A week after Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly embraced Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s ability to audit the Legislature, Beacon Hill’s top Democrats said Wednesday they are mulling over unspecified potential alterations to the voter law.
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Mass. AG Campbell: Gaetz ‘absolutely is not qualified’ to be nation’s AG
President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Rep. Matt Gaetz to become the nation’s attorney general was met with shock Wednesday, including from fellow Republicans. Massachusetts’ Democratic attorney general was among those highly critical of the pick.
Trump announced Wednesday that Gaetz, a firebrand lawmaker from Florida, was his nominee for the top law enforcement post in the U.S.
Speaking Wednesday at a children’s mental health event at the JFK Library and Museum in Boston, Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell of Massachusetts blasted the move.
“I got caught up in a lot of conversations with respect to who was just nominated to be, possibly, the next attorney general of this country,” Campbell told the crowd at “Voices From the Front Lines,” an event hosted by Boston Community Pediatrics.
Her mention of Gaetz’s name was met with some audible boos.
She said Gaetz is “currently under investigation for several allegations, including allegations of abuse and assault and sexual assault against children.”
While he was not criminally charged, Gaetz was the subject of a federal investigation into the alleged sex trafficking of a 17-year-old girl. The Justice Department ended its probe last year.
The House Ethics Committee has been investigating Gaetz for allegations involving sexual misconduct and drug use.
After his nomination Wednesday, Gaetz submitted a resignation letter, which Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said is effective immediately. The move deprives the ethics committee of jurisdiction and ends its investigation.
Campbell also pointed to Gaetz’s positions on reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ issues as causes for concern, adding that he “has said that he would revoke federal funding to organizations, including nonprofit health care organizations, that help migrants.”
She told those in attendance that state attorneys general will play a role in addressing the needs of their constituencies, no matter what is happening with the federal government.
“Right now across the country, the AGs, including myself, will be on the front lines to protect everything that we hold valuable here in Massachusetts, including the incredible organizations such as this one that are doing innovative and remarkable work in the health care space,” she said.
Speaking with NBC10 Boston after the event, Campbell reiterated her apprehension about the man who could hold her position on a national scale.
“This is also someone who does not believe, I think, in the rule of law [and] absolutely is not qualified,” she said. “I’m all for supporting the president-elect as we transition this power, it is a basic tenet of our democracy, but at the same time, clear-eyed about what can jeopardize and risk what we’re trying to do here in Massachusetts.”
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Both on stage and in her remarks to NBC10 Boston, Campbell said that Gaetz is a “Holocaust denier.”
Gaetz came under fire in 2018 for bringing a white nationalist who questioned the Holocaust as a guest to Trump’s State of the Union address, later claiming he was not aware of the man’s views.
While NBC10 Boston did not find evidence of Gaetz denying the Holocaust himself, the State of the Union incident is not the only case that has prompted allegations of antisemitism.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt — who praised Trump’s selections of Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel — lambasted the nomination Wednesday.
“Rep. Matt Gaetz has a long history of trafficking in antisemitism — from explaining his vote against the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act by invoking the centuries-old trope that Jews killed Jesus to defending the Great Replacement Theory and inviting a Holocaust denier as his 2018 State of the Union guest,” he wrote on social media. “He should not be appointed to any high office, much less one overseeing the impartial execution of our nation’s laws.”
Trump’s nominees will need to be approved by the majority of the Senate. Republicans will hold a slim majority with 52 or 53 seats, depending on the result of a recount in Pennsylvania. Several GOP senators have already called into question whether Gaetz will have enough support.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said he would face “a significant challenge,” adding that she doesn’t think he’s “a serious nomination for the attorney general.” Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said she was “certain that there will be a lot of questions,” pointing to the House Ethics Committee investigation. And Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota called his confirmation “a long shot.”
Boston sues chef Barbara Lynch, claiming over $1.6M in unpaid restaurant taxes
Renowned Boston chef Barbara Lynch and her restaurants owe more than $1.6 million in unpaid taxes, the city said in a civil lawsuit filed Wednesday.
The city filed the lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court in an effort to recover the tax money, which is still accruing by about $367 every day, according to its complaint.
“Ms. Lynch has failed, directly and through her corporate entities, to pay taxes due and owing to the City of Boston despite clear notification,” the complaint says, noting her announcement last month that she was closing her last two restaurants.
No. 9 Park owes the most of all Lynch’s restaurants, more than half a million in taxes dating back more than a decade, according to the lawsuit.
Asked about the lawsuit, a representative for Lynch shared this statement with NBC10 Boston: “Ms. Lynch does not, nor has ever owned the properties of the restaurants. Each restaurant is a distinct LLC. We are learning of this for the first time in the press and the matter has been referred to the company lawyers.”
Lynch herself and the restaurants’ corporate entities didn’t pay personal property tax for many years, except one payment from each one of the entities in August 2021, according to the lawsuit. It describes the corporate ownership of her Boston restaurants, saying the proceeds from the sale of her restaurants would be funneled “through the entities and ultimately at least in part to herself individually.”
Lynch has been named a best U.S. chef and outstanding restaurateur by the James Beard Foundation. In 2017, she was listed as one of Time’s 100 most influential people.
Mass. has a unique system to investigate murder cases — but is it working?
The Karen Read trial put a lot of eyes on Massachusetts law enforcement. Now, an author who researches homicides in the state is sharing her thoughts.
True crime writer Susan Zalkind says the case exposed something about Massachusetts State Police she has suspected for years. Despite the agency’s 94% homicide solve rate between 2019 and 2023, she says across the state, murder investigations are susceptible to conflicts of interest and a lack of oversight.
“The only reason that we know so much about what happened in the Karen Read investigation is because the feds stepped in,” Zalkind said.
Evidence in the high-profile case included blood collected in red Solo cups and stored in a grocery bag.
The revelation was the kind of moment that led to endless chatter on social media and criticism from legal experts.
For Zalkind, who looks into why things like this can happen in Massachusetts homicide investigations, the Read trial was a light bulb moment.
NBC10 Boston went through some of the police work from the Read trial to understand Zalkind’s perspective. She says the commonwealth’s main obstacle is the lack of a centralized, statewide major crimes unit with highly trained investigators, like every other state in New England has.
“The problem with how Massachusetts investigates homicide is that we use a localized approach,” she said.
State police detective units embedded in each of the 11 district attorney’s offices across Massachusetts’ 14 counties investigate homicides, except for the cities of Boston, Worcester, Springfield and Pittsfield, where the local police departments have their own homicide units.
Zalkind says she has not found this same organizational approach elsewhere, and NBC10 Boston’s research of other states also did not produce an exact match.
She says the Bay State way is why Boston Police Officer Brian Albert wasn’t questioned for days by troopers in the Read case, even though the victim, fellow Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, was found incapacitated on Albert’s front lawn.
“That is a clear example of ‘Protect your own culture,’” Zalkind argued.
Zalkind referred to one detail that emerged in Read trial testimony, when Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor was questioned about a text message. When a friend said the homeowner would “receive some s***,” Proctor replied, “Nope, homeowner is a Boston cop, too.”
“You have Michael Proctor saying that the reason he didn’t go into Brian Albert’s home was because he was a Boston cop,” Zalkind said.
Proctor pushed back when questioned, saying what he wrote did not mean he would not focus on Albert as a subject of investigation. But Zalkind says the statement is telling.
“Just a clear-cut example of the culture that we have here of local police, and state police who are localized, not following leads that might go back to members of law enforcement and other people in power,” Zalkind said. “We do things differently here in Massachusetts, and we’re seeing corruption over and over again.”
More on the Karen Read case
Zalkind worked on a Hulu docuseries called “Murders Before the Marathon,” which questions unfollowed leads in a 2011 Middlesex County triple homicide. The district attorney’s office there says the case remains open and active.
Since the docuseries in 2022, Zalkind’s book, “Waltham Murders,” has explored more deeply whether a lax investigation allowed Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to get away with murder before he killed again on Boylston Street less than two years later.
Criminal justice professor James Bigelow was a trooper for 16 years in the Worcester County District Attorney’s Office detective unit. He says the policing in Norfolk County for the Read case was the exception, not the rule.
“You’ve got one situation where it looks bad. Well, what about the other 2,300 guys on the state police that are out there every day doing the right thing?” Bigelow asked. “It’s not newsworthy, so it doesn’t catch that attention.”
Another thing worth noting — Massachusetts State Police homicide solve rates over the last five years average 94%, excluding data from some of the Bay State’s largest cities. Nationally, the average is much lower, around 50%. A case is marked “solved” once an arrest warrant is issued for a murder suspect. By that definition, O’Keefe’s death is considered a solved murder.
We’ll dig into policing a lot more next week when we launch our new series Commonwealth Confidential: State of policing.
What’s next for the Everett soccer stadium proposal?
It’s a long-awaited goal that’s finally taking a step forward — but Massachusetts lawmakers’ agreement to remove a zoning restriction on a former factory in Everett doesn’t mean a Kraft family-funded stadium for the New En…
Police investigating prostitution conduct searches in Everett, Malden
Officers investigated two businesses in Everett, Massachusetts, and a residence in nearby Malden on Wednesday as part of a prostitution investigation, police said.
No one was arrested, but four people were interviewed, Everett police said in …
