By ERIC TUCKER and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for former FBI Director James Comey want to review a transcript and audio recording of grand jury proceedings in his criminal case, citing what they say were “irregularities” in the process that should result in the dismissal of an indictment pushed by President Donald Trump.

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The request is one in a series of challenges that defense lawyers have waged against a criminal case charging Comey with making a false statement to Congress five years ago.

Defense lawyers last week asked for the case to be thrown out before trial on the grounds that it constituted a vindictive prosecution and because they say the hastily appointed U.S. attorney who filed the indictment was illegally appointed to the job.

Comey’s lawyers leveled new arguments against that prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, saying in a filing Thursday that her inexperience had tainted the process, created confusion and raised the prospect that legal and factual errors were presented to the grand jury that returned the indictment.

As examples, they cite the fact that the indictment was secured after hours with only 14 grand juror votes and that Halligan erroneously signed two separate indictments — including one containing a charge that the grand jury rejected.

“All available information regarding Ms. Halligan’s first-ever grand jury presentation smacks of irregularity,” Comey’s lawyers wrote. “It is virtually unheard of for a brand-new prosecutor to make her first grand jury presentation alone, without the supervision and guidance of an experienced prosecutor to ensure the absence of factual and legal errors.”

Trump had announced his plan to nominate Halligan as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia just one day after the prosecutor who had held the job, Erik Siebert, resigned under Trump administration pressure. In declaring his support for Halligan, Trump complained in a Truth Social post directed to Attorney General Pam Bondi that “nothing is being done” on investigations into some of his foes and called for action, specifically referencing inquiries into Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California.

“Although such inexperience alone would not ordinarily satisfy the defense’s burden for unsealing grand jury materials, that inexperience must be viewed alongside Ms. Halligan’s likely motive to obtain an indictment to satisfy the President’s demands, the inaccuracies in the indictment, and the determination of every career prosecutor to consider the case that charges were not warranted,” Comey’s lawyers wrote.

In separate filings Thursday, Comey’s legal team also requested specific details about the conduct at the center of the criminal case, saying the terse indictment is not even clear as to what Comey is alleged to have done wrong. They also asserted that the answers he gave to “fundamentally ambiguous questions” at the Senate hearing at which he is alleged to have lied were “literally true” and that, therefore, the case must be dismissed.

The indictment accuses Comey of having misled the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 30, 2020, in response to questions from Republican Sen. Ted Cruz about whether Comey had authorized a news media leak. But Comey’s lawyers say the indictment misstates his exchange with Cruz, attributing to Comey statements he did not make.

The defense team says the indictment omits context from Cruz’s question that made clear he was asking Comey if he had authorized his deputy director, Andrew McCabe, to serve as an anonymous source to the news media. The lawyers say the indictment misleadingly suggests the questioning from Cruz concerned another person, a Columbia University law professor and Comey friend named Daniel Richman. An earlier FBI investigation into whether Comey had disclosed classified information through Richman concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge either man.

“Senator Cruz’s questions are fundamentally ambiguous because people of ordinary intellect would not be expected to understand that he meant to ask a broad question about Mr. Comey’s interactions with anyone at the FBI — including Daniel Richman — during a colloquy focused on Mr. McCabe,” Comey’s lawyers wrote. “On the contrary, a reasonable person readily would have understood Senator Cruz to be asking only whether Mr. Comey had specifically authorized Mr. McCabe to be an anonymous source in news reports.”

By Nilesh Christopher, Los Angeles Times

Scrolling through the Sora app can feel a bit like entering a real-life multiverse.

Michael Jackson performs standup; the alien from the “Predator” movies flips burgers at McDonald’s; a home security camera captures a moose crashing through the glass door; Queen Elizabeth dives from the top of a table at a pub.

Such improbable realities, fantastical futures, and absurdist videos are the mainstay of the Sora app, a new short video app released by ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

The continuous stream of hyperreal, short-form videos made by artificial intelligence is mind-bending and mesmerizing at first. But it quickly triggers a new need to second-guess every piece of content as real or fake.

“The biggest risk with Sora is that it makes plausible deniability impossible to overcome, and that it erodes confidence in our ability to discern authentic from synthetic,” said Sam Gregory, an expert on deepfakes and executive director at WITNESS, a human rights organization. “Individual fakes matter, but the real damage is a fog of doubt settling over everything we see,”

All videos on the Sora app are entirely AI-generated, and there is no option to share real footage. But from the first week of its launch, users were sharing their Sora videos across all types of social media.

Less than a week after its launch Sept. 30, the Sora app crossed a million downloads, outpacing the initial growth of ChatGPT. Sora also reached the top of the App Store in the U.S. For now, the Sora app is available only to iOS users in the United States, and people cannot access it unless they have an invitation code.

To use the app, people have to scan their faces and read out three numbers displayed on screen for the system to capture a voice signature. Once that’s done, users can type a custom text prompt and create hyperreal 10-second videos complete with background sound and dialogue.

Through a feature called “Cameos,” users can superimpose their face or a friend’s face into any existing video. Though all outputs carry a visible watermark, numerous websites now offer watermark removal for Sora videos.

At launch, OpenAI took a lax approach to enforcing copyright restrictions and allowed the re-creation of copyrighted material by default, unless the owners opted out.

Users began generating AI video featuring characters from such titles as “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “South Park,” and “Breaking Bad,” and videos styled after the game show “The Price Is Right,” and the ‘90s sitcom “Friends.”

Then came the re-creation of dead celebrities, including Tupac Shakur roaming the streets in Cuba, Hitler facing off with Michael Jackson, and remixes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his iconic “I Have A Dream” speech — but calling for freeing the disgraced rapper Diddy.

“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Zelda Williams, daughter of late comedian Robin Williams, posted on Instagram. “You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hot dogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else’s throat, hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.”

Other dead celebrity re-creations, including Kobe Bryant, Stephen Hawking and President Kennedy, created on Sora have been cross-posted on social media websites, garnering millions of views.

A spokesperson on behalf of Fred Rogers Productions said that Rogers’ family was “frustrated by the AI videos misrepresenting Mister Rogers being circulated online.”

Videos of Mr. Rogers holding a gun, greeting rapper Tupac, and other satirical fake situations have been shared widely on Sora.

OpenAI’s new video-generating app, Sora, hit 1 million downloads in a week, but backlash erupted over unauthorized deepfakes of celebrities, dead figures and copyrighted characters. (Billy Tompkins/ZUMA Press Wire/TNS)

“The videos are in direct contradiction to the careful intentionality and adherence to core child development principles that Fred Rogers brought to every episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. We have contacted OpenAI to request that the voice and likeness of Mister Rogers be blocked for use on the Sora platform, and we would expect them and other AI platforms to respect personal identities in the future,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Times.

Hollywood talent agencies and unions, including SAG-AFTRA, have started to accuse OpenAI of improper use of likenesses. The central tension boils down to control over the use of the likenesses of actors and licensed characters — and fair compensation for use in AI videos.

In the aftermath of Hollywood’s concerns over copyright, Sam Altman shared a blog post, promising greater control for rights-holders to specify how their characters can be used in AI videos — and is exploring ways to share revenue with rights-holders.

He also said that studios could now “opt-in” for their characters to be used in AI re-creations, a reversal from OpenAI’s original stance of an opt-out regime.

The future, according to Altman, is heading toward creating personalized content for an audience of a few — or an audience of one.

“Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion, and along with it, the quality of art and entertainment can drastically increase,” Altman wrote, calling this genre of engagement “interactive fan fiction.”

The estates of dead actors, however, are racing to protect their likeness in the age of AI.

CMG Worldwide, which represents the estates of deceased celebrities, struck a partnership with deepfake detection company Loti AI to protect CMG’s rosters of actors and estates from unauthorized digital use.

Loti AI will constantly monitor for AI impersonations of 20 personalities represented by CMG, including Burt Reynolds, Christopher Reeve, Mark Twain and Rosa Parks.

“Since the launch of Sora 2, for example, our signups have increased roughly 30x as people search for ways to regain control over their digital likeness,” said Luke Arrigoni, co-founder and CEO of Loti AI.

Since January, Loti AI said it has removed thousands of instances of unauthorized content as new AI tools made it easier than ever to create and spread deepfakes.

After numerous “disrespectful depictions” of Martin Luther King Jr., OpenAI said it was pausing the generation of videos in the civil rights icon’s image on Sora, at the request of King’s estate. While there are strong free-speech interests in depicting historical figures, public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used, OpenAI said in a post.

Now, authorized representatives or estate owners can request that their likenesses not be used in Sora cameos.

As legal pressure mounts, Sora has become more strict about when it will allow the re-creation of copyrighted characters. It increasingly puts up content policy violations notices.

Now, creating Disney characters or other images triggers a content policy violation warning. Users who aren’t fans of the restrictions have started creating video memes about the content policy violation warnings.

There’s a growing virality to what has been dubbed “AI slop.”

Last week featured ring camera footage of a grandmother chasing a crocodile at the door, and a series of “fat olympics” videos where obese people participate in athletic events such as pole vault, swimming and track events.

Dedicated slop factories have turned the engagement into a money spinner, generating a constant stream of videos that are hard to look away from. One pithy tech commentator dubbed it “Cocomelon for adults.”

Even with increasing protections for celebrity likenesses, critics warn that the casual “likeness appropriation” of any common person or situation could lead to public confusion, enhance misinformation and erode public trust.

Meanwhile, even as the technology is being used by bad actors and even some governments for propaganda and promotion of certain political views, people in power can hide behind the flood of fake news by claiming that even real proof was generated by AI, said Gregory of WITNESS.

“I’m concerned about the ability to fabricate protest footage, stage false atrocities, or insert real people with words placed in their mouths into compromising scenarios,” he said.

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By JENNIFER SINCO KELLEHER

HONOLULU (AP) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration violated the law by imposing restrictions on accessing mifepristone, a medication for abortions and miscarriage management, a federal judge in Hawaii ruled Thursday.

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A lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union argues the FDA continues to overly restrict access to a safe medication without scientific justification. ACLU lawyers asked the judge to find that the FDA violated the law but didn’t seek an immediate elimination of the restrictions, which currently include special certification for prescribers and pharmacies and requiring patients to review a counseling form.

The FDA’s 2023 decision to maintain the restrictions was unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act, “by failing to provide a reasoned explanation for its restrictive treatment of the drug,” U.S. District Judge Jill Otake’s ruling says.

Otake’s ruling instructs the FDA to consider relevant evidence the agency allegedly disregarded. In the meantime, the restrictions remain in place.

The decision comes as the pill used in most U.S. abortions continues to be ensnared in politics that have plagued it for nearly a decade, with many wondering if it will be further restricted under President Donald Trump’s Republican administration. Trump’s top health officials, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., face growing pressure from abortion opponents to reevaluate mifepristone, which was approved 25 years ago and has repeatedly been deemed safe and effective by FDA scientists.

The case dates to 2017 and has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“Today’s decision is a victory for everyone who believes that our access to safe and essential medicines should be dictated by science, not politics,” Julia Kaye, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement. “Despite decades of real-world experience and mountains of evidence proving mifepristone’s safety, the FDA regulates this medication more heavily than 99 percent of prescription drugs.”

FILE – Mifepristone tablets are seen in a Planned Parenthood clinic, July 18, 2024, in Ames, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)

When the case first started, a key restriction required patients to pick up the medication in person at a hospital, clinic or medical office. That restriction was eventually removed and the pill can be sent through the mail. The lawsuit continues to focus on the remaining restrictions that the ACLU says disproportionately impact patients who already face difficulties accessing healthcare, such as those who are low-income or live in rural areas.

Justice Department attorneys involved in the case didn’t immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking comment on the ruling. They have argued previously the FDA has already reduced the burden by removing the in-person dispensing requirement.

Hawaii law allows abortion until a fetus would be viable outside the womb. After that, it’s legal if a patient’s life or health is in danger. The state legalized abortion in 1970, when it became the first in the nation to allow the procedure at a woman’s request.

By SOPHIE BATES

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Federal authorities on Thursday announced indictments against 20 people, including 14 current or former Mississippi Delta law enforcement officers, that allege the officers took bribes to provide safe passage to people they believed were drug traffickers.

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The yearslong investigation swept across multiple counties in the Mississippi Delta region of Mississippi and Tennessee. Two Mississippi sheriffs, Washington County Sheriff Milton Gaston and Humphreys County Sheriff Bruce Williams, were among those arrested.

Some bribes were as large as $20,000 and $37,000, authorities said at a news conference.

“It’s just a monumental betrayal of public trust,” U.S. Attorney Clay Joyner said at a news conference.

One of the indictments, which charges 15 people, says law enforcement officers provided armed escort services on multiple occasions to an FBI agent posing as a member of a Mexican drug cartel. The indictment alleges the officers understood they were transporting 55 pounds of cocaine through Mississippi Delta counties and into Memphis. The officers also provided escort services to protect the transportation of drug proceeds.

Gaston and Williams are alleged to have received bribes in exchange for giving the operations their “blessing,” the indictment said. It added that Gaston attempted to disguise the payments as campaign contributions, but did not report them as required by law.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said in a statement that he was disappointed to learn of the allegations.

“The law must apply equally to everyone regardless of the title or position they hold,” he wrote. “Know that if you betray the people’s trust in Mississippi, you will face consequences.”

Sunflower County Sheriff James Haywood in Mississippi confirmed the arrest of a deputy, Marvin Flowers, on Thursday morning. Haywood said Flowers has worked for the department for 13 years.

It wasn’t immediately known if those named in the indictments had lawyers who could comment for them.

Multiple Mississippi law enforcement agencies and sheriffs have faced federal scrutiny in recent years.

In 2024, the former Hinds County Sheriff Marshand Crisler was convicted of accepting $9,500 in bribes and knowingly providing ammunition to a convicted felon. The same year, former Noxubee County Sheriff Terry Grassaree pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI while being questioned about requesting and receiving nude photos from a female inmate.

William Brewer, a former Tallahatchie County sheriff, was sentenced to six years in prison in 2019 for extorting brides from a drug dealer.

In 2023, six law enforcement officers pleaded guilty to state and federal charges for torturing two Black men, a case that sparked a Department of Justice investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office. A similar DOJ probe concluded last year that officers of the Lexington Police Department discriminated against Black people.

This version has been corrected to show that people from Mississippi and Tennessee were charged, not just people from Mississippi.

Associated Press writer Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this report.