Multiple people shot at Dallas-area outlet mall

ALLEN, Texas — Multiple people were shot at an outlet mall in the Dallas suburb of Allen, Texas, on Saturday, sending hundreds of shoppers fleeing in panic in the latest gun violence to strike the country.

Calls about shots being fired came in about 3:40 p.m. from the Allen Premium Outlets. A dispatcher with Allen police confirmed the department was investigating a shooting but couldn't say more.

WFAA-TV reported that police on the scene said there were multiple victims, including children. Their conditions were not immediately known, but WFAA reported that the Collin County Sheriff said the shooter is dead.

A crowd of hundreds of people who had been shopping stood outside, across the street from the mall, Saturday evening. Officers circulated among them asking if anyone had seen what happened.

Fontayne Payton, 35, was at H&M when he heard the sound of gunshots through the headphones he was wearing.

“It was so loud, it sounded like it was right outside,” Payton said.

People in the store scattered before employees ushered the group into the fitting rooms and then a lockable back room, he said. When they were given the all-clear to leave, Payton saw the store had broken windows and a trail of blood to the door. Discarded sandals and bloodied clothes were laying nearby.

Once outside, Payton saw bodies.

“I pray it wasn’t kids, but it looked like kids,” he said. The bodies were covered in white towels, slumped over bags on the ground, he said.

“It broke me when I walked out to see that,” he said.

Further away, he saw the body of a heavyset man wearing all black. He assumed it was the shooter, Payton said, because unlike the other bodies it had not been covered up.

Stan and Mary Ann Greene were browsing in the Columbia sportswear store when the shooting started.

“We had just gotten in, just a couple minutes earlier, and we just heard a lot of loud popping,” Mary Ann Greene told The Associated Press. “I said, ‘Was that gunfire?’ ”

Employees immediately rolled down the security gate and brought everyone to the rear of the store until police arrived and escorted them out, the Greenes said.

Eber Romero was at the Under Armour store when a cashier mentioned that there was a shooting.

As he left the store, Romero said, the mall appeared empty, and all the shops had their security gates down. That is when he started seeing broken glass and people who had been shot on the floor.

Video shared on social media showed people running through a parking lot while gunfire could be heard.

More than 30 police cruisers with lights flashing were blocking an entrance to the mall, with multiple ambulances on the scene.

A live aerial broadcast from the news station showed armored trucks and other law enforcement vehicles stationed outside the sprawling outdoor mall.

Ambulances from several neighboring cities responded to the scene.

The Dallas office of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also responded.

Allen, a suburb about 25 miles north of downtown Dallas, has roughly 105,000 residents.

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Biden calls McCarthy ‘honest’ and himself wise as debt ceiling talks heat up

In the shadow of a looming debt ceiling deadline, President Joe Biden gave his first interview in weeks, during which he addressed both the potential for default and a number of other pressing matters, including his ability to win reelection at nearly 82 years old.

Here are a few of the top lines from his sit down with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle.

McCarthy, an honest guy

Biden declined the chance to take a personal jab at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, choosing instead to call him an “honest man.” The two have negotiated formally just once, though McCarthy has been pushing for a followup, and Biden will meet with him and the three other main congressional leaders next week. Instead of teeing off on the speaker, Biden criticized the deal McCarthy cut with his fellow House Republicans to get a debt ceiling hike through their chamber.

“I think he’s in the position, well, he had to make a deal and that was pretty — you know, 15 votes. Fifteen votes that where he had — just about sold away everything that he — at the far, far right,” he said. “There’s the Republican Party and there’s the MAGA Republicans, and the MAGA Republicans really have put him in a position where in order to stay speaker he has to agree — he’s agreed to things that, maybe he believes, but are just extreme.”

No workarounds… yet

The president said he wasn’t ready to try a workaround for raising the debt ceiling, at least not yet. Pressed by Ruhle as to whether he would argue that the debt limit was unconstitutional (as his aides are reportedly considering), he said he had not “gotten there yet.”

“Here’s the deal, I think that — first of all, this is not your father’s Republican Party. This is a different group. And I think that we have to make it clear to the American people that I am prepared to negotiate in detail with their budget,” he said. “How much are you going to spend? How much are you going to tax? Where can we cut?”

Age is but a number

It wasn’t all budget and debt talk. Ruhle also pressed Biden about running for a second term when he would be nearly 82 at his reelection. She noted that no one at a Fortune 500 company would consider hiring a CEO at that age. So why, she asked, would voters give him a job?

“Because I have acquired a hell of a lot of wisdom and know more than the vast majority of people,” said Biden. “And I’m more experienced than anybody that’s ever run for the office. And I think I’ve proven myself to be honorable as well as also effective.”

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Proud Boys juror says group’s deleted messages weighed on jury

Jurors who convicted four Proud Boys leaders of seditious conspiracy reviewed thousands upon thousands of text messages and private chats that the defendants sent in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021 — exchanges prosecutors described as the prelude to a violent effort to keep Donald Trump in power.

But paradoxically, it may have been the absence of key messages that sealed the case for prosecutors.

Andre Mundell, one of the 12 jurors who decided the four-month trial on Thursday, told Vice News that he was convinced that the Proud Boys leaders — including former national chair Enrique Tarrio — had committed seditious conspiracy in part because of the lengths the group took to hide its activities, deleting key messages.

“The Proud Boys didn't want everybody to know the plan, because then I guess it would have gotten out. And they didn't want it to get out,” Mundell said in the interview, noting that the thousands of messages they reviewed — extracted from the phones of Tarrio and his co-defendants — were peppered with blank slots where exchanges had been deleted.

“And that's why the government couldn't present too much of the evidence that they had already deleted, because it was unrecoverable,” Mundell said. “So, they definitely didn't want people to know.”

And that wasn’t the only absence of evidence that factored into the jury’s deliberations. Mundell said that he was persuaded by the fact that there wasn’t a single message among the Proud Boys leaders — even after their members contributed to the chaos at the Capitol — urging their allies to withdraw from the riot or stay away from the violence.

“That factored in for me. It showed an absence of evidence of standing down. No one says, ‘no, don't do this. We're not going to do this.’ There was none of that,” Mundell said. “And that was probably because they never said it. And the things that were affirming that they were going to be violent. They just kind of let it happen.”

Mundell’s comments are the first insight into the jury’s deliberation in the case of Tarrio and four Proud Boys who prosecutors say were the most crucial drivers of the violence that unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Justice Department contends that Tarrio, along with leaders Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl, spearheaded a conspiracy to prevent Joe Biden from taking office — and were prepared to use force to get their way. A fifth defendant, Dominic Pezzola, was acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted of numerous felonies for his own role in the attack — which included igniting the breach of the Capitol itself when he smashed a Senate window with a riot shield.

Prosecutors showed evidence that the Proud Boys spent weeks before Jan. 6 discussing their desire to prevent Biden from taking office, and on Jan. 6, hundreds — in a crowd led by Nordean, Biggs and Rehl — marched to the Capitol even while Trump was speaking to his supporters near the White House. At the Capitol, members of the Proud Boys marching group were present — and often involved — in the crucial moments when the mob breached police lines and many later entered the Capitol, led by Pezzola.

Mundell said he understood the jury’s work on the case as a significant moment for the country.

“I think it's huge. It's something that needed to happen,” he said. “I definitely think it's important because otherwise, somebody might get the idea that this is okay to do again.”

Although the jury deliberated for about a week, Mundell said it didn’t take long for jurors to agree that the group had committed a seditious conspiracy.

“The first day we elected a foreman. After that, we all put out our initial impressions of the evidence. We all voted and most people saw the evidence pointed towards seditious conspiracy. By the second day, we had pretty much established guilty verdicts on the conspiracy,” he said.

Mundell said the group agreed that Pezzola was not guilty of seditious conspiracy because he wasn’t closely tied enough to Tarrio or the group’s leaders — Pezzola took the stand and emphasized that he had only been in the Proud Boys for a month before Jan. 6 and barely knew his co-defendants.

“Another factor was just that he wasn’t the brightest bulb on the porch. And may not have been bright enough to really know about the plan,” Mundell said. “So I said, well, poor guy. He should've listened to his father-in-law, who told him ‘don’t go.’”

Mundell said the jury simply did not buy the defense’s claims that the Proud Boys were only interested in First Amendment-protected protests and to make their voices heard in Washington.

“You don't stop the steal by breaking into the Capitol and over-running the police lines and beating up on and spraying the police,” he said.

He also indicated that a crucial piece of evidence unearthed by an open-source online sleuth late in the Proud Boys trial factored heavily into the jury’s consideration of Rehl’s role in the attack. While Rehl, who took the stand in his own defense, had emphasized repeatedly that he committed no violence, prosecutors displayed a newly discovered video that appeared to show Rehl pepper spraying toward a line of outnumbered police officers at one of the early moments of the riot.

“Rehl really got caught on cross examination after he was adamant that he never sprayed a police officer … On cross that all fell apart when the video came out and it showed that he was spraying towards the cops,” Mundell said.

Mundell also emphasized that the jury considered very little about Trump’s role in Jan. 6, despite one “anti-Trump” juror’s effort to tie the former president to the Proud Boys’ actions. To be sure, Trump was a persistent undercurrent in the case — prosecutors noted that his invocation of the Proud Boys during a September 2020 debate turbocharged the group’s recruitment efforts. And his Dec. 19, 2020 tweet urging supporters to descend on Washington to protest the election results on Jan. 6, 2021, was the moment that jumpstarted the Proud Boys’ seditious conspiracy.

But Mundell said those two episodes were the extent of Trump’s relationship to the case.

“[T]he evidence doesn't show anything that Trump did other than ‘be there, will be wild’ and ‘stand back and stand by,’” he said. “That was his contribution to this case. Other than that, everyone was focused. I think they got a fair trial.”

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Eight false Trump electors have accepted immunity deals, lawyer says

Eight Republican activists who falsely claimed to be legitimate presidential electors for Donald Trump have accepted immunity deals from the Atlanta-area district attorney investigating Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.

Kimberly Debrow, a lawyer for the false electors, revealed the arrangement — reached last month — in a court filing Friday, opposing a bid by District Attorney Fani Willis to disqualify her from representing the large group.

It’s the latest indication of Willis’ advancing investigation, which she recently revealed could result in charges — possibly against Trump himself and a slew of high-profile allies — as soon as July.

Trump and his inner circle orchestrated a plan for GOP electors in seven states he lost to sign documents claiming to be legitimate presidential electors. Those false electors became a component in a desperate last-ditch bid by Trump to overturn the election on Jan. 6, 2021. Citing the certificates signed by the false electors, Trump and a cadre of fringe attorneys claimed there was a conflict that only Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence could resolve on Jan. 6.

Ultimately, Pence refused to support the effort, claiming it was illegal and unconstitutional, and rejecting a pressure campaign to treat the false GOP electors as legitimate.

Dozens of false electors were subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 select committee as well as special counsel Jack Smith, who is mounting a similar criminal probe into Trump’s bid to subvert the election.

Not all of the false electors across the country were equally involved in Trump’s effort — and dozens have contended that they had no knowledge their signatures would be used as part of Trump’s Jan. 6 effort. Rather, they said they were advised that they were signing “contingent” certificates that would only be used if courts reversed Trump’s defeat. They argued that similar tactics were used in 1960, when Democrats signed contingent certificates amid a recount in Hawaii. (The recount ultimately reversed that state’s results and the contingent electors were counted.)

But some of the false electors were also state party chairs and key Trump allies who played larger roles in Trump’s bid to stay in power. Willis, who has previously indicated she considers all of the false electors “targets” of her investigation, has raised concerns that Debrow’s representation of 10 of the false electors could present a conflict if any of them testify against each other. Last month, Willis claimed that recent interviews with the false electors revealed incriminating evidence about one of them.

Debrow, in Friday’s filing, sharply rejected that contention and maintained that none of her clients believed they had done anything wrong. She is urging the judge presiding over the matter, Robert McBurney, to reject Willis’ attempt to disqualify her from the case.

Debrow accused Willis’ team of misleading the judge about the status of immunity discussions between the electors and the DA’s office and she indicated that the assistant DA leading the interviews had threatened to indict one of the electors after a tense exchange. Debrow said she recorded aspects of the exchange without the prosecutors’ knowledge.

McBurney previously rejected a bid by Willis to disqualify Debrow from representing numerous contingent electors but did require one of them, David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia GOP, to separate from the larger group. Shafer appeared to be more exposed to potential criminal charges than the others, McBurney ruled at the time.

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Biden administration green lights nation’s first congestion pricing plan for New York

NEW YORK — The Biden administration on Friday cleared New York’s congestion pricing plan to move forward, approving an environmental review that suffered such significant delays many doubted the first-in-the-nation tolling system would ever happen.

The Federal Highway Administration issued a letter approving the New York Metropolitan Transportation’s Authority environmental assessment and issued a draft “Finding of No Significant Impact” that will now be up for public review for 30 days, according to a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO.

The news means the agency has been given the green light to start charging drivers entering central Manhattan at peak times in an effort to cut down on gridlock.

MTA officials have said they would need almost a year to set up the new tolling infrastructure once it obtains federal approval, putting it on track to meet its current target of launching congestion pricing in the second quarter of 2024.

A spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul said the finding “is a critical step that will allow our Environmental Assessment to be publicly available for anyone to read, and we will continue to work with our partners to move congestion pricing forward.”

“Governor Hochul is committed to implementing congestion pricing to reduce traffic, improve air quality, and support our public transit system,” John Lindsay, a spokesperson for Hochul, said in a statement. “We’ve worked closely with partners across government and with community members over the last four years to develop a plan that will achieve these goals.”

Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy condemned the approval as "unfair and ill-advised," and said it undercuts the Biden administration's own environmental goals. He also said his office is "closely assessing all legal options" because the current plan burdens commuters, state agencies and the environment.

"Everyone in the region deserves access to more reliable mass transit, but placing an unjustified financial burden on the backs of hardworking New Jersey commuters is wrong," Murphy said in a statement. "Simply put, it is a money grab."

However, the Federal Highway Administration said it determined the environmental assessment addresses public input and considers the impacts in the 28-county area in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

"Congestion pricing is a generational opportunity to make it easier for people to get around in, and get to, the Central Business District, by reducing traffic and funding improvements to the public transit system,” said John McCarthy, a spokesperson for the MTA.

The public transit authority hasn’t determined how much to charge drivers, but has considered fares ranging from $9 to $23 for passenger vehicles and between $12 and $82 for trucks. The scenarios contemplate different combinations of potential discounts, credits and exemptions.

A six-member Traffic Mobility Review Board will recommend a final pricing structure for the MTA board to approve. Members include major real estate and business leaders such as Kathy Wylde, CEO of the Partnership for New York City that represents area corporations, and John Banks, the former president of the Real Estate Board of New York.

The state approved congestion pricing in 2019 to raise $1 billion annually for the MTA’s capital plan. But officials waited more than a year for the Trump administration to determine what kind of environmental review they had to conduct before launching the program. Federal approval is required because the plan involves placing tolls on highways that have received federal funding.

Transit officials said the Trump administration held up the process amid political infighting with New York, with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo once stating it was retribution for the state's refusal to hand over driver's license records to federal immigration authorities. In 2021, the Biden administration said New York could conduct an environmental assessment, instead of a more rigorous environmental impact study.

The new tolling system — which will come on top of existing charges for the George Washington Bridge and Lincoln and Holland tunnels — has also drawn opposition from a bipartisan coalition of suburban lawmakers in New York and New Jersey. It’s expected to face legal challenges, as Murphy suggested.

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Eric Adams attacked for subway safety approach after killing of Jordan Neely

NEW YORK — In post-pandemic New York City, the subway has emerged as a politically prominent battleground.

Mayor Eric Adams, a moderate Democrat, spent his first year in office devoting major resources to countering criticism from Republicans and centrists over transit crime. He increased the presence of police underground and instituted a policy of removing homeless people — in some cases involuntarily — from the trains in order to create an atmosphere where commuters felt safe. Earlier this year, as transit crime dipped, the mayor and Gov. Kathy Hochul took a victory lap.

“We want zero felonies a day, but are we trending in the right direction? You’re darn right we are,” Adams said during a January press briefing to tout a safer subway system.

The killing of 30-year-old Jordan Neely on the subway earlier this week, however, put the mayor in a difficult position as progressive lawmakers led a growing chorus of outrage and launched a renewed attack on Adams’ approach to public safety.

The stakes are high. Subway crime was a driving force behind a groundswell of support for GOP candidates last year, which lifted a Republican gubernatorial candidate to within six points of winning the general election and helped the right flip several Congressional seats to take over the House. New York Republicans continue hammering Democrats on crime ahead of the upcoming congressional races that include several competitive seats. How New Yorkers ultimately view Neely’s killing and the government’s response could also alter the city’s strategy toward mental health and public safety.

On Monday, Neely was acting erratically aboard an F train when he was placed into a chokehold by a 24-year-old passenger and later died. On Wednesday, the city’s medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. Several reports have noted Neely, who did impersonations of Michael Jackson in years’ past, struggled with mental health issues.

Adams has said that the incident demonstrates why his policies have been needed all along.

“This is what highlights what I’ve been saying throughout my administration,” Adams said Thursday during an unrelated press conference, echoing comments he made the night before on national television. “People who are dealing with mental health illness should get the help they need and not live on the train. And I’m going to continue to push on that.”

Prominent progressives, however, have laced into the mayor’s response to the incident and re-upped long standing criticisms of Adams’ approach to mental health and safety.

“This is the inevitable outcome of the dangerous rhetoric of stigmatizing mental health issues, stigmatizing poverty and the continued bloated investment in the carceral system at the expense of funding access to housing, food and health,” Tiffany Cabán, a progressive New York City Council member, said in an interview.

So far, the mayor appears outnumbered by a growing cadre of elected officials who have weighed in. While Adams has characterized the incident as tragic, he has also said he will wait until Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg completes his investigation before making any assessment — a view that is not shared even by those politically aligned with the mayor.

“Racism that continues to permeate throughout our society allows for a level of dehumanization that denies Black people from being recognized as victims when subjected to acts of violence,” New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said in a statement, later adding that “the initial response by our legal system to this killing is disturbing and puts on display for the world the double standards that Black people and other people of color continue to face.”

And Maurice Mitchell, head of the national Working Families Party, noted Adams’ policies were in full effect Monday but did not stop Neely from dying.

"Even with hundreds of police in our subways, they failed to prevent this—or even apprehend the killer,” he said in a statement.

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Teachers union slams House GOP over ‘fishing expedition’

Lawyers for the American Federation of Teachers on Friday condemned the Republican-led Covid-19 oversight panel’s request for their president’s phone records as an “improper” expansion of its investigation.

House lawmakers are investigating the deliberations around pandemic-spurred school closures and the CDC's February 2021 school reopening guidance. On Thursday, House Coronavirus Pandemic Select Subcommittee Chair Brad Wenstrup penned a letter pressing AFT President Randi Weingarten to turn over phone and text records for any communication between the CDC, the Biden transition team and the Executive Office of the President.

“In requesting phone records between Ms. Weingarten and any member of the Executive Office of the President for the past 28 months, they underscore that your investigation has morphed into a fishing expedition that vastly exceeds your authority,” AFT Counsel Michael Bromwich wrote to the panel on Friday. “We will simply not accede to these unreasonable requests.”

He added that the teachers union would not comply with all of the panel’s requests.

The oversight panel honed in on Weingarten’s statements at a hearing last week where she said she had a direct phone number for outgoing CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. Weingarten, who leads one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, also told lawmakers that the Biden transition team had reached out to AFT for input on post-pandemic school reopening.

Wenstrup on Thursday night followed up by requesting that the union leader turn over documents and communication about Covid-19 between AFT and the Biden transition team between Nov. 3, 2020 and Jan. 20, 2021. The Ohio Republican is also seeking records of Weingarten's communication with Walensky and the Executive Office of the President, since Inauguration Day 2021.

Bromwich said the panel’s requests “do not even pretend to be limited to the February 12, 2021 Operational Strategy, which was the original focus of your investigation.”

However, the teachers union said it will be responsive to the committee’s request for communications Weingarten and the AFT had with the Biden Transition Team regarding Covid-19, between Election Day 2020 and Inauguration Day, because it “appears to be within the scope of the Subcommittee’s mandate.”

But the union’s counsel said it would take longer than the May 11 due date Republicans have asked for.

In response to the panel’s request for transcribed interviews, Bromwich said the subcommittee did not reach out to schedule them after its initial letter. Instead, Weingarten agreed to testify last week and only heard of the request for a “single transcribed interview” after the hearing. Bromwich said they were working on setting up the interview when they received the letter.

Wenstrup’s letter included a request for interviews with five AFT staff members. While the Thursday letter did not threaten to subpoena the teachers union, Wenstrup reinforced that the panel is authorized to investigate the decision to close schools during the pandemic and its outcome.

“As for subpoenas — The information the Select Subcommittee requests is important for our investigation,” Wenstrup’s spokesperson said in a statement Thursday. “Whether a subpoena is issued or not, is up to Ms. Weingarten and the AFT.”

Republicans have long sparred with teachers unions, but the pandemic exacerbated tension as schools remained closed while school teachers pushed for more safety protocols to return to the classroom. GOP lawmakers have since characterized AFT and other teachers unions as having undue influence over the nation’s school reopening plan.

“The words ‘uncommon influence’ were never spoken by Ms. Weingarten, nor did she testify in any way that would support that characterization,” Bromwich wrote.

House Democrats on the subcommittee also pushed back on the records requests, criticizing the GOP for “abusing the resources of this Subcommittee for their own political gain."

“Instead of working constructively to develop forward-looking policies that address learning loss and better prepare our schools for future pandemics,” a spokesperson for Democrats on the Select Subcommittee told POLITICO, “Select Subcommittee Republicans are sending absurd letters in the dead of night to harass Ms. Weingarten and her staff — pressing forward with their extreme, politically motivated investigations while pushing draconian cuts to programs that protect children’s health and education.”

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