By MARY CLARE JALONICK, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has confirmed President Donald Trump’s first judicial pick of his second term, voting to approve Whitney Hermandorfer as a judge for the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The confirmation of Hermandorfer, who worked for Tennessee’s attorney general, comes after the Democratic-led Senate under former President Joe Biden confirmed 235 federal judges and the Republican-led Senate in Trump’s first term confirmed 234 federal judges.

The two presidents each worked to reshape the judiciary, with Trump taking advantage of a high number of judicial vacancies at the end of President Barack Obama’s term and Democrats working to beat Trump’s number after he had the opportunity to nominate three Supreme Court justices.

So far in his second term, Trump has fewer vacancies to fill. While he inherited more than 100 vacancies from Obama, who was stymied by a Republican Senate in his final two years, Trump now has 49 vacancies to fill out of almost 900 federal judgeships.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said last week that the Senate would work to quickly confirm Trump’s judicial nominees, even though “we’re not facing the number of judicial vacancies this Congress we did during Trump’s first term.”

Sen. Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., center, talks after a policy luncheon on Wednesday, July 9, 2025, at the Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)

Hermandorfer, who was confirmed 46-42 along party lines, has defended many of Trump’s policies as director of strategic litigation for Tennessee’s attorney general, including his bid to end birthright citizenship. Democrats and liberal judicial advocacy groups criticized her as extreme on that issue and others, also citing her office’s defense of the state’s strict abortion ban.

Before working for the Tennessee Attorney General, she clerked for three Supreme Court justices. But at her confirmation hearing last month, Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware criticized what he called a “striking brevity” of court experience since Hermandorfer graduated from law school a decade ago.

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Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Monday that Trump is only focused on “a nominee’s perceived loyalty to him and his agenda — and a willingness to rule in favor of him and his administration.”

The Judiciary panel is scheduled to vote on additional judges this week, including top Justice Department official Emil Bove, a former lawyer for Trump who is nominated for the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Bove’s nomination has come under scrutiny after a fired department lawyer claimed in a complaint that Bove used an expletive when he said during a meeting that the Trump administration might need to ignore judicial commands. Bove has pushed back against suggestions from Democrats that the whistleblower’s claims make him unfit for the federal bench.

Bove has also accused FBI officials of “insubordination” for refusing to hand over the names of agents who investigated the U.S. Capitol riot and ordered the firings of a group of prosecutors involved in the Jan. 6 criminal cases.

A new suspect in the abduction of Mason City, Iowa, TV news anchor Jodi Huisentruit is identified in an ABC News’ documentary that premieres Tuesday on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.

The three-part series, “Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit,” names – for the first time – a Wisconsin resident, the ex-husband of a friend of Huisentruit’s, as a person of interest in the June 27, 1995, case.

Huisentruit’s friend said she reached out in 2022 to Mason City, Iowa, police about her ex-husband for a second time after a 20/20 segment, “Gone at Dawn,” on the Huisentruit case aired. The woman said she had emailed police in 2017 about her suspicions, but nothing came of it, according to “Her Last Broadcast.”

“The 20/20 show, that’s why I reached out to Mason City police,” the woman says in the documentary. “I’m positive he went to Mason City, and he met with Jodi. I’m 100-percent positive. He always asked about Jodi. He needs to be looked at.”

The couple’s divorce was finalized on June 23, 1995; Huisentruit went missing four days later. This year marked the 30th anniversary of her disappearance.

Mason City, Iowa, Police Investigator Terrance Prochaska, who is featured prominently in the new documentary, talks with the friend on camera: “We’ve had a lot of people call and say, ‘My ex-husband did it,’” Prochaska said. “But we know that you were one of her close friends. We call this a very high-priority lead.”

The tip led investigators last year to Winsted, Minn., where they searched for human remains in an area near where the man had owned property. No human remains were found. The search is featured in “Her Last Broadcast.”

The man reportedly drove a white Ford Econoline van for work; a van matching that description was seen near Huisentruit’s apartment around the time of her abduction, according to the series. A composite sketch of a man neighbors saw in the parking lot of Huisentruit’s apartment complex looked so much like the friend’s ex-husband that she got “goosebumps” when she saw it, she says in the series.

He also reached out to his ex-wife on the 10th anniversary of Huisentruit’s abduction, according to the series.

The man, who was questioned by police, declined to be interviewed for “Her Last Broadcast.” The Pioneer Press typically does not name suspects until they are charged.

Persons of interest

The man is one of four suspects named as persons of interest in the case in “Her Last Broadcast.”

Maria Awes, the documentary’s director and executive producer, said it was important to “examine all the evidence” to see if any of the four may have had something to do with Huisentruit’s abduction.

“It’s also to show that for Mason City police, this isn’t really a cold-case for them,” she said. “They’ve been working on it for decades. We wanted to get all this information out there, keep Jodi and her story, her legacy, top of mind. Hopefully, somebody who has any missing piece of information pertaining to any person of interest featured here or otherwise, will contact police. That’s just so critical for getting this case solved.”

A tipster reported seeing a white van in the parking lot of Huisentruit’s apartment around the time frame that they think she disappeared, Awes said.

“It wasn’t as though somebody saw her being put into this van or something like that, but it’s always been a vehicle that law enforcement has wanted to find,” she said. “They did an enormous amount of work trying to locate white vans. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of those. Trying to sift through literally every white van in Iowa, you know, and also even in Minnesota, I know that they were looking and trying to figure out whose van could this have been, and so the fact that (this man) had a white van, that was certainly something that piqued Mason City Police Department’s interest.”

Local celebrity

Awes, who grew up in Richfield, was studying broadcast-journalism at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul when Huisentruit disappeared, and Huisentruit’s case was discussed at length in class, she said.

In the 1990s, local TV news anchors like Huisentruit were celebrities, according to Awes.

“It was very different then,” she said. “People recognized them all over the place, and there are dangers that come with that type of local fame. You really can’t discount that. It was a serious thing. You also have just that generalized fear that all, you know, women kind of have where you’re alone. It’s dark. You’re going to your car. ‘Could something happen to you?’ And in this case, something did.

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“I think most women know what that experience is like. I think that’s one of the reasons Jodi’s case resonates so much with people is because of that fear. It’s something very identifiable for a lot of people.”

Who does Awes think is responsible?

“People ask me that all the time,” she said. “I always say it’s really not for me to necessarily comment on that other than to say, you know, I think my job is really I just want to get that information out there. I think people can evaluate it on their own and come to their own conclusions. And certainly the most important thing is not what I think or what anybody thinks, but really, who actually did it – and what’s the evidence? The hard evidence. And how can you prove that in court?”

Jodi Huisentruit documentary

“Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit” premieres Tuesday, July 15, on Hulu and Disney+.

The three-part series was produced by ABC News Studios and Committee Films, a Minneapolis company that produced an ABC “20/20” episode on Huisentruit’s abduction in 2022.

By BERNARD CONDON and TOM KRISHER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — A rare trial against Elon Musk’s car company began Monday in Miami where a jury will decide if it is partly to blame for the death of a stargazing university student after a runaway Tesla sent her flying 75 feet through the air and severely injured her boyfriend.

Lawyers for the plaintiff argue that Tesla’s driver-assistance feature called Autopilot should have warned the driver and braked when his Model S sedan blew through flashing red lights, a stop sign and a T-intersection at nearly 70 miles an hour in the April 2019 crash. Tesla lays the blame solely on the driver, who was reaching for a dropped cell phone.

“The evidence clearly shows that this crash had nothing to do with Tesla’s Autopilot technology,” Tesla said in a statement. “Instead, like so many unfortunate accidents since cellphones were invented, this was caused by a distracted driver.”

The driver, George McGee, was sued separately by the plaintiffs. That case was settled.

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A judgement against Tesla could be especially damaging as the company works to convince the public its self-driving technology is safe during a planned rollout of hundreds of thousands of Tesla robotaxis on U.S. roads by the end of next year. A jury trial is rare for the company, which often settles lawsuits, and this one is rarer yet because a judge recently ruled that the family of the stricken Naibel Benavides Leon can argue for punitive damages.

The judge, Beth Bloom of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, issued a partial summary judgement last month, throwing out charges of defective manufacturing and negligent misrepresentation against Tesla. But she also ruled plaintiffs could argue other claims that would make the company liable and ask for punitive damages, which could prove costly.

“A reasonable jury could find that Tesla acted in reckless disregard of human life for the sake of developing their product and maximizing profit,” Bloom said in a filing.

The 2021 lawsuit alleges the driver relied on Autopilot to reduce speed or come to a stop when it detected objects in its way, including a parked Chevrolet Tahoe that Benavides and her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, had gotten out of near Key West, Florida, to look up at the sky. The Tesla rammed the Tahoe at highway speeds, causing it to rotate and slam into Benavides, tossing her into a wooded area and killing her.

In legal documents, Tesla denied nearly all of the lawsuit’s allegations and said it expects that consumers will follow warnings in the vehicle and instructions in the owners’ manual, as well as comply with driving laws. Tesla warns owners in manuals that its cars cannot drive themselves and they need to be ready to intervene at all times.

Former AP auto writer Krisher reported from Detroit.

Motorists using the St. Croix River bridge south of Stillwater will encounter single-lane closures this week as the bridge undergoes inspection by Wisconsin Department of Transportation engineers.

From now until Thursday, daily lane closures will occur between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m. for eastbound traffic and between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. for westbound traffic, according to WisDOT officials.

Motorists might experience delays and should plan accordingly.

The bridge, which opened to traffic in August 2017, is inspected every two years.

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