Gov. Tim Walz Tuesday announced that he will require state workers to be in the office at least 50 percent of their work days beginning around June 1.

The governor noted that the policy change supports the economic vitality of office districts like downtown St. Paul, which depend on foot traffic back to businesses and public spaces that public employees provide.

“This approach balances the flexibility of telework with the workplace advantages of being in office,” Walz said in a statement. “Having more state employees in the office means that collaboration can happen more quickly and state agencies can build strong organizational cultures more easily.”

Approximately 60% of state employees currently work in-person and did so through the pandemic.

There is an exemption for workers living more than 75 miles away from where their main work site.

The governor’s announcement noted that the move will support downtown districts, such as St. Paul, that rely on foot-traffic form employees.

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By JAMIE STENGLE

The gunman who killed 23 people in a racist attack targeting Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart near the U.S.-Mexico border in 2019 would avoid the death penalty under a plea offer announced Tuesday, abruptly ending years of efforts by prosecutors to see that he face execution by lethal injection.

El Paso County District Attorney James Montoya said his decision in the prosecution of Patrick Crusius for one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history was driven by victims’ families who wanted the case behind them.

“I could see a worst-case scenario where this would not go to trial until 2028 if we continued to seek the death penalty,” he said.

But Montoya also acknowledged that not all families agreed with the reversal by his office, which under previous leadership had committed to taking the case to trial and seeking the death penalty.

Under the plea offer, Montoya said, Crusius would receive life in prison with no possibility of parole. Crusius, 26, was already sentenced to 90 consecutive life sentences at the federal level after pleading guilty in 2023 to hate crime charges.

FILE – In the is Oct. 10, 2019 file photo, El Paso Walmart shooting suspect Patrick Crusius pleads not guilty during his arraignment in El Paso, Texas. (Briana Sanchez/El Paso Times via AP, Pool, File)

Mark Stevens, an attorney for Crusius, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Under the Biden administration, federal prosecutors also took the death penalty off the table but did not explain why. In addition to the federal case, Crusius was also charged in state court with capital murder.

Montoya said he supports the death penalty and believes Crusius deserves it. But he said he met with the families of the victims and there was an overriding desire to conclude the process, though some relatives were willing to wait as long as it took for a death sentence.

“I’m just glad it’s over,” said Elise Hoffmann-Taus, whose father, Alexander Hoffmann was among those killed. “This is the outcome I wanted.”

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott also said Crusius deserved to die.

“I’ve heard about it. I think the guy does deserve the death penalty, to be honest,” Abbott said Tuesday about the announcement. “Any shooting like that is what capital punishment is for.”

Montoya, a Democrat, took office in January after defeating a Republican incumbent who was appointed by Abbott.

Crusius, who is white, was 21 years old and had dropped out of community college when police say he drove more than 700 miles from his home near Dallas to El Paso.

Moments after posting a racist screed online that warned of a Hispanic “invasion” of the state, he opened fire with an AK-style rifle inside and outside the store.

Before the shooting, Crusius appears to have been consumed by the immigration debate, posting online in support of building the border wall and other messages praising the hardline border policies of President Donald Trump, who was in his first term at the time. He went further in the rant he posted before the attack, saying Hispanics were going to take over the government and economy.

In the years since the shooting, Republicans have called migrants crossing the southern border an “invasion” and dismissed criticism that such rhetoric fuels anti-immigrant views and violence.

FILE – In this Aug. 6, 2019, file photo, police officers walk behind a Walmart at the scene of a mass shooting at a shopping complex in El Paso, Texas. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

In the U.S. government’s case, Crusius received a life sentence for each of the 90 charges against him, half of which were classified as hate crimes. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said after the sentencing that “no one in this country should have to live in fear of hate-fueled violence.”

One of his attorneys told the judge before the sentencing that his client had a “broken brain” and his thinking was “at odds with reality.”

Federal prosecutors did not formally explain their decision not to seek the death penalty, but they did acknowledge that Crusius suffered from schizoaffective disorder, which can be marked by hallucinations, delusions and mood swings.

The people who were killed ranged in age from a 15-year-old high school athlete to several grandparents. They included immigrants, a retired city bus driver, teachers, tradesmen including a former iron worker, and several Mexican nationals who had crossed the U.S. border on routine shopping trips.

In 2023, Crusius agreed to pay more than $5 million to his victims. Court records showed that his attorneys and the Justice Department reached an agreement over the restitution amount, which was then approved by a U.S. district judge. There was no indication that he had significant assets.

Associated Press writer Nadia Lathan contributed from Austin, Texas.

A federal judge in Texas has set a June trial date for the U.S. government’s years-old conspiracy case against Boeing for misleading regulators about the 737 Max jetliner before two of the planes crashed, killing 346 people.

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U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor did not explain in the scheduling order he issued on Tuesday why he decided to set the case for trial. Lawyers for the aerospace company and the Justice Department have spent months trying to renegotiate a July 2024 plea agreement that called for Boeing to plead guilty to a single felony charge.

The judge rejected that deal in December, saying that diversity, inclusion and equity policies the Justice Department had in place at the time might influence the selection of a monitor to oversee the company’s compliance with the terms of its proposed sentence.

Since then, O’Connor had three times extended the deadline for the two sides to report how they planned to proceed. His most recent extension, granted earlier this month, gave them until April 11 to “confer on a potential resolution of this case short of trial.”

The judge revoked the remaining time with his Tuesday order, which laid out a timeline for proceedings leading up to a June 23 trial in Fort Worth.

The Department of Justice declined to comment on the judge’s action. A Boeing statement shed no light on the status of the negotiations.

“As stated in the parties’ recent filings, Boeing and the Department of Justice continue to be engaged in good faith discussions regarding an appropriate resolution of this matter,” the company said.

The deal the judge refused to approve would have averted a criminal trial by allowing Boeing to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud Federal Aviation Administration regulators who approved minimal pilot-training requirements for the 737 Max nearly a decade ago. More intensive training in flight simulators would have increased the cost for airlines to operate the then-new plane model.

The development and certification of what has become Boeing’s bestselling airliner became an intense focus of safety investigators after two of Max planes crashed less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019. Many relatives of passengers who died off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia have pushed for the prosecution of former Boeing officials, a public criminal trial and more severe financial punishment for the company.

In response to criticism of last year’s plea deal from victims’ families, prosecutors said they did not have evidence to argue that Boeing’s deception played a role in the crashes. Prosecutors told O’Connor the conspiracy to commit fraud charge was the toughest they could prove against Boeing.

O’Connor did not object in his December ruling against the plea agreement to the sentence Boeing would have faced: a fine of up to $487.2 million with credit given for $243.6 million in previously paid penalties; a requirement to invest $455 million in compliance and safety programs; and outside oversight during three years of probation.

Instead, the judge focused his negative assessment on the process for selecting an outsider to keep an eye on Boeing’s actions to prevent fraud. He expressed particular concern that the agreement “requires the parties to consider race when hiring the independent monitor … ‘in keeping with the (Justice) Department’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.’”

“In a case of this magnitude, it is in the utmost interest of justice that the public is confident this monitor selection is done based solely on competency. The parties’ DEI efforts only serve to undermine this confidence in the government and Boeing’s ethics and anti-fraud efforts,” O’Connor wrote.

An executive order President Donald Trump signed during the first week of his second term ended diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government, likely rendering the judge’s concerns moot.

Trump’s return to office also means the Justice Department’s leadership has changed since federal prosecutors decided last year to pursue the case against Boeing.

Boeing agreed to the plea deal only after the Justice Department determined last year that the company violated a 2021 agreement that had protected it against criminal prosecution on the same fraud-conspiracy charge.

Government officials started reexamining the case after a door plug panel blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max during flight in January 2024. That incident renewed concerns about manufacturing quality and safety at Boeing, and put the company under intense scrutiny by regulators and lawmakers.

Boeing lawyers said last year that if the plea deal were rejected, the company would challenge the Justice Department’s finding that it breached the deferred-prosecution agreement. O’Connor helped Boeing’s position by writing in his December decision that it was not clear what the company did to violate the 2021 deal.

Doing what the party wants

Tim Walz has been Minnesota governor since 2019. He has been elected twice with just over 50% of the vote. In the time as governor he certainly has been in the news often.

The George Floyd riots in the spring of 2020 gave the governor a chance to show strong leadership for Minnesota; many think it was his absence from leadership that extended the riots that brought him into the news cycle.

Covid – what a tough time to make decisions but the governor was present in most news coverage.

Take the 2023 legislative session where the Democrats held the governorship and both houses of the Legislature — the trifecta as it was called. In that session Minnesota had an $18 billion surplus and the governor and his Legislature spent it all and raised the biennial budget from $52 billion to $72 billion (a 38% increase). The governor said on the news that he was very proud of this session and its productivity.

Fraud in state government the past five years during the Walz administration has been in the news often with the Feeding our Future scandal leading the way, along with others, totaling almost a half billion dollars. The governor has come out in the press to say this has to be addressed. Kind of like close the barn door after the horse is out.

In 2024 the Governor pursued nomination to run as VP; he got it and was in the national news constantly and absent from Minnesota for four months.

In 2025 the Minnesota legislative session was called to order and for the first three-plus weeks only the Republicans showed in the House of Representatives; thought the governor might show up to try to resolve the dispute that kept his party away from the Capitol, but I thought wrong.

Seems the governor is now taking his direction from new national Democratic Party Chair Ken Martin, leaving the state and touring other states and visiting congressional districts where the seat is held by a Republican and promoting his party’s agenda.

I guess this is just the way politics is, once you are elected you do what the party wants and not pay much attention to the needs of people (all people) in your state or district.

I hope we elect a person governor who shows they are a leader focusing on Minnesota issues and not what their political party leaders dictate.

Tom Troskey, St. Paul

 

I guess I am safe?

I read with horror that Pete Hegseth, Elon Musk, Donald Trump or their proxies are removing Pentagon references to D.E.I. because they don’t believe in their importance. I was somehow drawn back to memories of the Taliban blowing up World Heritage Sites because some of those sites represented beliefs disparate from their own. But then I considered that, well, Hegseth and the others were not actually blowing things up but only “removing” images.

And of course they also are not prosecuting or “removing” me from my family, they are only threatening other persons with prosecution who have challenged their beliefs. So I guess I am safe?

Kenneth Gilmore, Oakdale

 

‘Declaration of Conscience’

We need another Margaret Chase Smith. In the late 1940s to the mid 1950s there was a period referred to as the “Red Scare” and McCarthyism. During this time, Republican Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy rose to power. He presented himself as the only salvation against Communist infiltration and used the tactic of fear to maintain power. His M.O. was a rapid fire of accusations that a person was a Communist without evidence while shielding himself against reprisals due to Senate immunity.

The first person to take a stand against Sen. McCarthy was Maine Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith. On June 1, 1950, Sen. Smith took to the well of the Senate floor and gave a speech, “Declaration of Conscience.” Sen. McCarthy’s name was never used and was implied. Sen. Smith expressed her concern about a psychologically divided country, witch hunts that allowed multiple innocent people to be smeared, that we allowed ourselves to be tools of totalitarianism techniques of confuse, divide and conquer and the prevalence of fear, ignorance, bigotry, and sensationalism as innocent people were attacked and recipients of trial by accusation with no recourse.

Sen. Chase made a plea to recapture our unity and to promote the stalwarts of democracy: the right to protest, to hold unpopular beliefs, to criticize and right of independent thought. This speech was signed and concurred wotj by six other Republicans. Sen. Smith for four more years continued to speak up against McCarthy at great political risk. Finally in1954 the Senate censured Sen. McCarthy for improper conduct and he lost power and faded away.

Who will be our next Margaret Chase Smith?

Geri Minton, Roseville

 

For the long haul

Thanks to the Prairie Island Indian Community for being a stalwart friend of Grey Cloud Island. They are guided by such noble values and are fully committed to the preservation of cultural treasures and natural spaces. Their wisdom and spirit of generosity inspire us.

The Prairie Island Indian Community has never hesitated to help Grey Cloud Island, the smallest township in Minnesota, in our battle against Holcim, a multi-billion-dollar international company always seeking ways to extract more rock (a.k.a. blow the island to smithereens). Again and again, Holcim has tried to change our mining setbacks and blast closer to homes, despite the grave concern of residents.

Through it all, Prairie Island has been a voice of reason, contributing an historical perspective that far surpasses Holcim, who will one day complete their extractions, pack up and never return, leaving behind irreversible damage: a giant hole in our island.

Our friendship with Prairie Island has been a lifeline. Specifically, we owe a debt of gratitude to Shelley Buck and Barry Hand for their kindness and camaraderie. We also applaud Tribal Council President Grant Johnson for his leadership.

Grey Cloud Island is a sacred site for the Prairie Island Indian Community. It is home to the largest concentration of burial mounds in Washington County. Prairie Island has been an invaluable resource as we strive to preserve these artifacts. They are our teachers and our friends.

Ted Ries, Grey Cloud Island resident

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