NEW YORK (AP) — FBI agents raided the official residence of New York Mayor Eric Adams and confiscated his phone early Thursday morning, hours before an indictment containing criminal charges against the Democrat was expected to be made public.

Adams was accused by a grand jury on federal criminal charges that remain sealed, in response to two people aware of the matter who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to debate the matter publicly.

Federal law enforcement officers were spotted entering the mayor’s Manhattan residence at dawn on Wednesday. Several vehicles with federal law enforcement banners were parked outside the residence.

“Federal agents showed up at Gracie Mansion this morning to create a spectacle (again) and take Mayor Adams’ phone (again). He has not been arrested and is eagerly awaiting his day in court,” Adams’ attorney, Alex Spiro, said in an announcement. “They are sending a dozen agents to retrieve the phone when we would gladly give it to him.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment on the investigation. Adams’ attorney and the mayor’s spokesman didn’t immediately reply to questions Thursday morning.

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In a videotaped speech released Wednesday evening, Adams vowed to fight all charges against him, saying he had been “targeted” in a case “built on lies.”

“I will fight these injustices with all my strength and spirit,” he said.

It was not initially clear what laws Adams was accused of breaking or when he would must appear in court.

The indictment ends a rare few weeks in New York, where federal investigators zeroed in on those closest to Adams, prompting a flurry of raids, subpoenas and high-profile resignations.

Federal prosecutors are believed to be pursuing multiple separate investigations into Adams and his senior associates, relatives of those associates, campaign fundraising and possible influence peddling throughout the police and fire departments.

In the past two weeks alone, town’s police commissioner and the varsity system’s superintendent have announced their resignations.

FBI agents seized Adams’ electronic devices nearly a yr ago as part of an investigation focused, no less than partly, on Adams’ campaign contributions and interactions with the Turkish government. Because the fees were sealed, it was unclear whether or not they were the identical.

On September 5, federal investigators seized devices belonging to the police commissioner, the faculties chancellor, two deputy mayors and other trusted figures each inside and outdoors City Hall.

They all denied any irregularities.

Registered sex offender Billy Dupree had been free for six months after he strangled a 16-year-old black girl named Deleisha Kelley in 2014, raped her, then drove her body across state lines from Kansas to Missouri, where he dumped her body.

Yet despite DNA evidence from semen and Dupree’s phone records, obtained in 2015, linking him to the crime, Dupree was not arrested and charged with first-degree murder until 2023.

Earlier this month, prosecutors offered him a deal that reduced the first-degree murder charge to involuntary manslaughter, the bottom level of murder. Kelley was not informed of the deal by his family.

It seems Dupree’s uncle is the district attorney for Wyandotte County, Kansas, the identical county where the trial was set to begin on Monday.

Mark Dupree’s office didn’t prosecute the case since it was handled by the Kansas attorney general’s office, however the trial was scheduled to happen in the identical courthouse, which is taken into account the district attorney’s “home turf,” the editorial said. Kansas City Star.

“Any suggestion that the judge or the Attorney General’s Office was in any way influenced by Mr. Dupree’s family ties is false,” a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office said. Fox 4.

Dupree was elected to the position of Wyandotte County District Attorney in August 2016 and was re-elected in 2020.

However, Kelley’s family believes Billy Dupree’s uncle was a serious reason he was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter.

“They ripped off the scabs for nothing,” said her mother, Kellie Blewett. Kansas City Star“The system failed.”

Not only was there DNA and cellphone evidence linking Dupree to the murder, but his neighbor testified during a September 2023 hearing that Dupree knocked on his door on the morning of December 18, 2014, asking for help getting rid of the girl’s body.

“He said he had an underage girl there and that he had to kill her, strangle her,” the neighbor testified, according to the Kansas City Star.

The neighbor further testified that Dupree told him he “didn’t want to go back to jail if anyone found out he had sex” with one other underage girl.

The neighbor said he looked into Dupree’s apartment and saw a pair of feet protruding of his bedroom.

“I got out of there as fast as I could,” the neighbor said.

Kelley’s body was discovered in an abandoned garage in Kansas City, Missouri, on December 21, 2014, wrapped in a blanket. She was wearing only her underwear.

Investigation

It took several weeks for investigators to discover Kelley’s body, prompting them to search her cellphone call records, which showed she had made several calls to Dupree before her death.

Her last call was to 911, however it was never answered. Her cellphone records also showed she was inside 0.1 miles of Dupree’s residence.

At some point through the investigation, DNA from Dupree’s semen was found on Kelley’s body, further linking him to the murder.

He was summoned for questioning on January 28, 2015, six weeks after her murder – but was not arrested until eight years later, on January 4, 2023.

It then became clear to Kelley’s family that something was fallacious.

“Everything was known from day one — nothing happened,” Kelley’s uncle, Vinson Smith, told Fox 4 on the time.

“I’m sure we’re not the first family this has happened to, but that’s the most important thing. OK, I think we’re finally being heard, or something is being heard.”

But nine months later, prosecutors offered Dupree a plea deal that reduced the first-degree murder charge to manslaughter. They told the family the case was “old, so there’s no guarantee” of a conviction.

Dupree, 39, had been incarcerated since November 2020 for robbery, drug possession and deprivation of liberty, according to the Kansas City Star. He was previously imprisoned for child sex crimes, aggravated assault and criminal damage to property committed between 2003 and 2006.

The plea deal means Dupree could receive a 15-year sentence as an alternative of life. The Kansas City Star also reports that the brand new sentence will run concurrently with the one he’s currently serving, meaning he’ll only serve an extra 4 to five years. Sentencing will happen on November 22.

“I saw a bunch of bleach bottles in his trash,” his neighbor testified in September 2023, after telling jurors that Dupree asked him to help move the body. “I knew he was trying to clean up that shit.”

You might think that in America, the winner is the one who gets the most votes in an election. But with regards to presidential elections, that is not true.

One need look no further than Al Gore and Hillary Clinton to see how the American way of electing presidents can disappoint most voters.

Under the Electoral College, each state receives a certain variety of delegates who vote on behalf of voters in elections.

A state’s electoral votes are determined by the variety of senators (2) plus the variety of House representatives, which is predicated on the state’s population. For example, California may have 54 electoral votes (52 House representatives plus two senators), but a smaller state like Maine will only have 4 electoral votes.

When you add up all the state delegates, there are a total of 538 electoral votes. The presidential candidate who receives a majority of the electoral votes — 270 — wins the election.

In most states, if a presidential candidate wins a majority of the popular vote, she or he wins all of the electoral votes in that state.

For example, if Kamala Harris wins 5 million votes in a single state and Donald Trump only wins 5.1 million votes, Donald Trump will receive a portion of that state’s electoral votes.

Within the Electoral College, each state constitutes a mini-election of sorts.

Here’s where things get a little tricky. Many people think the Electoral College system is not fair to larger, more densely populated states like California or New York, because in those states, one delegate has to represent so many individuals. The Electoral College gives smaller states with fewer people just as much power as larger states.

Imagine the Electoral College as one big family barbecue. One side of the family might say they need macaroni and cheese as their most important course. They’re a big group with many members, like the states of California and New York.

But there may be one other side of the family, a little smaller, like Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Because they’ve more elders, their opinions carry more weight. That means if enough elders want potato salad, it doesn’t matter that almost all of the family wants macaroni and cheese. The elders have the upper hand in influencing what’s served.

That’s just about how the Electoral College works. States like New York and California could have more and are more densely populated, but their votes don’t carry as much weight as swing states, which could have fewer people but more heavily weighted electoral votes.

That’s why candidates spend a lot time in places where the Electoral College votes are more heavily weighted and where the consequence isn’t predictable. The assumption is that a place like New York will vote Democratic and Texas Republican, but there is not any such guarantee in Wisconsin.

That’s why voters have to listen to the changes in laws happening across the country right before our eyes – like in Georgia, where a group of pro-Trump voters in power recently voted to have all votes counted by hand, and hundreds of thousands of votes that before the deadline set by the state for confirming the voteThis is a rule change that can likely decelerate election results.

If you’re wondering why the United States adopted the Electoral College despite criticism over the years, the history of slavery played a role. During the drafting of the Constitution, the states of the North and South agreed to the Three-Fifths Compromise, which meant that an enslaved person can be counted as three-fifths of a person. This compromise ensured that the South wouldn’t be outnumbered by the more populous North. Essentially, slave bodies might be counted for representation, although enslaved people couldn’t vote.

Maintaining the Electoral College system protected Southern interests.

So in the event you vote this 12 months, remember what was done then to preserve the establishment, and do not assume the lengths people will go to now to tip the scales of their favor.

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