LAS VEGAS (AP) — A retired professional wrestler and former congressional candidate in Nevada and Texas has been indicted on a murder charge in the death of an Idaho man who suffered a head injury during a Halloween Party at a Las Vegas Strip hotel.

Daniel Rodimer, 45, who now lives in Texas, is expected to appear before a Nevada judge May 8 following his indictment Friday in the death of Christopher Tapp.

His defense attorneys, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, said Friday that Rodimer “maintains his complete innocence and looks forward to his day in court.”

Tapp, 47, of Idaho Falls, was injured Oct. 29 at the Resorts World hotel and taken to a hospital, where he died several days later, police said. He had served more than 20 years in prison in Idaho in a 1996 killing before receiving an $11.7 million settlement from Idaho Falls in 2022 in a wrongful conviction lawsuit.

Investigators initially believed Tapp had been fatally injured in a fall, but they later learned that he had been in an argument with Rodimer.

Rodimer, a Republican who lost bids for Congress in Nevada in 2020 and in Texas in 2021, surrendered to Las Vegas police for his arrest March 6 and remains free on a $200,000 bail.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — The Federal Election Commission has fined the campaign fund of a former Illinois congressman $43,475 for failing to refund excess contributions in a timely manner.

A letter from the FEC this month reports the fine against Republican Rodney Davis’ campaign committee, Rodney for Congress, and its treasurer, Thomas Charles Datwyler.

The violations occurred during the 2021-2022 election cycle. Federal campaign finance law prohibits contributions of more than $2,900 per cycle from an individual or single-candidate political committee and $5,000 per election from a multicandidate committee. Excess contributions must be refunded or redesignated within 60 days.

In a negotiated settlement with Davis’ committee and Datwyler, the FEC found that one contribution of $3,625 and general election contributions of $479,784 were not properly redistributed within 60 days, resulting in the fine. Davis was not eligible for the larger amount because he was not on the 2022 general election ballot.

A call to a telephone number associated with Davis went unanswered. A phone message was left for Datwyler.

The FEC noted that the committee disclosed refunds of excessive contributions on quarterly and year-end reports for 2022 and in January 2024 filed paperwork disclosing the refunds that were part of the negotiated settlement.

Davis, a 54-year-old Taylorville resident, served five terms in Congress. After the 2020 congressional redistricting controlled by Democrats in the Illinois General Assembly, Davis was pushed into a district with conservative Republican Mary Miller, who beat Davis in the 2022 GOP primary with more than 57% of the vote.

Davis’ committee told the FEC it would dissolve upon resolving the matter. The fine is payable by July 18.

Harvey Weinstein will appear in a New York City court next week, the first step in potentially retrying the film mogul after his 2020 rape conviction was overturned.

New York’s highest court on Thursday threw out Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction, ordering a new trial. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has said it intends to pursue a retrial, but gave no indication about the agenda for Wednesday’s hearing.

“We will do everything in our power to retry this case, and remain steadfast in our commitment to survivors of sexual assault,” the district attorney’s office said in a statement Friday.

Meanwhile, a woman Weinstein was sent to prison for sexually assaulting said Friday she is considering whether she would testify at any retrial.

Mimi Haley said she is still processing Thursday’s decision by the state Court of Appeals and is considering numerous factors, including the trauma of having to prepare for another trial and again relive what happened to her.

“It was retraumatizing and grueling and exhausting and all the things,” she said during a news conference with her attorney, Gloria Allred. “I definitely don’t want to actually go through that again. But for the sake of keeping going and doing the right thing and because it is what happened, I would consider it.”

Weinstein was convicted in New York in February 2020 of forcing himself on Haley, a TV and film production assistant, in 2006 for oral sex and raping an aspiring actress in 2013.

The Associated Press does not generally identify people alleging sexual assault unless they consent to be named and Haley has agreed to be named.

Weinstein, 72, will remain in prison because he was convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of another rape. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison in that case.

Thursday’s Court of Appeals court ruling in New York essentially resets Weinstein’s case, with next week’s hearing the first step in the process of potentially retrying him. Prosecutors will work off the same indictment, albeit excluding the charges he was acquitted of four years ago.

Among other things, authorities will need to sort out where Weinstein is incarcerated while he awaits a new trial in New York. He could be sent to the city’s notorious Riker’s Island jail complex, or to California to begin serving a sentence for his conviction there.

Allred said the New York decision shows how important it was to also bring charges in California, even when critics called that prosecution superfluous.

Weinstein’s attorney, Arthur Aidala, did not immediately respond to an email seeking a response to Haley’s comments. But on Thursday he called the state Court of Appeals ruling “a tremendous victory for every criminal defendant in the state of New York.”

The court overturned Weinstein’s 23-year sentence in a 4-3 decision, saying “the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts” and permitted questions about Weinstein’s “bad behavior” if he had testified. It called this “highly prejudicial” and “an abuse of judicial discretion.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul said Friday that her office is analyzing the scale of the decision and how the state can make sure that all women feel safe coming forward.

“I don’t want this to be a moment of stifling the environment that was created where finally we were calling out people who were abusing women in their presence,” Hochul said. “We don’t want to have any setbacks where there’s this sense that you now have to be silenced, and that’s something that we have to protect.”

Allred said she welcomed the governor’s comments and likely would be suggesting possible legislation. She said she’s concerned that the ruling will lead to fewer cases being brought, especially against high-profile defendants.

“Then there will be not only no access to justice for the ‘Me too’ witnesses, prior bad-act witnesses, but in addition for the actual victim of the crime…where it could have been prosecuted, would have been prosecuted otherwise,” she said.

Haley said she has talked to other alleged victims of Weinstein about the ruling, but the subject of testifying again did not come up.

“What would make me want to do it again would just be, like I said in the past, this isn’t just about me,” she said. “It’s a really important case. It’s in the public eye. It’s really difficult for me personally, but it’s important for the collective.”

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Associated Press writer Anthony Izaguirre contributed to this story from Albany, New York.

By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) – A former McKinsey & Co partner sued the global consulting firm on Friday and accused it of defaming him and making him a “scapegoat” to distract attention from its work advising OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma and other manufacturers of opioid pain medications.

Arnab Ghatak, who was fired in 2021, filed the lawsuit in New York state court just two days after Reuters and others reported that the U.S. Department of Justice was conducting a criminal investigation of McKinsey’s role in the U.S. opioid epidemic.

Part of that investigation concerns whether McKinsey obstructed justice, an inquiry related to McKinsey’s disclosure that it had fired two partners who communicated about deleting documents related to their opioids work, people familiar with the matter said.

Those partners included Ghatak, who had been a senior partner and McKinsey’s global head of medical affairs. In his lawsuit, Ghatak alleged that McKinsey and its global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, lied to the U.S. Congress and the public about his role deleting emails.

Ghatak accused Sternfels of misleading Congress when he testified before a House of Representatives committee in 2022 that the two partners were terminated for violating a document retention policy, one that Ghatak said in fact did not exist.

He said McKinsey knew no evidence existed of him improperly deleting emails, yet had promoted the narrative “to create a scapegoat as a diversion from their own decades long work in non abuse deterrent opioids.”

The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages from McKinsey and Sternfels, who was also named as a defendant.

A spokesperson for McKinsey called the complaint “entirely meritless.”

“We terminated him for serious violations of our professional standards,” the McKinsey spokesperson said. “We fully stand by our decision to terminate Dr. Ghatak and by our public statements on the matter.”

A U.S. Department of Justice spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

McKinsey previously agreed to pay nearly $1 billion to settle widespread opioid lawsuits and other related legal actions by states, local governments, school districts, Native American tribes and health insurers accusing it of contributing to a deadly U.S. opioid addiction epidemic.

McKinsey in 2019 said it would no longer advise clients on any opioid-related businesses. McKinsey did not admit to wrongdoing in those civil settlements.

Purdue pleaded guilty in 2020 to charges over its handling of opioids. A multi-billion-dollar settlement it reached in bankruptcy court resolving lawsuits alleging it fueled the epidemic is on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court considers a challenge by the Biden administration to the deal.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; additional reporting by Chris Prentice; Editing by Leslie Adler)

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Former Rep. Peter Meijer withdrew his name from the U.S. Senate race in Michigan on Friday, ending a longshot bid to become the Republican nominee and return to Congress after being ousted by voters for supporting an effort to impeach then-President Donald Trump.

Meijer announced his candidacy in November and contended for the Republican nomination against former U.S. Reps. Mike Rogers and Justin Amash, in addition to wealthy businessman Sandy Pensler.

Meijer met an April 23 deadline to turn in petition signatures to get his name on the ballot for the August primary but withdrew from the race on Friday, a Michigan Secretary of State spokesperson confirmed to The Associated Press. Meijer’s name will not be on the ballot since he met a 4 p.m. deadline Friday to withdraw from the race.

“The hard reality is the fundamentals of the race have changed significantly since we launched this campaign. After prayerful consideration, today I withdrew my name from the primary ballot,” Meijer said in a statement.

Although many believed that Meijer had the potential to be competitive in a general election, his vote to impeach Trump undermined his bid to be competitive in a primary in a state that supported Trump in 2016. Trump has endorsed Rogers in the race.

Meijer, who is from Grand Rapids, is an heir to a Midwestern grocery store empire and a former U.S. Army Reserve officer who served in Iraq. He was seen as part of the next generation of Republican leaders when he was elected to the U.S. House in 2020 at only 32 years old.

Meijer was among 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 following the deadly mob siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He then would lose reelection to a Trump-backed primary opponent in 2022 despite having a significant fundraising advantage.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem — a potential running mate for presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — is getting attention again. This time, it’s for a new book where she writes about killing an unruly dog, and a smelly goat, too.

The Guardian obtained a copy of Noem’s soon-to-be released book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.” In it, she tells the story of the ill-fated Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer she was training for pheasant hunting.

She writes, according to the Guardian, that the tale was included to show her willingness to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it has to be done. But backlash was swift against the Republican governor, who just a month ago drew attention and criticism for posting an infomercial-like video about cosmetic dental surgery she received out-of-state.

In her book, Noem writes that she took Cricket on a hunting trip with older dogs in hopes of calming down the wild puppy. Instead, Cricket chased the pheasants while “having the time of her life.”

On the way home from the hunting trip, Noem writes that she stopped to talk to a family. Cricket got out of Noem’s truck and attacked and killed some of the family’s chickens, then bit the governor.

Noem apologized profusely, wrote the distraught family a check for the deceased chickens, and helped them dispose of the carcasses, she writes. Cricket “was the picture of joy” as all that unfolded.

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, deeming her “untrainable.”

“At that moment,” Noem writes, “I realized I had to put her down.” She led Cricket to a gravel pit and killed her.

That wasn’t all. Noem writes that her family also owned a “nasty and mean” male goat that smelled bad and liked to chase her kids. She decided to go ahead and kill the goat, too. She writes that the goat survived the first shot, so she went back to the truck, got another shell, then shot him again, killing him.

Soon thereafter, a school bus dropped off Noem’s children. Her daughter asked, “Hey, where’s Cricket?” Noem writes.

The excerpts drew immediate criticism on social media platforms, where many posted photos of their own pets. President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign surfaced the story on social media alongside a photo of Noem with Trump.

The Lincoln Project, a conservative group that opposes Trump, posted a video that it called a “public service announcement,” showing badly behaved dogs and explaining that “shooting your dog in the face is not an option.”

“You down old dogs, hurt dogs, and sick dogs humanely, not by shooting them and tossing them in a gravel pit,” Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project wrote on X. “Unsporting and deliberately cruel … but she wrote this to prove the cruelty is the point.”

Noem took to social media to defend herself.

“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” she said on X. “Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.”

She urged readers to preorder her book if they want “more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping.”

Republican strategist Alice Stewart said that while some Republican voters might appreciate the story “as a testament to her grit,” it ultimately creates a distraction for Noem.

“It’s never a good look when people think you’re mistreating animals,” Stewart said. “I have a dog I love like a child and I can’t imagine thinking about doing that, I can’t imagine doing that, and I can’t imagine writing about it in a book and telling all the world.”

It’s not the first time Noem has grabbed national attention.

In 2019, she stood behind the state’s anti-meth campaign even as it became the subject of some mockery for the tagline “Meth. We’re on it.” Noem said the campaign got people talking about the methamphetamine epidemic and helped lead some to treatment.

Last month, Noem posted a nearly five-minute video on X lavishing praise on a team of cosmetic dentists in Texas for giving her a smile she said she can be proud of. “I love my new family at Smile Texas!” she wrote.

South Dakota law bans gifts of over $100 from lobbyists to public officials and their immediate family. A violation is a misdemeanor punishable up to a year in jail and/or a $2,000 fine. The state attorney general’s office has declined to answer questions about whether the gift ban applies to people who are not registered lobbyists.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — U.N. investigators are looking into allegations against 14 of the 19 staffers from the U.N. relief agency for Palestinians who Israel claims were involved in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants that spurred the latest war in Gaza, a spokesman said Friday.

The announcement by U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric provided the first information on the investigation ordered by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. The U.N.’s internal watchdog — the Office of Internal Oversight Services — is carrying out the probe following Israel’s initial allegations in January.

The watchdog, known as the OIOS, reported that of the 19 allegations against UNRWA agency staffers, one case was closed because Israel provided no evidence and four others were suspended for lack of sufficient evidence, Dujarric said.

The United Nations was informed in January of Israeli allegations that 12 employees of the agency known as UNRWA had taken part in the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, when Hamas and other Palestinian militants killed about 1,200 people and seized some 250 as hostages.

The agency had at the time terminated the contracts of all those employees.

Dujarric said the U.N. later received additional allegations from Israel about seven UNRWA staffers — five in March and two in April.

A separate, independent review of UNRWA’s neutrality. led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna was released on Monday. It said Israel had never before expressed concerns about anyone on the staff lists that UNRWA had given Israel every year since 2011.

UNRWA has 32,000 staff in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinian territories, including 13,000 in Gaza who provide education, health care, food and other services to several million Palestinians and their families.

The agency’s head, Philippe Lazzarini, said Tuesday that nearly 180 UNRWA staffers have been killed during the Israeli offensive in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, around two-thirds of them children and women, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.

Israel’s original allegations led to the suspension of contributions to UNRWA by the United States, its biggest donor, and more than a dozen other countries, causing a pause in funding worth about $450 million, according to Colonna’s report.

A number of countries have since resumed contributions, but the U.S. Congress has suspended any money for the agency until March 2025.

Dujarric on Friday reiterated Guterres’ appeal to donors to support UNRWA generously. Lazzarini, the agency’s commissioner general, says UNRWA has enough money to operate only through June. Dujarric pointed out that UNRWA had released the original information about the Israeli allegations and called for the independent review of its neutrality.

Colonna’s 48-page report said UNRWA has “robust” procedures to uphold the U.N. principle of neutrality but cited serious gaps in implementation. It made 50 recommendations to improve UNRWA’s neutrality, which Guterres and Lazzarini have pledged to implement.

Dujarric said OIOS has not given any indication when its investigation of the 14 staffers would be completed, not did he elaborate on the allegations. He told reporters that OIOS investigators had met with Israeli authorities and would visit again in May.

“These discussions are continuing and … have enabled progress on the investigations,” he said.

Of the 12 initial cases, eight remain under investigation, he said. Three cases have been suspended and one staffer has been cleared. U.N. “is exploring corrective administration action,” Dujarric said.

UNRWA’s Lazzarini said on Tuesday that anyone cleared by OIOS would be reinstated.

Of the seven additional cases brought to the U.N.’s attention after January, Dujarric said six remain under investigation and one has been suspended pending additional information.

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Find more of AP’s Israel-Hamas coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — A tornado plowed through suburban Omaha, Nebraska, on Friday afternoon, damaging hundreds of homes and other structures as the twister tore for miles along farmland and into subdivisions. Some injuries were reported but there were no immediate reports that anyone was killed.

Multiple tornadoes were reported in Nebraska but the most destructive storm moved from a largely rural area into suburbs northwest of Omaha, a city of 485,000 people.

Photos on social media showed ravaged homes and shredded trees. Video showed homes with roofs stripped of shingles, in a rural area near Omaha. Law enforcement were blocking off roads in the area.

Hundreds of houses sustained damage in Omaha, mostly in the Elkhorn area in the western part of the city, Omaha police Lt. Neal Bonacci said.

Police and firefighters are now going door-to-door helping people who are trapped.

Omaha Fire Chief Kathy Bossman said crews had gone to the “hardest hit area” and had a plan to search anywhere someone could be trapped.

“They’re going to be putting together a strategic plan for a detailed search of the area, starting with the properties with most damage,” Bossman said. “We’ll be looking throughout properties in debris piles, we’ll be looking in basements, trying to find any victims and make sure everybody is rescued who needs assistance.”

Bonacci said many homes were destroyed or severely damaged.

“You definitely see the path of the tornado,” Bonacci said.

In one area of Elkhorn, dozens of newly built, large homes were damaged. At least six were wrecked, including one that was leveled, while others had the top half ripped off.

There were dozens of emergency vehicles in the area.

“We watched it touch down like 200 yards over there and then we took shelter,” said Pat Woods, who lives in Elkhorn. “We could hear it coming through. When we came up our fence was gone and we looked to the northwest and the whole neighborhood’s gone.”

His wife, Kim Woods added, “The whole neighborhood just to the north of us is pretty flattened.”

Dhaval Naik, who said he works with the man whose house was demolished, said three people, including a child, were in the basement when the tornado hit. They got out safely.

KETV-TV video showed one woman being removed from a wrecked home on a stretcher in Blair, a city just north of Omaha.

Bonacci said only two people have been transported for treatment, both with minor injuries.

He said crews are now doing a second search of homes. He said fire crews would work throughout the night to check all the unsafe structures and make sure no one is inside.

“People had warnings of this and that saved lives,” Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said, of the few serious injuries.

The tornado warning was issued in the Omaha area on Friday afternoon just as children were due to be released from school. Many schools had students shelter in place until the storm passed. Hours later, buses were still transporting students home.

“Was it one long track tornado or was it several tornadoes?” said Becky Kern, the warning coordination meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Omaha office.

She said the agency planned to send out multiple crews over the next several days to determine the number of tornadoes and their strength, and that it could take up to two weeks to finish the evaluation.

“Some appeared to be violent tornadoes,” she continued. “There were tornadoes in different areas. And so it’s like forensic meteorology, we call it, like piecing together, all the damage indicators.”

Another tornado hit an area on the eastern edge of Omaha, passing directly through parts of Eppley Airfield, the city’s airport. Officials closed the airport to aircraft operations to access damage but then reopened the facility, Omaha Airport Authority Chief Strategy Officer Steve McCoy said.

The passenger terminal wasn’t hit by the tornado but people rushed to storm shelters until the twister passed, McCoy said.

Flight delays are expected Friday evening.

After passing through the airport, the tornado crossed the Missouri River and into Iowa, north of Council Bluffs.

Nebraska Emergency Management Agency spokesperson Katrina Sperl said damage is just now being reported. Taylor Wilson, a spokesperson for the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said they hadn’t seen any injuries yet.

Before the tornado hit the Omaha area, three workers in an industrial plant were injured Friday afternoon when a tornado struck an industrial plant in Lancaster County, sheriff’s officials said in an update on the damage.

The building just northeast of the state capital of Lincoln had collapsed with about 70 employees inside and several people trapped, sheriff’s officials said. Everyone was evacuated, and three people had injuries that were considered not life-threatening, authorities said.

Sheriff’s officials say they also had reports of a tipped-over train near Waverly, also in Lancaster County.

Two people who were injured when the tornado passed through Lancaster County were being treated at the trauma center at Bryan Medical Center West Campus in Lincoln, the facility said in a news release. It said the patients were in triage and no details were released on their condition.

The Omaha Public Power District reported that nearly 10,000 customers were without power in the Omaha area.

Daniel Fienhold, manager of the Pink Poodle Steakhouse in Crescent, Iowa, said he was outside watching the weather with his daughter and restaurant employees. He said “it looked like a pretty big tornado was forming” northeast of town.

“It started raining, and then it started hailing, and then all the clouds started to kind of swirl and come together, and as soon as the wind started to pick up, that’s when I headed for the basement, but we never saw it,” Fienhold said.

The forecast for Saturday was ominous. The Weather Service also issued tornado watches across parts of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas. And forecasters warned that large hail and strong wind gusts were possible.

“It does look like a big outbreak again tomorrow,” Kern said. “Maybe slightly farther south.”

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Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas. Associated Press writers Jack Dura in Bismarck, North Dakota, and Jeff Martin in Atlanta contributed to this report.

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A federal judge in Manhattan dismissed for good a lawsuit accusing Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler of sexually assaulting a former teenage model twice in one day in the mid-1970s.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said Jeanne Bellino cannot recover damages from the 76-year-old Tyler under a 2000 New York City law protecting victims of gender-motivated violence.

He said it would be futile to file an amended complaint, and dismissed Bellino’s case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again. Kaplan rejected an earlier complaint in February.

Lawyers for Bellino did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Tyler had “vehemently” denied Bellino’s allegations, which included that he assaulted her in a phone booth as others in his entourage stood by laughing, and later assaulted her in a hotel.

The alleged assaults occurred in the summer of 1975, when Bellino was 17 and Tyler was 27.

Bellino said she encountered Tyler after a friend arranged for her to meet Aerosmith following a Manhattan fashion show.

Kaplan said the city law was not retroactive, and that Bellino’s battery claim would have expired on her 19th birthday.

He also said two more recent state laws, the Adult Survivors Act and Child Victims Act, did not revive Bellino’s claim.

The judge said the first law covered only people who were at least 18 when they become victims, and the second did not cover claims filed after August 2021. Bellino sued in November 2023.

David Long-Daniels, a lawyer for Tyler, in an email said Kaplan “fastidiously applied the facts to the law. That is all we can ask from any judge. We are particularly happy for Steven and his family.”

Tyler has also defended against a lawsuit in Los Angeles, where the plaintiff Julia Misley claimed he sexually assaulted her in 1973 when she was 16 and he was 25.

Bellino’s law firm has represented Misley in that case.

Tyler’s given name is Steven Tallarico. Bellino’s case is Bellino v Tallarico, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 24-00712.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Diane Craft)

PHOENIX (AP) — Authorities revealed Friday the conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges filed against an ex-aide of former President Donald Trump and four attorneys in Arizona’s fake elector case, but the names of former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and lawyer Rudy Giuliani remained blacked out. The Arizona attorney general’s office released a copy of the indictment that revealed nine felony counts had been filed against Mike Roman, who was Trump’s director of Election Day operations, and attorneys John Eastman, Christina Bobb, Boris Epshteyn and Jenna Ellis. The lawyers were accused of organizing an attempt to use fake documents to persuade Congress not to certify Joe Biden’s victory.

The office had announced Wednesday that conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges had been filed against 11 Arizona Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring that Trump won in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election. They included a former state GOP chair, a 2022 U.S. Senate candidate and two sitting state lawmakers.

The identities of seven other defendants, including Giuliani and Meadows, were not released on Wednesday because they had not yet been served with the indictments. They were readily identifiable based on descriptions of the defendants, but the charges against them were not clear. Roman, Epshteyn, Bobb and Ellis declined to comment, did not respond or could not be reached. Representatives of Eastman, Meadows and Giuliani have attacked the prosecution as political.

Trump himself was not charged but was referred to as an unindicted co-conspirator.

With the indictments, Arizona becomes the fourth state where allies of the former president have been charged with using false or unproven claims about voter fraud related to the election.

Those charged in the Arizona case are scheduled for their initial court hearing on May 21.

The 11 people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claiming that Trump carried the state. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document was later sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.

Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes.