North Carolina’s elections board agreed Friday to fight federal subpoenas seeking millions of voting documents and ballots, even after prosecutors delayed a quick deadline to fulfill their demands until early next year.

The State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement voted unanimously to direct state attorneys to work to block the subpoenas issued last week to the state board and local boards in 44 eastern counties.

U.S. Attorney Bobby Higdon in Raleigh, whose office issued the subpoenas, hasn’t said specifically why immigration enforcement investigators working with a grand jury empaneled in Wilmington are seeking the information. Two weeks ago, Higdon announced charges against 19 non-U.S. citizens for illegal voting, of which more than half were indicted through a Wilmington grand jury.

The subpoenas ordered the documents, which the state board estimated would exceed 20 million pages, be provided by September 25 at a time when election administrators prepped for the midterm elections. Requested documents included voted ballots, voter registration and absentee ballot forms and poll books, some going back to early 2010.

The action by the panel — comprised of four Democrats, four Republicans and one unaffiliated voter — came a day after an assistant prosecutor wrote the board backing off the deadline because of the election and expressing willingness to narrow the scope of the subpoenas.

After close to an hour of meeting privately, board members decided to try to quash the subpoenas altogether.

“The subpoena we’ve received was and remains overly broad, unreasonable, vague, and clearly impacts significant interests of our voters, despite the correspondence received from the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” board member Joshua Malcolm said during an open portion of the meeting. “The fact is the subpoena has not been withdrawn, despite such correspondence.”

Board Chairman Andy Penry expressed frustration with the timing of the subpoenas, received by the state board office just as the Labor Day weekend began and without advance notice. He said officials in some counties believed their faxed subpoenas were actually bogus attempts to obtain information fraudulently.

While some of the documents and information are public records easily accessible, state law prevents access to voted ballots unless by court order. And Penry said the data sought included very confidential information about voters.

“We have not been given a reason as to why ICE wants that information and candidly I can’t think of any reason for it,” he said.

Voting rights activists and Democrats blasted federal investigators for the massive request, accusing them of trying to interfere in the fall elections and taint the sanctity of the secret ballot to look for what critics consider exaggerated occurrences of voter fraud. Absentee ballots can be traced to the individual voter casting one.

The North Carolina elections include races for Congress and all of the seats in the legislature as well as several constitutional amendments.

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice praised the board Friday “for taking steps to defend the privacy interests of North Carolina voters and to prevent likely unlawful fishing expeditions by the federal government that tends to fuel voter suppression and intimidation efforts,” said Allison Riggs, a coalition attorney.

North Carolina’s three Democratic members of Congress and ranking Democrats on four House committees on Friday asked for the U.S. Justice and Homeland Security departments to investigate the reason for the requests and their legality.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sebastian Kielmanovich wrote in a letter Friday to board attorney Josh Lawson that his office is “confident in the appropriateness of the subpoenas.”

Kielmanovich wrote Thursday that the original subpoena timeline was designed only to ensure documents wouldn’t be destroyed following state records procedures. But prosecutors want to “avoid any interference with the ongoing election cycle” and “do nothing to impede those preparations or to affect participation in or the outcome of those elections,” he wrote.

In offering a January deadline to comply, Kielmanovich also asked that vote information be redacted from ballots.

 
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The New York attorney general’s new investigation into clergy sex abuse allegations in the Roman Catholic Church could be massive, delving into confidential church files in a state where hundreds of people have already made claims through programs run by the church itself. 

But few criminal cases or lawsuits may come out of the inquiry, whatever its findings. New York has some of the nation’s strictest time limits on taking child sex abuse claims to civil or criminal courts. A years long campaign to extend the timeframe hasn’t passed the Legislature. 

And even if it succeeds, at least 375 people who have settled abuse claims through church-run compensation programs waived any right to sue.

Still, investigations by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood and her colleagues in several other states could be valuable to victims just by bringing information to light, says Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania legal expert on child sexual abuse and the founder of CHILD USA, an advocacy group.

“It’s a way of educating the public on how severe the problem is” and informing lawmakers’ debates on extending legal time limits, she says. “The public education and the public accountability is what we need, so there’s value in (the investigations). But there’s not a straight line to justice for the victims.” 

New York and New Jersey launched new investigations Thursday into the church’s handling of sexual misconduct claims against clergy. Nebraska, Illinois and Missouri also have started inquiries in the three weeks since a Pennsylvania grand jury report found that since the 1940s, about 300 Catholic priests had abused a total of more than 1,000 children statewide.

The report, which accused senior church officials of systematically covering up the abuse, reignited outrage and national discussion of how the church has dealt with the issue. But it yielded new criminal charges against just two priests because of legal time clocks.

In Pennsylvania, prosecutors have until a child sex abuse accuser’s 50th birthday to file charges; accusers have until their 30th birthdays to sue.

New York’s limits are tighter: the accuser’s 23rd birthday, in both civil and criminal cases. There’s no time limit for prosecuting some major child sex crimes, but only if they occurred after 2000. 

A measure that would raise the age for future cases – and open a one-year window for lawsuits that have been barred by the current age limits – is at an impasse amid opposition from the church, as well as other large institutions. 

They fault the proposal for not including public schools or other public institutions, and they say opening that “look-back window” could be financially devastating: Catholic dioceses paid $1.2 billion in legal settlements after a similar law passed in California in 2002. 

The New York proposal, called the Child Victims Act, has passed the Democratic-majority state Assembly, and Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo supports the idea. But it has been blocked from a vote by the Senate’s Republican leaders. They have broached a plan to address future age limits only.

Steve Jimenez, a leading advocate for the Child Victims Act, said the attorney general’s new civil investigation makes the legislation all the more urgent. 

“We must change the law,” he said. “And we will not give up until we do.”

Jimenez, who says a Roman Catholic brother repeatedly assaulted him when he was a child attending Catholic school in Brooklyn, said he and other supporters will be back in Albany when lawmakers reconvene in January to keep up the pressure. Underwood also has urged the Legislature to pass the law.

But it’s unclear how willing Senate leaders are to budge. Senate GOP spokeswoman Candice Giove noted Friday that Republicans have put forward their own proposals on the issue, “and we look forward to holding meaningful conversations that finally get results.”

Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, said that while the investigation may fuel calls to allow lawsuits over decades-old claims, the archdiocese established its own, private compensation program “because it was the right thing to do.”

The 278 people who have received a total of nearly $59.8 million through the program waived their right to sue, though they are free to speak about their experiences if they choose. 

A similar compensation program in the Diocese of Albany has provided over $9 million in direct compensation and counseling assistance to about 100 people, according to spokeswoman Mary DeTurris Poust. 

In March, the Diocese of Buffalo released a list of 42 priests facing sex abuse allegations. 

Church leaders have vowed to work with Underwood in her investigation. 
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A Russian hacker accused of helping pull off the biggest theft yet of consumer bank data in the United States has been extradited to the U.S. to face charges, federal prosecutors said Friday. 

Russian national Andrei Tyurin was arrested by Georgian authorities to face charges he helped steal personal data of more than 80 million JP Morgan Chase customers in a massive hacking scheme uncovered by federal prosecutors three years ago, according to the Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman.

Tyurin is alleged to have participated in a global hacking ring that ran illegal Internet casinos and payment processors and targeted the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and brokers such as E-Trade and Scottrade.

Phone calls to Tyurin’s attorney were not immediately returned.

In an indictment unsealed Friday, Tyurin, 35, is charged with ten counts of conspiracy to commit computer hacking, securities fraud, illegal internet gambling, and wire and bank fraud, the latter which carries a maximum prison term of 30 years. He follows several others accused of participating in the sprawling hacking enterprise. 

“As Americans increasingly turn to online banking, theft of online personal information can cause devastating effects on their financial wellbeing, sometimes taking years to recover,” said U.S. prosecutor Berman. “Today’s extradition marks a significant milestone for law enforcement in the fight against cyber intrusions targeting our critical financial institutions.”

Federal prosecutors have previously named several alleged co-conspirators, including Israeli Gery Shalon and U.S. citizen Joshua Samuel Aaron.
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A five-person South Korean delegation visited Pyongyang on Wednesday to lay the groundwork for a third summit between President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. VOA’s Steve Miller reports that although concrete denuclearization measures from Pyongyang have yet to materialize, South Korea is saying the purpose of the summit is to discuss a plan for permanent peace on the peninsula.
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Top officials within the Trump administration, from Vice President Mike Pence to several key Cabinet members, have denied that they authored an anonymous opinion piece in the New York Times critical of President Donald Trump’s leadership. Publication of the column has set off a furious debate in Washington about the Trump presidency and a high-stakes guessing game as to who the mysterious dissident voice may be. VOA National correspondent Jim Malone has more from Washington.
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