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Brexit: 'Sausage war' ceasefire as UK and EU agree three-month extension to grace period
Lord Frost says the move is a "positive first step", as the EU's Maros Sefcovic warns the bloc is not issuing a "blank cheque".
Alan McGuinness Political reporter @Alan_McGuinness
Wednesday 30 June 2021 16:20, UK
A deal to avoid a ban on sausages and other chilled meats moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland has been agreed at the last minute.
The UK and EU have announced a three-month extension to a grace period allowing their transit across the Irish Sea, hours before a ban would have come into force.
London had at one stage threatened to unilaterally extend the grace period, a move which would have triggered retaliation from Brussels in a row that has become known as the "sausage war".
...
MORE
https://news.sky.com/story/brexit-sausage-war-ceasefire-as-uk-and-eu-agree-three-month-extension-to-grace-period-12345718
Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price
Chris McGreal
Wed 30 Jun 2021 03.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment
Via an unprecedented wave of lawsuits, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for the devastation caused by fossil fuels
After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes.
An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way.
But, even more strikingly, the nearly two dozen lawsuits are underpinned by accusations that the industry severely aggravated the environmental crisis with a decades-long campaign of lies and deceit to suppress warnings from their own scientists about the impact of fossil fuels on the climate and dupe the American public.
Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern states watching “mega-rains” destroy crops and homes, and fishing communities losing catches to warming waters, are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels.
...
MUCH MORE
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment
Vance wants to leave with a major achievement to point to, and he has been after Trump for a long time.
Kim Jong Un Flips Out Over Unspecified COVID ‘Crisis’ in North Korea
‘GRAVE CONSEQUENCES’
Jamie Ross
News Correspondent
Published Jun. 30, 2021 5:03AM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kim-jong-un-flips-out-over-unspecified-covid-crisis-in-north-korea
Some top officials of the North Korean regime are in deep trouble. According to Reuters, Kim Jong Un has released a furious statement chastising members of his government after a mysterious and unspecified lapse in the country’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. A report from state media channel KCNA said: “[Kim] mentioned that senior officials in charge of important state affairs neglected the implementation of the important decisions of the Party... and thus caused a crucial case of creating a great crisis in ensuring the security of the state and safety of the people and entailed grave consequences.” Several officials were reportedly fired at a meeting this week over the unknown pandemic error. Despite the damning statement, North Korea still officially claims that it has recorded zero cases of the coronavirus.
Read it at Reuters https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/north-koreas-kim-chides-officials-unspecified-pandemic-lapse-2021-06-29/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kim-jong-un-flips-out-over-unspecified-covid-crisis-in-north-korea
Investigators Homing In On Trump Organization’s Culture of Cash Bonuses, Says Report
MAKING IT RAIN
Jamie Ross
News Correspondent
Published Jun. 30, 2021 8:00AM ET
Criminal charges against the Trump Organization could come down as soon as this week and, according to CNN, one area of keen interest is the company’s alleged use of cash bonuses to avoid paying taxes. While the network reports that it’s not clear who was rewarded in cash, or how much they were given, the payments are said to be a key part of the investigation into whether executives and the former president’s company failed to pay sufficient taxes on the benefits given out on top of base salaries. The Trump Organization has been under a joint investigation from the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the New York attorney general’s office for two years. On Monday, attorneys for the company reportedly met with prosecutors in a last-ditch attempt to persuade them not to go forward with charges. Donald Trump said in a Monday statement that his dealings are “standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime.”
Read it at CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/30/politics/trump-organization-cash-bonuses/index.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/investigators-homing-in-on-trump-organizations-culture-of-cash-bonuses-says-report?via=newsletter&source=CSAMedition
Trump Organization and CFO Allen Weisselberg Expected to Be Charged Thursday
The Manhattan district attorney’s first charges in three-year probe will focus on alleged tax-related crimes at former president’s company
By Corinne Ramey
Wall Street Journal
Updated June 30, 2021 10:03 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-organization-and-cfo-allen-weisselberg-expected-to-be-charged-thursday-11625060765?mod=djemalertNEWS
The Manhattan district attorney’s office is expected to charge the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer with tax-related crimes on Thursday, people familiar with the matter said, which would mark the first criminal charges against the former president’s company since prosecutors began investigating it three years ago.
The charges against the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg, the company’s longtime chief financial officer, are a blow to former President Donald Trump, who has fended off multiple criminal and civil probes during and after his presidency. Mr. Trump himself isn’t expected to be charged, his lawyer said. Mr. Weisselberg has rejected prosecutors’ attempts at gaining his cooperation, according to people familiar with the matter.
The defendants are expected to appear in court on Thursday afternoon, the people said.
The Trump Organization and Mr. Weisselberg are expected to face charges related to allegedly evading taxes on fringe benefits, the people said. For months, the Manhattan district attorney’s office and New York state attorney general’s office have been investigating whether Mr. Weisselberg and other employees illegally avoided paying taxes on perks—such as cars, apartments and private-school tuition—that they received from the Trump Organization.
If prosecutors could show the Trump Organization and its executives systematically avoided paying taxes, they could file more serious charges alleging a scheme, lawyers said.
Mr. Weisselberg and his lawyers haven’t commented on the investigation or impending charges.
Mr. Trump has denied wrongdoing and said the investigations, conducted by offices led by Democrats, are politically motivated. Earlier this week, he said in a statement that the case is composed of “things that are standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime.”
—Deanna Paul and Rebecca Ballhaus contributed to this article.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-organization-and-cfo-allen-weisselberg-expected-to-be-charged-thursday-11625060765?mod=djemalertNEWS
Joe Biden blames climate crisis for deadly heatwave in western US and Canada
Record-shattering temperatures linked to dozens of deaths, buckled roads, blackouts and wildfires
Jonathan Watts and Matthew Taylor
Wed 3https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/30/canada-heatwave-dozens-dead-as-searing-plus-40c-temperatures-grips-vancouver0 Jun 2021 09.23 EDT
Joe Biden has joined scientists in blaming the climate crisis for a record-shattering heatwave in the western US and Canada that has been linked to dozens of deaths, buckled roads, blackouts and wildfires.
Officials in Canada have been shocked by the temperature rise, which hit 47.9C (118F) in Lytton, British Columbia, on Monday, smashing the national record set the previous day. The extended heatwave has also posed a health threat. In Vancouver, police said they responded to 25 sudden-death calls in a 24-hour period.
Officers said they had redeployed dozens of officers and asked the public to call 911 only for emergencies because heat-related deaths had depleted frontline resources and delayed response times.
“Vancouver has never experienced heat like this, and sadly dozens of people are dying because of it,” Sgt Steve Addison said in a news release. “Our officers are stretched thin, but we’re still doing everything we can to keep people safe.”
By Tuesday afternoon, he said, police had responded to more than 65 sudden deaths since the heatwave that has spread across the Pacific north-west of the Americas began on Friday.
“The vast majority of these cases are related to the heat,” Addison said.
The deaths were still under investigation and many of the deceased were elderly people, Cpl Mike Kalanj of Burnaby Royal Canadian Mounted Police said. Temperatures in the Vancouver area reached just under 32C on Monday, but the humidity made it feel close to 40C in areas that were not near water, said Environment Canada, a government department.
Environment Canada said the weather system broke 103 heat records across British Columbia, Alberta, Yukon and Northwest Territories on Monday.
On the US west coast, Seattle and Portland registered consecutive days of exceptional heat. Local authorities said they were investigating about a dozen deaths in Washington and Oregon that could be attributed to the scorching temperatures.
The National Weather Service said the peak in the region was 42.2 C on Tuesday in Spokane, Washington, another local record. About 9,300 homes lost power and the local utility Avista Utilities said planned blackouts would be needed on Tuesday afternoon for the city of more than 200,000 people.
The hot, dry conditions also increased fire risks. In northern California, the Siskiyou County sheriff’s office issued evacuation orders for the Lake Shastina and Juniper Valley areas.
Local media reported the dangerous heat in the Pacific north-west was buckling roads as asphalt and concrete expanded to levels engineers had never anticipated.
Referring to the heatwave in the north-west, the US president said the US needed stronger infrastructure to prepare for extreme weather.
“Anybody ever believe you’d turn on the news and see it’s 116 degrees in Portland, Oregon? 116 degrees,” Biden said in a barbed criticism of climate deniers. “But don’t worry – there is no global warming because it’s just a figment of our imaginations.”
Katharine Hayhoe, a Canadian climate scientist at Texas Tech University, said human emissions had loaded the climate dice by making heatwaves earlier, longer and stronger. She cited studies and government reports showing Canada was warming twice as fast than the rest of the world and monthly higher temperatures were being broken three times more frequently than cold temperature records.
“I’ve worked with climate projections for 25 years so we knew this was coming: yet it’s still a shocker when you see these records falling in real life in a place you’re from,” she tweeted.
Ingrid Jarrett, the chief executive of the British Columbia Hotel Association, said residents in parts of the Lower Mainland, Victoria and the Okanagan regions had been booking air-conditioned rooms so they could continue working and also get some sleep.
Forecasters said the heatwave could ease over parts of British Columbia, Yukon and the Northwest Territories by Wednesday, but any reprieve for the prairie provinces was further off.
Wires were used in this report
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/30/canada-heatwave-dozens-dead-as-searing-plus-40c-temperatures-grips-vancouver
Dear Leader: A Near-Perfect Letter From a Trump Sycophant, Annotated
New York Times
June 30, 2021
By Michelle Cottle
Ms. Cottle is a member of the editorial board.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/opinion/trump-letter-chris-kapenga.html
Former President Donald Trump recently accused three Wisconsin Republican leaders of “working hard to cover up election corruption” as he continued pushing lies about the November presidential vote. Mr. Trump delights in turning his fire on members of his party who he feels are being insufficiently servile. Many promptly prostrate themselves; a few shrug it off.
Then there is State Senate President Chris Kapenga of Wisconsin, one of the Republicans singled out by Mr. Trump. He responded to the former president with a letter that approaches North Korean-style levels of Dear Leader obsequiousness.
It is tempting to dismiss Mr. Kapenga’s missive as a desperate plea for Mr. Trump to stop picking on him — which it is. But it also provides a valuable master class in the art of Trump sycophancy. The text of the letter below has been annotated for instructional purposes.
Mr. President,
One of the most frustrating things to watch during your presidency was the continued attacks on you from fake news outlets with no accountability to truth.
It is helpful early on to slip in a common Trumpian term like “fake news” or “Deep State” or “alternative facts.” This makes clear that you are operating in the same alternative reality as Mr. Trump.
I can’t imagine the frustration you and your family felt. Unfortunately, in our positions of public service, we have to accept the reality that often “truth” in the media is no longer based on facts but simply what one feels like saying.
Media bashing is a requirement when soliciting Mr. Trump. If you’re not willing to go there, don’t even bother.
This leads me to your recent press release stating that I am responsible for holding up a forensic audit of the Wisconsin elections. This could not be further from the truth.
The segue here from sucking up to gentle criticism is a smidge bumpy. And keep in mind that “truth” is a malleable concept for Mr. Trump.
Let me first say that very few people have the honor of being named publicly by a United States president.
Now you’re back on track: Having raised your concern, it is best to immediately backpedal and layer on more flattery. Plowing ahead with the details of your complaint without proper fertilizing risks getting Mr. Trump’s dander up.
I never imagined mine would be mentioned, much less in this light, from a President that I have publicly supported, and still support.
The genius of this sentence is that it sounds as though you’re expressing gratitude, even as you are expressing dismay.
I feel I need to respond even though you will likely never hear of it, as the power of your pen to mine is like Thor’s hammer to a Bobby pin.
Bonus points for going with a deity from Norse mythology. Mr. Trump clearly has a soft spot for the region, to the point that he expressed a desire for more Norwegian immigrants and even eyed buying Greenland from Denmark.
Nevertheless, I need to correct your false claim against me.
Oof. Another misstep: “False” is such a harsh, judgmental word. Would have been safer to go with “inaccurate” or, better still, “imprecise.”
I never received a call from you or any of your sources asking about the election audit. If you had, I would have told you that long before your press release I called the auditor in charge of the election audit that is taking place in Wisconsin and requested a forensic component to the audit.
Suggesting that Mr. Trump has behaved in any way other than perfectly is always dicey. What saves you here is immediately following up with reassurances that you, in fact, behaved exactly as he wanted.
Prior to owning several businesses, I was an auditor, so I understand the importance of this being done to determine what took place in the last election. This will help guide us as legislators to put fixes in place for any issues found, and more importantly, to ensure the integrity of elections moving forward.
Deft, fast pivot to expressing solidarity with Mr. Trump’s contention that there were serious voting “issues” requiring legislative “fixes.”
I made specific requests on procedures and locations, both of which I have not, nor will not, disclose. If I am not satisfied with the procedures performed, I will request additional work be done. If anyone illegally attempts to hinder information from being obtained, I will use my subpoena powers to get it.
Always good to throw in a bit of tough-guy posturing about how none of the libs or Deep State plotters can stand in the way of your mission.
This leads me back to your press release. It is false, and I don’t appreciate it being done before calling me and finding out the truth. This is what both of us have fought against.
It is unclear what anyone is fighting against here, but clarity should never be an impediment to flattery.
Being cut from similar cloth in our backgrounds, and knowing that reparation must always be of more value than the wrong done, I have two requests.
Curiously, Wikipedia identifies Mr. Kapenga as an accountant and business owner who has been in state politics for more than a decade. This would appear to make him as similar to the high-flying reality TV star and New York real estate scion as corduroy culottes are to cheetah-skin hot pants.
First, I ask that you issue a press release in similar fashion that corrects the information and also encourages people to support what I have requested in the audit.
Smart to sweeten your real ask by pairing it with something that Mr. Trump wants.
Second, you owe me a round of golf at the club of your choice.
Valiant attempt to lighten the mood while also playing to Mr. Trump’s vanity regarding the family business. Plus, offering him the chance to beat you at golf is smart, even if it requires you to throw the round.
I write this as I am about to board a plane due to a family medical emergency.
Bold move to appeal to Mr. Trump’s humanity.
In addition to my Trump socks, I will pull up my Trump/Pence mask when I board the plane, as required by federal law.
This bit of toadyism may feel like it’s going too far, but, with Mr. Trump, too far is never enough. And it never hurts to take a shot at the feds.
I figure, if the liberals are going to force me to wear a mask, I am going to make it as painful for them as possible.
Always remember that the throbbing heart of Trumpism is owning the libs.
I will continue to do this regardless of whether or not I ever hear from you.
Nice dismount! Emphasizes that you have internalized Trumpian values and will live by them even if the former president does not heed your imploration.
Thank you for doing great things as our president.
Always close with straight-up bootlicking. Don’t try to be fancy — or subtle.
Respectfully,
Chris Kapenga
Wisconsin Senate President
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/opinion/trump-letter-chris-kapenga.html
Also - https://dnyuz.com/2021/06/30/dear-leader-a-near-perfect-letter-from-a-trump-sycophant-annotated/
House poised to launch new probe of Jan. 6 insurrection
By MARY CLARE JALONICK
today
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-dc-wire-va-state-wire-capitol-siege-government-and-politics-6d939eaf5e7bf39e463edaebb32277c5
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House is poised to launch a new investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection on Wednesday with expected approval of a 13-person select committee to probe the violent attack.
The panel would be led by Democrats, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointing a chairperson and at least eight of the committee’s members. The resolution up for a vote gives Pelosi a possible say in the appointment of the other five members as well, directing that they will be named “after consultation” with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy.
In a memo to all House Republicans late Tuesday, No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise urged his members to vote against the resolution, saying the select panel “is likely to pursue a partisan agenda” in investigating the siege by former President Donald Trump’s supporters. Scalise and McCarthy have so far declined to say whether Republicans will even participate.
Pelosi is moving to form the select committee after Senate Republicans blocked the creation of a separate independent and bipartisan panel that would have been evenly split between the parties and modeled after a commission that investigated the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Republicans ready to move on from the insurrection — and Trump’s role in it — argued against that as well, claiming it would be duplicative and partisan.
The speaker has said that it was her preference to have an independent panel lead the inquiry, but that Congress could not wait any longer to begin a deeper look at the insurrection.
The GOP role in the probe, and the appointments to the panel, could help determine whether the committee becomes a bipartisan effort or a tool of further division. Two Senate committees issued a bipartisan report with security recommendations earlier this month, but it did not examine the origins of the siege, leaving many unanswered questions about the events of the day.
McCarthy is facing pressure to take the investigation seriously from police officers who responded to the attack, Democrats and even some of his fellow Republicans. Pelosi has invited representatives of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia and the U.S. Capitol Police to sit in the gallery and watch Wednesday’s vote, according to a person familiar with the plan who wasn’t authorized to discuss it and spoke on condition of anonymity. Dozens of those officers were brutally beaten and suffered injuries as Trump’s supporters pushed past them and broke into the building to interrupt the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.
Two of the officers who responded, Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone and Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, met with McCarthy on Friday and asked him to take the House investigation seriously.
Fanone, who has described being dragged down the Capitol steps by rioters who shocked him with a stun gun and beat him, said he asked McCarthy for a commitment not to put “the wrong people” on the panel, a reference to those in the GOP who have downplayed the violence and defended the insurrectionists. Fanone said McCarthy told him he would take his request seriously.
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, has also publicly pressured McCarthy. “I hope he appoints people who are seen as being credible,” he said Sunday on CNN.
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a close Trump ally, said that he doesn’t know what McCarthy is going to do but that it’s possible Republicans will just choose not to be involved.
“I know I’ve got real concerns, I know he does, that this is all just political, and that this is impeachment three against President Trump,” Jordan said.
Trump was twice impeached by the House and twice acquitted by the Senate, the second time for telling his supporters just before the insurrection to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat to Biden.
Pelosi has not yet said who will lead the panel, but one possibility is House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. Thompson said Tuesday that it would be an “honor” to serve as chair and that it’s Pelosi’s call if she wants to have a say on the Republican members.
“They had an opportunity to really engage,” Thompson said of Republicans who voted against the bipartisan commission. “And they didn’t. So they can’t now come back and say, ‘Oh, that’s not fair.’”
Many Republicans have expressed concerns about a partisan probe, since majority Democrats are likely to investigate Trump’s role in the siege and the right-wing groups that participated in it. Almost three dozen House Republicans voted last month for the legislation to create an independent commission, and seven Republicans in the Senate have also supported moving forward on that bill. But that was short of the 10 Senate Republicans who would be necessary to pass it.
Many Republicans have made clear that they want to move on from the Jan. 6 attack. But some have gone further, including Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who suggested that video of the rioters looked like a “tourist visit.” Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona insisted that a Trump supporter named Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed that day while trying to break into the House chamber, was “executed.” Others have defended the rioters as they have been charged with federal crimes.
In their meeting with McCarthy, Fanone and Dunn asked the GOP leader to publicly denounce those comments downplaying the violence, as well as the 21 Republicans who recently voted against giving medals of honor to the U.S. Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police to thank them for their service. They said McCarthy, who voted for the measure, told them he would only deal with those members privately.
Seven people died during and after the rioting, including Babbitt and three other Trump supporters who suffered medical emergencies. Two police officers died by suicide in the days that followed, and a third officer, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, collapsed and later died after engaging with the protesters. A medical examiner later determined he died of natural causes.
___
Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro, Kevin Freking and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-dc-wire-va-state-wire-capitol-siege-government-and-politics-6d939eaf5e7bf39e463edaebb32277c5
Arizona ballot audit shows signs of backfiring on GOP
Independent voters oppose the controversial recounting of ballots by a wide margin.
By MARC CAPUTO
06/29/2021 05:30 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/29/arizona-ballot-audit-gop-biden-496908
When Arizona Republicans first pushed for a partisan audit of the 2020 presidential ballots cast in the Phoenix metropolitan area, they argued that they needed to know if any irregularities or fraud caused President Trump to lose this rapidly evolving swing state.
But the audit itself could be damaging Republican prospects, according to a new Bendixen & Amandi International poll, which shows roughly half of Arizona voters oppose the recount effort. In addition, a narrow majority favors President Biden in a 2024 rematch against Trump.
The news isn’t entirely promising for Democrats, however: A majority of voters don’t think Biden should run for a second term.
Trump has cheered on the Maricopa County audit and continued to advance baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud as Republicans from other states he lost have made pilgrimages to Phoenix to review the idea of exporting the concept. But Arizona Republicans who pay close attention to the state’s changing demographics say the audit isn’t a political winner.
“It’s a failure. It’s a joke,” said Sean Noble, a top GOP operative in the state, advising Republicans elsewhere to “avoid it. The election is long over, time to look forward.”
Noble said public opinion surrounding the audit is just too baked in to change, even though the firm that conducted the effort, Cyber Ninjas, hasn’t finished its work. On Friday, Cyber Ninjas announced its team had finished photographing and recounting the 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots.
The final report is widely expected to make claims about election fraud, reflecting the politics of Cyber Ninja’s founder — he appeared in a conspiracy theorist’s documentary film rife with falsehoods, according to Arizona press reports.
By 49-46 percent, Arizona voters are opposed to the audit, which puts the result within the poll’s margin of error. But the survey of 600 likely voters found that the intensity of opposition to the audit exceeded the intensity of support, with those strongly opposed to it outnumbering those strongly in favor by 5 percentage points. And while Democrats and Republicans broke along familiar partisan lines, independent voters upon whom the state pivots in close elections opposed the audit by 18 percentage points.
“As bloody red meat for the MAGA Republican base, the audit is manna from heaven, but the problem is that Arizona is not a red state any more. It’s a swing state,” said Fernand Amandi, who conducted the survey. “The audit may be serving two interests: firing up the MAGA base but giving Democrats the opportunity to make the case to Arizona voters to stick with them.”
If a candidate supports the audit, the poll shows, Arizona voters would be less likely to support that politician by a margin of 9 percentage points.
Bendixen & Amandi International typically surveys for Democrats and accurately forecast Trump’s reelection troubles in Arizona more than a year before the 2020 vote. A Florida poll the firm conducted before the election also accurately warned Democrats that Hispanic voters in Miami-Dade County were leaning more strongly toward Trump than many expected.
Arizona opposition to the audit grew wider — with 51 percent against it and 44 percent in favor — when respondents were informed about the partisan nature of the effort: it’s being conducted by a firm with no experience in the field, and election experts, Democratic officials and Republican members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors oppose the recount. Those opponents have pointed out that the voting machines have already been checked by an accredited firm and that the election results were validated by a previous audit.
The new polling numbers are similar to a May poll from Arizona-based High Ground Inc., which tends to survey for Republicans, that found 55 percent opposed the audit and 41 percent supported it. That survey also found that, by an 11-point margin, Arizona voters would be less likely to support a candidate who backed the audit.
In Amandi’s poll, Biden’s favorability rating is almost equally divided, with 49 percent holding positive views of him and 48 percent with a negative view. Trump is in negative territory, with 46 percent holding a favorable opinion and 51 percent a negative opinion of him.
In a head-to-head rematch in Arizona, the poll shows, Biden edges Trump by 51-44 percent. The poll, which was conducted June 17 through June 23, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
The results don’t necessarily mean Arizonans want Biden to run again. Just over five months into his first year in office, only 37 percent of Arizona voters surveyed said Biden deserves a second term, while 53 percent say he does not. Fueling those numbers: strong Republican opposition to the president, relatively tepid Democratic support and double-digit opposition from independents.
“If Biden is interested in running for reelection and capturing Arizona’s Electoral College votes, paradoxically, he may want a rematch against Donald Trump,” said Amandi, who wouldn’t speculate about the causes behind Biden’s weak reelection numbers.
Noble, the Republican operative from Arizona, said he believes the 78-year-old president’s reelection numbers are “driven almost entirely by his age and cognitive ability. People are fine with him as president now, but they can’t imagine it in the future.”
The poll also gauged the popularity of the state’s Republican governor and its two Democratic senators.
Gov. Doug Ducey is slightly under water, with 47 percent holding a favorable impression and 49 percent holding an unfavorable view. Ducey, who refused Trump’s entreaties to try to overturn the results of the November election and has been as silent as he can about the audit, was viewed favorably by 72 percent of Republicans compared to 25 percent who viewed him unfavorably. Among independents, the governor was viewed unfavorably by 52 percent and favorably by 43 percent. He is term-limited and cannot seek reelection next year.
The Democratic senators, both of whom were elected in the Trump era, are in better shape.
Sen. Mark Kelly, who faces reelection next year, is viewed favorably by 48 percent of voters and unfavorably by 41 percent. His job approval rating is slightly better, with 51 percent approving and 35 percent disapproving.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is viewed favorably by 50 percent and unfavorably by 37 percent, essentially identical to her job-approval numbers.
Sinema has become a magnet for progressive criticism because of her refusal to scrap the filibuster, which essentially requires 60 voters in the 100-member Senate to approve most legislation. The poll shows that 46 percent of Arizona voters favor it and 36 percent are opposed.
When informed that Sinema’s support for the filibuster “may mean the policy priorities of President Biden and the Democratic leadership may not have a chance of becoming law and being implemented,” 50 percent said they supported her decision and 39 percent were opposed.
Sinema’s stance on the filibuster and other issues have cost her among Democratic voters — her disapproval ratings are higher among Democrats than Republicans and more Republicans approve of her job performance than Democrats.
Amandi, the pollster, said Sinema could be susceptible to a primary challenge in 2024, but her overall numbers make her a formidable general election candidate. Amandi said there’s a connection between Sinema’s support and the opposition to the audit: the electorate overall is in the middle in Arizona.
“Sen. Sinema seems to understand the lesson that Arizona voters are teaching when it comes to the audit: It’s smarter political terrain to be in the center than at the partisan extremes in Arizona,” Amandi said.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is term-limited and cannot seek reelection in 2022.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/29/arizona-ballot-audit-gop-biden-496908
Beyond Tulsa, Overlooked Race Massacres Draw New Focus
Efforts to teach the histories are gaining momentum even as some states try to limit how racism is discussed in schools.
By Mike Ives
June 29, 2021 Updated 10:53 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/us/elaine-massacre-history-lessons.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
The Elaine massacre of 1919 is believed to be the deadliest episode of racial violence in Arkansas history. But when the historian Brian Mitchell began researching it a few years ago, he met teachers in the state who didn’t know about it or weren’t sure how to explain it to their students.
“Teachers who were having a difficult time talking about difficult histories didn’t know where to start,” he said.
So Professor Mitchell, an expert on African American history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, helped create a virtual exhibit about the massacre and packed it with teaching materials.
After the murder of George Floyd last year triggered widespread protests and calls for racial justice, there has been more public discussion of America’s history of racial violence. The recent centennial of the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Okla., which prompted President Biden to visit the city, is a prominent example.
But the Tulsa race massacre isn’t the only one getting a fresh look. In some American schools, museums and other institutions, events like Elaine are being discussed for the first time. And some of these efforts are gaining momentum even as Republican politicians in several states try to block curriculums that emphasize systemic racism.
Roger Brooks, the president of Facing History and Ourselves, an educational nonprofit based in Massachusetts, said it was thrilling to see “the examination of untold or forgotten histories gaining traction across the country.”
“These types of projects, when approached with integrity and deep scholarship, provide a path toward filling out the contours of the larger contemporary picture of the times we’re living in,” he said.
An Arkansas tragedy
The massacre in Elaine, which sits on a bend of the Mississippi River about 100 miles south of Memphis, occurred after a group of Black sharecroppers informed plantation owners that they had formed a chapter of a national union.
As the farmers met at a local church, police officers interrupted them, leading to a shootout in which one of the officers was killed. A mob of white men then “poured into the county to suppress the alleged Black revolt that had been reported to them,” Professor Mitchell wrote in a recent essay. Hundreds of U.S. Army soldiers were sent to Elaine at the governor’s request.
Over the next few days, soldiers, police officers and white mobs are believed to have killed hundreds of people. Homes were burned with Black families inside, and the victims included men, women and children, according to Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, a professor emerita of African American studies at Pennsylvania State University.
A jury later convicted 12 Black men for the murders of three white men in Elaine. They were sentenced to death, but freed years later after six of the convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923.
Textbooks in Arkansas once “basically accepted” initial, pro-establishment accounts of the massacre from local officials and newspapers, said Barclay Key, a historian at the University of Arkansas. More recent textbooks, he added, have better explained the role of the Black union organizers and how the massacre started.
‘This happened in my community.’
When Professor Mitchell and his students began researching the Elaine massacre a few years ago, there was virtually no record of Black deaths from it in the county where it had occurred, he said. They managed to find death certificates in a local funeral home’s collection that confirmed deaths that had gone unreported at the time.
The class created a searchable index of those records and donated it to the Arkansas State Archive. Separately, Professor Mitchell helped to create a virtual exhibit around the massacre’s centennial for the university’s Center for Arkansas History and Culture that includes teaching guides, archival records and interactive maps.
Hundreds of local teachers have incorporated materials from the exhibit into their lesson plans, said Deborah Baldwin, the university’s associate provost of collections and archives.
One of them, Ruth Brown, said she had taught the massacre to middle and high school students over the past decade, initially relying on materials and speakers from the Elaine Legacy Center, a local project to commemorate the massacre’s victims.
Over the past year, Ms. Brown used resources from the virtual exhibit and taught about the massacre as part of a broader curriculum that focused on literacy.
“The reason I get a good response is because they take ownership,” Ms. Brown, a social studies teacher in the Marvell-Elaine School District, said of her students. “You know, ‘This happened in my community.’”
Elaine isn’t the only place in the American South where teachers, historians, curators and others are trying to educate communities about race massacres, often in places where such events are not a major focus of public school curriculums.
In Florida, the Orange County Library System’s website has a page about the 1920 Ocoee massacre — in which a white mob burned Black homes and churches — with links to books, films and other materials.
In Louisiana, the Historic New Orleans Collection published a website this year about Black activists during Reconstruction, the period immediately after the Civil War. One page analyzes the Mechanics’ Institute massacre of 1866, in which a white mob killed dozens of people attending a state constitutional convention that had been called to consider giving Black people the right to vote.
And last year in North Carolina, a museum published an interactive map about a massacre that coincided with the 1898 overthrow of a Black-majority city’s multiracial government.
That massacre by white militias in Wilmington, N.C., which left at least 60 Black people dead, began with efforts by local Democrats to block people from voting. A mob burned the office of a Black newspaper and sent Black workers fleeing into nearby swamps. White supremacists also forced elected Black officials to resign and banished other Black people from Wilmington.
A “story map” about the event, published last year by the Cape Fear Museum of History and Science, offers a fresh account of what happened in Wilmington — and calls it not a “riot” but a “white supremacist massacre and a coup d’état.”
“The story map was conceived of before both the pandemic and the racial protests of 2020,” said Jan Davidson, the museum’s historian. “Still, it became a particularly relevant and timely intervention into the public conversation about race and power.”
Efforts to teach students and the public about race massacre have critics: Several Republican-led state legislatures have either passed or proposed measures that would limit how schools teach about racism.
Those efforts will make it harder for many teachers and school districts to introduce a “serious curriculum” around topics like slavery, freedom struggles and the legacies of white supremacy, said Professor Woodruff, the Penn State historian.
Young people today are “more willing to question the past” than their parents were, she said, and demands for reckonings over the legacies of slavery and segregation — as well as the genocide of Native Americans and underreported state violence against Mexican Americans and Asian Americans — may grow as the United States moves from a white to a nonwhite majority.
“But we are not yet there,” she added.
Family history
In Arkansas, the push to talk more about the Elaine massacre comes not only from historians and teachers, but descendants of the victims.
One of them, James White Sr., directs programs at the Elaine Legacy Center. This summer he is helping to organize a reading program for about 50 children that will focus on the writer Richard Wright, who lived in Elaine as a child. Mr. Wright’s 1945 memoir, “Black Boy,” tells the story of how his uncle was lynched there three years before the 1919 massacre.
One of Ms. Brown’s former students, Edlun Marshall, said that he grew up hearing about the massacre from his extended family. Teachers mentioned it in passing, he added, but he did not learn the full story until he took Ms. Brown’s class in high school.
“I can definitely remember feeling the sadness,” he said, “and also the rage, to hear that innocent people were brutally attacked and killed for simply trying to have some type of equality in this land of opportunity.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/us/elaine-massacre-history-lessons.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
The land was worth millions. A Big Ag corporation sold it to Sonny Perdue’s company for $250,000.
Story by Desmond Butler
Graphics by John Muyskens
Videos by Joy Sharon Yi and Erin Patrick O'Connor
June 29, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/sonny-perdue-adm-land-deal/
It was a curious time for Sonny Perdue to close a real estate deal.
In February 2017, weeks after President Donald Trump selected him to be agriculture secretary, Perdue’s company bought a small grain plant in South Carolina from one of the biggest agricultural corporations in America.
Had anyone noticed, it would have prompted questions ahead of his confirmation, a period when most nominees lay low and avoid potential controversy. The former governor of Georgia did not disclose the deal — there was no legal requirement to do so.
An examination of public records by The Washington Post has found that the agricultural company, Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), sold the land at a small fraction of its estimated value just as it stood to benefit from a friendly secretary of agriculture.
Perdue did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the real estate deal. Jackie Anderson, a spokeswoman for Chicago-based ADM, denied that the company sold the property at a discount, saying that ADM began negotiations with Perdue’s former company, AGrowStar, in 2015 — well before Trump was elected — and could not find another buyer.
“This was nothing more than a business decision to sell a significantly underperforming asset,” she said.
Danny Brown, the former president of AGrowStar, confirmed negotiations began in late 2015. But Brown said ADM wanted $4 million for the plant — 16 times what Perdue’s company ultimately paid for it.
The timing of the sale just as Perdue was about to become the most powerful man in U.S. agriculture raises legal and ethics concerns, from the narrow question of whether the secretary followed federal financial disclosure requirements to whether the transaction could have been an attempt to influence an incoming government official, in violation of bribery statutes, ethics lawyers say.
“This stinks to high heaven,” said Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor. “It deserves a prosecutor’s attention,” she added. “Only a prosecutor with the powers of the grand jury can find out, in fact, whether there was a quid pro quo that existed at the time of the deal.”
Public officials are barred from accepting anything of value if the benefit is given “with intent to influence.” ADM, which spent millions of dollars lobbying the U.S. government during the Trump presidency, certainly had many interests before the USDA during Perdue’s tenure.
“We did not receive any special favors from Mr. Perdue during his administration,” Anderson said, “and it is unfair and inaccurate to imply that we did.”
ADM sold the plant in Estill, S.C., to Perdue’s then-company, AGrowStar, for $250,000 — a fraction of what county and independent appraisers say it is worth. Six years earlier, ADM had paid more than $5.5 million for the same land, a figure that closely matches assessments by independent experts contacted by The Post, who analyzed the value based on state records and drone footage of the property.
Months after Perdue took over the U.S. Department of Agriculture, his family trust sold AGrowStar to a group of investors along with all of its real estate for an undisclosed amount. According to Brown, AGrowStar sold for about $12 million.
The real estate sales illustrate the limits of the financial disclosure rules intended to reveal potential conflicts of interest before confirmation. Officials are not required to detail their companies’ transactions or any business deals completed before their confirmations.
The sale of Perdue’s company was also obscured by complex financial moves that appear to have evaded at least the spirit of an agreement Perdue made with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, according to Walter Shaub, who led the agency at the time.
“This may be a matter for the FBI to investigate, frankly,” he said.
Weeks after the lucrative deal with ADM, Perdue pledged that if confirmed he would uphold the highest ethical standards.
“For the American taxpayers, our customers, I will prioritize customer service every day,” he told senators at his confirmation hearing. “They expect and have every right to demand that we conduct the people’s business efficiently, effectively, and with the utmost integrity.”
While ADM asserts that the property was sold at fair market value, the commercial appraiser for Hampton County’s tax assessment office is skeptical.
“I would question the sale,” Robert Bates said. “It was an extremely low price to be paid for that facility.”
The heart of Estill
By the time Perdue’s company bought the Estill plant, its operations were so diminished hardly anyone noticed it went for a pittance.
The grain elevators, storage bins and oil processing machinery still loom over Estill. From the heart of the town, the rusting tops of the storage bins and the stained sides of the grain elevator are a reminder of better days, when the plant employed dozens of workers and could process more than 11 million bushels of soybeans a year into vegetable oil. The owners expanded the grain storage over time to 3 million bushels, an asset that remains today. Wheat, corn and soy would come and go along the train tracks that ran right to the grain elevator.
But by the end of the 1990s, amid changes in grain markets, the owners became overextended and eventually declared bankruptcy. The threat of closure, which would have devastated Estill, prompted the South Carolina Farm Bureau to join a group of investors to buy the plant and rename it Carolina Soya. The effort was not a success, and by 2010 they were looking for a buyer.
Paul Hankey managed the plant for 26 years, and he put his soul into it, he said in an interview at his home in Estill. When the plant went up for sale, there were two interested parties: the chicken company, Perdue Farms, which is unrelated to Sonny Perdue, and ADM. Hankey was pushing the investors to go with Perdue Farms, which would have kept the oil processing facility open and taken advantage of the leftover meal from the soy beans to feed chickens.
But the investors made a deal with ADM, a giant in the food processing market globally that had $64 billion in revenue last year and once billed itself as “supermarket to the world.”
The company has a history of manipulating markets. In the late ’90s, three ADM executives were convicted in a global price-fixing scheme and sentenced to prison terms. ADM was fined $100 million — the largest antitrust fine in U.S. history at the time.
Hankey recalled that the initial signed deal was for $10 million, but after a troubling assessment, ADM paid $5,525,854.70 in December 2010, according to a deed. Hankey said that the potential liability from fire or accidents with the aging facility would have given potential buyers pause — and would still.
Yet Hankey had suspicions about ADM’s motives in Estill, and he turned out to be right. ADM shut down the processing business. Some 30 people lost their jobs in a town where more than a third of the population lives below the poverty line, according to an estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau.
“It had a huge impact on the town,” Hankey said.
The sale also affected the wider region. Because it processed so much soy, the plant was a regional buyer in the market. That was a lot of capacity for local growers, who could sell to Carolina Soya instead of shipping it to big traders like Cargill or ADM.
When the Estill plant closed, local soy prices fell. That meant ADM, one of the biggest players in soy processing, could purchase beans at a lower cost.
“They bought the market,” Hankey said.
In ADM’s account, the decision to sell to AGrowStar went like this: The grain market was deteriorating, the plant was bleeding money, and the company wanted to offload underperforming assets. It put the property on the market in 2015.
ADM approached Brown, the AGrowStar president, at a grain elevator conference in December of that year with an offer of $4 million. “I said, ‘No way guys,’" Brown recalled.
A few months later, at a grain and feed meeting in Charleston, S.C., the offer got better. “At that point they had come down and it was two, two-and-a-half million,” Brown said. At a third meeting in May, on a golf course in Georgia, ADM told Brown to “make us an offer.”
“’We want out, our board wants out, and we want to get gone,’ ” ADM told Brown.
In the fall of 2016, when Perdue was working as an agriculture adviser for the Trump campaign, an ADM executive told Brown: “ ‘I got you a deal you can’t refuse,’ ’’ Brown recalled. The offer had slipped to $250,000.
“So me and Sonny looked at it,” Brown said. Even if they couldn’t turn a profit down the road, he told Perdue: “I think we can get our money back by selling scrap iron or the motors or the conveyors or the boiler.”
Brown said that the Estill property was hard for ADM to sell, because it was old and hard to run profitably. "It had nothing to do with the secretary of agriculture, the governor of Georgia or a sweetheart deal,” Brown said.
On Dec. 30, 2016, three weeks before Perdue was nominated, ADM and AGrowStar signed a purchase agreement. Anderson provided a redacted copy that is signed by Perdue, listed as “sole member” of AGrowStar, and an ADM executive.
At that time, there was already public speculation that Perdue could be the nominee — including hints from Perdue himself. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Dec. 1, 2016, Perdue said that days earlier, he had met with Trump, who asked about his “skill sets.”
As soon as AGrowStar bought the facility, Brown said, Perdue Farms offered to buy it for itself. “We could have sold it and doubled, tripled, quadrupled our money right then," he said. But the deal with ADM included a clause that AGrowStar could not sell it for a number of years.
“We could not compete, we could not crank up the processing, we could not sell that facility,” Brown said.
Hankey, the former plant manager, when told of Brown’s account, said that ADM’s efforts to close the soy bean processing and to keep it closed was unfair to Estill, a town that badly needed the jobs and the revenue.
“It makes me mad,” he said.
An appraiser contacted by The Post confirmed that the equipment on-site was probably worth more than $250,000, calling the deal “a no-risk proposition.”
Indeed, Brown said that he stayed on at AGrowStar after the Perdue family sold the company. The new owners stripped equipment from the Estill plant, including a huge boiler. “On a scale of one to 10, that boiler was a 10. It was a boiler that would go on the Titanic,” he said. And the boiler alone sold for double what AGrowStar had paid in early 2017 for the entire property in Estill. “We ended up getting, I don’t know, $500,000 for that boiler,” he said.
The property’s 3 million-bushel capacity was also worth substantially more than the quarter-million dollars that AGrowStar paid for it. For the grain storage, a very conservative commercial estimate of value would be $1 per bushel, or $3 million dollars, according to one of two independent appraisers contacted by The Post. They both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their work.
One of the appraisers assessed the property at $5.7 million based on state and county records and drone footage of the property taken by The Post. A second nationally known agricultural appraiser reviewed that assessment and agreed with its conclusions.
A third appraisal came from Hampton County, which pegged the property at almost $2.4 million in 2018, after the Purdue purchase, based on the replacement value of the assets. According to Brown, AGrowStar tried to appeal that valuation, but was denied.
“Replacement value isn’t any good if no one wants it,” he said.
ADM said that the three appraisers’ accounts might reflect current value, rather than value at the time of the sale. But Hampton County also appraised the property at $2.9 million in 2016 — the year before the sale.
It’s plausible that the company could have struggled to find a buyer and been happy to offload the property. What’s not plausible is that a company as steeped in the ways of Washington would have closed a deal with the incoming agriculture secretary without seeing the risk of controversy.
Unless nobody noticed.
‘3 minutes, 1 tax bill, $100,000 for Sonny Perdue’
It was this kind of insider dealing that Trump was referring to when he promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. But Perdue’s track record was no secret.
When he was elected governor of Georgia in 2003, Perdue came into office with a bevy of potential conflicts of interest. The barrel-chested politician was a walk-on football player at the University of Georgia, a veterinarian and a U.S. Air Force captain, but he spent much of his life — and made much of his fortune — in grain trading and real estate. The executive-turned-governor was twice found to have violated state ethics laws. He refused to put his assets in a blind trust and once dismissed the suggestion in a debate.
“I am a small-business owner. I’m in the agribusiness,” Perdue said during his 2006 reelection campaign. “That’s about as blind a trust as you can get. We trust in the Lord for rain and many other things.”
In 2005, it was the state legislature that helped Perdue’s business pursuits.
The governor had purchased some 20 acres of land near Walt Disney World in Florida for $2 million and faced a hefty tax bill. The following year, the Georgia legislature approved a bill allowing state residents to avoid taxes on property sold in Georgia if they bought similar land in another state. It made the changes retroactive to land deals from the previous year.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the provision was slipped into the bill at the last minute by a Republican legislator, Rep. Larry O’Neal, who had worked on land deals for the Perdue family as a lawyer. “For those of you who are still awake,” O’Neal joked as he introduced the amendment near midnight. Immediately afterward, the bill went to a vote.
It seemed tailor-made for Perdue: he had sold family property in Georgia months before the purchase in Florida. He signed the bill into law three days before tax day and saved himself an estimated $100,000 in taxes. When it came to light, the Atlanta paper ran a story headlined: “3 minutes, 1 tax bill, $100,000 for Sonny Perdue.”
It took Perdue and the U.S. Office of Government Ethics several weeks to negotiate a deal to untangle the potential conflicts of interests in his agribusinesses.
U.S. law requires senior officials to detail their assets before confirmation, remove conflicts, and file reports annually on their personal holdings so officials can certify that they have stuck to their agreements. They are required to report major transactions, but only after they are sworn in.
The only way ethics officers or lawmakers might have learned about Perdue’s ADM deal independently would have been by word of mouth, by looking at deeds in Hampton County — or if Perdue had disclosed it. He was not required to on his forms and did not otherwise inform the committee, according to two staff members for the Senate Agriculture Committee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue.
Negotiations with the government ethics office dragged on until March 7. Most of Perdue’s holdings were held in two trusts, including one called the Perdue Family Wealth Preservation Trust. He promised that within 90 days of his confirmation, he would move most of his holdings into two new trusts that would be irrevocably out of his control and would not benefit him or his wife.
In trust law, “irrevocable” means that the trust cannot be changed once it is signed. In this case, Perdue could make his children trustees and beneficiaries, but neither he nor the new trustees could shift that benefit and control back, according to the agreement. Filings showed Perdue’s holdings in his initial filing were between about $11.3 million and $47 million. The wide gap reflects the disclosure rules that list the value of each asset within a range.
Perdue was confirmed as agriculture secretary on April 24, 2017, with 11 senators voting against him. At some point afterward, Perdue did create an irrevocable trust, for which he and his wife were neither trustees nor beneficiaries, according to a USDA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss a specific ethics filing. And in Perdue’s 2018 required annual disclosure, the first since he took office, the two trusts were no longer listed as assets. His total assets had fallen to a range of between about $2.2 million and $5.1 million.
But then, without public explanation, most of the assets were back in a trust on his 2019 disclosure and his total assets had shot up to a range of about $11.9 million and $47.9 million.
“I just I don’t understand how you can be extremely rich in 2017, much less rich in 2018 and then all of a sudden to be rich again in 2019,” said Shaub, who led the Office of Government Ethics in 2017 and signed off on Perdue’s forms.
But the sale of AGrowStar was never reflected in Perdue’s disclosures because by the time it was sold, it was part of a trust no longer controlled by the secretary. It did not have to be disclosed.
After the sale of Perdue’s agribusinesses, the new trustees created a third set of trusts, returned all the assets to it and gave back the control and benefits to Perdue, according to the USDA official.
According to a former Perdue communications aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record by their current employer and spoke on the condition of anonymity, “Secretary Perdue complied with his ethics agreement and followed the advice of ethics officers at USDA.”
Officials could do nothing to stop it, said the USDA official.
Shaub doesn’t agree. The changes in the trusts should have been reported to the U.S. Senate, Shaub said, because it diverged from the terms of Perdue’s original agreement. According to Perdue’s government ethics filings, that notification never happened.
“It was like a bait and switch,” said Shaub, an Obama appointee who left the agency in June 2017. He did not see Perdue’s subsequent filings until asked to look at them by The Post.
Richard Painter, a chief ethics lawyer in President George W. Bush’s administration and later a staunch critic of the Trump administration, says the shuffling of the trusts may be legal under U.S. trust law, but, "It’s just fundamentally dishonest.”
What happened after the agreement, according to the USDA officials’ explanation, contradicts the letter Perdue signed and could amount to a violation of false statement statutes, Painter said.
“To say you have an irrevocable trust means you’re saying that you no longer own the asset and you never will,” he said. “I don’t know the extent of the exposure and whether he committed a crime, but I think he has serious issues."
The shifting assets also effectively obscured the sale of AGrowStar, a transaction that might have attracted more scrutiny to the Estill land deal. Because the company was effectively off the books when it was sold in 2018, Perdue did not have to detail it. Had the company been part of his holdings that year, he would have had to file a transaction report, including a sales price listed within a range, according to Shaub.
AGrowStar’s website, however, did note the sale.
Shaub and Painter said that the complex shuffling of trusts combined with the land deal and the subsequent sale of AGrowStar needs to be investigated.
The USDA’s inspector general and the House Oversight Committee should probe the transactions, Shaub said.
One of the open questions is how much money the Perdue family made from the land in Estill. According to Brown, he and Perdue boosted the value of AGrowStar before it was sold. In the course of the 10 months under Perdue’s ownership, the company used the rail line to the Estill plant to transport more grain and made the operation more efficient.
According to the deeds, AGrowStar bought the property for $250,000 and it was listed as changing hands months later at $524,000. But the Perdue family didn’t just sell the land, they sold the whole company for about $12 million, Brown said.
The AGrowStar transactions were first flagged to The Post by the government watchdog Accountable.US, which is calling for Perdue to be investigated.
The group’s president, Kyle Herrig, called the deal "the definition of corruption.”
“Perdue must be held accountable for putting his own interests — and those of one of the most powerful corporations he oversaw — ahead of consumers, family farmers and rural America,” he said.
Perdue, who is 74, has been in the running to head Georgia’s higher-education system.
ADM is no stranger to the ways of Washington. It employs a powerful team of in-house lobbyists, spending $1.7 million on those efforts in 2017, a figure that rose sharply the following year.
The Perdue years were good ones for ADM, which hit many targets among the top issues listed on its lobbying forms.
For one, the USDA changed food safety rules that had been in place for more than a half-century. In 2019, Perdue’s agency took steps to loosen regulations of pork production by reducing inspectors at slaughterhouses and eliminating the cap on “line speed” — the rate at which pigs are slaughtered, which had been 1,106 hogs per hour, or 18 hogs per minute.
A boost to the meat industry is a boost to the grain industry, since more pigs means more grain. The company was expanding its global animal feed business with a major acquisition of Neovia in 2019 that made it one of the largest players in the world.
When Thailand instituted a ban in 2019 on glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weed killer Roundup, ADM helped the USDA get the decision reversed by providing political intelligence on the Thai government, according to emails obtained by an advocacy group, the Center for Biological Diversity. Roundup is made by Bayer, but it is critical to ADM, which sells grains modified for resistance to glyphosate.
Vietnam also banned the chemical, prompting Perdue himself to warn Hanoi: “We are disappointed in Vietnam’s decision to ban glyphosate, a move that will have devastating impacts on global agricultural production."
Vietnam later postponed its ban.
But the biggest win for ADM came in the form of subsidies and tax breaks.
In 2019, U.S. farmers and Big Ag were pressuring the Trump administration to boost the biofuels industry. ADM is one of the largest U.S. producers of ethanol, made from corn, and of biodiesel made from vegetable oil.
The administration was caught in the middle of a perennial battle between corn growers and energy companies. U.S. regulations require oil refiners to blend a set amount of ethanol fuel made from corn into gasoline. More ethanol means less petroleum gas and vice versa. With oil prices low, U.S. gas producers were hurting, so the administration allowed many refiners to waive the ethanol requirements. Corn farmers, who were also suffering from a lack of demand, were growing increasingly angry, and the 2020 election was looming.
Inside the Trump administration, Environmental Protection Agency chief Andrew Wheeler, who had been a coal industry lawyer before his appointment, was backing the oil refiners. But the corn growers and ethanol producers, including ADM, had Perdue in their corner.
In August, Trump asked Perdue and Wheeler to come up with measures to boost demand for biofuels. Perdue traveled to Decatur, Ill., to attend the Illinois Farm Progress Show, where he told an audience that Trump would soon announce a plan.
Later, speaking from the “ADM stage,” Perdue dramatically took a call from Trump, who briefed the farmers on his trade policy and asked them to stick with him. “I hope you like me even better now than you did in ’16,” he said, eliciting a mixture of applause and boos.
In September 2019, Trump announced a deal to add hundreds of millions of gallons of ethanol to the U.S. gas supply. According to Bloomberg News, the deal was brokered at the White House by U.S. senators — and a representative of ADM.
Later that year, ADM checked off a top lobbying goal when Congress passed a biodiesel tax credit that amounted to $1 per gallon subsidy retroactive to 2017. In early 2020, at the onset of the coronavirus crisis, Perdue announced a $100 million subsidy of biofuels, including ethanol and biodiesel.
The subsidies and tax credit helped. On Jan. 29, 2020, ADM trumpeted quarterly earnings of $504 million.
More than half of that profit — $270 million — came from the biodiesel tax credit.
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
About this story
The Post created a 3-D model of the AGrowStar facility from drone footage using a process called photogrammetry. The Post used Open Drone Map, an open-source software tool, to process thousands of images from a series of flights over the property and output a model. The Post used Blender to clean the model, customize the lighting and render images. Further cleaning to remove digital artifacts in the rendered image was performed in Photoshop. Aerial imagery for the map of Estill is from the USDA Farm Service Agency’s National Agricultural Imagery Program and taken in 2017.
Project and story editing by Trish Wilson. Graphics editing by Monica Ulmanu. Video editing by Tom LeGro. Design and development by Tyler Remmel. Copy editing by Karen Funfgeld. Photo editing and research by Olivier Laurent.
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Desmond Butler
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Desmond Butler is an investigative reporter on The Washington Post's climate and environment team. He previously reported for the Associated Press in Washington, Istanbul and New York. His work has spotlighted unscrupulous military contractors, disinformation campaigns and nuclear smuggling. He also served as AP's chief correspondent in Turkey.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/sonny-perdue-adm-land-deal/
An Opioid Case Like No Other: N.Y. vs. the Entire Supply Chain
New York’s sweeping lawsuit is the first opioid case in which a jury rather than a judge will decide the outcome.
By Sarah Maslin Nir
June 29, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/nyregion/opioids-in-new-york.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
When New York’s sprawling opioid trial — the first in the country that targets the entire opioid supply chain — begins with opening arguments in Central Islip on Long Island on Tuesday, it will not be held in a courthouse.
There was not a courtroom large enough to fit the eight defendants, including drugmakers who manufacture opioids, distributors that supply the pills, their subsidiaries and their armies of lawyers. The judge will hear the case in an auditorium at a local college.
The trial, in which Nassau and Suffolk Counties have joined the New York State attorney general, marks the first opioid case where a jury rather than a judge will decide the outcome. Initially, the sweeping case also targeted several pharmacy chains that dispensed opioids, but in the days leading up to the trial, all were excised from the case following a flurry of settlements with New York, the details of which have not yet been finalized.
Still, the proceedings will offer rare illumination of the machinery that helped power a drug scourge that over the past two decades has killed more than 800,000 people nationwide via overdoses of prescription and street opioids, according to federal data.
Six jurors and six alternates will hear testimony inside the auditorium at Touro College’s Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center from what is likely to be hundreds of witnesses, as prosecutors seek to prove that the industry operated as a network of profiteers who cashed in on increasing the pills flooding into New York while ignoring the human cost.
“What is significant about a jury trial is it’s an opportunity for members of the community that have been so affected by the opioid epidemic to be able to hear the evidence, and rule for themselves as to whether the defendants should be held accountable,” said David Nachman, who until recently was the lead prosecutor for New York’s case. “I think that is significant in not only legal but moral and social terms.”
Conspicuously absent from the makeshift courtroom will be the defendant most associated by the public as culpable for the two-decade-long opioid epidemic — Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, which is owned by members of the billionaire Sackler family.
Purdue was initially named in the case, as were some individual Sacklers. But nearly two years ago, as Purdue faced thousands of opioid-related lawsuits, it filed for bankruptcy, a process that has paused cases against it and the Sacklers.
In addition, over the weekend, Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies, which had been a defendant the case, agreed to pay more than $230 million to settle with New York. The settlement ensures the company stays out of the opioid business in the United States permanently.
Johnson & Johnson, which says its drugs accounted for less than 1 percent of opioid prescriptions, had been a major supplier of the ingredients that make opioids to other manufacturers until 2016. It will also no longer stand trial.
The New York complaint also had named as defendants four major pharmacy chains: Walmart, CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens. But in the weeks leading up to the trial, all but Walgreens were severed from the case.
A spokesman for CVS confirmed that the pharmacy had reached a settlement agreement with Nassau and Suffolk Counties, the terms of which must be approved by the county legislatures before any financial payout is determined.
Rite Aid, Walmart and Walgreens did not respond to emails requesting comment. Lawyers for the counties declined to comment on the details of the pharmacies’ severance.
Even without the companies that have settled, a broad swath of the opioid industry is still set to take the stand, including manufacturers of generic versions of drugs, like Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. and Allergan Inc., as well as massive suppliers of the pills such as Cardinal Health and McKesson Corp.
The far-reaching nature of the case is perhaps both its strength and weakness: Plaintiffs’ lawyers say that the trial, which may last six months, will illustrate much of the scope of an industry that purports to treat pain patients but also profits from addiction. But that industry is overseen by federal agencies, and the defendants contend that they were producing, distributing and dispensing prescription drugs that were approved.
And the sheer volume of testimony may overwhelm jurors. The squads of lawyers defending the companies are expected to blame not only each other but also those not in the room, like Purdue and the Sacklers, in a tactic known as the empty chair defense.
More than 3,000 lawsuits have been filed across the country against entities involved in the supply of opioids. In New York, opioids in both prescribed and street forms killed 3,000 people in 2018, according to data from the New York State Department of Health.
Two opioid trials are currently ongoing: a state trial in California against several manufacturers, and a federal trial in West Virginia against a group of distributors.
The strategy of passing the blame can be effective but could fall flat in the New York case, said Elizabeth Burch, a professor at University of Georgia School of Law who writes about complex litigation.
“There has been a ton of finger-pointing, ‘It’s not us, it’s this other company over there that is the problem,’” Dr. Burch said.
In New York, “If you have the whole chain of distribution in front of the jurors at once,” she said, “if the defendants are pointing fingers at one another, that does some of the plaintiffs’ work for them.”
Prosecutors had initially made numerous legal claims, such as negligence and fraud, but state Supreme Court Justice Jerry Garguilo winnowed them down to just one for this current trial: that the defendants had fostered the opioid crisis and in so doing created a public nuisance — and are thus financially responsible for fixing it.
The jurors will not assess damages; they will be asked to determine only which, if any, of the defendants are liable. If New York prevails, a second trial will determine how much is owed. An analysis by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan policy research group, found that the opioid crisis had cost Long Island $8.2 billion in economic damage in 2017, the last year for which it had conducted research.
Any money recovered will not go to people harmed by the opioid crisis, but rather toward abatement — mitigating harm and preventing future crises with things like education and addiction treatment programs.
Plaintiffs in the New York case argue that the defendants are also responsible for much of the destruction wrought by drugs like heroin and fentanyl, to which they say opioids serve as a gateway.
The defendants say such claims are overly broad and that their culpability cannot be proven, according to court documents.
Broadly speaking, they contend that the pills were manufactured or provided legally. Any oversupply or abuse, they say, is the fault of those charged with monitoring opioid consumption — doctors, but also the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and even New York State and Suffolk and Nassau Counties themselves, which oversee things like the licensing of pharmacies and whose police departments tackle illegal drug use.
“The D.E.A. has always been responsible for setting the supply of opioid medications through its use of annual quotas, and demand is driven by the licensed physicians who write prescriptions based on their independent medical judgment,” the drug distributor AmerisourceBergen, a defendant, said in a statement. It added that the company “had no role in working with the D.E.A., to set quotas, nor did we interact with physicians or patients to recommend particular medications.”
Under Justice Garguilo’s instructions, the only burden for prosecutors in the New York case will be to convince a jury that all links in the distribution chain share in the blame.
“Sure, some of them make the pills, and some of them put them in trucks and send them out, and some of them put them on shelves, but they all have the same goal and all have the same tactics, and profit from each one of the falsehoods they tell,” said Jayne Conroy of Simmons Hanly Conroy, a lawyer for Suffolk County. “That’s the great secret about the case: It’s a whole bunch of defendants but not a complicated story.”
“The beauty of the law is you don’t just have to have one person who was responsible — every single one of these companies were a cause of this epidemic,” she said. “There is blame everywhere.”
Jan Hoffman contributed reporting.
Sarah Maslin Nir covers breaking news for the Metro section. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her series “Unvarnished,” an investigation into New York City’s nail salon industry that documented the exploitative labor practices and health issues manicurists face. @SarahMaslinNir
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/nyregion/opioids-in-new-york.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Rudy Giuliani Facing Inquiry Into Whether He Lobbied Trump for Turkey
By Christian Berthelsen, Greg Farrell, and Chris Strohm
29 June 2021, 13:57 BST
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-29/giuliani-facing-inquiry-into-whether-he-lobbied-trump-for-turkey
> DOJ inquiry is separate from criminal probe of Ukraine work
> U.S. could order ex-NYC mayor to register as foreign lobbyist
Rudy Giuliani is the subject of a Justice Department inquiry into possible foreign lobbying for Turkish interests separate from a criminal probe of his activities in Ukraine, according to people familiar with the matter.
For almost a year, the former New York mayor and personal lawyer to Donald Trump has been fielding questions about whether he was acting for Turkey when he pushed the Trump administration in 2017 to drop money-laundering charges against gold trader Reza Zarrab and deport exiled Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen. Zarrab later pleaded guilty and implicated Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a sanctions-evasion scheme, while Erdogan claims Gulen was behind a failed 2016 coup against his government.
The Turkey inquiry, which has not been previously reported, is not criminal, in contrast to the Ukraine investigation, which resulted in the Federal Bureau of Investigation seizing Giuliani’s electronic devices in April 28 raids on his Manhattan home and office. Though both matters focus on whether Giuliani lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of foreign interests, the Justice Department usually takes a softer approach when it thinks failure to register wasn’t intentional.
Giuliani has denied lobbying for either Turkish or Ukrainian interests, and the government has not accused him of wrongdoing in either matter. In the Turkey inquiry, if the government decides that Giuliani acted for a foreign interest, it could issue a determination letter requiring him to register as a lobbyist and also disclose all details of contacts he had with U.S. and Turkish officials concerning Zarrab and Gulen.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the matter. A lawyer for Giuliani also declined to comment.
The inquiry adds to the host of legal trouble Giuliani is facing. On top of the Ukraine probe, he had his New York law license suspended last week for spreading Trump’s false voter-fraud claims. Giuliani is also being sued over his election claims by voting machine makers and by members of Congress who accuse him of helping to incite the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. He is seeking to dismiss those suits.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-29/giuliani-facing-inquiry-into-whether-he-lobbied-trump-for-turkey
New York Takes Teva, McKesson, Others to Trial Over Opioids
By Reuters
June 29, 2021, at 6:07 a.m.
By Brendan Pierson
https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2021-06-29/new-york-takes-teva-mckesson-others-to-trial-over-opioids
NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York will take Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and other companies, including the nation's largest drug distributors, to trial on Tuesday, seeking to hold them liable for fueling an opioid crisis that has caused nearly half a million U.S. deaths over a decade.
The trial in Central Islip, New York, will mark the first time claims over the national opioid abuse and overdose epidemic go before a jury.
It will pit state Attorney General Letitia James and Suffolk and Nassau Counties against drugmakers Teva, Endo International and Abbvie Inc, as well as drug distributors AmerisourceBergen Corp, Cardinal Health Inc and McKesson Corp.
Another defendant in the case, drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, announced on Saturday it would pay $263 million to settle and avoid the trial.
New York and the counties claim that drug companies deceptively promoted opioids as safe, and that distributors ignored red flags that they were being diverted to illegal channels.
More than 3,000 lawsuits have been filed in the United States against drugmakers, distributors and pharmacies over the opioid epidemic, mostly by city, county and tribal governments.
Non-jury trials are already underway in cases brought against the four drugmakers by several counties in California, and against the three distributors by a city and county in West Virginia.
The New York counties had also sued pharmacy operators Walmart Inc, Rite Aid Corp and CVS Health Corp, but they were dropped from the trial during jury selection earlier this month. CVS said it had settled, without disclosing terms, while Walmart and Rite Aid declined to comment.
J&J and the three distributors last year proposed paying a combined $26 billion to settle all opioid claims against them nationwide, but the deal has not been finalized.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said nearly 500,000 people died from opioid overdoses from 1999 to 2019.
(Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Bill Berkrot)
https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2021-06-29/new-york-takes-teva-mckesson-others-to-trial-over-opioids
Arizona’s Maricopa County will replace voting equipment, fearful that GOP-backed election review has compromised security
By Rosalind S. Helderman
June 29, 2021 at 2:38 a.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/arizona-maricopa-2020-audit-review/2021/06/28/98da5e64-d863-11eb-9bbb-37c30dcf9363_story.html
Arizona’s Maricopa County announced Monday that it will replace voting equipment that was turned over to a private contractor for a Republican-commissioned review of the 2020 presidential election, concerned that the process compromised the security of the machines.
Officials from Maricopa, the state’s largest county and home to Phoenix, provided no estimates of the costs involved but have previously said that the machines cost millions to acquire.
“The voters of Maricopa County can rest assured, the County will never use equipment that could pose a risk to free and fair elections,” the county said in a statement. “As a result, the County will not use the subpoenaed equipment in any future elections.”
The announcement probably reflects an added cost to taxpayers for a controversial review that has been embraced by supporters of former president Donald Trump, who has falsely claimed that the 2020 election was rigged in Arizona and other battlegrounds that he lost.
The review was ordered by the Republican-led state Senate, which seized voting equipment, including nine tabulating machines used at a central counting facility and 385 precinct-based tabulators, as well as nearly 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County, with a legislative subpoena in late April. The review is being led by a Florida company called Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive has echoed Trump’s false claims. Audit organizers have said that they have completed a hand recount but that they will not release results from their review until August.
Spokesmen for the audit and for Senate President Karen Fann (R), who ordered the review, did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Maricopa’s announcement.
The process being used to recount ballots and examine voting machines — conducted on the floor of a former basketball arena in Phoenix and live-streamed exclusively using cameras operated by the pro-Trump One America News — has been widely panned by election experts as sloppy, insecure and opaque.
Among the most vocal critics has been the Republican-led leadership of Maricopa County. In May, all seven of the county’s elected officials — including five Republicans — joined in a scathing letter to the state Senate denouncing the audit as a sham.
“Our state has become a laughingstock,” they wrote. “Worse, this ‘audit’ is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic.”
Noting the tactics used by organizers of the review, such as hunting for bamboo in ballot paper, they added, “Your ‘audit,’ which you once said was intended to increase voters’ confidence in our electoral process, has devolved into a circus.”
The move to ditch all of the county’s voting machines came in response to a letter from the state’s chief elections officer, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D), who last month said she might decertify the machines if they were not decommissioned because of fears that their security had been compromised as they were handled by private actors.
“The lack of physical security and transparency means we cannot be certain who accessed the voting equipment and what might have been done to them,” wrote Hobbs, who is running for governor.
In a letter to Hobbs sent Monday, a county attorney wrote that the county board “shares your concerns” and had agreed to no longer use its voting equipment.
The county did not indicate whether it will ask the Senate to pay to replace the machines. When the state Senate took possession of the county’s voting equipment, Fann signed an agreement to pay any costs the county incurred “as a result of damage and/or alternation of the Subpoenaed Materials by the Senate or its agents.”
Biden was the first Democrat to win Arizona in nearly 25 years, snagging the state’s 11 electoral college votes largely on the strength of his victory in growing and diversifying Maricopa County.
Allegations of fraud or irregularities in Arizona’s vote were rejected last year by state and federal judges. Maricopa’s results were confirmed through a number of reviews, including a hand recount of a sample of ballots conducted jointly by both political parties, as well as a forensic audit conducted by federally accredited labs that was ordered by the county and concluded in February.
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By Rosalind Helderman
Rosalind Helderman is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2001. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/arizona-maricopa-2020-audit-review/2021/06/28/98da5e64-d863-11eb-9bbb-37c30dcf9363_story.html
America owes thanks to Trump’s lawyers — even William Barr
Opinion by George T. Conway III
Contributing columnist
June 28, 2021 at 7:46 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/28/george-conway-trump-barr-lawyers/
Donald Trump could never really count on the lawyers.
No matter how many cynical or craven congressmen, toadying aides, grifting consultants, unhinged activists, disinforming talking heads and deluded cultists he may have had, Trump still needed the lawyers. He needed serious members of the bar to provide at least some semblance of a legal justification for his attempted self-coup.
They never did.
Nearly six months after Jan. 6, as Trump’s private business stands on the verge of indictment, we’ve been learning more about how lawyers stood in the way of his attempt to commit the ultimate abuse of public trust during his final days in office.
The latest revelations involve former attorney general William P. Barr. An excerpt from a forthcoming book by ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl describes what Barr thought about the 45th president’s claims of electoral fraud: “It was all bulls---t." The Justice Department “realized from the beginning it was just bulls---." No legal term, English or Latin, fits better than that.
Barr shared a similar assessment with Trump at the White House on Dec. 1, 2020, Karl reports. You’ve shown no fraud, Barr explained, and yet “your people keep on shoveling this s--- out.”
Barr’s opposition left Trump enraged. One attendee described the president as having “the eyes and mannerism of a madman.” The book reports that the “livid” president responded by saying, “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”
To be sure, Barr’s rectitude that day doesn’t excuse his earlier kowtowing to Trump or his politicization of the Justice Department. And what Barr had done to precipitate his confrontation with Trump — issuing a bombshell public statement that the Justice Department had found no significant electoral fraud — didn’t exactly arise from high-minded motive: Karl reports that then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had prevailed upon Barr to make the announcement, fearing that Trump’s campaign to overturn the presidential election would cost their party the Senate.
But make no mistake: Barr, in Karl’s telling, did the right thing by refusing to treat Trump’s fraud claims as anything other than what he believed them to be: factual and legal manure.
And after Barr had resigned in the wake of that fiery confrontation, the remaining political appointees at the Justice Department similarly stood up to Trump. Barr’s successor, then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen, steadfastly refused Trump’s demand that the department seek to overturn the election.
Rosen did that despite knowing that the president might replace him with Jeffrey Clark, an official who was apparently eager to do Trump’s bidding. The remaining members of the Justice Department’s senior leadership likewise stood firm. They entered into a bureaucratic suicide pact by which they would all resign if Rosen were fired.
Emails recently unearthed by a congressional investigation show that Trump and his White House relentlessly urged these senior Justice Department officials to put Trump’s interests over the nation’s, and to follow Trump’s desires over the rule of law. They balked — and succeeded in running out the clock on Trump’s mendacious claims and his term of office.
Not attempting to destroy constitutional democracy would seem to be a low standard for members of the bar. And it is. But the importance of these lawyers’ refusals to behave lawlessly in the waning days of Trump’s presidency can’t be overstated.
As Barr put it at the White House with Trump on Dec. 1, according to Karl, “No self-respecting lawyer” would go “anywhere near” the president’s meritless claims. He was right: A number of lawyers quit their representation of Trump’s campaign as the absurdity of his claims became clear.
Their assessment was upheld by Trump-appointed judges, who in turn dealt scathing decisional blows to Trump’s electoral-fraud litigation charade. Those jurists included Stephanos Bibas, an appellate court appointee from Pennsylvania who emphatically affirmed that “democracy depends on counting all lawful votes promptly and finally not setting them aside without weighty proof.”
Precisely because good lawyers couldn’t fathom Trump’s false claims of fraud, Trump was left with what Barr aptly called a “clown show” of a legal effort — the clown show led by Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani got his well-earned due last week. His ceaseless public lying in support of Trump led a New York court to suspend his license to practice law because his conduct had undermined “the profession’s role as a crucial source of reliable information.”
The lawyers of the Trump era weren’t perfect — far from it — but Americans should still be grateful there were more Rosens than Giulianis. Even Barr deserves some credit.
And for that, in the end, we owe the essential culture of America’s legal profession. As exemplified by the decision suspending Giuliani, that culture, at its best, seeks to vindicate factual truth and the rule of law — values entirely anathematic to Trump. Which is why the lawyers could never really be on his side.
1562 Comments
Opinion by George Conway
George T. Conway III, a Washington Post contributing columnist, is a lawyer. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/28/george-conway-trump-barr-lawyers/
POLITICO Playbook: Who will be Pelosi’s Republican?
By RACHAEL BADE, RYAN LIZZA, EUGENE DANIELS and TARA PALMERI 06/29/2021 06:09 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2021/06/29/who-will-be-pelosis-republican-493407?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000015c-1617-df7d-af5f-de1f97750000&nlid=630318
PELOSI’S JAN. 6 COMMITTEE CURVEBALL — Speaker NANCY PELOSI surprised Washington when her office announced Monday that she was open to appointing a Republican to fill one of her party’s spots on the select committee to investigate Jan. 6. So instead of eight Democrats and five Republicans on the 13-member panel, it would be a 7-6 breakdown.
The move shows Pelosi has learned a thing or two after two-plus years of investigating DONALD TRUMP.
For one, a Pelosi-appointed Republican would make it harder for GOP leaders to attack the panel’s investigation as a partisan witch hunt. If Democrats decide to subpoena House Minority Leader KEVIN MCCARTHY, for instance, they’ll be able to portray the move as bipartisan — assuming, as we do, that the GOP appointee would side with Democrats on such moves.
Having a Republican signing off on the final report could also bolster the findings in the eyes of some GOP voters (though we’re under no illusion that many of those voters exist anymore).
Pelosi doesn’t make these sorts of decisions lightly. One of us is writing a book about her party’s effort to check Trump during the final two years of this presidency. We can say confidently that Pelosi prefers control — and predictability — over the process. Including a Republican among her picks injects at least some uncertainty, but the risk also comes with a clear upside.
SO WHO WILL GET THE JOB? Or perhaps the better question is: Who wants the job? Democratic leaders are eyeing the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in the face of immense pressure to toe the line.
Two names were being circulated in Democratic leadership circles Monday:
— Rep. LIZ CHENEY (Wyo.). The former House Republican Conference chair is the most obvious choice, after she lost her leadership post for refusing to keep quiet about Trump. Democrats for that reason view her as trustworthy on this matter. She also has a conservative track record that protects her from charges of being a “RINO.”
Drawbacks: Cheney, with her famous last name and willingness to buck her own party, might outshine whomever Pelosi chooses as chair, perhaps even being seen as the panel’s de facto leader. (Again, Pelosi likes to control things.) It’s also not clear she wants the job.
What she said: Cheney dodged questions about this Monday. “It’s up to the speaker,” she said.
— Rep. JOHN KATKO. The New York Republican was another top choice, particularly after he worked with House Homeland Security Chair BENNIE THOMPSON (D-Miss.) to try to establish a bipartisan commission to study Jan. 6. Ultimately, that proposal failed when McCarthy rallied members against it. But Katko, who also voted to impeach Trump, managed to persuade a few dozen GOP lawmakers to break with McCarthy to support an outside investigation.
Democrats like one more thing about him: He’s a skilled former trial lawyer and assistant U.S. attorney for the Justice Department. In that regard, he’s got a legal track record that others don’t.
Drawbacks: Katko made clear Monday night he didn’t want the job, blasting Pelosi for unveiling a structure with eight Democrats and five Republicans instead of an even-numbered commission split down the middle between the two parties. We’re not surprised by this. He’s actually fairly close with the GOP leadership and has sought to walk a fine line between criticizing Trump and being a loyal member of the House GOP Conference.
WHAT WILL GOP LEADERS DO? There’ve been some suggestions among rank-and-file Republicans that GOP leaders should refuse to appoint any of their own to this panel, ensuring that the select committee’s findings are seen as partisan and untrustworthy. This decision will ultimately rest with McCarthy, though it has risks: With no GOP members, Republicans would have no voice during possible high-profile hearings, or in the room to push back on assertions made in depositions. As our Nicholas Wu and Sarah Farris reported Monday night, some Dems fear McCarthy will tap Rep. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-Ga.) and turn the entire thing into a shitshow. Olivia Beavers: “House GOP bristles as a Jan. 6 investigation lands in its lap”
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2021/06/29/who-will-be-pelosis-republican-493407?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000015c-1617-df7d-af5f-de1f97750000&nlid=630318
Trump contempt for White House Covid taskforce revealed in new book
Nightmare Scenario reports dismissive attitude to key body
Martin Pengelly in New York
@MartinPengelly
Tue 29 Jun 2021 05.30 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/29/trump-white-house-covid-taskforce-fauci
Amid chaos at the White House as the coronavirus pandemic worsened, Donald Trump took to referring derisively to the Covid taskforce chaired by his vice-president as “that fucking council that Mike has”.
The revelation about the president’s contempt for his key advisory body is one among many in a new book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, which is published in the US on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Previous revelations from the book have included that Trump wanted to send infected Americans to Guantánamo Bay and that he mused about John Bolton, his national security adviser, being “taken out” by Covid.
Authors Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, both Washington Post reporters, also report in depth on how the extraordinary influence of “outside consultants” to Trump, including the controversial Stephen Moore, relentlessly undermined the work of the president’s scientific advisers.
The book is a deeply reported account of the beginning of a pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 in the US and a federal response hamstrung by incompetence and infighting.
Trump’s derisive term for his task force, the authors write, was “a signal that he wished it would go away” and “didn’t want anyone to exert leadership”.
“Many on the task force didn’t want the responsibility either, fearful of the consequences.”
Under the chairmanship of Vice-President Mike Pence – who is shown resisting his own appointment to replace the outmatched health secretary, Alex Azar – the task force was led by Dr Deborah Birx, a US Army physician widely praised for her role in the fight against Aids but whose star waned under Trump.
Abutaleb and Paletta portray Birx as a confident leader unafraid to challenge powerful men, but also someone who “overplayed her hand” when she decided to praise and flatter Trump as a way to manage him.
Of an interview Birx gave to the rightwing Christian Broadcasting Network, in which she praised Trump’s “ability to analyse and integrate data”, the authors write: “It was the kind of sycophancy one expected from Pence or [treasury secretary] Steve Mnuchin, not a government scientist.”
The authors also say Birx worked well with Pence and was admired by fellow workers, though by April 2020, chief of staff Mark Meadows was deriding the task force as “useless and broken”.
Birx served until the end of the Trump administration in January this year. Unlike her fellow task force member Anthony Fauci, now chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, she did not remain in public service.
Abutaleb and Paletta also report that in March, as cases spiraled and the US death toll passed 1,000, unofficial adviser Stephen Moore, Trump’s “emissary [from] the conservative establishment … strode into the Oval Office to convince the president” to end shutdowns and get the economy moving.
Moore is an economist who in 2019 was nominated by Trump to the board of the Federal Reserve, only to withdraw after outlets led by the Guardian reported controversies in his past.
He told Abutaleb and Paletta Trump’s controversial and soon dropped promise to reopen the US economy by Easter was “the smart thing to do”, because “the economic costs of this are mounting and there’s not a lot of evidence that lockdowns are working to stop the spread”.
Lockdowns to stop the spread of Covid-19 remain in use around the world.
Moore is also quoted attacking Fauci, a common target for conservative ire over subjects including mask-wearing and the origins of Covid in China.
“Fauci is the villain here,” Moore says. “He has the Napoleon complex, and he thinks he is the dictator who could decide how to run the country.”
Moore also says conservative activists he advised as they staged protests against lockdowns and masks – and who he famously claimed were successors of the great civil rights protester Rosa Parks – asked: “What’s wrong with this fucking Fauci? Sometimes they’d call him Fucky, not Fauci.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/29/trump-white-house-covid-taskforce-fauci
Obama: Trump broke ‘core tenet’ of democracy with ‘bunch of hooey’ over election
Ex-president calls for action to stop ‘delegitimizing of democracy’ during redistricting fundraiser
Guardian staff and agencies
Mon 28 Jun 2021 18.06 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/barack-obama-donald-trump-democracy-election-hooey
Barack Obama said on Monday that his successor in office, Donald Trump, violated a “core tenet” of democracy when he made up a “bunch of hooey” about last year’s election and refused to concede he lost.
Speaking at his first virtual fundraiser since the 2020 election, the former Democratic president said former Republican president’s claims undermined the legitimacy of US elections and helped lead to other anti-democratic measures such as efforts to suppress the vote.
“What we saw was my successor, the former president, violate that core tenet that you count the votes and then declare a winner – and fabricate and make up a whole bunch of hooey,” Obama said.
Trump has continued to falsely claim that his defeat was the result of widespread fraud, which has been rejected by multiple courts, state election officials and members of his own administration.
In a rare bipartisan chime, Obama’s assertion followed an article in the Atlantic on Sunday noting that Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr – expressing himself less politely – said his Republican former boss’s claims were always “bullshit”.
The Republican senator Mitt Romney on Sunday likened Trump’s claims of a stolen election to television wrestling – entertaining but “not real”.
Meanwhile, Obama added: “What’s been called ‘the big lie’ suddenly gains momentum,” which in turn has fueled moves by Republican-controlled legislatures to reduce access to voting and gain more control over voting operations.
“Here’s the bottom line. If we don’t stop these kinds of efforts now, what we are going to see is more and more contested elections … We are going to see a further de-legitimizing of our democracy,” he said, as well as “a breakdown of the basic agreement that has held this magnificent democratic experiment together all these years”.
Republican governors of Georgia, Arizona, Florida and Iowa have signed new voting restrictions into law this year, and state legislatures in Pennsylvania and Texas are trying to advance similar measures.
These states will be battlegrounds in the 2022 midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.
The US justice department on Friday sued to block the Georgia law, which tightened absentee ballot identification requirements, restricted the use of ballot drop-boxes, and allowed a Republican-controlled state agency to run local voting operations.
Obama said he believed the US Senate would hold a new vote on a Democratic voting rights bill that Republicans blocked last week.
Just before the bill before the Senate collapsed, Obama backed a compromise proposal from the conservative West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin.
The former first lady Michelle Obama, weighed in, too, decrying Republican efforts in many statehouses across the country to bring in new laws that restrict voting, and urging Congress to pass federal legislation “before it’s too late”.
The fundraising call was for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee as the United States heads into the once-a-decade redrawing of congressional districts that will play a critical role in determining whether Democrats keep control of the House of Representatives next year. History and redistricting suggests they are likely to fail.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/barack-obama-donald-trump-democracy-election-hooey
MIT and Harvard engineers develop face mask that detects COVID-19
By Rich Haridy
June 28, 2021
https://news.mit.edu/2021/face-mask-covid-19-detection-0628
Researchers from MIT and Harvard have demonstrated a cutting-edge biosensor technology by developing a face mask that can detect SARS-CoV-2 in a wearer’s breath within just 90 minutes. The sensor technology can be programmed to detect any kind of virus or toxin and is small enough to be integrated into clothing fabrics.
The biosensor has been in development for several years and is based on a new technology dubbed wFDCF (wearable freeze-dried cell-free). Unlike previously developed biosensors that require the incorporation of living cells, this system extracts and freeze dries the cellular machinery needed to detect organic molecules.
“Other groups have created wearables that can sense biomolecules, but those techniques have all required putting living cells into the wearable itself, as if the user were wearing a tiny aquarium,” explains Peter Nguyen, co-first author on the new study. “If that aquarium ever broke, then the engineered bugs could leak out onto the wearer, and nobody likes that idea.”
The wFDCF technology has previously been used to create experimental diagnostic tools for the Ebola and Zika viruses. Around a year ago, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold around the world, the researchers quickly pivoted to try and turn the experimental technology into a useful product to help combat it.
“We wanted to contribute to the global effort to fight the virus, and we came up with the idea of integrating wFDCF into face masks to detect SARS-CoV-2,” notes co-first author Luis Soenksen. “The entire project was done under quarantine or strict social distancing starting in May 2020.”
The sensor can easily be incorporated into a N95 mask, offering results in 90 minutesFelice Frankel and MIT News Office
The face mask presents the most advanced application of the wFDCF technology to date. Several biosensors in the mask are activated when a button is pressed, releasing a small reservoir of water. This liquid hydrates the freeze-dried molecules in the sensor which can analyze droplets from a wearer’s breath. Within 90 minutes a small strip of paper registers the wearer as either positive or negative for SARS-CoV-2, through a readout similar to that of a pregnancy test.
“We have essentially shrunk an entire diagnostic laboratory down into a small, synthetic biology-based sensor that works with any face mask, and combines the high accuracy of PCR tests with the speed and low cost of antigen tests,” says Nguyen.
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https://news.mit.edu/2021/face-mask-covid-19-detection-0628
Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan
China emulated US techniques to construct novel coronaviruses in unsafe conditions.
by Rowan Jacobsenarchive page
June 29, 2021
WIV virus research concept
MS TECH | AP
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/
In 2013, the American virologist Ralph Baric approached Zhengli Shi at a meeting. Baric was a top expert in coronaviruses, with hundreds of papers to his credit, and Shi, along with her team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had been discovering them by the fistful in bat caves. In one sample of bat guano, Shi had detected the genome of a new virus, called SHC014, that was one of the two closest relatives to the original SARS virus, but her team had not been able to culture it in the lab.
Baric had developed a way around that problem—a technique for “reverse genetics” in coronaviruses. Not only did it allow him to bring an actual virus to life from its genetic code, but he could mix and match parts of multiple viruses. He wanted to take the “spike” gene from SHC014 and move it into a genetic copy of the SARS virus he already had in his lab. The spike molecule is what lets a coronavirus open a cell and get inside it. The resulting chimera would demonstrate whether the spike of SHC014 would attach to human cells.
If it could, then it could help him with his long-term project of developing universal drugs and vaccines against the full spectrum of SARS-like viruses that he increasingly considered sources of potential pandemics. A SARS vaccine had been developed, but it wasn’t expected to be very effective against related coronaviruses, just as flu shots rarely work against new strains. To develop a universal vaccine that will elicit an antibody response against a gamut of SARS-like viruses, you need to show the immune system a cocktail of spikes. SHC014 could be one of them.
If you study a hundred different bat viruses, your luck may run out.
-Ralph Baric, University of North Carolina
Baric asked Shi if he could have the genetic data for SHC014. “She was gracious enough to send us those sequences almost immediately,” he says. His team introduced the virus modified with that code into mice equipped with the human receptor for such viruses and into a petri dish of human airway cells. Sure enough, the chimera exhibited “robust replication” in the human cells—evidence that nature was full of coronaviruses ready to leap directly to people.
While Baric’s study was in progress, the National Institutes of Health announced that it would temporarily halt funding for “gain of function” research—experiments that make already dangerous viruses more virulent or transmissible—on SARS, MERS (which is also caused by a coronavirus), and influenza until the safety of such research could be assessed. The announcement brought Baric’s work to a standstill.
Baric was a legend in the field, but no matter how many safety precautions are taken, there is always a chance that a never-before-seen virus can escape and trigger an outbreak. Baric felt that the extreme measures he took in the lab minimized the risk, and in fact made his work categorically different from the high-risk influenza work the NIH had been targeting. He also felt that his research was urgent: new cases of MERS, spread by camels, were even then popping up in the Middle East. Eventually the NIH agreed, waving him forward.
His 2015 paper, “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,” was a tour de force, utilizing bleeding-edge genetic technology to alert the civilized world to a looming danger on its periphery. It also revived concerns about gain-of-function experiments, which Baric had known it would. In the paper, he spelled out the extra precautions he’d taken and held up the research as a test case. “The potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens,” he wrote. “Scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue.”
The NIH decided the risk was worth it. In a potentially fateful decision, it funded work similar to Baric’s at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which soon used its own reverse-genetics technology to make numerous coronavirus chimeras.
Unnoticed by most, however, was a key difference that significantly shifted the risk calculation. The Chinese work was carried out at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2), a much lower tier than Baric’s BSL-3+.
What caused the covid-19 pandemic remains uncertain, and Shi says her lab never encountered the SARS-CoV-2 virus before the Wuhan outbreak. But now that US officials have said the possibility of a lab accident needs to be investigated, the spotlight has fallen on American funding of the Wuhan lab’s less safe research. Todaya chorus of scientists, including Baric, are coming forward to say this was a misstep. Even if there is no link to covid-19, allowing work on potentially dangerous bat viruses at BSL-2 is “an actual scandal,” says Michael Lin, a bioengineer at Stanford University.
The simmering concern that the US funded risky research in China burst into the national discussion on May 11, when Senator Rand Paul accused Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of funding “supervirus” research in the US and “making a huge mistake” by trading the know-how to China. Paul repeatedly confronted Fauci and demanded to know if he had funded gain-of-function research in that country. Fauci denied the accusation, stating categorically: “The NIH has not ever, and does not now, fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
The denial rests on the NIH’s specific definition of what was covered by the moratorium: work that would have deliberately enhanced SARS-like viruses, MERS, or flu by—for example—making them easier to spread through the air. The Chinese research did not have the specific goal of making the viruses more deadly, and rather than SARS itself, it used SARS’s close cousins, whose real-world risk to humans was unknown—in fact, determining the risk was the point of the research. Just as when you trade in part of a poker hand for fresh cards, there was no way of knowing whether the final chimeras would be stronger or weaker.
The NIH has still not fully explained its decision-making. Citing a pending investigation, it has declined to release copies of the grant to Wuhan, which sent the institute about $600,000 between 2014 and 2019. It has also revealed little about its new system for assessing gain-of-function risks, which is carried out by an anonymous review panel whose deliberations are not made public. Until there’s more sunlight, the agency will be fighting speculation, from Paul and others, that what occurred is a scenario Fauci himself had outlined in a 2012 commentary discussing research on pandemic germs.
“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk."
Richard Ebright, Rutgers University
“Consider this hypothetical scenario,” Fauci wrote. “An important gain-of-function experiment involving a virus with serious pandemic potential is performed in a well-regulated, world-class laboratory by experienced investigators, but the information from the experiment is then used by another scientist who does not have the same training and facilities and is not subject to the same regulations. In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?”
A wake-up call
Paul’s grilling of Fauci brought new scrutiny to the relationship between Ralph Baric’s lab at UNC and Zhengli Shi’s at WIV, with some narratives painting Baric as the Sith master of SARS and Shi as his ascendant apprentice. They did share resources—for example, Baric sent the transgenic mice with human lung receptors to Wuhan. But after their initial collaboration, the two centers were more like competitors. They were in a race to identify dangerous coronaviruses, assess the potential threat, and develop countermeasures like vaccines.
For Baric, that research started in the late 1990s. Coronaviruses were then considered low risk, but Baric’s studies on the genetics that allowed viruses to enter human cells convinced him that some might be just a few mutations away from jumping the species barrier.
That hunch was confirmed in 2002–’03, when SARS broke out in southern China, infecting 8,000 people. As bad as that was, Baric says, we dodged a bullet with SARS. The disease didn’t spread from one person to another until about a day after severe symptoms began to appear, making it easier to corral through quarantines and contact tracing. Only 774 people died in that outbreak, but if it had been transmitted as easily as SARS-CoV-2, “we would have had a pandemic with a 10% mortality rate,” Baric says. “That’s how close humanity came.”
As tempting as it was to write off SARS as a one-time event, in 2012 MERS emerged and began infecting people in the Middle East. “For me personally, that was a wake-up call that the animal reservoirs must have many, many more strains that are poised for cross-species movement,” says Baric.
By then, examples of such dangers were already being discovered by Shi’s team, which had spent years sampling bats in southern China to locate the origin of SARS. The project was part of a global viral surveillance effort spearheaded by the US nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. The nonprofit—which has an annual income of over $16 million, more than 90% from government grants—has its office in New York but partners with local research groups in other countries to do field and lab work. The WIV was its crown jewel, and Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, has been a coauthor with Shi on most of her key papers.
By taking thousands of samples from guano, fecal swabs, and bat tissue, and searching those samples for genetic sequences similar to SARS, Shi’s team began to discover many closely related viruses. In a cave in Yunnan Province in 2011 or 2012, they discovered the two closest, which they named WIV1 and SHC014.
Shi managed to culture WIV1 in her lab from a fecal sample and show that it could directly infect human cells, proving that SARS-like viruses ready to leap straight from bats to humans already lurked in the natural world. This showed, Daszak and Shi argued, that bat coronaviruses were a “substantial global threat.” Scientists, they said, needed to find them, and study them, before they found us.
Many of the other viruses couldn’t be grown, but Baric’s system provided a way to rapidly test their spikes by engineering them into similar viruses. When the chimera he made using SHC014 proved able to infect human cells in a dish, Daszak told the press that these revelations should “move this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger.”
To others, it was the perfect example of the unnecessary dangers of gain-of-function science. “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” the Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright, a longtime critic of such research, told Nature.
To Baric, the situation was more nuanced. Although his creation might be more dangerous than the original mouse-adapted virus he’d used as a backbone, it was still wimpy compared with SARS—certainly not the supervirus Senator Paul would later suggest.
In the end, the NIH clampdown never had teeth. It included a clause granting exceptions “if head of funding agency determines research is urgently necessary to protect public health or national security.” Not only were Baric’s studies allowed to move forward, but so were all studies that applied for exemptions. The funding restrictions were lifted in 2017 and replaced with a more lenient system.
Tyvek suits and respirators
If the NIH was looking for a scientist to make regulators comfortable with gain-of-function research, Baric was the obvious choice. For years he’d insisted on extra safety steps, and he took pains to point these out in his 2015 paper, as if modeling the way forward.
The CDC recognizes four levels of biosafety and recommends which pathogens should be studied at which level. Biosafety level 1 is for nonhazardous organisms and requires virtually no precautions: wear a lab coat and gloves as needed. BSL-2 is for moderately hazardous pathogens that are already endemic in the area, and relatively mild interventions are indicated: close the door, wear eye protection, dispose of waste materials in an autoclave. BSL-3 is where things get serious. It’s for pathogens that can cause serious disease through respiratory transmission, such as influenza and SARS, and the associated protocols include multiple barriers to escape. Labs are walled off by two sets of self-closing, locking doors; air is filtered; personnel use full PPE and N95 masks and are under medical surveillance. BSL-4 is for the baddest of the baddies, such as Ebola and Marburg: full moon suits and dedicated air systems are added to the arsenal.
“There are no enforceable standards of what you should and shouldn’t do. It’s up to the individual countries, institutions, and scientists.”
Filippa Lentzos, King’s College London
In Baric’s lab, the chimeras were studied at BSL-3, enhanced with additional steps like Tyvek suits, double gloves, and powered-air respirators for all workers. Local first-responder teams participated in regular drills to increase their familiarity with the lab. All workers were monitored for infections, and local hospitals had procedures in place to handle incoming scientists. It was probably one of the safest BSL-3 facilities in the world. That still wasn’t enough to prevent a handful of errors over the years: some scientists were even bitten by virus-carrying mice. But no infections resulted.
Brand-new pathogens
In 2014, the NIH awarded a five-year, $3.75 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance to study the risk that more bat-borne coronaviruses would emerge in China, using the same kind of techniques Baric had pioneered. Some of that work was to be subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Two years later, Daszak and Shi published a paper reporting how the Chinese lab had engineered different versions of WIV1 and tested their infectiousness in human cells. The paper announced that the WIV had developed its own reverse-genetics system, following the Americans’ lead. It also included a troubling detail: the work, which was funded in part by the NIH grant, had been done in a BSL-2 lab. That meant the same viruses that Daszak was holding up as a clear and present danger to the world were being studied under conditions that, according to Richard Ebright, matched “the biosafety level of a US dentist’s office.”
Ebright believes one factor at play was the cost and inconvenience of working in high-containment conditions. The Chinese lab’s decision to work at BSL-2, he says, would have “effectively increas[ed] rates of progress, all else being equal, by a factor of 10 to 20”—a huge edge.
Work at the WIV was indeed progressing quickly. In 2017, Daszak and Shi followed with another study, also at BSL-2, that one-upped Baric’s work in North Carolina. The WIV had continued to unearth dozens of new SARS-like coronaviruses in bat caves, and it reported making chimeras with eight of them by fusing the spikes of the new viruses to the chassis of WIV1. Two of them replicated well in human cells. They were, for all intents and purposes, brand-new pathogens.
The revelation that the WIV was working with SARS-like viruses in subpar safety conditions has led some people to reassess the chance that SARS-CoV-2 could have emerged from some type of laboratory incident. “That’s screwed up,” the Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, who coauthored the seminal paper arguing that covid must have had a natural origin, told the journalist Donald McNeil Jr. “It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”
But the WIV was not breaking any rules by working at BSL-2, says Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London “There are no enforceable standards of what you should and shouldn’t do. It’s up to the individual countries, institutions, and scientists.” And in China, she says, the vertiginous rise of high-tech biological research has not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in oversight.
In an email, Zhengli Shi said she followed Chinese rules that are similar to those in the US. Safety requirements are based on what virus you are studying. Since bat viruses like WIV1 haven’t been confirmed to cause disease in human beings, her biosafety committee recommended BSL-2 for engineering them and testing them and BSL-3 for any animal experiments.
In response to questions about the decision to do the research in BSL-2 conditions, Peter Daszak forwarded a statement from EcoHealth Alliance stating that the organization “must follow the local laws of the countries in which we work” and that the NIH had determined the research was “not gain-of-function.”
Questioning China
There is no law against using tighter lab security, however, and according to Baric, these viruses deserve it. “I would never argue that WIV1 or SHC014 should be studied at BSL-2, because they can grow in primary human cells,” he says. “There’s some risk associated with those viruses. We have no idea whether they could actually cause severe disease in a human, but you want to err on the side of caution ... If you study a hundred different bat viruses, your luck may run out.”
Since the pandemic began, Baric has not said much about the possible origins of the virus or about his Chinese counterparts. On several occasions, however, he has quietly pointed to safety concerns at the WIV. In May 2020, when few scientists were willing to consider a lab leak in public, he published a paper acknowledging that “speculation about accidental laboratory escape will likely persist, given the large collections of bat virome samples stored in labs in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the facility’s proximity to the early outbreak, and the operating procedures at the facility.” He flagged Daszak and Shi’s BSL-2 paper, in case anyone didn’t understand what he was saying.
The National Institutes of Health has also revisited its ties to the Wuhan lab. In April of 2020, the NIH terminated its grant to EcoHealth Alliance for bat virus research. In a follow-up letter to Daszak on July 8, it offered to reinstate the grant, but only if EcoHealth Alliance could allay its concerns, noting reports that the WIV “has been conducting research at its facilities in China that pose serious bio-safety concerns” for other countries. It added, “We have concerns that WIV has not satisfied safety requirements under the award, and that EcoHealth Alliance has not satisfied its obligations to monitor the activities of its subrecipient.”
The genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 does not resemble that of any virus the WIV was known to be culturing in its lab, such as WIV1, and Baric says he still believes a natural spillover is the most likely cause. But he also knows the intricate risks of the work well enough to see a possible path to trouble. That is why, in May of this year, he joined 17 other scientists in a letter in the journal Science calling for a thorough investigation of his onetime collaborator’s lab and its practices. He wants to know what barriers were in place to keep a pathogen from slipping out into Wuhan’s population of 13 million, and possibly to the world.
“Let’s face it: there are going to be unknown viruses in guano, or oral swabs, which are oftentimes pooled. And if you’re attempting to culture a virus, you’re going to have novel strains being dropped onto culture cells,” Baric says. “Some will grow. You could get recombinants that are unique. And if that was being done at BSL-2, then there are questions you want to ask.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/
Australia, U.S. and Canada Launch Interactive Map for Critical Minerals
By Reuters
June 29, 2021, at 2:46 a.m.
https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2021-06-29/australia-us-and-canada-launch-interactive-map-for-critical-minerals
FILE PHOTO: Jars containing rare earth minerals produced by Australia's Lynas Corp from its Mount Weld operations are seen near Laverton, northeast of Perth, Australia, August 23, 2019. REUTERS/Melanie Burton/File Photo REUTERS
MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Australia said it has teamed up with the United States and Canada to launch an interactive map of deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals that are expected to be in hot demand as the world moves to cleaner forms of energy.
The website https://portal.ga.gov.au/persona/cmmi contains the world’s largest dataset of minerals such cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements and has more than 7,000 mineral samples from over 60 countries which could help identify new areas of critical minerals.
The data can be used by governments to identify options to diversify their critical minerals sources and by companies to better target their exploration strategies, Keith Pitt, the minister for resources, water and northern Australia, said in a statement.
"While Australia is known across the world for its rich gold and iron ore deposits, our country also has an abundance of critical minerals – which are key to everything from iPhones to fighter jets," he added.
China is the dominant supplier of rare earths, which are used in electric vehicle batteries, a wide range of consumer products as well as satellites and lasers. Western governments have been keen to diversify procurement amid trade and political tensions with Beijing.
The United State said this month it would work with allies to secure the minerals needed for electric vehicle batteries and process them domestically.
The dataset was compiled by Geoscience Australia, the Geological Survey of Canada and the United States Geological Survey.
(Reporting by Melanie Burton; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2021-06-29/australia-us-and-canada-launch-interactive-map-for-critical-minerals
Trump in financial and political danger as company faces possible criminal charges
New York prosecutors may soon bring indictment against Trump Organization tied to perks for top executives
David Smith Washington bureau chief
@smithinamerica
Tue 29 Jun 2021 01.30 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/donald-trump-organization-new-york-criminal-charges
Donald Trump is facing a potentially crippling financial and political blow as state prosecutors consider filing criminal charges against his family business this week.
Prosecutors in New York could soon bring an indictment against the Trump Organization related to the taxation of lucrative perks that it gave to top executives, such as use of apartments, cars and school tuition.
The 45th president is not expected to be personally charged but the legal drama could bankrupt his company by damaging its relationships with banks and other business partners, as well as clouding his political comeback.
Ron Fischetti, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, held a virtual meeting with prosecutors last Thursday for about 90 minutes in an effort to dissuade them from pursuing criminal charges against the company.
“The charges are absolutely outrageous and unprecedented, if indeed the charges are filed,” Fischetti told the Associated Press (AP) on Friday. “This is just to get back at Donald Trump. We’re going to plead not guilty and we’ll make a motion to dismiss.”
Fischetti and his colleagues had until Monday to make their final arguments against charges being brought, according to a report in the Washington Post.
The long-running investigation by Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, began after Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid hush money ahead of the 2016 presidential election to two women who alleged that they had sexual encounters with Trump; Trump denies the claims.
There is now a particular focus on Allen Weisselberg, 73, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, the private real estate conglomerate. Prosecutors are examining his son Barry’s use of a Trump apartment at little or no cost, cars leased for the family, and tuition payments made to a school attended by Weisselberg’s grandchildren.
Such gifts and perks are worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. If the Weisselbergs failed to account properly for that money on tax returns and other financial filings, they could be in legal jeopardy. But Fischetti insists that any criminal charges based on fringe benefits would represent a speculative break from precedent.
“We looked back 100 years of cases and we haven’t found one in which an employee has been indicted for fringe benefits and certainly not a corporation,” he told the AP. “[To be a crime] it would have to be for the benefit of the corporation with the knowledge of the corporation. They don’t have the evidence at all.”
Even so, a point of intrigue is whether Weisselberg will remain loyal to the former president or turn informant, potentially testifying against Trump – the company’s owner – his son Don Jr and Eric, who are executive vice-presidents, and his daughter, Ivanka.
Trump, beaten by Joe Biden in last November’s election, has long sought to dismiss the investigation as a “witch-hunt” and remains politically active. He returned to campaign rallies on Saturday, intends to be heavily involved in the 2022 midterm elections and could run for president again in 2024. But there are signs that the walls are closing in.
Vance, investigating “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct”, has been scrutinising Trump’s tax records, subpoenaing documents and interviewing witnesses, including Trump insiders and company executives. A grand jury was recently empaneled to look at the evidence.
Meanwhile Letitia James, the New York state attorney general, said she was assigning two lawyers to work with Vance on the criminal investigation while she continues her own civil investigation of Trump’s business.
James’s office has been examining whether the Trump Organization inflated the values of some properties to obtain better terms on loans, and lowered their values to obtain property tax breaks.
Court records show some overlap between Vance’s and James’ separate investigations, including their interest in Seven Springs, a 212-acre estate outside Manhattan that Trump purchased in 1995. James is examining a $21.1m tax deduction taken when Trump agreed not to develop the property, after local opposition thwarted his plan to build a golf course, and a separate plan to build luxury homes was shelved.
Trump has angrily denounced both investigations. In a statement released on Monday, he claimed the case was an extension of the Democrats’ “witch hunt” against him. “They will do anything to stop the MAGA movement (and me),” he said, referring to the Make America Great Again campaign slogan and insisting that the Trump Organization had merely done “things that are standard practice throughout the US business community, and in no way a crime”.
The ex-president added: “Having politically motivated prosecutors, people who actually got elected because they will ‘get Donald Trump’, is a very dangerous thing for our Country. In the end, people will not stand for it. Remember, if they can do this to me, they can do it to anyone!”
Trump’s loss of power in Washington now deprives him, his family and his company of legal protections he enjoyed while in the White House.
The District of Columbia attorney general’s office, for example, is suing the Trump Organization and presidential inaugural committee over the alleged misuse of more than $1m for use of event space at the Trump hotel in Washington during Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.
Ivanka, who was a senior adviser at the White House, sat for a deposition with investigators last December, but is in no imminent danger of criminal charges.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/donald-trump-organization-new-york-criminal-charges
Health minister Helen Whately used private email for government work
Exclusive: social care minister’s use of Gmail will raise further questions after reports about Matt Hancock
Jessica Elgot and Rob Evans
Mon 28 Jun 2021 13.57 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/28/health-minister-helen-whately-used-private-email-for-government-work-matt-hancock
A third health minister, Helen Whately, used a private email account for government business, the Guardian can reveal, as the UK’s information watchdog said it was considering launching an investigation into the use of Gmail by Matt Hancock and James Bethell.
The Guardian can also reveal a number of emails were copied into Lord Bethell’s private email account. His address was copied into at least four official exchanges relating to a businessman who was attempting to get government contracts during the pandemic.
Bethell, who oversaw the award of Covid contracts, has faced calls for his resignation over his use of private email and his sponsorship of a parliamentary pass for Hancock’s married aide Gina Coladangelo, with whom the former health secretary had an affair.
In April 2020 the businessman had approached his MP, Oliver Dowden, as he believed his firm’s testing kits were cheaper than those being bought by the government.
Andrew Feldman, the former Conservative party chairman who had been brought into the government to advise on its approach to the pandemic, passed the matter on to a number of officials, copying in a private email address belonging to Bethell.
Later that day, a Department of Health and Social Care official (DHSC) circulated another email to his colleagues, again copying in the private email address belonging to Bethell. The emails were obtained by the Good Law Project, which has launched a series of legal challenges over the government’s handling of contracts during the pandemic.
Separately, Whately, the social care minister, copied in a private Gmail address to a diary invitation, according to a leaked email. Whately’s diary invitation, seen by the Guardian, was sent to both her official email and her Gmail and does not contain sensitive information, but will raise further questions about the routine use of private accounts.
A DHSC source said Whately’s private email account was only used for diary invitations and in line with department guidance.
Boris Johnson has also refused to answer whether he has ever conducted government business using a personal email account, saying: “I don’t comment on how I conduct government business.”
Hancock is reported to have routinely used a private account, according to minutes of an official meeting at the DHSC seen by the Sunday Times. The minutes said Hancock was only dealing with his private office “via Gmail account” and said he did not have a departmental inbox.
The minutes, which were to discuss a Good Law Project legal challenge over government contracts for faulty tests, also say that Bethell “routinely uses his personal inbox and the majority of [approvals for contracts] would have been initiated from this inbox”.
Cabinet Office guidance says ministers should use official email accounts in order to leave a paper trail for important decisions and to allow for scrutiny.
Elizabeth Denham, the UK information commissioner, said she was considering further action. “It is an important principle of government transparency and accountability that official records are kept of key actions and decisions,” she said.
“The issue of ministers and senior officials using private email accounts to conduct sensitive official business is a concerning one for the public and is one my office has advised on before. I am looking carefully at the information that has come to light over the past few days and considering what further steps may be necessary to address the concerns raised with me.”
The prime minister’s official spokesperson said: “Both the former health secretary and Lord Bethell understand the rules around personal email usage and only ever conducted government business through their departmental email addresses,” and said using personal Gmail was “related to things like diary acceptances”.
Johnson’s former aide Dominic Cummings suggested the prime minister and Hancock routinely used WhatsApp messages instead of official communications channels. He said there were “WhatsApps between PM, [Hancock] and Tory donors which No 10 officials know exist cos they’re copied in to some … So dozens of No 10 officials know No 10 press office openly lying again.”
The Cabinet Office minister Julia Lopez defended the use of private email addresses with regards to contracts, telling the Commons “a huge volume of correspondence was coming to ministers via their personal email addresses …”
Angela Rayner, the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, called for an investigation into government use of private email. “Who is telling the truth, the Cabinet Office minister and the Department of Health and Social Care civil servants, or the prime minister’s official spokesperson?” she said.
“We need a fully independent public inquiry to get to the bottom of ministers using their private email accounts to discuss and agree government contracts, which have resulted in taxpayers’ money being handed out to Tory donors and their friends.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “All ministers are aware of the rules around personal email usage and government business is conducted in line with those rules.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/28/health-minister-helen-whately-used-private-email-for-government-work-matt-hancock
David Corn @DavidCornDC SCOOP: Ivanka Trump's sworn testimony in the inauguration scandal case is contradicted by documents filed in the case and by material obtained by @MotherJones
. Did she testify falsely?
Documents Show Ivanka Trump Didn’t Testify Accurately in Inauguration Scandal Case
She said she played no role in planning inaugural events. These records suggest otherwise.
DAVID CORN
Washington, DC, Bureau Chief
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/06/documents-show-ivanka-trump-didnt-testify-accurately-in-inauguration-scandal-case/
2:24 PM · Jun 28, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
SCOOP: Ivanka Trump's sworn testimony in the inauguration scandal case is contradicted by documents filed in the case and by material obtained by @MotherJones. Did she testify falsely? https://t.co/y52Gurtejp
— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 28, 2021
Lin Wood, the pro-Trump attorney behind a slew of lawsuits seeking to overturn election results last year, told Talking Points Memo that his non-profit, Fight Back, donated $50,000 to Voices and Votes for the review. But it is not clear what the money is actually going to since the groups are subject to few financial disclosure rules.
Wood, who has promoted fundraising efforts for the review on Telegram, also told TPM that Cyber Ninja chief Logan worked out of Wood’s home to investigate 2020 election voter fraud claims.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/09/arizona-election-audit-trump-2020-review
Jan Wolfe @JanNWolfe
Lin Wood is now accused of leaving his client Kyle Rittenhouse in jail for a month as a fundraising ploy. Wood calls the claim by Rittenhouse's mother "blatantly false."
Kyle Rittenhouse, American Vigilante
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhouse-american-vigilante
THREAD
https://twitter.com/JanNWolfe/status/1409519867712229378
Andrew Feinberg @AndrewFeinberg It appears that @jonkarl’s reporting has upset the former president.
THREAD
It appears that @jonkarl’s reporting has upset the former president. pic.twitter.com/rBAsWFfo05
— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) June 28, 2021
‘Utterly Deranged’ Trump Has Full Meltdown Over Bill Barr, Mitch McConnell
The former president attacked the two key figures who enabled his agenda, calling them “spineless RINOs.”
By Ed Mazza
28/06/2021 09:45 BST | Updated 8 hours ago
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/donald-trump-attacks-barr-mcconnell_n_60d95d16e4b066ff5abc1293?ri18n=true
Donald Trump issued a lengthy and rambling statement late Sunday attacking two of his staunchest allies during his one term in office.
Trump called former attorney general Bill Barr and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “spineless RINOs” ( Republicans in Name Only) after Barr told The Atlantic that Trump’s constant claims of election fraud were “bullshit.” Barr also told the magazine that McConnell urged him to “inject some reality” into Trump as he repeated debunked claims of election fraud and baseless conspiracy theories last winter.
McConnell confirmed that account, the magazine reported. That was enough to trigger the former president.
Trump, who once claimed he would hire only “ the best and most serious people,” called Barr a “disappointment in every sense of the word,” much as he has attacked many of the other “best people” he hired, including Jeff Sessions (attorney general), Rex Tillerson (secretary of state), James Mattis (defense secretary) John Bolton (national security advisor), H.R. McMaster (national security advisor) John Kelly (homeland security and chief of staff) and Mike Pence (vice president), just to name a few.
Critics on Twitter slammed Trump for the disjointed new statement attacking two of his key enablers:
Holy moly. Our utterly deranged most recent Former President just released an absolutely crazed, delusional, lie filled, rambling lengthy attack on William Barr for telling the simple truth about Trump’s insane election fraud lies. The man is unraveling mentally more by the hour.
— Spiro’s Ghost (@AntiToxicPeople) June 28, 2021
Matt Hancock affair: Camera that caught aide kiss has been disabled, as MPs are told the device was an "outlier"
Justice Secretary Robert Buckland earlier revealed he had asked for his office to be checked for devices.
Sophie Morris
Political reporter @itssophiemorris
Monday 28 June 2021 17:00, UK
https://news.sky.com/story/matt-hancock-affair-camera-that-caught-aide-kiss-has-been-disabled-says-new-health-secretary-12343880
The camera that caught Matt Hancock kissing his aide has been disabled, new health secretary Sajid Javid says.
Mr Javid said the device has been "disabled by the department", adding that he does not believe ministers' offices should have cameras fitted.
It comes as a cabinet office minister told MPs the camera in Mr Hancock's office was an "outlier" and that it was not general policy for recording devices to be put in ministerial offices.
Asked about the device on Monday morning, Mr Javid said: "I haven't disabled the camera that you are talking about, but it has been disabled by the department.
"I think for security it is just common sense… I don't think, as a general rule, there should be cameras in the secretary of state's office.
"I've never known that in the other five departments that I've run and I am not really sure why there was one here.
"But I am sure there will be more to this as the whole incident is investigated."
Earlier on Monday, Justice Secretary Robert Buckland told Sky News he had asked for his office to be swept for "unauthorised devices" following the recording and leaking of footage of Matt Hancock from within the Department of Health and Social Care.
"I've never seen any camera facilities. I know there is CCTV in the building for obvious security reasons, but I am sure that many of my colleagues will be asking the same question and making sure that the offices are swept just in case there are unauthorised devices in there that could be a national security breach," the justice secretary said.
"I think that is the sensible thing to do."
Quizzed on when he asked whether there are cameras in his office, Mr Buckland added: "I asked on Friday, so I expect to have those answers later today."
Ministers should have a "safe space" to work, he said.
Later in the morning, Mr Buckland revealed he had since learnt that there were no devices in his office.
But ministers have continued to face questions about the potential security threat highlighted by the recording that emerged last week.
During an urgent question in parliament, Conservative MP Peter Bone said the existence of a recording device in a ministerial office "should be of national concern" and asked what was being done to investigate if there were other such cameras elsewhere in Whitehall.
"It is totally unacceptable for private conversations between ministers, civil servants, members of parliament and members of the public to be secretly recorded", Mr Bone said.
Cabinet Office minister Julia Lopez MP agreed secret recordings would be "unacceptable", but said in the case of Mr Hancock it was a CCTV camera operated by the health department and said there were no "covert concerns at this moment".
Dr Julian Lewis, who chairs the Intelligence and Security Committee, asked whether there were "rules common to all departments as to where security cameras can be cited and where they must not be".
Julia Lopez responded by saying: "My understanding is that it is general policy that there are not cameras cited within ministers' offices.
"I think this was an outlier in that regard, and I think we will have a better understanding of why that occurred once the Department of Health's investigation is complete" she added.
During the same session in parliament Labour’s Angela Rayner raised the issue of ministers using private emails for government business, after the Sunday Times reported that Matt Hancock had regularly used a personal email account.
"What steps have been and will be taken to preserve private emails as evidence for the public inquiry into the government’s mishandling of this COVID pandemic?" Angela Rayner asked.
Julia Lopez responded by saying "a number of internal and external inquiries" had already been conducted into the matter.
Downing Street insisted Mr Hancock not use personal email addresses for government business.
The PM's official spokesman said: "Both the former health secretary and Lord Bethell understand the rules around personal email usage and only ever conducted government business through their departmental email addresses."
UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said she is "looking carefully at the information that has come to light".
"It is an important principle of government transparency and accountability that official records are kept of key actions and decisions," she said.
"The issue of Ministers and senior officials using private email accounts to conduct sensitive official business is a concerning one for the public and is one my office has advised on before.
"I am looking carefully at the information that has come to light over the past few days and considering what further steps may be necessary to address the concerns raised with me."
Meanwhile, Downing Street confirmed Mr Hancock personally appointed Ms Coladangelo as a non-executive director at Department of Health and Social Care.
"As far as I'm aware I believe ministers are entitled to make direct appointments and I believe that was the case in this instance," the prime minister's official spokesperson said.
The justice secretary also said there was an "understandable groundswell of concern" surrounding the situation and that Mr Hancock was "right" to resign from his post on Saturday.
The justice secretary's comments come amid the continued controversy surrounding Mr Hancock and his affair with a close friend and aide Ms Coladangelo.
Ms Coladangelo was pictured kissing Mr Hancock apparently inside the Department of Health building in May, in breach of COVID guidance at the time.
Announcing his resignation on Saturday, the former health secretary said "those who make these rules have to stick by them".
In his letter, Mr Hancock said: "The last thing I would want is for my private life to distract attention from the single-minded focus that is leading us out of this crisis.
"I want to reiterate my apology for breaking the guidance, and apologise to my family and loved ones for putting them through this. I also need (to) be with my children at this time."
Former lobbyist Ms Coladangelo - who is married to the founder of fashion brand Oliver Bonas - was initially taken on as an unpaid adviser at the department on a six-month contract in March 2020, before being made a non-executive director.
It was reported in November that Mr Hancock had failed to declare he had appointed Ms Coladangelo before giving her a £15,000-a-year role on the board.
Sky News revealed on Friday that Roberto Coladangelo works at Partnering Health Limited (PHL Group), a specialist in the provision of urgent and primary care services to NHS patients.
https://news.sky.com/story/matt-hancock-affair-camera-that-caught-aide-kiss-has-been-disabled-says-new-health-secretary-12343880
Chris Wallace Accuses GOP Of Defunding Police In Testy Fox Interview
Mary Papenfuss
Sun, June 27, 2021
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/chris-wallace-accuses-gop-defunding-234041818.html
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace turned the tables on Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) on Sunday, accusing the Republicans, not the Democrats, of defunding police amid rising crime rates.
Wallace pressed Banks on his position, outlined in a recent Fox News op-ed, that crime is surging because of the “violence” of Black Lives Matter protests last year (but not the violent Capitol insurrection by Donald Trump supporters), and the “defund the police” movement he said Democrats supported.
Banks again grumbled on “Fox News Sunday” that Democrats have spent a year “stigmatizing” police and providing a “recipe that criminals in every city in America are liking.”
But that got Wallace going, and he quickly accused Republicans of defunding law enforcement.
Wallace pointed out that Republicans voted against President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID relief American Rescue Plan, which includes a massive $350 billion for local law enforcement agencies.
Biden called the plan a “central part of his anti-crime package,” Wallace noted. “Cities and states can use this money to hire more police officers, invest in new technologies and develop summer job training and recreation programs for young people,” Wallace pointed out to Banks.
“Congressman Banks, you voted against that package, against that $350 billion, just like every other Republican in the House and Senate. So can’t you make the argument that it’s you and the Republicans who are defunding the police?” Wallace pressed.
Banks said “not at all,” and immediately returned to comments made by Democrats about police, until Wallace cut him off — repeatedly — in a failed attempt to get Banks to respond to the funding question.
Ironically, in light of the Republicans’ defense of the violent Capitol riot, Banks insisted: “If we turn a blind eye to law and order and a blind eye to riots ... we’re inevitably going to see crime rise.” But he was only referring to Black Lives Matter protests “last summer.”
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/chris-wallace-accuses-gop-defunding-234041818.html
Donald Trump’s January 6 - The view from inside the Oval Office.
BOOK EXCERPT 6:00 A.M.
By Michael Wolff
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/michael-wolff-landslide-final-days-trump-presidency-excerpt.html
Seems like quite a few crazies,” said the president.
A little more than three weeks before rioters and revelers stormed the Capitol on January 6, several thousand Trump fans and fanatics gathered in Washington, D.C. There were the Proud Boys in elaborate dress, ZZ Top beards, and tie-dyed kilts — Enrique Tarrio, a Proud Boy organizer, got in line and took a public tour of the White House — who seemed to have appointed themselves Trump’s protectors and vanguard, as the Hells Angels had once done for the Rolling Stones. There were Trump impersonators and a wide variety of other made-for-the-cameras MAGA costumes. There were veterans — or people in military gear trying to suggest patriotism and firepower. There were older men and women, too — more Las Vegas than Altamont. Virtually all without masks.
“It’s like Let’s Make a Deal,” said Trump the next day to a caller, referencing the long-running game show from the 1960s — many of his references have never left this psychic era — on which audience members dressed up in foolish costumes to get the attention of the host.
The speakers at the December 12 event were themselves a retinue of Trump attention seekers: Michael Flynn, the former general who had briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser before being rolled out of office for lying to the FBI, had, after pleading guilty, reversed himself and abjectly reaffirmed his Trump loyalty, finally getting his pardon just days before the rally. Sebastian Gorka, a figure of uncertain provenance and function in the Trump White House during its first months, was one of the early oddballs to be pushed out when John Kelly became chief of staff and had pursued a Trump-based media career ever since. Also speaking: MyPillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell, a former drug addict and a current fevered conspiracist.
Four people were stabbed and 33 arrested, most in the several-hour mêlée that took place after sundown. This was, in hindsight, a run-through. But it was also a pretty good insight into Trump’s relationship to his army of supporters. The president often expressed puzzlement over who these people were with their low-rent “trailer camp” bearing and their “get-ups,” once joking that he should have invested in a chain of tattoo parlors and shaking his head about “the great unwashed.”
The fan base had always been peculiar to him. For most politicians, vox populi is a pretty remote concept, one brought home only with polling, press, and elections. Trump’s regular and, during some periods, nearly constant performances at stadium rallies gave him a greater direct route and connection to his base than any politician in the modern television age. It was adulation on a par with that of a pop star — a massive pop star. (“The only man without a guitar who can fill a stadium,” he liked to say about himself in another of his 1960s-stuck references.) Stars like him needed fans, but this did not mean that a fan was not a strange thing to be. The more devoted the fan, the odder the fan. Like any megastar, Trump saw his fans from a far distance out. Certainly, there was no personal connection. A star could not assume responsibility for his fans, could he?
By dawn on January 6, the crowd of great unwashed was building, with the various organizers of the various events each pulling in larger-than-expected numbers. From the perspective of the White House, the protest was still just background noise, a tailgate party before the main event: Vice-President Mike Pence counting, and they hoped rejecting, the electors representing the final tally of the November vote. That would begin at 1 p.m.
The remaining group of aides around the president that morning in the White House was down to Mark Meadows, the chief of staff; Eric Herschmann, one of Trump’s on-call lawyers; and Dan Scavino, his social-media alter ego, with Jason Miller, Justin Clark, Alex Cannon, and Tim Murtaugh, the last employees from the campaign, either working from home or, in the case of Clark, heading to a Republican National Committee winter meeting in Florida. All of them had woken up with something close to the same thought: How is it going to play when the vice-president fails to make the move the president is counting on him to make? And make no mistake: Each fully understood Mike Pence was not going to make that move.
Just as relevant, none of the seven men had precisely told the president this. They, along with almost everyone else in the White House, as well as those who had slipped out, just wanted this to be over.
This was not an uncommon feeling in the final days of the Trump presidency. There was the world within shouting distance of the Oval Office — privy to the president’s monologues, his catalogue of resentments, agitation, desires, long-held notions, stray information, and sudden inspirations with little practical relationship to the workings of government — and then there was the more normal world beyond that. Early in Trump’s presidency, aides noted that a second-floor office, where the likes of Stephen Miller and Kellyanne Conway worked, meant a degree of exclusion but also protection: Trump would never climb the stairs (and, by the end of his term, he never had).
To the degree that Trump had, for four years, been running the government with scant idea of the rules and practices of running the government, he was now doing it virtually without anybody who did have some idea and desire to protect both him and themselves from embarrassment or legal peril. Jared Kushner was, to his own great relief, in the Middle East, wrapping up what he saw as his historic mission: his peace deals. The president had all but banished the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone (who was grateful to be banished), and was speaking instead to Herschmann. Herschmann, believing he understood how to move the president, tended to offer objections that sounded awfully like the plaudits of a yes-man. Kayleigh McEnany had been strategically missing in action for several weeks. The remaining campaign officials (Jason Miller, Clark, Cannon) tended to be merely on the receiving end of Trump’s calls and opinions. And everybody else was, effectively, cleared out. White House wags noted that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had fled as far as Sudan — where he was negotiating a good-behavior economic pact with the former terrorism-sponsor nation — to get distance from this last election gasp. The one person Trump did have at his side, Rudy Giuliani, was drinking heavily and in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania.
Almost everyone who remained around the president understood that he, along with Giuliani, did in fact actually believe that there was yet a decent chance of upsetting the electoral count and having Trump declared the Electoral College winner or, failing that, prolonging the election and returning the fight to the disputed states. The president’s aides (and family) understood, too, that he was the only one (along with Giuliani, which only made the situation more alarming) in any professional political sphere to believe this. Hence — although they did not call it such and tried to see it as more nuanced — derangement.
There had been hardly a waking hour in the past 48 during which he and Giuliani had not been on the phone in pent-up nervousness and excitement over the coming battle in Congress on January 6. They were two generals poring over a map of the battlefield. Both men, egged on by hypotheticals ever nearer to fantasy and after exhausting all other options, had come to take it as an article of faith that the vice-president could simply reject Biden electors in favor of Trump ones and thereby hand the election to Trump; or, falling short of that, that the vice-president could determine that a state legislature ought to give further consideration to possible discrepancies in the state’s vote and send back the questioned electors for a reconsideration of their certification.
“There is no question, none at all, that the VP can do this. That’s a fact. The Constitution gives him the authority not to certify. It goes back to the state legislatures,” said Giuliani, as though on a loop. He kept repeating this to the president and to the others who were part of the continual conversation on his cell phone. (“Yes … Yes … Yes … Here’s the thing … Hold on a second … Hey, let me get back to you …”)
The president, in his own loop, kept similarly repeating this back to Giuliani.
And they both similarly repeated this to everyone else with such insistent determination that it overrode any opportunity to disagree with them or even engage in the conversation. Throughout, they continued to weigh the odds that the vice-president would come along: sometimes 50-50, sometimes as much as 60-40, even somewhat more. At the grimmest, 30-70. But always a solid shot.
The rest of the president’s aides gave it essentially no chance. They weren’t putting much stock in the January 6 rally, which looked to those around Trump less like a way to keep the president in power than a way to make money afterward.
Here was the math: He was going to lose the White House; that was certain. But he was going to be left with enormous reach and sway and influence. As the great unwashed were gathering, on the evening of January 5, there was another gathering, at the Trump Hotel, of ranking Republicans, all primarily there to plan and to fund-raise for 2022. This included a circle of top-draw Trump celebrities, Don Jr., Flynn, and Corey Lewandowski among them, and presentations by groups such as the Republican Attorneys General Association.
The primary organizer was Caroline Wren, the most prodigious fund-raiser in the Republican Party. On the eve of a protest over the 2020 election, Wren had assembled 30 to 40 major Republican donors. The organizers of the rally where the president would speak included Amy Kremer and her daughter Kylie Jane Kremer, tea-party and pro-Trump super-PAC activists, organizers, and fund-raisers; Ali Alexander, another right-wing organizer and Trump fund-raiser; and Alex Jones, the conspiracist media personality — each of them with a direct financial interest in the day’s events and in future dealings with the Trump money machine.
Early in the morning, Jason Miller called Boris Epshteyn, the shuttle between the Giuliani camp and the Trump aides, for a reality check: “So … how exactly do we think this is going to go today?”
“Short answer: We have no idea.”
“How many states are teed up?” The number of states receiving House and Senate objections would determine how long and how pitched the day’s events would be.
“We’re still not sure.”
“And the chance of anything going anywhere? Really, ballpark me.”
“Zero.”
“And then what?”
“Then it’s over.”
When Miller spoke to the president at 8 a.m., he was looking for a reaction to the loss of the Senate in Georgia — counting from the day before was only just finishing. As per their usual routine, the president, who had seen that morning’s coverage, asked Miller to recap it. Who was getting blamed? But of course the president right away told Miller the answer to what he was asking.
“It’s all about the $2,000 — if Mitch had just cut those checks. Do people get this? The Dems’ closing ads were all about those checks,” the president said. He asked Miller what he thought Pence would do and then told Miller that Pence would do the right thing.
The family arrived at the White House shortly before 10 a.m. Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Eric and Lara, and Ivanka, on her own — Jared was on his way back from the Middle East. It was a good-feeling gathering, even a bit of a party. The president might still be dug in, but his family was moving on — and wanting to acknowledge this most remarkable four years they had experienced. No regrets. Come on — who would have expected any of this!
One curious point of consideration for the family that morning — prescient of the events that would shortly unfold — was a follow-up to a discussion initiated some months before by aides and family. Trump representatives, working with Trump-family members, had approached Parler, the social network backed by Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, far-right exponents and large Trump contributors. They had floated a proposition that Trump, after he left office, become an active member of Parler, moving much of his social-media activity there from Twitter. In return, Trump would receive 40 percent of Parler’s gross revenues and the service would ban anyone who spoke negatively about him.
Parler was balking only at this last condition.
This was now being offered by the family as a carrot to entice the president out of the White House (it was also a potential future family revenue stream): Trump could do what he loved to do most and potentially make a fortune off it. It was a given in the Trump White House that he was one of social media’s most valuable assets and that he would like nothing better than to share, monetarily, in that value.
Giuliani left the Willard with John Eastman, a right-wing constitutional scholar whom Giuliani had recruited to argue the vice-president’s wide latitude in accepting or rejecting presidential electors; Bernie Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who went to prison on federal tax-fraud charges and to whom, at Giuliani’s urging, Trump granted a full pardon; and Epshteyn at a little before 10 a.m. Giuliani was now in hyperdrive over Pence. To the president, Giuliani was still offering good odds that the vice-president would come through. To others, he was saying that Pence just didn’t have the balls to do what could be done.
On the evening of January 4, as both the president and the vice-president were returning from a campaign swing in the runoff Senate races in Georgia, Giuliani arranged yet another come-to-Jesus meeting for the president and vice-president on the subject of the VP’s ability to upset the election — this time with Eastman in attendance. Marc Short, the VP’s chief of staff, believed they had made it absolutely clear that the vice-president believed he had no discretion in the electoral count and was reluctant to reprise the discussion. He agreed now to the meeting only to avoid insulting the president — and only on the understanding that Giuliani, whom Short considered unhinged, would not be present.
The next day, the president again called Pence on the carpet — the meeting at which the president famously asked Pence, “Do you want to be a patriot or a pussy?” At other points, he was more politic. “You want to do the right thing,” said the president. “I very much want to do the right thing,” said the vice-president. “That’s all I want to do.”
Giuliani had spent weeks telling everyone that they knew exactly what was going to happen, that they could depend on Pence, no question at all about that.
Coming out of the Willard, Giuliani ran into Roger Stone in the lobby. When Giuliani asked if he was going to the rally, Stone said he hadn’t been invited. He didn’t even know who had organized it, he said.
The four men were let out of their car and had to walk across the grass to the Ellipse. They were already freezing by the time Giuliani went on at about 10:50.
At 11:45 a.m., the White House entourage, including Meadows, Herschmann, and Scavino, piled into the Beast, the presidential limo, and the follow-on vehicles for the two-minute ride to the rally-staging area (mostly the president liked to ride alone with the rest of the entourage following). The Trump family was already there. The greenroom tent was almost giddy. Nostalgia was beginning. Don Jr. had his phone out, filming the moment.
A few days before, rally organizers had amended their estimate of the crowd’s size from 5,000 to 30,000. Various media reports were now putting it at more than 10,000. The best estimate put the crowd somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 — a righteous cold-weather turnout for a defeated president. During his speech, the president would pause to observe that he reckoned there were 250,000 people there. In days to come, he would raise his estimate to 1 million.
He came onstage to his standard anthem, “God Bless the U.S.A.,” but with less swagger than usual — slower, less sure, even. He was in a black overcoat and black gloves: a strongman look.
The speech, shortly on its way to becoming the most notorious of his presidency, and the key piece of evidence for his imminent second impeachment, was a B-grade delivery. Not long into it, Giuliani and his crew, with freezing toes, left and went back to the Willard. They had heard it all before.
At about 12:30 p.m., midway through Trump’s speech, the vice-president’s office released a two-and-a-half-page letter explaining that “after a careful” study, the vice-president had concluded that he was not able to reject votes unilaterally or, in effect, to do anything else, beyond playing his ceremonial role, that the president might want him to do.
“Oh, shit,” noted Miller at home, sending the statement to Giuliani, Epshteyn, and Scavino and leaving it to one of them to tell the president. Everybody else thought Oh, shit, too.
At the Ellipse, Trump’s delivery was more singsong than bombastic and explosive. He was rushing through it. Ordinarily, he’d have thrown some red meat out and waited for the reaction — always, clearly, the moments of his keenest enjoyment — but now he was just plunging forward. “After this, we’re going to walk down — and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down. We’re going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”
He had added that part: the walk. After this, we’re going to walk down — and I’ll be there with you. The walk wasn’t in the text. The entourage heard little else — the hundreds upon hundreds of hours of Trump rallies that they all had been subjected to blurred into the usual blah-blah, but they heard that line: the walk. He did not mean this, of course. Trump didn’t walk anywhere.
Meadows and Scavino had slipped out and weren’t listening to the speech. One of the Secret Service agents hurried to get Meadows aside and tell him the president said he was planning to march to the Capitol with the protesters.
“No. There’s no way we are going to the Capitol,” said Meadows.
Meadows confirmed this with the president as soon as he came off the stage at 1:11 p.m.
The president seemed unsure what Meadows was talking about.
“You said you were going to march with them to the Capitol.”
“Well — ”
“How would we do that? We can’t organize that. We can’t.”
“I didn’t mean it literally,” Trump said.
By 1:30, the president was back at the White House, his family returning with him. Lunch was waiting.
Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle and Eric and Lara Trump left, and Ivanka hung around.
Trump was back on the phone trying to get new information on Pence. The Joint Session had convened at 1 p.m. Arizona was the first objection.
The state had occupied a special place in the president’s paranoia ever since Election Night, when Fox News had called it for Biden much earlier than its competitors — and much earlier than Trump’s data team had believed was plausible.
The president was looking for coverage of the breakout sessions in Congress, when both the Senate and the House would return to their respective chambers and debate the challenges to the various states. But only C-SPAN seemed to be on it. Giuliani, calling from the Willard, where he had watched the remainder of the president’s speech and was just seeing the first mentions of disorder in the streets, gave him a breathless report on Pence but without any new information. That said, he was also promising that as many as six states would be contested, hence a volatile situation — We just didn’t know what’s going to happen (his breathlessness was only increasing). Meadows was in close touch with Jim Jordan. But the details Jordan was offering were unsatisfying. The president was, in theory, waging an extraordinary legislative fight, one with hardly any precedent — the culmination of a two-month battle in which he had considered little else and on which both his immediate future and his place in history depended. But other than via his own tweets and fulminations and his meeting the day before with the vice-president, nobody in the White House was much participating or even present.
There was nobody on the White House side whipping votes. There was nobody on the White House side who was particularly up-to-date on who might be with them or against them other than from public reports. To the extent that, as the media darkly warned, there was an extraordinary plot to hold on to power — an incipient coup, even — there really were only two plotters, with no one to back them up. Trump had no functioning political staff, the White House counsel’s office had been all but shut down (to the degree the office was still functioning, it was almost entirely focused on vetting pardon pleas), and the leadership of the Justice Department was in disarray.
All the same, the president and Giuliani, in their bubble, remained confident that success was there for them to grab.
At 1:49 p.m., the president retweeted a video of his Ellipse speech. At just about this time, rioters were breaching the Capitol door.
At two o’clock, the president and Giuliani — the president in the White House and Giuliani at the Willard — tried to find Tommy Tuberville, the recently seated senator from Alabama, but they instead mistakenly called Mike Lee, the Utah senator, on his cell phone. Lee, amid the increasing confusion as reports started to come in of mobs breaching the Capitol fences, found Tuberville and put him on the phone. The president and Giuliani seemed to have no idea what was occurring, and Tuberville was either unsuccessful in telling them or thought better of trying.
At about 2:15 p.m., Epshteyn, watching television in Giuliani’s suite at the Willard, was one of the first people in the greater Trump circle to start, with some sense of panic, to take note of what was happening. Epshteyn spoke to Miller, who called Meadows.
“I’m sure you’re tracking this,” Miller said.
“Yeah, I know. Some things are moving here that I can’t get into at the moment,” Meadows said.
Miller assumed the White House was mobilizing the National Guard. By 2:20 p.m., both the House and Senate had adjourned.
At 2:24 p.m., the president, having been informed that Mike Pence had not rejected the Arizona Biden electors, tweeted:
Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
Reading the tweet in the Capitol bunker, the siege now in progress, Pence and Short, hardly for the first time, noted how far off the president could be from the page everyone else was on. That was the generous interpretation.
In part, the president seemed just not to be grasping the facts as they were coming through — mounting crowds, breached barricades, protesters entering the Capitol. Or maybe he was simply disagreeing with them: These people were protesting the election, he was still repeating as late as 2:30. The protesters wanted Pence to do the right thing. These were good protesters: his protesters.
Meadows, Herschmann, and Scavino began pressing the president to make some public acknowledgment of what was happening and to admonish the protesters, but his attention was elsewhere, still focused on the vice-president. Fourteen minutes after his tweet attacking Pence, at 2:38 p.m., the aides managed to get a tweet out from the president composed by Scavino: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”
Approaching 3 p.m., the pressure for the president to say something quickly mounted.
Ivanka Trump had been floating around the West Wing, chatting to a variety of people. Her children had gotten into private school in Florida, and she was pleased about this — an excited topic of conversation. She was pulled away from her discussion about schools to join the increasingly tense debate about how to respond to the news.
The president, though, was digging in his heels. He remained singularly focused on the electoral challenge and had blinders on to everything else — at least, that was how everybody was rationalizing something close to his total failure, willful or not, to understand what was going on. At the same time, no one in the White House was seeing this as the full-on assault on the Capitol and the nail in the coffin of the Trump administration that the world would shortly understand it to be; they were, for perhaps another 90 minutes or so, still treating this as “an optics issue,” as Ivanka was putting it.
It wasn’t until later in the three o’clock hour that Trump seemed to begin the transition from seeing the mob as people protesting the election — defending him so he would defend them — to seeing them as “not our people.” Therefore, he bore no responsibility for them.
Giuliani and Epshteyn were still watching television reports from the Willard. Giuliani was on the phone with the president, relating, with growing concern, what he was seeing on television, but both men were still talking about the vice-president and what might happen in the electoral count.
Ivanka wasn’t casting off the protesters entirely — here was the base. “American Patriots,” she addressed them directly in a tweet at 3:15, which she would shortly delete, “any security breach or disrespect to our law enforcement is unacceptable. The violence must stop immediately. Please be peaceful.”
The debate about putting the president out there to say something — something calming — continued for as much as an hour.
There were three views: that he must, as fast as possible, say something — it was getting serious (though no one yet was seeing this as the defining moment of his presidency); his own view, which was that he should say nothing — it was not his fault or responsibility, and he certainly didn’t want to give a speech that might imply it was; and, lastly, that anything he said, instead of helping to address the problem, might well make matters much worse, as it did when he was forced to make a speech condemning the racist protesters in Charlottesville.
Aides put in front of the president two suggested tweets, written in Trump’s voice, which they hoped he might accept:
Bad apples, like ANTIFA or other crazed leftists, infiltrated today’s peaceful protest over the fraudulent vote count. Violence is never acceptable! MAGA supporters embrace our police and the rule of law and should leave the Capitol now!
The fake news media who encouraged this summer’s violent and radical riots are now trying to blame peaceful and innocent MAGA supporters for violent actions. This isn’t who we are! Our people should head home and let the criminals suffer the consequences!
Trump either rejected them or ignored them (other than Dan Scavino, Trump didn’t like anyone else writing his tweets).
The challenge now became how to use Trump’s own arguments to convince him that he had to do something — what passed for the Socratic method in the Trump White House. He had often said what he needed to say, so just say it again: He and the Republican Party represented law and order, so how could he not speak out about lawlessness? He should urge his people, the good people, to go home and leave the bad people.
Still, he did not see the necessity of speaking out. It wasn’t as bad as the media were saying it was. People were saying it was bad just to blame it on him. It took 35 minutes from his “Stay Peaceful” tweet to get him to go further — with Scavino as the author:
I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order — respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!
The entire narrative of the election — and indeed the Trump presidency — was quickly being transformed: The Capitol was under siege; the “steal” was moot. But Trump remained fixed in his obsession: The election had been taken from him, and whatever happened, someone had to give it back; he could not see or think or imagine beyond this.
By 3:30 p.m., he was telling callers that, yes, he had decided to say something. He was going to speak. But he was still repeating that the election had been stolen and was seeking assurances from each caller that the protests were overblown — that it was mostly a peaceful protest, wasn’t it?
Every one of the people yet in the White House as well as those who had slipped out, along with the president’s large traveling retinue, his family, the many members of Congress seeking photo ops with him, and the legions of favor seekers, had all been at rally after rally and, over and over again, seen vivid demonstrations of the exotic, self-dramatizing, out-from-under-a-rock Trump fan base. But now, to a person, to a political professional, they were dumbfounded and awestruck — revulsion competing with incomprehension.
In part, the radically faithful had simply been concentrated. The merely eager party types, and the Las Vegas audience sorts, and the local business proprietors, and the family-outing Republicans, and the VFW-post members, and various church groups, the salt of the Republican earth, more or less in normal dress, all had mostly self-selected out, leaving what was generally, if abstractly, referred to in the Trump circle as the “hard core.” But no one had ever come so clearly face-to-face with this pure hard core as was happening now and would happen, in video footage and in indictments, in the weeks to come. Even Trump himself, the clearest channel through to this fan base, was growing confused.
As he went upstairs to the residence, he seemed, said some of the people talking to him there by phone, at a terrible loss. The monologue slowed and even paused, with a few people not even sure that this otherwise-unstoppable monologuist was still on the line.
At about this time, Scavino informed Trump that he had been booted off Twitter — still a temporary suspension. For more than four years, he’d been told that this was always a possibility, and every time, he’d responded that Twitter needed him more than he needed it.
The doubtless president was, at least for a moment, someone else. “I don’t know what to do here,” he said to one caller not long after 7 p.m. — as stark a sense of uncertainty and even crisis as the caller had ever heard the president express.
The notable thing is that he seemed to have finally recognized that the main event, the certification of the electoral votes, was now far from the main event. He may even have realized that after 64 days of struggle, it was over.
Jason Miller, at home in Arlington, was lying stupefied in bed with his wife, watching the video loops of the day over and over again and hoping there was a plan. But no one called. At 9 p.m., he got out of bed, opened his laptop, and started to write a statement. A statement — the considered language of politics, the true mandarin’s language — was an indication of ongoing business. This meant doing what Trump had refused for the past 64 days to do: acknowledge that Joe Biden would inevitably be the next president.
But there was not going to be an abject or contrite Trump or even a formally defeated one. It was necessary to skip over the fairness of the election and to skip over the Trump-told narrative — the election in his mind would remain stolen, forever stolen. This statement could certainly not be the official, belated concession — at least not to Trump — but it had to establish acceptance, a fait accompli, and put Trump’s stamp on the new, if disagreeable, reality.
Miller was trying to get the headline, the chyron roll: the message from Trump that something had changed.
Orderly transition.
Not exactly the torch passing, and hardly a round of applause for democracy in action.
That was as far as the president could be moved. He called Kushner and read him the draft.
“Will you call the president?” Kushner smoothly pushed Miller into the fray.
Miller called Meadows, still in the West Wing, and then the president. The president seemed eager to hear from Miller, eager to be on the phone. Most often for Trump, the phone was a one-way instrument: Callers listened.
“How bad is this?” Trump asked, a stark difference from his usual opener, “How are we doing?” — which was not, ordinarily, a question at all but a preface to Trump’s saying how well everything was going.
“Mr. President, today is literally going to change everything.”
“This looks terrible. This is really bad. Who are these people? These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits. They look like Democrats. Hold on, our great First Lady is here,” said Trump, switching to speakerphone.
“Jason,” said the great First Lady with a sharp note. “The media is trying to go and say this is who we are. We don’t support this.”
“That’s what we have to make clear,” said Miller, relieved that the president and First Lady were seeing the protesters as bad guys rather than good guys (and not a mix of the two). Pushing through, Miller told the president and First Lady that he had just gotten off the phone with Kushner and Meadows and that they had a proposal for later that evening if Biden reached an electoral majority. He went into reading the statement draft.
The president suggested “peaceful” transition instead of “orderly.” Miller said that that called attention to the fact that it wasn’t peaceful now and might not be peaceful. “Orderly,” Miller did not say, suggested not just an absence of disruption but that all the aspects of government would pass, as they should, to a new administration. “Peaceful” put it in someone else’s hand; “orderly” meant cooperation, too — the Trump White House would cooperate with the incoming Biden White House. It wasn’t just the protesters who needed to stop; Trump needed to extend himself, too. After all, it wasn’t just the recount effort and the election challenge behind the protests but Trump’s personal intransigence.
Trump seemed to appreciate this now, to walk back, even. “The media thinks I’m not going to leave,” said the president. “Do they really think that? That’s crazy.”
“We’ve never laid that out,” said Miller, with some deadpan. “I really can’t stress enough how much we have to make it clear that we’re fully onboard with an orderly transition.”
“We didn’t tell people to do something like this. We told people to be peaceful. I even said ‘peaceful’ and ‘patriotic’ in my speech!”
“I’ll work with Dan on getting this out,” Miller told the president. Saying this, Miller suddenly wondered if they would even have the tools and channels to get it out. Every call — to the wires, networks, and major dailies — yielded variations on the same question: When are we going to hear directly from the president? When is he going to come and talk about it? When is he going to stand in front of us and in front of the American people?
This is over, Miller thought. This is the end of the road. Of all the news outlets, only Fox had never gotten back to him. Even Fox, Miller accepted, was truly over Trump.
Scavino could use only his personal Twitter account to finally, at 3:49 a.m., get out the president’s statement.
If this was an attempted putsch, it had not only failed but shown its leader to be almost a random participant in it, without method or strategy. Disorder had always been his element, and it was now his followers’, too. But he was not so much with them as alone in his own rebellion and desires, a bubble of grievance that somehow floated apart from actual events, even events that were meant to make real the president’s own delusions.
Excerpted from
https://www.amazon.com/Landslide-Final-Days-Trump-Presidency/dp/125083001X?ots=1&slotNum=0&imprToken=90bd2938-87c3-121c-c73&ascsubtag=[
Michael Wolff’s ‘Landslide’: Donald Trump’s January 6 (nymag.com)
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/michael-wolff-landslide-final-days-trump-presidency-excerpt.html
Matt Hancock personally appointed aide Gina Coladangelo to £15k government job
The disgraced former Health Secretary faces new questions after he 'directly' appointed Gina Coladangelo to his department's board last year
By Dan Bloom Online Political Editor
13:41, 28 JUN 2021 UPDATED13:51, 28 JUN 2021
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-matt-hancock-personally-appointed-24413418
Matt Hancock faces fresh questions after No10 confirmed he personally appointed his aide to her £15,000-a-year government job.
The former Health Secretary "directly" appointed Gina Coladangelo last year as a non-executive director at the Department of Health - where she sat on its board alongside Chris Whitty.
He later began an affair with her and they were filmed snogging in his office on May 6.
Friends of Mr Hancock have insisted the affair began in May, but the pair were university friends long before their kiss.
The Ministerial Code states: "Within departments, the Minister should advise their Permanent Secretary of the interest and responsibilities should be arranged to avoid any conflict of interest."
No10 today declined to confirm whether Mr Hancock declared any kind of relationship with Ms Coladangelo when she was appointed to his department's board. Yet a spokesman said "I don't believe" an investigation into whether Mr Hancock broke the Code is under way.
Boris Johnson's official spokesman said: "Ministers are entitled to make direct appointments when it comes to non-executive directors. Her appointment followed the correct procedure in this regard."
Pushed further to confirm Mr Hancock appointed her, he said: "As far as I'm aware, I believe ministers are entitled to make direct appointments, and I believe that was the case in this instance."
Asked if ministers had "carte blanche" to appoint anyone, he said: "That detail is set out on gov.uk, I don't have that to hand. Obviously non-executive directors are appointed to bring experience from all sectors and provide advice to government departments."
Asked if the "full facts" of her relationship were disclosed as part of her appointment, he replied: "As I said, her appointment followed correct procedure."
Asked if that procedure would involve declaring a relationship he said: "I think the roles require a declaration of interest."
The briefing came after Boris Johnson broke his silence on Matt Hancock's resignation for kissing a senior aide - saying it had undermined public health messaging.
The PM made the remarks despite giving his full backing to the former Health Secretary on Friday after pictures emerged of him in clinch with aide Gina Coladangelo.
Downing Street repeatedly insisted on Friday that Mr Johnson considered the matter closed and had accepted Mr Hancock's apology.
But Mr Hancock was forced to resign the next day in the face of overwhelming criticism.
He was swiftly replaced by former Chancellor Sajid Javid.
Asked whether Mr Hancock's actions undermined the message about being "all in it together", the PM made a complete u-turn, saying: "That's right, and that's why when I saw the story on Friday we had a new Secretary of State for Health in on Saturday."
But asked if Mr Johnson had sacked his Health Secretary, the PM's spokesman clarified: "No, the former Health Secretary resigned."
Asked if the PM urged him to resign, the spokesman said: "No, the Prime Minister accepted his resignation, he agreed it was the right decision."
Asked how the matter could be "closed" on Friday and then be the "right decision" for Mr Hancock to quit on Saturday, the spokesman replied: "They discussed it further.
"On the following day the Health Secretary offered his resignation, the Prime Minister agreed it was the right thing to do."
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-matt-hancock-personally-appointed-24413418
QAnon Supporters Express Boredom With 'Same Old' Trump Speech: 'This Is Getting Ridiculous'
By Benjamin Fearnow
Newsweek On 6/27/21 at 10:21 AM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/qanon-supporters-express-boredom-same-old-trump-speech-this-getting-ridiculous-1604489
Both QAnon and longtime supporters of former President Donald Trump criticized his Saturday night speech in Wellington, Ohio, accusing him of the "same-old, same-old" grievances against Democrats and his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.
QAnon supporters, some of whom are the former president's most fanatical online backers, sent a barrage of messages through the Telegram app that expressed boredom and even anger at the speech Trump described as "the very first rally of the 2022 election." They blasted Trump for not mentioning how his January 6 insurrection supporters are "rotting in jail." And numerous others said Trump should be booed by the Ohio rallygoers for even "bringing up the word 'vaccine,'" specifically because they believe COVID-19 was entirely a hoax.
But a majority of the top QAnon user comments simply expressed their outright boredom with Trump's post-election stump speech, in which he baselessly claimed to have won in November 2020 and blasted any dissenting GOP members as "traitors."
"I'm 100% with the dude, but literally switched from his speech 3 mins ago. Im [sic] done with his speeches," wrote QAnon user Jacob.
"Judging by the Trump-supporting normies I live with, they were bored with his speech," wrote another QAnon user. "I support Trump but this is getting ridiculous."
"Love President Trump. But, if I'm being honest, it's a lot of the 'same old-same old,' we've all heard a thousand times before," wrote Annmarie Calabro.
Some of Trump's more mainstream critics and former supporters also appeared to have grown tired of the former president using his rally platform to blast the same figures, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Ohio GOP Congressman Anthony Gonzalez. Trump also painted a dire picture of the current state of America, claiming that the country is falling apart without his so-called leadership.
"Murders, rapes, rioting, looting, stolen elections happening everywhere, all the time, nonstop in America. Nothing but carnage. Everywhere you look," Trump said Saturday night, prompting former Illinois GOP Congressman Joe Walsh to quote him, adding: "That's about it. I'm gonna go play with the dogs."
Several political pundits accused Trump of being unable to read off his teleprompter during the Ohio rally speech Saturday night. The Bulwark publication noted that Trump even attacked U.S. military leaders.
"In one of the only original passages in his Ohio speech, he criticized 'woke generals' and claimed that 'our military will be incapable of fighting and incapable of taking orders.' America's 'military brass have become weak and ineffective leaders,'" the publication noted.
Newsweek reached out to the former president's "Save America" super PAC Sunday morning for comment
https://www.newsweek.com/qanon-supporters-express-boredom-same-old-trump-speech-this-getting-ridiculous-1604489
MPs criticise ministers’ failure to plan industrial policy
Committee says firms have been left guessing with UK government’s ‘short-term approach’
Jillian Ambrose
Mon 28 Jun 2021 01.01 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/28/mps-criticise-ministers-failure-to-plan-industrial-policy
A worker at the Siemens wind turbine factory in Hull. MPs said businesses wanted ‘long-term consistency’ as the UK moves to a low-carbon economy. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
The government’s failure to set out an industrial policy agenda has left UK businesses unclear about the future at a time when a green economic recovery is urgent, according to MPs on the business, energy and industrial strategy committee.
The group of cross-party MPs has accused the government of taking a “short-termist, unclear and unwelcome” approach to the UK’s industrial policy since scrapping the business department’s industrial strategy in March.
In a highly critical report the committee warned that the decision to abandon the strategy, put forward by Theresa May’s government in 2017, had led to a “fragmented” Treasury-led plan which would risk “widening the gap” between government and business.
Darren Jones, the chair of the committee, warned that the “short-termist” approach adopted by the prime minister and the chancellor came at a time when business leaders were “crying out for long-term consistency and clarity” as the UK began to rebuild a low-carbon, post-pandemic economy outside the EU.
The government scrapped plans to overhaul its industrial strategy in favour of a Treasury-led “plan for growth” to help revive the economy in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis.
“The reality is that it is nothing more than a list of existing policy commitments, many of which are hopelessly delayed,” Jones said. “Long term cross-economy challenges – from problems in productivity and our ageing workforce to the opportunities presented by new technologies and the net zero transition – no longer appear to command ministerial support as long-term, cross-party, whole-of-government policy priorities.”
The committee added that the government’s decision to disband its in-house think-tank, the Industrial Strategy Council, led by the Bank of England’s Andy Haldane, would remove the “expert, independent oversight” which had offered “important guidance” on how to shape the UK’s industrial policies.
Jones said business leaders and parliamentarians were “now left guessing what the government’s approach is to industrial policy, with no expert oversight reporting on what ministers have actually been able to deliver”.
In response a government spokesperson said that since the industrial strategy was published more than four years ago the government had legislated to end the UK’s contribution to climate crisis by becoming a net-zero carbon economy by 2050, and was continuing to fight the Covid-19 pandemic while forging a new path outside the EU.
“That’s why it was right to change our approach too, with our new plan for growth setting out the opportunities we’ll seize across the UK to drive economic growth, create jobs and support British industry as we level up and build back better out of this pandemic,” the spokesperson said.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/28/mps-criticise-ministers-failure-to-plan-industrial-policy
Top US general got into shouting match with Trump over race protests – report
Book claims Gen Mark Milley yelled at Trump, prompting former president to yell back: ‘You can’t fucking talk to me like that!’
Martin Pengelly in New York @MartinPengelly
Mon 28 Jun 2021 07.39 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/mark-milley-us-general-trump-shouting-match
Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, reportedly “yelled” at Donald Trump that he was not and would not be in charge of the federal response to protests for racial justice, prompting the then president to yell back: “You can’t fucking talk to me like that!”
The shouting match in the White House situation room was reported on Monday by Axios, in another trail of a much-trailed book: Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael Bender, a Wall Street Journal reporter.
Bender’s book will be published in August but it has been extensively previewed.
Milley made headlines last week when he clashed with Republicans over teaching concerning America’s history of racism – and for his pains was called “stupid” and a “pig” by Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
A previous excerpt of Bender’s work showed Milley resisting Trump’s urges to “crack skulls” and “just shoot” protesters marching for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.
The exchange reported by Axios concerned command authority. Milley, Bender writes, told Trump he was an adviser but could not command the response.
“I said you’re in fucking charge!” Trump reportedly shouted.
“Well, I’m not in charge!” Milley is said to have “yelled” back.
“You can’t fucking talk to me like that!” Trump reportedly shouted.
Bender reports that Milley told advisers gathered in the situation room: “Goddamnit. There’s a room full of lawyers here. Will someone inform him of my legal responsibilities?”
William Barr, then attorney general, is said to have backed Milley up.
Trump denied the exchange, a spokesman calling it “fake news” and saying Bender, who like scores of other authors interviewed the former president for his book, “never asked me about it and it’s totally fake news”.
“If Gen Milley had yelled at me, I would have fired him,” Trump said.
It has been widely reported that Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act, a historic piece of legislation to deal with domestic unrest most recently used during the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It was not invoked but the New York Times has reported that aides drafted an order. Milley reportedly opposed use of the act.
On 1 June last year, Trump raged at governors on a conference call, telling them to “toughen up” in response to protests which sometimes turned violent.
“If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re going to walk away with you,” Trump said. “In Washington we’re going to do something people haven’t seen before.”
Milley and other aides subsequently accompanied Trump on a controversial walk across Lafayette Square outside the White House, which had been violently cleared of protesters, to stage a photo-op at a church.
The general later apologised.
“I should not have been there,” he told students at National Defense University. “My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/mark-milley-us-general-trump-shouting-match
Revealed: neo-Confederate group includes military officers and politicians
Jason Wilson @jason_a_w
Mon 28 Jun 2021 05.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/neo-confederate-group-members-politicians-military-officers
Leaked data shows other high-profile members have overlapping membership in more explicitly racist or violent groups
Leaked membership data from the neo-Confederate Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) organization has revealed that the organization’s members include serving military officers, elected officials, public employees, and a national security expert whose CV boasts of “Department of Defense Secret Security Clearance”.
But alongside these members are others who participated in and committed acts of violence at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and others who hold overlapping membership in violent neo-Confederate groups such as the League of the South (LOS).
The group, which is organized as a federation of state chapters, has recently made news for increasingly aggressive campaigns against the removal of Confederate monuments. This has included legal action against states and cities, the flying of giant Confederate battle flags near public roadways, and Confederate flag flyovers at Nascar races.
Last Monday, the Georgia division of SCV commenced legal action against the majority-black city of Decatur with the aim of restoring a Confederate memorial obelisk which was removed in June 2020, and later replaced with a statue of the late congressman and civil rights activist, John Lewis.
Last year, in a widely criticized move, the University of North Carolina’s board of governors proposed creating a $2.5m charitable trust which would pay the state’s SCV organization to maintain a Confederate “Silent Sam” statue which had been removed from the campus.
That deal fell apart in recent weeks. But critics – including former members – alleged that the SCV commander for the state, Kevin Stone, associated with extremists and other “scary” individuals who had been recruited to the group.
Stone, who who also co-founded the SCV Mechanized Cavalry, a motorcycle club associated with the SCV, reportedly led a takeover of the branch which pushed out anti-racist members.
College of Charleston historian, Adam Domby, whose book, The False Cause, details the history of the neo-Confederate movement, said in a telephone conversation that “throughout its history, the SCV has been linked with white supremacist groups, and historically it has avowedly supported white supremacist groups”.
Jalane Schmidt, a professor of religion at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has been active in the campaign to remove the statues that the Unite the Right rally sought to defend in 2017, and is working on a book about the history of neo-Confederate groups including SCV in Virginia.
In a telephone conversation, she pointed to an 1 April ruling of the Virginia supreme court which reversed lower court rulings in favor of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and The Monument Fund in their quest to ensure Charlottesville’s monuments stayed in place.
“According to the Supreme Court, the SCV and the Monument Fund were wrong all along, and we could have taken down our statues in 2017”, she said.
Instead, the statues were still standing when Unite the Right was organized. As a result of the rally, Schmidt added, “people are dead”.
SCV’s attempts to preserve Confederate monuments have become more difficult in the face of intensifying demands for their removal since the rise of the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement, and the neo-Confederate-inspired mass murder of Black church-goers by Dylann Roof in South Carolina in 2015.
SCV last year rededicated removed statues of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford at its National Confederate Museum in Columbia, Tennessee.
The data
The national membership data was provided to the Guardian by a self-described hacktivist whose identity has been withheld for their safety.
The data reveals the names, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses of almost 59,000 past and present members of the organization, including 91 who used addresses associated with government agencies for their contact email, and 74 who used addresses associated with various branches of the armed forces.
They noticed that the organization’s website had been misconfigured, allowing access to membership rolls, recruiting data, and other information about the internal workings of the group. The website has had the security issue for a number of years, according to the hacktivist.
The membership data shows members’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, whether they are active or not, and their email addresses.
The Guardian identified members who were listed as active, and whose contact information included addresses associated with government agencies, the armed forces, educational institutions, and non-government organizations.
There was some previous reporting on an earlier version of the membership database, made public by Atlanta Antifa, which noted the presence of Georgia state legislators in the group’s data.
But the Guardian has found additional legislators, and active members who are in positions of influence and responsibility that stretch far beyond the walls of state legislatures.
High-profile members
One member listed as active in the data is Scott Wyatt, who represents the 97th district in Virginia’s house of delegates, which comprises rural counties north of Richmond, which served as the Confederate capital for much of the civil war.
Duane AJ Probst, who was elected coroner of Osage county, Missouri in 2020, after reaching the rank of Lt Col in the US Army National Guard, is also listed as an active member of the group.
In a telephone conversation, Probst confirmed his membership, saying that he had joined in the last “four or five years” after he discovered a relative had fought for the Confederacy, had attended meetings until around two years ago when he became too busy for regular attendance.
He said that in his experience of the local group in Missouri, it was “a friendly organization that doesn’t advocate white supremacy”, and the main activities he had been involved in were dinners and lectures.
On the question of statues, Probst said that “the men who forged the country were flawed”, and that “I don’t know that taking down a statue is going to ameliorate any issues”, adding that he was not opposed to adding plaques to monuments since “perspectives change as time goes on”.
On the presence of extremists in SCV, Probst said he had never encountered any, but that “it doesn’t surprise me. There are militant members of every organization.”
Probst, who ran for coroner as a Republican, added that: “I am a member of a political faction in this country. There are members of that faction who are loony in my opinion. That doesn’t mean I have to walk away from the organization. Instead I fight for the values I think it represents.”
Another member of the group who is listed as active, Dr Danny W Davis, is both a professor and program director at Texas A & M University and a training consultant to the US army reserve. His membership data includes a US army contact email address
Davis states on his publicly available CV that he has “Department of Defense Secret Security Clearance”, that he is a “Training Consultant to US Army Reserve, San Antonio, Texas”, and the “Director, Certificate in Homeland Security Program”.
Davis’s CV includes details of courses Davis has taught and developed, including “Domestic Terrorism: The Internal Threat to America”, which is described as “a comprehensive survey of domestic terrorism”. The CV also points to Davis’s 20 year military career which ended in 1997 with Davis a Lt Col.
In a telephone conversation, Davis confirmed his active membership in the group, saying that he had joined because he had “three great grandfathers” who had fought for the Confederate army.
On the question of statues he said that “when we start taking down monuments, I think that’s wrong”, and that to him they “represent men who were fighting for something they believed in”.
Davis said that those beliefs “included slavery, but not only slavery”, adding, “do I think the right outcome came out of the civil war? Yes.”
Davis said “I am not a white supremacist” and said he was surprised to hear about the overlap between the group and extremist organizations, saying that members were mostly “re-enactors”, “people like me who are interested in history”, and “military veterans”.
He said that he includes rightwing extremists in his graduate courses on domestic terrorism, and that he is currently revising a course to include the 6 January assault on the US Capitol, as well as the activities of “Antifa and BLM in the Northwest”.
A number of members listed as active members use email addresses associated with The Citadel, a public military academy located in Charleston, South Carolina.
A total of 13 members using Citadel or Citadel alumni email addresses appear in the membership database, with six listed as active members.
One of those active members is retired National Guard Brig Gen Roger Clifton Poole, who has twice served as interim president of the college, and remains a professor in The Citadel’s School of Business.
Wyatt and Poole did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Radical neo-Confederates
Alongside these SCV members, however, are others who have overlapping membership in more explicitly racist or violent groups, or who have been involved in political violence at events like Unite the Right, the event where Heather Heyer was murdered by white supremacist James Fields in 2017.
They include North Carolina lawyer, Harold Crews, who is listed as an active member of the SCV. Crews is also a member of the League of the South, and marched with the group at Unite the Right in 2017.
Crews was involved in scuffles with counter-protesters on the day. Later, backed by a disinformation campaign pushed by white nationalist blogger, Brad Griffin, who was then LOS’s public relations officer, Crews persuaded a judge to issue a warrant for the arrest of DeAndre Harris, who Crews and who was badly beaten in a parking garage by six Unite the Right attendees.
While the public positions of SCV emphasize the preservation of Confederate “heritage”, LOS is an openly secessionist group which seeks to separate the states which joined the confederacy as a new white supremacist state. Crews served as the North Carolina chair of LOS, and hosted a podcast called Southern Nationalist Radio, where his guests included LOS founder, Michael Hill.
Other active members who attended Unite the Right include Virginian, George Randall, and North Carolina based James Shillinglaw. On the day of the rally, Shillinglaw was captured on video beating a counter-protester with a flagpole.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Randall and Shillinglaw are also LOS members.
Also on the membership rolls, but listed as currently inactive, is long time Georgia-based far-right activist Chester Doles. Doles, a former Klansman and member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance who marched at Unite The Right with the Hammerskins white power gang, was pictured in 2013 wearing the insignia of the SCV Motorized Cavalry, a motorcycle club made up of members of SCV.
Doles was apparently a member of the group long after he was imprisoned first in Maryland in 1993 for beating a black man, and later for weapons charges in Georgia.
Crews, Doles, Randall, and Shillinglaw did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/28/neo-confederate-group-members-politicians-military-officers
US airstrikes target Iran-backed militias in Syria, Iraq
By LOU KESTEN
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-syria-iran-middle-east-iraq-47774c2b5a6862353c8c6751738e7ba0
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military, under the direction of President Joe Biden, carried out airstrikes against what it said were “facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups” near the border between Iraq and Syria, drawing condemnation from Iraq’s military and calls for revenge by the militias.
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said the militias were using the facilities to launch unmanned aerial vehicle attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq. It was the second time the Biden administration has taken military action in the region since he took over earlier this year.
Kirby said the U.S. military targeted three operational and weapons storage facilities on Sunday night — two in Syria and one in Iraq.
He described the airstrikes as “defensive,” saying they were launched in response to the attacks by militias.
“The United States took necessary, appropriate, and deliberate action designed to limit the risk of escalation — but also to send a clear and unambiguous deterrent message,” Kirby said.
The Pentagon said the facilities were used by Iran-backed militia factions, including Kata’ib Hezbollah and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada.
Two Iraqi militia officials told The Associated Press in Baghdad that four militiamen were killed in the airstrikes near the border with Syria. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give statements. They said the first strike hit a weapons storage facility inside Syrian territory, where the militiamen were killed. The second strike hit the border strip.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that closely monitors the Syrian conflict through activists on the ground, reported that at least seven Iraqi militiamen were killed in the airstrikes.
The Iran-backed Iraqi militia factions vowed revenge for the attack and said in a joint statement they would continue to target U.S. forces. “We ... will avenge the blood of our righteous martyrs against the perpetrators of this heinous crime and with God’s help we will make the enemy taste the bitterness of revenge,” they said.
The Popular Mobilization Forces, an Iraqi state-sanctioned umbrella of mostly Shiite militias — including those targeted by the U.S. strikes — said their men were on missions to prevent infiltration by the Islamic State group and denied the presence of weapons warehouses.
Iraq’s military condemned the strikes as a “blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and national security.” It called for avoiding escalation, but also rejected that Iraq be an “arena for settling accounts” — a reference to the U.S. and Iran. It represented rare condemnation by the Iraqi military of U.S. airstrikes.
In Iran, foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh accused the U.S. of creating instability in the region.
“Definitely, what the U.S. is doing is disrupting the security of the region,” he said on Monday.
U.S. military officials have grown increasingly alarmed over drone strikes targeting U.S. military bases in Iraq, which became more common since a U.S.-directed drone killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani near the Baghdad airport last year. Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was also killed in the attack. The strike drew the ire of mostly Shiite Iraqi lawmakers and prompted parliament to pass a nonbinding resolution to pressure the Iraqi government to oust foreign troops from the country.
Sunday’s strikes mark the second time the Biden administration launched airstrikes along the Iraq-Syria border region. In February, the U.S. launched airstrikes against facilities in Syria, near the Iraqi border, that it said were used by Iranian-backed militia groups.
The Pentagon said those strikes were retaliation for a rocket attack in Iraq earlier that month that killed one civilian contractor and wounded a U.S. service member and other coalition troops.
At that time, Biden said Iran should view his decision to authorize U.S. airstrikes in Syria as a warning that it can expect consequences for its support of militia groups that threaten U.S. interests or personnel.
“You can’t act with impunity. Be careful,” Biden said when a reporter asked what message he had intended to send.
On Sunday, Kirby said Biden “has been clear that he will act to protect U.S. personnel. Given the ongoing series of attacks by Iran-backed groups targeting U.S. interests in Iraq, the President directed further military action to disrupt and deter such attacks.”
The Pentagon spokesman added: “As a matter of international law, the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense. The strikes were both necessary to address the threat and appropriately limited in scope.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Sunday that the U.S. airstrikes “appear to be a targeted and proportional response to a serious and specific threat,” adding, “Protecting the military heroes who defend our freedoms is a sacred priority.”
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Associated Press writer Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-syria-iran-middle-east-iraq-47774c2b5a6862353c8c6751738e7ba0
According to the movie's website, the film is based on a book about a 2020 election conspiracy theory written by Patrick M. Byrne, titled: "The Deep Rig: How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who Did Not Vote for Him."
The Deep Rig
(or what to send friends who ask, "Why do you doubt the integrity of Election 2020?")
by Patrick M Byrne
Synopsis
Byrne is a libertarian who did not vote for Trump and has publicly criticized him: that said, he believes Election 2020 was rigged, and that should be objectionable to every person who believes, "just government derives its power from the consent of the governed." In this book he explains what caused him in August 2020 to study election fraud, and what really happened during the 2020 election.
He describes how his team of "cyber-ninjas" unraveled it while they worked against the clock of Constitutional processes, all against the background of being a lifetime entrepreneur trying to interact with Washington, DC. This book takes you behind the headlines to backroom scenes that determined whether or not the fraud would be exposed in time, and paints a portrait of Washington that will leave the reader asking, "Is this the end of our constitutional republic?"
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-deep-rig-how-election-fraud-cost-donald-j-trump-the-white-house-by-a-man-who-did-note-vote-for-him
Doug Logan, the man behind the Cyber Ninjas Arizona audit, starred in an election conspiracy theory film alleging the CIA was behind election misinformation
Cheryl Teh 4 hours ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/doug-logan-cyber-ninjas-arizona-audit-election-conspiracy-theory-film-2021-6?r=US&IR=T
* Arizona audit leader Doug Logan, who heads the Cyber Ninjas, is in a new conspiracy theorist movie.
* Logan appeared on "The Deep Rig," a film that alleges that the CIA was involved in election misinformation.
* The movie's director is a man whose previous work claimed aliens were behind the September 11 attacks.
Doug Logan is the man currently heading the controversial audit of the 2020 Maricopa County election results in Arizona. He is also one of the stars of a conspiracy theory documentary claiming that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump — providing an ominous voiceover alleging a lack of election integrity.
Logan is the founder and CEO of Cyber Ninjas, a private consultancy based in Florida that was nominated to audit the votes in Arizona. Logan himself is a "Stop the Steal" supporter who has been known to tout election conspiracy theories, particularly those in favor of former President Donald Trump.
According to an article by local media outlet AZ Central, Logan was revealed to be a mysterious tech expert featured in the film "The Deep Rig." The documentary premiered over the weekend to a crowd of around 500 people at a church in Phoenix, who each forked out $25 for a ticket.
The AZ Central wrote that Logan's identity was revealed during the premier to cheers from the audience. This came after it was earlier speculated that a character in the film called "Anon," who works as an "application security analyst," was actually Logan.
Local news outlet AZ Mirror reported that Logan made several statements in the movie, including allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved with "disinformation" and election fraud.
Per the AZ Mirror, Logan said in the movie: "If we don't fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy."
According to the movie's website, the film is based on a book about a 2020 election conspiracy theory written by Patrick M. Byrne, titled: "The Deep Rig: How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who Did Not Vote for Him."
It is directed by Roger R. Richards, who also made a 2018 film called "Above Majestic" that claimed aliens were behind the September 11 attack.
The AP reported on June 26 that 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County have been counted and photographed, but noted that a report on the audit may still be months away.
But questions regarding the legitimacy of the audit have been raised.
Arizona GOP elections official Stephen Richer blasted the audit in a June 21 interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, saying that these processes are "insane just from a competence standpoint." Arizona Democrats have also fought the Maricopa audit, calling it a "sham."
The audit process itself has not been smooth sailing.
For one, the vote recount was critiqued by voting machine maker Dominion and the US Justice Department, after questions arose about the chain of custody and integrity of the ballots. In May, the Cyber Ninjas also appeared to be pursuing a far-fetched theory that ballots were flown in from Asia and smuggled into the stack, and were sifting through the ballots to find Chinese bamboo fibers.
Most recently, an expert review of the audit found that the Cyber Ninjas' audit process had "fatal flaws," and recommended that its findings should not be trusted.
https://www.businessinsider.com/doug-logan-cyber-ninjas-arizona-audit-election-conspiracy-theory-film-2021-6?r=US&IR=T