “appeared to have significant limitations.” The special counsel portrayed Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with his ghostwriter in 2017 as “often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events.” And, the report said, his recollection “was worse” in his interview with Mr. Hur in October, when Mr. Biden came off, he said, “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”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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      Scores of N.Y.C. Public Housing Workers Charged in Record Corruption Case

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      Manhattan’s federal prosecutor said the number of bribery charges, more than 60 in all, amounted to a single-day record for the Justice Department.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged more than 60 current and former employees of the New York City Housing Authority with bribery and extortion, a sweeping indictment of a troubled organization.The unsealing of the complaints was announced early Tuesday, with additional details on the scope of the investigation to be unveiled by Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, at a late morning news conference.The defendants were charged with “accepting cash payments from contractors in exchange for awarding NYCHA contracts,” a news release said. It added that the more than 60 federal bribery charges amounted to a single-day record for the Department of Justice.Last year, officials at the housing agency estimated that it would need some $78 billion over the next two decades to renovate the aging system, which is home to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in an expensive city starved for affordable apartments. Complaints about aging buildings, rodents, leaky pipes and broken elevators have dogged the agency, which operates more than 270 developments.In 2022, NYCHA collected just 65 percent of the rent it charged, the lowest percentage in its nearly 100-year history.This is a developing story and will be updated. More

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      U.S. Hits Back at Iran With Sanctions, Criminal Charges and Airstrikes

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      In the hours before the United States carried out strikes against Iran-backed militants on Friday, Washington hit Tehran with more familiar weapons: sanctions and criminal charges.The Biden administration imposed sanctions on officers and officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran’s premier military force, for threatening the integrity of water utilities and for helping manufacture Iranian drones. And it unsealed charges against nine people for selling oil to finance the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.The timing seemed designed to pressure the Revolutionary Guards and its most elite unit, the Quds Force, at a moment of extraordinary tension in the Middle East. Although the sanctions have been brewing for some time and the charges were filed earlier under seal, the region has been in turmoil for months.The actions are part of a coordinated governmentwide effort to disrupt Iran’s efforts to use illicit oil sales to fund terrorism, and to push back on the country’s increasingly capable offensive cyberoperations. In the 15 years since the United States mounted a major cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the country has trained a generation of hackers and struck back at Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States, among others. Two American officials said the United States conducted cyberoperations against Iranian targets on Friday but declined to provide details.The effects of sanctions and indictments are hard to measure. Few Iranian officers or officials keep assets in Western banks or travel to the United States, meaning the sanctions may have little practical effect. While the indictments and sanctions have a psychological element, demonstrating to Iranians and their business associates around the world that Western intelligence agencies are often tracking their movements and their transactions, actual arrests and trials are infrequent.“The reason that we bring these cases is, we know that the money Iran obtains from the illicit sale of oil is used to fund its malign activities around the world,” Matthew G. Olsen, who heads the national security division of the Justice Department, said on Friday. “The threats posed by Iran and the destabilizing effects of its actions have only come into sharper relief since the attacks of Oct. 7,” the day of the Hamas attack on Israel that killed roughly 1,200 people.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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      Prosecutors in Documents Case Reject Trump’s Claims of Bias

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      The office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, pushed back on the former president’s assertions that his prosecution was motivated by animosity toward him in intelligence agencies.Federal prosecutors pushed back on Friday against former President Donald J. Trump’s contention that his prosecution over the handling of classified documents was motivated by a longstanding bias against him among the intelligence agencies and other government officials.The pushback by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, came in a 67-page court filing. The filing was intended to argue against Mr. Trump’s requests for additional discovery materials in the classified documents case.When Mr. Trump’s lawyers made those requests for materials last month, they signaled that they planned to place accusations that the intelligence community and other members of the so-called deep state were biased against Mr. Trump at the heart of their defense.But Mr. Smith’s team said that the former president’s requests for additional information were “based on speculative, unsupported, and false theories of political bias and animus.”Some of Mr. Trump’s demands for discovery were so ambiguous “that it is difficult to decipher what they seek,” the prosecutors wrote, while others, they added, “reflect pure conjecture detached from the facts surrounding this prosecution.”Discovery disputes can be contentious in criminal cases as defense lawyers push for as much information as they can get and prosecutors seek to limit access to materials that they believe are irrelevant.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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      Judge Declines to Hold Prosecutors in Contempt in Trump Election Case

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      Judge Tanya S. Chutkan issued her order after prosecutors continued to file court papers in the former president’s election interference case even though she had put the proceeding on hold.It was one of the odder tit-for-tat battles to have emerged so far in the federal case accusing former President Donald J. Trump of plotting to subvert the 2020 election.Even though the proceeding was put on hold by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan while Mr. Trump seeks to have the charges tossed out with broad claims of immunity, prosecutors, trying to nudge it forward, have continued filing motions and turning over evidence. The former president’s lawyers have angrily accused them of violating the judge’s order and were eventually annoyed enough to ask that the prosecutors be held in contempt.After simmering for a month, the dispute was resolved on Thursday when Judge Chutkan, who is handling the case in Federal District Court in Washington, issued an order saying she would not punish anyone with a finding of contempt.Still, in what felt like an attempt to soothe the tensions between the defense and prosecution, the judge told both sides that they should not file any more “substantive” motions without first asking for permission.From the outset, the quarrel over the filings and disclosures seemed to be the sort of petulant but ultimately harmless one-upmanship that often arises in prominent criminal cases. But it was also a reflection of a much more consequential fight over the timing of the case and whether it will go to trial as scheduled in March.It all began last month when prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, sent Mr. Trump’s legal team a draft list of exhibits and a modest batch of discovery material even though Judge Chutkan had ordered all deadlines in the case put on hold only days before.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