New York
Ex-Epoch Times CFO pleads guilty to laundering money in $67 million scheme
NEW YORK (AP) — The former chief financial officer of The Epoch Times, a conservative multinational media company, interrupted jury selection at his money laundering trial on Thursday to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge in a $67 million fraud scheme.
Weidong “Bill” Guan, 63, of Secaucus, New Jersey, entered the plea in Manhattan federal court, admitting his participation in what prosecutors described as a scheme to launder fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits and other funds through the New York-based media company’s bank accounts and related entities.
The conspiracy charge relating to illegal financial transactions carries a potential prison sentence of up to 10 years in prison, but the deal with prosecutors spares him from the possibility that he would be convicted of other charges at trial and face the chance of more than a decade in prison.
Judge Victor Marrero did not immediately set a sentencing date for Guan, who remains free on bail.
As he admitted his role, Guan said he knew there was “a high probability” that money passing through accounts he oversaw “were the proceeds of criminality.”
He said that despite the probability that the money was linked to fraud, he “chose to accept” explanations he was given and “did not look deeper to verify my concerns.”
“This was a tremendous lapse in judgment,” Guan told the judge. “It was wrong and I am very sorry for my actions.”
In response to a question posed by the judge, Guan confirmed that he knew what he was doing was wrong and illegal.
But when the judge asked him if he was pleading guilty, he responded: “I feel like I’m guilty.”
Marrero told him it was not a question of what he felt, but whether he was guilty.
“I’m guilty,” Guan responded.
According to court papers, members of the company’s “Make Money Online” team, which was managed by Guan, used cryptocurrency since 2020 to “knowingly purchase tens of millions of dollars in crime proceeds,” including funds from fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits that were loaded onto prepaid debit cards.
Stolen personal information was then used to open accounts as part of the money laundering scheme, prosecutors said. The money was further laundered through other bank accounts held by Epoch and Guan’s personal bank and cryptocurrency accounts, they said.
Prosecutors have said the charges are not related to the media company’s newsgathering activities.
A prosecutor told the judge that a trial would have included testimony from current and former Epoch Times employees along with cryptocurrency records and hundreds of emails and text messages, including some in which Guan misled banks about the nature of the income going through various accounts.
Federal prosecutors said the media company’s revenues jumped approximately 410% when the money laundering began, from approximately $15 million to $62 million. Guan, they said, lied to banks when they asked about the increase in transactions and said there was an increase in legitimate donations.
The Epoch Times, which has promised full cooperation with prosecutors, has become politically conservative over the years and has embraced President Donald Trump.
After Thursday’s plea, the Epoch Times said in a statement that it was never a party to the litigation and it “remains focused on producing award-winning and independent journalism” under the leadership of its chief executive, Samuel Zhou, and its chief financial officer, William Cheung.
Ohio
8 men indicted in planned drone and sniper attack on White House UFC cage-fighting show
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Eight men were indicted on murder and terrorism conspiracy charges Thursday for their alleged roles in a thwarted drone and sniper attack on the UFC cage-fighting show staged at the White House in June.
The indictment, returned in Ohio, charges all eight in two separate conspiracies, one to provide material support to terrorists and a second to commit murder on federal government territory and to murder a federal government official.
It remains unclear from the court records how close the would-be attackers could have come to being able to carry out the plan had it not been thwarted.
According to the new indictment, the plot began in May, when the group began amassing money, firearms, ammunition, body armor, explosives, drones, medical equipment, communications equipment and other items.
It was on June 10 that law enforcement officials learned about a possible threat to President Donald Trump’s UFC cage-fighting show, four days before the mixed martial arts extravaganza was scheduled to take place.
The Justice Department last month announced a series of criminal complaints in different districts across the country in connection with the UFC plot, including from Ohio, Missouri, Washington, Nebraska and California.
The indictment announced Thursday represents an effort by the government to streamline the case and knit the defendants together into a single conspiracy prosecution in Ohio. Officials have said the group members harbored fringe conspiracy theories and hoped the attack would destabilize the government.
One of the defendants told investigators that they planned to fly explosive-laden drones into the event and then shoot panicked crowd members as they fled, according to a federal affidavit.
They communicated through online chat groups and forums and classified participants into tiers, with tier 1 participants committing “to put themselves in harm’s way, break the law, and potentially go into hiding,” according to the federal indictment.
Members of the group also engaged in marksmanship and combat training.
Tycen C. Proper 19, of Danville, Ohio, and four others were arrested and charged in Missouri, Nebraska and California the weekend of the cage-fighting event, called Freedom 250. Two more defendants were charged and arrested by the FBI about a week later in Washington and Missouri.
The Justice Department said an eighth man was charged this week. He is 21-year-old Chandler D. Scaggs, of Chapmanville, West Virginia, who was taken into custody in that state. Scaggs was allegedly assigned to be one of the snipers in the plotted attack, according to an affidavit.
The affidavit said Scaggs was apparently to be picked up by Proper and taken to Washington but lost contact with him after Proper was arrested, the same as the others. Scaggs allegedly signaled to the group that he was still willing to participate in the attack and arranged to travel to the event with another co-conspirator.
Scaggs’ attorney, Eric Brehm, said his office was thoroughly reviewing the allegations and declined to comment further.
Conspiring to provide material support to terrorists is punishable by up to 15 years in prison, and conspiring to commit murder carries a penalty of up to life in prison.
Federal prosecutors allege that the group planned to murder Trump, Vice President JD Vance, other federal officials, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, trillionaire businessman Elon Musk and “other high value targets” at the event.
New Hampshire
2 transgender girls drop lawsuit after Supreme Court ruling
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Two transgender girls who were the first to challenge President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” have withdrawn their lawsuit in New Hampshire based on a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld state bans on transgender athletes in girls’ sports and their own personal hardships, their lawyer said.
“This case was always about two courageous young girls who simply wanted the same opportunities as their peers to participate in school life,” their lawyer, Chris Erchull of GLAD Law, said in a statement Thursday. “Their willingness to stand up to extraordinary hostility made clear the human cost of laws that target transgender youth.”
The teenagers, Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle, took on Trump’s executive order last year, amending their 2024 complaint against New Hampshire’s law on banning transgender girls from school sports. A federal judge had granted a court order allowing them to play as the case proceeded.
For Tirrell, it meant being able to keep playing on her high school girls’ soccer team. For Turmelle, it was having a chance to try out for different sports.
Both sides agreed to pause the case and wait for a ruling from the Supreme Court as it considered similar state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school and college athletic teams in Idaho and West Virginia. Last month, the court upheld the laws. It also said that barring transgender girls and women doesn’t run afoul of the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
One teen and her family decided to move from New Hampshire
Turmelle and her family moved out of New Hampshire last summer following proposed legislation against transgender people. One measure signed into law by Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte last year prohibits medical professionals from providing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy to new transgender patients under age 18.
“Though there may be a carve-out for people already receiving gender-affirming care, that is way too close a call for us to risk staying,” Turmelle’s mother, Amy Manzetti, wrote in an op-ed piece at the time. “Other New Hampshire laws also seek to erase her.”
Most Republican-controlled states in the past five years have adopted laws or policies limiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors and limiting which school bathrooms transgender people can use, as well as sports restrictions. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that about 3% of youth ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender.
“The challenges with relocation are significant and burdensome — this includes having to find new employment, buying and selling homes, packing and moving possessions, integrating kids with a new school system, losing access to longstanding family and friends, and potential loss of income,” Corinne Goodwin, the executive director of Eastern PA Trans Equality Project in Pennsylvania, said in an email.
“But these families do so because they love their kids and know that supporting them with the care and opportunities they need is critical to their long-term success and happiness.”
The other teen gave up playing soccer at high school
Tirrell, 17, began her junior year last fall on the girls’ junior varsity soccer team. Things were fine at first, and each time she scored a goal, she got a round of ice cream from her parents. But a few weeks into the season, she decided to stop playing.
“With all of the political stuff going on, soccer wasn’t just about the game anymore,” her mother, Sara Tirrell, told The Associated Press in an interview.
It became more about preparing for the possibility of conflict.
“Were there any local Facebook groups where they were sort of agitating about potential protests and how do we prepare, and what are walking into, and we never kind of knew,” she said. “We were on a lot of pins and needles, especially after the previous season.”
She was referring to a controversy at an away game where two dads from an opposing team were banned from school grounds for wearing pink wristbands marked “XX” to represent female chromosomes. They sued the school district and a judge ruled against them. They have appealed their case.
Last fall, there was an increased presence of school administrators at the games and bus drivers pulled in closer to the field so the students weren’t in the parking lot, she said.
Parker’s father described the atmosphere as “palpable tension.”
Even playing on her own turf, “there would typically be a couple of police officers at the home games where there weren’t previously,” Zach Tirrell said.
Parker’s parents hope she’ll return to playing soccer some day. In the meantime, “she plans to be around and use her voice to continue standing up to discrimination,” her mother said.
Ex-Epoch Times CFO pleads guilty to laundering money in $67 million scheme
NEW YORK (AP) — The former chief financial officer of The Epoch Times, a conservative multinational media company, interrupted jury selection at his money laundering trial on Thursday to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge in a $67 million fraud scheme.
Weidong “Bill” Guan, 63, of Secaucus, New Jersey, entered the plea in Manhattan federal court, admitting his participation in what prosecutors described as a scheme to launder fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits and other funds through the New York-based media company’s bank accounts and related entities.
The conspiracy charge relating to illegal financial transactions carries a potential prison sentence of up to 10 years in prison, but the deal with prosecutors spares him from the possibility that he would be convicted of other charges at trial and face the chance of more than a decade in prison.
Judge Victor Marrero did not immediately set a sentencing date for Guan, who remains free on bail.
As he admitted his role, Guan said he knew there was “a high probability” that money passing through accounts he oversaw “were the proceeds of criminality.”
He said that despite the probability that the money was linked to fraud, he “chose to accept” explanations he was given and “did not look deeper to verify my concerns.”
“This was a tremendous lapse in judgment,” Guan told the judge. “It was wrong and I am very sorry for my actions.”
In response to a question posed by the judge, Guan confirmed that he knew what he was doing was wrong and illegal.
But when the judge asked him if he was pleading guilty, he responded: “I feel like I’m guilty.”
Marrero told him it was not a question of what he felt, but whether he was guilty.
“I’m guilty,” Guan responded.
According to court papers, members of the company’s “Make Money Online” team, which was managed by Guan, used cryptocurrency since 2020 to “knowingly purchase tens of millions of dollars in crime proceeds,” including funds from fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits that were loaded onto prepaid debit cards.
Stolen personal information was then used to open accounts as part of the money laundering scheme, prosecutors said. The money was further laundered through other bank accounts held by Epoch and Guan’s personal bank and cryptocurrency accounts, they said.
Prosecutors have said the charges are not related to the media company’s newsgathering activities.
A prosecutor told the judge that a trial would have included testimony from current and former Epoch Times employees along with cryptocurrency records and hundreds of emails and text messages, including some in which Guan misled banks about the nature of the income going through various accounts.
Federal prosecutors said the media company’s revenues jumped approximately 410% when the money laundering began, from approximately $15 million to $62 million. Guan, they said, lied to banks when they asked about the increase in transactions and said there was an increase in legitimate donations.
The Epoch Times, which has promised full cooperation with prosecutors, has become politically conservative over the years and has embraced President Donald Trump.
After Thursday’s plea, the Epoch Times said in a statement that it was never a party to the litigation and it “remains focused on producing award-winning and independent journalism” under the leadership of its chief executive, Samuel Zhou, and its chief financial officer, William Cheung.
Ohio
8 men indicted in planned drone and sniper attack on White House UFC cage-fighting show
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Eight men were indicted on murder and terrorism conspiracy charges Thursday for their alleged roles in a thwarted drone and sniper attack on the UFC cage-fighting show staged at the White House in June.
The indictment, returned in Ohio, charges all eight in two separate conspiracies, one to provide material support to terrorists and a second to commit murder on federal government territory and to murder a federal government official.
It remains unclear from the court records how close the would-be attackers could have come to being able to carry out the plan had it not been thwarted.
According to the new indictment, the plot began in May, when the group began amassing money, firearms, ammunition, body armor, explosives, drones, medical equipment, communications equipment and other items.
It was on June 10 that law enforcement officials learned about a possible threat to President Donald Trump’s UFC cage-fighting show, four days before the mixed martial arts extravaganza was scheduled to take place.
The Justice Department last month announced a series of criminal complaints in different districts across the country in connection with the UFC plot, including from Ohio, Missouri, Washington, Nebraska and California.
The indictment announced Thursday represents an effort by the government to streamline the case and knit the defendants together into a single conspiracy prosecution in Ohio. Officials have said the group members harbored fringe conspiracy theories and hoped the attack would destabilize the government.
One of the defendants told investigators that they planned to fly explosive-laden drones into the event and then shoot panicked crowd members as they fled, according to a federal affidavit.
They communicated through online chat groups and forums and classified participants into tiers, with tier 1 participants committing “to put themselves in harm’s way, break the law, and potentially go into hiding,” according to the federal indictment.
Members of the group also engaged in marksmanship and combat training.
Tycen C. Proper 19, of Danville, Ohio, and four others were arrested and charged in Missouri, Nebraska and California the weekend of the cage-fighting event, called Freedom 250. Two more defendants were charged and arrested by the FBI about a week later in Washington and Missouri.
The Justice Department said an eighth man was charged this week. He is 21-year-old Chandler D. Scaggs, of Chapmanville, West Virginia, who was taken into custody in that state. Scaggs was allegedly assigned to be one of the snipers in the plotted attack, according to an affidavit.
The affidavit said Scaggs was apparently to be picked up by Proper and taken to Washington but lost contact with him after Proper was arrested, the same as the others. Scaggs allegedly signaled to the group that he was still willing to participate in the attack and arranged to travel to the event with another co-conspirator.
Scaggs’ attorney, Eric Brehm, said his office was thoroughly reviewing the allegations and declined to comment further.
Conspiring to provide material support to terrorists is punishable by up to 15 years in prison, and conspiring to commit murder carries a penalty of up to life in prison.
Federal prosecutors allege that the group planned to murder Trump, Vice President JD Vance, other federal officials, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, trillionaire businessman Elon Musk and “other high value targets” at the event.
New Hampshire
2 transgender girls drop lawsuit after Supreme Court ruling
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Two transgender girls who were the first to challenge President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” have withdrawn their lawsuit in New Hampshire based on a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld state bans on transgender athletes in girls’ sports and their own personal hardships, their lawyer said.
“This case was always about two courageous young girls who simply wanted the same opportunities as their peers to participate in school life,” their lawyer, Chris Erchull of GLAD Law, said in a statement Thursday. “Their willingness to stand up to extraordinary hostility made clear the human cost of laws that target transgender youth.”
The teenagers, Parker Tirrell and Iris Turmelle, took on Trump’s executive order last year, amending their 2024 complaint against New Hampshire’s law on banning transgender girls from school sports. A federal judge had granted a court order allowing them to play as the case proceeded.
For Tirrell, it meant being able to keep playing on her high school girls’ soccer team. For Turmelle, it was having a chance to try out for different sports.
Both sides agreed to pause the case and wait for a ruling from the Supreme Court as it considered similar state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school and college athletic teams in Idaho and West Virginia. Last month, the court upheld the laws. It also said that barring transgender girls and women doesn’t run afoul of the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
One teen and her family decided to move from New Hampshire
Turmelle and her family moved out of New Hampshire last summer following proposed legislation against transgender people. One measure signed into law by Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte last year prohibits medical professionals from providing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy to new transgender patients under age 18.
“Though there may be a carve-out for people already receiving gender-affirming care, that is way too close a call for us to risk staying,” Turmelle’s mother, Amy Manzetti, wrote in an op-ed piece at the time. “Other New Hampshire laws also seek to erase her.”
Most Republican-controlled states in the past five years have adopted laws or policies limiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors and limiting which school bathrooms transgender people can use, as well as sports restrictions. The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that about 3% of youth ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender.
“The challenges with relocation are significant and burdensome — this includes having to find new employment, buying and selling homes, packing and moving possessions, integrating kids with a new school system, losing access to longstanding family and friends, and potential loss of income,” Corinne Goodwin, the executive director of Eastern PA Trans Equality Project in Pennsylvania, said in an email.
“But these families do so because they love their kids and know that supporting them with the care and opportunities they need is critical to their long-term success and happiness.”
The other teen gave up playing soccer at high school
Tirrell, 17, began her junior year last fall on the girls’ junior varsity soccer team. Things were fine at first, and each time she scored a goal, she got a round of ice cream from her parents. But a few weeks into the season, she decided to stop playing.
“With all of the political stuff going on, soccer wasn’t just about the game anymore,” her mother, Sara Tirrell, told The Associated Press in an interview.
It became more about preparing for the possibility of conflict.
“Were there any local Facebook groups where they were sort of agitating about potential protests and how do we prepare, and what are walking into, and we never kind of knew,” she said. “We were on a lot of pins and needles, especially after the previous season.”
She was referring to a controversy at an away game where two dads from an opposing team were banned from school grounds for wearing pink wristbands marked “XX” to represent female chromosomes. They sued the school district and a judge ruled against them. They have appealed their case.
Last fall, there was an increased presence of school administrators at the games and bus drivers pulled in closer to the field so the students weren’t in the parking lot, she said.
Parker’s father described the atmosphere as “palpable tension.”
Even playing on her own turf, “there would typically be a couple of police officers at the home games where there weren’t previously,” Zach Tirrell said.
Parker’s parents hope she’ll return to playing soccer some day. In the meantime, “she plans to be around and use her voice to continue standing up to discrimination,” her mother said.
