Washington
Judge tosses ex-CIA head’s lawsuit against DOJ over document preservation
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday rejected a lawsuit from John Brennan that sought to force the Justice Department to preserve investigative records so that the former CIA director can challenge any eventual criminal case against him as a selective and malicious prosecution.
A lawyer for Brennan conceded during arguments last month that the request for a court order was unusual but said it was necessary given what he called the Justice Department’s pattern of vindictiveness in its pursuit of Brennan and its recent track record of erasing or failing to preserve communications and records in other matters.
The lawsuit contends that the records being sought would demonstrate that any prosecution of Brennan, who has been investigated for months by the Trump administration Justice Department but not charged, is the product of a political vendetta to punish one of President Donald Trump’s perceived adversaries.
But U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb denied Brennan’s request, saying his arguments were too speculative at the moment and that the former CIA director had not proven that the Justice Department was failing to preserve records relevant to a future malicious prosecution argument.
“Brennan’s allegations — that he is being targeted by the Trump Administration not because of his conduct, but because he has opposed the current president — are deeply concerning,” Cobb wrote in dismissing the lawsuit. “If he was eventually able to prove those allegations true, that would certainly suggest that his potential prosecution is vindictive. But even taking all of Brennan’s allegations to be truthful at this stage, the injury he alleges is simply too attenuated from the actions he seeks to enjoin to warrant a finding of standing here.”
Lawyers for Brennan said in a statement that Cobb’s decision addressed a technical matter of legal standing and was not based on their argument “that the Justice Department is using the criminal justice system to target and investigate him for politically vindictive reasons.” They said the government had refused to offer assurances that it was preserving records and communications that would reveal the “motivations behind its investigations of Director Brennan.”
“With this lawsuit, Director Brennan has served notice that the government’s conduct and its document preservation will be carefully scrutinized in the event of any future indictment. Director Brennan will continue to vigorously defend himself against these baseless investigations, and he will challenge any attempt to use the criminal justice system for personal and political retribution,” said Brennan’s lawyers, Ken Wainstein and Dan Gelber.
As CIA director in the final years of President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration, Brennan was a key figure in the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Trump, who went on to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton for the White House. That assessment has for years infuriated Trump, who spent much of his first term shadowed by an investigation into whether his campaign had conspired with Russia.
Brennan over the last year has been entangled in Justice Department investigations into whether he made false statements before the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 and in a broader Florida-based inquiry into whether he and other former intelligence and law enforcement officials engaged in a conspiracy to keep Trump from power.
He has been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in the broader conspiracy investigation, though the date of his appearance has been postponed. His lawyers have said they’ve been told by prosecutors that he remains a target in the false statements investigation.
Brennan has vigorously denied any wrongdoing, with Wainstein telling Cobb during arguments last month that the notion of a broad anti-Trump conspiracy was “fiction.”
It is unclear whether Brennan will face charges, but his attorneys sued in July to put the government on notice that they would challenge any prosecution on vindictive prosecution grounds. They said records they received from the government through a court order would help support their argument.
Cobb was nominated in 2021 by President Joe Biden, who earlier served as Obama’s vice president.
Ohio
Another court declares school choice voucher program unconstitutional
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Another court declared Ohio’s private school voucher program unconstitutional on Thursday, finding it provides a choice to the private schools that must honor the taxpayer-funded vouchers rather than to Ohio families.
The ruling by a three-judge panel of the 10th District Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s June 2025 ruling that found the EdChoice program violates an Ohio constitutional requirement for “a thorough and efficient system of common schools.” The ruling will not immediately affect the EdChoice program, which was allowed to remain operational in anticipation of an appeal.
“EdChoice, as presently structured and funded, secures with taxpayer funds a competing system of uncommon schools that is not subject to the same obligations imposed on Ohio’s system of common schools,” Judge David Leland wrote in a unanimous opinion.
Judges took particular issue with the fact that a private school that participates in EdChoice has “broad discretion” over which students it admits, including denying or discontinuing any student “based on its perception that its stated admissions criteria are not met, whatever those criteria may be.”
“Thus, under the program, it is the participating school, not the student or their family, that chooses whether to admit the student and, consequently, whether the student may utilize taxpayer vouchers at that school,” the court said.
The court further found that EdChoice harms public schools in three ways: by allowing private schools to cherry-pick students, concentrating participating schools in urban areas and giving voters less reason to approve local school levies.
“Each one of these effects reinforce one another,” according to the court, “creating a downward spiral of reduced enrollment, reduced revenue, and increased fiscal pressure on schools.”
The decision comes in a 2022 lawsuit joined by hundreds of public school districts, known collectively as Vouchers Hurt Ohio, as well as some parents, students and the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding.
The plaintiffs argued that Ohio’s nearly 30-year-old school voucher plan, known as EdChoice, has over time created an unconstitutional system of separately funded private schools and led to resegregation of some districts because mostly nonminority students take advantage of the program. In her lower court ruling, Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page rejected plaintiffs’ argument that EdChoice violates the equal protection clause.
Ohio expanded to a universal voucher program in 2023 that is one of the largest and most expansive in the U.S.
Republican Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, who championed that effort, said Thursday that the appellate court’s ruling is out of step with legal precedent.
“The constitutionality of various school choice programs has been affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, the Ohio Supreme Court, and a variety of other tribunals over the past several decades,” Huffman said in a statement.
“The decision of one of 12 courts of appeal in Ohio will not affect that.”
In Thursday’s opinion, Leland wrote that the appeals court was not suggesting “that school vouchers in all forms violate the Ohio Constitution” — only that EdChoice does “as presently structured, funded, and challenged in this case.”
New York
Prosecutors: College student died after being drugged and raped in her dorm
NEW YORK (AP) — A man raped a student at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology after giving her fentanyl that left her unconscious and ultimately killed her, federal prosecutors said Thursday. The student’s friend also took the drug and nearly died.
Moises Freire, 19, of the Bronx, was charged with participating in a fentanyl distribution conspiracy and distributing a deadly drug with intent to commit rape. Brian Peralta Cabrera, 18, of Queens, was also charged in the drug conspiracy.
According to prosecutors, Freire brought fentanyl to the students’ dorm room March 18 and falsely claimed that the substance, which he’d previously described as “straight poison,” was pure cocaine. At his urging, the women took the drug and almost immediately lost consciousness, prosecutors said. Freire was not a student at FIT. The woman he is accused of raping lapsed into a coma and died March 21.
Freire and Peralta Cabrera were first arrested in March and pleaded not guilty to an initial set of charges that did not include the rape allegation. They remain in federal custody and have yet to be arraigned on the new indictment.
A third defendant, Harry Rosales Pino, pleaded guilty in September to a charge of conspiracy to distribute narcotics resulting in death and serious bodily injury. He is set to be sentenced in December.
Emails seeking comment were left for lawyers for Freire and Peralta Cabrera. If convicted, they face a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison and a possible life sentence.
Neither of the women were identified in court papers.
The Fashion Institute of Technology, part of the State University of New York, was not identified, either, but a defense lawyer mentioned it during a prior hearing. School officials didn’t immediately comment.
At a court hearing in April, Freire’s lawyer, Mitchell Schwartz, called the woman’s death a tragedy but said Freire was not trying to ply the students with drugs.
If anything, he told Judge Sidney Stein, what preceded the overdoses — including the woman’s suggestion that Freire wear a wig and “look like a girl” so he could sneak up to her dorm room after she had invited him over — was “a story of teenagers doing what I would call ‘dumb teenager things.’”
“It’s not dumb teenager things to give somebody fentanyl, sir,” Stein replied.
At the same hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ariana Bloom detailed the rape allegations at the heart of the superseding indictment unsealed Thursday.
Bloom told the judge that Freire admitted in a written statement to campus security that he had sex with the woman and realized she was unconscious after.
Freire said he then looked to his left and saw her friend unconscious on the floor “with her eyes rolled back in her head,” according to Bloom.
Freire did not immediately seek help, instead waiting about 45 minutes while he sent photos of the unconscious women to others, prosecutors said.
When he finally went to campus security, he claimed that the women simply drank too much, prosecutors said.
Christopher Roberts, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration New York Task Force Division, said the allegations were “beyond disturbing and include a cruel deception and unimaginable assault.”
“College should be a place where young people can learn, grow, and pursue their dreams, not a place where predators exploit their vulnerability,” Roberts said. “Every student deserves to feel safe, whether walking across campus, sitting in a classroom, or inside their own dorm room.”
New York
Lawsuit alleges DHS effort to collect detailed state voter data violates federal law
NEW YORK (AP) — A lawsuit filed Thursday challenges the Trump administration’s sprawling effort to collect and analyze Americans’ voter data, alleging the government has obtained voter files from at least 47 states and handled the data in a way that violates federal law.
The 42-page complaint filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., claims the Department of Homeland Security’s secretive probe of the voter data, including a policy to combine it with commercial datasets, disregards federal safeguards and flouts the privacy rights of millions of Americans.
The case, brought by the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the League of United Latin American Citizens, is the latest in a torrent of legal challenges that have emerged in response to President Donald Trump’s crusade against noncitizen voting, a concern he views as a serious problem but which research shows is exceedingly rare.
The Trump administration has consistently sought to exert more power over elections, even as the Constitution grants that authority to states and, in some cases, Congress. Judges have consistently upheld states’ rights to decline to hand over their lists to the federal government.
DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thursday’s lawsuit alleges the Trump administration has obtained voter lists from 47 states, even as 30 states refused to turn them over to the administration. It calls for the court to declare the administration’s collection of voter data illegal, block the policy and order DHS to delete and stop using the voter information it already has collected.
The lawsuit comes less than three weeks before Election Day, as the administration has continued to escalate threats to states alleging they are not doing enough to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls.
On Thursday, the administration sued California election officials, alleging they didn’t act quickly enough to review names the federal government identified as “likely” noncitizens, and asking a judge to bar the state from counting those people’s mail ballots for next month’s midterm elections. The secretary of state’s office said it was given just 48 hours to review 20,000 names without the Justice Department providing any evidence to substantiate its claims.
Judge tosses ex-CIA head’s lawsuit against DOJ over document preservation
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday rejected a lawsuit from John Brennan that sought to force the Justice Department to preserve investigative records so that the former CIA director can challenge any eventual criminal case against him as a selective and malicious prosecution.
A lawyer for Brennan conceded during arguments last month that the request for a court order was unusual but said it was necessary given what he called the Justice Department’s pattern of vindictiveness in its pursuit of Brennan and its recent track record of erasing or failing to preserve communications and records in other matters.
The lawsuit contends that the records being sought would demonstrate that any prosecution of Brennan, who has been investigated for months by the Trump administration Justice Department but not charged, is the product of a political vendetta to punish one of President Donald Trump’s perceived adversaries.
But U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb denied Brennan’s request, saying his arguments were too speculative at the moment and that the former CIA director had not proven that the Justice Department was failing to preserve records relevant to a future malicious prosecution argument.
“Brennan’s allegations — that he is being targeted by the Trump Administration not because of his conduct, but because he has opposed the current president — are deeply concerning,” Cobb wrote in dismissing the lawsuit. “If he was eventually able to prove those allegations true, that would certainly suggest that his potential prosecution is vindictive. But even taking all of Brennan’s allegations to be truthful at this stage, the injury he alleges is simply too attenuated from the actions he seeks to enjoin to warrant a finding of standing here.”
Lawyers for Brennan said in a statement that Cobb’s decision addressed a technical matter of legal standing and was not based on their argument “that the Justice Department is using the criminal justice system to target and investigate him for politically vindictive reasons.” They said the government had refused to offer assurances that it was preserving records and communications that would reveal the “motivations behind its investigations of Director Brennan.”
“With this lawsuit, Director Brennan has served notice that the government’s conduct and its document preservation will be carefully scrutinized in the event of any future indictment. Director Brennan will continue to vigorously defend himself against these baseless investigations, and he will challenge any attempt to use the criminal justice system for personal and political retribution,” said Brennan’s lawyers, Ken Wainstein and Dan Gelber.
As CIA director in the final years of President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration, Brennan was a key figure in the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Trump, who went on to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton for the White House. That assessment has for years infuriated Trump, who spent much of his first term shadowed by an investigation into whether his campaign had conspired with Russia.
Brennan over the last year has been entangled in Justice Department investigations into whether he made false statements before the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 and in a broader Florida-based inquiry into whether he and other former intelligence and law enforcement officials engaged in a conspiracy to keep Trump from power.
He has been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in the broader conspiracy investigation, though the date of his appearance has been postponed. His lawyers have said they’ve been told by prosecutors that he remains a target in the false statements investigation.
Brennan has vigorously denied any wrongdoing, with Wainstein telling Cobb during arguments last month that the notion of a broad anti-Trump conspiracy was “fiction.”
It is unclear whether Brennan will face charges, but his attorneys sued in July to put the government on notice that they would challenge any prosecution on vindictive prosecution grounds. They said records they received from the government through a court order would help support their argument.
Cobb was nominated in 2021 by President Joe Biden, who earlier served as Obama’s vice president.
Ohio
Another court declares school choice voucher program unconstitutional
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Another court declared Ohio’s private school voucher program unconstitutional on Thursday, finding it provides a choice to the private schools that must honor the taxpayer-funded vouchers rather than to Ohio families.
The ruling by a three-judge panel of the 10th District Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s June 2025 ruling that found the EdChoice program violates an Ohio constitutional requirement for “a thorough and efficient system of common schools.” The ruling will not immediately affect the EdChoice program, which was allowed to remain operational in anticipation of an appeal.
“EdChoice, as presently structured and funded, secures with taxpayer funds a competing system of uncommon schools that is not subject to the same obligations imposed on Ohio’s system of common schools,” Judge David Leland wrote in a unanimous opinion.
Judges took particular issue with the fact that a private school that participates in EdChoice has “broad discretion” over which students it admits, including denying or discontinuing any student “based on its perception that its stated admissions criteria are not met, whatever those criteria may be.”
“Thus, under the program, it is the participating school, not the student or their family, that chooses whether to admit the student and, consequently, whether the student may utilize taxpayer vouchers at that school,” the court said.
The court further found that EdChoice harms public schools in three ways: by allowing private schools to cherry-pick students, concentrating participating schools in urban areas and giving voters less reason to approve local school levies.
“Each one of these effects reinforce one another,” according to the court, “creating a downward spiral of reduced enrollment, reduced revenue, and increased fiscal pressure on schools.”
The decision comes in a 2022 lawsuit joined by hundreds of public school districts, known collectively as Vouchers Hurt Ohio, as well as some parents, students and the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding.
The plaintiffs argued that Ohio’s nearly 30-year-old school voucher plan, known as EdChoice, has over time created an unconstitutional system of separately funded private schools and led to resegregation of some districts because mostly nonminority students take advantage of the program. In her lower court ruling, Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page rejected plaintiffs’ argument that EdChoice violates the equal protection clause.
Ohio expanded to a universal voucher program in 2023 that is one of the largest and most expansive in the U.S.
Republican Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, who championed that effort, said Thursday that the appellate court’s ruling is out of step with legal precedent.
“The constitutionality of various school choice programs has been affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, the Ohio Supreme Court, and a variety of other tribunals over the past several decades,” Huffman said in a statement.
“The decision of one of 12 courts of appeal in Ohio will not affect that.”
In Thursday’s opinion, Leland wrote that the appeals court was not suggesting “that school vouchers in all forms violate the Ohio Constitution” — only that EdChoice does “as presently structured, funded, and challenged in this case.”
New York
Prosecutors: College student died after being drugged and raped in her dorm
NEW YORK (AP) — A man raped a student at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology after giving her fentanyl that left her unconscious and ultimately killed her, federal prosecutors said Thursday. The student’s friend also took the drug and nearly died.
Moises Freire, 19, of the Bronx, was charged with participating in a fentanyl distribution conspiracy and distributing a deadly drug with intent to commit rape. Brian Peralta Cabrera, 18, of Queens, was also charged in the drug conspiracy.
According to prosecutors, Freire brought fentanyl to the students’ dorm room March 18 and falsely claimed that the substance, which he’d previously described as “straight poison,” was pure cocaine. At his urging, the women took the drug and almost immediately lost consciousness, prosecutors said. Freire was not a student at FIT. The woman he is accused of raping lapsed into a coma and died March 21.
Freire and Peralta Cabrera were first arrested in March and pleaded not guilty to an initial set of charges that did not include the rape allegation. They remain in federal custody and have yet to be arraigned on the new indictment.
A third defendant, Harry Rosales Pino, pleaded guilty in September to a charge of conspiracy to distribute narcotics resulting in death and serious bodily injury. He is set to be sentenced in December.
Emails seeking comment were left for lawyers for Freire and Peralta Cabrera. If convicted, they face a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison and a possible life sentence.
Neither of the women were identified in court papers.
The Fashion Institute of Technology, part of the State University of New York, was not identified, either, but a defense lawyer mentioned it during a prior hearing. School officials didn’t immediately comment.
At a court hearing in April, Freire’s lawyer, Mitchell Schwartz, called the woman’s death a tragedy but said Freire was not trying to ply the students with drugs.
If anything, he told Judge Sidney Stein, what preceded the overdoses — including the woman’s suggestion that Freire wear a wig and “look like a girl” so he could sneak up to her dorm room after she had invited him over — was “a story of teenagers doing what I would call ‘dumb teenager things.’”
“It’s not dumb teenager things to give somebody fentanyl, sir,” Stein replied.
At the same hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ariana Bloom detailed the rape allegations at the heart of the superseding indictment unsealed Thursday.
Bloom told the judge that Freire admitted in a written statement to campus security that he had sex with the woman and realized she was unconscious after.
Freire said he then looked to his left and saw her friend unconscious on the floor “with her eyes rolled back in her head,” according to Bloom.
Freire did not immediately seek help, instead waiting about 45 minutes while he sent photos of the unconscious women to others, prosecutors said.
When he finally went to campus security, he claimed that the women simply drank too much, prosecutors said.
Christopher Roberts, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration New York Task Force Division, said the allegations were “beyond disturbing and include a cruel deception and unimaginable assault.”
“College should be a place where young people can learn, grow, and pursue their dreams, not a place where predators exploit their vulnerability,” Roberts said. “Every student deserves to feel safe, whether walking across campus, sitting in a classroom, or inside their own dorm room.”
New York
Lawsuit alleges DHS effort to collect detailed state voter data violates federal law
NEW YORK (AP) — A lawsuit filed Thursday challenges the Trump administration’s sprawling effort to collect and analyze Americans’ voter data, alleging the government has obtained voter files from at least 47 states and handled the data in a way that violates federal law.
The 42-page complaint filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., claims the Department of Homeland Security’s secretive probe of the voter data, including a policy to combine it with commercial datasets, disregards federal safeguards and flouts the privacy rights of millions of Americans.
The case, brought by the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the League of United Latin American Citizens, is the latest in a torrent of legal challenges that have emerged in response to President Donald Trump’s crusade against noncitizen voting, a concern he views as a serious problem but which research shows is exceedingly rare.
The Trump administration has consistently sought to exert more power over elections, even as the Constitution grants that authority to states and, in some cases, Congress. Judges have consistently upheld states’ rights to decline to hand over their lists to the federal government.
DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thursday’s lawsuit alleges the Trump administration has obtained voter lists from 47 states, even as 30 states refused to turn them over to the administration. It calls for the court to declare the administration’s collection of voter data illegal, block the policy and order DHS to delete and stop using the voter information it already has collected.
The lawsuit comes less than three weeks before Election Day, as the administration has continued to escalate threats to states alleging they are not doing enough to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls.
On Thursday, the administration sued California election officials, alleging they didn’t act quickly enough to review names the federal government identified as “likely” noncitizens, and asking a judge to bar the state from counting those people’s mail ballots for next month’s midterm elections. The secretary of state’s office said it was given just 48 hours to review 20,000 names without the Justice Department providing any evidence to substantiate its claims.
