Michigan corrections officer sentenced to 17.5 years in prison for distributing child pornography
In May 2024, at Eversman's request, a 15-year-old child in New York created several sexually explicit videos and sent them to Eversman, according to Birge. A month later, Eversman sent two of those videos to another person online.
Eversman was a corrections officer for the Eaton County Sheriff's Office at the time.
"Today's sentencing of Ethan Eversman, a former Corrections Deputy, reinforces the FBI's unwavering commitment to enforcing the highest standards of integrity in law enforcement," said Cheyvoryea Gibson, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Michigan. "Members from the FBI's Lansing Resident Agency, in collaboration with our law enforcement partners at the Michigan State Police, worked tirelessly throughout this investigation, in an effort to halt Mr. Eversman's predatory actions. "I also want to express my gratitude to the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Western District of Michigan for their vital role in ensuring this child predator faces justice."
This case is part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative designed to protect children from online exploitation and abuse. The U.S. Attorney's Office, county prosecutor's offices, the Internet Crimes Against Children task force (ICAC), federal, state, tribal, and local law enforcement are working closely together to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children. The partners in Project Safe Childhood work to educate local communities about the dangers of online child exploitation, and to teach children how to protect themselves. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov. Individuals with information or concerns about possible child exploitation should contact local law enforcement officials.
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Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
The Quickest Route to a Plum Judicial Appointment
Emil Bove has had a busy six months at the Department of Justice. Appointed to a leadership role by President Donald Trump almost immediately after the inauguration, Bove quickly set about establishing himself as a feared enforcer of presidential will. He personally fired attorneys involved in prosecuting January 6 rioters, pushed other prosecutors to resign rather than go along with what they considered to be unethical orders, and accused FBI officials of ' insubordination ' for refusing to hand over a list of FBI agents to fire for political reasons. According to a whistleblower, Bove played a key role in encouraging the administration to defy court orders, suggesting that the department should consider telling judges, 'Fuck you.' Under any previous administration, revelations of behavior like this would probably have been enough to get Bove fired. They might even have been enough to bring down the attorney general, if not the presidency as a whole. But this is the second Trump administration, so instead of being punished, Bove was rewarded with a nomination to a lifetime appointment on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed him to that seat, 50 to 49, with all Democrats voting against the nominee. (Republican Senator Bill Hagerty did not vote; his GOP colleagues Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski cast their votes against Bove.) As an appellate judge, Bove, who is 44 years old, will have a hand in shaping the law for decades to come. Even more significant is the message that his confirmation sends to bright young lawyers seeking to get ahead. During Trump's first term, the president was able to tilt the courts to the right with a slate of judicial nominees hand-selected by the leadership of the conservative Federalist Society. Many of these judges were ideologically extreme, but their road to a nomination came through a legal movement that, whatever its flaws, had developed a distinct culture and set of jurisprudential principles that sometimes conflicted with devotion to Trump or the MAGA movement. Bove's confirmation suggests that, in Trump's second term, the route to a plum judicial appointment may be distinguishing oneself as a bruiser willing to do anything for Trump himself. When, in late November, the president-elect announced that he would pick Bove to help run the Justice Department, Bove was best known for his role as a member of Trump's criminal-defense team. Even so, his résumé seemed relatively normal for an appointee of the new administration. Over the course of the New York hush-money trial in spring 2024, he'd appeared regularly in the Manhattan courtroom alongside Todd Blanche, whom Trump would later nominate as deputy attorney general. Bove was a capable litigator with a light touch in front of the judge that seemed at odds with his dour appearance: a shaved head and a long, saturnine face that, together with his dark suit, led some journalists watching the trial to joke about his resemblance to Nosferatu. Listen: The wrecking of the FBI Even in this period, Bove gave no public signs of being a MAGA diehard. His legal pedigree is respectable, without any obvious ideological tilt one way or the other. He went to Georgetown Law School and spent years as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, a famously hard-charging corner of the Justice Department, before leaving in 2021 to work in private practice. Bove's time in the Southern District was not without controversy. He was reportedly reprimanded for abusive management and left the office not long after a judge excoriated a unit he led for hiding exculpatory evidence in a terrorism trial. His job as Trump's lawyer, meanwhile, raised the potential for conflicts of interest. But he was not an obviously bad pick to serve as the deputy attorney general's lead adviser—especially compared with the slate of conspiracy theorists and unqualified media figures chosen to lead various crucial departments. This soothing notion did not persist for long. On January 31, when Bove fired attorneys involved in prosecuting January 6 defendants, he quoted Trump's assertion that the lawyers' work constituted a 'grave national injustice.' The choice of language was particularly striking because Bove himself, as NBC News would soon report, had pushed aggressively during his first stint at the DOJ to be involved in investigating the insurrection. This hypocrisy did not seem to trouble him. Bove continued to establish himself as Trump's hatchet man, the avatar of a new order under which the Justice Department's guiding star was not even-handed enforcement of the law but immediate assent to whatever Trump said. In February, Bove forced his old office in the Southern District to end the corruption prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams's assistance with immigration roundups. This was so jaw-droppingly inappropriate that it ultimately led 10 department lawyers, including the acting head of the Southern District, to resign rather than carry out the order. The judge in the case reluctantly acknowledged that his only choice was to dismiss the charges, but he did so in a manner that blocked the government from dangling a future prosecution over Adams's head, decrying the apparent scheme as ' grave betrayal of the public trust. ' Trump, however, was pleased. He announced Bove's nomination to the federal bench on May 28, in a Truth Social post. 'He will end the Weaponization of Justice,' the president wrote of the new nominee. 'Emil Bove will never let you down!' Shortly afterward, whistleblower testimony surfaced from yet another fired Justice Department lawyer who alleged that Bove had played a significant role in encouraging the government to defy court orders in multiple immigration cases. According to the whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, Bove was a key driver behind the government's decision to send Venezuelans to a Salvadoran prison under the Alien Enemies Act despite a court ordering it not to. At his confirmation hearing on June 25, when he was asked directly whether he had suggested potentially defying the court, Bove did not quite deny the allegations. Instead, he said he had 'conveyed the importance' of the flight to El Salvador and did not recall the specifics of which words he used. In the days before the confirmation vote, another whistleblower announced that they had alerted the Senate Judiciary Committee of additional information corroborating Reuveni's report. News also broke of a third whistleblower who had attempted to warn Republican senators that Bove had lied in his confirmation hearing concerning his role in tossing out the Adams prosecution. Bove's nomination produced a flood of opposition. More than 80 retired judges and more than 900 former Justice Department lawyers signed letters urging the Senate to reject his appointment. 'It is intolerable to us that anyone who disgraces the Justice Department would be promoted to one of the highest courts in the land,' the former government attorneys wrote. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board voiced concern. Other prominent supporters of Trump's first-term efforts to shift the courts to the right dissented as well. 'I have serious doubts that Bove has the character and integrity to be worthy of confirmation as a federal judge,' warned Ed Whelan, a conservative strategist known for his work shepherding the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Republican senators, apparently, were not swayed. Nor could a series of last-minute revelations—including that the Justice Department Office of Inspector General said it had 'lost' the second whistleblower's complaint, and that the Adams whistleblower had recorded audio of Bove making the incriminating statements—change their minds. Speaking on the Senate floor after the vote, Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, where Bove's new judgeship is based, lamented the chamber's 'abdication of its responsibilities.' How Judge Bove will comport himself on the bench is not obvious. During his confirmation hearing, he seemed to support an aggressive vision of unilateral presidential power in line with arguments that the Trump administration has pursued in court. There is widespread speculation that Bove will use his spot on the Third Circuit to audition for the Supreme Court. Or perhaps he will be satisfied with his achievement, taking advantage of a lifetime appointment to drop his pro-Trump posturing. Whatever approach Bove takes from here, his path so far has demonstrated that total sycophancy to the president can be a fantastic career move for ambitious lawyers—especially those for whom other avenues of success might not be forthcoming. During Trump's first term, the president essentially outsourced his judicial nominations to Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society. With the administration pushing to appoint as many judges as possible to reshape the federal bench, affiliation with the conservative legal movement was the smart play for up-and-coming attorneys dreaming of a judicial appointment. Now, though, the alliance between the president and the movement is splintering, as some of the administration's tactics prove too much even for judges on the right. In May, after a panel of three judges—including one whom Trump himself had appointed during his first term—blocked tariffs from going into effect, Trump raged against Leo and the Federalist Society. Leo, the president wrote on Truth Social, was a 'bad person' and a 'sleazebag.' From the January/February 2024 issue: A MAGA judiciary Trump's alignment with legal conservatives was never entirely stable. In the long term, Trump couldn't accept an equal partnership with a community whose primary fealty is to a system of reasoning that does not orbit entirely around his whims. Although many Trump-appointed judges are all too willing to go along with his plans, every exception is, to Trump, a personal insult. Still, even as cracks showed between Trump and Leo, there was always the question of where Trump would find his next batch of judges. Now we have an answer: enforcers like Bove. The newest member of the Third Circuit does not appear to have been an ideologue. Instead, his résumé suggests an ambitious lawyer who was looking to get ahead. When he had a chance to distinguish himself by pushing hard on investigating January 6, he did that. When the winds changed, he changed with them. What is striking about Bove is just how normal he once was, and how normal his path to the bench may soon come to seem.
Fox News
an hour ago
- Fox News
Jimmy Hoffa's family calls on Trump to release FBI files
Fifty years ago today, at 2:30 p.m. in the parking lot of a Bloomfield Hills, Michigan restaurant, Jimmy Hoffa vanished. He was seen getting into a Maroon Mercury and disappeared forever, starting one of the greatest mysteries in American history. Hoffa's family is asking President Donald Trump to make public all the Hoffa case FBI files to find out what the government knows and has kept hidden for half-a-century to finally provide the answers to the iconic case. "I call on President Trump to release the Hoffa files once and for all," said Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa. Hoffa sat down for an exclusive interview for the final two episodes of the Fox Nation series "Riddle: The Search for James R. Hoffa with Eric Shawn." "Let's find out what really happened. President Trump, release the files," Hoffa said. "I don't know what's in those files. That's why we have to have them released, and the American public, the Teamsters union, the Teamsters union members, our family deserve it, and I think you'll do it." Tens of thousands of pages of FBI reports, interviews and summations, such as the 1976 "HOFFEX Memo," which documented what the bureau knew at the time, have been released by the FBI or obtained through reporters' Freedom of Information Act requests. But Hoffa pointed out that a vast amount of material remains redacted, blacked out, making it difficult to determine vital information and identities. "They say it's still an ongoing case, and when you get the material from the FBI, it's all redacted, you can't read it," he said. In 1989, his sister, Barbara Crancer, filed a federal lawsuit against the Justice Department to pry open the 69 volumes of documents and memorandums about her father's case that were in the government's possession. But the DOJ even refused to provide an index of what it had. "You can sit forever clipping newspaper articles and waiting for deathbed confessions," Crancer said at the time. She hoped the release would provide "an ending." Crancer and The Detroit Free Press obtained several thousand pages in 2002 after the newspaper spent a decade pursuing the case and sued the Department of Justice twice. Pulitzer Prize-winning Detroit Free Press reporter David Ashenfelter was part of that effort and tells Fox Nation that it is long past time for the government to release the Hoffa files. "The FBI knows as much as it's ever going to know about the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. I doubt that it's ever going to prosecute anyone, so it should tell his family what it knows. But as we've seen, the government is slow to give up its secrets," he said. In 2021, as part of the "Riddle, The Search for James R. Hoffa" series, Fox Nation reported on the push by then-New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, now the Trump administration Secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency, to get the FBI files released. He filed a formal congressional request to open the Hoffa files to the public. "It would be fantastic closure for the Hoffa family, for those who knew him, and for the American public," he said. "Declassification should have been done years ago." Zeldin submitted a "Congressional Mandatory Declassification Review," but the request was turned down, as were the others. The FBI routinely cites the fact that the Hoffa investigation remains an open, ongoing case and that the bureau cannot compromise the case by releasing classified material. The latest episode of "Riddle: The Search for James R. Hoffa" reports that investigators and observers have narrowed Hoffa's killers down to two members of the Detroit Mafia, Vito "Billy Jack" Giacalone and Anthony "Tony Pal" Palazzolo. James P. Hoffa told Fox Nation that he believes Giacalone picked up his father in the car that day to drive him to the location where he was murdered. He blames Giacalone and his older brother, Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone, for being the mobsters behind the killing, along with then-Teamsters Union president Frank Fitzsimmons. "The only way to stop him was to kill him." Hoffa was planning to reclaim the presidency of the Teamsters union by challenging Fitzsimmons, but Hoffa's son said Fitzsimmons and the mob decided to kill his father to prevent him from taking back the union. Hoffa was vowing to rid the Teamsters of the organized crime elements that he accused Fitzsimmons of permitting to run rampant in the union. The mob was making hundreds of millions of dollars from the union's billion-dollar Central State pension fund that Hoffa said Fitzsimmons loaned to the mob to help build Las Vegas. Fox Nation reports the new claim that an informant told the FBI that he was present when Hoffa was killed and said that Vito "Billy Jack" Giacalone murdered Hoffa. Such information would likely have been documented in the FBI records, but so far the information has not been released. Detroit mob reporter Scott Burnstein, who runs has reported that "Billy Jack's" brother, "Tony Jack," told his fellow gangsters that another mobster, Anthony "Tony Pal" Palazzolo, killed Hoffa. Burnstein, and others, believe that both "Billy Jack" and "Tony Pal" were the Mafia hit time who drove Hoffa to where he was killed, most likely a house owned by Detroit Mobster Carlo Licata. "They actually got together to kill him because they couldn't stop him any other way," Hoffa said. "The only way to stop him was to kill him." Giacalone's son, Jackie Giacalone, has told Fox Nation that he does not know what happened to Hoffa, and Palazzolo's family did not comment to Fox Nation. The FBI will not comment on the claims, citing the ongoing investigation that remains an open case. But that is not stopping the Hoffa family from continuing its decades-long quest to have the files finally made public. "My sister was very active in trying to bring a lawsuit to get all the records from the FBI regarding the disappearance. And we've worked very hard on keeping the case alive. We keep in contact with the FBI," he said. "But it doesn't bring him back." He said every July 30 is difficult for him, his sister, and their family. They are marking the 50th anniversary of the disappearance privately. "It's a hard day. We always spend time thinking of it. I mark my calendar every year and realize that it is a special time, a time to remember and also to say, remember all the bad things that happened, and the fact is that I had a great father, and he did a great job raising our family." And without the final answers that he said could come with Trump releasing the FBI files, the Hoffas are left with an emotional emptiness. "We don't have closure. To this day, we don't have closure because we don't have a grave, and it's amazing what that means to people," he said. "We have a hole in our heart right now because we don't know what happened to him, and we don't have closure on his disappearance." Watch all eight episodes of "Riddle: The Search for James R. Hoffa," now streaming on Fox Nation.
Forbes
4 hours ago
- Forbes
You Must Stop These Calls On Your iPhone Or Android Phone
Do not take these calls. Smartphone users are at risk from criminals 'capitalizing on fear and intimidation,' the FBI warns, as a malicious new attack surges. All iPhone and Android users are now told: 'Be wary of answering phone calls from numbers you do not recognize.' The attack is as simple as it is devious. Criminals pretend to be federal agents or police officers and then work up a scam that ultimately demands payment to avoid an arrest or court appearance or jury duty or worse. And victims fall for it. 'Because nobody wants to be the subject of a law enforcement investigation,' the FBI says. We have seen such attacks across the U.S., but the latest warning comes from Boston, where the FBI issued a statement assuring citizens that 'law enforcement and federal agencies do not call individuals threatening arrest or demanding money.' Increasingly these attacks make use of spoofed phone numbers, which can make it appear that the call is coming from an FBI field office or similar. As ever, smartphone users are told not to engage or react. Hang-up, and if you have any doubts whether it's a scam, you should call the authorities independently to check. Impersonation scams are soaring Ted Docks, the bureau's SAIC in Boston, told local media: 'We've seen an increase in these scams which is why we're reminding the public to resist the urge to act immediately and verify who is actually contacting you.' This is a nationwide threat. In a separate warning, the FBI's Charlotte NC field office has warned that citizens are being called to be told they have missed jury duty and are now subject to a federal arrest warrant. 'Legitimate arrest warrants are not emailed or texted,' the bureau said in a statement. 'They are served by a law enforcement officer or court official and never include a demand for payment to avoid jail time,' The FBI's advice is simple: 'Trust your instincts and hang up on callers who make you feel pressured or uncomfortable.' The fact these impersonation scams are surging tells you they're working. And while readers of cybersecurity articles are more scam-aware than most, the real threat is to the less technically savvy and especially to the elderly. It's worth warning those around you that might be vulnerable to such attacks.
