Leonard Leo says he will not cooperate with D.C. Attorney General tax probe

Judicial activist Leonard Leo is not cooperating with an investigation by Washington D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb for potentially misusing nonprofit tax laws for personal enrichment, his attorney confirmed.

David Rivkin, Leo’s attorney, said in a statement to POLITICO that Schwalb has “no legal authority to conduct any investigatory steps or take any enforcement measures” because Leo’s multi-billion-dollar aligned nonprofits — which poured millions into campaigning for the nominations of conservative Supreme Court justices and advocating before them — were organized outside of D.C.

Leo’s consulting firm, CRC Advisors is registered in D.C. and his main aligned nonprofit, The 85 Fund, used a D.C. mailing address for at least a decade.

Schwalb is also looking into liberal “dark money” group Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm founded by a former Clinton official that manages a handful of nonprofits, POLITICO confirmed, after Republican attorneys general recently complained that Schwalb should instead be probing Arabella.

“Arabella Advisors complies with the law and will cooperate with the District of Columbia Attorney General’s civil inquiry,” said Arabella spokesman Steve Sampson said in a statement. “We’re confident in the systems we have in place to ensure our business conforms with legal and regulatory requirements, and Arabella Advisors is proud of the work we do."

The subpoenas come a few weeks after POLITICO reported that Schwalb is looking into the multi-billion-dollar dark money network aligned with conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo, who has not said whether he is cooperating with the investigation.

The investigations — and subsequent subpoenas — are in response to dueling complaints from liberal and conservative watchdog groups filed with the IRS that began after POLITICO reported that the lifestyle of Leo and a handful of his allies took a lavish turn beginning in 2016, the year he was tapped as an unpaid adviser on judicial nominations to former President Donald Trump.

Arabella was targeted in the complaint from Americans for Public Trust, a watchdog mostly funded by DonorsTrust, often described as the “dark money ATM” of the conservative movement which has given millions to Leo-aligned nonprofits and his consulting firm, CRC Advisors. A liberal watchdog, Campaign for Accountability, once affiliated with Arabella, filed a complaint with the IRS and D.C. Attorney General following POLITICO’s reporting on Leo's lifestyle.

Gabe Shoglow-Rubenstein, Schwalb’s communications director, declined to confirm or deny the existence of either probe.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed last week said Schwalb lacks jurisdiction to investigate since Leo’s aligned groups are located in Virginia or Texas and criticized him for failing to investigate Arabella. It cited a recent letter sent to Schwalb from a dozen Republican state attorneys general.

The opinion piece did not note that a Leo-aligned group has been the top donor to the Republican Attorneys General Association or that The 85 Fund, one of Leo’s primary aligned groups, quietly relocated in recent months from the capital area to Texas amid the investigation. The 85 Fund had been incorporated in Virginia for nearly 20 years but it was using a UPS drop box in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood as its principal office address.

The conservative watchdog’s complaint, filed in mid-August, asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate whether Arabella’s founder, Eric Kessler, took in funds that exceeded fair market value in exchange for services provided by his nonprofits. It claims that more than $228 million has been “diverted” back to Arabella over the past two decades.

Leo has long pointed to Arabella as his inspiration in creating his network of nonprofits which have poured tens of millions of dollars over the past decade to promote Trump’s Supreme Court picks, file briefs before the court and, more recently, used an alias to push for voting restrictions and accuse Democrats of cheating in the 2020 election.

Liberals cite significant differences between Arabella and Leo’s network, much of it registered as “charitable” and “social welfare” groups managed by a handful of allies.

Leo is considered the architect of the ultraconservative Supreme Court who recently received a $1.6 billion contribution, believed to be the biggest political donation in U.S. history, from a far-right billionaire. Trump chose his three Supreme Court picks, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, from a list drawn up by Leo.

Arabella, which says on its website that it focuses on “philanthropy” and “impact investing,” acts as a vendor to nonprofit groups to supply human resources, legal and other administrative services. It has stressed that it does not direct the spending decisions of its clients whereas Leo has declined to say what services were provided in exchange for $43 million which has flowed to his company over two years.

Schwalb, who took office in January, has a background in tax law and served as a trial attorney in the tax division of the Department of Justice under former President Bill Clinton.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/Oq8elfw
via IFTTT

Read More

Pro-Christie groups urge New Hampshire Dems to switch parties and back him

Chris Christie’s political operation is aggressively trying to persuade New Hampshire Democrats to switch parties to vote for the former New Jersey governor in the state’s first-in-the-nation Republican presidential primary.

Two organizations aligned with Christie — who is centering his campaign around his outspoken opposition to former President Donald Trump — have launched advertising campaigns targeting Democratic voters. Those efforts come just days ahead of the state’s Oct. 6 deadline to switch party registration.

The pro-Christie Tell It Like It Is super PAC is sending mailers to registered Democratic voters ahead of that deadline, urging them to switch affiliations. The mailer tries to woo Democrats by telling them they can help “make sure” Trump “never sees the inside of the Oval Office again.”

“This can’t happen again,” the mailer says, against a background photo showing rioters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. “You can make sure it doesn’t. Stop Trump by switching parties & voting in the Republican primary.”

In an effort to assuage concerns, the mailer tells voters that “it’s easy to switch your party affiliation back after” next year’s primary.

Another pro-Christie group, an under-the-radar nonprofit policy organization called American Leadership Today, has begun running a digital ad in New Hampshire educating voters on how they can switch their party affiliation.

“In New Hampshire on a cold January night, democracy will be on the ballot,” the commercial says. “Will we continue to uphold our constitution?”

American Leadership Today has also been sending out text messages and direct mail to New Hampshire Democrats. Like its TV ad, the organization’s mailer tells voters how to switch their party registration and also notes that unaffiliated voters can cast ballots in a primary.

“Exercise your right to vote,” the mailer says. “You can protect our democracy.”

Collectively, the efforts by both groups underscores the degree to which Christie has hitched his political future to anxiety over the prospect of a second Trump presidency. The former governor has run predominantly on his willingness to call out the former president, who he once supported. He has aggressively attacked the Republican frontrunner for, among other things, his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege and for refusing to participate in the primary debates.

And he has campaigned largely in New Hampshire, hoping that his opposition to Trump will resonate with independent-minded voters who factor prominently in the state. His popularity with Democrats in New Hampshire has soared.

An American Leadership Today spokesperson said the organization’s “goal [was] spreading awareness about available choices through a multi-faceted campaign and expanding voter participation in the Granite State’s proud First In The Nation primary process.”

While pro-Christie groups are now trying to build a voting base around an anti-Trump candidacy that extends well beyond the GOP primary electorate, Christie himself has stopped short of explicitly encouraging Democrats to switch parties for him. He said in a Sept. 19 town hallin North Hampton, N.H. that he was “uncomfortable with the idea of asking people to change their party. Because I think that's something that's very personal for them to decide.”

But, he added, “whoever is eligible to vote …and wants to vote, should go out and vote and vote for the person that they think will make a difference."

Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, dismissed the pro-Christie super PAC’s gambit.

“Of course Chris Christie is begging Democrats to support him. Chris Christie is a stone cold loser who spends every day on the cable news casting couch auditioning for a contributor contract whenever his joke of a campaign ends up in flames,” Cheung said.

Adam Sexton, a reporter for the New Hampshire TV station WMUR, first reportedon the Tell It Like It Is mailer.

Recent polls have shown Trump with a commanding lead in the state, with Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley trailing.

Christie, who parted ways with the former president after he left the White House, similarly focused on New Hampshire during his short-lived 2016 presidential campaign. The former governor has said he would “leave” the contest if he doesn’t perform well in the state’s primary.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/meMA8po
via IFTTT

Read More

Justices voice doubts about challenge to consumer protection agency funding

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau appears likely to escape a potentially devastating blow from the Supreme Court after several conservative justices expressed doubts about arguments that the agency’s funding stream is unconstitutional.

During oral arguments Tuesday, all the court’s liberal justices and at least three members of the conservative majority sounded skeptical about claims by financial services companies that Congress's decision to insulate the CFPB from the annual budget process ran afoul of the Constitution’s clause about appropriations of federal money.

Critics of the funding arrangement, which lawmakers adopted when they created the bureau more than a decade ago, say it effectively takes future Congresses out of the loop, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh forcefully rejected that claim.

“Congress could change it tomorrow,” Kavanaugh said. “There’s nothing perpetual or permanent about this.”

The case is being widely watched because it threatens to curtail the power of the bureau and upend some of the industries it regulates. Depending on the scope of the ruling, the case has the potential to disrupt financial markets and cast doubt on the functions of banking regulators beyond the CFPB — a scenario the Biden administration and allies of the consumer agency have repeatedly raised.

Noel Francisco, a lawyer for payday lenders and other financial firms fighting the CFPB, said Congress’s decision to fund the bureau out of Federal Reserve fees and to impose an annual cap of $600 million, adjusted for inflation, allowed the executive branch to determine how much the regulators would spend each year.

Francisco insisted that, under the government’s view, Congress could essentially sign over all its spending powers to the president.

But even Justice Clarence Thomas — a conservative stalwart — sounded skeptical that the arrangement was unconstitutional simply because it was novel.

“Not having gone this far [before] is not a constitutional problem,” Thomas said. “It may be a problem with analogues, but it doesn’t prove your case.”

“I think we’re all struggling to figure out what the standard is,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said to Francisco.

“It’s difficult to come up with a hard-and-fast rule that says how much is too much,” Francisco acknowledged.

Almost a year ago, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the financial arrangement violates the Constitution’s requirement that Congress pass appropriations for federal spending. Based on that conclusion, the appeals court scrapped the CFPB’s 2017 payday lending rule on the grounds that the agency was unconstitutionally funded when it devised the regulation.

The 5th Circuit’s ruling was groundbreaking. It is the only ruling by any U.S. court that Congress violated the Constitution’s appropriations clause through a law that it passed, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the justices Tuesday.

While the government contended the funding process is constitutional, it also appealed to the justices to sever that provision from the rest of the law creating the CFPB if they hold otherwise, rather than invalidate its existing rules and previous actions.

A retrospective remedy tossing out all prior CFPB actions would be destabilizing, Prelogar argued.

“It would create profound disruption in various economic markets that would hurt the regulated industries themselves,” she said.

Still, a Supreme Court ruling that all funds an agency expends must be appropriated by Congress could disturb the longstanding funding streams for numerous federal agencies like the Fed, various bank regulators and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Emergency legislation could be needed to shore up some of those operations.

A broad ruling against the CFPB could also limit the flexibility of some agencies to weather a government shutdown like the one narrowly averted last weekend. Many agencies and the federal judiciary rely on user fees and similar payments to keep their operations going when more traditional Congressional funding lapses.

A decision in the case is expected by late June.

The funding fight arrived at the high court amid a drive by its conservative majority to curtail regulatory power, paring back the authority of the sprawling federal bureaucracy critics deride as “the administrative state.”

While the justices have sometimes reached out for obscure cases to plumb theories of regulatory excess, in this instance the Supreme Court had little choice but to step in.

Allowing the 5th Circuit ruling to stand threatened to defund an entire federal agency and would’ve allowed the New Orleans-based appeals court that has produced much of the fodder for the justices this term to effectively resolve the funding question for the whole country.

In addition, the justices almost always accept cases urged on them by the solicitor general. Those often include cases where a federal statute has been found unconstitutional.

The case argued at the high court Tuesday is also a measure of the power of conservative judges — especially the stridently conservative ones nominated by former President Donald Trump. All three judges on the 5th Circuit panel that ruled the CFPB’s funding mechanism unconstitutional — Don Willett, Kurt Engelhardt and Cory Wilson — are Trump appointees.

The bureau was established by the landmark Dodd-Frank law in 2010 to police consumer lending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The agency said this summer that it has returned $17.5 billion to consumers affected by fraud and other abuses.

The Supreme Court held in a 5-4 decision three years ago that a different part of the CFPB’s structure, a director who could only be fired for cause rather than at will by the president, was unconstitutional. But the agency itself survived after the court concluded that infirmity was no reason to toss out all the agency’s enabling legislation.

“[T]he Dodd-Frank Act contains an express severability clause,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in that opinion. “There is no need to wonder what Congress would have wanted if ‘any provision of this Act’ is ‘held to be unconstitutional because it has told us: ‘the remainder of this Act’ should ‘not be affected.'"

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/sHKxnae
via IFTTT

Read More

Canada’s Parliament elects first Black speaker

OTTAWA, Ont. — Canada's House of Commons has elected Liberal MP Greg Fergus as speaker — the first time a Black Canadian will hold the role.

Fergus, who represents a Quebec riding across the river from Ottawa, bested six other candidates: Chris d'Entremont, Carol Hughes, Alexandra Mendès, Peter Schiefke, Sean Casey and Elizabeth May.

Fergus takes on the task of presiding over a fractious House. "What motivates me, and what I vow to work night and day to promote and advance, can be summed up in one word, respect," Fergus said during a short speech before polling stations opened in the chamber.

He promised to be "firm, thoughtful, collaborative, consistent and certainly fair."

Some Conservatives were vocally opposed to Fergus's candidacy. Calgary MP Michelle Rempel Garner claimed a past ethics violation made him unfit for the role.

Still, Poilievre smiled as he guided Fergus to the chair with the help of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — a centuries-old parliamentary tradition in which the new speaker feigns reluctance at taking on the job.

MPs voted in person on a secret ranked ballot. The detailed vote breakdowns are never released publicly.

— The backstory: Fergus's election caps a tumultuous period in the House.

Former speaker Anthony Rota lost the confidence of every party in the chamber last month after he publicly recognized a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran who fought under Nazi command.

Trudeau and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had just delivered a historic address, joined Rota and the rest of the chamber in standing ovations for Yaroslav Hunka, whose personal history evaded any screening processes.

Rota faced widespread resignation calls from Jewish groups and eventually every party in the House of Commons. He quit on Sept. 27, setting in motion a rare mid-session speaker election — the likes of which hadn't occurred in the chamber since 1986.

— The perks: The speaker receives the base MP salary of C$194,600, plus a top-up of C$92,800 and a C$1,000 car allowance. They hobnob with dignitaries in a private reception area and travel on official visits to other countries. The gig also comes with an official residence, The Farm, located on an estate north of the city in Gatineau Park.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/HoNny4l
via IFTTT

Read More

Newsom’s says his ‘incredible’ pick for Senate can run if she wants

SAN FRANCISCO — In his first public remarks about his Senate appointment, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday it’s completely up to Laphonza Butler whether she’ll run for the seat previously held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein — before listing reasons why she’d be an ideal candidate.

He also expressed some regret about saying last month he'd choose an interim senator as he praised the 44-year-old Butler.

“I just think Laphonza Butler is uniquely positioned, simply the best person that I could find for this moment in this job,” Newsom told reporters at a Democratic congressional fundraiser in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood.

Butler, who will be sworn in Tuesday, hasn’t publicly expressed her plans and isn’t expected to make an announcement until after Feinstein’s memorial on Thursday, according to a person with knowledge of her timeline.

She will serve out much of what was left in Feinstein's term, which was to end next year. She will have to decide soon if she wants to run for the seat — jumping into an active primary that includes three Democratic House members: Barabara Lee, Adam Schiff and Katie Porter.

Newsom, who had pledged in 2021 to fill the seat with a Black woman, if given the opportunity, said he has left the decision in Butler’s hands, despite having earlier refused to name Lee to the post to avoid interfering with the race.

“We didn’t have that conversation. I said, ‘This is up to you.’ That was the end of that conversation,” Newsom said.

Whatever she decides, the governor said she would be an ideal candidate for the seat if she chooses to run for it. He noted Butler’s age, as well as her background advocating for abortion rights, LGBTQ people and labor unions.

“I’ve got an incredible appointee,” Newsom said.

Butler is president of EMILY’s List, the national fundraising giant for Democratic women candidates. She previously worked as an adviser on Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and led a union of long-term care workers. Butler has also done policy consulting work for corporate clients, including Airbnb and Uber.

“You in some ways can't even make all of this up, if I had to literally design from the mind of imagination, put pen to paper, someone I would like,” Newsom said. “Including the time of life, she’s just 44 years old.”

Newsom told “Meet the Press” in September that he wanted a placeholder appointee to avoid tipping the scales close to the March 5 election.

That comment drew a furious response from Lee, who said it was an insult for Newsom to appoint a Black woman to a caretaker role.

On Monday, Newsom said the comment had been a “hypothetical on top of a hypothetical” because he didn’t expect Feinstein to die in office.

“With grace, I walked into it by saying I didn’t want to get in the middle of the primary,” Newsom said. “I said what I said. That’s rearview mirror stuff right now.”

Melanie Mason contributed to this report.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/rAnUaI9
via IFTTT

Read More

Jimmy Carter turns 99 at home with Rosalynn and other family

ATLANTA — Jimmy Carter has always been a man of discipline and habit. But the former president broke routine Sunday, putting off his practice of quietly watching church services online to instead celebrate his 99th birthday with his wife, Rosalynn, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Plains.

The gathering took place in the same one-story structure where the Carters lived before he was first elected to the Georgia Senate in 1962. As tributes poured in from around the world, it was an opportunity for Carter’s family to honor his personal legacy.

“The remarkable piece to me and I think to my family is that while my grandparents have accomplished so much, they have really remained the same sort of South Georgia couple that lives in a 600-person village where they were born,” said grandson Jason Carter, who chairs the board at The Carter Center, which his grandparents founded in 1982 after leaving the White House a year earlier.

Despite being global figures, the younger Carter said his grandparents have always “made it easy for us, as a family, to be as normal as we can be.”

At The Carter Center in Atlanta, meanwhile, 99 new American citizens, who came from 45 countries, took the oath of allegiance as part of a naturalization ceremony timed for the former president’s birthday.

“This is so impressive, and I’m so happy for it to be here,” said Tania Martinez after the ceremony. A 53-year-old nurse in Roswell, Martinez was born in Cuba and came to the U.S. from Ghana 12 years ago.

“Now, I will be free forever,” she said, tears welling.

Celebrating the longest-lived U.S. president this way was inconceivable not long ago. The Carters announced in February that their patriarch was forgoing further medical treatments and entering home hospice care after a series of hospitalizations. Yet Carter, who overcame cancer diagnosed at age 90 and learned to walk after having his hip replaced at age 94, defied all odds again.

“If Jimmy Carter were a tree, he’d be an towering, old Southern oak,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic national chairperson and presidential campaign manager who got her start on Carter’s campaigns. “He’s as good as they come and tough as they come.”

Jill Stuckey, a longtime Plains resident who visits the former first couple regularly, cautioned to “never underestimate Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.”

His latest resilience has allowed Carter a rare privilege even for presidents: He’s been able to enjoy months of accolades typically reserved for when a former White House resident dies. The latest round includes a flood of messages from world leaders and pop culture figures donning “Jimmy Carter 99” hats, with many of them focusing on Carter’s four decades of global humanitarian work after leaving the Oval Office.

Katie Couric, the first woman to anchor a U.S. television network’s evening news broadcast, praised Carter in a social media video for his “relentless effort every day to make the world a better place.”

She pointed to Carter’s work to eradicate Guinea worm disease and river blindness, while advocating for peace and democracy in scores of countries. She noted he has written 32 books and worked for decades with Habitat for Humanity building houses for low-income people.

“Oh, yeah, and you were governor of Georgia. And did I mention president of the United States?” she joked. “When are you going to stop slacking off?”

Bill Clinton, the 42nd president and first Democratic president after Carter’s landslide defeat, showed no signs of the chilly relationship the two fellow Southerners once had.

“Jimmy! Happy birthday,” Clinton said in his video message. “You only get to be 99 once. It’s been a long, good ride, and we thank you for your service and your friendship and the enduring embodiment of the American dream.”

Musician Peter Gabriel led concertgoers at Madison Square Garden in a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” as did the Indigo Girls at a recent concert.

In Atlanta, the Carter Library & Museum and adjacent Carter Center held a weekend of events, including the citizenship ceremony. The museum offered 99-cent admission Saturday. The commemoration there was able to continue Sunday only because Congress came to an agreement to avoid a partial government shutdown at the start of the federal fiscal year, which coincides with Carter’s birthday.

Jason Carter said his grandfather has found it “gratifying” to see reassessments of his presidency. Carter’s term often has been broad-brushed as a failure because of inflation, global fuel shortages and the holding of American hostages in Iran, a confluence that led to Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1980 romp.

Yet Carter’s focus on diplomacy, his emphasis on the environment before the climate crisis was widely acknowledged and his focus on efficient government — his presidency added a relative pittance to the national debt — have garnered second looks from historians.

Indeed, Carter’s longevity offers a frame to illuminate both how much the world has changed over his lifetime while still recognizing that certain political and societal challenges endure.

The Carter Center’s disease-eradication work occurs mostly in developing countries. But Jimmy and Roslaynn Carter were first exposed to river blindness growing up surrounded by the crushing poverty of the rural Deep South during the Great Depression.

The Center’s global democracy advocacy has reached countries that were still part of various European empires when Carter was born in 1924 or were under heavy American influence in the decades after World War II. Yet in recent years, Carter has declared his own country to be more of an “oligarchy” than a well-functioning democracy. And the Center has since become involved in monitoring and tracking U.S. elections.

Carter has lived long enough finally to have a genuine friend in the Oval Office again. President Joe Biden was a young Delaware politician in 1976 and became the first U.S. senator to endorse Carter’s campaign against better-known Washington figures. Now, as Biden seeks reelection in 2024, he faces the headwinds of inflation that Republicans openly compare to Carter’s economy. Biden had a wooden birthday cake display placed on the White House front law to honor Carter.

The year Carter was born, Congress passed sweeping immigration restrictions, sharply curtailing Ellis Island as a portal to the nation. Now, the naturalization ceremony to mark Carter’s 99th birthday comes as Washington continues a decades-long fight over immigration policy. Republicans, especially, have moved well to the right of Reagan, who in 1986 signed a sweeping amnesty policy for millions of immigrants who were in the country illegally or had no sure legal path to citizenship.

Carter also was born into Jim Crow segregation, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan marched openly on state capitols and in Washington. As governor and president, Carter set new marks for appointing Black Americans to top government posts. At 99, Carter’s Sunday online church circuit includes watching Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Yet, at the same time, some white state lawmakers in Carter’s native region are defying the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to curtail Black voters’ strength at the ballot box.

Jason Carter said understanding his grandfather’s impact means resisting the urge to assess whether he solved every problem he confronted or won every election. Instead, he said, the takeaway is to recognize a sweeping impact rooted in respecting other people on an individual level and trying to help them.

“You don’t get more out of a life than he got, right?” the younger Carter said. “It is a incredible, full rich life with a long marriage, a wonderful partnership with my grandmother, and the ability to see the world and interact with the world in ways that almost nobody else has ever been able to do.”

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/FQRpIMJ
via IFTTT

Read More

North Dakota state senator, his wife and 2 kids killed in Utah plane crash

BISMARCK, N.D. — A state senator from North Dakota, his wife and their two young children died when the small plane they were traveling in crashed in Utah, a Senate leader said Monday.

Doug Larsen’s death was confirmed Monday in an email that Republican Senate Majority Leader David Hogue sent to his fellow senators and was obtained by The Associated Press.

The plane crashed Sunday evening shortly after taking off from Canyonlands Airfield about 15 miles (24 kilometers) north of Moab, according to a Grand County Sheriff’s Department statement posted on Facebook. The sheriff’s office said all four people on board the plane were killed.

“Senator Doug Larsen, his wife Amy, and their two young children died in a plane crash last evening in Utah,” Hogue wrote in his email. “They were visiting family in Scottsdale and returning home. They stopped to refuel in Utah.”

“I’m not sure where the bereavement starts with such a tragedy, but I think it starts with prayers for the grandparents, surviving stepchild of Senator Larsen, and extended family of Doug and Amy,” Hogue wrote. “Hold your family close today.”

The crash of the single-engine Piper plane was being investigated, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a post on X, the social media website formerly called Twitter.

An NTSB spokesman said a board investigator was expected to arrive at the scene Monday “to begin to document the scene, examine the aircraft, request any air traffic communications, radar data, weather reports and try to contact any witnesses. Also, the investigator will request maintenance records of the aircraft, and medical records and flight history of the pilot.”

It’s not clear who was piloting the plane at the time of the crash. Online FAA information stated, “Aircraft crashed under unknown circumstances after takeoff, Moab, UT.”

In a December 2020 Facebook post, Larsen noted his wife had flown “her first flight as a pilot.” The post included a picture of a small, orange plane.

A phone message left with sheriff’s officials seeking additional information wasn’t immediately returned Monday.

Larsen was a Republican first elected to the North Dakota Senate in 2020. His district comprises Mandan, the city neighboring Bismarck to the west across the Missouri River. Larsen chaired a Senate panel that handled industry and business legislation.

He was also a lieutenant colonel in the North Dakota National Guard. He and his wife, Amy, were business owners.

District Republicans will appoint a successor to fill out the remainder of Larsen’s term, through November 2024. His Senate seat is on the ballot next year. Republicans control North Dakota’s Legislature with supermajorities in the House and Senate.

Moab is a tourism-centered community of about 5,300 people near Arches and Canyonlands national parks.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/d6wKtPH
via IFTTT

Read More