By RIO YAMAT, Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Duane “Keffe D” Davis, who is awaiting trial in the 1996 killing of rap icon Tupac Shakur, has lost a bid for a new trial in a separate battery case tied to a jailhouse fight.

The ruling came Wednesday after a tense hearing in a Las Vegas courtroom that underscored the high-profile status of the defendant and his upcoming trial in one of hip-hop’s most infamous crimes.

The jurors who convicted Davis of battery in the jailhouse fight were put on the witness stand Wednesday. One by one, each of them denied claims by Davis’ son and a man who describes himself as a journalist that they overheard one of the jurors talking about the battery case during a lunch break ahead of deliberations.

Duane Davis looks back during a hearing on claims of juror misconduct in his jailhouse battery case at the Regional Justice Center on Wednesday, July 2, 2025, in Las Vegas. (L.E. Baskow/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, Pool)

Both Davis’ son, Duane Davis Jr., and the self-described journalist, Richard Bond, testified Wednesday about hearing the juror’s comments in the hallway outside of the courtroom on the final day of a two-day trial in April.

“Those two witnesses do have a relationship and a bias and a motive to testify in a certain way, whether subconsciously or not,” Clark County District Judge Nadia Krall said while ruling from the bench.

It was revealed Wednesday when prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo questioned the men separately that they considered each other friends, that Bond had been sending money to both Duane Davis and his son, and that Bond had advised them to fire their attorney, Carl Arnold.

“Ever taken a class on journalistic ethics?” DiGiacomo asked Bond.

“No, I have not taken a class on journalistic ethics,” Bond said.

Duane Davis looks back during a hearing on claims of juror misconduct in his jailhouse battery case at the Regional Justice Center on Wednesday, July 2, 2025, in Las Vegas. (L.E. Baskow/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP, Pool)

The fight in December 2024 in a common room was captured on security video. Prosecutors said Davis was being escorted by a corrections officer back to his unit when he and another man exchanged words and then started fighting. Arnold said he was ambushed and acted in self-defense.

DiGiacomo, who also is prosecuting Duane Davis in the Shakur killing, said after court that he had no comment. A spokesperson for Arnold’s office also declined to comment.

Arnold said in court Wednesday that his client did not receive a fair trial in the battery case because of the juror’s apparent comments. The juror himself denied it multiple times while on the witness stand.

Wednesday’s hearing was not the first time that the credibility of those with ties to Davis has been questioned in court.

Davis, the only person ever charged in Shakur’s death, had sought to be freed from custody shortly after his arrest in September 2023. But a judge rejected his request, saying she suspected a cover-up of the true source of funds for his bond.

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A music record executive offering to underwrite Davis’ $750,000 bail at the time testified that he obtained the money legally and wanted to help Davis because he’s “always been a monumental person in our community.”

But the judge said she was skeptical after receiving two identical letters apparently from an entertainment company that Cash “Wack 100” Jones says wired him the funds as payment for his work. One letter was signed with a name that had no ties to the company, the judge said, while the other included a misspelled name and a return address tied to a doctor’s office.

Davis has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. He’s accused of orchestrating the fatal drive-by shooting of Shakur nearly 30 years ago at a traffic light near the Las Vegas Strip.

Prosecutors say the evidence against Davis is strong, including his own accounts of the shooting throughout the years in interviews and a 2019 tell-all memoir. His trial is scheduled for February.

Shakur’s death at 25 came as his fourth solo album, “All Eyez on Me,” remained on the charts, with some 5 million copies sold. Nominated six times for a Grammy Award, Shakur is still largely considered one of the most influential and versatile rappers of all time.

By DAVID KLEPPER and ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A declassified CIA memo released Wednesday challenges the work intelligence agencies did to conclude that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election because it wanted Republican Donald Trump to win.

The memo was written on the orders of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, a Trump loyalist who spoke out against the Russia investigation as a member of Congress. It finds fault with a 2017 intelligence assessment that concluded the Russian government, at the direction of President Vladimir Putin, waged a covert influence campaign to help Trump win.

It does not address that multiple investigations since then, including a report from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020, reached the same conclusion about Russia’s influence and motives.

The eight-page document is part of an ongoing effort by Trump and close allies who now lead key government agencies to revisit the history of the long-concluded Russia investigation, which resulted in criminal indictments and shadowed most of his first term but also produced unresolved grievances and contributed to the Republican president’s deep-rooted suspicions of the intelligence community.

The report is also the latest effort by Ratcliffe to challenge the decision-making and actions of intelligence agencies during the course of the Russia investigation.

A vocal Trump supporter in Congress who aggressively questioned former special counsel Robert Mueller during his 2019 testimony on Russian election interference, Ratcliffe later used his position as director of national intelligence to declassify Russian intelligence alleging damaging information about Democrats during the 2016 election even as he acknowledged that it might not be true.

The new, “lessons-learned” review ordered by Ratcliffe in May was meant to examine the tradecraft that went into the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment on Russian interference and to scrutinize in particular the conclusion that Putin “aspired” to help Trump win.

The report cited several “anomalies” that the authors wrote could have affected that conclusion, including a rushed timeline and a reliance on unconfirmed information, such as Democratic-funded opposition research about Trump’s ties to Russia compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele.

The report takes particular aim at the inclusion of a two-page summary of the Steele dossier, which included salacious and uncorroborated rumors about Trump’s ties to Russia, in an annex of the intelligence community assessment. It said that decision, championed by the FBI, “implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment.”

But even as Ratcliffe faulted top intelligence officials for a “politically charged environment that triggered an atypical analytic process,” his agency’s report does not directly contradict any previous intelligence.

Russia’s support for Trump has been outlined in a number of intelligence reports and the August 2020 conclusions of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Sen. Marco Rubio, who now serves as Trump’s secretary of state. It also was backed by Mueller, who in his 2019 report said that Russia interfered on Trump’s behalf and that the campaign welcomed the aid even if there was insufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy.

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“This report doesn’t change any of the underlying evidence — in fact it doesn’t even address any of that evidence,” said Brian Taylor, a Russia expert who directs the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at Syracuse University.

Taylor suggested the report may have been intended to reinforce Trump’s claims that investigations into his ties to Russia are part of a Democratic hoax.

“Good intelligence analysts will tell you their job is to speak truth to power,” Taylor said. “If they tell the leader what he wants to hear, you often get flawed intelligence.”

Intelligence agencies regularly perform after-action reports to learn from past operations and investigations, but it’s uncommon for the evaluations to be declassified and released to the public.

Ratcliffe has said he wants to release material on a number of topics of public debate and has already declassified records relating to the assassinations of President John Kennedy and his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, as well as the origins of COVID-19.

By MICHELLE L. PRICE, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump will meet at the White House on Thursday with Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage in Gaza, who was released in May.

“The President and First Lady have met with many released hostages from Gaza, and they greatly look forward to meeting Edan Alexander and his family in the Oval Office tomorrow,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

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Alexander, now 21, is an American-Israeli from New Jersey. The soldier was 19 when combatants stormed his base in Israel and dragged him into the Gaza Strip. Alexander moved to Israel in 2022 after finishing high school and enlisted in the military.

He was released on May 12 by Hamas, which has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union, after 584 days in captivity. Alexander had been in Israel since he was freed until he traveled last month home to New Jersey, where his family still lives.

He was among 251 people taken hostage by Hamas in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack that led to the Israel-Hamas war.

Trump in early March met at the White House with a group of eight former hostages who had been released by Hamas: Iair Horn, Omer Shem Tov, Eli Sharabi, Keith Siegel, Aviva Siegel, Naama Levy, Doron Steinbrecher and Noa Argamani.

Thursday’s meeting comes ahead of a planned visit on Monday to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Trump pushes the Israeli government and Hamas to negotiate a ceasefire and hostage agreement and end the war in Gaza.