Ex-Missouri lawmaker who admitted to COVID fraud sentenced to prison

A former Missouri House speaker was sentenced to 21 months in prison after admitting to misusing federal COVID-19 relief loans for personal expenses, prosecutors said on Monday, March 9.

U.S. District Judge Sarah E. Pitlyk also fined John J. Diehl Jr. $50,000, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Missouri. Diehl, 60, pleaded guilty in September 2025 to wire fraud after he confessed to defrauding the U.S. Small Business Administration out of hundreds of thousands of dollars through fraudulently obtained COVID-19 pandemic loans, prosecutors said.

Diehl formerly served as an alderman for Town and County, an affluent suburb west of downtown St. Louis, and was the chairman of the St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners, according to prosecutors. He resigned as Speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives in 2015 afterThe Kansas City Starreported that he had exchanged sexually suggestive text messages with a college intern.

In a plea agreement last September, prosecutors said Diehl admitted that he obtained a total of $379,900 in federal loans for his law firm from 2020 to 2022. In applications for an Economic Injury Disaster Loan, a program created to help struggling small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic, prosecutors said Diehl promised that his law firm would use the funds to "alleviate economic injury caused by disaster."

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Instead, prosecutors said Diehl used the funds for his personal benefit, such as paying off vehicle payments, bills, and a civil settlement related to his time as state House speaker. His lawyer previously confirmed that Diehl has since repaid the money to the U.S. Treasury.

"This defendant's law practice didn't suffer at all during the COVID-19 pandemic," Assistant U.S. Attorney Hal Goldsmith said during court, according to anews releasefrom the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Missouri.

Goldsmith said Diehl did not use any of the loans for his law firm, adding that Diehl "saw a way to make some easy and cheap money."

FBI: John Diehl 'diverted those funds for personal use'

According to prosecutors, Diehl applied for the federal loan in March 2020 and received $94,900. About two years later, he requested a loan modification and obtained $285,000 from the second loan.

In those applications, prosecutors said Diehl signed an agreement form in which he falsely certified that his law firm "will use all the proceeds of this Loan solely as working capital to alleviate economic injury caused by disaster occurring in the month of January 31, 2020, and continuing thereafter."

"Although he legitimately obtained pandemic relief loans for his law practice, Diehl diverted those funds for personal use rather than the purposes Congress intended," Chris Crocker, special agent in charge of the FBI's St. Louis Division, said in a statement. "Relief programs like these were created to help small businesses survive the COVID-19 pandemic — not to line someone's pockets."

After federal loan proceeds were wired into his law firm's bank account, prosecutors said Diehl would transfer some of the funds to his personal bank accounts. In April 2020, Diehl made a $1,320.15 payment to a country club for personal dues and charges after receiving a $1,000 advance from the loan, according to prosecutors.

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Diehl then received the remainder of the first loan — about $93,900 — in June 2020, and "impermissibly used" the funds for unauthorized personal use, prosecutors said. He made payments on his Tesla, Audi, and Jeep vehicles; personal credit cards; a home mortgage; a family member's college tuition; pool maintenance; additional country club dues and fees; and cash withdrawals.

Diehl also transferred $50,039.55 from the loan to his law firm's retirement plan, in which Diehl was the only participant, in September 2020, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors said Diehl received funds from the second loan in April 2022 and continued to spend the money on personal payments, including fees paid to a St. Louis law firm for a personal legal matter and another transfer of $150,000 to his retirement plan.

Diehl was later fined $47,392 after he entered into a consent order with the Missouri Ethics Commission in 2023. Prosecutors said Diehl was accused of misusing $6,762.70 of campaign committee funds to pay for personal expenses and "failing to report additional expenditures of campaign committee funds, including at least $28,700 of personal expenses."

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Former Missouri House speaker resigned in 2015 over sexting scandal

According to court documents, Diehl used some loan funds to pay off "a civil settlement related to his time as Speaker of the House."

Diehl, who was first elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 2008, announced in 2015 that he was resigning as House speaker afterThe Kansas City Starrevealed he had exchanged sexually suggestive text messages with a college freshman who was part of a state Capitol internship program.

At the time, Diehl acknowledged in a written statement that he had made a "serious error in judgment."

"I take full responsibility for my actions and am truly sorry to those I let down. I apologize for the poor judgment I displayed that put me and those closest to me in this situation," Diehl said in the statement. "I also regret that the woman has been dragged into this situation. The buck stops here. I ask for forgiveness. I will begin immediately working to restore the trust of those closest to me, and getting back to the important work that is required in the final days of session."

Following the news of the text messages, the local newspaper reported that the Missouri Southern State University decided to end its Capitol internship program a month early.

Richard Miller, who was the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Missouri Southern at the time, told The Star that the university pulled its four interns out of the state Capitol after an unspecified incident.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Former Missouri House speaker sentenced for COVID-19 pandemic fraud

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Ex-Missouri lawmaker who admitted to COVID fraud sentenced to prison

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Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed Watergate tapes, dies at 99

WASHINGTON (AP) — Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide who inadvertentlyhastened Richard Nixon's resignationoverthe Watergate scandalwhen he revealed that the president had bugged the Oval Office and Cabinet Room and routinely recorded his conversations, has died. He was 99.

Obit Butterfield

His death was confirmed to The Associated Press by his wife, Kim, and John Dean, who served as White House counsel to Nixon during the Watergate scandal and went on to, along with Butterfield, helpexpose the wrongdoing.

"He had the heavy responsibility of revealing something he was sworn to secrecy on, which is the installation of the Nixon taping system," Dean said. "He stood up and told the truth."

As a deputy assistant to the president, Butterfield oversaw the taping system connected to voice-activated listening devices that had been secretly placed in four locations, including Nixon's office in the Executive Office Building and the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Butterfield later said that, besides himself and the president, he believed that only White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, a Haldeman assistant and a handful of Secret Service agents knew about the taping system.

"Everything was taped … as long as the president was in attendance," Butterfield told Watergate investigators when testifying under oath during a preliminary interview.

The tapes would expose Nixon's role in the cover-up that followed the burglary in 1972 at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate building. To avoid impeachment by the House, Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974, less than a month after the Supreme Court had ordered him to surrender the relevant tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.

Butterfield believed he'd had a hand in the president's fate. "I didn't like to be the cause of that, but I felt that I was, in a lot of ways," he said in a 2008 oral history for the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

Butterfield, a college friend of Haldeman's at UCLA who had contacted his friend to ask about opportunities in the new Nixon administration, served as a deputy assistant to Nixon from 1969 to 1973. In that capacity, he worked under Haldeman and, among other duties, was secretary to the Cabinet and helped oversee White House operations.

The Air Force veteran had left the White House to become administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration when Senate committee staffers privately questioned him on July 13, 1973, during their investigation of the Watergate break-in. A routine question about the possibility of a taping system had been prompted by former White House counsel John Dean's testimony that he believed a conversation he had had with Nixon may have been recorded.

When Butterfield acknowledged that a taping system indeed existed, he was brought before a public hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. The public revelation on July 16, 1973, of a taping system designed to record all the president's conversations stunned Nixon friends and foes alike. The tapes promised Watergate investigators a rich vein of evidence in their quest to determine what Nixon and others knew about the break-in — a great deal, as it turned out.

Efforts by investigators to gain access to the tapes sparked a yearlong legal battle that was resolved in July 1974 when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had to give them up.

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The thousands of hours of tapes made public over the years — they are now controlled by the National Archives — provide a unique, if often unflattering, view of Nixon. His words exposed a bad temper, vulgar language, bigoted racial and religious views, and unvarnished opinions about national and international figures.

"I just thought, 'When they hear those tapes …' I mean, I knew what was on these tapes … they're dynamite," Butterfield told the Nixon Library. "I guess I didn't foresee that the president might be put out of office or impeached, but I thought it would be a perilous few years for him. I guess I couldn't conceive of (Nixon) being forced out of office. It had never happened before."

Butterfield later said he believed that Nixon's successor, President Gerald Ford, fired him as FAA administrator in 1975 as part of an agreement worked out between the Nixon and Ford staff members. He said he had heard from White House friends that he had been targeted shortly after his testimony to the Senate committee.

After leaving the FAA, Butterfield worked as a business executive in California. He earned a master's degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 1994.

Alexander Porter Butterfield was born on April 6, 1926, in Pensacola, Florida.

He left UCLA to join the Navy and later earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland in 1956 and a master's degree from George Washington University in 1967.

In 1948, he joined the Air Force and served as an instructor at a base near Las Vegas during the Korean War and later served in Germany. In Washington, he was a military assistant to the special assistant of the defense secretary in 1965 and 1966 and later served as senior military representative of the U.S. and representative for the commander-in-chief, Pacific Forces, Australia. He retired at the rank of colonel after 20 years in the Air Force.

Butterfield was unsparing in his criticism of the former president in later years. While he commended Nixon's achievements in foreign affairs, he considered his former boss "not an honest man" and "a crook" and believed that Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in before it occurred and was the architect of the ensuing cover-up.

Butterfield found himself "cheering … just cheering" the day Nixon resigned, he told the Nixon Library, because "justice had prevailed."

"I didn't think that it would for a while," he said. "This guy was the ringleader."

Daniel, the primary writer of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2023.

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Two teen brothers in Texas mariachi band are released from ICE custody amid bipartisan criticism

RAYMONDVILLE, Texas (AP) — A family whose two teen boys are in a nationally recognized mariachi band in South Texas was reunited Monday afternoon after bipartisan criticism that the Trump administration'scampaign for mass deportationoverreached by detaining the family.

Immigrations Enforcement Texas Fatal Shooting

Brothers Antonio Gámez-Cuéllar, 18, and Joshua, 14, were detained along with their 12-year-old brother and their parents Feb. 25. The teenage boys were prominent members of the McAllen High School Mariachi Oro band, which has visited the White House, performed at Carnegie Hall and won eight state championships.

The two younger boys and their parents were released Monday from a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat who visited them, marking histhird visitto the detention center.

Antonio was released on Monday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from a detention center in Raymondville, Texas.

"They were ecstatic. They were crying. They were excited to be reunited with their son and brother, Antonio, who was being held separately in Raymondville," Castro said at a news conference in San Antonio. "But their mom kept asking, 'What did we do wrong? We followed all the rules. We went to court, we haven't done anything wrong.'"

The family had been checking in regularly with immigration authorities, as instructed, when they were detained, according to a relative and a girlfriend who organized a GoFundMe account for the family.

The Department of Homeland Security said the parents, Emma Guadalupe Cuellar Lopez and Luis Antonio Gamez Martinez, were arrested by immigration authorities and "chose" to bring their three children with them. The department said they entered the U.S. illegally in 2023 near Brownsville, Texas.

Efrén C. Olivares, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center representing the eldest son, Antonio, clarified that the family entered lawfully through the CBP One app, a legal pathway, in 2023.

Olivares said Antonio was released after attorneys filed a parole request with ICE which ICE granted, and attorneys did not need to ask for a judge's order.

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Elected officials from across the political spectrum voiced support for the family, who are from Mexico and had sought asylum in the U.S. and were going through their immigration proceedings.

"I challenge my colleagues to work together for new enforcement policies that not only secure our border but make safer communities and that ultimately are common sense," U.S. Rep. Monica de la Cruz, a Republican congresswoman representing McAllen, in Raymondville after Antonio's release.

McAllen's Republican mayor, Javier Villalobos, said he supported the family and said he continues to advocate for "responsible pathways for law abiding individuals who want to contribute to our economy, support their families, and become productive neighbors in McAllen."

U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a New York Democrat and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, called the family's detention "outrageous."

The boys' mariachi directors visited the family held in Dilley earlier Monday. Alex Treviño, the mariachi director and Neri Fuentes, the assistant director, said the kids were concerned about losing their playing abilities.

"They were worried that their fingers weren't going to work, because they don't have instruments," Treviño said.

Antonio, who had been held apart from the family due to his age, recently won the first chair for trumpet in a state competition.

"This year he's going to be graduating from high school and going to college and joining some other groups in college. He wants to be a music educator," Fuentes said.

Castro attributed the release of the family to an "ensemble" effort and said he continues to push for the family detention center in Dilley to be closed. He said the population at the detention facility had gone down from about 1,100 people in January to about 450 people, with about 100 of them being children.

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Two teen brothers in Texas mariachi band are released from ICE custody amid bipartisan criticism

RAYMONDVILLE, Texas (AP) — A family whose two teen boys are in a nationally recognized mariachi band in South Texas was r...

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Tua Tagovailoa, Falcons agree to one-year deal

Tua Tagovailoalanded on his feet quickly after being released by the Miami Dolphins.

Tagovailoa has agreed to a one-year contract to join theAtlanta Falconsin 2026 NFL free agency, according toreports. He is signing the veteran minimum which will be $1.3 million for 2026.

The deal cannot be finalized until Tagovailoa is released Wednesday.

The Falcons entered the 2026 NFL offseason in need of a veteran quarterback behind 2024 first-round pickMichael Penix Jr.after parting withKirk Cousins. Tagovailoa will fill that need, and the 28-year-old left profiles as a good fit for Kevin Stefanski's offense.

OT Tytus Howard: Traded to Cleveland Browns (previous team: Houston Texans)

" style="max-width:100%; height:auto; border-radius:6px; margin:10px 0;" loading="lazy" /> CB Trent McDuffie: Traded to Los Angeles Rams (previous team: Kansas City Chiefs)

" style="max-width:100%; height:auto; border-radius:6px; margin:10px 0;" loading="lazy" /> RB David Montgomery: Traded to Houston Texans (previous team: Detroit Lions)

" style="max-width:100%; height:auto; border-radius:6px; margin:10px 0;" loading="lazy" /> WR DJ Moore: Traded to Buffalo Bills (previous team: Chicago Bears)

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2026 NFL offseason tracker: Player signings, trades

OT Tytus Howard:Traded to Cleveland Browns(previous team: Houston Texans)

Tagovailoa is coming off his first losing season as an NFL starting quarterback. The 2020 first-round pick posted a 6-8 record across 14 starts while completing 67.7% of his passes for 2,660 yards, 20 touchdowns and 15 interceptions – good for second-most in the league behind only Geno Smith (17).

The Dolphins benched Tagovailoa in favor of rookieQuinn Ewersfor the final three games of the 2025 NFL season, throwing his future with the team into question.

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Days before free agency, Miami officially announced it would be releasing Tagovailoa – and absorbing an NFL-record $99.2 million in dead-cap space to do so – at the start of the new league year.

The Falcons will be hoping Tagovailoa – who made the Pro Bowl in 2023 – can enjoy a bounce-back season with a change of scenery.

Falcons QB depth chart

It isn't yet clear whether Tagovailoa will battle Penix for the team's starting job or just serve as high-upside insurance in case the third-year pro needs extra time to return from a torn ACL he suffered midway through last season.

Here's how things will look when Tagovailoa officially signs on Wednesday:

• Michael Penix Jr. (injured)

• Tua Tagovailoa

Easton Stick– the third quarterback on the Falcons' roster in 2025 behind Penix Jr. and Cousins – is a free agent.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Tua Tagovailoa signs: Falcons to sign QB to deal in NFL free agency

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Pats' Christian Barmore battery, assault charges dropped by prosecutors

Prosecutors in Massachusetts are dropping the case againstNew England Patriotsdefensive lineman Christian Barmore.

During an arraignment Monday in Attleboro District Court, prosecutors said they would not be able to prove a case against Barmore, 26, who faced assault and battery charges.

A woman who shares a child with Barmore and was previously his girlfriendfiled a criminal complaint in Decemberthat said Barmore threw her to the ground during a domestic dispute that allegedly occurred Aug. 8, 2025. The woman did not want to travel out of state for the case, Bristol County District Attorney Thomas M. Quinn III told reporters,according to the Associated Press. Barmore was never arrested.

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The NFL and Patriots were aware of the charges and let the legal process play out. Barmore had been the second Patriots player charged with a physical crime after former wide receiver Stefon Diggs had been accused of felony strangulation of a former personal chef (Diggs pleaded not guilty Feb. 13).

"I think that these are allegations, like you mentioned in your question, it's things that we have to handle," Patriots coach Mike Vrabel said after the charges against Barmore were reported. "Everyday there are distractions. Some are smaller than others. Confident that we'll focus on the Dolphins and those two individuals that you mentioned will be able to handle the ongoing legal process."

Barmore started 16 games last season and had 2.0 sacks. He's been with New England since the organization drafted him in the second round (38th overall) of the 2021 draft. The Alabama Crimson Tide product is under contract with the team through the 2028 season.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Patriots' Christian Barmore has battery, assault charges dropped

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Pats' Christian Barmore battery, assault charges dropped by prosecutors

Prosecutors in Massachusetts are dropping the case againstNew England Patriotsdefensive lineman Christian Barmore. ...

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