This week, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released three major announcements pertaining to its efforts to minimize an increase in opioid use and opioid-related deaths in recent years. DOJ simultaneously announced multiple arrests of opioid manufacturers and vendors and what it terms “first-of-its-kind action to reduce opioid over-prescription.”

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced this week a massive $4.9 billion settlement with the Royal Bank of Scotland, “resolving federal civil claims that RBS misled investors in the underwriting and issuing of residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) between 2005 and 2008.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), one of the federal government’s most secretive research arms, tasked with keeping the United States on top of bleeding-edge technology developments, is reportedly hard-at-work attempting to develop a reliable means of identifying “deepfake” videos.

This week, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced “that Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. and several of its affiliates (Wells Fargo) will pay a civil penalty of $2.09 billion under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA) based on the bank’s alleged origination and sale of residential mortgage loans that it knew contained misstated income information and did not meet the quality that Wells Fargo represented.”

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has released a sweeping new report on the Attorney General’s Cyber-Digital Task Force, providing an initial assessment of the group formed in February 2018 at the direction of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

This week, federal officials charged Mariia Butina, a 29-year-old Russian citizen living in Washington D.C., “with conspiracy to act as an illegal agent of the Russian government, including attempting to establish ‘back-channel’ relationships with U.S. officials on behalf of the Kremlin,” according to Politico.

The Department of Justice, as referenced in last week’s “The Takedown” column here in FEDagent, recently announced that it had filed charges against a Virginia man who had taken out a number of loans under the identity of a federal employee.

Tech news website Fifth Domain has flagged “what appears to be the first illicit use of federal employee data that was swiped by suspected Chinese hackers in 2015, creating a cloud of mystery that has sparked the attention of members of Congress.”

This week, a federal grand jury charged James Alex Fields Jr. with thirty separate counts relating to his alleged perpetration of the August 12th, 2017 attack in Charlottesville, Virginia. According to the indictment, Fields entered his vehicle following his participation in a gathering of white nationalists called the “Unite the Right Rally” and subsequently observed the gathering of “a racially and ethnically diverse crowd of individuals.”

This week, the Department of Justice announced Joshua Schulte, age 29, faces a 13-count superseding indictment concerning his alleged theft of classified national defense information.

Yesterday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office “returned a more than 500-year-old copy of Christopher Columbus’ letter describing his discoveries in the Americas to Spain during an evening repatriation ceremony at the Residence of the Spanish Ambassador to the United States,” according to a press release posted by the Department of Justice.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Everitt Aaron Jameson, 26, of Modesto, California, had pled guilty to “attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham” or ISIS.

The United States Justice Department has indicted four defendants--Karim Baratov, Dmitry Dokuchaev, Igor Sushchin, and Alexsey Belan-- “for computer hacking, economic espionage, and other criminal offenses in connection with a conspiracy, beginning in January 2014, to access Yahoo’s network and the contents of webmail accounts.”

The U.S. State Department is investigating a federal employee’s reports of experiencing unusual sounds and sensations of pressure at an American consulate in Guangzhou, China. The experience was shared by e-mail with American citizens located in China.

Coinciding with the observance of Police Week 2018, the FBI this week released the report of Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 2017.

A suspected gang member has been charged with shooting an ATF agent last week in an ambush in Chicago.

This week, a new report released by the Department of Defense showed a 10 percent increase in servicemembers who report being the victim of sexual assault. According to Caroline Houck at Defense One, “In 2017, 6,769 servicemembers reported being the victim of a sexual assault, though a tenth of those incidents occurred before they joined the military.”

A former U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer has pled guilty in Las Cruces federal court to obstruction of justice, the Justice Department announced this week.

U.S. Marshals arrested a man last week in Texas who escaped an Oklahoma state prison nearly 40 years ago–making him Oklahoma Department of Corrections’ longest outstanding escape suspect.

Seven top officials behind the website Backpage.com were arrested after a federal grand jury in Arizona indicted them on 93 counts, including facilitating prostitution and money laundering.