VA secretary’s aide retiring amid scandal

WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs says the agency’s chief of staff has stepped down after an investigation found she had doctored emails to justify Secretary David Shulkin’s wife accompanying him on a European trip at taxpayer expense.

The investigation by the department’s inspector general found “serious derelictions” by Shulkin and his staff and urged administrative action against chief of staff Vivieca Wright Simpson.

VA spokesman Curt Cashour said Simpson “elected to retire” and the VA is opening a formal investigation into her role. didn’t mention the administration or Trump himself in an online announcement that he is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Utah. The closest he came was noting that Utah “welcomes legal immigrants from around the world,” while “Washington sends immigrants a message of exclusion.”

Romney, 70, will be the heavy favorite for the seat being opened by Sen. Orrin Hatch’s retirement.

The judge said the Saudi-born defendant wanted to kill “dozens or maybe hundreds of Americans” and those from other nationalities as well.

A jury last March convicted Harun, 47, after prosecutors said he confessed while in Italian custody that he threw a grenade and shot at an American military unit in a 2003 ambush that killed Army Pvt. Jerod Dennis, of Antlers, Oklahoma, and Air Force Airman Ray Losano, of Del Rio, Texas.

While on the run, Harun later masterminded a failed plot to bomb a U.S. embassy in Nigeria, the government said.

Harun was extradited from Italy to the U.S. in 2012.

Gregory Kyle Seerden, 32, was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Norfolk.

Seerden was stationed in San Diego but was staying with family in Virginia for the holidays last January when he was accused of sexually assaulting a female acquaintance after a night out drinking on a Virginia Beach naval base. When Navy investigators searched Seerden’s phone, they found child pornography, including four videos in which Seerden sexually abused a 5-year-old child while she slept.

Seerden is also charged in San Diego with sexually abusing another family member in 2014, when she was 7.