By DAVID KLEPPER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has withheld a complaint made about her conduct from members of Congress for eight months, claiming the delay is needed for a legal review, an attorney for the person making the allegations said Monday.

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The complaint was reviewed by the office of the intelligence community’s inspector general, which deemed it not credible, Gabbard’s office said. The person then sought to have the complaint referred to members of Congress’ intelligence committees, as is permitted by federal law, but that has not occurred.

Andrew Bakaj, the attorney for the person who made the complaint, said he could not identify his client, their employer or offer specifics about the allegations because of the nature of their work. But he said there’s no justification for keeping the complaint from Congress since last spring.

There was no delay in getting the complaint to members of the intelligence committees, Gabbard’s press secretary Olivia Coleman said, though she added that the number of classified details in the complaint made the review process “substantially more difficult.”

Gabbard’s office disputed the claims, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Coleman noted that the inspector general who deemed the complaint non-credible wasn’t selected by Gabbard and began their work during then-President Joe Biden’s administration.

“Director Gabbard has always and will continue to support whistleblower’s and their right, under the law, to submit complaints to Congress, even if they are completely baseless like this one,” Coleman wrote in a post on X.

Gabbard coordinates the work of the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies. In an unusual role for a spy chief, she was on site last week when the FBI served a search warrant on election offices in Georgia central to Trump’s disproven claims about fraud in the 2020 election, raising questions from Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Bakaj, meanwhile, has asked Congress to investigate the handling of the complaint.

A spokesperson for Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Gabbard pledged under oath during her confirmation hearing that she would protect whistleblowers and make sure Congress was kept informed.

“We expect her to honor those commitments and comply with both the letter and the spirit of the law,” Warner’s office said in a statement.

The inspector general’s office, which is tasked with providing independent oversight of the intelligence community, did not immediately respond to questions about the complaint.

A former intelligence officer with the CIA, Bakaj previously represented an intelligence community whistleblower whose account of a phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy helped initiate the first of two impeachment cases against the Republican leader during his first team.

Trump was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate in February 2020 over the call during which he asked the Ukrainian president for a “favor” — to announce he was investigating Democrats including 2020 rival Joe Biden.

Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

By MELISSA GOLDIN

Multiple AI-generated photos falsely claiming to show New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a child and his mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and his confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, along with other high-profile public figures, were shared widely on social media Monday.

The images originated on an X account labeled as parody after a huge tranche of new Epstein files was released by the Justice Department on Friday. They are clearly watermarked as AI and other elements they contain do not add up.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

CLAIM: Images show Mamdani as a child and his mother with Jeffrey Epstein and other public figures linked to the disgraced financier.

THE FACTS: The images were created with artificial intelligence. They all contain a digital watermark identifying them as such and first appeared on a parody X account that says it creates “high quality AI videos and memes.”

In one of the images, Mamdani and Nair appear in the front of a group photo with Maxwell, Epstein, former President Bill Clinton, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. They seem to be posing at night on a crowded city street. Mamdani looks to be a preteen or young teenager.

Another supposedly shows the same group of people, minus Nair, in what appears to be a tropical setting. Epstein is pictured holding Clinton sitting in his arms, while Maxwell has her arm around Mamdani, who appears slightly younger.

Other AI-generated images circulating online depict Mamdani as a baby being held by Nair while she poses with Epstein, Clinton, Maxwell and Bezos. None of Epstein’s victims have publicly accused Clinton, Gates or Bezos of being involved in his crimes.

Google’s Gemini app detected SynthID, a digital watermarking tool for identifying content that has been generated or altered with AI, in all the images described above. This means they were created or edited, either entirely or in part, by Google’s AI models.

The X account that first posted the images describes itself as “an AI-powered meme engine” that uses “AI to create memes, songs, stories, and visuals that call things exactly how they are — fast, loud, and impossible to ignore.”

An inquiry sent to the account went unanswered. However, a post by the account seems to acknowledge that it created the images.

“Damn you guys failed,” it reads. “I purposely made him a baby which would technically make this pic 34 years old. Yikes.”

The photos began circulating after an email emerged in which a publicist, Peggy Siegal, wrote to Epstein about seeing a variety of luminaries, including Clinton, Bezos and Nair, an award-winning Indian filmmaker, at 2009 afterparty for a film held at Maxwell’s townhouse.

While Mamdani appears as a baby or young child in all of the images, he was 18 in 2009, when Nair is said to have attended the party.

The images have led to related falsehoods that have spread online in their wake. For example, one claims that Epstein is Mamdani’s father. This is not true — Mamdani’s father is Mahmood Mamdani, an anthropology professor at Columbia University.

The NYC Mayor’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.

By FATIMA HUSSEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Legal experts say President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax information raises a plethora of legal and ethical questions, including the propriety of the leader of the executive branch pursuing scorched-earth litigation against the very government he is in charge of.

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The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Florida, includes the president’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric as plaintiffs. It alleges that the leak of Trump’s and the Trump Organization’s confidential tax records caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”

In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn, of Washington, D.C. — who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense and national security tech firm — was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about Trump and others to two news outlets between 2018 and 2020.

The outlets were not named in the charging documents, but the description and time frame align with stories about Trump’s tax returns in The New York Times and reporting about wealthy Americans’ taxes in the nonprofit investigative journalism organization ProPublica. The 2020 New York Times report found Trump paid $750 in federal income tax the year he first entered the White House and no income tax at all some years thanks to reported colossal losses.

Legal analysts say that Trump does have a legitimate claim against the IRS but question the amount he is seeking as well as his decision to pursue the case at all. The disclosure violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal statute, which provides a legal remedy for individuals whose tax information is leaked, including a minimum of $1,000 per disclosure.

Since Littlejohn stole tax records of other billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, there is a possibility the case sets a precedent for other high-wealth earners to seek compensation from the government over the leak.

David Gair, a tax attorney with Troutman Pepper Locke in Dallas who represents individuals whose tax information was included in the Littlejohn leak, told The Associated Press that several clients have already reached out about bringing a potential claim against the government.

“People are saying, well, if he can do it, then why can’t I do it? And so I think you will have a lot more people filing similar lawsuits, thinking that they might be able to piggyback on what he’s doing.”

Amy Hanauer, executive director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, says a legal remedy has already been provided for the leak.

“The contractor who leaked this information has been imprisoned, the Trump administration’s Treasury Department canceled its contracts with the company that employed the leaker, and the IRS issued a rare public apology to taxpayers affected by the leak,” and the IRS has pledged to strengthen its data protection procedures as a result, Hanauer said.

She adds that “even if an unbiased judge rightly rejects Trump’s demands as preposterous, there is a great danger that the IRS would ‘agree’ to settle and pay out an enormous sum of taxpayer dollars to Trump.”

Trump, when asked by a reporter over the weekend how he will manage being on both sides of the lawsuit, referred to a previous complaint he filed against the Department of Justice seeking roughly $230 million in damages over investigations into his 2016 campaign’s Russia ties and the 2022 Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.

He added that he’s supposed to “work out a settlement with myself.”

“I think what we’ll do is do something for charity,” Trump said Saturday. “We could make it a substantial amount. Nobody would care because it’s going to go to numerous very good charities.”

A White House representative did not offer details on what organizations might receive any settlement money.

Individuals whose tax information has been leaked don’t have to prove compensatory damages, Gair noted, though Trump is also seeking punitive damages, changing the stakes.

Referring to the deals that Trump’s family business has inked since he won reelection, Gair said Trump may have a hard time showing real harm.

“It’s hard for me to believe that he really had any losses, but maybe,” Gair said.

The military’s Northern Command has taken more than 1,500 active-duty troops in Alaska and North Carolina off heightened alert for possible deployment to Minnesota, a U.S. official said Monday on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

The infantry soldiers and military police were told last month to prepare for a possible deployment to the state, where President Donald Trump had threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act as a response to protests there against the Jan. 7 killing of a Minneapolis woman by a federal immigration officer.

But the shooting death by immigration officers of a second U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti, on Jan. 24 galvanized public sentiment against the federal government’s tactics and forced the administration to retreat. Over the weekend, Northern Command quietly ordered the active-duty troops on standby to stand down.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.