Sara D. Davis/Getty Images(GREENSBORO, N.C.) -- John Edwards was a bad husband who cheated on his wife while she died of cancer, but he never broke the law, his lawyer said in closing arguments Thursday.
The prosecution said Edwards was more than a bad husband. The former presidential candidate was the chief architect of a criminal scheme to illegally use campaign contributions to cover up the love affair.
Edwards, 58, is on trial for allegedly using nearly $1 million in donations from wealthy donors Fred Baron and Rachel "Bunny" Mellon to keep secret his affair with mistress Rielle Hunter in order to protect his 2008 presidential ambitions and later his hopes of winning a spot as vice president or attorney general. The jury is being asked to decide whether the money was political donations used to dupe the government or gifts from friends who helped Edwards fool his wife. If convicted, Edwards could be sentenced to as much as 30 years in prison.
John Edwards remained unemotional during closing arguments, much the way he has throughout the trial, keeping his chin pressed against his crossed hands, and only occasionally looking at the jury.
Edwards never took the stand in his own defense. Nor did jurors hear directly from Rielle Hunter.
Edwards' defense lasted just three days and consisted mostly of a forensic accounting of bank statements and phone records. That testimony contrasted sharply with three weeks of prosecution witness who detailed Edwards' sordid affair, but never said Edwards had any direct knowledge that he was violating campaign finance laws.
FBI(WASHINGTON) -- An Alabama mother whose son joined an al Qaeda group in Africa said she can't turn her back on her boy even though he advocates attacking America and hasn't been in direct contact with her in years.
"If I could touch him for five minutes, I would be thrilled," Debra Hammami of Daphne, Ala. said of her son Omar who this week published a 127-page account of his road to terrorism from a small town in the American South.
"The silence has been devastating," she told ABC News. "I don't agree with the ideology of any of that, but I do love my son and I do have that motherly love."
Her son's account, "American Jihadist," comes two months after he released a video online in which he said he feared for his life after a falling out with other members of the al Qaeda group, called al-Shabaab. In the document he describes the roles and deaths of numerous Americans, mostly from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, who also joined with the al Qaeda group.
"Minnesota represented!" he writes. "Those Minnesota brother have almost all left their mark on the [jihad] and most have them received martyrdom; while the rest are still waiting [sic]."
Debra Hammami said that even though she doesn't agree with what her son has become, the memoir was something of a comfort considering it's the fullest account yet of what her 27-year-old has been doing in the shadows for the last few years. The two have had no direct contact since he disappeared in 2006 after telling his family he was going to Dubai for work and instead headed to the Somali capital of Mogadishu.
Omar Hammami, who later took on the moniker Abu Mansoor al-Amriki or "The American," recounts in his book his arrival in Somalia and how he fumbled his way through the city for days before meeting the militants he hoped to join.
"At any rate, I took them to the house and they told me that they were the Shabaab... and that they had come to take me to the place of the mujihadeen," Hammami says in the book. "I was extremely excited again."
Hammami describes the training he received, including from one instructor just called "The Spy," and joked that the American drones buzz overhead a "racist" against the white people in Somalia.
"They just want to kill off every white [fighter] they can," he says.
Throughout, Hammami is unrepentant for his decision to join the jihad and for his calls for violence against the West.
Amended to the book are his answers to questions posed by a journalist. When he is asked if he has any final remarks, Hammami just says, "Viva la Revolution!"
For her part, Debra Hammami said she still fears for her son's life and wants him back home.
"It is very devastating, [but] it's a day to day process," she said. "But I do love my son. I have that motherly love."
Charles Eshelman/FilmMagic(NEW YORK) -- Mary Richardson Kennedy, the wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., died of asphyxiation by hanging, according to New York's Westchester County Medical Examiner's office.
Mary Richardson Kennedy's body was found Wednesday in an outbuilding on the couple's property in Bedford, N.Y. Her death marked the final event in a life that had turned tumultuous of late and adds yet another dark moment to the Kennedy family's history.
Kennedy, 52, had four children with her husband, the son of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, to whom she'd been married for 16 years.
In September 2007, the Westchester Journal News reported that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., worried about his wife's mental state, had tried to drive her to a psychologist's office. She resisted and ran from the car into the road, according to police reports.
The couple filed for divorce in 2010, a day after police arrived at the couple's Bedford home in response to a "domestic incident" during which Mary Kennedy was allegedly intoxicated, according to the Journal News.
KRDO/ABC News(DENVER) -- A second grader was removed from school by his parents after the principal objected to him showing up in black face to do a presentation on the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Sean King had a vision for his project, part of “Wax Museum Day” at Meridian Ranch Elementary School in Peyton, Colo., said his mother Michelle King-Roca.
“He said, ‘Mom, I want to wear a black suit because that’s what he wore, a black tie, a white shirt and also I want to do my face black and wear a mustache,” she told ABC affiliate KRDO.
As parents and their pint-sized historical figures waited to file into a classroom on Wednesday, the principal asked King-Roca to remove her son’s make-up, she said.
Instead, she ignored the request and waited for Sean’s presentation.
King-Roca said she was then called to the principal’s office where she, her husband and Sean had a discussion with three school officials. Unsatisfied with the situation, King-Roca pulled her son out of school for the day.
School officials could not be reached for comment, but blackface has historically been used by minstrel shows and burlesque for offensive caricatures of black people.
School officials told KRDO the principal was just doing her job.
“When other students are offended by something, it is the principal’s role that the educational environment is safe for all students,” said school spokesperson Stephanie Meredith.
Hemera Technologies/Thinkstock(MAYER, Ariz.) -- Firefighters in Arizona are battling a growing problem, as high winds overnight caused a handful of wildfires to nearly triple in size.
“The next three days are critical in fire weather, as far as the winds that are coming through,” said incident fire official Karen Takai. “We have a lot of concerns about how the fire is going to move and what is going to happen.”
The so-called Gladiator fire in central Arizona is being considered the most dangerous of the four fires currently burning in the state. It has consumed more than 5,400 acres and has forced the evacuation of the historic mining town of Crown King.
Fire officials told ABC News on Thursday that the fire burning near Crown King appears to be growing away from the tiny town and firefighters have become increasingly confident that they will be able to save it. Crown King is situated southwest of the fire, and the wind is currently blowing north.
But shifting 35-mile per hour winds have made the path of the fire tough to predict, officials said earlier.
“They're still not out of the woods,” said Michelle Fiddler of the southwest incident management team. “This is still an ongoing fire and conditions change periodically.”
“At this point the fire's progressed into more remote areas where it's more challenging to get to,” she said.
“Our strategy all along has been to corral this fire, keep it small, put it out," Fiddler explained. "Unfortunately the winds have really worked against us and its pretty steep, rugged terrain in there."
About 400 firefighters are trying to contain the blaze and officials say the fire is unusually dangerous. It's not just the smoke and heat that have officials concerned; the area is known for rattlesnakes and abandoned mines.
A much larger fire, the so-called Sunflower fire, has burned approximately 12,500 acres, but is burning in a much more remote location. That fire is 10 percent contained.
Comstock Images/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- For the first time since it began keeping records, the Census Bureau reported on Thursday that more babies are being born collectively to Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed races than to white families.
During the 12-month period that ended in July 2011, births of minority babies reached 50.4 percent compared to 49.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites.
It’s expected that whites will remain the majority until mid-century. However, William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, described the ongoing shift to The New York Times as a “transformation from a mostly white baby boomer culture to the more globalized multiethnic country that we are becoming.”
Census Bureau figures reveal there are nearly 350 U.S. counties in which whites are no longer in the majority. Minorities have become the majority in four states and the District of Columbia, as well as large metro areas that include New York, Las Vegas and Memphis.
This changing face of the nation has already started a generational divide, with young minorities on one side and older white people on the other.
Carlos Hernandez (L), and Carlos De Luna (R). (Corpus Christi Police Department)(NEW YORK) -- A brutal murder, two similar-looking suspects, and a death sentence. For Jim Liebman, these three ingredients became the catalyst for exposing one of the judicial system's greatest risks: executing an innocent person.
In a new book-length study written by Liebman, a Columbia law professor, and six of his students, and published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, the decision to execute Carlos De Luna for the 1983 murder of a Corpus Christi gas station attendant is called into question again and again.
"This case, because it is such an everyday case, a very commonplace case, an 'everycase' if you've got problems in this kind of case that no one was paying attention to. It contributes to the wider debate about what the risks [of the death penalty] are to human life," Liebman told ABC News.
De Luna was arrested in 1983 for the murder of Wanda Lopez, a brutal killing in which Lopez was stabbed to death by a Hispanic man shopping in the convenience store where she worked. But throughout his arrest, trial and time on death row, De Luna insisted it was Carlos Hernandez, a friend of his from Corpus Christi, who looked uncannily similar to De Luna, who'd actually killed Lopez.
Liebman, who set out to examine whether the judicial system had put seemingly-innocent criminals to death, spent five years investigating the details of the De Luna case. He and his team of investigators and students talked to more than 100 witnesses, combed through 20 feet of documents and compiled a 400-plus page narrative case study of the Lopez murder. To back up their assertions, the team put the study online, with hundreds of footnotes and links to original documents and primary source materials so that people could come to their own conclusions about the two Carloses.
Liebman's students arranged to have the study published in a special issue of the Human Rights Law Review, which will be devoted entirely to the De Luna narrative. The decision to publish their findings as a nonfiction narrative story, rather than as an academic paper, was made to try to bring a more general readership to the story of Carlos De Luna.
"My hope is that this will bring more readers to the story and potentially a broader category of readers, including college students around country and even the public," Liebman said.
During its investigation, the team found a mountain of evidence that convinced them De Luna was innocent. They talked to Hernandez's family and friends, who made it seem as if it was "common knowledge" in Corpus Christi that Hernandez had bragged about making De Luna his "fall guy," Liebman said.
While prosecutors pushed forward with the case against De Luna, Hernandez allegedly confessed multiple times, including just weeks after Lopez's death.
Liebman and his students also found glaring mistakes about how police and prosecutors had treated the case, including contamination of the crime scene by investigators.
De Luna maintained his innocence throughout his trial, his time on death row and in his last words before he was executed in 1989.
Hernandez went on to be arrested more than a dozen times, including for the murder of a different woman, killed by a knife similar to the one used in Lopez's killing. The charges were dropped because of prosecutorial delay, according to Liebman's study.
Hernandez died in prison in 1999 of liver disease, and the case will never be reopened, Liebman acknowledged.
Humane Society of the United States(NEW YORK) -- Large numbers of the famed Tennessee Walking Horses have been tortured and beaten in order to make them produce the high-stepping gait that wins championships, an ABC News investigation has found.
"All too often, you have to cheat to win in this sport," said Keith Dane of the Humane Society of the United States.
In the most recent example, an undercover video made by an investigator for the Humane Society, documents the cruelty of one of the sport's leading trainers, Jackie McConnell of Collierville, Tenn.
The video led to a federal grand jury indictment of McConnell and was seen publicly for the first time Wednesday night on the ABC News program Nightline.
The tape shows McConnell and his stable hands beating horses with wooden sticks and using electric cattle prods on them as part of a training protocol to make them lift their feet in the pronounced gait judges like to see.
In another scene, McConnell oversees his hands as they apply caustic chemicals to the ankles of the horses and then wrap them with plastic wrap so the chemicals eat into the skin.
"That creates intense pain and then the ankles are wrapped with large metal chains so the horses flinch, or raise their feet even higher," said Dane of the Humane Society.
McConnell is expected to enter a guilty plea to one count, according to his lawyers.
He declined to comment, or apologize for his acts, when approached by ABC News this week outside his home.
Leaders of the Tennessee Walking Horse industry maintain that such brutality is rare and that trainers do not have to cheat to win championships, which can add millions of dollars to the value of horses.
"They do not have to cheat to win," said Dr. Steve Mullins of the group called SHOW, which oversees inspections of horses before major events. "You don't have to do this kind of junk to win. ... And we are terribly against this stuff."
The industry group maintains that the vast majority of horses are not subjected to the cruel practice of "soring."
But a random inspection by the agents of the Department of Agriculture at last year's annual championship found that 52 of 52 horses tested positive for some sort of foreign substance around front hooves, either to cause pain or to hide it.
Dr. Mullins told ABC News there could be innocent explanations for some of the foreign substances found by the inspectors.
Sketch by Christine Cornell(GREENSBORO, N.C.) -- John Edwards rested his case Wednesday, but his defense was dealt a blow when the federal judge said she will set a lower bar than Edwards' legal team had sought for convicting the former presidential candidate of violating the federal campaign finance law.
The judge's decision about how she will instruct the jury came just hours after Edwards' lawyers ended their case, not with the bang of the candidate and his mistress testifying, but with a series of bank statements, phone records and Federal Election Commission memos and a final shot at the credibility of Edwards' chief accuser.
Edwards is on trial for allegedly using nearly $1 million in donations from wealthy backers Fred Baron and Rachel "Bunny" Mellon to keep his affair with mistress Rielle Hunter secret in order to protect his presidential ambitions and later his hopes of winning a spot as vice president or attorney general. If convicted, Edwards could be sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Edwards' lawyers hoped the case would rest in part on Judge Catherine Eagles' interpretation of the word "the." The statute governing illegal receipt of campaign contributions "means any gift, subscription, loan, advance, or deposit of money... for the purpose of influencing any election for federal office." The words "the purpose" suggests that in order for a conviction, the sole reason for the money would have to be to finance a presidential campaign.
Edwards' legal team argued that his main reason for hiding his mistress was to keep the secret from his wife, Elizabeth, who was dying of breast cancer. The judge, however, decided the government will not have to prove that the sole and only purpose of the hush money was to influence the election. It could be to keep it from his wife and to influence his political chances.
Closing arguments are set to begin Thursday morning and Edwards' lawyers will likely use them to take aim at the credibility of Edwards' primary accuser, Andrew Young.
Charles Eshelman/FilmMagic(NEW YORK) -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s estranged wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, has died at age 52, apparently committing suicide by hanging herself, multiple sources told ABC News.
"We deeply regret the death of our beloved sister Mary, whose radiant and creative spirit will be sorely missed by those who loved her," Mary Kennedy's family said in a statement released through her lawyer. "Our heart goes out to her children who she loved without reservation."
Bedford, N.Y., police responded to the Kennedy home in Mount Kisco, N.Y., at 1:36 p.m. Wednesday to investigate a "possible unattended death," according a news release. While police would not identify the person who died, the house is listed under the names of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mary Kennedy on property reports.
"Responding officers confirm that a deceased individual has been located inside an out building on that property," the statement said. "At this time, the Bedford Police Department is not releasing the identity of that individual until notification to family members has been made."
The incident is under investigation by the Bedford Police Department with assistance from the Westchester County Medical Examiner's Office. An autopsy on Mary Kennedy's body will be performed on Thursday.
Mary Kennedy appeared to have hung herself, a family member told ABC News.
Mary Kennedy was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s second wife and the couple had four children together. The couple was married for 16 years before a divorce filing in 2010.
"Mary inspired our family with her kindness, her love, her gentle soul and generous spirit," Kennedy Jr.'s family said in a prepared statement. "Mary was a genius at friendship, a tremendously gifted architect and a pioneer and relentless advocate of green design who enhanced her cutting edge, energy efficient creations with exquisite taste and style. She applied her talent, energy and passion which were both brilliant and abundant, to advocacy for treatment and finding a cure for food allergies and asthma. She was an instrumental co-founder and driving force of the Food Allergy Initiative to which contributions may be made in her name."
Kennedy Jr. is the son of former Sen. Robert Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
In 2010, Kennedy Jr. filed for divorce, according to the Journal News in White Plains, N.Y., a day after Bedford police responded to the Kennedy home for a "domestic incident" during which Mary Kennedy allegedly was intoxicated.
Three days later, Mary Kennedy was stopped outside of a school after she steered her Volvo station wagon over a curb, according to the Journal News. She was charged with driving while intoxicated after her blood alcohol level was reported to be 0.11 percent, above the legal limit of 0.08 percent. She pleaded guilty to driving while impaired, the paper reported, and her license was suspended.
The next month, August 2010, she was arrested again for driving under the influence of drugs.
Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, broadly addressed counterterrorism issues speaking before the American Bar Association’s standing Committee on Law and National Security Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
Olsen used his speech to push for renewal of sections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which will expire at the end of the year. Recently Olsen and FBI Director Robert Mueller have been saying the impact of not renewing the FISA amendments would leave the U.S. defenseless in the counterterrorism realm by not being able to intercept certain overseas communications.
Olsen said that core al Qaeda leaders are having difficulty communicating with operatives. Repeating the analysis of Mueller and other top intelligence community officials Olsen cited AQAP as the most active and dangerous of the al Qaeda affiliates.
Olsen said that the intelligence community is taking action to locate AQAP’s bomb maker Ibrahim al-Asiri, noting the bomb maker is “a very important person for us to find out where he is and to take appropriate action.”
On the issue of homegrown terrorism Olsen said the intelligence and law enforcement community face “real obstacles on the homegrown side,” citing the difficulty in detecting lone extremists who may not provide typical warning indicators of terrorist activity.
In a question-and-answer session, Olsen also addressed the issue of media leaks relating to the recent bomb plot and called it “devastating.” “Leaks do endanger people’s lives...that is not an exaggeration,” Olsen said.
One reporter questioned Olsen about his preference for using drones to neutralize terrorist threats, or if he favored capture and interrogation. Olsen responded saying, “I have a strong preference for gaining intelligence. That is our goal...we need to always take advantage of whatever opportunities we have to interrogate."
Digital Vision/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- There were chuckles all around the Pentagon Wednesday as an alert notice appeared on computers warning building employees a swarm of bees had parked themselves outside an entrance to the building. The swarm of about 10,000 European honey bees landed on the branch of a small tree just outside the Pentagon's Mall Entrance.
By coincidence, a short time later a fire alarm led to the evacuation of a portion of the building. On the way out of the building a Pentagon employee was overheard saying, “I wonder if it’s the swarm of bees?”
Turns out, the two events were not connected, but they piqued journalists' interest in the “hive” of activity at the entrance.
A short time later, another building notification told building employees that bee specialists had been called in to deal with the bee swarm at that entrance.
Some amateur beekeepers who work at the Pentagon and who, after seeing the internal alerts had shown up to assist the local beekeeper, called to resolve the situation. The beekeeper cut off a portion of the branch and placed it in a cardboard box with the expectation that most would follow their queen bee into the box.
Air Force Lt. Col. Craig Bucher was one of the amateur beekeepers who had arrived to help. With the bees safely in the box, he planned to take them home and share them with fellow bee enthusiasts.
“Now that we have the hive," Bucher said, “I’m in touch with others in the area who would really jump at the opportunity to incorporate it in their home.
“I’m going to take this hive home with me and then put the word out to someone who can hopefully give them a good home,” he said.
Bucher explained that the swarm of bees had likely split off from another hive and followed a new queen bee to look for a new home. He said that typically a mature hive would have between 30,000 to 50,000 bees so the Pentagon swarm might have numbered 10,000.
He estimated that the bees who’d landed on the tree “had stopped to rest” there as they were looking for a new home.
PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- Enjoy the sun. If you live along a narrow band across the southwestern United States, Sunday afternoon will bring the rare treat of an annular solar eclipse -- a ring of sunlight as the new moon, passing between Earth and the Sun, blocks most, but not all, of the Sun’s disc.
Mind you, this is not the kind of eclipse of which you usually see pictures -- the moon blocking the sun completely, creating a few moments of near-night in the middle of the day, with only the sun’s ethereal corona visible around the moon’s edges. The sky will darken a bit, but there will still be a blindingly bright ring (an “annulus” in Latin) of sun, and it’s dangerous to look directly at it.
Still, there will be a striking sight to see, if you look at a heavily-filtered image projected onto a screen through binoculars or a small telescope, or protect your eyes with No. 14 arcwelders glass (not something found at most hardware stores).
The ring will be visible Sunday afternoon in a strip that begins on the California-Oregon coast and stretches southeastward across Reno, Nev., the Grand Canyon, and Albuquerque, N.M., and ends at sunset near Lubbock, Texas.
Why this rare annular eclipse? Because the moon, constant in size as it appears, does not move in a perfect circle around us. Its orbit is slightly elliptical. On average, it’s about 239,000 miles away, but at its closest it comes within about 225,000 miles of us. At its farthest -- as it will be Sunday -- it’s a little more than 250,000 miles away. It’s just enough of a difference so that the moon will only cover 88 percent of the sun.
The Interior Department points out that a number of national parks -- Redwoods and Lassen in California, Zion in Utah, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona, Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico -- will all be at the center of the eclipse path.
But if you’re in the eclipse path, you really just need a place with a good clear view westward. You may want to go to a local observatory or planetarium, where viewing parties are likely.
And if you don’t feel like investing in welder’s glasses, you may be happy -- seriously -- with a piece of paper, or leafy trees around you. Prick a small hole in the paper and it will act as a tiny lens, projecting a miniscule image of the sun onto the pavement. Likewise, take advantage of the natural pinholes in many leaves. As the eclipse approaches maximum, look down, not up. If you’re lucky, you’ll see hundreds of little eclipse images dancing on the ground beneath your feet.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Forty-two years after his selfless act of heroism during the Vietnam War saved the lives of his fellow soldiers, Army Specialist Leslie H. Sabo Jr. posthumously received the Medal of Honor Wednesday.
"This Medal of Honor is bestowed on a single soldier for his singular courage. But it speaks to the service of an entire generation, and to the sacrifice of so many military families," President Obama said in a White House ceremony before presenting the nation's highest decoration for valor to Sabo's widow and brother.
Sabo, then 22, died on May 10, 1970, as his patrol was ambushed near a remote border area of Cambodia. The attack by North Vietnamese troops killed seven of Sabo's fellow soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division and would come to be known as the "Mother's Day ambush."
"Les was in the rear -- and he could have stayed there. But those fighters were unloading on his brothers," Obama said. "So Les charged forward and took several of those fighters out."
When an enemy grenade landed near a wounded comrade, Sabo used his body to shield the soldier from the blast as he tossed the grenade out of the way. Even though he had been wounded by automatic weapons fire, Sabo "did something extraordinary," Obama said. "He began to crawl straight toward an enemy bunker, its machine guns blazing."
"Les kept crawling, kept pulling himself along, closer to that bunker, even as the bullets hit the ground all around him. And then, he grabbed a grenade and he pulled the pin. It's said he held that grenade and didn't throw it until the last possible moment, knowing it would take his own life, but knowing he could silence that bunker. And he did. He saved his comrades, who meant more to him than life," Obama said.
Sabo's commanders nominated him for the Medal of Honor, but the request was somehow lost. "Four decades after Leslie's sacrifice, we can set the record straight," Obama said Wednesday.
"Leslie Sabo left behind a wife who adored him, a brother who loved him, parents who cherished him, and family and friends who admired him. But they never knew. For decades, they never knew their Les had died a hero. The fog of war, and paperwork that seemed to get lost in the shuffle, meant this story was almost lost to history," the president said.
A campaign to correct the oversight began in 1999 when Tony Mabb, a researcher for the 101st Airborne Division Association's magazine, came across a thick file of Sabo's paperwork in the National Archives. Mabb contacted members of Congress, who worked to extend the statute of limitations for nominations for the Medal of Honor so Sabo's case could be reviewed. Nominations for the medal usually had to be made within three years of the incident.
After legislation was passed in 2008 that eliminated that hurdle, the Army's recommendation that Sabo should receive the Medal of Honor was forwarded to the White House in 2010. The White House announced in April that President Obama would posthumously award Sabo the medal.
The president Wednesday personally thanked Mabb for his determination to "right this wrong."
Sabo emigrated with his family from Austria as a toddler. He met Rose Mary Brown at a high school football game. They dated for two years and were married in 1969, after he received his draft notice.
The 30 days of Army leave he took before being deployed overseas were the only time he and his wife would spend together as a married couple before he was killed in action the following May.
Brown was visibly shaken Wednesday as the president, standing with his arm around her, presented her with her husband's Medal of Honor. As she wiped away tears, Obama leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Afterwards, an emotional Brown told reporters, "I know a piece of cloth and a medal won't bring him back, but my heart beats with pride for Leslie."
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- FBI director Robert S. Mueller III Wednesday disclosed that the FBI is investigating leaks to the news media about the recently disrupted plot by al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate to smuggle a bomb designed to be concealed in underwear onto a U.S.-bound jet.
A day after the plot was first reported, it was revealed that the individual at the center of the plot was a double agent working for Britain’s MI-6 secret intelligence service and the CIA along with Saudi Arabian intelligence assets.
“We have initiated an investigation into this leak,” Mueller testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. “Leaks such as this threaten ongoing operations, puts at risk the lives of sources, makes it much more difficult to recruit sources, and damages our relationships with our foreign partners.”
“Leaks such as this have a -- I don’t want to overuse the word ‘devastating’ -- but have a huge impact on our ability to do our business, not just on a particular source and the threat to the particular source, but your ability to recruit sources is severely hampered,” Mueller said, describing the implications of the leak of sensitive national security information.
Mueller continued, “In cases such as this, your -- the relationship with your counterparts overseas are damaged [sic] which means that an inhibition in the willingness of others to share information with us where they don’t think that information will remain secure. So it also has some long-term effects, which is why it is so important to make certain that the persons who are responsible for the leak are brought to justice.”
The investigation is likely being run by the Justice Department’s counterespionage section and agents from the FBI’s Washington Field Office.
Justice Department officials and an FBI spokesman declined to comment on the nature of the investigation. The CIA also declined comment.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is also conducting a review with the DNI’s general counsel to see if the leaks originated in any of the 16 agencies that DNI director James Clapper oversees.
Earlier in the day Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, addressed the issue of media leaks relating to the plot and called it “devastating.”
“Leaks do endanger people’s lives...that is not an exaggeration,” Olsen said, speaking before the American Bar Association’s standing Committee on Law and National Security, in Washington, D.C.
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FBI(WASHINGTON) -- An Alabama mother whose son joined an al Qaeda group in Africa said she can't turn her back on her boy even though he advocates attacking America and hasn't been in direct contact with her in years. 
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