Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Ex-Justice lawyer and Trump ally cuts short his Jan. 6 deposition
WASHINGTON — A former assistant attorney general who aligned himself with former President Donald Trump after he lost the 2020 election has declined to be fully interviewed by a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, ending a deposition after around 90 minutes Friday.
Jeffrey Clark, who championed Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, presented the committee with a letter saying he would not answer questions based on Trump’s assertions of executive privilege, including in an ongoing court case, according to a person familiar with the closed-door meeting who was granted anonymity to discuss it. Clark left the interview with his lawyer, who told reporters that they were heading “home.”
Clark, who was subpoenaed by the committee to appear, would not answer any questions from reporters as he departed.
A committee spokesman also declined to comment.
Clark’s refusal is just the latest fallout from Trump’s attempt to assert executive privilege in a lawsuit he filed against the committee and the National Archives. The suit aims to block the government from releasing a tranche of internal White House documents, including call logs, drafts of remarks, speeches and handwritten staff notes from before and during the insurrection. President Joe Biden has so far waived executive privilege on nearly all the documents that the committee has asked for, citing the panel’s need to investigate the violent attack.
Amid the legal wrangling, the House panel has struggled to gain cooperation from some of Trump’s other top allies — including his longtime associate Steve Bannon and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — as it conducts a sweeping investigation outside of public view. The committee has interviewed more than 150 witnesses so far, according to two people familiar with the interviews who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them.
Palestinian boy killed: A 13-year-old Palestinian boy was shot and killed by Israeli fire during clashes in the occupied West Bank on Friday, Palestinian health officials said.
The teen, identified as Mohammad Daadas, died as a result of a gunshot wound to the stomach during clashes with Israeli forces near the northern West Bank village of Deir al-Hatab, said the health officials’ statement. Daadas was taken to a nearby hospital, where medical staff pronounced him dead.
The Palestinian Red Crescent medical service said the Israeli army fired live ammunition, as well as tear gas and rubber bullets, at protesters while also closing off surrounding roads, preventing their ambulances from entering the site. No other serious injuries were reported.
In a statement issued later Friday, the army said dozens of Palestinians near Deir al-Hatab began hurling rocks at Israeli troops who responded with live fire.
Flint water fallout: The state of Michigan said Friday it agreed pay $300,000 to settle wrongful discharge claims by the only employee who was fired as a result of lead-contaminated water in Flint.
The deal with Liane Shekter Smith, who was head of the state’s drinking water division, came weeks after an arbitrator said she was wrongly fired in 2016 by officials likely looking for a “public scapegoat” in one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.
The state this week faced a deadline to appeal the order through the civil service system as well as an award of $191,880 in back pay and other compensation. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration instead paid 56% more to Shekter Smith to close the case.
Asked why the state is paying more, Hugh McDiarmid Jr., spokesman for the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, said there was no guarantee that the arbitrator’s figure would hold during an appeal. Shekter Smith had been seeking more than $900,000 in lost compensation.
Bosnia flooding: Heavy rain caused severe flash flooding in Bosnia, prompting evacuations, causing power outages in most of the capital, closing a key facility for oxygen used for COVID-19 patients and submerging roads in some parts of the Balkan country on Friday.
The only certified medicinal oxygen filling plant in Bosnia, part of Germany’s Messer Group, was among workplaces and homes in the suburbs of Sarajevo that had to be evacuated after being overrun by fastmoving flood water.
Avdo Delic, general manager of Messer’s Bosnia branch, said the plant was completely submerged, and voiced concern that hospitals around the country treating COVID-19 patients might run out of medicinal oxygen cylinders unless the company’s operations are quickly restored at alternative locations.
Hundreds of homes in the Sarajevo suburbs, along the rivers Bosnia, Tilava and Zeljeznica, and in the southwest part of the country, around the town of Konjic, also had to be evacuated under heavy downpours.
Cuomo complaint ‘defective’:
A prosecutor investigating accusations that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo groped a woman asked a judge for more time to evaluate the evidence, saying the criminal complaint filed last week by the local sheriff was “potentially defective,” according to a letter released Friday.
The request from Albany Country District Attorney David Soares came a week after Cuomo was charged with a misdemeanor sex crime. The one-page complaint filed in Albany City Court by a sheriff’s office investigator accuses Cuomo of forcible touching by putting his hand under a woman’s shirt on Dec. 7.
Soares said in a letter to Judge Holly Trexler on Thursday that his office had been investigating the matter for several months.
“We were in the middle of that investigation when the Sheriff unilaterally and inexplicably filed a compliant in this court,” Soares wrote in the letter.
The court granted a delay until Jan. 7, 2022, a spokesperson for Soares said.
Knight son jailed: The son of R&B legend Gladys Knight has been sentenced to serve two years in prison for failing to withhold payroll taxes for the restaurants that bore his mother’s name, federal prosecutors in Atlanta said. From at least 2012 to 2016, Shanga Hankerson, 45, failed to remit more than $1 million in payroll taxes at his restaurants, Gladys Knight’s Chicken and Waffles, which first opened in Atlanta in 1997, prosecutors said.
Knight won a legal battle to sever ties to the business in 2017, and her son was ordered to stop using her name, likeness and memorabilia, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.