CBS News
FBI director Christopher Wray speaks candidly on Laken Riley’s death, threats to democracy, civil rights
Washington — FBI Director Christopher Wray offered unusually expansive comments Tuesday on recent high-profile crimes and their intersection with the work of the FBI.
He talked about how FBI agents are working with law enforcement to “help achieve justice” in the case of murdered University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who investigators say was killed by a Venezuelan migrant in the U.S. illegally, according to Wray.
“I want to tell you how heartbroken I am — not just for the family, friends, classmates, and staff who are grieving Laken’s loss,” Wray told a group gathered at the University of Georgia on Tuesday in his first public comments on the tragedy. “I’m saddened to see that sense of peace shattered by Laken’s murder and the subsequent arrest of a Venezuelan national who’d illegally entered the country in 2022.”
He promised the FBI is doing “everything [it] can to help achieve justice for Laken,” who was killed while she was jogging.
The remarks from the FBI director were notable, since he rarely speaks publicly about ongoing criminal cases in which the bureau is involved.
He also spoke extensively about a group of former law enforcement officers who dubbed themselves “the Goon Squad” and are being sentenced this week, after admitting they had tortured two Black men last year. One of the men, Hunter Eldward, was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison on Tuesday. He admitted that he shoved a firearm in the mouth of one of the men as part of a mock execution, which was just one component of the racist attacks.
“Without a warrant or any exigent circumstances, the six of them kicked in the door of a home where two Black men were staying and subjected them to an hour and a half of pure hell,” Wray said Tuesday as part of his speech focused on government accountability. “Who do you call when the police are the ones terrorizing you? No human being should ever be subjected to the torture, the trauma, the horrific acts of violence carried out by those individuals.”
All six men will be sentenced by the end of the week. In a separate statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged, “The Justice Department will hold accountable officers who violate constitutional rights, and in so doing, betray the public trust.”
The FBI director has been vocal in recent months about the dangers Americans face in a heightened threat landscape that includes domestic threats like ransomware attacks and vulnerabilities at the southern border, as well as international risks posed by Chinese cyberattacks and the growing conflict in the Middle East.
Tuesday’s comments, however, treaded into the political sphere as Wray warned against the politicization of the FBI and democratic institutions.
“Whether it’s a trial, a Supreme Court case, even an election — people’s standard these days for judging whether something was fair or objective is whether they like the result — whether their side won or lost,” he said.
FBI agents have been intricately involved in various high-profile, politically charged investigations in recent years, including two federal probes into former President Donald Trump’s conduct, one into classified documents that led the FBI to execute a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in 2022. They also investigated President Joe Biden’s handling of classified records and his son Hunter’s business dealings.
Hunter Biden has been charged in two jurisdictions for tax and gun crimes and pleaded not guilty.
Trump – who has also pleaded not guilty to the charges against him — has blasted the Justice Department’s dual investigations as a politically motivated attempt to harm him during an election year.
Without calling out any specific individuals by name, the FBI director warned Tuesday that “baseless attacks” on the bureau’s work “strike at the heart of the rule of law.”
“It’s bad enough when folks denounce a specific case or investigation as tainted or unfair just because their side lost,” he said, “But it gets exponentially worse when that attack goes from this case or that, to saying the whole institution is corrupt because they didn’t like a particular outcome.”
The most partisan attacks and “shrill” accusations, Wray argued, are “coming from the most politicized speakers.”
And when pressed on recent cuts to the FBI’s budget pushed by congressional Republicans, Wray said his focus is on reasoning with Congress to make sure lawmakers don’t “double down” on their belt-tightening.
Washington — Vice President Kamala Harris‘ presidential campaign said it brought in $540 million since Harris entered the race last month, touting a surge in donations during the Democratic National Convention as the party rallied around its new ticket.
The campaign said it brought in $82 million during the week, characterized the convention contribution as “unprecedented grassroots donations.” And the best hour of fundraising since the launch came after Harris delivered her highly anticipated speech on Thursday to accept the presidential nomination, the campaign said.
“The Convention was a galvanizing moment for the Harris-Walz coalition throughout the country, energizing and mobilizing volunteer and grassroots donors alike,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a memo, noting that the campaign is using the resources to build on momentum heading into Labor Day — with November’s election on the horizon.
The campaign, which announced the totals on Sunday, noted that a third of the contributions received during the DNC were from first-time contributors, with two-thirds of those contributors being women. And it touted volunteer engagement, with nearly 200,000 new volunteer shifts since the convention began.
The four-day convention came just a month after President Biden left the race on July 21. The party quickly coalesced around Harris, with $200 million of the month’s total fundraising coming in during the first week.
At the convention, delegates heard from prominent Democrats like former first lady Michelle Obama and former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton, who enthusastically encouraged Democrats to vote for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Mr. Biden himself spoke on the first night of the convention, passing the torch to his vice president as the party’s new standard bearer.
When Francine Madden heard about a Wyoming man who killed a gray wolf after injuring it with his snowmobile and showing it off at his local bar, she was disturbed, but not very surprised.
She’s seen a lot during her almost three decades working as a mediator for wildlife conflict. She’s resolved disputes over gorillas in Uganda and tigers in Bhutan, but for 50-odd years, the management of gray wolves has been an intractable American problem.
Dennis Fast / VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Since 1973, the gray wolf has been on and off the federal government’s endangered species list. When the wolves are on the list, advocates say the protections help wolves’ place in the natural environment and allow them to roam the great American West as they did for hundreds of years — not be treated, as some say, “like vermin.” On the other side, some ranchers then say there are too many wolves and they have to bear the economic — and emotional — costs of lost livestock.
“I watch my animals die and get murdered,” Kathy McKay, owner of the 1,600-acre K-Diamond-K ranch in Washington state, told CBS News. She says she can’t sleep at night in fear for the lives of her animals, and she’s lost about 40 to wolves.
When the wolves are off the endangered species list, as they are now in certain states in the lower 48, advocates say wolves are killed indiscriminately. Attorney and advocate Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, says wolf carcasses are “piling up” and there is a “cowboy mentality” around a species often not seen as worthy.
K-Diamond-K Guest Ranch
Enter Madden. Hired as a mediator by the federal government in December, this is her second time wading into the morass, albeit on a much larger scale. She facilitated Washington state’s 18-person working group on the gray wolves in 2015, helping to come to some policy decisions around population management.
Almost a decade later, she and her firm Constructive Conflict are back, this time at the national level. But in some ways, the sides have become more entrenched. Madden says she’s speaking to Americans who “feel their way of life, or what they care about, is under very real threat.” Yet she remains confident she’ll have all sides at the table starting in 2025.
Sides drawn along partisan lines
Thousands of gray wolves roamed America’s wilderness for centuries until hunters, ranchers and others nearly decimated the species. In 1973, the federal government listed them as endangered in the lower 48 states. Fewer than 1,000 wolves roamed in the U.S. at that time, according to the International Wolf Center.
Protected from hunting, gray wolves began to proliferate, and some people grew concerned they were killing livestock and threatening tribal communities and lands. Soon the pushback began.
Dennis Fast / VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Animals were killed, businesses were shut, and the sides — often drawn along partisan lines — dug in, each convinced they knew the right approach to managing gray wolves. For many, “wolves became a symbol of government overreach,” said Adkins. Recent action sowed even more division; as the population rebounded, the gray wolf was taken off the federal government’s endangered species list in 2020 and the management was shifted to the states.
Wolves began to die. One example: a third of Wisconsin’s gray wolf population was killed by hunters and poachers when protections were removed, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found in 2021.
John Vucetich, a professor at Michigan Technological University, along with more than 100 other scientists, wrote to the Biden administration to reinstate protections. Lawsuits began, and on Feb. 10, 2022, gray wolves in the lower 48 states — with the exception of the Northern Rocky Mountain population — were added back to the list by a court order.
The news devastated McKay, who was born on the ranch her parents bought in 1961.
“I don’t know how people 300 miles away have so much control over our livelihood and the survival of our livestock,” said McKay. “Why do we even have to ask?”
K-Diamond-K Guest Ranch
Differing viewpoints, ongoing divisions
Working group members in Washington state couldn’t move any policy forward in the years before Madden arrived, she said, and they “couldn’t speak civilly or constructively to each other.”
“The costs of the conflict over wolves has been staggering,” she said, adding that no agency has truly been able to count the damage the economic costs — or societal costs — of the conflict.
“We weren’t that comfortable in the same room, with such differing viewpoints. Ranchers were carrying all of the burden, and there were environmentalists we felt didn’t have skin in the game,” said Washington rancher Molly Linville, a working group member whose husband’s family has worked 6,000 acres of land for more than 100 years.
In the year after Madden started mediating the local conflict, “they were able to come up with a decision they all agreed upon,” she said. At the end of a three-year, $1.2 million state contract, she said, the working group hammered out a series of constructive policies to manage wolves in their state.
Madden brings the same optimism to the national dialogue.
She’s close to the end of the first year of a three-year, $3 million contract. Her group contracted three companies to work on this project; one, a film company, will document the conversations around gray wolves and share the film with the public. Her group has already started selecting the roughly 24 participants who will have ongoing conversations on how to come together around gray wolves.
She traveled to Montana in June to meet with livestock producers and reservations and visit tribal nations. For the past year, she met with people from Wisconsin, Montana, California, Idaho, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Colorado, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Indiana. Madden acknowledges that “skepticism” abounds when she tells people her group’s approach to the conflict, but says many are open to talking as they feel that the “current vicious cycle of conflict in this country is harming people and wolves.”
She still believes in the power of Americans to listen to each other.
“There is a genuine hope that at a national scale, in this deeply divided society, we can come together for this conversation to take a step in the right direction for the long-term viability of communities, cultures and wildlife conservation,” said Madden.
CBS News
German police say a man has turned himself in, claiming to be behind deadly Solingen festival knife attack
A 26-year-old man turned himself in to police, saying he was responsible for the Solingen knife attack that left three dead and eight wounded at a festival marking the city’s 650th anniversary, German authorities announced early Sunday.
Duesseldorf police said in a joint statement with the prosecutor’s office that the man “stated that he was responsible for the attack.”
“This person’s involvement in the crime is currently being intensively investigated,” the statement said.
The suspect is a Syrian citizen who had applied for asylum in Germany, police confirmed to The Associated Press news agency.
Sascha Schuermann / Getty Images
On Saturday, the Islamic State terror group claimed responsibility for the attack, without providing evidence. The extremist group said on its news site that the attacker targeted Christians and that he carried out the assaults Friday night “to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere.” The claim couldn’t be independently verified.
The attack comes amid debate over immigration ahead of regional elections next Sunday in Germany’s Saxony and Thuringia regions where anti-immigration parties such as the populist Alternative for Germany are expected to do well. In June, Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed that the country would start deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again after a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant left one police officer dead and four more people injured.
On Saturday, a synagogue in France was targeted in an arson attack. French police said they made an arrest early Sunday.
What happened during the Solingen attack?
A city of about 160,000 residents near the bigger cities of Cologne and Duesseldorf, Solingen was holding a “Festival of Diversity” to celebrate its anniversary.
The festival began Friday and was supposed to run through Sunday, with several stages in central streets offering attractions such as live music, cabaret and acrobatics.
The attack took place in front of one stage. Shortly after 9:30 p.m. on Friday, people alerted police to the presence of an attacker who had wounded several people with a knife.
At least three people were killed, authorities said: two men aged 67 and 56 and a 56-year-old woman. Police said the attacker appeared to have deliberately aimed for his victims’ throats.
Sascha Schuermann / Getty Images
The festival was canceled as police looked for clues in the cordoned-off square.
Friday’s attack plunged the city of Solingen into shock and grief. Residents gathered to mourn the dead and injured, placing flowers and notes near the scene of the attack.
“Warum?” asked one sign placed amid candles and teddy bears. Why?
Among those asking themselves the question was 62-year-old Cord Boetther, a merchant from Solingen.
“Why does something like this have to be done? It’s incomprehensible and it hurts,” Boetther said.
Officials had earlier said a 15-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion he knew about the planned attack and failed to inform authorities, but that he was not the attacker. Two female witnesses told police they overheard the boy and an unknown person before the attack speaking about intentions that corresponded to the bloodshed, officials said.
The ISIS militant group declared its caliphate in large parts of Iraq and Syria about a decade ago, but now holds no control over any land and has lost many prominent leaders. The group is mostly out of global news headlines.
Still, it continues to recruit members and claim responsibility for deadly attacks around the world, including lethal operations in Iran and Russia earlier this year that killed dozens of people. Its sleeper cells in Syria and Iraq still carry out attacks on government forces in both countries as well as U.S.-backed Syrian fighters.
contributed to this report.
