Senate confirms Trump lawyer Emil Bove for appeals court amid whistleblower claims

Published

1 month ago

July 30, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate confirmed former Trump lawyer Emil Bove 50-49 for a lifetime appointment as a federal appeals court judge Tuesday as Republicans dismissed whistleblower complaints about his conduct at the Justice Department.

A former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Bove was on Trump’s legal team during his New York hush money trial and defended Trump in the two federal criminal cases. He will serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Democrats have vehemently opposed Bove’s nomination, citing his current position as a top Justice Department official and his role in the dismissal of the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. They have also criticized his efforts to investigate department officials who were involved in the prosecutions of hundreds of Trump supporters who were involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Bove has accused FBI officials of “insubordination” for refusing to hand over the names of agents who investigated the attack and ordered the firing of a group of prosecutors involved in those Jan. 6 criminal cases.

Whistleblowers cite evidence against Bove

Democrats have also cited evidence from whistleblowers, a fired department lawyer who said last month that Bove had suggested the Trump administration may need to ignore judicial commands — a claim that Bove denies — and new evidence from a whistleblower who did not go public. That whistleblower recently provided an audio recording of Bove that runs contrary to some of his testimony at his confirmation hearing last month, according to two people familiar with the recording.

The audio is from a private video conference call at the Department of Justice in February in which Bove, a top official at the department, discussed his handling of the dismissed case against Adams, according to transcribed quotes from the audio reviewed by The Associated Press.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the whistleblower has not made the recording public. The whistleblower’s claims were first reported by the Washington Post.

None of that evidence has so far been enough to sway Senate Republicans — all but two of them voted to confirm Bove as GOP senators have deferred to Trump on virtually all of his picks.

Democrats say Bove’s confirmation is a ‘dark day’

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that Bove’s confirmation is a “dark day” and that Republicans are only supporting Bove because of his loyalty to the president.

“It’s unfathomable that just over four years after the insurrection at the Capitol, when rioters smashed windows, ransacked offices, desecrated this chamber, Senate Republicans are willingly putting someone on the bench who shielded these rioters from facing justice, who said their prosecution was a grave national injustice,” Schumer said.

Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted against Bove’s confirmation. “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench,” Murkowski said Tuesday.

At his confirmation hearing last month, Bove addressed criticism of his tenure head-on, telling lawmakers he understands some of his decisions “have generated controversy.” But Bove said he has been inaccurately portrayed as Trump’s “henchman” and “enforcer” at the department.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee released Tuesday evening just before the vote, Bove said he does not have the whistleblower’s recording but is “undeterred by this smear campaign.”

A February call emerges as evidence

Senators at the Judiciary Committee hearing asked Bove about the February 14 call with lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which had received significant public attention because of his unusual directive that the attorneys had an hour to decide among themselves who would agree to file on the department’s behalf the motion to dismiss the case against Adams.

The call was convened amid significant upheaval in the department as prosecutors in New York who’d handled the matter, as well as some in Washington, resigned rather than agree to dispense with the case.

According to the transcript of the February call, Bove remarked near the outset that interim Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon “resigned about ten minutes before we were going to put her on leave pending an investigation.” But when asked at the hearing whether he had opened the meeting by emphasizing that Sassoon and another prosecutor had refused to follow orders and that Sassoon was going to be reassigned before she resigned, Bove answered with a simple, “No.”

In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Bove defended his testimony as accurate, noting that the transcript of the call shows he didn’t use the word “reassigned” when talking to the prosecutors.

At another moment, Bove said he did not recall saying words that the transcript of the call reflects him as having said — that whoever signed the motion to dismiss the Adams case would emerge as leaders of the section.

But in the letter to Grassley, Bove said he did not intend to suggest that anyone would be rewarded for submitting the memo but rather that doing so would reflect a willingness to follow the chain of command, something he said was the “bare minimum required of mid-level management” of a government agency.

Republicans decry ‘unfair accusations’

Grassley said Tuesday that he believes Bove will be a “diligent, capable and fair jurist.”

He said his staff had tried to investigate the claims but that lawyers for the whistleblowers would not give them all of the materials they had asked for until Tuesday, hours before the vote. The “vicious rhetoric, unfair accusations and abuse directed at Mr. Bove” have “crossed the line,” Grassley said.

The first whistleblower complaint against Bove came from a former Justice Department lawyer who was fired in April after conceding in court that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who had been living in Maryland, was mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison.

That lawyer, Erez Reuveni, described efforts by top Justice Department officials in the weeks before his firing to stonewall and mislead judges to carry out deportations championed by the White House.

Reuveni described a Justice Department meeting in March concerning Trump’s plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act over what the president claimed was an invasion by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Reuveni said Bove raised the possibility that a court might block the deportations before they could happen. Reuveni claims Bove used a profanity in saying the department would need to consider telling the courts what to do and “ignore any such order,” Reuveni’s lawyers said in the filing.

Bove said he has “no recollection of saying anything of that kind.”

___

Associated Press writer Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.

Source link

Up Next

Boomerang tariffs ahead for China?

Don't Miss

White House blocks NIH from awarding any research grants

Mary Clare Jalonick

Click to comment

Anthropic pays authors $1.5 billion to settle copyright infringement lawsuit

Published

1 hour ago

September 6, 2025

Matt O'Brien

NEW YORK (AP) — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.

The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.

The company has agreed to pay authors or publishers about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.

“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”

A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude.

Thriller novelist Andrea Bartz is photographed in her home, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025 (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.

If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.

“We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms.

Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, “will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.”

“We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” said Aparna Sridhar, the company’s deputy general counsel.

As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.

Books are known to be important sources of data — in essence, billions of words carefully strung together — that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Alsup’s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it “knew had been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.

Debut thriller novel “The Lost Night” by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the dataset.

Thriller novelist Andrea Bartz is photographed in her home, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025 (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.

The Authors Guild told its thousands of members last month that it expected “damages will be minimally $750 per work and could be much higher” if Anthropic was found at trial to have willfully infringed their copyrights. The settlement’s higher award — approximately $3,000 per work — likely reflects a smaller pool of affected books, after taking out duplicates and those without copyright.

On Friday, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called the settlement “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it.”

The Danish Rights Alliance, which successfully fought to take down one of those shadow libraries, said Friday that the settlement would be of little help to European writers and publishers whose works aren’t registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.

“On the one hand, it’s comforting to see that compiling AI training datasets by downloading millions of books from known illegal file-sharing sites comes at a price,” said Thomas Heldrup, the group’s head of content protection and enforcement.

On the other hand, Heldrup said it fits a tech industry playbook to grow a business first and later pay a relatively small fine, compared to the size of the business, for breaking the rules.

“It is my understanding that these companies see a settlement like the Anthropic one as a price of conducting business in a fiercely competitive space,” Heldrup said.

The privately held Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, earlier this week put its value at $183 billion after raising another $13 billion in investments.

Anthropic also said it expects to make $5 billion in sales this year, but, like OpenAI and many other AI startups, it has never reported making a profit, relying instead on investors to back the high costs of developing AI technology for the expectation of future payoffs.

The settlement could influence other disputes, including an ongoing lawsuit by authors and newspapers against OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft, and cases against Metaand Midjourney. And just as the Anthropic settlement terms were filed, another group of authors sued Apple on Friday in the same San Francisco federal court.

“This indicates that maybe for other cases, it’s possible for creators and AI companies to reach settlements without having to essentially go for broke in court,” said Long, the legal analyst.

The industry, including Anthropic, had largely praised Alsup’s June ruling because he found that training AI systems on copyrighted works so chatbots can produce their own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative.”

Comparing the AI model to “any reader aspiring to be a writer,” Alsup wrote that Anthropic “trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different.”

But documents disclosed in court showed Anthropic employees’ internal concerns about the legality of their use of pirate sites. The company later shifted its approach and hired Tom Turvey, the former Google executive in charge of Google Books, a searchable library of digitized books that successfully weathered years of copyright battles.

With his help, Anthropic began buying books in bulk, tearing off the bindings and scanning each page before feeding the digitized versions into its AI model, according to court documents. That was legal but didn’t undo the earlier piracy, according to the judge.

Source link

College of Charleston instructor among victims killed in Lisbon funicular crash

Published

2 hours ago

September 5, 2025

Babak Dehghanpisheh

The College of Charleston confirmed on Friday that one of its instructors was among the 16 people killed in the crash of the popular funicular railway in Lisbon on Wednesday, which shocked Portugal and led to pointed questions about the cause of the accident.

Heather Hall, a member of the faculty of the Department of Teacher Education, was the only American killed in the accident, which also injured 21. Among the dead were five Portuguese citizens, two South Koreans, one Swiss, three British citizens, two Canadians, one French and one Ukrainian, according to the Portuguese police.

Hall had been in Lisbon to speak at a conference, Fran Welch, the dean of the School of Education, said in a statement.

“This is a tragic loss for all of us,” Welch said. “As an alumna of the College (‘97) and a dynamic instructor with a specialization is special education, she shared her love of travel with her students.”

The statement noted that Hall had been a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana and had taken her students on study abroad trips to Italy.

Welch added, “Her energy, kindness and student-centeredness will be deeply missed.”

Hall’s passion for travel is highlighted on her Facebook page which shows photos of her in Havana, Venice and at the Colosseum in Rome.

The wreckage of the funicular, known as the Elevador da Glória, was cleared overnight and put in police custody.

Alexandre Rodrigues, the commander of the Lisbon fire brigade, told reporters Wednesday that authorities were alerted about the derailment at 6:01 p.m. local time (12:01 p.m. ET) and arrived within three minutes. The funicular derailed and crashed into a building, he said.

Becky Britton, of Minnesota, was vacationing in the city with her husband when she walked past the scene and saw what she described as carnage.

“I feel sad, and when you’re here it’s real. If it happened to us, our families, we would have been notified and that’s just devastating,” she said.

Emergency officials said all victims were pulled out of the wreckage in just over two hours.

Classified as a national monument, the Elevador da Glória funicular connected Restauradores Square to the Jardim de São Pedro de Alcântara, a popular garden in the Bairro Alto neighborhood.

The service, which was inaugurated in 1885, goes up and down a few hundred yards of a hill on a curved, traffic-free road in tandem with one going the opposite way. It is a popular attraction with Lisbon’s tourists, and long lines of people typically form for the brief rides.

Harnessed by steel cables, it can carry more than 40 people, seated and standing, and it is also commonly used by Lisbon residents.

The government’s Office for Air and Rail Accident Investigations is expected to release a preliminary technical report on the accident on Saturday.

Babak Dehghanpisheh

Colin Sheeley

The Associated Press contributed.

Source link

Chiefs vs. Chargers live updates: Game score, analysis, highlights as AFC West rivals meet in Brazil

Published

2 hours ago

September 5, 2025

Garrett Podell

The 2025 NFL season is here, and Brazil is the host of a clash between AFC West heavyweights Friday night: the three-time defending conference champion Kansas City Chiefs and 2024 wild card Los Angeles Chargers.

There’s plenty of fun matchups all over the field. Los Angeles returns much of its defensive core that comprised the NFL’s No. 1 scoring defense for the first of two showdowns with the Chiefs’ dynamic future Hall of Fame duo of quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce. Kansas City will counter Chargers Pro Bowl quarterback Justin Herbert, fresh off a career year in 2024, with the league’s No. 4 scoring defense (19.2 points per game allowed) from a year ago.

It’s also a near guarantee Friday night’s showdown will go down to the wire even though the Chiefs have won the past seven matchups. Six of those meetings were one-score games.

Will the Chiefs, whose 17-game winning streak in one-score games including the playoffs is the longest in NFL history, escape with another narrow victory over their division rivals? Or will the ball finally bounce the Chargers’ way under the lights in Sao Paulo?

Keep it locked here as CBS Sports provides you with live updates, highlights and analysis as the Chiefs battle the Chargers in Week 1.