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Trump loses case against Omarosa Manigault Newman, who wrote tell-all White House book
"It’s over. We’ve won in Donald Trump and the Trump Campaign’s chosen forum," her attorney said.
Sept. 28, 2021, 11:08 PM BST
By Dartunorro Clark
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-loses-case-against-omarosa-who-wrote-tell-all-white-n1280277?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma
A New York arbitrator ruled Monday that former President Donald Trump's nondisclosure agreement with his ex-White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman is "unenforceable."
The arbitrator, T. Andrew Brown, said in the ruling that the terms of the nondisclosure agreement were "highly problematic" because it did not adhere to typical legal standards, describing it as "vague, indefinite, and therefore void and unenforceable."
"The Agreement effectively imposes on [Manigault Newman] an obligation to never say anything remotely critical of Mr. Trump, his family or his or his family members' businesses for the rest of her life," Brown said in the ruling.
Manigault Newman and her attorney released statements celebrating the decision Tuesday.
"Clearly, I am very happy with this ruling," Manigault Newman said. "Donald has used this type of vexatious litigation to intimidate, harass and bully for years! Finally the bully has met his match!"
Her attorney, John Phillips, said in his statement that he hopes the ruling encourages more people to "come forward and blow the whistle on corrupt government."
"It's over. We've won in Donald Trump and the Trump Campaign's chosen forum," he said.
Trump's campaign filed an arbitration complaint against Manigault Newman with the American Arbitration Association in New York City in 2018, alleging that she was in breach of a 2016 confidentiality agreement.
The action was related to claims Manigault Newman made in her 2018 book, "Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House," in which she called Trump a racist and suggested that he was in severe mental decline.
Trump hosted the reality television show "The Apprentice" and its spinoff, "The Celebrity Apprentice," both of which aired on NBC, from 2004 to 2015 before he ran for president. "The Celebrity Apprentice" was produced and owned by MGM.
Newman was a three-time contestant on the show and over time became a close confidant of Trump before she supported him for president and followed him to the White House. During his campaign, she was one of his most prominent Black supporters. However, their relationship soured during her time in the administration, and she was reported to have been forced out in 2017. Manigault Newman has insisted that she left on her own terms.
In her book, Manigault Newman wrote that she had not signed a nondisclosure agreement for her work in the White House. She asserted in the book that within 24 hours of her departure, Lara Trump, the president's daughter-in-law, emailed her a contract to work on Trump's re-election campaign for $15,000 per month in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement that was "as harsh and restrictive as any I'd seen in all my years of television."
Brown, the arbitrator, said that given how vaguely the agreement was written, there would be no way for Manigault Newman to know whether she was in breach of the contract.
"The statements do not disclose hard data such as internal polling results or donor financial information," Brown wrote. "Rather, they are for the most part simply expressions of unflattering opinions, which are deemed 'confidential information' based solely upon the designation of Mr. Trump. This is exactly the kind of indefiniteness which New York courts do not allow to form the terms of a binding contract."
Brown said Trump's campaign would have to pay Manigault Newman's legal fees.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-loses-case-against-omarosa-who-wrote-tell-all-white-n1280277?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma
131 Federal Judges Broke the Law by Hearing Cases Where They Had a Financial Interest
The judges failed to recuse themselves from 685 lawsuits from 2010 to 2018 involving firms in which they or their family held shares, a Wall Street Journal investigation found
By James V. Grimaldi, Coulter Jones and Joe Palazzolo
Sept. 28, 2021 9:07 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/131-federal-judges-broke-the-law-by-hearing-cases-where-they-had-a-financial-interest-11632834421
Judge David Norton in South Carolina presided over six asbestos suits beginning in 2012 while his disclosures show he held between $95,004 and $250,000 of stock in two defendants, 3M Co. and GE.
In 2015 he heard a case filed by James Chesher, who alleged that he developed cancer from exposure to asbestos in the Navy. Mr. Chesher and his wife sought damages from 3M, GE and about two dozen other companies. They reached settlements with 3M and GE in 2016.
Mr. Chesher died in 2017. His widow, Cheryl Ann Chesher, was surprised to learn from the Journal of the judge’s financial interest in GE and 3M.
“He should have policed himself,” Ms. Chesher said. “He knows what the law is on that and he should have followed through,” she said, adding: “You have to wonder if he’s looking out for himself...rather than the clients.”
In an emailed statement, Judge Norton said he didn’t recuse himself because 3M and GE played no significant role in the suits and were “defendants in name only.”
He added: “At the outset the lawyers involved in these cases assured me that 3M and GE would be dismissed and not involved in the case pursuant to a pre-existing agreement between the plaintiffs’ lawyers and GE and 3M.”
Peter Kraus, an attorney for the Cheshers, said he and his co-counsel “have no recollection about making any assurances to the judge that GE and 3M would be dismissed.” They “were sued because the evidence in the case implicated them, and were certainly not ‘defendants in name only,’ ” he said, adding that attorneys for both companies participated in depositions.
A 3M spokeswoman said neither the company nor its attorneys ever assured the judge regarding any dismissals. A spokeswoman for GE didn’t respond to questions about whether it had conveyed such an assurance. An attorney for GE said she didn’t recall the case.
Told what 3M and the plaintiffs’ attorney said, Judge Norton reiterated his recollection of the case.
As remaining asbestos defendants moved toward trial, Judge Norton, a George H.W. Bush appointee, issued rulings that broadly benefited companies with asbestos liabilities.
In hearings, he took aim at the theory behind the cases: that any exposure to asbestos was significant enough to contribute to their cancer. The defendants said the plaintiffs’ expert witness shouldn’t be allowed to testify because he was unable to show that the men more likely than not would have avoided the disease but for their exposure to the asbestos. Judge Norton sided with the companies, ruling that the expert witness’s testimony—“scientifically sound as it may be”—couldn’t be presented to a jury.
The ruling drew national attention. Plaintiffs’ lawyers denounced it, while lawyers who often defend corporations embraced it as common-sense analysis. A Harvard Law Review article blasted it, saying that “unrealistic legal expectations of science could do great injustice.”
Mr. Kraus, the Cheshers’s attorney, called the decision out of sync with court precedent on liability in asbestos cases. Other courts have adopted Judge Norton’s analysis, including the Ohio Supreme Court.
Mr. Kraus said he has never asked to see a judge’s financial disclosure form. He said he wasn’t sure he ever would.
“If a judge who is considering a matter you have before him finds out that you’ve been snooping around about his finances, I’d be very concerned as a practitioner that it would cause a negative backlash that would affect my clients’ rights in the court,” Mr. Kraus said.
Judge Norton also violated an ethics rule when he bought a box of cuff links at an auction of the government-seized property of a man he earlier sentenced to prison for a Ponzi scheme, according to the chief judge of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“The judge’s purchase did create an appearance of impropriety,” though it didn’t affect the sentence imposed, Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote in 2017, without identifying the cuff links buyer.
Judge Gregory quoted the unnamed judge as saying he tried to “keep current on all ethical rules and take the yearly ethics test prepared by the Administrative office” but was unaware that his participation in the auction could create the appearance of impropriety.
Judge Norton, who confirmed in a separate filing that he bought the cuff links, told the Fourth Circuit: “Now that I have been made aware of this, my actions will not be repeated.”
—Ava Sasani and Lisa Schwartz contributed to this article.
Write to Coulter Jones at Coulter.Jones@wsj.com and Joe Palazzolo at joe.palazzolo@wsj.com
More than 130 federal judges have violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing court cases involving companies in which they or their family owned stock.
A Wall Street Journal investigation found that judges have improperly failed to disqualify themselves from 685 court cases around the nation since 2010. The jurists were appointed by nearly every president from Lyndon Johnson to Donald Trump.
About two-thirds of federal district judges disclosed holdings of individual stocks, and nearly one of every five who did heard at least one case involving those stocks.
Alerted to the violations by the Journal, 56 of the judges have directed court clerks to notify parties in 329 lawsuits that they should have recused themselves. That means new judges might be assigned, potentially upending rulings.
When judges participated in such cases, about two-thirds of their rulings on motions that were contested came down in favor of their or their family’s financial interests.
In New York, Judge Edgardo Ramos handled a suit between an Exxon Mobil Corp. unit and TIG Insurance Co. over a pollution claim while owning between $15,001 and $50,000 of Exxon stock, according to his financial disclosure form. He accepted an arbitration panel’s opinion that TIG should pay Exxon $25 million and added $8 million of interest to the tab.
In Colorado, Judge Lewis Babcock oversaw a case involving a Comcast Corp. subsidiary, ruling in its favor, while he or his family held between $15,001 and $50,000 of Comcast stock.
At an Ohio-based appeals court, Judge Julia Smith Gibbons wrote an opinion that favored Ford Motor Co. in a trademark dispute while her husband held stock in the auto maker. After she and the others on the three-judge appellate panel heard arguments but before they ruled, her husband’s financial adviser bought two chunks of Ford stock, each valued at up to $15,000, for his retirement account, according to her disclosure form.
The hundreds of recusal violations found by the Journal breach a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence: No one should be a judge of his or her own cause. Congress first laid out that principle in 1792 to guarantee litigants an impartial judge and reassure the public that courts could be trusted.
Judge Ramos, who oversaw the Exxon case, was unaware of his violation, said an official of the New York federal court, because his “recusal list”—a tally judges keep of parties they shouldn’t have in their courtrooms—listed only parent Exxon Mobil Corp. and not the unit, whose name includes the additional word “oil.” The official said the court conflict-screening software relied on exact matches.
The unit had informed the court at the outset of the case that it was a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil so Judge Ramos could “evaluate possible disqualification or recusal,” a court filing shows.
After the Journal contacted Judge Ramos, who was named to the court by former President Barack Obama, the court’s clerk notified the parties of his stockholding. TIG attorneys asked the court to set aside his ruling and send the case to a new judge because of “the inevitable appearance of partiality.” Exxon opposed assigning a new judge, calling that a “manifest unfairness, gross inefficiency, and waste of judicial resources.” An appellate court has put a hearing on hold until the district court decides what to do.
In the Comcast case, a Colorado couple asked Judge Babcock to issue an order blocking Comcast from accessing their property to install fiber-optic cable. Representing themselves in court, Andrew O’Connor and Mary Henry accused Comcast workers of bullying them, scaring their 10-year-old daughter and injuring their dog, Einstein, allegations the company denied. Judge Babcock, who was appointed to the court by former President Ronald Reagan, ruled the couple had “continually blocked Comcast’s access to the easement.” He sent the case back to state court, as Comcast wanted.
“I dropped the ball,” Judge Babcock said when asked about the recusal violation. He blamed flawed internal procedures. “Thank you for helping me stay on my toes the way I’m supposed to,” he said. A Comcast spokeswoman declined to comment.
Mr. O’Connor, who settled his case in state court, said, “If you are a federal judge, you should not be holding individual stocks.”
Judge Gibbons from the Ford trademark case, appointed to the appeals court by former President George W. Bush, said she had mistakenly believed a holding in her husband’s retirement account didn’t require her recusal. She later directed the clerk of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to notify the parties of the violation and said that her husband has since told his financial adviser not to buy individual stocks.
“I regret my misunderstanding, but I assure you it was an honest one,” she said.
A spokesman for Ford said: “A fair and impartial judiciary is critical to the integrity of our legal system. In this case, the violation of Ford’s trademarks was clear.”
Nothing bars judges from owning stocks, but federal law since 1974 has prohibited judges from hearing cases that involve a party in which they, their spouses or their minor children have a “legal or equitable interest, however small.” That law and the Judicial Conference of the U.S., which is the federal courts’ policy-making body, require judges to avoid even the appearance of a conflict. Although most lawsuits don’t directly affect a company’s stock price, the Supreme Court in 1988 said the law’s purpose is to promote confidence in the judiciary.
Conflict-of-interest rules are common for state and federal employees as well as for lawyers, journalists and corporate executives. U.S. government workers may not participate “personally and substantially” in matters in which they have a financial interest.
The Journal reviewed financial disclosure forms filed annually for 2010 through 2018 by roughly 700 federal judges who reported holding individual stocks of large companies, and then compared those holdings to tens of thousands of court dockets in civil cases. The same conflict rules apply to criminal cases, but large companies are rarely charged, and the Journal found no instances of judges holding shares of corporate criminal defendants in their courts.
It found that 129 federal district judges and two federal appellate judges had at least one case in which a stock they or their family owned was a plaintiff or defendant.
Judges’ stockholdings exceeded $15,000 in 173 cases and $50,000 in 21 of those cases, although under the law, the amount doesn’t matter.
The Journal found 61 judges or their families not only holding stocks in companies that were plaintiffs or defendants in the judges’ courts but also trading the stocks during cases.
Judges offered a variety of explanations for the violations. Some blamed court clerks. Some said their recusal lists had misspellings that foiled the conflict-screening software. Some pointed to trades that resulted in losses. Others said they had only nominal roles, such as confirming settlements or transferring cases to other courts, though there is no legal exemption for such work.
The ethics code for federal judges “requires recusal when a judge has a financial conflict, regardless of the substance of the judge’s actual involvement in the case,” the Judicial Conference’s Committee on Codes of Conduct wrote in a letter to a judge this month.
In response to the Journal’s findings, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said: “The Wall Street Journal’s report on instances where conflicts inadvertently were not identified before a case was resolved or transferred is troubling, and the Administrative Office is carefully reviewing the matter.”
It said the federal judiciary “takes very seriously its obligations to preclude any financial conflicts of interest” and has taken steps, such as conflict-screening software and ethics training, to prevent violations. “We have in place a number of safeguards and are looking for ways to improve,” the office said.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who heads the federal judiciary, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The nation’s roughly 600 full-time federal trial judges, supplemented by about 460 semiretired jurists called senior judges, wield enormous power. Holding lifetime appointments, they preside over hundreds of thousands of civil and criminal cases each year in 94 court districts.
They have soup-to-nuts control over all elements of their courtrooms, from pretrial process and trial to criminal pleas, judgments and sentencing. Judges have wide latitude for fact findings and evidentiary rulings, most of which can be overturned only for abuse of discretion, a high hurdle.
Violations of the 1974 law almost never become public. Judges’ financial disclosures aren’t online, are cumbersome to request and sometimes take years to access.
Judges are informed if anyone requests to see their disclosures, creating a disincentive for lawyers who might fear annoying judges in whose courtrooms they frequently appear.
Judges rarely make public the lists of companies on whose cases they shouldn’t work. When judges disqualify themselves from cases, they typically don’t disclose details. No judges in modern times have been removed from the federal bench solely for having a financial interest in a plaintiff or defendant that appeared in their courtroom.
The Journal analyzed data from the Free Law Project, a nonpartisan legal-research nonprofit that is planning to post judicial disclosure forms online. The findings amount to a pervasive disregard for the judicial conflict-of-interest laws, legal experts said.
A recusal violation in isolation could be viewed as an oversight, but the Journal’s investigation “raises a more systemic problem of judges chronically neglecting their duty to disqualify in such cases,” said Charles Geyh, a law professor at Indiana University, who specializes in judicial conduct, ethics and accountability.
The findings “are both surprising and disappointing,” said Timothy Batten Sr., chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia and a member of the Committee on Codes of Conduct for the Judicial Conference of the U.S.
“I believe in the vast majority of these cases, it is an oversight and indolence,” he added.
Judge Batten himself owned shares of JPMorgan Chase & Co. while he heard 11 lawsuits involving the bank, most of which ended in the bank’s favor, the Journal’s analysis shows.
“I am mortified,” Judge Batten said in a phone interview when notified about his violations, which occurred in 2010 and 2011, before he joined the Codes of Conduct committee in 2019. “I had no idea that I had an interest in any of these companies in what was a most modest retirement account” managed by a broker.
“I just blew it. I regret any question that I’ve created or appearance of impropriety or a conflict of interest,” he said.
Judge Batten, appointed by former President George W. Bush, said he stopped investing in individual stocks in 2012 and moved his portfolio to mutual funds, which don’t require recusal, and has since closed the account.
The Journal analyzed cases to determine whether judges made rulings on contested motions, such as those seeking dismissal or summary judgment. Judges ruled on contested motions in 21% of the nearly 700 cases in question.
Those rulings favored the judges’ financial interests in 94 cases, went against the judges’ interest in 27 cases and had mixed outcomes in 24 cases.
Already, several parties on the losing side of the rulings have petitioned for a new judge to hear their cases after they were alerted to the violations identified by the Journal.
Several judges misunderstood the law, initially saying that they didn’t have to recuse themselves because their shares were held in accounts run by a money manager.
The ban on holding even a single share of a company while presiding in a case involving the firm means judges must be vigilant. The 1974 law requires judges to inform themselves about their own financial interests and make a “reasonable effort” to do the same for their spouses and any minor children. The Judicial Conference of the U.S. requires courts to use conflict-checking software to help identify cases where judges should bow out.
Judge Janis Sammartino of California traded in stocks of Bank of America Corp. , CVS Health Corp. , Deutsche Bank AG , Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., HSBC Holdings PLC, JPMorgan, Pfizer Inc., Public Storage, Wells Fargo & Co. and Microsoft Corp. while hearing 18 lawsuits involving one or more of those companies, the Journal found. In all, she heard 54 cases involving companies held in her family’s trusts.
In the Microsoft case, a Chicago man alleged the software giant violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by sending an unsolicited text about its Xbox gaming console to his mobile phone. He filed suit in 2011. One of Judge Sammartino’s family trusts bought Microsoft stock twice in 2012 and added three purchases in 2013.
The plaintiff’s lawyers sought in 2013 to turn the case into a class action involving 91,708 people who allegedly received the text messages. Microsoft said that it had received permission to send the texts but that records confirming this had been destroyed. Had a class been approved, the case could potentially have cost Microsoft more than $45 million, according to court filings by the plaintiff.
Judge Sammartino denied the class-action motion as well as Microsoft’s motion to dismiss the case. She ruled that the law permitted the plaintiff to seek damages of $500 for one alleged violation, potentially tripled. He appealed but settled before the appeal was heard. A spokesman for Microsoft declined to comment. One of the plaintiff’s lawyers also declined to comment.
Judge Sammartino, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, initially referred questions from the Journal to William Cracraft, a spokesman for the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “She asked me to let you know” her stocks “are in a managed account, so she’s not seeing as how there could be a conflict,” Mr. Cracraft said. “She’s not inclined to discuss her private business with you since it is all in managed accounts, and she thinks that’s sufficient.”
An opinion by the Judicial Conference’s Committee on Codes of Conduct in 2013 confirmed that judges must bow out of cases involving stocks they own in accounts run by money managers.
Judge Sammartino later informed the court clerk’s office of the conflicts, and the office filed a letter notifying parties to the Microsoft case and other cases with violations identified by the Journal.
“Judge Sammartino was not aware of this financial interest at the time the case was pending,” the letter said. “The matter was brought to her attention after disposition of the case. Thus, the financial interest neither affected nor impacted her decisions in this case. However, the financial interest would have required recusal.”
Before the Journal contacted Judge Sammartino about her recusal violations, she disqualified herself in at least 10 other cases involving companies whose stocks were listed on her disclosure forms, a review of her cases shows.
Judge Rodney Gilstrap, chief of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, had the largest number of conflicts in the Journal’s analysis: 138 cases assigned to him involving companies in which he or his wife held an interest.
Judge Gilstrap said he believed he didn’t need to recuse himself from some cases because they required little or no action on his part, and in other cases because the stocks were in a trust created for his wife. Legal-ethics experts disagreed on both counts.
“I take my obligations related to potential conflicts/recusals seriously,” he said in an email. “Throughout my judicial career, I have endeavored to comply with all such obligations, and I will continue to do so.”
Judge Sammartino’s 54 conflicts were the second-most recusal violations. Brian Martinotti in New Jersey ranked third, handling 44 cases involving companies in which he had invested. Among his biggest holdings was Alphabet Inc., the parent of Google. He disclosed in 2016, 2017 and 2018 that he owned $15,001 to $50,000 of Alphabet shares.
In 2017, the judge threw out a lawsuit against Google alleging that videos on its YouTube unit falsely said the plaintiff was a sex offender, ruling that the Communications Decency Act let Google off the hook.
Judge Martinotti, an Obama appointee, didn’t respond to requests for comment, but after the Journal inquired, the district court clerk notified parties to 44 cases of Judge Martinotti’s stock ownership. His Alphabet holding didn’t affect the judge’s decisions but would have required recusal, the clerk wrote. A spokesman for Google declined to comment.
“I would like my case to be re-opened as Judge Brian R. Martinotti was unfairly biased and should have recused himself from my case,” the plaintiff, Nuwan Weerahandi, wrote in an August 2021 letter to the court, after receiving notice of Judge Martinotti’s violation.
The chief judge of the New Jersey federal court, Freda Wolfson, denied Mr. Weerahandi’s request on Sept. 2, saying the Communications Decency Act bars defamation-related claims against computer services such as Google.
“Importantly, in making this purely legal determination, Judge Martinotti did not engage in any factfinding that would bear on the credibility of any party, including you,” Judge Wolfson wrote.
In at least 18 instances, judges disqualified themselves over conflicts, only to have the case reassigned to a judge who also had a conflict but didn’t recuse.
In 2015, Judge Robert Cleland in Michigan, a George H.W. Bush appointee, bowed out of a suit by an injured motorist against insurer Allstate Corp. , whose stock the judge had been buying and selling that year.
The case was reassigned to Judge Gershwin Drain, who also owned Allstate shares. Judge Drain heard the case—and six others involving Allstate—and wrote a ruling denying a request by the motorist to move the dispute to state court. The case then settled on undisclosed terms.
Presented with his conflicts in 42 cases, Judge Drain, an Obama appointee, said he had added notices to the court’s public docket for each suit.
“I can say with absolute certainty that I never made any decision in favor of a company because I owned stock and was invested in that company,” Judge Drain said in an email. “To prevent any future issues, however, I have taken steps to review any new cases and if I am invested in any of the companies among the new cases that are assigned to me I will immediately recuse myself.” Allstate didn’t respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for the motorist declined to comment.
Frequent recusals can upset courts’ random drawing of judges for cases and lead to a smaller pool. In 20 federal districts, a third or more judges owned the same stock in the same year. In the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in 2017, fully a third disclosed a Microsoft stock holding.
More than 340 federal appellate and trial judges reported holdings in Apple Inc. at some point from 2010 to 2018 and 300 in Microsoft. About 500 judges owned Bank of America, Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan or Wells Fargo shares at some point.
Those numbers reflect only stock ownership, not recusal violations. However, the Journal found 37 judges who owned a bank stock while improperly hearing a case involving that bank.
Judge Emily Marks bought Wells Fargo stock two weeks after she was assigned a Wells Fargo case, a conflict that now threatens to upset a ruling she made.
In the suit, Jacob Springer and Jeanetta Springer of Roanoke, Ala., acted as their own attorneys in challenging Wells Fargo’s foreclosure of Ms. Springer’s father’s home.
In court filings, they said her ailing father missed a mortgage payment three months before he died, after which his daughter, who inherited the home, made payments. Wells Fargo foreclosed, saying the Springers missed payments of about $4,100 on an outstanding mortgage of more than $80,000; they said they had missed just one $695 payment.
Judge Marks, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama and an appointee of former President Donald Trump, was assigned the case in mid-August 2018. The judge bought Wells Fargo stock at the end of the month. In September, she adopted a magistrate judge’s recommendation to dismiss the Springers’ suit, a decision affirmed on appeal.
Judge Marks declined to comment. The court clerk told parties to the case that the judge had informed her of having owned the bank stock and directed the clerk to notify the parties. The clerk told them Judge Marks’s stock ownership didn’t affect her decisions in the case but would have required recusal.
Mr. Springer said, “This is outrageous. How am I supposed to know she owns stock in Wells Fargo?”
The Springers asked the court to reopen the case, saying in a filing that “a non-interested Judge” might have let them amend their pleadings. The court assigned a new judge to their suit in July. A spokesman for Wells Fargo declined to comment.
The nation’s 94 district courts are organized into 12 circuits, or regions. The Journal identified recusal violations in each region.
The U.S. Supreme Court wasn’t part of the Journal’s analysis. Nor did it include bankruptcy or magistrate judges.
Half of all federal trial and appellate judges in the Journal’s review disclosed minimum financial assets of $775,000 in 2018, while 31 reported a minimum of $10 million of assets. Some jurists joined the bench after lucrative careers in private practice.
Federal district judges draw an annual salary of $218,600, which isn’t much more than a first-year attorney at a top-tier law firm earns. Some judges said their salary level makes stock investments an attractive option.
“I have my judicial salary, but the law really restricts what else judges can do for additional income,” said Judge Susan Webber Wright in Arkansas. She said she held more stock when she was younger and trying to build a nest egg for her family.
Judge Wright, an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush, oversaw 2005 and 2006 cases involving Eli Lilly and Co. and Home Depot Inc. while owning shares of those companies. She issued no major rulings before one case settled and the other was transferred to another district.
“A judge has to be on her toes, and obviously I was not,” Judge Wright said.
Judges who have many conflicts are “either being careless or have people working for them who are not exercising due diligence,” she said, though she added that judges bear the ultimate responsibility for steering clear of conflicts.
Judge Donald Graham in Florida held American depositary receipts of Alcatel-Lucent while assigned to a case involving the French telecom maker. He sold the ADRs in 2010, a day after he approved a $45 million civil settlement between the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Alcatel-Lucent over allegations the company bribed foreign officials. The company neither admitted nor denied the allegations.
After being contacted by the Journal, Judge Graham, a George H.W. Bush appointee, notified the court clerk of the violation. In a publicly filed letter to the parties, the clerk said Judge Graham’s holding didn’t affect his decisions.
A lawyer for the SEC told the court the agency didn’t believe any further action was required. Alcatel-Lucent’s current owner, Nokia Corp., declined to comment.
Judge Benjamin Settle in Washington state sold as much as $15,000 of Amgen Inc. stock during a case that was settled in 2012. He sold the stock in 2008, while the suit was under seal, giving him access to nonpublic information about an allegation of kickbacks to doctors. The case contributed to a $762 million penalty against the biotech company in 2012.
Judge Settle, a George W. Bush appointee, said he hadn’t included all of his holdings on his recusal list when he inherited the case in 2007 as a newly commissioned federal judge. “Amgen was among those mistakenly omitted,” he said.
Judge Settle said he directed his broker in 2008 to sell all of his stocks. A spokesman for Amgen declined to comment.
The Journal’s tally of recusal violations is likely an undercount. In Mississippi, Judge Sharion Aycock’s husband owned as much as $15,000 in shares of Dollar General Corp. at a time when the Journal found two cases she heard involving the retailer. After being asked about the matter, Judge Aycock found five more violations involving Dollar General and notified the clerk about all seven.
A few of the judges with violations the Journal identified had legendary careers, including Jack Weinstein and Arthur Spatt in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
Judge Weinstein, a Lyndon Johnson appointee, oversaw four cases involving Medtronic PLC or Target Corp. while he or his family held their shares. Judge Spatt, who was named to the court by former President George H.W. Bush, had a violation involving Johnson & Johnson. Judge Spatt died in 2020 and Judge Weinstein died earlier this year, both having served into their 90s.
Judge Margo Brodie, chief of the Eastern District, which includes New York City’s Brooklyn and Queens boroughs, acknowledged the conflicts but said the judges’ “involvement was minimal, limited to ministerial actions” such as approving settlements or opinions by magistrate judges.
“These two judges have been revered by the practicing bar for their integrity and even handedness,” Judge Brodie said in an email. “There has never been a suggestion, much less an accusation, that either ever acted inappropriately.”
The Journal identified 36 conflicts by one judge in Colorado, R. Brooke Jackson. The cases included Apple, Chevron Corp. , Eli Lilly, Facebook Inc., General Electric Co. , Home Depot, Honeywell International Inc., Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan, Pfizer and Wells Fargo.
Reached by phone, Judge Jackson said he had no idea which stocks he owns because a money manager handles them and because his wife fills out his disclosure forms. He said that because he doesn’t know, he couldn’t have a conflict of interest.
“I’ve never really paid much attention to it,” Judge Jackson said of his and his wife’s investments. “I have preferred to stay unknowledgeable about it.”
Told he was required to know under the law, he said: “That’s news to me.”
In a later email, Judge Jackson, an Obama appointee, admitted his mistake. “I am taking immediate steps to provide a current list of stocks and other investments held by my wife and by me to our Clerk’s Office so that we can create an appropriate conflicts list and be sure that this does not happen again,” he wrote.
Reached by phone, Judge Jackson said he had no idea which stocks he owns because a money manager handles them and because his wife fills out his disclosure forms. He said that because he doesn’t know, he couldn’t have a conflict of interest.
“I’ve never really paid much attention to it,” Judge Jackson said of his and his wife’s investments. “I have preferred to stay unknowledgeable about it.”
Told he was required to know under the law, he said: “That’s news to me.”
In a later email, Judge Jackson, an Obama appointee, admitted his mistake. “I am taking immediate steps to provide a current list of stocks and other investments held by my wife and by me to our Clerk’s Office so that we can create an appropriate conflicts list and be sure that this does not happen again,” he wrote.
Judge David Norton in South Carolina presided over six asbestos suits beginning in 2012 while his disclosures show he held between $95,004 and $250,000 of stock in two defendants, 3M Co. and GE.
In 2015 he heard a case filed by James Chesher, who alleged that he developed cancer from exposure to asbestos in the Navy. Mr. Chesher and his wife sought damages from 3M, GE and about two dozen other companies. They reached settlements with 3M and GE in 2016.
Mr. Chesher died in 2017. His widow, Cheryl Ann Chesher, was surprised to learn from the Journal of the judge’s financial interest in GE and 3M.
“He should have policed himself,” Ms. Chesher said. “He knows what the law is on that and he should have followed through,” she said, adding: “You have to wonder if he’s looking out for himself...rather than the clients.”
In an emailed statement, Judge Norton said he didn’t recuse himself because 3M and GE played no significant role in the suits and were “defendants in name only.”
He added: “At the outset the lawyers involved in these cases assured me that 3M and GE would be dismissed and not involved in the case pursuant to a pre-existing agreement between the plaintiffs’ lawyers and GE and 3M.”
Peter Kraus, an attorney for the Cheshers, said he and his co-counsel “have no recollection about making any assurances to the judge that GE and 3M would be dismissed.” They “were sued because the evidence in the case implicated them, and were certainly not ‘defendants in name only,’ ” he said, adding that attorneys for both companies participated in depositions.
A 3M spokeswoman said neither the company nor its attorneys ever assured the judge regarding any dismissals. A spokeswoman for GE didn’t respond to questions about whether it had conveyed such an assurance. An attorney for GE said she didn’t recall the case.
Told what 3M and the plaintiffs’ attorney said, Judge Norton reiterated his recollection of the case.
As remaining asbestos defendants moved toward trial, Judge Norton, a George H.W. Bush appointee, issued rulings that broadly benefited companies with asbestos liabilities.
In hearings, he took aim at the theory behind the cases: that any exposure to asbestos was significant enough to contribute to their cancer. The defendants said the plaintiffs’ expert witness shouldn’t be allowed to testify because he was unable to show that the men more likely than not would have avoided the disease but for their exposure to the asbestos. Judge Norton sided with the companies, ruling that the expert witness’s testimony—“scientifically sound as it may be”—couldn’t be presented to a jury.
The ruling drew national attention. Plaintiffs’ lawyers denounced it, while lawyers who often defend corporations embraced it as common-sense analysis. A Harvard Law Review article blasted it, saying that “unrealistic legal expectations of science could do great injustice.”
Mr. Kraus, the Cheshers’s attorney, called the decision out of sync with court precedent on liability in asbestos cases. Other courts have adopted Judge Norton’s analysis, including the Ohio Supreme Court.
Mr. Kraus said he has never asked to see a judge’s financial disclosure form. He said he wasn’t sure he ever would.
“If a judge who is considering a matter you have before him finds out that you’ve been snooping around about his finances, I’d be very concerned as a practitioner that it would cause a negative backlash that would affect my clients’ rights in the court,” Mr. Kraus said.
Judge Norton also violated an ethics rule when he bought a box of cuff links at an auction of the government-seized property of a man he earlier sentenced to prison for a Ponzi scheme, according to the chief judge of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“The judge’s purchase did create an appearance of impropriety,” though it didn’t affect the sentence imposed, Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote in 2017, without identifying the cuff links buyer.
Judge Gregory quoted the unnamed judge as saying he tried to “keep current on all ethical rules and take the yearly ethics test prepared by the Administrative office” but was unaware that his participation in the auction could create the appearance of impropriety.
Judge Norton, who confirmed in a separate filing that he bought the cuff links, told the Fourth Circuit: “Now that I have been made aware of this, my actions will not be repeated.”
—Ava Sasani and Lisa Schwartz contributed to this article.
Write to Coulter Jones at Coulter.Jones@wsj.com and Joe Palazzolo at joe.palazzolo@wsj.com
Judge David Norton in South Carolina presided over six asbestos suits beginning in 2012 while his disclosures show he held between $95,004 and $250,000 of stock in two defendants, 3M Co. and GE.
In 2015 he heard a case filed by James Chesher, who alleged that he developed cancer from exposure to asbestos in the Navy. Mr. Chesher and his wife sought damages from 3M, GE and about two dozen other companies. They reached settlements with 3M and GE in 2016.
Mr. Chesher died in 2017. His widow, Cheryl Ann Chesher, was surprised to learn from the Journal of the judge’s financial interest in GE and 3M.
“He should have policed himself,” Ms. Chesher said. “He knows what the law is on that and he should have followed through,” she said, adding: “You have to wonder if he’s looking out for himself...rather than the clients.”
In an emailed statement, Judge Norton said he didn’t recuse himself because 3M and GE played no significant role in the suits and were “defendants in name only.”
He added: “At the outset the lawyers involved in these cases assured me that 3M and GE would be dismissed and not involved in the case pursuant to a pre-existing agreement between the plaintiffs’ lawyers and GE and 3M.”
Peter Kraus, an attorney for the Cheshers, said he and his co-counsel “have no recollection about making any assurances to the judge that GE and 3M would be dismissed.” They “were sued because the evidence in the case implicated them, and were certainly not ‘defendants in name only,’ ” he said, adding that attorneys for both companies participated in depositions.
A 3M spokeswoman said neither the company nor its attorneys ever assured the judge regarding any dismissals. A spokeswoman for GE didn’t respond to questions about whether it had conveyed such an assurance. An attorney for GE said she didn’t recall the case.
Told what 3M and the plaintiffs’ attorney said, Judge Norton reiterated his recollection of the case.
As remaining asbestos defendants moved toward trial, Judge Norton, a George H.W. Bush appointee, issued rulings that broadly benefited companies with asbestos liabilities.
In hearings, he took aim at the theory behind the cases: that any exposure to asbestos was significant enough to contribute to their cancer. The defendants said the plaintiffs’ expert witness shouldn’t be allowed to testify because he was unable to show that the men more likely than not would have avoided the disease but for their exposure to the asbestos. Judge Norton sided with the companies, ruling that the expert witness’s testimony—“scientifically sound as it may be”—couldn’t be presented to a jury.
The ruling drew national attention. Plaintiffs’ lawyers denounced it, while lawyers who often defend corporations embraced it as common-sense analysis. A Harvard Law Review article blasted it, saying that “unrealistic legal expectations of science could do great injustice.”
Mr. Kraus, the Cheshers’s attorney, called the decision out of sync with court precedent on liability in asbestos cases. Other courts have adopted Judge Norton’s analysis, including the Ohio Supreme Court.
Mr. Kraus said he has never asked to see a judge’s financial disclosure form. He said he wasn’t sure he ever would.
“If a judge who is considering a matter you have before him finds out that you’ve been snooping around about his finances, I’d be very concerned as a practitioner that it would cause a negative backlash that would affect my clients’ rights in the court,” Mr. Kraus said.
Judge Norton also violated an ethics rule when he bought a box of cuff links at an auction of the government-seized property of a man he earlier sentenced to prison for a Ponzi scheme, according to the chief judge of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“The judge’s purchase did create an appearance of impropriety,” though it didn’t affect the sentence imposed, Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote in 2017, without identifying the cuff links buyer.
Judge Gregory quoted the unnamed judge as saying he tried to “keep current on all ethical rules and take the yearly ethics test prepared by the Administrative office” but was unaware that his participation in the auction could create the appearance of impropriety.
Judge Norton, who confirmed in a separate filing that he bought the cuff links, told the Fourth Circuit: “Now that I have been made aware of this, my actions will not be repeated.”
—Ava Sasani and Lisa Schwartz contributed to this article.
Write to Coulter Jones at Coulter.Jones@wsj.com and Joe Palazzolo at joe.palazzolo@wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/131-federal-judges-broke-the-law-by-hearing-cases-where-they-had-a-financial-interest-11632834421
DHS Whistleblower: Trump Team Wanted Us to Lie About Russia, the Border, and White Supremacy“ They did not want the public to know that the Russians were supporting Trump,” the whistleblower says
By WILLIAM VAILLANCOURT
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/brian-murphy-whistleblower-trump-border-russia-racism-1232427/
A Department of Homeland Security whistleblower leveled a series of bombshell accusations Sunday in his first television interview, accusing his Trump administration superiors of pressing for manipulated intelligence on three critical subjects: Russian support for Donald Trump, the Mexican border, and the white supremacist threat inside the United States.
Brian Murphy, the former principal deputy undersecretary in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, filed a whistleblower complaint last year — as well as a handful of internal complaints and reports — that all painted a frightening picture of how things were running in the department tasked with keeping Americans safe. “From the outset, there were three things that I was told that we would look to manipulate intelligence on and bend the truth about,” Murphy told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. “And I told them upfront that I wasn’t going to do it.”
On Russia, the border, and white supremacy, Murphy said he felt “intense pressure to try to take intelligence and fit a political narrative” — accusing administration officials of demanding information be manipulated to burnish Trump’s image and help his messaging
In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved efforts to denigrate Democratic candidates in order to benefit Trump, an intelligence community report from March found. Putin also authorized a campaign “undermining public confidence in the electoral process and exacerbating socio-political divisions in the U.S” — something that Trump and some of his closest allies readily embraced during and after the election by making repeated false claims of fraud.
In regards to the southern border, the former FBI agent alleged, the DHS took a similar approach: fabricating a terrorist threat and misleading Congress to improve the political conditions for Trump’s coveted border wall.
The pattern repeated when it came to white supremacists, particularly after white supremacists killed a counter protester, Heather Heyer, at a right-wing rally in Charlottesville in 2017. “After Charlottesville, it became a third-rail issue…within the department to talk about white supremacy in any meaningful way,” Murphy said.
In his whistleblower complaint, Murphy wrote that senior official Ken Cuccinelli demanded that he “modify the section on White Supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe.” But Murphy says he refused, because doing so “would constitute censorship of analysis and the improper administration of an intelligence program.”
Murphy’s reluctance to play along gave him a “target on his back,” he recalled.
Former DHS director Chad Wolf accused him of having a credibility problem, and removed him from his position last August, citing claims that he violated legal requirements regarding the collection of information about journalists during riots in Portland, Oregon. Murphy denied those claims.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/brian-murphy-whistleblower-trump-border-russia-racism-1232427/?fbclid=IwAR0AsItcqYGyfk1uTh6XlCH-pPmpd3kolL6tzOQrbZ5-zyrDERlMKct0hrk
Trump played tough with Putin when cameras were around, while Putin toyed with his insecurities, a new book says
By Jada Yuan and Josh Dawsey
Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/stephanie-grisham-book/2021/09/27/6589e23c-1cf1-11ec-8380-5fbadbc43ef8_story.html
Little is known about what happened in the 90-minute conversation between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Osaka, Japan, two years ago. But as journalists were quickly ushered out of the room at the 2019 Group of 20 Summit, Stephanie Grisham once again found herself with a close-up view of the action.
She saw Trump lean toward Putin that day and tell him: “Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave, we’ll talk. You understand.”
It’s just one of many telling interactions detailed by Grisham in her new book, titled, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now.” One of the most senior and longest-serving Trump advisers, she worked as the president’s third press secretary and as first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff and communications director before she resigned on Jan. 6 during the Capitol riot.
Her 352-page book — obtained by The Washington Post — alleges a litany of misdeeds by the 45th president: from ogling a young female staffer, to orchestrating lies for the public, to attempting to ban the news media from the White House compound. It also gives a rare firsthand look at Melania Trump, who craved her privacy, and a blow-by-blow of how she wound up wearing that “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket.
Grisham even claims to know dirt on Trump’s hair, which she says he cuts himself with “a huge pair of scissors that could probably cut a ribbon at an opening of one of his properties.”
“The intent behind this book is obvious,” Melania Trump’s office said in a statement after a passage leaked comparing the former first lady to Marie Antoinette. “It is an attempt to redeem herself after a poor performance as press secretary, failed personal relationships, and unprofessional behavior in the White House. Through mistruth and betrayal, she seeks to gain relevance and money at the expense of Mrs. Trump.”
Likewise, the former president responded to the book with a statement that tossed accusations back at Grisham. “This book is another pitiful attempt to cash in on the President’s strength and sell lies about the Trump family,” said Trump’s spokeswoman Liz Harrington. She called Grisham “a disgruntled former employee” and said publishers “should be ashamed of themselves for preying on desperate people who see the short term gain in writing a book full of falsehoods.”
As press secretary, Grisham was often unresponsive, and never once held a news briefing. Former colleagues said she was irregularly in the office during her last year in the White House, when she caught the coronavirus while serving as press secretary at the start of the pandemic, then transitioned to being the first lady’s chief of staff.
But Grisham is undeniably one of the Trump originals. She was wrangling reporters on the campaign plane in 2016, before working her way into the Trumps’ inner circles. And she is still viewed widely as a consummate Trump insider.
A major theme of the book is the culture of lies that pervaded Trump’s administration. “Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as if it were in the air conditioning system,” Grisham writes.
For example, in 2019, Trump went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center without disclosing to the media that he was going, or why.
It was a days-long mystery in the national news, but Grisham’s book strongly hints that the president went for a simple colonoscopy, without actually using the word. (She wrote that it was “a very common procedure” for which “a patient is sometimes put under” and that George W. Bush had one as president, too.)
As for the elaborate concealment — Grisham writes that Trump was resistant to having Vice President Mike Pence in power even for a short period of time, and he didn’t want to be “the butt of a joke” on late-night TV.
Trump could have used the power of his office to demystify colonoscopies and save lives, Grisham writes. “But as with covid, he was too wrapped up in his own ego and his own delusions about his invincibility.”
Grisham also discloses that Trump didn’t want to ban travel to China in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, despite his later claims that he did. Grisham writes that “the upcoming election influenced every decision Trump made about the pandemic.
But other times, Grisham writes, White House crises had as much to do with incompetence as dishonesty.
She offers a new interpretation of the notorious September 2019 incident known as Sharpiegate. It apparently all began with Trump refusing to believe a report that Hurricane Dorian had altered its course and was no longer projected to strike Alabama. To make his point, Grisham writes, the president grabbed a Sharpie during a staff meeting and drew on a weather map, altering the hurricane’s course to show it slamming into the state.
Then someone ushered the media into the room, forgetting that the doctored map was still on display. Trump kept pointing at the map as he spoke to reporters, making it seem like he was intentionally misleading them.
Sometimes the staff even lied to Trump. When President George H.W. Bush died, the staff arranged for the former president’s family to have use of Air Force One, as is customary, but obscured most of the details from Trump for fear of his reaction. The airplane was used to carry Bush’s service dog, Sully, his family and his casket to the funeral.
“We knew he wouldn’t be okay with that, even for a brief trip,” Grisham writes. “Dead bodies, death, sickness — those things really seemed to creep him out.” He was also not a fan of the Bushes and vice versa.
Grisham alleges that Trump became obsessed with a young, female press aide who isn’t named in the book. The president constantly asked where the aide was during press events, Grisham wrote, and allegedly once requested that she be brought to his cabin on Air Force One so he could “look at her [behind].”
Trump behaved inappropriately with Grisham, too, she wrote — once calling her from Air Force One to assure her that his penis was not small or toadstool-shaped, as the porn star Stormy Daniels had alleged in an interview.
Grisham wrote that Trump once asked her then-boyfriend, a fellow Trump aide, if she was good in bed.
She is particularly negative about the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband Jared Kushner — both of whom held senior White House positions. She wrote that the first lady and White House staff called Ivanka “the Princess” who regularly invoked “my father” in work meetings, and Grisham dubbed Kushner “the Slim Reaper” for his habit of inserting himself into other people’s projects, making a mess and leaving them to take the blame.
Tellingly, Grisham writes that Ivanka and Jared tried to push their way into meeting Queen Elizabeth II alongside the president and first lady, a wild breach of protocol on a state visit, but were thwarted when they couldn’t fit into the helicopter. “I finally figured out what was going on,” Grisham writes. “Jared and Ivanka thought they were the royal family of the United States.”
“I had shared with Mrs. Trump many times my opinion that if we lost reelection in 2020 it would be because of Jared,” Grisham writes. “She didn’t disagree with me.”
By the end of the administration, Grisham says, Kushner was Trump’s “real chief of staff.” He sat next to Pence, the vice president and the newly named head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and ran the first meeting about what Trump should say to the nation about the pandemic. He also apparently dictated much of the president’s first widely criticized televised address about the pandemic — the one that announced travel restrictions before alerting the federal agencies who would have to implement them.
The culture of dishonesty extends to that infamous day Melania Trump wore a jacket reading, “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” while traveling to visit migrant children at the Texas-Mexico border. Grisham devotes an entire chapter to the saga.
The first lady had been upset by the situation her husband’s immigration policies had caused and wanted to see it for herself. For reasons that still remain a mystery, she’d ordered a $39 jacket online from Zara. Grisham said she was on her phone ironing out details for the trip and missed the chance to stop Melania Trump from wearing it.
It was just a jacket, Melania said, as she huddled with Grisham for a damage-control session on the plane. As they arrived back at the White House, an aide told them the president wanted to see his wife in the Oval Office. It was the first time he’d ever summoned her in such a way in front of staff. He yelled and asked “what the [expletive]” they thought they were doing. Then just as quickly he came up with a solution. He would tweet out that the jacket was a message to the Fake News Media.
It’s the story that the first lady repeated four months later in her first and only televised interview during the administration.
The Melania Trump whom Grisham describes is as stubborn as her husband, but his temperamental opposite. She believed in self-care so much that she’d change into a robe and slippers almost immediately upon boarding Air Force One. Self-consciousness around her accent and her English grammar meant she rarely wrote anything on her own.
The Secret Service gave her a nickname, “Rapunzel,” because she rarely left her tower, a.k.a the White House residence. Agents would request to be placed on her detail so they could spend more time with their families, Grisham writes.
If she wasn’t spending time with her son, Barron, or her parents, she was working on her photo albums, which Grisham calls one of “her two children.” Deep into the pandemic, she spent two hours recreating the ribbon-cutting for the White House tennis pavilion because she hadn’t gotten the right shot weeks earlier. She was working on a photo shoot of a rug during the Capitol riot.
The airing of Trump’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels is what “unleashed” Melania Trump to start publicly contradicting or ignoring her husband — trying to embarrass him as he had embarrassed her. She walked into his first State of the Union address arm-in-arm with a handsome military aide Grisham had hand-selected because, Melania said, the floors of the Capitol were too slippery.
“I laughed to myself because I’d seen the woman navigate dirt roads in her heels,” Grisham writes.
And when Grisham drafted a tweet for Melania requesting privacy, saying she was concentrating on being a mother, wife and first lady, she had Grisham remove the word “wife.”
What the scandal didn’t unleash was an emotional reaction. Grisham wrote that Melania Trump didn’t believe her husband’s denials of the affair, but essentially shrugged it all off:“This is Donald’s problem. He got himself into this mess. He can fix it by himself.”
By the end of the administration, Grisham writes, the first lady was so checked out that she slept through election night, as hundreds gathered in the White House for a party Melania had strenuously objected to — given the potential for another coronavirus outbreak at the White House.
Melania wasn’t entirely removed from politics, though. Grisham writes that the first lady intimated that she thought the 2020 election was illegitimate — that “something bad happened.”
She went along with Trump’s plan to snub Jill Biden rather than invite her over to the traditional first ladies tea welcoming her to the White House, according to Grisham.
And the first lady also pointed out how she’d been criticized for not standing next to Trump the way Jill Biden stood next to her husband on election night. “She said, ‘I don’t stand next to him because I don’t need to hold him up like she does. Can you imagine?’?” Grisham writes. “That made me laugh.”
By Jada Yuan
Jada Yuan is a writer for The Washington Post's Style section with a focus on national politics. She spent 2018 circumnavigating the globe as the inaugural 52 Places Traveler for the New York Times. Before that, she was a longtime culture writer for New York Magazine, covering film and profiling figures such as Stevie Nicks and Bill Murray. Twitter
By Josh Dawsey
Josh Dawsey is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2017 and previously covered the White House. Before that, he covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street Journal. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/stephanie-grisham-book/2021/09/27/6589e23c-1cf1-11ec-8380-5fbadbc43ef8_story.html
Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom BREAKING: California is now PERMANENTLY a vote-by-mail state.
Because we believe in making voting EASIER and for every voice to be heard.
THREAD
BREAKING: California is now PERMANENTLY a vote-by-mail state.
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 27, 2021
Because we believe in making voting EASIER and for every voice to be heard. https://t.co/zGXkPPobBa
New Mexico reports two deaths from ivermectin
BY JENNA ROMAINE - 09/27/21 08:44 AM EDT
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/574051-new-mexico-reports-two-deaths-from-ivermectin
New Mexico has linked two deaths in the state to misuse of ivermectin, a medicine typically used for parasitic infections in animals that has repeatedly been used by people as an anti-COVID-19 medication.
New Mexico reported the two deaths on Wednesday, according to the state health department. They were among the 14 patients in the state hospitalized after being poisoned by the use of ivermectin, which has been promoted by both podcast host Joe Rogan and Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist.
While the FDA has approved the use of ivermectin in specified doses for humans suffering from intestinal parasites such as worms, it isn’t intended or used to treat viruses.
David Scrase, the acting head of the state health department, said the two patients who died — ages 38 and 79 years old — had both contracted the coronavirus and attempted to treat it themselves with ivermectin. In one patient, the use of the drug led to kidney failure.
“It’s the wrong medicine for something really serious,” Scrase said.
Amid a surge of prescriptions for the drug, as well as an increase in people purchasing the version of the drug meant for livestock, the FDA has continued to warn of the dangers.
“The FDA has received multiple reports of patients who have required medical support and been hospitalized after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses,” the FDA said, adding, “Animal drugs are often highly concentrated because they are used for large animals like horses and cows, which can weigh a lot more than we do—a ton or more. Such high doses can be highly toxic in humans.”
According to a report by The New York Times, the American Association of Poison Control Centers has reported 1,440 cases of ivermectin poisoning for the year as of Sept. 20, more than triple the number in 2019 and 2020.
The Times also noted that a number of states are reporting rising calls about the drug to poison control centers.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/574051-new-mexico-reports-two-deaths-from-ivermectin
Aaron Rupar @atrupar Get a load of Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen (R) talking about ivermectin over the weekend
VIDEO -
Get a load of Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen (R) talking about ivermectin over the weekend pic.twitter.com/M2YJlI4He2
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 27, 2021
Get a load of Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen (R) talking about ivermectin over the weekend pic.twitter.com/M2YJlI4He2
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 27, 2021
Facebook groups promoting ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment continue to flourish.
Sept. 28, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET3 hours ago
3 hours ago By Davey Alba
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/technology/facebook-ivermectin-coronavirus-misinformation.html
Facebook has become more aggressive at enforcing its coronavirus misinformation policies in the past year. But the platform remains a popular destination for people discussing how to acquire and use ivermectin, a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms, even though the Food and Drug Administration has warned people against taking it to treat Covid-19.
Facebook has taken down a handful of the groups dedicated to these discussions. But dozens more remain up, according to recent research. In some of those groups, members discuss strategies to evade the social network’s rules.
Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group, found 60 public and private Facebook groups dedicated to ivermectin discussion, with tens of thousands of members in total. After the organization flagged the groups to Facebook, 25 of them closed down. The remaining groups, which were reviewed by The New York Times, had nearly 70,000 members. Data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social network analytics tool, showed that the groups generate thousands of interactions daily.
Facebook said it prohibited the sale of prescription products, including drugs and pharmaceuticals, across its platforms, including in ads. “We remove content that attempts to buy, sell or donate for ivermectin,” Aaron Simpson, a Facebook spokesman, said in an emailed statement. “We also enforce against any account or group that violates our Covid-19 and vaccine policies, including claims that ivermectin is a guaranteed cure or guaranteed prevention, and we don’t allow ads promoting ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19.”
In some of the ivermectin groups, the administrators — the people in charge of moderating posts and determining settings like whether the group is private or public — gave instructions on how to evade Facebook’s automated content moderation.
In a group called Healthcare Heroes for Personal Choice, an administrator instructed people to remove or misspell buzzwords and to avoid using the syringe emoji.
An administrator added, referring to video services like YouTube and BitChute: “If you want to post a video from you boob or bit ch ut e or ru m b l e, hide it in the comments.” Facebook rarely polices the comments section of posts for misinformation.
Facebook said that it broadly looks at the actions of administrators when determining if a group breaks the platform’s rules, it said, and if moderators do break the rules, that counts as strikes against the overall group.
The groups also funnel members into alternative platforms where content moderation policies are more lax. In a Facebook group with more than 5,000 members called Ivermectin vs. Covid, a member shared a link to join a channel on Telegram, a messaging service, for further discussion of “the latest good news surrounding this miraculous pill.”
“Ivermectin is clearly the answer to solve covid and the world is waking up to this truth,” the user posted.
After The Times contacted Facebook about the Ivermectin vs. Covid group, the social network removed it from the platform.
Identifying information has been redacted.
Davey Alba is a technology reporter covering disinformation. In 2019, she won a Livingston Award for excellence in international reporting and a Mirror Award for best story on journalism in peril. @daveyalba
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/technology/facebook-ivermectin-coronavirus-misinformation.html
Britain puts military on standby as panic buying leaves pumps dry
Post-Brexit shortage of lorry drivers and lack of driver testing during Covid sows chaos through British supply chains
about 4 hours ago
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/britain-puts-military-on-standby-as-panic-buying-leaves-pumps-dry-1.4685601
Britain put the army on standby to deliver fuel from Tuesday after an acute shortage of truckers triggered panic buying that left fuel pumps dry across the country.
Queues of drivers snaked back from those petrol stations that were still serving in major cities, though dozens of forecourts were closed with signs saying that their petrol and diesel had run dry, Reuters reporters said.
A post-Brexit shortage of lorry drivers, exacerbated by a debilitating halt to truck-driving-licence testing during Covid lockdowns, has sown chaos through British supply chains, raising the spectre of shortages and price rises in the run up to Christmas.
The UK’s Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said a limited number of military tanker drivers had been put on a state of readiness to be deployed to deliver fuel if necessary.
“While the fuel industry expects demand will return to its normal levels in the coming days, it’s right that we take this sensible, precautionary step,” Mr Kwarteng said in a statement late on Monday.
“If required, the deployment of military personnel will provide the supply chain with additional capacity as a temporary measure to help ease pressures caused by spikes in localised demand for fuel.”
Fights broke out at some petrol stations as drivers jostled for fuel.
An air of chaos has gripped the world’s fifth largest economy in recent weeks as the shortage of truckers strained supply chains and a spike in European wholesale natural gas prices tipped energy companies into bankruptcy.
Retailers, truckers and logistics companies have warned that prices for everything from energy to Christmas gifts will have to rise.
No quick fix
UK government ministers, fuel companies and petrol stations say there are sufficient supplies of fuel but that the lack of truckers combined with panic buying has drained the system.
Such is the gravity of the situation that the British Medical Association has called for health workers to get priority access to fuel to ensure the health service can operate.
The demand for fuel has meant that 50 per cent to 90 per cent of pumps were dry in some areas of Britain, according the Petrol Retailers Association, which represents independent fuel retailers who account for 65 per cent of all the 8,380 UK forecourts.
“As many cars are now holding more fuel than usual, we expect that demand will return to its normal levels in the coming days, easing pressures on fuel station forecourts. We would encourage everyone to buy fuel as they usually would,” fuel firms said in a joint statement.
However, hauliers, petrol stations and retailers say there are no quick fixes as the shortfall of truck drivers – estimated at about 100,000 – was so acute, and because transporting fuel demands additional training and licensing.
The government said it was also extending specific HGV (heavy good vehicle) licences, which allow drivers to transport fuel, for those whose permits were due to expire in the next three months to allow them to keep working without having to take refresher courses. –Reuters
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/britain-puts-military-on-standby-as-panic-buying-leaves-pumps-dry-1.4685601
Far-right cryptocurrency follows ideology across borders
By ERIKA KINETZ and LORI HINNANT
2 hours ago
https://apnews.com/article/cryptocurrency-coronavirus-pandemic-technology-business-europe-f7f754fc2c68b0eb0d712239323f26c3
BRUSSELS (AP) — The Daily Stormer website advocates for the purity of the white race, posts hate-filled, conspiratorial screeds against Blacks, Jews and women and has helped inspire at least three racially motivated murders. It has also made its founder, Andrew Anglin, a millionaire.
Anglin has tapped a worldwide network of supporters to take in at least 112 Bitcoin since January 2017 — worth $4.8 million at today’s exchange rate — according to data shared with The Associated Press. He’s likely raised even more.
Anglin is just one very public example of how radical right provocateurs are raising significant amounts of money from around the world through cryptocurrencies. Banned by traditional financial institutions, they have taken refuge in digital currencies, which they are using in ever more secretive ways to avoid the oversight of banks, regulators and courts, finds an AP analysis of legal documents, Telegram channels and blockchain data from Chainalysis, a cryptocurrency analytics firm.
Anglin owes more than $18 million in legal judgments in the United States to people whom he and his followers harassed and threatened. And while online, he remains visible — most days, dozens of stories on the Daily Stormer homepage carry his name — in the real world, Anglin’s a ghost.
His victims have tried — and failed — to find him, searching at one Ohio address after another. Voting records place him in Russia in 2016 and his passport shows he was in Cambodia in 2017. After that, the public trail goes cold. He has no obvious bank accounts or real estate holdings in the U.S. For now, his Bitcoin fortune remains out of reach.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and the PBS series FRONTLINE that examines challenges to the ideas and institutions of traditional U.S. and European democracy.
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Beth Littrell, a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center who is helping represent one of Anglin’s victims, says it’s grown harder to use the legal system to stamp out hate groups because now they operate with online networks and virtual money. “We were able to sue the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization, in essence out of existence,” she said. Doing the same today is much harder, she said. “The law is evolving but lagging behind the harm.”
CURRENCY OF THE RADICAL RIGHT
In August 2017, a week after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Anglin received 14.88 Bitcoins, an amount chosen for its oblique references to a 14-word white supremacist slogan and the phrase “Heil Hitler” because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Worth around $60,000 at the time, it was his biggest Bitcoin donation ever and would be valued at over $641,000 at today’s exchange rate. The source of the funds remains a mystery. Anglin now faces charges in U.S. court for conspiring to plan and promote the deadly march.
By the time of Charlottesville, Anglin had been cut off by credit card processors and banned by PayPal so Bitcoin was his main source of funding. In his “Retard’s Guide to Using Bitcoin,” published in April 2020, he claimed to have funded the Daily Stormer exclusively through Bitcoin for four years.
“I’ve got money now. I’ve got money to pay for the site for the foreseeable future,” he wrote in December 2020, as Bitcoin’s price surged.
Anglin’s former lawyer, Marc Randazza, argued that political censorship by financial authorities drove Anglin to cryptocurrency by shutting him out of traditional banking, which he said is “more Nazi-like than Andrew Anglin could ever hope to be.”
“Don’t create a black market and then be surprised there’s a black market,” Randazza added.
While Anglin likely turned to Bitcoin for practical reasons, part of the appeal of cryptocurrency to the radical right is ideological.
Bitcoin was developed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis when distrust of the global financial system was running high. It offers an alternative that doesn’t depend on banks. Instead, transactions are validated and recorded on a decentralized digital ledger called the blockchain, which derives its authority from crowdsourcing rather than a class of elite bankers.
As one white nationalist cryptocurrency guide circulating on Telegram puts it: “We all know the Jews and their minions control the global financial system. When you are caught having the wrong opinion, they will take it upon themselves to shut you out of this system making your life very difficult. One alternative to this system is cryptocurrency.”
Richard Spencer, an American white supremacist, has dubbed Bitcoin the “currency of the alt-right.”
It’s hard to tell how large a role cryptocurrency plays in overall financing for the far right. Merchandise sales, membership fees, donations in fiat currencies, concerts, fight clubs and other events, as well as criminal activity, are also common sources of revenue, government and academic research has shown.
What is clear is that early adopters of Bitcoin, like Anglin, have profited handsomely from its increase in value over the years. Bitcoin prices are notoriously volatile. Since April, the currency has shed a third of its value against the U.S. dollar, then took a further drubbing last week when China declared cryptocurrency transactions illegal.
Chainalysis collected data for a sample of 12 far-right entities in the U.S. and Europe that publicly called for Bitcoin donations and showed significant activity. Together, they took in 213 Bitcoin — worth more than $9 million at today’s value — between January 2017 and April 2021.
These groups embrace a range of ideologies and include white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and self-described free-speech advocates. They are united by a shared desire to fight the perceived progressive takeover of culture and the state.
“These people have real assets. People with access to hundreds of thousands of dollars can start doing real damage,” said John Bambenek, a cybersecurity expert who has been tracking the use of cryptocurrency by far-right actors since 2017.
Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, Anglin’s webmaster for the Daily Stormer, has raked in Bitcoin worth $2.2 million at today’s values. The Nordic Resistance Movement, a Scandinavian neo-Nazi movement that’s been banned in Finland, Counter-Currents, a U.S.-based white nationalist publishing house, and the recently banned French group Génération Identitaire have each received Bitcoin that’s now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, Chainalysis data shows.
Two social media platforms that have been embraced by the far right, Gab and Bitchute, received a surge in Bitcoin funding in the lead up to the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection. Since 2017, Bitchute has gotten Bitcoin worth nearly $500,000 at today’s values, about a fifth of which rolled in during the month of December 2020. Gab has gotten more than $173,000; nearly 40% came in during December 2020 and January 2021, Chainalysis data shows. On Aug. 1, Gab announced it was stepping up its fight against “financial censorship” and creating its own alternative to PayPal to “fight against the tyranny of the global elites.”
PRIVACY COIN
While cryptocurrencies have a reputation for secrecy, Bitcoin was built for transparency. Every transaction is indelibly — and publicly — recorded on the blockchain, which enables companies like Chainalysis to monitor activity. Individuals can obscure their identities by not publicly linking them to their cryptocurrency accounts, but with Bitcoin they cannot hide the transactions themselves.
Because of that public footprint, Anglin in November 2020 — just as Donald Trump lost the U.S. presidential election — abandoned Bitcoin and asked his supporters to send him money only in Monero, a “privacy coin” designed to enhance anonymity by hiding data about users and transactions. He published a new guide in February 2021 on how to use Monero, which included instructions for non-U.S. donors.
“Every Bitcoin transfer is visible publicly. Generally, your name is not attached to the address in a direct way, but spies from the various ‘woke’ anti-freedom organizations have unlimited resources to try to link these transactions to real names. With Monero, the transactions are all hidden.” Anglin wrote.
Monero, Anglin advised, “is really easy. Most importantly, it is safe.”
Others have reached the same conclusion.
Thomas Sewell, an Australian neo-Nazi currently facing charges, is soliciting donations in Monero for his legal defense fund. Jaz Searby, a martial arts instructor who headed an Australian chapter of the Proud Boys, is seeking donations — Monero only — to help “spread our message to a generation of young Aryan men that may feel alone or fail to understand the forces that are working against us.” The Nordic Resistance Movement and Counter-Currents also solicit donations in other cryptocurrencies, including Monero, and NRM has experimented with letting supporters mine Monero directly on their behalf.
“Do you really think how we operate our economy is any of your business?” Martin Saxlind, the editor of NRM’s magazine, Nordfront, asked AP in an email. “Swedish banks have abused their control of the economy to deny us and others regular banking accounts for political reasons. That’s why we use cryptocurrency ... you should investigate the corrupt banks instead of doing what I assume is some retarded hit piece on white dissidents.”
The Global Minority Initiative, which describes itself as a “prison relief charity” for American white nationalists also takes donations only in Monero or by postal money order. And France’s Democratie Participative, a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ website that was banned by French courts in 2018, also solicits donations in Monero only, warning supporters not to contribute via a mainstream cryptocurrency exchange.
“Money is the sinew of war,” the site says on its fundraising page. “Thanks to your support we can continue to prevent Jews and their allies from sleeping soundly.”
The AP reached out to all the groups and individuals named in this article. Most did not reply to requests for comment. A few were unreachable. Others replied anonymously, sending anti-Semitic and pornographic content. One email, for example, read: “Stay the f--- out of our crypto you demonic k--- ... DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
GOING GLOBAL
Shortly before his suicide, in December 2020, a French computer programmer named Laurent Bachelier sent 28.15 Bitcoins — then worth over $520,000 — to 22 far-right entities. The bulk went to Nick Fuentes, an American white nationalist influencer who would spend the coming weeks encouraging his tens of thousands of followers to lay siege to the U.S. Capitol. One bitcoin went to a Daily Stormer account.
“I care about what happens after my death,” Bachelier wrote in his suicide note. “That’s why I decided to leave my modest wealth to certain causes and people. I think and hope that they will make a better use of it.”
Since getting Bachelier’s money, Fuentes has ramped up recruiting for his America First livestream and expanded the reach of his political nonprofit, the America First Foundation, which says in corporate registration documents it advocates for “conservative values based on principles of American Nationalism, Christianity, and Traditionalism.”
The transactions only became public because of a tip to a journalist at Yahoo News and the fact that Bachelier happened to leave digital traces that linked his Bitcoin address with his email. The money trail offered clear evidence that domestic extremism isn’t purely domestic and showed how wealthy donors can use cryptocurrency to fund extremists around the world with little scrutiny.
Bachelier’s money slipped quietly into the U.S., not triggering alerts it might have had it landed via traditional banking channels. That’s because much of it — notably the Bitcoin donation to Fuentes, then worth $250,000 — passed through accounts that were not hosted by regulated cryptocurrency exchanges, according to Chainalysis.
Those exchanges, which can convert Bitcoin into U.S. dollars and other currencies, are generally regulated like banks, allowing authorities to get access to information or funds.
But cryptocurrency wallets can also be “unhosted,” which means that users themselves control access. Unhosted wallets — like Fuentes’ — are akin to cash. They don’t have to go through banks or exchanges that could flag suspicious transactions, verify a user’s identity or hand over money to satisfy a court judgment.
Financial regulators around the world are waking up to the threat. The Financial Action Task Force, a Paris-based multilateral organization that sets global guidelines to protect against money laundering and terrorism financing, in June released its first report on far-right fundraising, which highlighted the groups’ use of cryptocurrencies and warned that transnational links among such actors are growing. The FATF also said there is a dearth of information about both cross-border fundraising and the scale of cryptocurrency use.
“Similar to their jihadist counterparts, many of these groups have used the internet and social media to share propaganda and recruit ideologically-aligned supporters from around the world. They also may be looking to forge financial links,” the report said. “This trend has posed a challenge for law enforcement or security services which are used to combating ERWT (extreme right-wing terrorism) as a domestic threat with few transnational links.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic sealed borders, white nationalists continued to gather in virtual communities that allowed them to connect with people from around the world.
On Telegram, posts tagged with different flags stream together: There’s a burly “White Boys Club” in Kyiv, a group of “nationalists” in Minnesota and a cluster of men with pixelated faces in Greece, each posing around “White Lives Matter” banners. Images of people stomping on or burning colorful LGBTQ buttons and flags roll in from Poland, Slovakia, Russia, Croatia. Men with skull masks and rifles pose after tactical training in the woods in Poland. A person with a fascist flag stands in the rain in France, and a man draped with a swastika banner looks out from a high hill somewhere in the woods of America.
“The transnational links make people feel they are part of a much larger community, they can inspire each other and network,” said Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
They can also raise money.
Blockchain data shows that Andrew Anglin’s donors are part of a global community of believers who sent money to entities in multiple countries. Donors to Anglin since 2017 have also given Bitcoin to 32 other far-right groups and people in at least five different countries, according to Chainalysis data.
The data also shows that money flowed into the sample of 12 far-right groups from cryptocurrency exchanges that serve customers all over the world, with Western and Eastern European-focused exchanges playing a growing role. Chainalysis uses web traffic data and economic activity patterns to estimate where the customers that use a given exchange are located.
European groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement and Génération Identitaire also received donations from North America-focused exchanges. Similarly, U.S. entities like American Renaissance, Daily Stormer and WeAreChange got money via exchanges that serve customers in Western and Eastern Europe.
Kimberly Grauer, Director of Research at Chainalysis, said the shift to using global exchanges “certainly could be in order to obfuscate detection, but it could also be a sign that increasingly donations are coming in from all over the world.”
VIRTUAL JUSTICE
While Andrew Anglin remains physically hidden and his money remains virtually untouchable, his debt grows. Each day that ticks by, he owes Tanya Gersh, a Jewish real estate agent in Montana, another $760.88, interest on a $14 million court judgment he has failed to pay.
After Gersh got in a dispute with the mother of white supremacist Richard Spencer in 2016, Anglin published her contact information and used his website to whip up an army of trolls against her.
She received death threats, threats against her as a Jew and threats against her child. Sometimes she’d pick up the phone and hear a gunshot. Gersh’s hair started falling out. She had panic attacks, sought trauma counseling and seriously considered fleeing.
The balm for all that came in 2019, when a federal court made clear that targeted anti-Semitic hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment. But since that fleeting moment of victory, nothing has happened. Gersh has yet to see a penny of her $14 million.
She is not the only one.
Anglin also owes Muslim comedian Dean Obeidallah $4 million, and he’s supposed to pay Taylor Dumpson, the first Black student body president of American University, $725,000 — all the results of civil litigation in U.S. courts over libel, invasion of privacy, inflicting emotional distress and intimidation on the Daily Stormer.
Last September, Gersh’s legal team sent requests to six Ohio addresses and four emails demanding that he disclose his assets. Four were returned as undeliverable, one was refused. He didn’t respond to the rest. The court then ordered Anglin to hand over information about his finances, but the April 1 deadline for that came and went. Her lawyers moved to hold him in contempt of court, which could lead to his arrest.
Anglin’s Bitcoin is his most visible asset. Gersh’s lawyers can see Anglin’s virtual fortune but so far they haven’t been able to touch it. He also keeps his cryptocurrency in unhosted wallets, according to Chainalysis, complicating collection efforts.
Meanwhile, Gersh is running up legal bills at a rate of $980 an hour.
“The problem with an unhosted wallet is what is your pain point?” said Amanda Wick, who served as a senior policy adviser for the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and as a federal prosecutor before joining Chainalysis as chief of legal affairs. “The only thing we have is civil contempt or criminal conviction. If someone is willing to sit in jail and the money is theirs on the other side because no one can access it, that’s a problem.”
The hunt for Anglin — and his pain point — continues. He may not be in the United States, but he is out there somewhere, Littrell said, and he’s not untouchable.
“He will be held accountable,” she said. “We will get his cryptocurrency.”
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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.
https://apnews.com/article/cryptocurrency-coronavirus-pandemic-technology-business-europe-f7f754fc2c68b0eb0d712239323f26c3
Jan. 6 trials slowed by mounting evidence in US Capitol riot
By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER and LINDSAY WHITEHURST
17 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-trials-arrests-health-united-states-3f40cb01b0415c6cd453b214711ab4ea
In the nearly nine months since Jan. 6, federal agents have tracked down and arrested more than 600 people across the United States believed to have joined in the riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Getting those cases swiftly to trial is turning out to be an even more difficult task.
Investigators have collected a mountain of evidence in the attack and are working to organize it and share it with defense attorneys. And that mountain keeps growing with new arrests still happening practically every week.
Washington’s federal court, meanwhile, is clogged with Jan. 6 cases, which more than double the total number of new criminal cases filed there all of last year. Further complicating things are limitations the court has put on trials because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The court delays are dragging out a process already called into question by some right-wing lawmakers, who argue it’s a waste of time and money to prosecute people accused of low-level crimes. As the court cases continue to stall, so do answers to what happened that day and the possibility for consequences from the most violent assault at the Capitol in a generation. Meanwhile, Democrats in the House are subpoenaing former President Donald Trump’s aides and have requested a trove of documents as a select committee also probes the insurrection.
While it’s not unusual for federal cases to take a year or more to work through the system, some defense lawyers and judges are raising concerns that defendants with a right to a speedy trial may end up waiting a long time before getting their day in court.
“The reason for the delay has not changed or become even remotely concrete. It remains as amorphous today as it was months ago,” an attorney wrote in court documents opposing prosecutors’ request to cancel the scheduled November trial for Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, an ex-Army reservist described by co-workers as a known Nazi sympathizer.
So far, only about 80 cases have been resolved by guilty pleas — largely by those who were charged only with misdemeanor offenses. Scores of others face serious felony charges including conspiracy, assaulting officers and obstructing of an official proceeding that call for lengthy sentences behind bars.
The Justice Department has called it the largest investigation in American history, with probes open in 55 out of 56 FBI field offices. Evidence collected in the attack includes thousands of hours of video footage, hundreds of thousands of tips from the public and more than 1 million Parler posts, replies and data. The Justice Department is building massive databases to share all evidence stemming from the attack with defense attorneys.
In the most high-profile case brought so far, involving more than a dozen members and associates of the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers, prosecutors recently told a judge that a January trial date for the first set of defendants is looking increasingly unrealistic given how much evidence they still need to get into defense attorneys’ hands.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said if they have to wait until prosecutors turn over “every single scrap of evidence” they’ve collected in the Jan. 6 investigation — rather than just that which relates to a specific defendant — there won’t be trials in any of these cases before 2023. And three of the Oath Keepers defendants, accused of conspiring to block the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory over Trump, are behind bars.
“I have to keep their interests in a speedy trial in mind here,” Mehta said. “I am concerned about a lengthy pretrial detention period,” he added. He didn’t immediately rule but signaled that the first Oath Keepers trial would likely be pushed to April, with the second scheduled for July.
At least one of those roughly 70 defendants who are locked up pretrial has already pointed to the delays in an effort to get out of jail. Kelly Meggs, described by authorities as the leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, said in an unsuccessful motion for release that with a January trial looking unlikely, he’s effectively being held in “indefinite pre-trial detention which, under the circumstances, is tantamount to a human rights violation.”
Prosecutors say they are working as quickly as possible under unprecedented challenges to share all evidence that could potentially help the defense and keep the cases moving forward. But new evidence is still being unearthed with each new arrest or as analysis is completed on the thousands of hours of video taken during that chaotic day.
In the case of Robert Reeder, armchair detectives who call themselves Sedition Hunters unearthed new evidence just before he was supposed to be sentenced last month with a recommendation of probation. The video appears to shows Reeder scuffling with a police officer, running counter to his assertion that he had not been part of any violence that day. Reeder’s attorney called the clip problematic. A new sentencing is set for Oct. 8.
The coronavirus is only making matters worse.
Cases were already backed up because of the pandemic, and the court has said no more than three trials can be held at once at least until the end of October to allow for social distancing. A judge in one case recently warned attorneys there’s no guarantee they will be going to trial as planned in February if COVID-19 numbers tick up.
The pandemic has also made it harder for defendants held behind bars to safely work with their lawyers — a problem that’s plagued the entire criminal justice system.
“The defense attorneys just aren’t really able to consistently meet with their clients, aren’t able to consistently share data or prepare defense with them in an engaged, consistent way,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow who’s been following the Jan. 6 cases for the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “It’s a very real issue.”
Some defendants, like Hale-Cusanelli, say they don’t want to wait any longer for their chance to defend themselves in court. Hale-Cusanelli is scheduled for trial on Nov. 9, but prosecutors say there’s no way that’s possible. A judge has set a hearing for next week to decide whether to keep that date in place.
A lawyer for the former Army reservist accused prosecutors of seeking more time only to “further cement their case” against his client, “despite having allegedly sufficient evidence to indict” him. Prosecutors called that assertion “wholly without foundation.”
“The government has presented eminently reasonable explanations for the delay: its strenuous efforts to meet the challenges imposed by the enormous amount of relevant evidence that it must review, process, categorize, and organize into a format that will make it accessible and useful to the defense,” they wrote in court documents.
Prosecutors say Hale-Cusanelli, who worked as a security contractor at a Navy base, used his military training to avoid the effects of pepper spray and tactical hand signals to urge fellow rioters forward on Jan. 6. He later described the day as exhilarating to a tipster, praising the “the adrenaline, the rush, the purpose” he felt, according to court documents.
Hale-Cusanelli’s attorney has noted that he is not accused of hurting anyone that day. The defense has called him an “opinionated individual” who “fully exercised his right to speak freely before being imprisoned.”
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Richer reported from Boston, and Whitehurst reported from Salt Lake City.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-trials-arrests-health-united-states-3f40cb01b0415c6cd453b214711ab4ea
Scottacular @Scottcrates This will never stop being funny
VIDEO
This will never stop being funny
— Scottacular (@Scottcrates) September 26, 2021
pic.twitter.com/5R1YcJNsFr
This will never stop being funny
— Scottacular (@Scottcrates) September 26, 2021
pic.twitter.com/5R1YcJNsFr
Arizona ballot review commissioned by Republicans reaffirms Biden’s victory
By Rosalind S. Helderman
Today at 8:00 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/arizona-ballot-review-draft-report/2021/09/24/7c19ac08-1562-11ec-b976-f4a43b740aeb_story.html
A Republican-commissioned review of nearly 2.1 million ballots cast last year in Arizona confirmed the accuracy of the official results and President Biden’s win in Maricopa County, according to a final report released Friday, striking a blow to former president Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in the 2020 election.
The report, which was prepared by private contractors and submitted to Republican leaders of the state Senate, went even further than an earlier draft that confirmed Biden’s victory.
In a letter describing the findings, Senate President Karen Fann (R) — who commissioned the process — stressed the importance of the ballot count showing Biden’s winning margin and noted that it “matches Maricopa County’s official machine count.”
“This is the most important and encouraging finding of the audit,” she wrote, adding: “This finding therefore addresses the sharpest concerns about the integrity of the certified results in the 2020 general election.”
The final report echoed that in a passage that had not appeared in the earlier draft, emphasizing the finding over other sections of the report that suggested some ballots could have been improperly counted.
“The paper ballots are the best evidence of voter intent and there is no reliable evidence that the paper ballots were altered to any material degree,” the report stated.
Still, the conclusion of the recount, which was commissioned earlier this year, is unlikely to quiet Trump’s false claims that the election was rigged and his attempts to pressure Republicans across the country to pursue their own 2020 recounts.
The former president reacted with fury to coverage of the Arizona report’s findings, asserting without evidence Friday that the ballot review uncovered “a major criminal event” and calling for Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) to investigate. He fired off a series of false statements about the Arizona recount throughout Friday evening, including one demanding that the state “immediately decertify their 2020 Presidential Election Results.”
That idea was quickly shot down by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R), who noted that the report did not call for the election to be decertified and that there was no lawful way to do so.
“The outcome stands and the 2020 election in Arizona is over,” he wrote in a series of tweets.
Still, Brnovich, who has announced he is running for the U.S. Senate, indicated a willingness to potentially pursue a case, a sign of Trump’s ongoing power in the party.
“I will take all necessary actions that are supported by the evidence and where I have legal authority. Arizonans deserve to have their votes accurately counted and protected,” the attorney general said in a statement before the release of the final report.
In her letter to Brnovich, Fann said that the ballot review found “less-than-perfect adherence to Arizona’s standards and best practices.”
Fann said the recount’s findings — including a claim that thousands of votes could have been improperly counted or cast — reflected “why people questioned the ballots and the election,” adding that the report and additional material would be turned over to the attorney general for further review.
The release of the report Friday capped a costly and drawn-out recount that kept alive false claims that fraud tainted the election in the state’s most populous county. The process was pilloried by election experts who warned that the methods used by the firm hired to run the review were sloppy and biased and cost almost $6 million — most of it given by groups that cast doubt on the election results.
In the end, the final report concluded that 45,469 more ballots were cast for Biden in Maricopa County than for Trump — widening Biden’s margin by 360 more votes than the certified results.
The report found the count to have “no substantial differences” from the county’s certified tallies.
The finding punctures unsubstantiated claims made by Trump and his allies that vote tabulating machines had miscounted paper ballots or been hacked to flip thousands of Trump votes to Biden.
Still, the report also suggested that some ballots could have been improperly accepted and counted by the county, a notion strongly disputed by election experts.
The findings were unveiled at a more than three-hour public presentation that was held on the floor of the Arizona Senate. Democrats were not allowed to attend, and no public comment or questions were permitted.
The hearing featuring the contractors involved in the recount included a lengthy presentation on a “forensic analysis” of the county’s tabulating machines and election software and vague insinuations of improprieties that at one point drew a cheer from Trump supporters in the Senate gallery.
Online, election experts picked apart the allegations as irresponsible and unproven innuendo, and Maricopa County officials challenged the claims in a furious series of tweets.
“These ‘auditors’ threw out wild, damaging, false claims in the middle of their audit and Senate leadership provided them the platform to present their opinions, suspicions, and faulty conclusions unquestioned and unchallenged,” Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers (R) said in statement. “Today’s hearing was irresponsible and dangerous.”
Fann said Friday — as she has repeatedly stated in the past — that the goal was not to revisit Biden’s win but instead to look for ways to improve the state’s election laws. “This has never been about overturning an election. This has never been about decertification,” she said.
But Trump on Friday sought to turn attention away from the document’s finding that the vote count was accurate, falsely claiming that the review vindicated his baseless allegation that the election was stolen.
In a statement, the former president said that the recount “conclusively shows there were enough fraudulent votes, mystery votes, and fake votes to change the outcome of the election 4 or 5 times over.”
In fact, the report does not assert that any ballots were cast or counted due to fraud — only that further investigation may be warranted. It cautions in multiple places that its own findings may include errors and that there could be reasonable and lawful explanations for them.
And the final version of the report included new language that had not been in an earlier draft noting that many of the ballots flagged as possibly problematic by the contractors were cast by registered Republicans, as well as registered Democrats.
“If you actually read the report, they give themselves a million outs with these numbers,” said Elizabeth Howard, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and a former election administrator in Virginia. “They’re desperately trying to suggest that what are routine procedures are suspicious, because they don’t have election administration experience or knowledge.”
The report also includes in its recommendations for improving Arizona election law measures that are already standard practice in the state. For instance, it recommends a paper backup for all votes cast by machine — even though Arizona voters already cast their votes on paper ballots.
Biden’s win in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, helped him earn a narrow victory in Arizona and become the first Democrat to win the state since 1996. The state’s results were upheld by state and federal courts.
The state Senate’s ballot review began in April over the objections of the Republican-led county leadership. Lawmakers used a subpoena to obtain Maricopa County’s ballots and tabulating machines, which were handed over to private contractors for review.
The Florida-based firm that led the review, Cyber Ninjas, had never before been involved in administering an election or recount, and its chief executive, Doug Logan, publicly embraced Trump’s false claims of fraud before getting the job.
After his firm was selected to conduct the review, Logan did not deny his potential bias and said that it is “the most skeptical person” who makes the best auditor, “not the person who thinks it is impossible to find anything.”
Democratic lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating the Arizona recount, sent Logan a letter Thursday requesting his testimony at an Oct. 7 hearing.
Election experts criticized the process run by Logan’s firm as opaque, insecure and frequently changing, and said the recount followed few best practices established over decades for conducting unbiased and accurate election audits.
In May, all of Maricopa’s seven elected officials — including five Republicans — joined to demand the Senate put an end to the review, calling it a “con” and a “sham.”
“Our democracy is imperiled,” they wrote in a letter to Fann.
The Justice Department also warned in the spring that the recount risked violating federal law, which requires that ballots be securely maintained for 22 months following a federal election.
Election experts said that the potential issues with ballots described by Cyber Ninjas in its report were based on flawed analysis and weak evidence.
For example, the report claimed that more than 23,000 mail ballots were submitted by voters who moved before the election — a group Trump described Friday as “phantom voters.”
But the report itself included important caveats about the finding, noting that there are “potential ways” that the ballots were cast that “would not violate the law.” And it found that a third of those ballots were cast by registered Republicans. What’s more, Cyber Ninjas acknowledged that the ballots were identified by comparing voter registration rolls to information maintained by a commercially available address validation tool, adding that “some error is expected.”
Chris Sautter, a political strategist who teaches election law at American University and has participated in dozens of election recounts, said such databases are not typically accurate enough to be used to confirm addresses for voter registration purposes. “These commercial data companies have a long history of producing flawed lists, which have resulted in the disenfranchisement of eligible voters,” he said.
Election experts said the Arizona experience should serve as a warning sign to other Republican legislators who have in recent weeks responded to pressure from Trump and agreed to embark on their own reviews of the 2020 election, including in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Texas.
“It is a huge defeat for Donald Trump,” Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican campaign attorney, told reporters Friday. “This was a swing and a miss at what he thought was a sure thing, and they missed by a mile. That should have repercussions down the road.”
He added: “This was an audit in which they absolutely cooked the procedures, they took funding from sources that should delegitimize, automatically, the finding. This was Donald Trump’s best chance to prove his cases of elections being rigged and fraudulent, and they failed.”
Elise Viebeck contributed to this report.
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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-ballot-review-draft-report/2021/09/24/7c19ac08-1562-11ec-b976-f4a43b740aeb_story.html
House passes legislation to create statutory right to abortion as battle over Texas law heats up
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/abortion-house-texas-supreme-court/2021/09/24/d5e731be-1ca2-11ec-a99a-5fea2b2da34b_story.html
Trump accused Democrats of trying to distract from the Arizona audit results, seemingly unaware that they confirm Biden's victory
In the statement late Thursday, Trump hit out at the House of Representatives commission investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which on Thursday subpoenaed several allies and aides of the president.
Trump claimed the move was timed to distract from the expected release on Friday of the result of the Maricopa County audit by contractors Cyber Ninjas.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-hype-arizona-audit-result-seems-unaware-confirms-biden-win-2021-9
The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln BREAKING: “The three-volume report by the Cyber Ninjas, the Senate’s lead contractor, includes results that show Trump lost by a wider margin than the county’s official election results.”
Hand count in audit affirms Biden beat Trump, as Maricopa County said in November
JEN FIFIELD , ROBERT ANGLEN | Arizona Republic
7 hours ago
https://eu.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2021/09/23/arizona-audit-draft-report-confirms-biden-beat-trump-2020/5835521001/
THREAD
BREAKING: “The three-volume report by the Cyber Ninjas, the Senate’s lead contractor, includes results that show Trump lost by a wider margin than the county’s official election results.”https://t.co/bf1sACM1wB
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 24, 2021
Biden has say in whether Trump’s 1/6 records go to Congress
By COLLEEN LONG and ZEKE MILLER
today
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-capitol-siege-449e1d583627cb4532d104bb72d4fe6d
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration will have a big say in whether the government releases information to Congress on the actions of former President Donald Trump and his aides on Jan. 6. But there could be a lengthy court battle before any details come out.
The House committee investigating the January insurrection at the U.S. Capitol asked last month for a trove of records, including communication within the White House under Trump and information about planning and funding for rallies held in Washington. Among those events was a rally near the White House featuring remarks by Trump, who egged on a crowd of thousands before loyalists stormed the Capitol.
A person familiar with the matter confirmed that the first tranche of documents from the Trump White House was turned over by the National Archives at the end of last month to the White House and Trump. Either party can object to the release of specific items. And Biden’s White House has the right to overrule a Trump effort to block the release of information.
Beyond that, the former president may sue to block it all. Or Congress could choose to sue if legislators felt the Biden White House wanted to hold back too much. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Trump has said he would cite executive privilege and refuse to hand over any details. The legal maneuver has been used for decades by presidents and staff — including Trump himself — to avoid scrutiny by Congress.
But Trump doesn’t necessarily have the final word now that he’s out of office. According to a executive order on presidential records, the archivist who is in possession of the records “shall abide by any instructions given him by the incumbent President or his designee unless otherwise directed by a final court order.”
The White House has indicated it is inclined to release as many of the documents as possible; but officials aren’t ruling out that there could be individual records Biden may deem privileged.
Presidents tend to be protective of their executive privilege to keep White House documents private, both for themselves and their predecessors. But any White House move to deny the congressional request for records on Trump’s activities could inflame Democratic legislators just when Biden needs their support to advance his agenda.
The requested documents are part of a lengthy, partisan and rancorous investigation into how a mob was able to infiltrate the Capitol and disrupt the certification of Biden’s presidential victory, inflicting the most serious assault on Congress in two centuries. More than 650 people have been charged criminally in the attack, the largest prosecution in U.S. history.
In addition to White House records from the archives, demands are being made for material from the departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security and Interior, as well as the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
And late Thursday, the House committee subpoenaed former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Dan Scavino, former Defense Department official Kashyap Patel and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
The request for the National Archives and Records Administration is 10 pages long. The committee is seeking “All documents and communications within the White House on January 6, 2021,” related to Trump’s close advisers and family members, the rally at the nearby Ellipse and Trump’s Twitter feed. It asks for his specific movements on that day and communications, if any, from the White House Situation Room. Also sought are all documents related to claims of election fraud, as well as Supreme Court decisions on the topic.
White House spokesman Michael Gwin said Biden has been engaging with Congress on Jan. 6 issues for several months, and will continue to do so.
“As President Biden has said, the events of January 6th were a dark stain on our country’s history, and they represented an attack on the foundations of our constitution and democracy in a way that few other events have,” Gwin said. “The president is deeply committed to ensuring that something like that can never happen again and he supports a thorough investigation into what occurred.”
The committee is also seeking information about efforts within the Trump administration to push the president’s baseless claims of election fraud and any efforts to try to overturn the results of November’s election or to “impede the peaceful transfer of power.”
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., is heading the committee, appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after all but two Republicans opposed creating the 13-person panel.
It has also requested that telecommunications and social media companies preserve the personal communications of hundreds of people who may have somehow been connected to the attack.
Taylor Budowich, communications director for Trump and his political action committee, criticized the congressional panel’s request for records and said the former president would fight it.
“The highly partisan, Communist-style ‘select committee’ has put forth an outrageously broad records request that lacks both legal precedent and legislative merit,” he said. “Executive privilege will be defended, not just on behalf of President Trump and his administration, but also on behalf of the Office of the President of the United States and the future of our nation.”
___
Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-capitol-siege-449e1d583627cb4532d104bb72d4fe6d
House Jan. 6 panel subpoenas Trump advisers, associates
By MARY CLARE JALONICK and ERIC TUCKER
today
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-capitol-siege-subpoenas-mark-meadows-bennie-thompson-41b9b7a09f4530b7a182549e556a9ad9
WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol has issued its first subpoenas, demanding records and testimony from four of former President Donald Trump’s close advisers and associates who were in contact with him before and during the attack.
In a significant escalation for the panel, Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., announced the subpoenas of former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Dan Scavino, former Defense Department official Kashyap Patel and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. The four men are among Trump’s most loyal aides.
Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., wrote to the four that the committee is investigating “the facts, circumstances, and causes” of the attack and asked them to produce documents and appear at depositions in mid-October.
The panel, formed over the summer, is now launching the interview phase of its investigation after sorting through thousands of pages of documents it had requested in August from federal agencies and social media companies. The committee has also requested a trove of records from the White House. The goal is to provide a complete accounting of what went wrong when the Trump loyalists brutally beat police, broke through windows and doors and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory — and to prevent anything like it from ever happening again.
Thompson says in letters to each of the witnesses that investigators believe they have relevant information about the lead-up to the insurrection. In the case of Bannon, for instance, Democrats cite his Jan. 5 prediction that ”(a)ll hell is going to break loose tomorrow” and his communications with Trump one week before the riot in which he urged the president to focus his attention on Jan. 6.
MORE ON CAPITOL BREACH
– Biden has say in whether Trump's 1/6 records go to Congress
In the letter to Meadows, Thompson cites his efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat in the weeks prior to the insurrection and his pressure on state officials to push the former president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud.
“You were the president’s chief of staff and have critical information regarding many elements of our inquiry,” Thompson wrote. “It appears you were with or in the vicinity of President Trump on January 6, had communication with the president and others on January 6 regarding events at the Capitol and are a witness regarding the activities of the day.”
Thompson wrote that the panel has “credible evidence” of Meadows’ involvement in events within the scope of the committee’s investigation. That also includes involvement in the “planning and preparation of efforts to contest the presidential election and delay the counting of electoral votes.”
The letter also signals that the committee is interested in Meadows’ requests to Justice Department officials for investigations into potential election fraud. Former Attorney General William Barr has said the Justice Department did not find fraud that could have affected the election’s outcome.
The panel cites reports that Patel, a Trump loyalist who had recently been placed at the Pentagon, was talking to Meadows “nonstop” the day the attack unfolded. In the letter to Patel, Thompson wrote that based on documents obtained by the committee, there is “substantial reason to believe that you have additional documents and information relevant to understanding the role played by the Defense Department and the White House in preparing for and responding to the attack on the U.S. Capitol.”
Scavino was with Trump on Jan. 5 during a discussion about how to persuade members of Congress not to certify the election for Joe Biden, according to reports cited by the committee. On Twitter, he promoted Trump’s rally ahead of the attack and encouraged supporters to “be a part of history.” In the letter to Scavino, Thompson said the panel’s records indicate that Scavino was “tweeting messages from the White House” on Jan. 6.
Thompson wrote that it appears Scavino was with Trump on Jan. 6 and may have “materials relevant to his videotaping and tweeting” messages that day. He noted Scavino’s “long service” to the former president, spanning more than a decade.
The subpoenas are certain to anger Republicans, most of whom have been content to move on from the insurrection and have remained loyal to Trump even after denouncing the attack. Only two Republicans sit on the panel, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger.
In July, the committee held an emotional first hearing with four police officers who battled the insurrectionists and were injured and verbally abused as the rioters broke into the building and repeated Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud.
At least nine people who were there died during and after the rioting, including a woman who was shot and killed by police as she tried to break into the House chamber and three other Trump supporters who suffered medical emergencies. Two police officers died by suicide in the days that immediately followed, and a third officer, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, collapsed and died after engaging with the protesters. A medical examiner later determined he died of natural causes.
The Metropolitan Police announced this summer that two more of their officers who had responded to the insurrection, Officers Kyle DeFreytag and Gunther Hashida, had also died by suicide.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-capitol-siege-subpoenas-mark-meadows-bennie-thompson-41b9b7a09f4530b7a182549e556a9ad9
Buckle up: Arizona Republicans to show 2020 recount results
By JONATHAN J. COOPER and BOB CHRISTIE
today
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-elections-arizona-phoenix-conspiracy-theories-d38321441bcd6cea58421f6871b4f74e
PHOENIX (AP) — Ten months after Donald Trump lost his 2020 reelection bid in Arizona, supporters hired by Arizona Senate Republicans were preparing to deliver the results of an unprecedented partisan election review that is the climax of a bizarre quest to find evidence supporting the former president’s false claim that he lost because of fraud.
Nearly every allegation made by the review team so far has crumbled under scrutiny. Election officials in Arizona and around the country expect more of the same Friday from the review team they say is biased, incompetent and chasing absurd or disproven conspiracy theories.
“Every time Trump and his supporters have been given a forum to prove this case, they have swung and missed,” said Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election attorney and vocal critic of Trump’s push to overturn the election.
The unprecedented partisan review — focused on the vote count in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa — is led and funded largely by people who already believe that Trump was the true winner, despite dozens of lawsuits and extraordinary scrutiny that found no problems that could change the outcome. They’ve ignored the detailed vote-counting procedures in Arizona law.
Despite being widely mocked, the Arizona review has become a model that Trump supporters are eagerly pushing to replicate in other swing states where Biden won. Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general sued Thursday to block a GOP-issued subpoena for a wide array of election materials. In Wisconsin, a retired conservative state Supreme Court justice is leading a Republican-ordered investigation into the 2020 election, and this week threatened to subpoena election officials who don’t comply.
No matter what the reviews in Arizona and elsewhere purport to find, they cannot reverse Biden’s victory.
In Arizona, five people are scheduled to publicly outline the findings for two top Republicans in the state Senate chamber, including Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, a cybersecurity consulting firm with no election experience. He served as the head of the review team despite his prior work to promote “stop the steal” election conspiracies.
Shiva Ayyadurai, who has developed a loyal following for promoting COVID-19 misinformation on social media, will discuss his review of signatures on mail ballots. It’s not clear why he is qualified to do so. Ayyadurai, who is known as Dr. Shiva to his fans, has a Ph.D. but is not a medical doctor.
Ben Cotton, a computer forensics expert, will outline his analysis of vote-counting machines. Cotton has walked back his allegation that a key elections database was deleted.
Also scheduled to speak are Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state, and Randy Pullen, a former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party. Both served as liaisons between the Senate and the review team.
They’ve been tight-lipped about their findings, but Bennett told a conservative radio host this week that he will “have a brief report about where Maricopa County failed to meet and comply with state statutes and election procedures.”
A document purported to be a leaked draft of the Cyber Ninjas report circulated late Thursday. It said a hand count of ballots confirmed Biden’s victory and showed a net gain of 360 votes for him. It also outlined a series of alleged shortcomings and recommended changes to state election laws.
Republican Senate President Karen Fann said in a text message the document was “a leaked draft from three days ago,” but did not dispute its authenticity. She would not say if the findings from the draft had changed over the course of the week, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
“I have signed an NDA,” she said. “I will not break my word.”
The hand count’s confirmation of a Biden victory goes against Trump’s narrative that widespread election fraud cost him the election. It also undercuts claims by some of this closest allies that vote-counting machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which were used in Maricopa County, changed votes.
“Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election,” Maricopa County officials said on Twitter.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, controlled 4-1 by Republicans, has vehemently defended the vote count. Republican Chairman Jack Sellers has called the review “a grift disguised as an audit.” GOP Supervisor Bill Gates said Thursday that the review’s reliance on funding from out-of-state Trump allies means the findings won’t be believable.
“The people who are funding this audit, the people who have called for this audit, we all know what they want it to find,” Gates said. “They want it to find that Donald Trump won Maricopa County.”
The Senate has agreed to spend $150,000 on the audit, plus security and facility costs. That pales in comparison to the nearly $5.7 million contributed as of late July by Trump allies.
Another Republican county supervisor, Clint Hickman, has been the subject of an outlandish conspiracy theory claiming a fire that killed 120,000 chickens at his family’s egg farm west of Phoenix was a ruse to destroy evidence of Trump’s victory.
Maricopa County’s vote count was conducted in front of bipartisan observers, as were legally required audits meant to ensure voting machines work properly. A partial hand count spot check found a perfect match.
Two extra post-election reviews by federally certified election experts also found no evidence that voting machines switched votes or were connected to the internet. The Board of Supervisors commissioned the extraordinary reviews in an effort to prove to Trump backers that there were no problems, but Fann and others backing her partisan review were unpersuaded.
Election experts predict the report could misinterpret normal election procedures to claim something nefarious or elevate minor mistakes into major allegations of wrongdoing.
“They’re minor procedural issues, and to try and amplify them to the point where they cast doubt on the election is nothing more than sore loserism,” said David Becker, a former lawyer in the U.S. Department of Justice voting section who founded the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Biden won Maricopa County by 45,109 votes and Arizona by 10,457 votes. Minor procedural issues wouldn’t affect a margin that large, Becker said.
In July, Logan laid out a series of claims stemming from his misunderstanding of the election data he was analyzing, including that 74,000 mail ballots that were recorded as received but not sent. Trump repeatedly amplified the claims. But they had innocuous explanations.
Friday’s report stems from a process that began nearly a year ago. Trump and his allies, after their claims of election fraud were repeatedly dismissed in court, searched frantically for a way to block the certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6. Two top Republicans in the Arizona Senate came through, issuing a sweeping subpoena for all ballots in Maricopa County, the machines that counted them and a trove of election data. They said they would use the materials to conduct a “forensic audit.”
A court battle over the validity of the subpoena delayed the delivery of materials until April, three months after Biden took office. The review was supposed to take about 60 days but has been repeatedly set back, most recently because Logan and four others on his team contracted COVID-19.
The review has energized Trump supporters who hope it will prove he was the legitimate winner of the election and lead to his return to the White House, despite extraordinary scrutiny finding no fraud that would affect the election’s outcome.
Fann, the Republican Senate president, says the review is not intended to overturn the 2020 election but will find ways the Legislature can improve election laws.
Not all Republicans, even in the Senate, trust whatever results will come out of the review.
“They’re going to have to justify their existence, so they’re going to have to come up with something,” GOP Sen. Paul Boyer said Thursday. “And God knows what that is.”
___
Associated Press writer Bob Christie contributed.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-elections-arizona-phoenix-conspiracy-theories-d38321441bcd6cea58421f6871b4f74e
Draft report of GOP-backed ballot review in Arizona confirms Biden’s win
By Rosalind S. Helderman
Today at 12:18 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/arizona-ballot-review-draft-report/2021/09/24/7c19ac08-1562-11ec-b976-f4a43b740aeb_story.html
A Republican-commissioned review of nearly 2.1 million ballots cast last year in Arizona confirmed the accuracy of the official results and President Biden’s win in Maricopa County, according to a draft report prepared by private contractors who conducted the recount.
The draft was obtained by The Washington Post late Thursday night in advance of a planned public release of a final version on Friday.
The ultimate findings will cap a costly and drawn-out recount launched by the GOP-led Arizona Senate that had been championed by former president Donald Trump and kept alive false claims that fraud tainted the election in the state’s most populous county. The process was pilloried by election experts who warned that the methods used by the firm hired to run the review were sloppy and biased.
After nearly six months and almost $6 million — most of it given by groups that cast doubt on the election results — the draft report shows that the review concluded that 45,469 more ballots were cast for Biden in Maricopa County than for Trump, widening Biden’s margin by 360 more votes than certified results.
The draft report found the count to have “no substantial differences” from the county’s certified tallies.
If included in the final report, that finding would puncture unsubstantiated claims made by Trump and his allies that vote tabulating machines had miscounted paper ballots or been hacked to flip thousands of Trump votes to Biden.
The draft report sought to undercut that conclusion by suggesting that some ballots could have been improperly accepted and counted by the county. But the document includes key notes of caution, saying only that further investigation is warranted.
The report could still go through additional revisions before its public release, scheduled for Friday afternoon. The draft was provided to The Post by the Arizona secretary of state’s office, which had obtained a copy.
Randy Pullen, a spokesman for the ballot review, told an NPR affiliate in Phoenix that the draft version was “close” to the final report. He added, “Was there massive fraud or anything? It doesn’t look like it.”
Later, in a text message to The Post, he cautioned there will be “updates in the final report.”
Biden’s win in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, helped him earn a narrow victory in Arizona and become the first Democrat to win the state since 1996. The state’s results were upheld by state and federal courts.
The state Senate’s ballot review began in April over the objections of the Republican-led county leadership. Lawmakers used a subpoena to obtain Maricopa County’s ballots and tabulating machines, which were handed over to private contractors for review.
State Senate President Karen Fann (R), who has led the effort, has said publicly that the goal is not to revisit Biden’s win but instead to look for ways to improve the state’s election laws.
But Trump has repeatedly said he believes the investigation will vindicate his allegations about the election and show he was in fact the victor.
On Thursday night, apparently unaware of the findings of the draft report, the former president said in a statement, “Everybody will be watching Arizona tomorrow to see what the highly respected auditors and Arizona State Senate found out regarding the so-called Election!”
The Florida-based firm that led the review, Cyber Ninjas, had never before been involved in administering an election or recount, and its chief executive, Doug Logan, publicly embraced Trump’s false claims of fraud before getting the job.
After his firm was selected to conduct the review, Logan did not deny his potential bias but said that it is “the most skeptical person” who makes the best auditor, “not the person who thinks it is impossible to find anything.”
Election experts criticized the process as opaque, insecure and frequently changing, and said the recount followed few best practices established over decades for conducting unbiased and accurate election audits.
In May, all of Maricopa’s seven elected officials — including five Republicans — joined to demand the Senate put an end to the review, calling it a “con” and a “sham.”
“Our democracy is imperiled,” they wrote in a letter to Fann.
The Justice Department also warned in the spring that the recount risked violating federal law, which requires that ballots be securely maintained for 22 months following a federal election.
After the leak of the draft report late Thursday, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers (R) said in a statement that the findings mean “the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters. That should be the end of the story. Everything else is just noise.”
He added: “Board members told the truth in the face of angry phone calls and emails fueled by a coordinated campaign to shake Americans’ faith in the power of their vote. Will they accept the truth now?”
A spokesman for Fann did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump allies tried to play down the conclusion in the draft report. GOP state Sen. Wendy Rogers wrote in a post on Twitter that she had just spoken to Logan by phone, who told her that the early version of the report that leaked was “simply a draft and is only a partial report.”
“Tomorrow’s hearing will render findings of great consequence,” wrote Rogers, who has been calling for Biden’s win to be decertified. “Then he said ‘God is in control’. Please pray for our audit team tomorrow as they present their findings.”
Election experts said the Arizona experience should serve as a warning sign to other Republican legislators who have in recent weeks responded to pressure from Trump and agreed to embark on their own reviews of the 2020 election, including in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Texas.
“Every time Trump and his supporters have been given a forum to make their case, they have swung and missed,” said Ben Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer who has been critical of Trump’s false claims of fraud. He spoke to reporters in a call organized by the Center for Election Innovation & Research Thursday before the draft leaked.
“If Trump and his supporters can’t prove it here — with the process they’ve designed — then they can’t prove it anywhere,” Ginsberg said.
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-ballot-review-draft-report/2021/09/24/7c19ac08-1562-11ec-b976-f4a43b740aeb_story.html
Biden White House leans toward releasing information about Trump and Jan. 6 attack, setting off legal and political showdown
By Tom Hamburger and Jacqueline Alemany
Today at 10:51 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-executive-privilege-subpoenas/2021/09/23/1c163312-1ba7-11ec-8380-5fbadbc43ef8_story.html
The White House is leaning toward releasing information to Congress about what Donald Trump and his aides were doing during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol despite the former president’s objections — a decision that could have significant political and legal ramifications.
Trump has said he will cite “executive privilege” to block information requests from the House select committee investigating the events of that day, banking on a legal theory that has successfully allowed presidents and their aides to avoid or delay congressional scrutiny for decades, including during the Trump administration.
But President Biden’s White House plans to err on the side of disclosure given the gravity of the events of Jan. 6, according to two people familiar with discussions who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.
In response to questions about White House deliberations over what information to release, Biden spokesman Michael J. Gwin said the president views the attack on the Capitol as “a dark stain on our country’s history” and is “deeply committed to ensuring that something like that can never happen again, and he supports a thorough investigation.”
Members of the investigative committee argue that Trump no longer enjoys the protection of executive privilege, encouraging the White House to push aside institutional concerns about sharing information with Congress and aid the panel in an investigation focused on what Democrats and a handful of Republicans have called an assault on democracy.
“It’s not really relevant because there’s no president involved — there’s no such thing as a former president’s executive privilege,” said Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a committee member who teaches constitutional law. “That’s extremely dilute and not really relevant.”
What Trump was doing while the attack was occurring and who he was speaking with are among the big, unanswered questions concerning the assault on the Capitol.
The debate over the veracity of his executive privilege claims comes as the committee is moving into a new, more aggressive phase of its investigation. Having requested material from telecom, social media companies and the White House — and receiving some response — it is now looking at how best to compel testimony and documents from those reluctant to participate.
Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) said this week that his panel will soon issue subpoenas to witnesses and organizations, adding that the committee has started scheduling closed door testimony with cooperative witnesses. A preliminary list of subpoenas is expected to be released by the committee as soon as Thursday and may include prominent Trump allies and White House officials.
Trump has derided the committee’s work as partisan and is promising to fight its effort to collect information and testimony related to the attack.
“The highly partisan, Communist-style ‘select committee’ has put forth an outrageously broad records request that lacks both legal precedent and legislative merit,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said in a statement. “Executive privilege will be defended, not just on behalf of President Trump and his administration, but also on behalf of the Office of the President of the United States and the future of our nation.”
In response to the House panel’s request, the National Archives has already identified hundreds of pages of documents from the Trump White House relevant to its inquiry. As required by statute, the material is being turned over to the Biden White House and to Trump’s lawyers for review.
The committee’s Aug. 25 letter to the National Archives was both sweeping and detailed, asking for “all documents and communications within the White House on January 6, 2021, relating in any way” to the events of that day. They include examining whether the White House or Trump allies worked to delay or halt the counting of electoral votes and whether there was discussion of impeding the peaceful transfer of power.
The letter asked for call logs, schedules and meetings for a large group, including Trump’s adult children, son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and first lady Melania Trump as well as a host of aides and advisers, such as his attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.
The committee has focused, in part, on seeking information about whether the Trump White House and members of Congress played any role in encouraging the demonstrations, which interrupted the constitutionally mandated certification of electoral votes and unleashed a series of violent confrontations with the U.S. Capitol Police.
So far, more than 650 people have been charged with crimes in connection with the violent demonstrations that delayed that vote. Many were charged with obstructing a federal procedure and for knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building. Documents and testimony could show whether White House officials and members of Congress encouraged or supported those actions, congressional staffers said.
White House documents requested by the panel are identified by National Archives personnel and then sent to Biden and Trump lawyers. The first tranche was sent out Aug. 31, according to a person familiar with the transfer.
Trump has 30 days following the delivery of the documents to decide whether to object to their release, according to the statute. Even if he opposes turning them over, the Biden White House has decision-making authority and can release them, over Trump’s objections, after an additional 60 days has elapsed. Trump’s remaining option would be to go to court to try to halt the release, legal advisers said.
While Trump has struck a defiant tone, his options may be limited if Biden decides to handover the information the former president says should be protected, according to several legal experts — including those who have reviewed similar requests in the past.
“The law we have is not favorable to the former president,” said Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama. “A former president has a chance to review the materials, to raise issues of privilege and if the former and the current presidents cannot reach some agreement, to take the dispute to the courts.”
Bauer added that while an inquiry into a former president is unique, legal precedents suggest disclosure of the information Congress is seeking.
“The circumstances here — the former president acting at the time in his capacity as a candidate seeking to challenge his defeat at the polls — make this uphill battle much, much tougher,” he said.
Norm Eisen, a former Obama appointee, who advised the first House impeachment inquiry of Trump, said the former president’s power to assert executive privilege has weakened since he left the White House.
“The executive privilege stonewalling that Trump used while he was in office won’t work anymore,” Eisen said, noting that the current president — not the former — has the real decision-making power.
A former federal judge who worked on executive privilege issues in the Ronald Reagan White House and the George H.W. Bush Justice Department pointed out that privilege requests do not typically attempt to shield information about potential wrongdoing.
“With a few notable exceptions, the historical practice has been for Presidents to avoid asserting Executive Privilege to protect from disclosure information that suggests wrongdoing or potential wrongdoing by a President and/or his advisers,” J. Michael Luttig, a former U.S. federal judge, said in an email.
Several cases involving requests for tapes and other records from the Richard Nixon White House provide precedent for release of presidential records when requested by Congress or government agencies.
In 1977, the Supreme Court in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, rejected Nixon’s privilege claims about White House tapes and documents, embracing the idea that executive privilege “is not for the benefit of the President as an individual, but for the benefit of the Republic.”
Legal experts also pointed to recent private talks involving Trump officials and Congress that could provide a path to a resolution that does not involve going to court. They cite the negotiations that occurred between lawyers for Trump, the Justice Department and the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating claims that a Trump Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, had sought to deploy department resources after the election to back Trump’s claims of massive voting fraud.
In the end, the Biden Justice Department waived executive privilege, and two of Trump’s top former Justice Department officials, Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue, sat for interviews with the Senate Judiciary Committee, providing detailed accounts of what happened during the post-election period.
The decisions Biden and Trump make about the current records and interview requests will be momentous, said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University who has written about the protection of White House documents and previously argued that Democrats’ impeachment efforts against Trump were a misguided use of congressional power.
“There is an unbroken tradition of deference by the incumbent presidents to their predecessors,” Turley said. “In the past, incumbent presidents would generally support their predecessors in restricting access, despite partisan differences. It appears we may be poised here to shatter that tradition.”
Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.
By Tom Hamburger
Tom Hamburger is an investigative reporter on the national desk of The Washington Post. He has covered the White House, Congress and regulatory agencies, with a focus on money and politics. Twitter
Image without a caption
By Jacqueline Alemany
Jacqueline Alemany is the author of The Early 202, an early morning newsletter featuring news critical to the nation’s many power centers, including the White House, Capitol Hill, government agencies, the Pentagon and more. She joined The Washington Post in 2018 after six years at CBS News. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-executive-privilege-subpoenas/2021/09/23/1c163312-1ba7-11ec-8380-5fbadbc43ef8_story.html
Fraud in UK at level where it ‘poses national security threat’
UK Finance says £754m stolen from bank customers in first half of 2021 as scammers capitalised on Covid
Rupert Jones
Wed 22 Sep 2021 11.03 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/sep/22/fraud-in-uk-at-level-poses-national-security-threat-bank-customers-covid
Fraud in the UK has risen to a level where it poses a “national security threat”, according to the main banking body, with £754m stolen from bank customers during the first half of this year – a 30% rise on the same period in 2020.
UK Finance said fraudsters had capitalised on the coronavirus pandemic, with criminals targeting children as young as 14 via social media to become money mules.
Losses from bank transfer scams leapt by 71% to £355m during the first half of the year – almost £2m a day. There were a total of 106,164 cases of such fraud, equivalent to 12 people being defrauded every half an hour.
There had also been a notable increase in the use of cryptocurrency wallets to quickly move stolen money outside the banking system.
Consumer bodies say banks often wrongly try to pin the blame for fraud on their customers. However, UK Finance said much of the criminal activity was taking place outside the banking system, and called on the big tech companies to do more to clamp down on the fraud being perpetrated on their platforms.
The consumer body Which? described the sums lost during the pandemic as “a staggering amount”.
In previous years, the largest losses have involved debit and credit cards being used to commit fraud but this year scammers focused their activity on authorised push payment fraud.
This often involves email accounts being hacked in order to trick individuals and businesses into sending money to bank accounts operated by criminals posing as genuine customers.
It sometimes involves people who are buying a property or having building work done and need to make a sizeable payment as a result, although it also includes many cases where criminals pose as delivery companies, people looking for romance or investment firms.
Impersonation scams – where criminals seized on people’s fears about the pandemic and pretended to be from trusted organisations such as the NHS or government departments in order to send out scam texts and emails – were up 123% in the first six months of 2021 compared with the same period last year.
Investment scam losses, meanwhile, were up 95% as criminals exploited the low interest rate environment to post adverts on social media offering high returns.
“We also saw changes in how criminals moved stolen money,” UK Finance said. “They targeted people as young as 14 via social media platforms to become money mules, where their bank account is used to launder stolen money.”
It went on to say that “fraud is now at a level where it poses a national security threat”. UK Finance is demanding government-coordinated action across all sectors to tackle the problem, including ensuring that all economic crime is brought within the scope of the online safety bill.
Which? said most of the money lost by bank transfer scam victims was still not being reimbursed. “This shameful situation raises serious questions about the payment regulator’s response and the behaviour of banks that all too often wrongly try to pin the blame on their customers,” it added.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/sep/22/fraud-in-uk-at-level-poses-national-security-threat-bank-customers-covid
Capitol attack panel said to be considering subpoenas to Trump White House aides
Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino and former campaign manager Brad Parscale are among those being targeted
Hugo Lowell in Washington DC
Wed 22 Sep 2021 07.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/21/capitol-attack-panel-trump-white-house-aides
The House select committee investigating the 6 January attack on the US Capitol is considering issuing a blitz of subpoenas for top Trump White House aides including the former chief and deputy chief of staff, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The subpoenas – which are expected to be authorized as early as this week – would place House select committee investigators inside the White House and Trump campaign war rooms at the time of the insurrection as the panel prepares to ramp up the pace of its inquiry.
House select committee investigators are considering subpoenas for call detail records or testimony of key aides including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, the source said.
The scope and subjects of the subpoenas are not yet finalized and discussions about who to include in the first tranche are still ongoing, the source said, although the three Trump officials are presently considered likely targets.
Taken together, the developing move from the select committee marks perhaps the most aggressive investigative actions since the panel made an array of records demands and records preservation requests for Trump officials last month.
It is also likely to further inflame tensions with Trump, already furious at the select committee for opening a line of inquiry into what he knew in advance of plans to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, as well as Republicans under scrutiny over 6 January.
Trump officials such as Meadows, Scavino and Parscale played a major part in advancing baseless and disproven lies about a stolen 2020 election that precipitated the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally which descended into the insurrection as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
The former White House chief of staff, who remained by Trump’s side as the violence unfolded, is among several aides who may hold the key to unlock inside information pertaining to the Capitol attack that left five dead and nearly 140 injured.
But House select committee investigators are also taking a special interest in the role played by Scavino, the source said, since he held the additional role of being the director of social media – Trump’s preferred messaging platform.
Subpoenas for call detail records, testimony or other material from those Trump officials and other individuals involved in the 6 January attack would cast a close net around the former president’s inner circle while simultaneously putting them at the center of the probe.
House select committee investigators first signaled their intention to pursue a close inquiry into the potential role played by the Trump White House and House Republicans when they asked 35 telecom and social media companies to preserve records in case of later subpoenas.
In the records preservation requests, the select committee instructed the companies to avoid destroying the records of several hundred people, including House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and, as the Guardian reported, the White House chief of staff Meadows.
Much of the investigative work by the select committee has so far been focused on gathering evidence, as a prosecutor might, to build a case backstopped by empirical data that would safeguard its final report from criticism of partisanship or built-in bias.
To that end, the select committee is also in the process of scheduling closed-door depositions with key persons of interest included in and beyond the subpoenas, the source said, though the agenda and potential subjects of the interviews were not immediately clear.
A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment about subpoena discussions for Trump administration and campaign officials. But the panel’s chairman, Bennie Thompson, previously told the Guardian he would investigate 6 January conversations involving Trump.
House select committee investigators are showing a new urgency to jolt the investigation into higher gear after the panel held its first hearing before members departed Washington for an extended summer recess. The full select committee – members, counsel and advisors – met for the first time on Monday for more than five hours in the Capitol, taking only short breaks to vote, grab dinner and make an occasional dash to the toilet.
Members and staff for the select committee say they remain in discussions about when and on what topic to schedule a second hearing. At least two members told the Guardian they now expect the next public hearing will be delayed until October, though plans remain fluid.
Congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, told reporters after the meeting that new facts about the Capitol attack were surfacing every day and that he expected the panel to ultimately receive all the records and testimony it sought.
Raskin added that he was pushing to secure testimony under oath from anyone with relevant information. “We should see it as an honor and a privilege to be able to provide evidence to Congress about this violent insurrection,” he said.
House select committee investigators are expected to present the subpoenas as non-negotiable, and 6 January select committee member Adam Schiff told reporters that subpoenas were imminent for individuals expected to resist requests for testimony.
“In some cases, we’re making requests we think will be complied with,” said Schiff. “In other cases, we’re going straight to subpoenas where we think we’re dealing with recalcitrant witnesses.”
Schiff, a former Trump impeachment manager from the 2019 trial and the chairman of the House intelligence committee, said he hoped the justice department would also help the select committee hold subpoena defiers in contempt of Congress.
Trump has threatened in recent weeks to mount challenges to the select committee’s work, enraged at the prospect of his embarrassing private efforts to subvert the 2020 election results and reinstall himself in office being made public.
“Executive privilege will be defended, not just on behalf of my administration and the patriots who worked beside me, but on behalf of the office of the president of the United States and the future of our nation,” Trump said in a statement.
It was not clear whether his claims of executive privilege carried weight. The justice department has declined to assert the protection over Capitol attack testimony after the White House office of legal counsel determined it did not exist to benefit private interests.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/21/capitol-attack-panel-trump-white-house-aides
Shots fired at Ukraine presidential aide's car in assassination bid
Reuters
September 22, 2021 11:01 AM BST Last Updated a minute ago
Europe
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/shots-fired-car-carrying-ukraine-presidents-aide-driver-wounded-2021-09-22/
KYIV, Sept 22 (Reuters) - A volley of shots was fired at a car carrying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's principal aide on Wednesday in what a senior official called an assassination attempt.
More than 10 bullets hit the car near the village of Lesnyky, around 5 km(3 miles) outside the capital Kyiv, wounding the driver, a police statement said. It said a criminal case on suspicion of premeditated murder had been opened.
A local television station said at least 19 bullet holes could be seen on the driver's side of the car.
A senior lawmaker said the aide, Serhiy Shefir, was not hurt. Shefir is close to the president, leading a group of advisers.
Zelenskiy, who came to power on a promise to take on the country's oligarchs and fight corruption, is currently in the United States at the U.N. General Assembly.
His office said Zelenskiy had been informed and would comment shortly.
Zelenskiy adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said the assassination attempt could be a result of the president's fight against the oligarchs.
"This open, deliberate and extremely violent assault with automatic weapons cannot be qualified any differently than as an attempted killing of a key team member," Podolyak told Reuters.
"We, of course, associate this attack with an aggressive and even militant campaign against the active policy of the head of state," Interfax Ukraine quoted Podolyak as saying.
"The president's policy aimed at fundamental transformation of the state will remain unchanged," he told Reuters, promising tougher measures against oligarchs.
Parliament is this week due to debate a presidential law directed on reducing the influence of oligarchs.
Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Natalia Zinets and lya Zhegulev ; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Giles Elgood
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/shots-fired-car-carrying-ukraine-presidents-aide-driver-wounded-2021-09-22/
MSNBC Hosts Crack Up Over Error Found On First Page Of Trump Lawsuit
Trump is suing his niece Mary Trump, The New York Times and three of its reporters.
By Josephine Harvey
HuffPost
September 21, 2021
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/maddow-odonnell-trump-lawsuit-error_n_614ab7fae4b077b735ec61bb?ri18n=true
Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell had a good chuckle on air Tuesday night after apparently discovering an error on the first page of former President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against his niece Mary Trump, The New York Times and three of its reporters.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in New York, alleges that the Times participated in an “insidious plot” with Mary Trump to obtain his private tax files, which were then used in its bombshell reporting about his financial history, The Daily Beast reported.
As she signed off her program and handed over to O’Donnell, Maddow said she had just received a copy of the lawsuit during the commercial break.
“But on page one, it says, “The defendants’ actions were motivated by a personal vendetta and their desire to gain fame, notoriety, acclaim and a financial windfall and were further intended to advance their political agenda,” Maddow said. “Then it says this: ‘The brazenness of the defendants’ actions cannot be understated.’”
“That’s page one of the lawsuit! Cannot be understated. OK. How can you not understate brazenness? ! I’m sorry,” she added.
“He has the lawyers who think the way he does,” O’Donnell quipped.
Trump’s lawyers ostensibly meant to say the brazenness of the defendants’ actions could not be overstated.
Trump is seeking damages of no less than $100 million. The reporters named in the suit ? Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner won a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for their reporting on Trump and his businesses’ history of tax dodges. Trump never revealed his tax returns during his presidency, breaking precedent and his own campaign pledge.
When asked about the lawsuit, Mary Trump told the Daily Beast her uncle was acting out of desperation.
“I think he is a fucking loser,” she said. “As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/maddow-odonnell-trump-lawsuit-error_n_614ab7fae4b077b735ec61bb?ri18n=true
THE TRUMP COUP The Failed Game Plan for Overthrowing the 2020 Vote
The basis of John Eastman’s memo: Get Pence to lie, then count on the GOP to be Trump trucklers.
by PHILIP ROTNER SEPTEMBER 21, 2021 5:30 AM
https://www.thebulwark.com/the-failed-game-plan-for-overthrowing-the-2020-vote/
John C. Eastman, one of the lawyers who advised President Donald Trump in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, reportedly presented Trump with an exquisitely Trumpian plan to have Vice President Mike Pence do his dirty work: Pence should lie.
Then he should leverage his lie in order to take the election out of the hands of American voters through the exercise of an authority he doesn’t have under the Constitution.
Eastman’s alleged plan is laid out in a two-page memo marked “PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL.” According to CNN and the Washington Post, which published it on Monday, the memo was sent on January 2 to Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who was “shocked” by what he saw.
In the memo, Eastman set out a “January 6 scenario” in six steps. He barely managed to make it through the first one without embarrassing himself. In Step 1, according to Eastman, Pence would begin “to open and count the ballots, starting with Alabama.”
So far so good. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution does, after all, authorize the vice president to “open” the sealed electoral votes signed and certified by the states, which votes “shall then be counted.” Forget, for the sake of sanity, Eastman’s bizarre admonition that Pence should begin his roll call of the states with Alabama “without conceding” that he is required to go through the states alphabetically. God forbid.
By Step 2, however, Eastman went wildly off the rails. When Pence gets to Arizona in the roll call (presumably only after going through Alabama and Alaska by dint of the dreaded tyranny of alphabetization), Eastman said, Pence should announce that “he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States.”
The problem with this is that it wasn’t true: Pence didn’t have multiple slates of electors from Arizona, unless Eastman is referring to something Pence might have received over the transom or stumbled upon on Twitter. But random flotsam doesn’t count. The Twelfth Amendment is quite clear on this: The Vice President shall open “the certificates” signed and certified by the states, not just anything he might chance to pick up off the street. Arizona, like every other state, had “signed” and “certified” a single slate of electors, reflecting the results of the state’s election.
By the time he got to Step 3, Eastman dove into territory that Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe has described as “jaw-droppingly stupid.” Eastman wanted Pence, after going through the states, to simply announce that because of the nonexistent “disputes” in Arizona and six other states, “there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States”—despite the fact that every state in the Union had signed and certified a single slate of electors pursuant to the results of their elections. Once the inconvenient votes of the seven states had been flushed, Eastman posited, Trump would have a majority of the electors in the non-flushed states. Case closed: “Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.”
Eastman was now piling bogus, anti-constitutional analysis on top of his original lie. Even if there were multiple slates of electors signed and certified by seven states—and there weren’t—Pence still wouldn’t have had the constitutional authority to unilaterally “gavel” in a president by fiat. Professor Tribe put it this way:
“The vice president has no power whatsoever in deciding which votes count,” Tribe said. “From the beginning of the republic, the Constitution’s history has made clear that the vice president’s role in this special quadrennial joint session is purely ceremonial. He doesn’t have to even truly count the votes. He simply announces the vote count and in announcing it, he has no discretion whatsoever.”
The Twelfth Amendment simply doesn’t permit a vice president to gavel in a president if no candidate wins a majority of the electoral votes. Instead, it sets out a somewhat convoluted process in which the decision is thrown to the House of Representatives, not to the vice president.
Eastman clearly recognized the preposterousness of his “legal” analysis and signaled what is clearly his driving obsession, to elicit “howls” from the Democrats. In step 4 of his January 6 scenario, he acknowledges that in the event of a genuine constitutional dispute, the decision goes to the House, with each state having a single vote. No problem there for Eastman, of course, since the Republicans then controlled 26 of the state delegations, a majority. The unstated assumption behind this calculation—perhaps the most accurate, albeit unspoken, piece of Eastman’s analysis—is that none of the Republican state delegations would have the integrity or character to insist that the states’ election results, not party loyalty, should control the selection of an American president.
Eastman didn’t limit himself to written advice; on January 5, he reportedly also made his anti-constitutional case to Pence directly in the Oval Office. In an email quoted by the Washington Post yesterday, Eastman said that his final advice to Pence was not to act as though there with states with multiple slates of electors, as outlined in the memo, but rather to insist on delaying the certification process, to buy more time.
Then, on January 6, Eastman delivered a fiery speech at Trump’s “Save America” rally, just two and a half hours before the insurrectionist mob overtook the Capitol. As a result, faculty at Chapman University, where Eastman held an endowed faculty position, called for his removal for acts “in direct opposition to the values and beliefs of our institution.” Eastman was ultimately pressured into resigning his position there. He was also stripped of his public duties at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Eastman will now be remembered not for whatever academic standing he once may have enjoyed, but for his clownish role as a Trump apologist. He has made himself yet another member of the not-so-exclusive club of public figures who at one point were mostly taken seriously, but after being run through the Trump defilement machine emerged transformed into something ridiculous.
Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn would be proud.
Philip Rotner
Philip Rotner is a columnist whose articles appear in national publications and on his website, philiprotner.com. Philip is an attorney who has practiced for over 40 years, both in private practice and as the general counsel of a global professional services firm. Philip’s views are his own, and do not reflect the views of any organization with which he has been associated.
MORE IN THE TRUMP COUP
https://www.thebulwark.com/the-failed-game-plan-for-overthrowing-the-2020-vote/
Huge hack reveals embarrassing details of who’s behind Proud Boys and other far-right websites
Drew Harwell, Craig Timberg, Hannah Allam
The Washington Post
September 21, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/21/epik-far-right-hack-anonymous/
Epik long has been the favorite Internet company of the far-right, providing domain services to QAnon theorists, Proud Boys and other instigators of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — allowing them to broadcast hateful messages from behind a veil of anonymity.
But that veil abruptly vanished last week when a huge breach by the hacker group Anonymous dumped into public view more than 150 gigabytes of previously private data — including user names, passwords and other identifying information of Epik’s customers.
Extremism researchers and political opponents have treated the leak as a Rosetta Stone to the far-right, helping them to decode who has been doing what with whom over several years. Initial revelations have spilled out steadily across Twitter since news of the hack broke last week, often under the hashtag #epikfail, but those studying the material say they will need months and perhaps years to dig through all of it.
“It’s massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I’ve seen and, as an extremism researcher, it’s certainly the most interesting,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism. “It’s an embarrassment of riches — stress on the embarrassment.”
Epik, based in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish, has made its name in the Internet world by providing critical Web services to sites that have run afoul of other companies’ policies against hate speech, misinformation and advocating violence. Its client list is a roll-call of sites known for permitting extreme posts and that have been rejected by other companies for their failure to
moderate what their users post.
Online records show those sites have included 8chan, which was dropped by its providers after hosting the manifesto of a gunman who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; Gab, which was dropped for hosting the antisemitic rants of a gunman who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and Parler, which was dropped due to lax moderation related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Epik also provides services to a network of sites devoted to extremist QAnon conspiracy theories. Epik briefly hosted the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer in 2019 after acquiring a cybersecurity company that had provided it with hosting services, but Epik soon canceled that contract, according to news reports. Epik also stopped supporting 8chan after a short period of time, the company has said.
Earlier this month, Epik also briefly provided service to the antiabortion group Texas Right to Life, whose website, ProLifeWhistleblower.com, was removed by the hosting service GoDaddy because it solicited accusations about which medical providers might be violating a state abortion ban.
An Epik attorney said the company stopped working with the site because it violated company rules against collecting people’s private information. Online records show Epik was still the site’s domain registrar as of last week, though the digital tip line is no longer available, and the site now redirects to the group’s homepage.
Epik founder Robert Monster’s willingness to provide technical support to online sanctuaries of the far-right have made him a regular target of anti-extremism advocates, who criticized him for using Epik’s tools to republish the Christchurch gunman’s manifesto and live-streamed video the killer had made of the slaughter.
Monster also used the moment as a marketing opportunity, saying the files were now “effectively uncensorable,” according to screenshots of his tweets and Gab posts from the time. Monster also urged Epik employees to watch the video, which he said would convince them it was faked, Bloomberg News reported.
Monster has defended his work as critical to keeping the Internet uncensored and free, aligning himself with conservative critics who argue that leading technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and YouTube have gone too far in policing content they deem inappropriate.
Monster did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post. But he said in an email to customers two days after hackers announced the breach that the company had suffered an “alleged security incident” and asked customers to report back any “unusual account activity.”
“You are in our prayers today,” Monster wrote last week, as news of the hack spread. “When situations arise where individuals might not have honorable intentions, I pray for them. I believe that what the enemy intends for evil, God invariably transforms into good. Blessings to you all.”
Since the hack, Epik’s security protocols have been the target of ridicule among researchers, who’ve marveled at the site’s apparent failure to take basic security precautions, such as routine encryption that could have protected data about its customers from becoming public.
The files include years of website purchase records, internal company emails and customer account credentials revealing who administers some of the biggest far-right websites. The data includes client names, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and passwords left in plain, readable text. The hack even exposed the personal records from Anonymize, a privacy service Epik offered to customers wanting to conceal their identity.
Similar failings by other hacked companies have drawn scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, which has probed companies such as dating site Ashley Madison for failing to protect their customers’ private data from hackers. FTC investigations have resulted in settlements imposing financial penalties and more rigorous privacy standards.
“Given Epik’s boasts about security, and the scope of its Web hosting, I would think it would be an FTC target, especially if the company was warned but failed to take protective action,” said David Vladeck, a former head of the FTC’s consumer protection bureau, now at Georgetown University Law Center. “I would add that the FTC wouldn’t care about the content — right wing or left wing; the questions would be the possible magnitude and impact of the breach and the representations … the company may have made about security.”
The FTC declined to comment.
Researchers poring through the trove say the most crucial findings concern the identities of people hosting various extremist sites and the key role Epik played in keeping material online that might otherwise have vanished from the Internet — or at least the parts of the Internet that are easily stumbled upon by ordinary users.
The company played such a major role in keeping far-right terrorist cesspools alive,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which studies online extremism. “Without Epik, many extremist communities — from QAnon and white nationalists to accelerationist neo-Nazis — would have had far less oxygen to spread harm, whether that be building toward the Jan. 6 Capitol riots or sowing the misinformation and conspiracy theories chipping away at democracy.”
The breach, first reported by the freelance journalist Steven Monacelli, was made publicly available for download last week alongside a note from Anonymous hackers saying it would help researchers trace the ownership and management of “the worst trash the Internet has to offer.”
After the hackers’ announcement, Epik initially said it was “not aware of any breach.” But in a rambling, three-hour live-stream last week, Monster acknowledged there had been a “hijack of data that should not have been hijacked” and called on people not to use the data for “negative” purposes.
“If you have a negative intent to use that data, it’s not going to work out for you. I’m just telling you,” he said. “If the demon tells you to do it, the demon is not your friend.”
Several domains in the leak are associated with the far-right Proud Boys group, which is known for violent street brawls and involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and was banned by Facebook in 2018 as a hate group.
A Twitter account, @epikfailsnippet, that is posting unverified revelations from the leaked data, included a thread purporting to expose administrators of the Proud Boys sites. One man who was identified by name as administrator of a local Proud Boys forum was said to be an employee of Drexel University. The university said he hasn’t worked at Drexel since November 2020.
Technology news site the Daily Dot reported that Ali Alexander, a conservative political activist who played a key role in spreading false voter fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, took steps after the Jan. 6 siege to obscure his ownership of more than 100 domains registered to Epik. Nearly half reportedly used variations of the “Stop the Steal” slogan pushed by Alexander and others. Alexander did not reply to requests for comment from the Daily Dot or, on Tuesday, from The Post.
Extremism researchers urge careful fact-checking to protect credibility, but the data remains tantalizing for its potential to unmask extremists in public-facing jobs.
Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit whistleblower group, said some researchers call the Epik hack “the Panama Papers of hate groups,” a comparison to the leak of more than 11 million documents that exposed a rogue offshore finance industry. And, like the Panama Papers, scouring the files is labor intensive, with payoffs that could be months away.
“A lot of research begins with naming names,” Best said. “There’s a lot of optimism and feeling of being overwhelmed, and people knowing they’re in for the long haul with some of this data.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/21/epik-far-right-hack-anonymous/
Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers’ Voting Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows
Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal.
By Alan Feuer
Sept. 21, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/us/politics/trump-dominion-voting.html
Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.
But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.
By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.
The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.
The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.
According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.
Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:
* That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.
* That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.
* And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.
As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.
Even at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.
It is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.
“The Trump campaign continued to allow its agents,” the motion says, “to advance debunked conspiracy theories and defame” Mr. Coomer, “apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories.”
Mr. Coomer, Dominion’s onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Ms. Powell, Mr. Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others last year in state district court in Denver. He has said that after the election, he was wrongly accused by a right-wing podcast host of hacking his company’s systems to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat and of then telling left-wing activists that he had done so.
Soon after the host, Joe Oltmann, made these accusations, they were seized upon and amplified by Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani, who were part of a self-described “elite strike force” of lawyers leading the charge in challenging Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
On Nov. 19, for example, Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani appeared together at the news conference at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters and placed Mr. Coomer at the center of a plot to hijack the election by hacking Dominion’s voting machines. By Ms. Powell’s account that day, the conspiracy included Smartmatic, Venezuelan officials, people connected to Mr. Soros and a “massive influence of communist money.”
Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani did not respond to messages seeking comment on the documents. Representatives for Mr. Trump also did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Mr. Trump continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him, and in recent months Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the election was rife with fraud. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were “substantially true.”
And as recently as three weeks ago, Ms. Powell told a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the 2020 election was “essentially a bloodless coup where they took over the presidency of the United States without a single shot being fired.”
It remains unclear how widely the memo was circulated among Trump campaign staff members. According to the court documents, Mr. Giuliani said in a deposition that he had not seen the memo before he gave his presentation in Washington, and he questioned the motives of those who had prepared it.
“They wanted Trump to lose because they could raise more money,” Mr. Giuliani was quoted as saying in the deposition.
But at the time that the internal report was prepared, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell were both “active supervisors,” as he put it in his deposition, in the Trump campaign’s broader plan to challenge the election results — an effort that eventually included more than 60 failed lawsuits filed across the country. While Ms. Powell soon went her own way in claiming that Dominion had conspired to steal the election, Mr. Giuliani continued working closely with Mr. Trump and his campaign, ultimately changing strategies and seeking to persuade state legislatures to overturn the popular vote.
The motion notes that “the lines were blurred” as to whom Ms. Powell was working for at the time: herself, her nonprofit organization or the Trump campaign. Almost immediately after she promoted the conspiracy theory about Dominion at the news conference in November, Mr. Trump sought to distance himself from her. But by December, as Mr. Trump’s legal options narrowed, the former president considered bringing her back into the fold and discussed whether to appoint her as a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud.
The release of the documents was only the latest legal trouble for Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell, both of whom have been sued directly by Dominion for defamation. Dominion has also brought a defamation suit against Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, for amplifying false election claims. Last month, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the cases could continue moving toward trial.
About the same time, a federal judge in Detroit ordered penalties to be levied against Ms. Powell and eight other pro-Trump lawyers — Mr. Giuliani was not among them — who filed a lawsuit that sought to overturn the election results in Michigan using the false claims about Dominion.
“This case was never about fraud,” the judge, Linda V. Parker, wrote in her decision. “It was about undermining the people’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.”
In June, a New York court suspended Mr. Giuliani’s law license, ruling that he had made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while fighting the results of last year’s election for Mr. Trump.
Even recently, the new court documents say, former Trump campaign officials have continued to cling to the baseless notion that the election was marred by fraud.
When lawyers for Mr. Coomer asked Sean Dollman, a representative of the Trump campaign, in a deposition if the campaign still believed that the election was fraudulent, he answered, “Yes, sir.”
The lawyers then asked, “What is that opinion based on?”
According to the court documents, Mr. Dollman gave a less than certain answer.
“We have no underlying definite facts that it wasn’t,” he said.
Susan Dominus, Shay Castle and Mindy Sink contributed reporting.
Alan Feuer covers courts and criminal justice for the Metro desk. He has written about mobsters, jails, police misconduct, wrongful convictions, government corruption and El Chapo, the jailed chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel. He joined The Times in 1999. @alanfeuer
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 22, 2021, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Campaign Knew Vote Case Was Groundless. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/us/politics/trump-dominion-voting.html
Trump International Hotel and Tower Toronto and a web of links to Russia
Wendy Siegelman
18 hours ago·20 min read
https://wsiegelman.medium.com/trump-international-hotel-and-tower-toronto-and-a-web-of-links-to-russia-f61c5b3e642f
Trump’s campaign and presidency provided an endless flow of shocking stories about his business and personal life, from dozens of claims of sexual misconduct to exposes on shady real estate deals, tax schemes and decades of associations with mafia and criminal figures. The news flowed so quickly it blurred together and significant news was often over-shadowed by the latest shiny story du jour.
With Trump gearing up for a possible 2024 campaign and wielding more influence on the future of the Republican party than anyone else, it’s imperative to continue investigating and exposing the network, especially links to foreign adversaries that helped build his brand and influence.
Of all of Trump’s real estate deals, the Trump Toronto International Hotel and Tower deal — which started in 2001 and ended after Trump became president — may be the deal with the most transactions and financing with people and entities linked to Russia and the Kremlin.
“One of the most striking things about the history of the Trump Toronto is the number of independent threads that connect Trump to post-Soviet money.” - Tom Burgis, Financial Times
This overview is a synthesis of many stories on Trump Toronto and layers in new research to provide a comprehensive account of this Trump deal.
...
MUCH MORE
https://wsiegelman.medium.com/trump-international-hotel-and-tower-toronto-and-a-web-of-links-to-russia-f61c5b3e642f
READ: Trump lawyer's memo on six-step plan for Pence to overturn the election
Updated 1220 GMT (2020 HKT) September 21, 2021
(CNN)John Eastman, a conservative lawyer working with then-President Donald Trump's legal team, outlined in a two-page memo a scheme to try to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to subvert the Constitution and throw out the 2020 election results on January 6.
The memo was obtained by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, the authors of "Peril," and which was subsequently obtained by CNN.
Read the memo:
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/viewer.html?pdfurl=https%3A%2F%2Fs3.documentcloud.org%2Fdocuments%2F21066248%2Feastman-memo.pdf&clen=85732&chunk=true
tinyurl.com/ydly5quz
Jason Kint @jason_kint !!! news. mother of all lawsuits quietly filed last month vs Facebook in Delaware. I'll explain why it avoided notice until now in a bit but Zuckerberg, Sandberg, CFO, board inc Peter Thiel and Palantir are defendants - it's a result of sealed docs between FB execs and board. /1
2:20 PM · Sep 21, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
!!! news. mother of all lawsuits quietly filed last month vs Facebook in Delaware. I'll explain why it avoided notice until now in a bit but Zuckerberg, Sandberg, CFO, board inc Peter Thiel and Palantir are defendants - it's a result of sealed docs between FB execs and board. /1 pic.twitter.com/FSWtV8T8MG
— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) September 21, 2021
As background, State of Rhode Island originally had sued Facebook claiming it WAY overpaid FTC by as much as $4.9B to protect Zuckerberg. It won rights to inspect a lot of docs from 2013-2019 leading to this new lawsuit which draws on a ton of evidence from all over the place. /4 pic.twitter.com/TkZ7Ti3FGY
— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) September 21, 2021
Longtime GOP operatives charged with funneling Russian national’s money to Trump, RNC
Jesse Benton and Doug Wead pleaded not guilty to six felony charges, including facilitating a campaign contribution by a foreign national.
By JOSH GERSTEIN and KYLE CHENEY
09/20/2021 07:27 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/20/gop-operatives-charged-funneling-russian-money-trump-rnc-513219
Longtime GOP operatives charged with funneling Russian national’s money to Trump, RNC
Two veteran Republican campaign operatives — including one who got a pardon from then-President Donald Trump one month before he left office — are charged in a new federal indictment with funneling $25,000 from a Russian national into the Trump campaign in 2016.
Jesse Benton, 43, and Doug Wead, 75, made brief appearances Monday at a video hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, pleading not guilty to six felony charges including facilitating a campaign contribution by a foreign national, acting as a straw donor and causing the filing of false campaign finance reports.
The grand jury indictment alleges that Benton and Wead worked together to accept $100,000 from an unidentified Russian national in order to get the foreigner a meeting with then-candidate Trump at a fundraiser in Philadelphia on Sept. 22, 2016.
Neither Trump nor his campaign are mentioned by name in the indictment, but details in the 19-page document make clear that the scheme involved seeking the donation in connection with the Trump event and an opportunity to get face to face with him.
For example, the indictment’s reference to a $25,000 donation on Oct. 27, 2016, to a political committee by Benton — allegedly to cover up the foreign source of the money — lines up with a donation of the same size and date to Trump’s political committee attributed to a “Jesse Bentor,” which prosecutors said is a garbling of Benton’s name.
There is no indication in the indictment that Trump or his campaign aides were aware that the money originated with the Russian donor. The charges say that Benton and Wead “concealed” the arrangement from Trump, and that part of the scheme involved getting the political committees to “unwittingly” file reports indicating that Benton was actually the source of the funds.
The indictment suggests that Benton and Wead hoped to make money from the scheme and did — taking $100,000 from the Russian, but paying only $25,000 to Trump Victory, a joint venture between the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.
Benton, a veteran of Kentucky and presidential politics, had previously faced federal campaign finance charges for payments to a key Iowa state lawmaker who switched endorsements from Michelle Bachman to Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential GOP primary. Trump, just before leaving office, pardoned Benton for the crimes he was convicted of. Benton is also an in-law and former adviser to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is Ron Paul’s son. Benton previously led Sen. Mitch McConnell’s 2014 reelection campaign before stepping down amid legal scrutiny.
In pardoning Benton and another associate, Trump indicated that the move had the support of Rand Paul and former FEC Chair Lee Goodman.
The new indictment alleges that Benton was carrying out the foreign-donation scheme in the days just before and after he was sentenced to two years’ probation on the Iowa-related campaign finance case.
Wead is a conservative commentator and activist who co-authored a book with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, published just before Bush became president in 1989. Wead also enjoyed close access to the Trump White House during his presidency.
Wead is represented in the case by two former attorneys for Trump when he was president, Jay Sekulow and Jane Raskin.
Asked about the charges, Sekulow said in a statement: “Doug Wead is a respected author and supporter of charitable causes. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and will continue to respond appropriately in court.”
The case against Benton and Wead has been assigned to Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/20/gop-operatives-charged-funneling-russian-money-trump-rnc-513219
Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee personally vetted Trump’s fraud claims, new book says. They were unpersuaded.
“Peril,” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, reveals the lengths the two Republicans went to in examining the president’s baseless claims
By Isaac Stanley-Becker
Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/20/peril-woodward-costa-graham-lee-fraud/
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham agreed to hear Rudolph W. Giuliani out.
In a Jan. 2 meeting arranged by Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and held in his West Wing office, the South Carolina Republican met with Giuliani and his legal team to learn about findings they said could hand Trump a second term.
Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney at the time, put forward a computer whiz who presented a mathematical formula suggesting Biden’s support in certain states was unrealistic. Graham, a lawyer and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, found the reasoning too abstract. He wanted hard evidence. “Give me some names,” Graham said at the Saturday meeting. “You need to put it in writing. You need to show me the evidence.”
Giuliani promised details by Monday — proof that scores of ballots had been cast in the names of dead people and people under 18, among other irregularities.
This scene is recounted in a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa. The book, “Peril,” describes parallel efforts by the South Carolina Republican and his conservative colleague from Utah, Sen. Mike Lee, to personally investigate the president’s claims of voter fraud as the lawmakers prepared to certify Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6.
Graham and Lee, both of whom ultimately voted to certify the results, took the claims of election fraud seriously enough to get briefed on the details, involve their senior staff and call state officials throughout the country. But privately, Graham gave the arguments a withering assessment, according to the book, saying they were suitable for “third grade.”
The episode illustrates how strenuously the president’s legal team sought to nullify the results of the election; how flimsy even their more serious claims were; and what little stock the president’s own allies placed in his objections, even as they stood steadfastly with their standard-bearer.
Giuliani’s promised proof arrived on Jan. 4 in the form of several memos he sent to Graham, one titled “Voting Irregularities, Impossibilities, and Illegalities in the 2020 General Election.”
Graham had already proved himself willing to act on assertions of election irregularities, calling Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in November to see if he could toss mail ballots in counties found to have high rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger later said. Graham maintained he was only inquiring about the state’s signature-matching requirements.
The memos from Giuliani included sweeping claims lacking references or evidence. One said Pennsylvania had processed 682,777 mail-in ballots without proper observation — an assertion underlying a suit rejected by a federal judge two months earlier. “If you deduct just this number, President Trump wins the state by hundreds of thousands,” the memo argued. Another claimed hundreds of dead people had voted in Georgia, based on an extensive analysis of “mail-in and absentee ballot voter names and obituaries.”
Graham dispatched his driver to deliver the documents to his top lawyer on the Judiciary Committee. The lawyer, Lee Holmes, was unimpressed, according to the account in “Peril.”
It was impossible for him to tell precisely what kind of records had been used to conduct the analysis, which proved nothing conclusively, in his view. Of the more sensational claims, such as ballots from the deceased, Holmes thought it was much more likely, based on Giuliani’s own evidence, that some people had voted and then died, according to the book. He was equally unconvinced by theories about people voting twice, improper absentee ballot applications and fraudulent ballots cast from vacant or nonexistent addresses. “Holmes could find no public records that would even allow someone to reach these conclusions,” according to the account in “Peril.”
Where he could find relevant records, they contradicted Giuliani’s conclusions. Claims of nearly 12,000 so-called “overvotes” in Arizona — when someone picks more than the maximum number of selections allowed — masked the fact that only 180 applied in the presidential contest, not nearly enough to close Biden’s margin of victory in the state.
The argument that “Georgia’s 2020 election is in doubt and should be nullified,” was laid out in an “Executive summary” of “Independent analysis conducted by expert CPAs and Ivy League statisticians,” according to the documents provided by Giuliani. The experts were unnamed, but their alleged probe — correlating data for 7.6 million registered voters with postal records — struck Holmes as unfeasible or, at best, inconclusive, because it would involve matching millions of registered voters with U.S. Postal Service data. Similar analysis failed to convince a District Court judge in Nevada, who wrote in a December judgment dismissing a suit from the Trump campaign that there was insufficient information about how the data was obtained and used and “what the rate of false positives would be.”
Graham’s attorney shared those concerns.
“Holmes found the sloppiness, the overbearing tone of certainty, and the inconsistencies disqualifying,” the authors write. The memos, he determined, “added up to nothing.”
But it wasn’t until after a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol that Graham, speaking on the Senate floor, said, “Count me out. Enough is enough. I’ve tried to be helpful.”
He has since tacked back, visiting Trump at Mar-a-Lago, speaking to him regularly and saying the GOP “can’t grow” without the former president. Still, he has continued to deliver criticism directly to Trump, according to the book. In a phone call this summer, he bemoaned Trump’s volatility and focus on voter fraud, telling the former president, “You f---ed your presidency up.” Trump abruptly hung up on him. A spokesman for Graham declined to comment.
The same day Graham met with Giuliani in the West Wing, Lee received a two-page memo from the White House marked “PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL.” It included a stunning claim — that Vice President Pence could hand the election to Trump because seven states had submitted dueling slates of electors to Congress, split between the incumbent and Joe Biden. Pence could simply set those states aside on Jan. 6 and count only electors from the remaining states, it claimed. “Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.”
That outcome was envisioned by John Eastman, the conservative legal scholar and author of the memo, titled, “January 6 scenario,” which was obtained for “Peril” and reviewed by The Washington Post.
Lee knew dueling electors were merely Trump loyalists putting themselves forward in certain states, in a move the authors describe as “a social media campaign — an amateur push with no legal standing.” Electors are generally bound by the popular vote in each state; because they sum to 538, an absolute majority of 270 is needed to clinch the presidency.
The authors suggest the senator, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, was surprised this theory had been circulated by Eastman, a professor at the Chapman University School of Law and former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. Document in hand, and bewildered that theories about dueling electors were still coming from Trump’s legal team, Lee made “phone call after phone call” to officials in some of the relevant states, such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona, he told constituents in a Jan. 27 online town hall, appearing to refer to the Eastman memo without naming its author. A spokesman for Lee did not respond to a request for comment.
No one seemed poised to certify a new slate of electors. “At that point, I believed that we had reached the end of the process, as indeed we had,” Lee said during the town hall.
The senator also explained his interpretation of the limited role the Constitution gave to Congress and the vice president in counting electoral votes — an interpretation in conflict with the one outlined by Eastman, who argued Pence could be the “ultimate arbiter” and either name Trump the president-elect or send the matter to the House.
Eastman even anticipated what “Peril” describes as “certain outrage and worry of a coup.” In the memo, however, he dismissed these concerns as, “Howls, of course, from the Democrats …”
Four days after his memo reached Lee, the law professor addressed Trump supporters outside the White House on Jan. 6. A week after that, Chapman University announced his immediate retirement from the Orange, Calif., school.
In an email to The Post, Eastman said his memo merely “explored all options that had been proposed.” Ultimately, his advice to Pence was not to act on the basis of the dueling electors, he added, because “at that point, no legislature had certified an alternative slate of electors.” Rather, he counseled the vice president to delay certification, Eastman said, by pointing to objections leveled by state legislators — a move Pence explored, according to “Peril,” but did not make.
Eastman’s remarks on Jan. 6, he said, were unplanned and designed to “fill a gap in the roster of speakers when the president’s arrival was delayed.”
Lee, for his part, said in a Fox News interview a month after the Jan. 6 riot that Trump deserved a “mulligan” for the speech he delivered encouraging his supporters to march on the Capitol, using a golf term for giving someone another try.
Claire McMullen contributed to this report.
By Isaac Stanley-Becker
Isaac Stanley-Becker is a national political reporter. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/20/peril-woodward-costa-graham-lee-fraud/
The Telegraph @Telegraph The 18-year-old gunman, who is believed to have injured more than 10 others, was killed at the scene, according to reports
9:12 AM · Sep 20, 2021·Twitter Web App
🔴The 18-year-old gunman, who is believed to have injured more than 10 others, was killed at the scene, according to reports
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 20, 2021
Five dead in shooting at Russian university as students climb out of windows
Sian Elvin
Monday 20 Sep 2021 8:20 am
https://metro.co.uk/2021/09/20/russia-university-shooting-three-shot-dead-at-perm-state-university-15284563/
...
Shocking scenes from a shooting in Russia show students climbing out of windows to escape a gunman.
Five are dead and at least six more are injured after the incident at Perm State University, according to the authorities.
Footage from the scene shows a person holding a weapon outside the university, who was later detained by police.
Students jumped from first-floor windows to escape the building, and landed heavily on the ground before running to safety.
People in the university’s auditorium were told to stay where they were and ‘shield’ while the incident was ongoing, and others were evacuated from campus.
Others were told to turn back if they were on their way to the university.
Russia’s Investigative Committee – the agency that handles major crimes – said the gunman had been identified as a student at the university.
Perm University, around 800 miles east of Moscow, is known for its medical excellence and is one of the oldest universities in Russia.
...
MORE
https://metro.co.uk/2021/09/20/russia-university-shooting-three-shot-dead-at-perm-state-university-15284563/
Simon Schama @simon_schama amazing bravery of the young
Yalda Hakim
@BBCYaldaHakim
· Sep 19
The Taliban have prohibited girls from secondary school in Afghanistan. In solidarity, many boys have been refusing to go to school themselves. “We don’t go to school without our sisters”, reads this sign.
THREAD
amazing bravery of the young https://t.co/LN9TqmmPgi
— Simon Schama (@simon_schama) September 19, 2021
East Antarctic summer cooling trends caused by tropical rainfall clusters
A new study identifies key linkages between rainfall occurring in the tropics and climate trends in Antarctica
Date:June 23, 2021
Source: Institute for Basic Science
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210623141711.htm
Summary:
A study uncovers a new mechanism linking climate trend in Antarctica to rainfall occurrences in the tropics.
FULL STORY
Our planet is warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions; but the warming differs from region to region, and it can also vary seasonally. Over the last four decades scientists have observed a persistent austral summer cooling on the eastern side of Antarctica. This puzzling feature has received world-wide attention, because it is not far away from one of the well-known global warming hotspots -- the Antarctic Peninsula.
A new study published in the journal Science Advances by a team of scientists from the IBS Center for Climate Physics at Pusan National University in South Korea, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Ewha Womans University, and National Taiwan University, uncovers a new mechanism that can explain the regional warming/cooling patchwork over Antarctica. At the heart of the mechanism are clusters of rainfall events in the western tropical Pacific, which release massive amounts of heat into the atmosphere by condensation of water vapor. Warm air rises over the organized rainfall clusters and sinks farther away. This pressure difference creates winds which are further influenced by the effect of earth's rotation. The interplay of these factors generates a large-scale atmospheric pressure wave which travels from west to east along the equator with a speed of about several hundred kilometers per day and which drags along with it the initial rainfall clusters. This propagating atmospheric wave is known as the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), named after Roland Madden and Paul Julian, who discovered this phenomenon in 1971. The characteristic atmospheric pressure, convection and wind anomalies, which fluctuate on timescales of 20-70 days, can extend into the extratropics, reaching even Antarctica.
The international research team arrived at their conclusions by analyzing observational datasets and specially designed supercomputer climate model simulations. "Our analysis provides clear evidence that tropical weather systems associated with the Madden-Julian Oscillation can directly impact surface temperatures over East Antarctica." says Prof. Pang-Chi Hsu from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, who co-led the study.
More specifically, as the MJO rainfall clusters move into the western Pacific towards the location of the Solomon Islands, the corresponding global atmospheric wave tends to cool East Antarctica three to eleven days later (Image, right panel). In contrast, when the MJO-related rainfall occurs in the Indian Ocean, East Antarctic shows a pronounced warming (Image, left panel).
"During recent decades, MJO rainfall and pressure changes preferably occurred over the western tropical Pacific but decreased over the Indian Ocean. This situation has favored cooling of East Antarctica during austral summer.," says Prof. June-Yi Lee from the IBS Center for Climate Physics and Pusan National University, and co-leader of the study.
The research team estimated that up to 20% to 40% of the observed summer cooling trend in East Antarctica from 1979 to 2014 can be attributed to the long-term changes in the character and longitudinal core location of the MJO. Other contributing factors include the ozone hole and the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation -- a slowly varying weaker companion of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The new Science Advances study highlights that climate change even in remote regions such as Antarctica, can be linked to processes that happen nearly 10,000 km away.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Institute for Basic Science. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
Pang-Chi Hsu, Zhen Fu, Hiroyuki Murakami, June-Yi Lee, Changhyun Yoo, Nathaniel C. Johnson, Chueh-Hsin Chang, Yu Liu,. East Antarctic cooling induced by decadal changes in Madden-Julian oscillation during austral summer. Science Advances, 2021 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abf9903
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210623141711.htm
Scientists Find “Surprising” And “Statistically Significant” Cooling Trend Over Entire Continental Antarctica
By P Gosselin on 17. September 2021
https://notrickszone.com/2021/09/17/scientists-find-surprising-and-statistically-significant-cooling-trend-over-entire-continental-antarctica/
Aaron Rupar @atrupar TAPPER: Governor, if Mississippi were a country, you would have the 2nd worst per capita death toll in the world. And I'm saying, are you going to do anything to try to change that?
TATE REEVES: Deaths unfortunately are a lagging indicator
VIDEO
TAPPER: Governor, if Mississippi were a country, you would have the 2nd worst per capita death toll in the world. And I'm saying, are you going to do anything to try to change that?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 19, 2021
TATE REEVES: Deaths unfortunately are a lagging indicator pic.twitter.com/uelbjQRqJo
TAPPER: Governor, if Mississippi were a country, you would have the 2nd worst per capita death toll in the world. And I'm saying, are you going to do anything to try to change that?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 19, 2021
TATE REEVES: Deaths unfortunately are a lagging indicator pic.twitter.com/uelbjQRqJo
Not a single person shows up for ‘Million Militia March,’ and state-capital protests fail badly too
David Neiwert
Daily Kos Staff
Monday January 18, 2021 · 7:51 PM GMT
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/1/18/2010122/-Not-a-single-person-shows-up-for-Million-Militia-March-and-state-capital-protests-fail-badly-too?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=Sendible&utm_campaign=RSS
All of the various right-wing “Million”-themed marches that have been organized over the past several years (such as December’s “Million MAGA March”) have fallen well short of the million people they claimed to rally—usually, they number at best in the tens of thousands. But Sunday’s planned “Million Militia March” was a failure of truly epic proportions: It seems no one showed up to march. Not a soul.
Similarly, worries about marches on various states’ Capitols around the nation turned out to be groundless when only tiny smatterings of armed militiamen showed up at a few of the events that pro-Donald Trump “Patriots” said they were planning in places such as Columbus, Ohio, and Salem, Oregon. Both failures suggest that the American radical right is now in utter disarray, at least for the time being.
The plans for the Washington march, coming on the heels of the January 6 insurrection attempt at the Capitol by the same crowd of violent far-right Trump supporters, were supposed to represent a kind of “Round 2” for their attempt to overturn the results of the November election by falsely claiming the vote was riddled with fraud.
However, the organizers were surrounded in chaos and incompetence—unable to settle on a date, disagreements over the focus of the march, and claiming the state-capital protests were actually “false flags” organized by the “Deep State” as a way of urging greater attendance. Those same accusations were then laid against them by organizers of the state-level protests.
Attendance was probably also significantly dampened by the wave of arrests of key leading figures in the January 6 insurrection. Major militia groups such as the Oath Keepers and III Percenters are currently the focus of an FBI investigation. Livestreaming alt-right figure Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet was arrested Saturday for his prominent role in the insurrection.
On Saturday, Cuoy Griffin, the New Mexico county commissioner who heads up “Cowboys for Trump,” was arrested for his role participating in the Capitol takeover. Griffin, who was retweeted by Trump in May for saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” had also boasted that he intended to bring his guns to Biden’s inauguration.
The chaos resulted in a complete no-show Sunday, exacerbated by the extraordinary security measures now in place around the Capitol in anticipation of Wednesday’s Inauguration for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. A RawsMedia tweet Sunday showed the streets around the Capitol Mall completely empty, primarily due to security measures, with not a single peep from any far-right protesters.
The situation at most state capitals was roughly the same, despite the plans announced by angry MAGA fans during the week before:
* In Columbus, Ohio, about a dozen militiamen showed up to march. Most of these men were affiliated with the “Boogaloo” civil-war movement, and they claimed they had nothing to do with the insurrection in Washington.
* The scene in Lansing, Michigan, was similar: A smattering of “Patriot” protesters standing outside thoroughly guarded Capitol grounds, shouting a few slogans and utterly impotent.
* In Salem, Oregon, protesters were outnumbered 3-to-1 by the members of the media who were there to cover them.
* In Olympia, Washington, which had seen several protests around January 6, the grounds of the state Capitol were essentially deserted on Sunday.
* Perhaps the most pathetic state-capital protest was in Trenton, New Jersey, where a single protester showed up with a sign that he eventually abandoned on a sidewalk.
The decidedly low energy for these events is reflective of the disarray that has descended on American radical-right circles ever since the January 6 riots. As Alexander Reid Ross described at Daily Beast, alt-right white supremacists have engaged in extensive bickering over the mess, accusing each other of being federal informants and traitors to the cause, as well as con artists.
“Eric Striker and other movement f**s want you to join a public group to grift off of you and other naïve whites,” commented one white supremacist on Telegram, “and when these naïve whites get arrested for doing stupid public shit, Striker and the other grifting movement fags kick these naïve whites to the curb without hesitation, thought, or remorse for their own actions which got these naïve whites into trouble in the first place. Think about that.”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/1/18/2010122/-Not-a-single-person-shows-up-for-Million-Militia-March-and-state-capital-protests-fail-badly-too?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=Sendible&utm_campaign=RSS