Washington
Appeals court limits order for LinkedIn to disclose journalists’ communications in leak probe
WASHINGTON (AP) — A judge must narrow an order requiring LinkedIn to divulge journalists’ communications on the social media platform to the Trump administration as part of a leak investigation, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a case with profound free-speech implications.
A three-judge panel from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the government isn’t entitled to a “blanket” order for LinkedIn to disclose a broad array of user records belonging to the journalists, whose employer isn’t identified in court records.
“A request by the government to scoop up reporters’ records wholesale and ascertain the identity of their sources would tip the balance against informed discourse in a manner inimical to democratic health,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in the court’s unanimous opinion.
But the panel also rejected LinkedIn’s request to entirely quash the district court’s “substantially overbroad” disclosure order. The panel recognized that the journalists’ First Amendment rights must be balanced against the administration’s duty to protect national security information.
“Serious security and speech claims are in tension in this case. There is space under law for both,” wrote Wilkinson, who was nominated to the court by Ronald Reagan, a Republican.
The panel also included Judge James Andrew Wynn, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, and Judge Nicole G. Berner, who was nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden.
U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Hanes, a Biden nominee based in Newport News, Virginia, issued the order that LinkedIn challenged in the case.
Republican President Donald Trump’s administration opened its leak investigation when an unidentified news organization published an article about a top-secret U.S. military operation in a foreign country, revealing classified information.
The journalists targeted by the leak investigation had reported on nearly 1,000 stories on many topics over the 18-month period covered by the judge’s order. The order would unmask every confidential source that the targeted journalists communicated with on LinkedIn over that span.
“While that order may catch sources relevant to the government’s investigation, it will also inevitably sweep in every other confidential source with whom the targeted journalists spoke,” Wilkinson wrote.
The panel returned the case to Hanes with an instruction to narrow the disclosure order.
“That court was right to accord the government considerable latitude in pursuing and maintaining the integrity of its investigation,” Wilkinson wrote. “Even so, that latitude is not infinite. It is not appropriate for district courts to approve requests purely because the records requested are logistically feasible to compile.”
Idaho
Man gets 18 years in prison for an Islamic State support plot
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — An Idaho man has been sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State group.
Alexander Scott Mercurio, 21, pleaded guilty to the federal terrorism charge last month. U.S. District Judge David C. Nye sentenced him Tuesday and said Mercurio would be placed on lifetime supervised release after completing his prison term.
Prosecutors said Mercurio had pledged his allegiance to IS and planned to attack churches in Coeur d’Alene on the group’s behalf, using explosives, knives, firearms and other weapons. He was arrested by the FBI on April 6, 2024, one day before the planned attack, according to prosecutors.
Idaho U.S. Attorney John Shirts said the sentence “sends the clear message that where individuals intend to pursue acts of terrorism against the United States — whether in Coeur d’Alene, or any other community — they will be brought to justice.”
Mercurio’s defense attorneys, Carter Powers Beggs and J. Stephen Roberts Jr. with the Federal Defenders of Eastern Washington and Idaho, declined to comment on the case. But in a court document, they described Mercurio as a depressed teen when he was arrested who was raised in a dysfunctional family that exposed him to white supremacist ideology at a young age.
Mercurio was dealing with family trauma and isolated from the outside world when he was befriended online by a government informant, his attorneys wrote. He had already bounced between multiple political ideologies by that time, ultimately embracing radical Islam when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, they said.
“Starting when he was just seventeen years old, Mr. Mercurio spent his days holed away in his basement bedroom, talking with his best friend about increasingly radical terrorist ideologies,” his attorneys wrote. “Together they brainstormed a plan that was as horrific as it was unlikely to succeed: a suicidal attack on local churches using his father’s firearms and an untested improvised explosive/flamethrower.”
Mercurio has since renounced his extremist views, and has been assessed as a low risk of future danger, his attorneys said. They asked the judge to impose a sentence of nine years in prison.
According to court records, Mercurio created an online repository for pro-IS content and originally wanted to travel overseas to support the organization but lacked the money and resources to make the trip. Shortly before his arrest, he gave the informant an audio recording pledging his support for IS, along with a photo of himself holding a knife in front of an IS flag.
The Islamic State group, which the U.S. government designates a terror group, took control of a large swath of territory in Syria and Iraq in 2014 and declared the territory to be a caliphate. The group had been largely defeated in both countries by 2018, but still has sleeper cells that carry out deadly attacks in both countries, and IS affiliates also operate in West Africa.
California
Tech consultant sentenced to 16 years to life in stabbing death of Cash App founder
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The tech consultant convicted in the stabbing death of Cash App founder Bob Lee was sentenced in San Francisco on Tuesday to 16 years to life to prison.
A jury in December 2024 found Nima Momeni guilty of second-degree murder, rejecting the defendant’s claim that he had acted in self-defense. He has remained in custody since his arrest nine days after the April 4, 2023, killing.
Before imposing the sentence, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Alexandra Gordon rejected Momeni’s request for a new trial. His attorneys have said they plan to appeal.
Members of Lee’s family addressed the court on Tuesday, including his 18-year-old daughter, Scout Lee, who spoke directly to Momeni.
“You did not just end his life, you ended an entire future built around a man,” she told Momeni, according to media reports.
Momeni, wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, maintained that he acted in self-defense. He told Lee’s family that he understood their loss.
“Unfortunately, we have completely different understandings of what transpired,” Momeni said.
Lee, a renowned tech mogul, was found staggering on a deserted downtown street, dripping a trail of blood and calling for help. Lee, 43, later died at a hospital.
Prosecutors said Momeni planned the attack on Lee, driving him to an isolated spot under the Bay Bridge and stabbing him three times, including once to the heart, with a knife he took from his sister’s kitchen. They said Momeni was angry with Lee for introducing his younger sister to a drug dealer she says gave her GHB and other drugs and then sexually assaulted her.
But Momeni testified on the stand that Lee was the one who attacked him with a knife, angry after the tech consultant chided him about spending more time with his family instead of searching for a strip club that night. Momeni, who studies martial arts, said he didn’t realize he had fatally wounded Lee or that Lee was even hurt.
Lee had created mobile payment service Cash App and was the chief product officer of the cryptocurrency MobileCoin when he died. He had recently moved to Miami from the San Francisco Bay Area, where his ex-wife Krista Lee lives with their two children, and had returned to California for a visit.
Jurors in the end rejected a charge of murder in the first degree, which required prosecutors prove that Momeni acted deliberately, willfully and with premeditation. Murder in the second degree does not require premeditation.
Washington
Kennedy family members ask a judge to block Trump’s Arlington memorial arch
Nine family members of the Kennedy political dynasty asked a judge Tuesday to block President Donald Trump’s plan to build a towering memorial arch, saying the 250-foot (76-meter) structure would cast a shadow over their relatives’ gravesites at Arlington National Cemetery.
The shadow would “fundamentally alter the experience of visiting the gravesites,” the relatives argued. They filed a motion to intervene in two existing lawsuits seeking to block construction of the arch.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan last week prohibited the Trump administration from breaking ground on the structure for 14 days.
The nine Kennedy family members who filed suit are children and grandchildren of Robert F. Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy, brothers of the slain U.S. president John F. Kennedy, both of whom served in the U.S. Senate. They are buried close to the eternal flame that marks JFK’s gravesite, a trio of memorials that are a major draw for the millions of people who visit the Arlington cemetery each year.
Building the arch would be a “permanent denigration” of the gravesites, and the Kennedy offspring “would never again be able to appreciate both sites as they always have before, and as the Kennedy family always intended,” lawyers for the relatives wrote. They are represented by veteran Washington lawyer Norm Eisen and Democracy Defenders Fund.
“It is unfortunate to see that some members of the Kennedy family have joined the litigation against the Arch as the project is intended to honor our heroes who rest in Arlington Cemetery,” said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle. “The judiciary should not be abused to politicize a structure designed to unite our nation.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s health and human services secretary who has a fractured relationship with many of his relatives, did not join the lawsuit.
The arch is one of several projects around Washington that the Republican president has undertaken as he alters the capital to his tastes — from renovating one of its storied public golf courses to threatening to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Those projects could soon face intense scrutiny after Democrats gained control of Congress in the midterm elections.
The White House last week unveiled a glitzy new website to showcase the arch, which is slated to rise in a mass of gold ornamentation and stately gray granite between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.
Appeals court limits order for LinkedIn to disclose journalists’ communications in leak probe
WASHINGTON (AP) — A judge must narrow an order requiring LinkedIn to divulge journalists’ communications on the social media platform to the Trump administration as part of a leak investigation, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a case with profound free-speech implications.
A three-judge panel from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the government isn’t entitled to a “blanket” order for LinkedIn to disclose a broad array of user records belonging to the journalists, whose employer isn’t identified in court records.
“A request by the government to scoop up reporters’ records wholesale and ascertain the identity of their sources would tip the balance against informed discourse in a manner inimical to democratic health,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in the court’s unanimous opinion.
But the panel also rejected LinkedIn’s request to entirely quash the district court’s “substantially overbroad” disclosure order. The panel recognized that the journalists’ First Amendment rights must be balanced against the administration’s duty to protect national security information.
“Serious security and speech claims are in tension in this case. There is space under law for both,” wrote Wilkinson, who was nominated to the court by Ronald Reagan, a Republican.
The panel also included Judge James Andrew Wynn, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, and Judge Nicole G. Berner, who was nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden.
U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Hanes, a Biden nominee based in Newport News, Virginia, issued the order that LinkedIn challenged in the case.
Republican President Donald Trump’s administration opened its leak investigation when an unidentified news organization published an article about a top-secret U.S. military operation in a foreign country, revealing classified information.
The journalists targeted by the leak investigation had reported on nearly 1,000 stories on many topics over the 18-month period covered by the judge’s order. The order would unmask every confidential source that the targeted journalists communicated with on LinkedIn over that span.
“While that order may catch sources relevant to the government’s investigation, it will also inevitably sweep in every other confidential source with whom the targeted journalists spoke,” Wilkinson wrote.
The panel returned the case to Hanes with an instruction to narrow the disclosure order.
“That court was right to accord the government considerable latitude in pursuing and maintaining the integrity of its investigation,” Wilkinson wrote. “Even so, that latitude is not infinite. It is not appropriate for district courts to approve requests purely because the records requested are logistically feasible to compile.”
Idaho
Man gets 18 years in prison for an Islamic State support plot
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — An Idaho man has been sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State group.
Alexander Scott Mercurio, 21, pleaded guilty to the federal terrorism charge last month. U.S. District Judge David C. Nye sentenced him Tuesday and said Mercurio would be placed on lifetime supervised release after completing his prison term.
Prosecutors said Mercurio had pledged his allegiance to IS and planned to attack churches in Coeur d’Alene on the group’s behalf, using explosives, knives, firearms and other weapons. He was arrested by the FBI on April 6, 2024, one day before the planned attack, according to prosecutors.
Idaho U.S. Attorney John Shirts said the sentence “sends the clear message that where individuals intend to pursue acts of terrorism against the United States — whether in Coeur d’Alene, or any other community — they will be brought to justice.”
Mercurio’s defense attorneys, Carter Powers Beggs and J. Stephen Roberts Jr. with the Federal Defenders of Eastern Washington and Idaho, declined to comment on the case. But in a court document, they described Mercurio as a depressed teen when he was arrested who was raised in a dysfunctional family that exposed him to white supremacist ideology at a young age.
Mercurio was dealing with family trauma and isolated from the outside world when he was befriended online by a government informant, his attorneys wrote. He had already bounced between multiple political ideologies by that time, ultimately embracing radical Islam when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, they said.
“Starting when he was just seventeen years old, Mr. Mercurio spent his days holed away in his basement bedroom, talking with his best friend about increasingly radical terrorist ideologies,” his attorneys wrote. “Together they brainstormed a plan that was as horrific as it was unlikely to succeed: a suicidal attack on local churches using his father’s firearms and an untested improvised explosive/flamethrower.”
Mercurio has since renounced his extremist views, and has been assessed as a low risk of future danger, his attorneys said. They asked the judge to impose a sentence of nine years in prison.
According to court records, Mercurio created an online repository for pro-IS content and originally wanted to travel overseas to support the organization but lacked the money and resources to make the trip. Shortly before his arrest, he gave the informant an audio recording pledging his support for IS, along with a photo of himself holding a knife in front of an IS flag.
The Islamic State group, which the U.S. government designates a terror group, took control of a large swath of territory in Syria and Iraq in 2014 and declared the territory to be a caliphate. The group had been largely defeated in both countries by 2018, but still has sleeper cells that carry out deadly attacks in both countries, and IS affiliates also operate in West Africa.
California
Tech consultant sentenced to 16 years to life in stabbing death of Cash App founder
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The tech consultant convicted in the stabbing death of Cash App founder Bob Lee was sentenced in San Francisco on Tuesday to 16 years to life to prison.
A jury in December 2024 found Nima Momeni guilty of second-degree murder, rejecting the defendant’s claim that he had acted in self-defense. He has remained in custody since his arrest nine days after the April 4, 2023, killing.
Before imposing the sentence, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Alexandra Gordon rejected Momeni’s request for a new trial. His attorneys have said they plan to appeal.
Members of Lee’s family addressed the court on Tuesday, including his 18-year-old daughter, Scout Lee, who spoke directly to Momeni.
“You did not just end his life, you ended an entire future built around a man,” she told Momeni, according to media reports.
Momeni, wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, maintained that he acted in self-defense. He told Lee’s family that he understood their loss.
“Unfortunately, we have completely different understandings of what transpired,” Momeni said.
Lee, a renowned tech mogul, was found staggering on a deserted downtown street, dripping a trail of blood and calling for help. Lee, 43, later died at a hospital.
Prosecutors said Momeni planned the attack on Lee, driving him to an isolated spot under the Bay Bridge and stabbing him three times, including once to the heart, with a knife he took from his sister’s kitchen. They said Momeni was angry with Lee for introducing his younger sister to a drug dealer she says gave her GHB and other drugs and then sexually assaulted her.
But Momeni testified on the stand that Lee was the one who attacked him with a knife, angry after the tech consultant chided him about spending more time with his family instead of searching for a strip club that night. Momeni, who studies martial arts, said he didn’t realize he had fatally wounded Lee or that Lee was even hurt.
Lee had created mobile payment service Cash App and was the chief product officer of the cryptocurrency MobileCoin when he died. He had recently moved to Miami from the San Francisco Bay Area, where his ex-wife Krista Lee lives with their two children, and had returned to California for a visit.
Jurors in the end rejected a charge of murder in the first degree, which required prosecutors prove that Momeni acted deliberately, willfully and with premeditation. Murder in the second degree does not require premeditation.
Washington
Kennedy family members ask a judge to block Trump’s Arlington memorial arch
Nine family members of the Kennedy political dynasty asked a judge Tuesday to block President Donald Trump’s plan to build a towering memorial arch, saying the 250-foot (76-meter) structure would cast a shadow over their relatives’ gravesites at Arlington National Cemetery.
The shadow would “fundamentally alter the experience of visiting the gravesites,” the relatives argued. They filed a motion to intervene in two existing lawsuits seeking to block construction of the arch.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan last week prohibited the Trump administration from breaking ground on the structure for 14 days.
The nine Kennedy family members who filed suit are children and grandchildren of Robert F. Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy, brothers of the slain U.S. president John F. Kennedy, both of whom served in the U.S. Senate. They are buried close to the eternal flame that marks JFK’s gravesite, a trio of memorials that are a major draw for the millions of people who visit the Arlington cemetery each year.
Building the arch would be a “permanent denigration” of the gravesites, and the Kennedy offspring “would never again be able to appreciate both sites as they always have before, and as the Kennedy family always intended,” lawyers for the relatives wrote. They are represented by veteran Washington lawyer Norm Eisen and Democracy Defenders Fund.
“It is unfortunate to see that some members of the Kennedy family have joined the litigation against the Arch as the project is intended to honor our heroes who rest in Arlington Cemetery,” said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle. “The judiciary should not be abused to politicize a structure designed to unite our nation.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s health and human services secretary who has a fractured relationship with many of his relatives, did not join the lawsuit.
The arch is one of several projects around Washington that the Republican president has undertaken as he alters the capital to his tastes — from renovating one of its storied public golf courses to threatening to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Those projects could soon face intense scrutiny after Democrats gained control of Congress in the midterm elections.
The White House last week unveiled a glitzy new website to showcase the arch, which is slated to rise in a mass of gold ornamentation and stately gray granite between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.
