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.

Marjorie Johnson, the witty home baker who was a perennial Minnesota State Fair ribbon winner for more than five decades, died Thursday at 106.

Her son Steven Johnson said she moved to Little Hospice in Edina on Wednesday afternoon. Staff thought she’d be there for weeks.

“She went real fast, peaceful,” he said.

As for the family point of pride that she was the oldest person to win a State Fair blue ribbon: “She liked to win,” he said.

Marjorie Johnson, who was born in 1919 and lived in Robbinsdale, began entering her baked goods in the Minnesota State Fair competitions in 1974 — and won three ribbons that year. Over the years since then, she went on to win more than 3,000 state and county fair ribbons, including two at the 2025 State Fair for her honey yeast bread and gingersnap cookies.

Johnson’s magnetic personality and penchant for baking quickly made a splash, including off the Fairgrounds. Competing in the Pillsbury Bake-Off in 1976 in Boston, as St. Paul Dispatch food writer Eleanor Ostman reported from the scene, Johnson was “the darling of interviewers,” who were “tickled by her enthusiasm, her breathless chatter.”

Locally, Johnson was a regular guest on TV news, especially during Fair season, and appeared nationally on award show red carpets and programs like “The Martha Stewart Show” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” whose host invited her back several times to demonstrate recipes and act as a guest correspondent.

In 2007, she wrote a cookbook titled “The Road to Blue Ribbon Baking,” with a foreword by Rosie O’Donnell.

She thought she would be nervous making high-profile TV appearances but was surprised to find she was not, she told the Pioneer Press that year.

“I just try to be myself,” she said. “And I’ve been myself for so many years that it’s the easiest thing to do.”

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By AARON MORRISON and ERIC TUCKER

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department is investigating whether leaders in the Black Lives Matter movement defrauded donors who contributed tens of millions of dollars during racial justice protests in 2020, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

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In recent weeks, federal law enforcement officials have issued subpoenas and served at least one search warrant as part of an investigation into the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc. and other Black-led organizations that helped spark a national reckoning on systemic racism, said the people, who were not authorized to discuss an ongoing criminal probe by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

It was not clear if the investigation would result in criminal charges, but its mere existence invites fresh scrutiny to a movement that in recent years has faced criticism about its public accounting of donations they have received. The recent burst of investigative activity is also unfolding at a time when civil rights organizations have raised concerns about the potential for the Trump administration to target a variety of progressive and left-leaning groups that have been critical of him, including those affiliated with BLM, the transgender rights movement and anti-ICE protesters.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department declined to comment on Thursday.

One of the people said the investigation had been initiated during the Biden administration but is getting renewed attention during the Trump administration. A second person confirmed that allegations were examined in the Biden administration.

The foundation said it took in over $90 million in donations, following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man whose last breaths under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer sparked protests across the U.S. and around the world.

Critics of the nonprofit foundation, and of the BLM movement broadly, accused organizers of not being transparent about how it was spending the donations. That criticism grew louder after BLM foundation leaders in 2022 confirmed they used donations to purchase a $6 million Los Angeles-area property that includes a home with six bedrooms and bathrooms.

Leaders previously have denied wrongdoing and publicly released tax documents. No prior investigations into the nonprofit’s finances have yielded proof of impropriety.

Leaders of the foundation have received subpoenas. In a statement emailed to the AP on Thursday, the foundation said it “is not a target of any federal criminal investigation.”

“We remain committed to full transparency, accountability, and the responsible stewardship of resources dedicated to building a better future for Black communities,” the foundation said in the statement.

The Black Lives Matter movement first emerged in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. But it was the 2014 death of Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, that made the slogan “Black lives matter” a rallying cry for progressives and a favorite target of derision for conservatives.

Movement founders and organizers pledged to build a decentralized organization governed by the consensus of BLM chapters. But as the movement’s influence grew, so did the number of organizations that became affiliated with BLM. In 2020, a tidal wave of public contributions in the aftermath of protests over Floyd’s murder came mainly to the BLM foundation, although other organizations were resourced from those funds.

Leaders of the foundation opened up about finances and organizational structure in 2022, revealing detailed accountings of expenditures. The latest Form 990 filing shows the BLM foundation had $28 million in assets for the fiscal year ending June 2024.

The investigation is being run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, in Los Angeles.

The top prosecutor there, Bill Essayli, was determined by a federal judge this week to have stayed in his temporary acting U.S. attorney job longer than allowed by law but permitted him to effectively remain the office’s chief prosecutor but with a different title of First Assistant United States Attorney.

Essayli had previously served as a Republican assemblyman in California, where he took up conservative causes and criticized the state’s COVID-19 restrictions. He has been outspoken against state policies to protect immigrants living in the country illegally, and he has aggressively prosecuted people who protest Trump’s ramped up immigration enforcement across Southern California.

As a private practice attorney, he characterized BLM as a “radical organization” while defending a white couple charged in 2020 with a hate crime after they were videotaped defacing a BLM mural in Martinez, California.

At the time, city-sanctioned BLM murals had been painted on roadways in cities throughout the U.S. in an expression of solidarity with the racial justice movement. Essayli was quoted as having told reporters at the time that his clients were simply expressing their political viewpoints and that they disagreed with taxpayer funds being used to “sponsor a radical organization, Black Lives Matter.”

The couple took plea deals to resolve the case in 2022.

At the height of the Floyd-sparked reckoning on racial injustice, some state officials vowed their own investigations in the foundation’s finances, citing their responsibility to protect residents who may have donated to BLM. But most of those probes were resolved without official action.

In 2022, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita filed a lawsuit against the BLM foundation for failing to comply with an investigation into the organization’s finances. Soon after, a representative of the foundation responded with the necessary information and documentation, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said, and the lawsuit was dismissed.

Alana Durkin Richer in Washington, D.C., and Graham Lee Brewer in Oklahoma City contributed.

By BRIAN WITTE

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — A Maryland state senator has been indicted on federal charges including extortion related to her 2022 campaign for a state House seat for allegedly conspiring to threaten the release of an explicit video of a former consultant’s affair.

State Sen. Dalya Attar, a Baltimore Democrat, was charged in a federal indictment unsealed Thursday that involves her brother, Joseph Attar, and Kalman Finkelstein, a Baltimore police officer who worked on her campaign.

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The group conspired to silence a former consultant by threatening to make public a video of her in bed with a married man, according to the indictment. The alleged purpose was to obtain evidence that could be used to prevent her from saying negative things about the lawmaker’s campaign.

The senator said in a statement that the case centers on “the allegations of my former disgruntled employee,” and she noted that “we have yet to see any tangible evidence to support the claim that I knew of any illegal actions taken on my behalf.”

“I look forward to sharing my side of the story, and believe the truth will be the arbiter of justice,” Attar said. “In the meantime, I will continue to serve my community with humility and honor, and look forward to being as transparent as possible.”

According to the indictment, there were secret recordings of Attar’s former political consultant in bed with a married man with recording devices disguised as smoke detectors. The consultant was staying at the time at an apartment owned by Finkelstein’s family.

The recording was intended to be used to potentially harm matchmaking efforts for the consultant’s daughter, according to the indictment.

“She wants her daughters to get married more than she wants to screw me,” Dalya Attar wrote in a WhatsApp message, according to the indictment.

Dalya Attar apparently had a falling out with the consultant, prompting her concerns about future comments about her campaign, but the indictment doesn’t provide any details about the break.

In January 2020, Dalya Attar sent a series of WhatsApp messages to a co-conspirator, saying that two years later the consultant “is still looking to screw me badly,” according to the indictment.

The indictment says that Joseph Attar went to the man who the consultant was recorded sleeping with to share the message: “Leave Dalya alone.”

“Don’t bring her up anymore to anyone,” Joseph Attar allegedly told the man to tell the consultant, according to the indictment. “Stay out of this election, the Delegate election. And make sure she doesn’t do anything against Dalya throughout this election.”

None of the defendants had an attorney listed in online court records.

Dalya Attar is the first Orthodox Jewish woman to serve in the Maryland Senate. She was first elected to her Baltimore district in the Maryland House of Delegates in 2018, and the former consultant worked on that campaign. Earlier this year, she was appointed to an open Maryland Senate seat to fill a vacancy.

She has been charged in the eight-count indictment with multiple counts of conspiracy, extortion via interstate communications, aiding and abetting, interception and disclosure of a wire.

The indictment says she conspired with her brother and Finkelstein to prevent the consultant from communicating to members of the Orthodox Jewish community in her district about her voting record.

If the consultant did not refrain from commenting about the election, Joseph Attar allegedly told the man: “I’ll share this video with everybody you know, everyone she knows, every Rabbi in town, your kids, your wife, her daughters.”