Mangino discusses deadlocked Lindsay Clancy jury on NewsNation

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The target at Penn State was cocaine kingpin Agostino S. Abbatiello

September 2. 2026 marked the first court hearing for those who were allegedly part of a cocaine trafficking ring involving two Penn State fraternities, reported WHP-21.

Six of 14 defendants had hearings scheduled. Agostino S. Abbatiello was the only defendant in court wearing Department of Corrections-issued clothing the defendants in the Penn State Drug Ring preliminary hearings.  He was escorted by police into the courthouse. He was wearing a red jumpsuit and had handcuffs on. 

The reason: Abbatiello is the Penn State cocaine kingpin. All the others have cooperated with investigators, waived their preliminary hearing and three codefendant's testified against Abbatiello. 

At Abbatiello's preliminary hearing, Thomas Robinson was the first person called to the stand.

Robinson said he initially sold small amounts of cocaine, splitting profits with Huraibi. He said he stored cocaine in his room in the fraternity house.

Robinson said he later was in a Snapchat group chat with Abbatiello and Huraibi. He said they used Snapchat because messages are deleted after 24 hours.

Robinson described one time where he met with Abbatiello to purchase 250 grams of cocaine in February 2024. Robinson said Abbatiello came out and sat in Robinson's car to exchange cash for a shoebox of cocaine.

Robinson said later purchases were in larger amounts, including 500 grams and 1 kilogram.

Robinson said he sold mostly to members of his own fraternity, Delta Upsilon.

Mohammed Huraibi is second to the stand

Huraibi said he was introduced to Abbatiello via Snapchat.

Huraibi said he and Robinson purchased cocaine from Abbatiello. He said their first purchase together was in August 2023.

Huraibi said he later "decided I wanted to walk away from everything going on."

Huraibi said Abbatiello didn't sell to just anyone; they'd have to be "introduced" to him.

Huraibi said he used cocaine and other drugs after he started selling it. He said the drug use affected his ability to recall what occurred.

Lars Zeepvat is third to the stand

Zeepvat said he, Abbatiello and another friend "pooled" their money together to purchase cocaine from a distributor in Philadelphia.

Zeepvat said Abbatiello later found a cocaine plug from Long Island, which is when he "shifted."

"I saw a difference in Augie," Zeepvat said. "He started selling for money and popularity."

Zeepvat said he would later sell bags of cocaine. He was told, "You can keep a bag for yourself if you sell 4-5."

Zeepvat said "things really started picking up" during senior year. He believed Abbatiello was making more money because he was gambling, buying more clothes and selling larger quantities of cocaine.

Zeepvat said 3-12 people would go to after-parties at Abbatiello's apartment, where cocaine was out on the table.

When Abbatiello learned about the investigation into the ring on July 4, 2026, he allegedly told Zeepvat, "don't cooperate" with the grand jury investigation.

When Zeepvat did receive a letter to testify in front of the grand jury, he said he called Abbatiello. He said Abbatiello told him, "please don't say anything."

"There are lots of cocaine sources at Penn State," Zeepvat said. "When I was pledging (Sigma Chi), it was the seniors."

Bail

Abbatiello was initially denied bail, but his attorney argued that he should have the opportunity to get out on bail. His attorney argued that he's not a flight risk or a danger to the community. He said Abbatiello would live at his parents' home without any drugs or weapons.

The prosecution said hat he was trafficking drugs and "poison" into the community. The prosecutor said the judge was right to deny bail, but if it is granted, it should be set at $5 million.

The judge ultimately granted bail as $250,000 secured. Abbatiello is not allowed contact with any witnesses or any alcohol.

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Trump Administration uses obscure customs statute to circumvent search warrant

The Trump administration has been deploying an obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, non-profits and unions, raising alarm over a power the government has asserted without judicial oversight, reported The Guardian.

In one instance, the government obtained six months of telephone records for Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist. Fort was not notified of the request for her information, nor was she given a chance to contest the government’s effort to obtain them, her lawyers said in court papers.

In February of this year, federal prosecutors twice sought search warrants for account information for the YouTube channel of Fort and the journalist Don Lemon, both of whom have pleaded not guilty to criminal charges in connection to a protest at a Minneapolis church in January that they were covering. A judge twice rejected the request, writing that the government had failed to establish probable cause of a crime and that he wanted Lemon and Fort to be informed of the request so they could have a chance to challenge it. About a month after the judge’s ruling in late February, the government said it was withdrawing the request.

But officials hadn’t given up on getting the data.

Less than a month later, the DHS served Google with a different request for the YouTube information. This time, DHS utilized a different method that didn’t require approval from a judge, only a sign-off from a DHS official. It served Google an administrative summons citing an arcane provision of federal law – 19 USC 1509 – dealing with customs imports. The provision gives the DHS broad power to inspect records in order to determine whether duties and taxes are being correctly levied on imported items. It also instructed the recipients of the summons to keep it secret.

The DHS summons was issued under a statute that does give the agency broad power to demand records, but only in the limited circumstance of there being a need to investigate a customs issue, said Chris Duncan, a former lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security. “These laws have absolutely nothing to do with a domestic situation at a church, a social media post, even an immigration matter,” he said.

These laws have nothing to do with a domestic situation at a church, a social media post, even an immigration matter

Chris Duncan, former lawyer at the DHS

“It’s outrageous conduct on so many levels. It’s hard to know where to begin,” said John Roth, who served as the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security from 2014 to 2017. “This is an improper use of the subpoena under any circumstances. This is not a customs case; it is not a customs violation. They are not investigating a customs violation.”

The episode in Minnesota was particularly alarming because it appeared to be an end run around a judge who was skeptical of the government’s need for the information.

“There is no judge in the loop. You don’t have that independent authority to scrutinize the demand and to say whether or not it’s legitimate,” said Caitlin Vogus, a senior adviser at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The DHS also sought and obtained six months of phone records for Fort from T-Mobile, which included records for more than 10,000 calls and text messages. Fort was not notified the government was seeking the records until mid-July, when government lawyers produced them to her lawyers. Fort’s lawyers wrote in a filing this week they were “stunned” to see the government had unilaterally been able to obtain a log of her communications after a judge had warned them about obtaining records about a journalist.

“That’s very concerning because the information demanded can help the government uncover a journalist’s confidential sources,” Vogus said.

In a statement, T-Mobile did not address why it turned over the information.

“We take our responsibility to protect customers’ privacy and personal information very seriously. Our team carefully reviews government demands for customer information and responds in accordance with the law. We don’t comment on specific law enforcement demands,” the company said.

The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security both declined to comment on the use of the summons.

In addition to Fort and Lemon, the DHS also sought information on the YouTube accounts for the left-leaning outlet Democracy Now, conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and an independent journalist named Brendan Gutenschwager. Some of the videos they cited in the summons were livestreams of the protest, but not all of them. The video cited as part of the request for information on Democracy Now involved a news report on the protest and an interview with Nekima Levy Armstrong, who led the protest. The video cited on the request for Kelly’s show included an interview with Jonathan Parnell, the pastor at the church.

It’s unclear why exactly the DHS wanted the YouTube account information, which includes things like a user’s IP address, and information about when a user was logging in.

“It’s still concerning that the government sought subscriber information for Lemon and Fort because there’s no reason it would need this information for the criminal charges that it’s brought against them,” Vogus said. “It’s not a crime to post a YouTube video, and it’s not at all clear why the government is demanding this information about Lemon and Fort’s YouTube accounts.”

The episode was the most recent example of an alarming pattern in recent months in which the DHS avoided judicial scrutiny and deployed a summons related to customs enforcement to pressure companies into turning over information on Americans. The US constitution’s fourth amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and law enforcement generally must show a judge or a grand jury they have probable cause to believe the materials they want to search will produce evidence of a crime.

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ICE arrests surge -- 50,000 people in July alone

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 50,000 people in July, the highest single monthly arrest total during the second Trump administration, according to new figures. reported The Associated Press.

The spike in immigration arrests shows that the administration has continued to advance its mass deportations agenda despite a shift in approach earlier this year from high-profile operations in large American cities that sparked a public outcry to arrests that have garnered less attention but have nonetheless been disruptive.

The July arrest tally of 49,571 marks a 15% jump from 43,021 arrests a month earlier and a 70% increase from 29,241 in February, in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in Minnesota, according to government data that was provided by ICE to the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA and analyzed by The Associated Press.

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Richard Nixon set the table for the presidential excesses of today

“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”                                                             

 -Former President Richard M. Nixon 

He made that stunning statement to television personality David Frost in a May 1977 interview that reached an audience of 45 million, reported Just Security. Nixon’s quote is often cited to illustrate the epitome of his arrogance and blindness to the rule of law — his confidence that his power rose to such heights that he possessed a presidential prerogative to redefine the law. For nearly fifty years, that statement stood at the apex of presidential contempt for the law. But a new contender has emerged. Within weeks of taking office for his second term in 2025, President Donald Trump posted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law.” Trump apparently believes that his definition of saving the country includes whatever he believes needs to be done, with the law no obstacle. The months since he made the statement are consistent with that theory.

While Trump’s statement rivals Nixon’s in placing the president above the law, a nearly forgotten postscript to Nixon’s statement reveals that Nixon made a far more nuanced argument for presidential power. Less than a month after the Frost interview, Nixon published a full-page essay in the Washington Star to correct “widespread misinterpretations of the comments I made on the inherent powers of the presidency.” Nixon’s essay was an effort to repudiate the widespread perception that he asserted a pretense to monarchical power—akin to a claim that the “king can do no wrong.” He explained that his comment to Frost reflected his belief that in emergency circumstances, a president must sometimes violate the letter of the law to preserve its spirit. According to Nixon, this view echoed positions held by former Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.

Nixon’s lost apologia deserves renewed attention—especially with Nixon’s recent return to the headlines. This summer, Vice President J.D. Vance expressed his admiration for Nixon while seeking to rewrite the saga of Watergate. In Vance’s eyes, Nixon was brought down by the “deep state,” and Watergate today would be “like a 12-hour news story.” But minimizing Nixon’s enormous abuses of power does not make them vanish. If anything, Vance’s effort to rehabilitate Nixon makes it all the more important to grapple with Nixon’s own explanation of his actions—and to demonstrate the flaws in a line of thinking — and an attempt at justification — that places the president above the law.

A president’s assertions of unchecked powers in a perceived emergency inherently invites abuse. But Nixon does not stand alone in claiming such powers. The view that a president has free rein in an emergency to override the law reflects a longstanding current in American views of presidential power. Taking Nixon seriously can help clarify what to expect from a president in an emergency—where unexpected circumstances pose challenges that Congress either did not anticipate or fails to address.

Our current norm-shattering presidency acknowledges no such boundaries. Nixon’s excesses may have foreshadowed Trump’s—the flagrant deception, the impoundments of appropriated funds, the denigration of Congress, the muscular use of the military, the political dirty tricks, the electoral interference, and myriad abuses of power all have Nixonian antecedents. But the brazenness and scale of Trump’s actions make Nixon’s transgressions pale by comparison. Trump has made extravagant claims of presidential power — in the political arena, in court, and in secret — often fueled by massive deceptions and power grabs, that Nixon’s seem tame. The emergence of such unchecked authority makes defining when a president has exceeded his constitutional powers a more pressing question than ever. So do the threats over the horizon, including the prospect of the president claiming emergency powers to meddle with U.S. elections.

What we learn from Nixon’s forgotten essay is this: presidential initiative may be essential, but democracy can tolerate only so much unilateral presidential action before government too closely resembles a monarchy or autocracy. Trump’s razing of legal barriers has underscored that the post-Watergate reforms adopted 50 years ago to rein in presidential power are fragile and, in some cases, ineffective. A president determined to impose his will on the nation, who has a weak or compliant Congress, and who treats laws as dispensable faces few constraints, at least in the short term, and in many realms, perhaps indefinitely. Just as the nation enacted a suite of reforms after Watergate to strengthen the rule of law, new reforms after Trump will be vital to prevent runaway executive power. No rebuilding project is more important to democracy than defining the limits to presidential power and installing practical means of enforcing them.

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Judges, 128 of the them, file ethics complaint against counsel for Homeland Security

The general counsel for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is now facing an ethics complaint over his social media posts about the “worst of the worst” judges, reported the ABA Journal.

In a complaint filed with the Florida Bar on Tuesday, 128 retired federal and state judges, the Democracy Defenders Fund and the Lawyers Defending American Democracy allege that general counsel James Percival’s posts “not only constitute serious professional misconduct, but they threaten the rule of law and increase the risk of violence against judges.”

Specifically, they allege that Percival violated Florida Rule of Professional Conduct 4-8.2(a), which bars lawyers from impugning the qualifications and integrity of judges or other officers.

“The posts were attacks on the characters of four sitting judges, based on mischaracterizations of the underlying cases and without concern for the repercussions of those statements,” according to the complaint. “Nothing exempts federal officials who are licensed by the state of Florida from the Rules of Professional Conduct. Nor do the rules provide for an excuse from investigating federal officials like Mr. Percival.”

On July 23, Percival published a list called the “Worst of the Worst, District Judge Edition” on his official X social media page, formerly known as Twitter. According to the complaint, this is the same label that the DHS uses for a series highlighting immigrants it has deported.

Judge Matthew Kennelly of the Northern District of Illinois, Judge Allison Burroughs of the District of Massachusetts, Judge Paula Xinis of the District of Maryland and Judge Hernán Vera of the Central District of California were included in the list. Percival “continued to attack other judges” in separate posts later, the complaint also said.

A spokesperson for the DHS on Wednesday told Bloomberg Law, which has additional coverage, that Percival’s posts were “nothing more than a factual review of judicial decisions and their real-world consequences.”

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Man who served 70 years in prison dies at age 101

Frank Smith, who served 70 years in prison — one of the longest known terms of incarceration in American history — for fatally shooting a Connecticut yacht club’s night watchman during a robbery in 1949, died on June 25 in Rocky Hill, Conn. He was 101, reported The New York Times.

His death, at a nursing home to which he had been paroled, was confirmed by the Connecticut Department of Correction and was previously reported by The Boston Globe and Greenwich Time.

In 1950, Mr. Smith was convicted of the first-degree murder of the watchman, 68-year-old Grover Hart, and sentenced to death. Mr. Smith, who insisted on his innocence, eventually received eight reprieves from the electric chair in Wethersfield, Conn.

His case attracted the attention of Aaron Cohen, a realtor in West Hartford and a member of the American League to Abolish the Death Penalty. Mr. Cohen visited Mr. Smith and orchestrated a telegram- and letter-writing campaign to stop the execution.

“I did not believe all Smith told me at first, and it took me time to believe him,” Mr. Cohen told The Hartford Courant in 1951, adding: “I am convinced that an innocent man is going to his death. He has already died too many times in his cell.”

In 1954, on the eve of Mr. Smith’s last scheduled execution, a Courant reporter wrote that he “spends most of his time trying to figure out how he was convicted. He discusses his case with anyone who’ll listen.”

The article described how, before a planned execution a year earlier, a chaplain had visited Mr. Smith in his cell. “All he wanted to talk about was his trial,” the chaplain recalled.

On June 7, 1954, two hours before he was to be strapped into the chair, the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted his death sentence.

“Thanks be to God!” Mr. Smith said in the hearing room, where his parents, three sisters and two brothers were watching.

Seven decades later, he remained haunted by the electric chair — “still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear,” Annalisa Quinn wrote in a 2023 profile in The Boston Globe Magazine. “‘It cooks you,’ he would repeat, folding into himself. ‘It cooks you.’”

On June 7, 1954, two hours before Mr. Smith was to be executed, Connecticut’s Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted his death sentence.Credit...Jared Charney for The Boston Globe

In 2012, Connecticut outlawed the death penalty.

Except for a brief escape attempt in 1967 and nearly 10 months on parole (which he violated) in 1975, Mr. Smith remained in prison until 2020. The state then paroled him to 60 West, a private facility that helps the state care for formerly incarcerated people who are difficult to place in traditional nursing homes. There, he lived in a secure unit.

A spokesman for the correction department said Mr. Smith’s six years at 60 West meant that he had served 76 years of his life sentence.

It is not known if that is officially America’s longest imprisonment. “Seventy years is a long time,” Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News, wrote in an email, “but I think there are probably some more out there just because the U.S. locks up so many people and also locks them up for such long periods of time.”

Francis Clifford Smith was born on Sept. 1, 1924, in Stamford, Conn., and at some point moved to the Noroton neighborhood of nearby Darien. His mother was Doris (Curtis) Smith, and his father, also named Francis, was a roofer, according to The Globe, which reported that Frank was sent to a reform school when he was 10 or 11.

He then served time as a teenager in a reformatory for young men and, after escaping and assaulting a guard with a deadly weapon, was sent to a state prison for four years. He later worked as a messenger for a numbers racketeer.

On the night of July 23, 1949, two men broke into and burglarized the Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich. By some accounts, Mr. Hart surprised them, and one or both of the robbers shot him.

Before he died, Mr. Hart told police that one of the men wore a bandanna; Mr. Smith was known to police for wearing one. After a manhunt, he was arrested in the woods in Wilton, Conn. George Lowden, his accused accomplice, was also arrested.

Mr. Lowden struck a plea deal for second-degree murder, and he implicated Mr. Smith. During the trial, Mr. Smith denied his involvement in the crime, and his father testified that he found his son asleep in his car on the night of the shooting.

The jury’s verdict against Mr. Smith was clouded by several factors, including Mr. Lowden’s refusal to testify at the trial. Then, two years after the trial, a witness recanted testimony that had suggested Mr. Smith’s culpability.

In 1953, David Blumetti, an armed robber from Stamford who was imprisoned in Alabama, confessed to the murder and said that he and Mr. Lowden had been partners in the crime.

Mr. Blumetti said that he knew Mr. Smith from a previous prison stint. He said that the two men met earlier on the day of the robbery and murder, drove around in Mr. Smith’s gray Cadillac and discussed places they could rob. By Mr. Blumetti’s account, Mr. Smith decided against the robbery, and Mr. Blumetti said that he borrowed Mr. Smith’s car, picked up Mr. Lowden and, with Mr. Lowden, fired at Mr. Hart.

“They’ll be executing the wrong man,” Mr. Blumetti told The Connecticut Post in the days before the state pardons board met to commute Mr. Smith’s death sentence.

At that hearing, Leo F. Carroll, the state police major who had interrogated Mr. Smith after his arrest, told the panel that he believed Mr. Blumetti’s confession and that Mr. Smith was innocent.

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