Trump commutes sentence for donor Imaad Zuberi
President Trump has commuted the sentence of top political donor Imaad Zuberi, who had been sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2021 after giving illegal campaign contributions to former President Biden and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
A White House official confirmed Trump commuted his sentence to The Hill's sister network NewsNation on Wednesday.
Zuberi had pleaded guilty in 2019 and 2020 to tax evasion, lobbying top U.S. officials while working as a foreign agent, campaign finance violations and obstruction of justice. Alongside the 12-year sentence, U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips ordered Zuberi to pay close to $16 million in restitution and a nearly $2 million fine.
'I'm deeply sorry and, of course, humiliated,' Zuberi previously told Phillips. 'I have no excuse for what I've done.'
Zuberi has also been accused of putting together meetings with U.S. and foreign politicians as well as being behind a straw donor plot.
'Everyone wants to come to Washington to meet people,' Zuberi said in a decade-old email in which he was attempting to put together a meeting between the president of Guinea and a congressman, according to the AP.
'We get request(s) for meeting(s) from all scumbag of the world, warlords, kings, queens, presidents for life, military dictators, clan chiefs, tribal chiefs and etc.'
The New York Times previously reported that Zuberi donated over $1.1 million in the three months following Trump's first election to committees linked with the president and the GOP after previously backing former President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her 2016 bid for the presidency.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
A suspected drone attack on a hospital in Sudan kills 6, activists say
CAIRO (AP) — A suspected drone attack by Sudanese paramilitaries Friday hit a hospital in southern Sudan, killing at least six people and knocking the facility out of service, officials and rights advocates said. The Emergency Lawyers, a rights group, blamed the Rapid Support Forces for the attack on the Obeid International Hospital, al-Dhaman, in Obeid, the capital city of North Kordofan province. At least 15 others were wounded in the attack, it said. In a statement on social media, the hospital said the attack resulted in severe damage to its main building. Services at the hospital, the main medical facility serving the region, were suspended until further notice, it said. Sudan plunged into civil war on April 15, 2023, when simmering tensions between the military and the RSF exploded into open warfare in the capital Khartoum and other parts of the country. The Emergency Lawyers, which tracks Sudan's war, said the attack on the hospital was part of a large-scale artillery offensive on the city, which is held by the military. Obeid is 363 kilometers (225 miles) south of Khartoum. There was no immediate comment from the RSF. The attack was the latest on Obeid. On May 10, at least 20 inmates were killed in a drone attack on the city's main prison. That attack was also blamed on the RSF. The war in Sudan has been marked by atrocities including mass rape and ethnically motivated killings that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, especially in the western region of Darfur, according to the United Nations and international rights groups. The conflict created the world's worst humanitarian crisis and pushed parts of the country into famine. Thousands of people have been killed and over 14 million were forced to flee their homes.
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Opinion - More renters are getting lawyers during evictions, and that's a good thing
Last year, landlords in Los Angeles filed almost 90,000 eviction cases. These cases are hard on tenants: Beyond just the immediate loss of housing, eviction leads to drops in income, higher rates of homelessness, serious health issues, and even increased risk of death. Yet the vast majority of Angelenos who navigate the complex eviction court process do so alone. That is about to change. Last month, Los Angeles joined 18 other cities, two counties, and five states across the nation where most or all tenants are guaranteed a lawyer when they go to court for an eviction. These 'right-to-counsel' programs improve outcomes for individual tenants, but their impact goes further: They can help to coordinate services, change the way the courts operate, and open up new possibilities for tenant organizing. As researchers who study eviction in the U.S., we urge more jurisdictions to push forward housing justice and stability for renters by extending the right to counsel. These programs are particularly important now. Over the last twenty years, rents have gone up much faster than incomes, leaving half of renters cost-burdened. Faced with these sorts of affordability challenges — and given evidence that homelessness is at an all-time high and rising — the federal government should be taking steps to protect renters. Instead, it is making the situation worse. The Trump administration is proposing shrinking the Department of Housing and Urban Development and gutting key benefits such as Housing Choice Vouchers. Right-to-counsel programs provide an example of what state and local governments can do to step into the leadership void created by federal retrenchment. Pop culture has sold us the myth that every defendant has the right to an attorney. But that's not true. Americans aren't necessarily guaranteed a government-funded lawyer when faced with a civil action such as debt collection, a child custody claim, or a landlord-tenant dispute. They're on their own unless they can afford a lawyer, and most people can't. These civil actions are far more common than criminal cases. In any given year, almost half of Americans have to deal with a civil legal case. Take eviction, for example. An average of 7.6 million Americans face eviction cases annually; only 4 percent of these tenants have lawyers to help them through this rapid, complicated, and deeply consequential process. That started changing in 2017, when New York City established the nation's first right to counsel program. Since then, this movement has expanded protections for renters in San Francisco, Baltimore, Detroit, and dozens of other places. Although programs differ in who receives access to a lawyer and when in the process they can get help, the basic idea is the same: to provide tenants with legal assistance during what may be their darkest hour. For tenants who now have lawyers, these programs make a world of difference. Eviction filings are less likely to result in a tenant being removed by court order, and even those that do result in evictions often leave the tenant owing less money. The benefits to health and well-being are also substantial. For example, the availability of right to counsel during pregnancy reduces adverse birth outcomes among newborns. At the end of the day, a lawyer cannot make up for missed rent. But in our work studying how jurisdictions have implemented right-to-counsel, we have seen how the presence of lawyers defending tenants can lead to wholesale culture shifts in civil courts — something that rental assistance and other one-time interventions don't achieve. We have seen courts where, rather than just rubber-stamping landlords' eviction cases, judges now inform tenants of their rights and postpone hearings to make sure that they are represented. Courts can become a place where advocates and social workers connect tenants with services and resources and diversion is a priority. To meet their full potential, state and local leaders need to provide the stable, long-term funding necessary to launch and run these programs right. That means adequate money for outreach and education so that tenants know that protections are available if they show up to court. It also means sufficient funding to ensure that enough lawyers are available, a challenge that the New York City program has faced. San Francisco provides a model of how to do this right, steadily increasing funding, even expanding support during the pandemic when other programs were being cut. Right to counsel programs are bringing change, justice, and hope for renters experiencing one of the most difficult challenges of their lives. As the federal government pulls back supports and reverses longstanding legal protections for low-income renters, it's time for state and local leaders to work together to expand protections like right-to-counsel in a sustainable way that can help as many families as possible avoid the irreversible fallout of eviction and the risk of homelessness. Peter Hepburn is an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University-Newark and associate director of Princeton University's Eviction Lab. Emily A. Benfer is a professor of clinical law at the George Washington University Law School and a research collaborator at the Princeton University Eviction Lab. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump administration threat to end Harvard contracts puts research at risk
May 30 (UPI) -- The Trump administration is seeking to end all contracts it has with Harvard University, a move that adds to the strain between the federal government and America's researchers. The administration announced on Tuesday that it is in the process of reviewing its contracts with Harvard in preparation for their termination. The move may cost the United States a generation of top researchers, Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff in the American Council of Education's government relations department, told UPI. "We're going to lose grad students or post-docs that might have been educated in those federally funded labs," Spreitzer said. "The undergrads are going to lose the opportunity of working alongside those researchers and learning from their work." Harvard has contracts partnering with government departments including NASA, Veterans Affairs, the Office of the Secretary in the Department of Commerce and the Small Business Administration. Dozens of these contracts have been entered into, extended or otherwise updated since President Donald Trump took office. Harvard University did not respond to requests for comment from UPI. One of the largest contracts Harvard holds with the government is a $15 million contract from the Department of Health and Human Services. It is described in the Federal Procurement Data System as a "task order for human organ chip enabled development of radiation countermeasures." It was entered into on July 26. Another of its largest contracts is a $10.6 million contract with the National Institutes of Health for tuberculosis research. Harvard holds more than one contract with the government related to this work. "They want to do more with less," Spreitzer said of the Trump administration. "They're making decisions based on budgetary impacts but that's layered on top of some of the regulatory actions that they are taking, which is really, again, slowing down or completely stalling the scientific process." The Trump administration has cut research funding grants to several universities, many of them Ivy League schools. It has also made cuts to programs in the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among others that offer grant opportunities to universities. Since World War II, the U.S. government has leaned on universities to expand its research capabilities, leading to innovations in health, technology, economics and other disciplines. Spreitzer, who has been an advocate for higher education for 20 years. In that time she said she has interacted with nearly every federal agency, said the partnership has advanced the interests of the government and delivered value to U.S. taxpayers. "Right now we are at this historical inflection point where the federal government is rethinking their partnership with our institutions of higher education," she said. "It's been a very profitable and very important partnership that's helped the entire United States. Whether you're talking about new drugs or medical research or the innovative products that might be spun out and have created jobs." The rethinking of the partnership between the government and universities goes beyond contracts and grants. It is also proposing a lower cap on its reimbursement to universities for indirect costs or facilities and administrative costs. These are overhead expenses that an institution has that are not related to specific projects, such as government-funded research. Prior to the current Trump administration, the National Institutes of Health reimbursed an average of 27% to 28% of direct costs to universities to help cover indirect costs. These rates were negotiated with some institutions being reimbursed at rates more than 50%. There has not been a cap on most reimbursements since Congress removed them in 1965. In February, the National Institutes of Health announced a new policy to cap these reimbursements at 15%. The American Council on Education filed a lawsuit seeking to block the proposed cap, warning that it would greatly disrupt research across the country. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs granted a preliminary injunction against the Department of Energy from instituting a rate cap policy. The injunction succeeds a temporary restraining order Burroughs granted against the administration, shielding all institutions of higher education from rate caps. "It would have a huge impact on our institutions," Spreitzer said. "They've also made huge cuts in some of the fellowship programs. Whether it's the fellowship program for the next generation of NSF scientists or whether it's the Fulbright program -- those have all been suddenly stopped."
