U.S. officials indicted six executives at German automaker Volkswagen on Wednesday in connection with the company’s scheme to deliberately deceive U.S. regulators about the emissions standards of its diesel engine vehicles and sell those cars illegally to American drivers.

Five of the six executives, at least some of whom were described as high ranking, are currently in Germany. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said it was too soon to say how that will impact legal proceedings moving forward. The sixth executive was arrested and charged in Miami earlier this week.

Additional executives at the company are being investigated and could potentially face charges, Ms. Lynch said.

Volkswagen has agreed Wednesday to plead guilty to three criminal counts, a rare admission of wrongdoing for a major company, and pay $4.3 billion in criminal and civil fines in a settlement with the Department of Justice.

“As you all know we cannot put companies in jail, but we can hold their employees personally accountable and we can force companies to pay hefty fines,” said FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

“This is really a reflection of the fact that faceless multinational corporations don’t commit crimes, flesh-and-blood people commit crimes,” added Sally Yates, deputy attorney general. “And we’ve sharpened our focus to ensure that we’re doing everything from the very beginning of an investigation … to hold those individuals accountable and build out from there.”

GM and Toyota both incurred steep fines from the Department of Justice in recent years connected to safety defects that caused human fatalities. Neither company faced criminal charges or admitted to wrongdoing. Officials said Wednesday that the Volkswagen case stood out because the deception lasted 10 years and involved senior managers.

“This is a company where lower-level people actually expressed concern along the way about the fact that these defeat devices were being used and questioned whether they should be used, and higher-up people decided to keep using them,” said Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell.

“We don’t really see many major multinational corporations that decide at a very high level … to violate U.S. law in a systematic way for nearly a decade,” she added.

The six executives face one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and American consumers, and violation of the U.S. Clean Air Act. Those indicted include Heinz-Jakob Neusser, 56, Jens Hadler, 50, Richard Dorenkamp, 68, Bernd Gottweis, 69, Oliver Schmidt, 48, and Jürgen Peter, 59, all of Germany. Mr. Schmidt was arrested and charged earlier this week in Miami.

A spokesman for Volkswagen declined to disclose the employment status of the six indicted individuals, citing a policy not to discuss ongoing investigations or personnel matters.

Hans Dieter Pötsch, who chairs the company’s supervisory board, said in a statement: “When the diesel matter became public, we promised that we would get to the bottom of it and find out how it happened — comprehensively and objectively. We are no longer the same company we were 16 months ago.”

Indeed, Volkswagen shed several top executives and implemented other internal changes after the emissions scandal came to light. The company also apologized to U.S. lawmakers and pledged to regain the trust of American consumers. The Department of Justice said those actions helped the company avoid even steeper penalties.

A judge must now approve the settlement before it’s made official. That court date has not been said, a Department of Justice spokesman said.

Volkswagen is charged with conspiring to defraud the government and violate environmental regulations from May 2006 to November 2015 by installing devices in its diesel engine vehicles that obscure the amount of nitrogen oxide they spew into the air. Those devices and accompanying software allowed Volkswagen to evade regulators for years, the Justice Department asserts.

However, Volkswagen falsely claimed that its vehicles met all environmental regulations in order to import and sell the affected vehicles in the United States from 2009 to 2015, according to the charges. In all, the emissions scandal touched 11 million vehicles worldwide, including more than half a million sold in the United States.

When U.S. officials finally caught on, Volkswagen “did corruptly alter, destroy, mutilate and conceal business records” in order to obstruct the investigation, charging documents declare. In August and September 2015, a Volkswagen supervisor is accused of deleting emails and files related to the deceptive device and instructing employees to do the same, charging documents show.

A portion of the penalty announced Wednesday will settle three civil complaints that it violated environmental, customs and finance laws as part of its deception.

Wednesday’s announcement will bring Volkswagen’s total fines to roughly $20 billion. The largest of those penalties was the $14.7 billion the company was ordered to pay to buyback cars and otherwise compensate customers impacted by the scandal.

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A retired Squirrel Hill doctor stood before a federal judge today and apologized to his family, his patients and his colleagues for distributing oxycodone for no medical purpose.

“I truly have disgraced and dishonored myself,” Alan Barnett, 69, told U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti.

But he won’t go to prison.

On a recommendation by the government and by his lawyer, the judge sentenced him to probation, eight months of home confinement and 250 hours of community service in educating the public and other doctors about the scourge of narcotics.

The details will be worked out with the U.S. probation office.

Stan Levenson, Barnett’s lawyer, and Assistant U.S Attorney Robert Cessar both felt prison was not appropriate for Barnett, who is under treatment for cancer of the esophagus.

Barnett surrendered his U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration license to prescribe. He also retired and shut down his office last year when the DEA and FBI confronted him about his prescribing practices.

Mr. Levenson also presented 36 letters from supporters saying that Barnett had been a caring and compassionate internist for his entire career.

In addressing the judge, the doctor said he was not himself after being diagnosed with cancer three years ago, although he said that was no excuse for what he did.

After receiving information that he was writing prescriptions for narcotics for no legitimate purpose, the FBI and DEA sent in an undercover witness to gather evidence.

The patient visited him four times between October and December 2014 and received oxycodone for no medical reason.

During one visit, according to evidence presented at Barnett’s guilty plea, the patient said Barnett never asked him about pain but merely had him touch his toes and arch his back.

When the patient complied and didn’t complain of pain, Barnett said, “I guess you don’t need them anymore” but then wrote a prescription for oxycodone.

On a later visit, the patient said he wasn’t taking the drug anymore but Barnett wrote him a prescription anyway.

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SEATTLE — Washington, Massachusetts, Virginia and New York are becoming the first states to sue the Trump administration with filings announced this week over the executive order restricting refugees and immigration. They likely won't be standing alone for long.

Since Donald Trump was elected president, Democratic state attorneys general have been forming a coordinated wall of legal resistance over immigration, environmental protections, health care, and other major issues.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman told The Associated Press that lawyers, including attorneys general, are having an "awakening" regarding the Trump administration.

"This is a president who does not have respect for the rule of the law," Schneiderman said. "That's something that bothers a lot of people."

On Tuesday, Schneiderman, and the attorneys general for Massachusetts and Virginia announced separately that their offices were joining legal challenges to Trump already filed in their states by advocacy groups.

The state officials' plan for legal pushback has precedent: Several Republican attorneys general made it a practice to routinely file lawsuits against the policies of former President Barack Obama.

Unlike groups taking up fights on behalf of individuals, attorneys general —the chief lawyers for state governments — can sue more broadly on behalf of their states. Most are elected and thus can act independently of their state legislatures or governors.

"It's my responsibility as attorney general to defend the rule of law, to uphold the Constitution on behalf of the people of this state. And that's what we're doing," Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said Monday when announcing his lawsuit against Trump's executive order.

He said other states could join the lawsuit, which asks a judge to throw out key provisions of the order Trump issued Friday to temporarily closes the U.S. to all refugees and all people from seven majority-Muslim countries and bars Syrian refugees indefinitely.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who has held town hall meetings around Massachusetts on responding to Trump, called the policy "harmful, discriminatory and unconstitutional."

The administration says such action is needed to protect the country from terrorist attacks. Since it was issued, the White House has said people from the banned countries who have permission to work in the U.S. can enter.

On Sunday, 17 Democratic attorneys general signed a letter vowing to "use all of the tools of our offices to fight this unconstitutional order." Most of the signatories were from states controlled by Democrats and that Hillary Clinton won in November. But also signing were the Democratic attorneys general from Iowa and Pennsylvania, which voted for Trump, and Maine, where the electoral vote was split.

Attorneys general have taken smaller actions since Trump was elected, both on their own and in concert.

For example, some wrote Trump calling for him to keep former President Barack Obama's clean power plan in place.

In January, a group of them asked a judge to let it intervene in a court case on the constitutionality of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That motion could be a step toward the state officials defending the office in court. Trump said Monday he intends to do "a big number" on the bill that created the agency. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller told the AP that protecting the office is a priority.

Some attorneys general banded together to urge the U.S. Senate to reject Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions to lead the U.S. Department of Justice.

Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen said he has spoken with advocacy groups about legal strategies. Among them is Planned Parenthood, which is preparing to react if Trump and the GOP-led Congress defund the organization.

One of the first steps T.J. Donovan took when he became attorney general in Vermont this month was forming a task force to advise him on immigration policies.

State attorneys general have a history of banding together. Most notably, a series of lawsuits from them led to the 1998 tobacco industry settlement under which cigarette makers agreed to pay states more than $200 billion over 25 years.

Republican attorneys general sued President Obama over his health insurance overhaul minutes after he signed it and over his rules to limit power plant emissions even before the details were final. In both cases, courts sided with them, at least in part. After Trump won the White House in November, taking on the president became part of the job description for their Democratic counterparts.

State attorneys general have become more active since the administration of former President George W. Bush, especially when it comes to federal laws and policies, said a scholar who studies the office.

"It's become such an established part of what AG's do on the national level," said Paul Nolette, an assistant professor of political science at Marquette University. "It's become much more AG's going on the offensive."