WASHINGTON — When former President Donald Trump argues that President Joe Biden botched the 2021 American withdrawal from Afghanistan — a broad point that even some of Biden’s fellow Democrats will concede — he often laments what his campaign says are hundreds or thousands of U.S. citizens trapped in a country ruled by the Taliban.
“For 18 months, we lost nobody in Afghanistan. And then we had that horrible, horrible withdrawal where we lost 13 soldiers, 38 horribly wounded, left Americans behind,” Trump said in remarks after his Super Tuesday victories earlier this month.
“You have Americans right now still behind,” he continued. “Call them hostages, if you like.”
In a video his campaign released last week, Trump repeated the charge.
“We have many American people still living in Afghanistan, probably as hostages,” he said.
But two senior Biden administration national security officials told NBC News that the Taliban is holding two Americans that the U.S. government would like to see released. Other Americans in Afghanistan are there of their own volition, they said.
“Every American who wanted to leave has left,” the first official said. “In fact, we didn’t leave a single person behind. And we are also getting Afghan allies out every month.”
State Department officials said they could not provide an exact figure for how many U.S. citizens are in Afghanistan and have requested assistance in getting out of the country.
“It is impossible to say with certainty how many U.S. citizens are in Afghanistan today,” a State Department spokesperson said. “In the 30 months since our embassy closed, many U.S. citizens departed, returned, and departed again.”
One of the Americans being jailed by the Taliban, Ryan Corbett, started a microfinance company in the country during the war, fled with assistance from the U.S. government in 2021, and then returned in 2022. The harsh conditions he faces, and his deteriorating physical condition, have been detailed by onetime fellow prisoners who were released. He has not been charged with a crime.
The national security officials declined to name the other person whose release they are seeking but noted that person entered Afghanistan on a tourist visa after the 2021 evacuation.
“Both went to Afghanistan AFTER we left,” the first official said in a text message.
At least 67,000 Afghans have applied for what are known as special immigrant visas created for local nationals who supported the U.S. mission in the country, according to State Department officials. At least 20,000 Afghans have been found eligible for those visas and are moving forward in the process.
Since regaining power, the Taliban have reportedly killed at least 200 members of the Afghan security forces, which fought alongside U.S forces. The Taliban have also banned girls over the age of 11 from attending school, the only government in the world to do so.
The ban is enforced unevenly across Afghanistan, but an unknown number of Afghan women are believed to also want to leave the country.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump, defended the former president’s argument.
“President Trump is absolutely right to call out Joe Biden for his betrayal of Americans in Afghanistan,” Leavitt said in a statement. “Biden’s calamitous withdrawal left hundreds, if not thousands, of citizens behind and led to the tragic deaths of 13 U.S. Service Members at Abbey Gate.”
Abbey Gate is the location outside the Kabul Airport where 13 American service members were killed in a terrorist attack as the U.S. evacuated Afghanistan in August 2021.
“Now the Taliban has regained control of the country using billions of dollars of our military equipment, and radical terrorists are emboldened across the entire region,” Leavitt said.
Jonathan Allen
Jonathan Allen is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News, based in Washington.
Ahead of India’s general elections that begin April 19, critics of West Bengal state leader Mamata Banerjee shared a photo collage they falsely claimed depicted her faking an injury. But the pictures — one showing her with a bloodied forehead while the other showing a different part of her face bandaged — were from two separate incidents. A spokesman for Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress party told AFP she was wounded when she slipped and fell at her home in March.
Warning: This story contains images of an injured woman
“What kind of drama is this? The injury is in the middle of forehead and the bandage has been applied on the side,” said the Hindi-language caption to the collage shared on Facebook on March 16, 2024.
Banerjee, a fierce critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been in power for over a decade in West Bengal state that is home to 90 million people.
Her Trinamool Congress (TMC) will battle Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for seats in the lower house of parliament in upcoming elections that start mid-April.
Screenshot of the false Facebook post, taken on March 22, 2024
The photo collage was also shared alongside a similar false claim on Facebook here and here, and on social media platform X here.
Comments on the posts indicated social media users believed the claim.
“Election gimmick,” one wrote. Another said: “Why does such drama happen just before elections?”
Separate incidents
Reverse image searches on Google found the pictures in the collage were taken from two separate incidents that happened in different months.
The picture that showed Banerjee with blood from a wound on her forehead was among the three photos published by her party on X here on March 14, 2024 (archived link).
The post said: “Our chairperson @MamataOfficial sustained a major injury. Please keep her in your prayers.”
Below is a screenshot comparison of the picture in the false posts (left) and the one shared by TMC (right):
Similar pictures were published by local news websites here and here which reported Banerjee fell in a room at her house on March 14 and was rushed to a hospital (archived links here and here).
The image showing her with the bandage on her face, however, was from an incident that happened over a month prior. It corresponds to a photo published by news website Indian Express on January 25, 2024 (archived link).
The report said the West Bengal chief minister sustained a head injury at the time when her car made a sudden halt to avoid hitting another vehicle.
A video report uploaded on regional Bengali-language news outlet ABP Ananda’s YouTube channel on January 24 showed Banerjee briefing the media about the incident (archived link).
The visuals from the 2:05 mark of the report showed her with the same bandage as in the picture in the collage.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the photo in the false posts (left) and the video uploaded on ABP Ananda’s YouTube channel (right):
Responding to the posts, Trinamool Congress spokesman told AFP on March 28 the collage showed “two very different incidents”.
“Mamata Banerjee hit her head on the windshield and sustained minor injury on January 24,” Dutta said, referring to the picture of her with the bandage.
The more recent injury, caused by her slipping and falling at home in March, caused “a major gash on her forehead” and several other cuts. “There were four stitches that were applied to her. Later she was at home, under treatment,” Dutta added.
AFP had previously debunked misinformation targeting Banerjee here and here.
Posts repeatedly shared in Myanmar falsely claimed Muslims massacred “eight million Buddhists” in Indonesia in 1965, completely wiping out Buddhism in the archipelago. Multiple scholars told AFP the posts, which shared unrelated photos, misrepresented mass killings in Indonesia in the mid-1960s which they said targeted communists and not Buddhists. The latest government data showed there were around two million Buddhists in Muslim-majority Indonesia as of 2022.
“Why did Buddhism disappear in Indonesia?” said part of a lengthy Burmese-language post shared on Facebook on August 25, 2023.
It claimed to describe details from a “bloody morning” in 1965 when Muslims supposedly massacred millions of Buddhists in the archipelago.
“Over 30,000 girls were raped. Over 16,000 died of rape. Muslims took more than 100,000 Buddhist women as concubines. Buddhist children were enslaved at their houses. Over 8 million of Buddhists were killed just in one day.”
The post also included three black-and-white photos of a submerged Buddha statue and men tied with ropes.
Screenshot of the false post, taken March 26, 2024
The post appeared to be an example of anti-Muslim sentiment in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where sectarian violence had flared between Buddhist communities and the Rohingya Muslim minority.
The Southeast Asian nation faces charges of genocide at the UN’s top court after the military drove out about 750,000 Rohingya Muslim minority in a supposed crackdown on militants in 2017.
Posts similarly claiming Indonesia’s Muslims massacred millions of Buddhists have been shared more than 1,700 times on Facebook since at least 2022 here, here, here, here and here.
The claims are false, several scholars told AFP.
‘Total lie’
Upwards of half a million people were massacred across Indonesia between October 1965 and March 1966, in a bloody spectacle that ushered in the long rule of dictator Suharto.
The killings led to the collapse of the now-banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), once among the biggest in the world behind China and the Soviet Union.
But it was “impossible” for eight million Buddhists to have died then, said anthropologist Roberto Rizzo who specialises in research about the history of Buddhism in Indonesia (archived link).
“There weren’t so many Buddhists in Indonesia at any time in the country’s modern history,” he told AFP. Buddhists might have been killed but “definitely not in massive numbers”, he added.
Saskia E. Wieringa, chair of the International People’s Tribunal 1965, a people’s court set up by activists that held hearings on the violence, separately said the claims were “a total lie” (archived link).
The victims were targeted mainly “because they were considered to belong to a communist organisation”, she told AFP. “The rapes and murders of women were associated with their presumed political links, not with any religious aspect.”
Andi Achdian, a historian at the National University in Jakarta, separately said: “The victims were the communists or those who were accused of being communists, so religious affiliation was irrelevant” (archived link).
Buddhism has not completely disappeared from Indonesia contrary to the claim in the posts.
According to statistics from the archipelago’s Ministry of Religious Affairs as of August 2022, around two million of its citizens are Buddhists, comprising 0.73% of the population (archived link).
Misused pictures
Moreover, reverse image and keyword searches on Google found the pictures shared in the posts were shared in a false context.
The picture of the Buddha statue was taken in Taiwan after a typhoon, according to the Associated Press (AP) news agency which originally published it in August 2019 (archived link).
“A statue of Buddha’s head is seen submerged in flood water and debris from Typhoon Morakot at a temple in Kaohsiung County, southern Taiwan Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009,” reads the caption to the picture.
Typhoon Morakot slammed central and southern Taiwan in mid-August 2009, killing hundreds of people (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the Buddha statue picture in the false post (left) and the photo from AP (right):
Screenshot comparison of the photo in the false post (left) and the original photo from AP (right)
The other two pictures appearing to show men who were tied up were previously published on the website of the Dutch National Archives here and here (archived links here and here).
The national archives agency indicated both pictures predated the 1960s killings. Captions said they were part of a series taken during a communist uprising in Madiun in east Java in September 1948 (archived link).
The pictures in the false post (left) were flipped horizontally as shown in the screenshot comparison below with the original photographs from the Dutch National Archives (right):
Screenshot comparisons of the detained men pictures in the false post (left) and the original photos from the Dutch National Archives (right)
A Russian-backed “propaganda” network has been broken up for spreading anti-Ukraine stories and paying unnamed European politicians, according to authorities in several countries.
Investigators claimed it used the popular Voice of Europe website as a vehicle to pay politicians.
The Czech Republic and Poland said the network aimed to influence European elections.
Voice of Europe did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
Czech media, citing the countries intelligence agency BIS, reported that politicians from Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary were paid by Voice of Europe in order to influence upcoming elections for the European Parliament.
The German newspaper, Der Spiegel, said the money was either handed over in cash in covert meetings in Prague or through cryptocurrency exchanges.
Pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk is alleged by the Czech Republic to be behind the network.
Mr Medvedchuk was arrested in Ukraine soon after the Russian invasion, but later transferred to Russia with about 50 prisoners of war in exchange for 215 Ukrainians.
Czech authorities also named Artyom Marchevsky, alleging he managed the day-to-day business of the website. Both men were sanctioned by Czech authorities.
Poland’s intelligence agency said it had conducted searches in the Warsaw and Tychy regions and seized €48,500 (£41,500) and $36,000 (£28,500).
“Money from Moscow has been used to pay some political actors who spread Russian propaganda,” BIS said in a statement.
It added that the sums amounted to “millions” of Czech crowns (tens of thousands of pounds).
The alleged propaganda network “aimed to carry out activities against the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine,” BIS said.
BIS did not name the politicians allegedly involved. However, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo alleged they included members of the European Parliament.
“It came for example to light that Russia has approached MEPs, but also paid [them], to promote Russian propaganda here,” Mr De Croo told Belgian MPs.
The Voice of Europe website was offline on Thursday. An archived version of its homepage showed several articles highlighting internal divisions within European countries and expressing scepticism about support for Ukraine.
These included: “Protest in Prague: people’s voice against corruption, military support for Ukraine, and government”, and “Ukraine’s army faces a mounting troop shortage amid ongoing challenges”.
Voice of Europe had more than 180,000 followers on Twitter/X. The publication did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
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ZIGUINCHOR, Senegal (AP) — Mariama Sonko’s voice resounded through the circle of 40 women farmers sitting in the shade of a cashew tree. They scribbled notes, brows furrowed in concentration as her lecture was punctuated by the thud of falling fruit.
This quiet village in Senegal is the headquarters of a 115,000-strong rural women’s rights movement in West Africa, We Are the Solution. Sonko, its president, is training female farmers from cultures where women are often excluded from ownership of the land they work so closely.
Across Senegal, women farmers make up 70% of the agricultural workforce and produce 80% of the crops but have little access to land, education and finance compared to men, the United Nations says.
“We work from dawn until dusk, but with all that we do, what do we get out of it?” Sonko asked.
She believes that when rural women are given land, responsibilities and resources, it has a ripple effect through communities. Her movement is training women farmers who traditionally have no access to education, explaining their rights and financing women-led agricultural projects.
Across West Africa, women usually don’t own land because it is expected that when they marry, they leave the community. But when they move to their husbands’ homes, they are not given land because they are not related by blood.
Sonko grew up watching her mother struggle after her father died, with young children to support.
“If she had land, she could have supported us,” she recalled, her normally booming voice now tender. Instead, Sonko had to marry young, abandon her studies and leave her ancestral home.
After moving to her husband’s town at age 19, Sonko and several other women convinced a landowner to rent to them a small plot of land in return for part of their harvest. They planted fruit trees and started a market garden. Five years later, when the trees were full of papayas and grapefruit, the owner kicked them off.
The experience marked Sonko.
“This made me fight so that women can have the space to thrive and manage their rights,” she said. When she later got a job with a women’s charity funded by Catholic Relief Services, coordinating micro-loans for rural women, that work began.
“Women farmers are invisible,” said Laure Tall, research director at Agricultural and Rural Prospect Initiative, a Senegalese rural think tank. That’s even though women work on farms two to four hours longer than men on an average day.
But when women earn money, they reinvest it in their community, health and children’s education, Tall said. Men spend some on household expenses but can choose to spend the rest how they please. Sonko listed common examples like finding a new wife, drinking and buying fertilizer and pesticides for crops that make money instead of providing food.
With encouragement from her husband, who died in 1997, Sonko chose to invest in other women. Her training center now employs over 20 people, with support from small philanthropic organizations such as Agroecology Fund and CLIMA Fund.
In a recent week, Sonko and her team trained over 100 women from three countries, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau and Gambia, in agroforestry – growing trees and crops together as a measure of protection from extreme weather – and micro gardening, growing food in tiny spaces when there is little access to land.
One trainee, Binta Diatta, said We Are the Solution bought irrigation equipment, seeds, and fencing — an investment of $4,000 — and helped the women of her town access land for a market garden, one of more than 50 financed by the organization.
When Diatta started to earn money, she said, she spent it on food, clothes and her children’s schooling. Her efforts were noticed.
“Next season, all the men accompanied us to the market garden because they saw it as valuable,” she said, recalling how they came simply to witness it.
Now another challenge has emerged affecting women and men alike: climate change.
In Senegal and the surrounding region, temperatures are rising 50% more than the global average, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the UN Environment Program says rainfall could drop by 38% in the coming decades.
Where Sonko lives, the rainy season has become shorter and less predictable. Saltwater is invading her rice paddies bordering the tidal estuary and mangroves, caused by rising sea levels. In some cases, yield losses are so acute that farmers abandon their rice fields.
But adapting to a heating planet has proven to be a strength for women since they adopt climate innovations much faster than men, said Ena Derenoncourt, an investment specialist for women-led farming projects at agricultural research agency AICCRA.
“They have no choice because they are the most vulnerable and affected by climate change,” Derenoncourt said. “They are the most motivated to find solutions.”
On a recent day, Sonko gathered 30 prominent women rice growers to document hundreds of local rice varieties. She bellowed out the names of rice – some hundreds of years old, named after prominent women farmers, passed from generation to generation – and the women echoed with what they call it in their villages.
This preservation of indigenous rice varieties is not only key to adapting to climate change but also about emphasizing the status of women as the traditional guardians of seeds.
“Seeds are wholly feminine and give value to women in their communities,” Sonko said. “That’s why we’re working on them, to give them more confidence and responsibility in agriculture.”
The knowledge of hundreds of seeds and how they respond to different growing conditions has been vital in giving women a more influential role in communities.
Sonko claimed to have a seed for every condition including too rainy, too dry and even those more resistant to salt for the mangroves.
Last year, she produced 2 tons of rice on her half-hectare plot with none of the synthetic pesticides or fertilizer that are heavily subsidized in Senegal. The yield was more than double that of plots with full use of chemical products in a 2017 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization project in the same region.
“Our seeds are resilient,” Sonko said, sifting through rice-filled clay pots designed to preserve seeds for decades. “Conventional seeds do not resist climate change and are very demanding. They need fertilizer and pesticides.”
The cultural intimacy between female farmers, their seeds and the land means they are more likely to shun chemicals harming the soil, said Charles Katy, an expert on indigenous wisdom in Senegal who is helping to document Sonko’s rice varieties.
He noted the organic fertilizer that Sonko made from manure, and the biopesticides made from ginger, garlic and chilli.
One of Sonko’s trainees, Sounkarou Kébé, recounted her experiments against parasites in her tomato plot. Instead of using manufactured insecticides, she tried using a tree bark traditionally used in Senegal’s Casamance region to treat intestinal problems in humans caused by parasites.
A week later, all the disease was gone, Kébé said.
As dusk approached at the training center, insects hummed in the background and Sonko prepared for another training session. “There’s too much demand,” she said. She is now trying to set up seven other farming centers across southern Senegal.
Glancing back at the circle of women studying in the fading light, she said: “My great fight in the movement is to make humanity understand the importance of women.”
___
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In 2016, as the stress of wedding planning bore down on Joseph Sinclair, he got into an argument with his parents and told them something that sent his family into a tailspin: As a child, he said, he was sexually abused by a neighbor they had hired to babysit him.
The revelation wreaked havoc on the family, which sought years of therapy to heal. But now they say they are being forced to relive the trauma.
Maureen Sartain, the babysitter Sinclair has accused of abusing him, has filed a lawsuit against Sinclair’s mother, saying in court documents that Marie Sinclair intentionally caused her emotional distress by telling others about the alleged abuse. The case is scheduled to go to trial next month in New York.
“It keeps me up at night,” Marie Sinclair said of the thought of her son being called to testify in the trial. “Because of this ridiculous lawsuit, he’s being forced to confront some painful memories. It is so unfair.”
Sartain declined a request for an interview through her attorney, Scott Mishkin, who referred NBC News to her deposition from last year. In it, Sartain denied abusing Joseph Sinclair. She is not suing for defamation and some legal experts have expressed surprise that the case is scheduled to go to trial.
“What she’s trying to do is get around the truth test by reframing the case,” said Richard Epstein, a professor at New York University School of Law. “It’s an effort to repackage a defamation case as an emotional distress case to avoid the truth test.”
Unlike in a suit for emotional distress, the plaintiff in a defamation case has to prove that the statement in question was false.
Sartain’s attorney did not return a request for comment about the nature of the suit.
The Sinclair family avoided Sartain for years after they learned of the alleged abuse, Marie Sinclair said.
“Me and my husband, Jimmy, wanted to kill her,” she said of the babysitter, who lived on the same Smithtown street as the couple until they moved last year. But a therapist told them it wouldn’t be good for Joseph Sinclair’s therapy if they confronted her. “He needed to heal. He needed to get over the guilt and the shame of it, and confronting her would only harm him,” Marie Sinclair said the therapist told them.
She followed that advice for three years. Then, on Nov. 2, 2020, she changed course.
“I see you are friends with Maureen Grennan Sartain on Facebook,” she wrote in direct messages sent to at least a dozen people on the social network, according to the lawsuit, a transcript of her deposition and screenshots of messages Sinclair provided to NBC News. “I want you to know she is a pedophile and raped my child when he was 8 years old. She has never been prosecuted for this crime. If anything I can warn you, your family and your children.”
Marie Sinclair
She also sent the message to Sartain, adding: “I sent this to your friends. I hope someday you pay for your sick crimes.”
The messages, which were sent to Sartain’s friends and family and to the parents of children she may have cared for, are at the center of a lawsuit Sartain filed against Sinclair alleging intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Sartain’s attorney says in the lawsuit that she was “devastated to see that she was being accused of such conduct and was even more mortified over the fact that this false allegation was being sent to her friends and family.”
The suit accuses Sinclair of having launched a “deliberate and malicious campaign of harassment” that was “intentional, reckless, extreme and outrageous.”
But for the Sinclairs, who believe Sartain to be an abuser, the pending jury trial has landed like a punch, adding insult to injuries they had worked to heal.
Joseph Sinclair, 28, was between the ages of 8 and about 13 when the alleged abuse occurred, he said in an interview with NBC News.
“It has affected every relationship I’ve had, in terms of trust, interpersonal communication,” he said. “I was manipulated, and it makes me feel terrible about myself. That I allowed it, or that I didn’t say anything.”
Not long after they learned about the alleged abuse, the Sinclairs also sought advice from the Suffolk County district attorney’s office in July 2017. In a copy of an email sent to the office that was shared with NBC News, they asked whether Sartain could be prosecuted and what the process would involve.
“How can we prevent her from abusing other children in her care,” the email concluded.
The Sinclairs said they never received a response. Marie Sinclair said she had also called the district attorney’s office with the same inquiry and was told that Joseph Sinclair could press charges but that it would be very difficult to win a criminal case against Sartain because the Sinclairs did not have footage or any other physical evidence of the alleged abuse.
A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office said in a statement: “We cannot comment on matters from the prior administration as those in leadership from that time period are no longer employed here.” The spokesperson said the office is willing to speak with the Sinclairs and provided a name and phone number for an investigator. The spokesperson declined to comment further, saying, “sexual assault victims cannot be outed without their consent.”
Joseph Sinclair said he never pursued criminal or civil action against Sartain because his focus has been on trying to heal.
“During my years of therapy, eventually, one of our goals was to come to that decision — whether or not I wanted to,” he said.
But now he plans to testify on his mother’s behalf, he said. Jury selection is scheduled to begin April 22 on Long Island.
“I want her to be held accountable,” he said of Sartain. “And I want her to be seen as the terrible person she is.”
In a deposition taken last year, Sartain testified that she babysat for a handful of other families from approximately 1990 to 2002. After Marie Sinclair told people about the alleged abuse, Sartain testified that she started having panic attacks every couple of days, would sometimes have trouble sleeping, had worsening jaw pain, and felt stressed.
“I don’t like going out,” she said, according to a transcript of the deposition. “I feel like neighbors have shunned me. People on Facebook have unfriended me.”
At Marie Sinclair’s deposition, Sartain’s attorney repeatedly asked Sinclair what her intention was in sending the messages and whether she cared at all about how they would affect Sartain. Sinclair responded that she wanted to warn people about who she believed Sartain to be and was concerned for any other potential victims.
“If she was upset by it, that’s on her,” Sinclair responded, according to a transcript of the deposition. “I was worried about the families that I was sending it to.”
About two weeks after she sent the messages, Sinclair received a cease-and-desist letter from Sartain’s attorney demanding, among other things, that she “immediately publish an apology for her false statements.” The lawsuit was filed three months later, in February 2021.
It is not uncommon, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement, for people who come forward to allege sexual assault and harassment to be sued for defamation by their alleged perpetrators. But Sartain’s case differs from many of those in that, while she denies the allegations, she is not suing for defamation nor is she suing the person whom she is alleged to have abused.
Benjamin Zipursky, a professor at Fordham Law School in New York, described this approach as a “backdoor maneuver.”
“Sometimes, people try to take a kind of alternative lawsuit for a variety of reasons,” Zipursky said. “One of the most common reasons is they believe defamation law has been crafted by the courts, including the Supreme Court over the last many decades, to be very protective of speakers and to make it very hard for plaintiffs who have been defamed to prevail.”
Some attorneys who believe there may be too many defenses available to defendants for their client to win may shift to another category, Zipursky said, adding that one of the most common would be intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Zipursky, who specializes in tort law and defamation law, said the jury will have to decide whether Marie Sinclair’s conduct was extreme and outrageous.
“If this is what her boy told her had happened to him, then I don’t think that they’re going to think it was outrageous for her to say so,” he said.
Ukraine’s military intelligence has sharply rejected comments by Russian President Vladimir Putin about the country’s alleged involvement in Friday’s terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall.
Putin’s claim that four perpetrators were arrested on their way to an escape route into Ukraine is an “absolutely false and absurd statement,” the spokesman of the HUR intelligence service, Andriy Yusov, said on Saturday.
“Of course, this version cannot stand up to criticism,” the spokesman said, according to the Ukrainian Pravda website.
“Everyone in the world understands this, except perhaps the zombified Russian population,” he added, listing the many obstacles preventing any such infiltration across the border.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been under way for more than two years, and the border areas are full of its troops, special agents, intelligence services and security forces, Yusov said.
“The border line is mined, it is monitored using all means, including aerial reconnaissance from both sides.”
The spokesman accused the Kremlin of wanting to use the tragedy in Moscow to intensify repression within Russia.
A day after at least 133 people died in the attack by gunmen on the Crocus City Hall concert hall near Moscow, Putin claimed in a televised speech that four of 11 suspects arrested had tried to flee to Ukraine.
He cited a “Ukrainian trail” in Friday’s bloody events, using a Russian expression for apportioning blame or involvement.
Russian propagandists were also quick to dismiss as fake a letter of confession from the Islamic State terrorist militia, which claimed responsibility for the attack.
A federal judge in New York on Monday dismissed Donald Trump’s countersuit against E. Jean Carroll, the writer who won a $5 million verdict against the former president for battery and defamation earlier this year.
Trump filed his counterclaims against Carroll in June, alleging she defamed him by continuing to say publicly that he’d raped her even after a jury found him not liable for doing so.
But, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan noted Monday, the jury did find Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll during an encounter in the dressing room of a New York City department store in the mid-1990s, and the details of that finding show that her having maintained that the former president raped her is “substantially true.”
Kaplan dismissed Trump’s counterclaim, which sought unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, as well as several of Trump’s defenses against a separate still-pending defamation lawsuit brought by Carroll.
“We strongly disagree with the flawed decision and will be filing an appeal shortly,” Trump attorney Alina Habba said.
Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said she was “pleased” with the ruling, which means that the impending Jan. 15 trial in the case “will be limited to a narrow set of issues and shouldn’t take very long to complete.”
Trump has denied wrongdoing in the case and is appealing the $5 million verdict, but did not testify at trial.
Carroll’s battery claim against Trump alleged that he’d raped her and sexually abused her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store near Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Asked on its verdict sheet whether Carroll had proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that “Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll,” the nine-person jury checked the box that said “no.” Asked whether Carroll had proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that “Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll,” the jury checked the box that said “yes.”
Trump’s defamation claim centered on an interview Carroll had with CNN the day after the verdict, where she was asked her reaction to the jury’s finding that she had not been raped. “Well, I just immediately say in my own head, ‘Oh, yes, he did. Oh, yes, he did.'”
In his ruling, the judge noted the definition of rape he’d given the jury in the case was “the narrow, technical meaning of that term” under New York law, which defines rape as forcible penetration with the penis.
The judge said the sexual abuse finding shows the jury believed Trump forcibly penetrated Carroll with his fingers. The verdict “establishes, as against Mr. Trump, the fact that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her, albeit digitally rather than with his penis. Thus, it establishes against him the substantial truth of Ms. Carroll’s ‘rape’ allegations,” Kaplan wrote.
The judge also denied Trump’s claim of presidential immunity in Carroll’s pending defamation case, finding he’d waited too long to raise that defense. Kaplan also shot down Trump’s argument that Carroll should not be entitled to punitive damages in the case.
The current case was filed before the case that resulted in the May verdict against Trump.
The original case, which the judge refers to as “Carroll I,” alleges then-President Trump defamed Carroll after she came forward with her rape claim in 2019.
While that case was tied up on appeal, Carroll filed a second suit over the decades-old rape allegation that included a defamation claim for post-presidency comments Trump had made about her.
Carroll was able to file the battery claim after New York passed a law that opened a one-year window for adult victims of sexual offenses to file civil suits, even if the statute of limitations on their claims had expired, as it had for Carroll.
While Trump did not take the witness stand in “Carroll II,” he did sit for a deposition in the case last year, and excerpts of his sworn testimony were shown to the jury.
Prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, where Trump has been charged with falsifying business records relating to hush money payments, issued a subpoena to review the entire deposition, which Kaplan signed off on in a ruling last week, court records show.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in the New York case, and his lawyers have accused the DA’s office of engaging in a fishing expedition with the subpoena.
Adam Reiss
Adam Reiss is a reporter and producer for NBC and MSNBC.
Dareh Gregorian
Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.
A federal judge in New York has dismissed former President Donald Trump’s counterclaim against the writer E. Jean Carroll, finding that Carroll’s assertion that Trump raped her is “substantially true.”
A civil trial jury in May found that Trump “sexually abused” Carroll in the mid-1990s and awarded her $5 million, but did not find him liable for “rape.” Trump’s attorneys claimed she defamed him in an interview the next day, on May 10, when she said he raped her — an allegation she had made repeatedly over the years.
But U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, in his 24-page ruling Monday, said the jury found Trump raped Carroll “as the term is understood more broadly.”
He wrote that while the jury concluded Trump was not liable for rape according to New York penal code — which requires proof of forceful penetration involving the attacker’s genitals — the jurors’ conclusion that he was liable for sexually abusing her by forcefully inserting his fingers was an “implicit determination that Mr. Trump digitally raped her.”
“Ms. Carroll’s statements are ‘substantially true,'” Kaplan wrote.
Kaplan’s conclusion echoed what he wrote in a July 19 court filing, that “Mr. Trump did in fact digitally rape Ms. Carroll.”
“The definition of rape in the New York Penal Law is far narrower than the meaning of ‘rape’ in common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere,” Kaplan wrote on July 19.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan — who is not related to the judge — said Monday she and Carroll are “pleased” with the ruling.
Alina Habba, an attorney for Trump, said, “We strongly disagree with the flawed decision and will be filing an appeal shortly.”
Carroll’s interview aired the same day as a CNN town hall with Trump, where he called her a “whack job” who “made up” her allegations. That prompted Carroll to file a $10 million defamation claim against Trump — an update to a lawsuit she filed in 2019.
A trial in that suit is scheduled to begin Jan. 15, 2024, the same day as the Iowa caucuses, when Republicans in the state will consider Trump’s candidacy for president.
In March, Trump is scheduled to face a criminal trial in a New York state case, in which he is charged with 34 felony counts of falsification of business records in connection with an alleged “hush money” payment before his 2016 presidential election victory.
In May, Trump is scheduled to go on trial in federal court in Florida on 40 federal felony counts related to alleged “willful retention” of national security information after leaving the White House.
Trump has entered not guilty pleas in both cases.
On Aug. 3, Trump entered a not guilty plea in a third criminal case, in which he was charged with four felonies related to alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election after he was defeated.
Trump has strenuously denied all allegations and accused every prosecutor charging him, and Carroll, of political bias.
Graham Kates
Graham Kates is an investigative reporter covering criminal justice, privacy issues and information security for CBS News Digital. Contact Graham at KatesG@cbsnews.com or grahamkates@protonmail.com
