Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Dominion Sues Newsmax, OAN And Ex-Overstock CEO Byrne In New Defamation Suits Over Election Conspiracy Theory
Alison Durkee Forbes Staff
Aug 10, 2021,09:01am EDT|Updated Aug 10, 2021, 09:40am EDT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/08/10/dominion-sues-newsmax-oann-and-ex-overstock-ceo-byrne-in-new-defamation-suits-over-election-conspiracy-theory/?sh=2c3f18a95440
TOPLINE
Dominion Voting Systems sued Newsmax, One America News Network (OAN) and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne Tuesday for defamation after the far-right networks and businessman spread conspiracy theories about the election involving the company’s voting machines, the latest in a series of billion-dollar lawsuits Dominion has filed in the wake of the 2020 election.
KEY FACTS
OAN and Newsmax "helped create and cultivate an alternate reality where up is down, pigs have wings, and Dominion engaged in a colossal fraud to steal the presidency from Donald Trump by rigging the vote,” Dominion alleged, suing the networks along with OAN anchors Chanel Rion and Christina Bobb.
The voting machine company alleged the far-right networks “manufactured, endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies” about Dominion and its machines despite knowing the claims were false, including by “broadcasting and promoting” interviews with far-right figures Dominion has already sued like far-right attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and MyPillowCEO Mike Lindell.
Newsmax—which unlike OAN and Byrne was sued in Delaware state court instead of federal court—“created an entire brand out of defaming Dominion,” the company alleged, pointing to anchor Greg Kelly’s segment “Democracy or Dominion,” while OAN similarly aired election fraud documentaries by Lindell and began a line of programming named “Dominion-ing the Vote.”
Byrne, the former Overstock CEO who has more recently become known for spreading election conspiracy theories, “manufactured and promoted fake evidence to convince the world that the 2020 election had been stolen” including through Dominion voting machines, Dominion alleged.
Byrne “bankrolled and promoted...facially implausible conspiracy theorists” including Russell Ramsland and Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan—who’s leading the election audit in Arizona—who have “manufacture[d]” lies about the election involving Dominion voting machines, the company alleged, noting former President Donald Trump’s advisors cut off Byrne’s access to Trump over his false claims.
The ex-Overstock chief “is far too intelligent to buy the nonsense he has been selling to the American public,” Dominion alleges, claiming Byrne stands to profit from Dominion’s failure after investing millions in blockchain voting technology “which can succeed only if voters and elected officials reject the auditable paper-based voting systems” Dominion uses.
BIG NUMBER
$1.6 billion. That’s approximately how much Dominion is asking for in damages from Byrne, Newsmax and OANN—more than the $1.3 billion figure the voting machine company has asked from Powell, Giuliani and Lindell, and the same figure they’ve asked from Fox News.
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“The defendants in today's filings recklessly disregarded the truth when they spread lies in November and continue to do so today. We are filing these three cases today because the defendants named show no remorse, nor any sign they intend to stop spreading disinformation,” Dominion CEO John Poulos said in a statement Tuesday. “We have no choice but to seek to hold those responsible to account.”
CHIEF CRITIC
Newsmax said in a statement to Forbes Tuesday that while it “has not reviewed the Dominion filing, in its coverage of the 2020 Presidential elections, Newsmax simply reported on allegations made by well-known public figures,” calling the lawsuit “a clear attempt to squelch such reporting and undermine a free press.” OAN has not yet responded to a request for comment.
KEY BACKGROUND
Dominion’s lawsuits Tuesday are the fifth, sixth and seventh the voting machine company has filed, after the conspiracy theory involving the company’s voting machines took hold on the far-right in the wake of the election. The company has also filed lawsuits against Powell, Giuliani, Lindell and MyPillow and Fox News.
FURTHER READING
After Lawsuit Against Fox News, Here’s Who Dominion Has Sued So Far—And Who Could Be Next (Forbes)
The Exclusive Inside Story Of The Fall Of Overstock’s Mad King, Patrick Byrne (Forbes)
Follow me on Twitter. Send me a secure tip.
Alison Durkee
I am a New York-based journalist covering breaking news at Forbes. I previously covered politics and news for Vanity Fair and Mic, and as a theater critic I serve as a… Read More
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/08/10/dominion-sues-newsmax-oann-and-ex-overstock-ceo-byrne-in-new-defamation-suits-over-election-conspiracy-theory/?sh=2c3f18a95440
Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1 Breaking: Dominion Voting Systems is suing Newsmax, One America News Network, and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne for defamation.
Dominion is seeking more than $1.6 billion in damages.
2:30 PM · Aug 10, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Breaking: Dominion Voting Systems is suing Newsmax, One America News Network, and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne for defamation.
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 10, 2021
Dominion is seeking more than $1.6 billion in damages.
Texas governor appeals for out-of-state help to fight latest Covid wave
Two more of the state’s largest school districts announced mask mandates as a county-owned hospital in Houston raised tents
Associated Press
Tue 10 Aug 2021 13.31 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/10/texas-coronavirus-covid-delta-cases-hospitals-mask-mandates
The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, appealed for out-of-state help to fight the third wave of Covid-19 in his state amid dire warnings while two more of the state’s largest school districts announced mask mandates in defiance of the increasingly hardline Republican.
Abbott’s request came on Monday as a county-owned hospital in Houston raised tents to accommodate their coronavirus patient overflow.
Private hospitals in the county already were requiring their staff to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Meanwhile, the Dallas and Austin school districts announced Monday that they would require students and staff to wear face masks. The Houston school district already announced a mask mandate for its students and staff later this week if its board approves.
The highly contagious Delta variant is fueling the wave.
The Republican governor has directed the Texas department of state health services to use staffing agencies to find additional medical staff from beyond the state’s borders as the Delta wave began to overwhelm its present staffing resources.
He also has sent a letter to the Texas Hospital Association to request that hospitals postpone all elective medical procedures voluntarily.
Hospital officials in Houston said last week that area hospitals with beds had insufficient numbers of nurses to serve them.
Abbott also directed the state health department and the Texas division of emergency management to open additional Covid-19 antibody infusion centers to treat patients not needing hospital care and expand vaccine availability to the state’s underserved communities.
He also announced about $267m in emergency Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program food benefits for August. That was on top of the $3.9bn in benefits previously allocated since April 2020.
The governor is taking action short of lifting his emergency order banning county and local government entities from requiring the wearing of masks and social distancing to lower the Covid-19 risk.
Abbott has said repeatedly that Texans have the information and intelligence to make their own decisions on what steps to take to protect their health and the health of those around them.
Dallas county judge Clay Jenkins filed a lawsuit asking a judge to strike down Abbott’s mask mandate ban. Meantime, one of Houston’s two county-owned hospitals, Harris Health System and Lyndon B Johnson hospital in north-eastern Houston, added nearly 2,000 sq ft of medical tents in the hope of taking control of the anticipated increase in patient volume and keep staff and non-Covid patients safe.
Last week, Houston area officials said the wave of Delta variant infections so strained the area’s hospitals that some patients had to be transferred out of the city, with one being sent to North Dakota.
The rolling two-week daily average of new Covid-19 cases in Texas has increased by 165% to 8,533, according to Johns Hopkins University research data.
About 45% of the state’s population has been vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/10/texas-coronavirus-covid-delta-cases-hospitals-mask-mandates
Florida Asks for Hundreds More Ventilators as COVID-19 Cases Spiral, Says Report
GETTING WORSE
Jamie Ross News Correspondent
Published Aug. 10, 2021 8:57AM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/florida-asks-for-hundreds-more-ventilators-as-covid-19-cases-spiral-says-report?via=twitter_page
While Gov. Ron DeSantis carries on with his tough-guy act of telling President Joe Biden to keep out of Florida’s worsening coronavirus crisis, the state has reportedly asked the federal government for urgent help. According to Local10, Florida’s Department of Health and Human Services asked the federal government for 300 ventilators on Friday as it dealt with a record-breaking surge of new coronavirus cases. A document seen by the network said more machines—which are expected to be delivered this week—were needed “to replace expended state stores.” Figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that 56,633 new coronavirus cases were recorded over the past two days, but Florida’s health department disputed those figures and gave its own, much-lower total.
Read it at Local10 https://www.local10.com/news/local/2021/08/09/florida-sets-another-covid-case-record-as-hospitals-face-sheer-exhaustion/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/florida-asks-for-hundreds-more-ventilators-as-covid-19-cases-spiral-says-report?via=twitter_page
Ryan Goodman @rgoodlaw·27m I'm surprised this has not been covered by main press.
On Monday, @USGAO released a report — critical of DHS's failure to designate #January6th as specially protected event before the attack.
@justinhendrix and I just published this explanation
GAO Faults DHS for Failing to Designate Jan. 6 as a Protected Event in Advance of Attack
Department erroneously considered activities at the Capitol “routine congressional business,” GAO report says
https://www.justsecurity.org/77709/gao-faults-dhs-for-failing-to-designate-jan-6-as-a-protected-event-in-advance-of-attack/
1:20 PM · Aug 10, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
I'm surprised this has not been covered by main press.
— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) August 10, 2021
On Monday, @USGAO released a report — critical of DHS's failure to designate #January6th as specially protected event before the attack.@justinhendrix and I just published this explanationhttps://t.co/HTLNHNigbP
Voting Machine Tampering Is Coming From Inside The MAGA House
Colorado County Clerk Tina Peters May Have Committed The Very Crime She Accused The Left Of Committing
by TIM MILLER
AUGUST 9, 2021 4:24 PM
https://www.thebulwark.com/voting-machine-tampering-is-coming-from-inside-the-maga-house/
“The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” – Hal Holbrook
After months of being promised by the former President and his stooges that Dominion Voting Systems had RIGGED the election, we finally have our first credible investigation into voting machine tampering.
The lede in Monday’s Grand Junction Sentinel brings the Kraken: “The Mesa County Clerk’s Office is under investigation…for a breach in security over its election system.”
A breach! It’s Happening!!!
But no, the breach wasn’t coming from the anti-Trump deep state. Instead, the clerk who is under investigation for tampering with the county election system is Tina Peters, a fervent supporter of Donald Trump and amateur vaccine science aficionado, who appears to have executed a self-own of historic proportion.
Last week Gateway Pundit reported that Q himself… errr “CodeMonkeyZ” Ron Watkins…posted a video and a few screenshots to his Telegram that had been provided by a “whistleblower.” The posts were supposed to demonstrate that Dominion Voting Systems machines could in fact be connected to the internet, which is a necessary but not sufficient element in support of their bat guano theory of election fraud.
The grainy, shaky video presented a conversation between an election official and a Dominion employee, in which the election official asks a series of leading questions in order to demonstrate how, with the help of someone on the inside, the machine could hypothetically be tampered with over the internet using the BIOS motherboard settings.
When the official shared this “bombshell” video with CodeMonkey Watkins they included in it an image of their election system’s BIOS password, which is, of course, a massive breach of voting system security.
And in doing so they stepped on a pretty large rake – because the password in the video was unique, which allowed the Colorado Secretary of State’s office to identify which county the leak came from and during which meeting it was recorded.
Oops.
It turns out the election hacker was not Antifa or a Hugo Chavez apparition but a real live human in the office of Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters.
Peters was not exactly a surprising suspect. She had previously gained notoriety through a series of social media posts during the January 6th insurrection that attested to how easy it might be for a criminal to tamper with election equipment. This latest leak appears to have been an attempt to verify her premise.
Her posts shamed Republican Senators like Pat Toomey who were not going along with President Trump’s effort to overturn the result of the November election with the fervor that she had hoped. Among her since-deleted tweets,
“Their intent is not to ‘overturn’ the election. This was not an election. This was planned fraud on a grand scale. If you refuse to acknowledge that you WILL NOT be re-elected. We need others in your place that uphold the Constitution and preserve our Republic.”“Shame on you! As one that administers elections in my county, you apparently have no idea how it is possible to 1) tabulate more than once ballots favoring a candidate 2) change algorithm in a voting machine (see Eric Coomer from Dominion’s Facebook ranks) UR Dirty or ignorant.”“You would be wise to learn the Constitution that you swore to uphold and to protect us from enemies ‘foreign and domestic.’”“Also, the vaccines are troubling in the mechanics in the RNA. I don’t want anyone messing with my RNA, my DNA or anything else – MY BODY, my right!”While it is not yet clear whether Peters herself was involved in the breach, the tweets certainly indicate she was sympathetic to the Gateway Pundit/Qanon/CodeMonkey worldview. And according to the Sentinel, the “security information” that was posted was only accessible by “state and county election workers who have passed background checks,” meaning it was sourced from one of a very small number of people in her office.
In short, in an attempt to demonstrate that Donald Trump was still the rightful president, a county clerk tweeted that the election machines she was in charge of overseeing were in fact vulnerable, and in order to prove it someone in her office allegedly carried out the very breach she was falsely claiming must have been committed by anti-Trump forces.
Now that’s some legendary criming.
It doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence to know that it is people like Peters who will be in places of authority the next time Trump or an acolyte tries to steal an election.
https://www.thebulwark.com/voting-machine-tampering-is-coming-from-inside-the-maga-house/
Trump was ‘in pain and afraid’ during post-Covid display of bravado, niece’s book says
Mary Trump’s new book The Reckoning, seen by the Guardian, describes a national trauma worsened by her uncle
David Smith in Washington
@smithinamerica
Tue 10 Aug 2021 06.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/09/trump-covid-coronavirus-mary-trump-book-the-reckoning
Donald Trump was “afraid” when he put on a display of bravado at the White House after being treated for a severe coronavirus infection, his estranged niece Mary Trump has claimed.
The then US president had a pained expression that Mary recognised from her grandmother, but dared not admit his fear even to himself, she recalls in a scathing new book seen by the Guardian.
The Reckoning argues that the US is suffering a national trauma manifest in rising levels of rage and hatred and exacerbated by her uncle’s assault on democracy. It follows the psychologist’s memoir, Too Much and Never Enough, which portrayed Trump as the product of a dysfunctional family.
Last October Trump was discharged from a military hospital after three days of treatment and made a typically theatrical return to the White House, landing on the south lawn and climbing a grand exterior staircase to the Truman balcony.
“Doing his best Mussolini imitation, he took off his mask in a macho display of invulnerability,” Mary writes. “He clenched his teeth and jutted out his jaw, just as my grandmother did when she was biting back anger or clamping down on her pain. In Donald, I saw the latter.”
She adds: “I have asthma, so I am acutely aware of what it looks like when somebody is struggling to breathe. He was in pain, he was afraid, but he would never admit that to anybody – not even himself. Because, as always, the consequences of admitting vulnerability were much more frightening to him than being honest.”
For all the outward show, Trump was more severely ill than the White House admitted at the time, with depressed blood oxygen levels and a lung problem associated with pneumonia, according to a February report in the New York Times. Some officials were worried that he would need to be put on a ventilator.
Mary eviscerates Trump’s handling of the pandemic and, reflecting on his turbulent presidency, links his “unrestrained antisemitism and homophobia” to deadly violence in America and beyond. She argues that while the president was incompetent, others in his administration built a “lean and ruthless machine for advancing fascism”.
Mary, 56, has become one of her uncle’s most trenchant critics and says she does not love him. She has written memorably about family dinners in the Trump household, highlighting the coldness of her “sociopath” grandfather Fred, who was Donald’s father. Mary voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and last spoke to Donald at her aunt’s birthday party at the White House in April 2017.
At that point she was “in the worst psychological shape of my life”, she writes in the book, and several months later she sought treatment at a centre in Tucson, Arizona, that specialises in post-traumatic stress disorder. “I would be there for weeks, excavating decades-old wounds and trying to figure out why my uncle Donald’s elevation to the White House had so undone me.”
She was desperate to remain anonymous at the centre where, fortunately, people did not reveal their last names. “Even so, I found it unthinkable that anyone should find out who I was or, more relevantly, who my uncle was. Long before my uncle had entered the political realm, I had never admitted to anyone that I belonged to the Trump family.”
With Too Much and Never Enough, which sold nearly a million copies on its first day of publication, Mary became the first member of the family to publish a Donald Trump biography. She has since been a frequent interviewee on cable news and vocal supporter of Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign against Trump.
In The Reckoning, she widens the lens, contending that it is “almost impossible to grow up white in America and not be racist” and that Trump “is the symptom of a disease that has existed in the body politic from this country’s inception” but that has now “metastasized”.
She adds a stark warning: “From increasing levels of rage and hatred on the one side to increasing levels of helplessness, stress, and despair on the other, we are heading toward an even darker period in our nation’s history.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/09/trump-covid-coronavirus-mary-trump-book-the-reckoning
A U.S. scientist settled his federal whistle-blowing complaint over Covid treatments.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Aug. 9, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/us/politics/rick-bright-whistleblower.html
Rick Bright, the virologist who claimed the Trump administration retaliated against him last year by ousting him from his job, has settled his whistle-blower complaint against the federal government and will receive back pay and compensation for “emotional stress and reputational damage,” his lawyer said Monday.
Dr. Bright’s removal last April as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency created upheaval within the Department of Health and Human Services in the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic.
He said he was removed from his post after he pressed for rigorous vetting of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug embraced by President Donald J. Trump as a coronavirus treatment, and that the administration had put “politics and cronyism ahead of science.”
Those allegations are still being investigated by the Office of Special Counsel, which protects federal whistle-blowers. Under Mr. Trump, H.H.S. officials denied any wrongdoing.
The Biden administration confirmed the settlement of the case on Monday in a statement praising Dr. Bright, who advised President Biden during his transition.
“The agency would like to thank Dr. Bright for his dedicated public service and for the contributions he made to addressing the Covid-19 pandemic while he served as BARDA director,” the statement said. “We wish him well in his new endeavors.”
Neither side disclosed details or specifics of the settlement. But Dr. Bright’s lawyer, Debra S. Katz, said her client had been compensated to the fullest extent allowed by the law. She said he will receive back pay, as well as damages to cover the costs of private security and temporary housing that he required after receiving threats. He will also receive compensation, Ms. Katz said, for distress “associated with the disparaging comments and threats” made by administration officials including Mr. Trump, who had blasted Dr. Bright on Twitter as a “creep” and a “disgruntled employee.”
Dr. Bright now works for the Rockefeller Foundation, where he is developing a new institute devoted to pandemic prevention that will function as a hub for scientists in government, the private sector and academia. The goal is to identify new pathogens, he said in an interview. He said he was glad to have the episode behind him.
“Going through the assault that I experienced from the last administration, going through the public criticism from the White House and H.H.S. leadership when I was just trying to do my job, put a lot of stress on me,” he said. “They were trying to find anything they could to disparage me and discredit me.”
After clashing with his bosses, Dr. Bright was assigned to a narrower role at the National Institutes of Health to work on a “Shark Tank”-style program to develop coronavirus treatments. He later went on sick leave because of hypertension, a spokeswoman said at the time. In the interview Monday, Dr. Bright said that at the height of the controversy, he also received a diagnosis of skin cancer.
Ultimately, he quit the government — a departure that Ms. Katz characterized as effectively a termination, because, she said, he had not been given any meaningful work.
Ms. Katz said the settlement was especially satisfying to her. “Many times, whistle-blowers come forward and that’s the end of their career,” she said. But Dr. Bright, she said, has “gone from being persona non grata under the Trump administration to being a respected and important subject matter expert.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg is a Washington Correspondent covering health policy. In more than two decades at The Times, she has also covered the White House, Congress and national politics. Previously, at The Los Angeles Times, she shared in two Pulitzer Prizes won by that newspaper’s Metro staff. @SherylNYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/us/politics/rick-bright-whistleblower.html
Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD @PeterHotez ·43m Looks like COVID-19 now steeply accelerating in #Kentucky, over last 14 days +165% increase in cases and +128% increase in hospitalizations, overwhelmingly among unvaccinated. So please be on the lookout for disinformation, or what we call "weaponized health communication"
Quote Tweet
Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski
· 16h
Rand Paul today: “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us .. No one should follow the CDC.” He then says he will introduce amendments to defund any govt agency that seeks to enforce CDC guidelines, including schools.
Show this thread
Rand Paul today: “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us .. No one should follow the CDC.” He then says he will introduce amendments to defund any govt agency that seeks to enforce CDC guidelines, including schools. pic.twitter.com/PYOQtKDYBN
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 9, 2021
Looks like COVID-19 now steeply accelerating in #Kentucky, over last 14 days +165% increase in cases and +128% increase in hospitalizations, overwhelmingly among unvaccinated. So please be on the lookout for disinformation, or what we call "weaponized health communication" https://t.co/FNttv0KJAL
— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) August 9, 2021
Piers Morgan @piersmorgan I can’t get over this story. Three members of the same family dead because they believed all the crazy anti-vaxxer nonsense so didn’t get jabbed. Sad & insane.
Daily Mail U.K.
@DailyMailUK
· 9m
Covid wipes out anti-vaxxer family: Son loses father, 73, mother, 65, and brother, 40, to virus within a week
https://trib.al/jo30gxe
7:05 PM · Aug 9, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
I can’t get over this story.
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) August 9, 2021
Three members of the same family dead because they believed all the crazy anti-vaxxer nonsense so didn’t get jabbed. Sad & insane. https://t.co/JLdOAK9JPC
Biden administration takes fresh action against Belarus' Lukashenko
Trevor Hunnicutt
Daphne Psaledakis
August 9, 2021 4:07 PM BST
Last Updated 3 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/biden-administration-set-impose-new-sanctions-belarus-official-2021-08-09/
WASHINGTON, Aug 9 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday signed an executive order imposing new measures aimed at punishing Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko as the United States steps up pressure against his government in coordinated action with the United Kingdom and Canada.
On the anniversary of the presidential election Lukashenko is accused of rigging, the United States will also issue its largest round of sanctions to date on Belarusian individuals and entities, targeting the country's economy and the Belarusian National Olympic Committee, a White House official said.
The U.S. Treasury Department will blacklist Belaruskali OAO, which the official said is one of Belarus’ largest state-owned enterprises and one of the world’s largest producers of potash, which is used in fertilizers and is Belarus' main foreign currency earner.
The Belarusian National Olympic Committee will also be hit with sanctions in Monday's action, the official said, over accusations it facilitated money laundering, sanctions evasion, and the circumvention of visa bans.
The action comes after Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya refused to board a flight home during the Olympics after she was taken to the airport against her wishes. She has since sought refugee status in Poland.
Western governments have sought to escalate their pressure on Lukashenko, who is accused of rigging elections in August 2020 and cracking down on the opposition to prolong his now 27 years in power. Lukashenko has denied rigging the vote.
Tens of thousands of people joined street protests in 2020 -- Lukashenko's biggest challenge since he became president in 1994. He responded with a crackdown in which many opponents have been arrested or gone into exile. They deny planning a coup.
Britain announced its new sanctions on Monday, targeting exports of oil products and potash. Lukashenko said Britain would "choke" on its measures and that he was ready for talks with the West instead of a sanctions war.
Canada also imposed new sanctions on Belarus to protest what it called the "gross and systematic violations of human rights" under Lukashenko.
Read More https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/canada-imposes-new-sanctions-belarus-targets-financial-sector-2021-08-09/
Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Daphne Psaledakis and Humeyra Pamuk; Writing by Daphne Psaledakis; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/biden-administration-set-impose-new-sanctions-belarus-official-2021-08-09/
Choose your own Fox News: The network edited out Trump’s election lie from an interview — then uploaded a second version with the lie back in
WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD
PUBLISHED 08/09/21 12:49 PM EDT
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/choose-your-own-fox-news-network-edited-out-trumps-election-lie-interview-then-uploaded
Fox News was publicly caught over the weekend attempting to edit out false claims that former President Donald Trump made in a phone interview — ironically enough, on a program called Unfiltered with Dan Bongino — from the version the network posted on YouTube and its own site. And now, faced with backlash from a problem of the network’s own making by even having Trump on the air in the first place, Fox has set up a Choose Your Own Adventure pathway: A person can watch Trump with his election lie, or without it.
Fox is currently being sued for billions of dollars by two voting machine companies over the network’s role in helping to spread lies about the 2020 election. In addition, YouTube has previously banned content that spreads baseless claims of voter fraud to deny the 2020 election’s legitimacy, in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. (YouTube’s enforcement has been spotty, though.)
As Mediaite documented on Sunday, Fox News clearly edited out Trump’s claims of a “fake election” from the videos it posted online — otherwise posting the entire interview, but cutting out approximately five seconds.
Here was Trump during the live broadcast on Saturday, threatening that the country would not “stand for it much longer” against the “fake election”:
VIDEO
From the August 7, 2021, edition of Fox News’ Unfiltered with Dan Bongino
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s a disgrace what’s happening, and I don’t think the country’s going to stand for it much longer, they are disgusted. You have a fake election, you have an election with voter abuse and voter fraud like nobody’s ever seen before, and based on that, and based on what happened, they are destroying our country, whether it’s at the border, whether it’s on crime, I could say in plenty of instances, including military.
And here is the edited version that Fox posted to YouTube, as well as on its own website, in which Trump’s words became a more generalized complaint about conservative grievances:
VIDEO
Citation
From the August 7, 2021, edition of Fox News’ Unfiltered with Dan Bongino — via Fox News’ YouTube account
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s a disgrace what’s happening, and I don’t think the country’s going to stand for it much longer, they are disgusted. They are destroying our country, whether it’s at the border, whether it’s on crime, I could say in plenty of instances, including military.
Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington, who has vocally promoted the defeated president’s election lies, then took to Twitter to attack both Fox News as a company for having put Trump’s “honest statement” down an Orwellian “Memory Hole” — and host Dan Bongino personally, telling him in a since-deleted tweet (preserved in screen grabs by Mediaite) that his show ought to be called “FILTERED” instead.
Bongino then responded to Harrington, promising that he was “looking into it,” and complaining that he “wasn’t even contacted BEFORE” Harrington attacked him. “I’ve been a staunch ally to President Trump from the beginning, even when others sold him out,” the Fox host wrote.
Harrington followed up on Twitter Sunday night — interestingly enough, by taking down and then posting a new version of her “Memory Hole” tweet — shifting the blame entirely onto the network. “This had nothing to do with @danbongino,” she wrote, further adding: “It was @FoxNews who cut out President Trump's statement about the Fake Election, just like they have cut out coverage of election fraud ever since.”
...
MUCH MORE
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/choose-your-own-fox-news-network-edited-out-trumps-election-lie-interview-then-uploaded
Job growth so strong, the GOP is (literally) at a loss for words
For months, Republicans tried to draw a direct connection between the White House's economic agenda. As it turns out, that wasn't a good idea.
Aug. 9, 2021, 2:22 PM BST
By Steve Benen
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/job-growth-so-strong-gop-literally-loss-words-n1276329
It was around this time a few months ago when the public first saw the report on April's job growth. At face value, the numbers looked quite good: 269,000 jobs were created that month, which under normal circumstances, would've constituted a terrific total.
But there's nothing normal about the circumstances, and April's numbers were a bitter disappointment. Since most analysts expected far more robust growth, Republicans immediately pounced, blaming President Biden and congressional Democrats for the economic setback. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) released this press statement soon after the data was released:
"Today's disappointing jobs report confirms once again that President Biden's tax-and-spend policies are bad for American workers, families, and small businesses.... Experts are calling this jobs report the 'worst miss in 23 years', and it was a direct result of President Biden's counterproductive policies. So President Biden is not fixing a crisis, but creating new ones."
In the days that followed, McCarthy continued to make a direct connection between the White House's economic agenda and the U.S. job market. A week after April numbers were released, the House GOP leader again argued, "President Biden and Democrats will make excuses for this abysmal reality, but the truth is their own massive spending agenda created this problem." McCarthy specifically pointed to Democratic unemployment benefits as "one of the main causes of the striking predicament our country has found itself in."
It wasn't just McCarthy. The Republican National Committee connected Biden's policies and job growth over and over and over again.
There was just one small problem with this strategy: it was apparently based on the idea that the U.S. job market would continue to fall short for the indefinite future.
That assumption was shattered on Friday morning, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy created 943,000 new jobs in July and the unemployment rate dropped to its lowest point since the start of the pandemic. Harvard's Jason Furman, an economist who isn't prone to exaggeration, said, "I have yet to find a blemish in this jobs report. I've never before seen such a wonderful set of economic data."
And that in turn got me thinking about the Republican efforts from the spring to draw a straight line between Biden's agenda and the domestic job market. What would Kevin McCarthy and the RNC have to say about the Democratic president and the nation's robust growth in American jobs?
As it turns out, nothing. McCarthy and the RNC didn't bother to note the good news at all. Job growth proved to be so strong that Republican officials were literally at a loss for words.
The only meaningful acknowledgement of Friday's jobs report from Republican leaders was on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) website, which as of Friday afternoon, blamed "persistent unemployment" on Democrats. Over the weekend, the phrase was quietly removed.
As for Donald Trump, the good news is, he acknowledged during his latest Fox News appearance that the economy under Biden is improving. The bad news is, the former president -- who swore for months that the economy would collapse if Biden took office -- insisted he deserves the credit for recent gains.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/job-growth-so-strong-gop-literally-loss-words-n1276329
VoteVets @votevets What’s that, @RandPaul? Why are you endangering American lives on purpose? For soundbites? Why get vaccinated and then tell other people that they shouldn’t? What’s your endgame?
1:56 PM · Aug 9, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
twitter.com/votevets/status/1424716105365479449
Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski
Rand Paul today: “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us .. No one should follow the CDC.” He then says he will introduce amendments to defund any govt agency that seeks to enforce CDC guidelines, including schools.
VIDEO
Rand Paul today: “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us .. No one should follow the CDC.” He then says he will introduce amendments to defund any govt agency that seeks to enforce CDC guidelines, including schools. pic.twitter.com/PYOQtKDYBN
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 9, 2021
I spoke to 13 campaign finance experts for this article. They were all stunned. And they said it appears illegal.
Roger Sollenberger
@SollenbergerRC
· 35m Replying to
@SollenbergerRC
THREAD
https://twitter.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1424707459495628801
GOP Cash Machine’s Behavior Is ‘Nothing Short of Scandalous’
Roger Sollenberger
Mon, 9 August 2021, 9:52 am·8-min read
https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/gop-cash-machine-behavior-nothing-085226313.html
WinRed PAC, the for-profit Republican fundraising juggernaut, raised more than $2.24 billion for GOP campaigns and committees in the 2020 election. But somehow, that gargantuan undertaking appears to have cost the PAC almost nothing.
As the old saw goes, it takes money to make money. According to the 13 campaign finance experts interviewed for this article, WinRed has not disclosed possibly tens of millions of dollars in PAC expenses. In doing so, WinRed, which Republican leaders forced on campaigns in the 2020 election, has kept secret the identities of the people and firms who work for it and provide its services. According to these experts, based on WinRed’s disclosures, the PAC appears to have potentially crossed the blurry lines of federal campaign finance laws.
Former FEC commissioner Ann Ravel reviewed WinRed’s filings, and called them “absurd” and “nothing short of scandalous.”
“I can’t think of any mechanism or loophole that would permit this. Really.” Ravel, who stepped down from the agency in 2017, told The Daily Beast. “It has the appearance of being, if not outright fraudulent, at least not complying with the intent of disclosure laws. On its face that’s what any reasonable federal auditor would think.”
“This isn’t like anything we’ve seen on this scale,” Jordan Libowitz, communications director for government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told The Daily Beast upon CREW’s extensive legal review of the disclosures. “With the publicly available information we have, it appears potentially illegal.”
PACs are required by law to disclose their expenses. ActBlue—WinRed’s Democratic non-profit counterpart—reports a range of costs common to virtually all functional PACs. Those payments cover expenses like staff salaries, transaction fees, travel and meals, Uber rides, rent, administrative costs, communications, legal and accounting work, payroll taxes, and bank fees.
WinRed’s PAC claims to pay for none of those things.
Disclosure is the heart of campaign finance law. And if WinRed doesn’t disclose its expenses, that means donors, campaigns, regulators, and the public cannot see who the organization pays.
But according to filings with the Federal Election Commission, the PAC paid a grand total of $1,522.55 for the 2020 election. All of that meager amount went to its sister company, a for-profit corporation called WinRed Technical Services LLC, for “merchandise.”
Over the same period, ActBlue—a nonprofit—raised double that amount, $4.4 billion. It reported spending a little over $42 million on operating costs, about one percent of its total. To put that in perspective, WinRed PAC’s $1,502.55 budget was around 3.57 thousandths of 1 percent the size of ActBlue’s. If WinRed expended 1 percent of its $2.24 billion—ActBlue’s approximate rate—its operating budget would be $22.4 million. (ActBlue declined to comment for this article.)
WinRed’s reports baffled all the campaign finance experts consulted by The Daily Beast, some of whom declined to comment on the record, citing possible conflicts of interest.
Michael Kang, endowed professor of law at Northwestern University, said the PAC is “on shaky legal ground in almost every respect.” Tim Werner, election law specialist at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business, said it appears to be “an incredible grift.” Norm Eisen, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, called it “highly unusual” and pointed to the “striking” contrast with ActBlue’s transparency.
“It’s hard to understand how a PAC of this volume could operate with such minimal expenses,” Eisen said. “It’s so unusual that it’s incumbent upon WinRed to answer these questions. And if they won’t do so, the FEC should make them.”
A spokesperson with WinRed’s public affairs firm—Bullpen Strategy Group—did not answer detailed questions about WinRed’s reporting, with four days of follow-ups. That firm, which the spokesperson said in an email fields questions for the PAC, doesn’t appear on its expenses.
The core issue, campaign finance specialists say, appears to lie with WinRed PAC’s relationship to its sister corporation—WinRed Technical Services LLC. In theory, it is supposed to pass along donations to various Republican candidates.
As WinRed’s website explains it, “Donations made on our platform go to the WinRed PAC and then get transfered [sic] directly to the candidate you want it to go to.”
But the relationship is far more complicated. WinRed’s for-profit arm, WinRed Technical Services (WTS), provides and maintains the technological infrastructure, as well as WinRed’s website and its fundraising landing pages. It also processes and forwards the contributions to the PAC, and acts as a sort of combo merchant bank-billing service between campaigns and their vendors.
The setup is so tangled that it has tripped up veteran Republican campaign treasurers.
The Republican Party’s Big New Online Donor Portal Is Off to a Bumpy Start
With WinRed, it just appears that WinRed Technical Services “does everything,” in the words of Brett Kappel, who specializes in campaign finance law at Harmon Curran. “WinRed PAC, as far as we know, has no employees, but does everything through one vendor—WinRed Technical Services,” Kappel said. “The law requires PACs to pay fair market value for all services, and to report services rendered for free as in-kind contributions.”
Experts said they don’t see how the WinRed PAC could function completely autonomously. It would have to pay for services and overhead, noted Werner, of the University of Texas, “which would also include server expenses, bandwidth costs, maintenance, internet, and the rest.”
FEC rules state that contributions are “all forms of support including money and other things of value.” PAC contributions are capped at $5,000 a year, and they cannot come from companies, such as WTS, and be used to cover all costs. And in-kind contributions must also be reported as expenses in order to balance the books.
“Unless you’re claiming that all of this costs less than five grand per individual per year, there’s not a path to say these are in-kind contributions,” Dan Weiner, Deputy Director for Election Reform at the Brennan Center, said. “And corporations can’t make in-kind contributions to PACs.”
WinRed’s reports do not show any of this spending, and as a private company, WinRed Technical Services doesn’t have to disclose its finances. That means the vendors WinRed contracts will never be public—and neither will their payments.
But there does in fact appear to be an arcane loophole.
A PAC like WinRed can use a separate bank account, called a “nonfederal” account, to accept and spend money. And if WinRed doesn’t give money to state candidates, the PAC can pay vendors with that account and legally keep it a secret.
Libowitz, of CREW, said that if WinRed does exploit this loophole the “legal hocus pocus” is still “clearly a way of intentionally hiding how they spend their money.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean the law will allow it.
“People will often do things under the hope they don't get caught, or that the FEC doesn’t want to enforce the law. But the law always lags behind the people who want to break it,” he said. “Specific schemes don’t get explicitly outlawed or codified until someone tries them.”
Last July, the Campaign Legal Center hit the Trump campaign with a federal complaint alleging a similar lack of disclosure was illegal. The complaint cited hundreds of millions of dollars the campaign paid a shell company called American Made Media Consultants, which then forwarded the money to unknown final vendors. The case is ongoing.
The concealment mechanism has implications beyond WinRed’s PAC. The option is available to any federal PAC in WinRed’s class, including so-called “scam PACs.”
The setup also blinds the campaigns, many of whom were strong-armed into using WinRed for the 2020 election. Republican campaign officials have complained about WinRed’s opacity, which conceals who is making money at their expense. And WinRed’s convoluted transaction model has frustrated a number of GOP candidates and committees, leaving some of them on the hook with the FEC. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), for instance, came under federal scrutiny this year after his campaign misreported roughly $3 million, chalked up in large part to confusion about WinRed’s slicing and dicing.
Campaigns also grumble about the high transaction fees. ActBlue charges a flat rate of 3.95 percent for transactions. And while WinRed charges 3.8 percent, it takes another 30 cents from every transaction, no matter the dollar amount. That adds up to a bigger cut than other Republican processing platforms such as Anedot or Revv, the company launched by WinRed founder Gerrit Lansing for the 2016 election.
Lansing did not reply when asked for comment.
“If I were a GOP campaign, I’d be pissed,” Werner, of the University of Texas, said. “It’s not an issue of ideology or good government. It just sounds like an incredible grift, lining the pockets of unknown companies, and at the cost of candidates who don’t know what this conduit is doing with their money. You don’t know they can be trusted.”
Read more at The Daily Beast.
https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/gop-cash-machine-behavior-nothing-085226313.html
Roger Sollenberger @SollenbergerRC SCOOP: Republican fundraising machine WinRed PAC has an operating budget of zero—hiding possibly tens of millions of dollars in payments and keeping the identities of who it pays a secret.
Me @thedailybeast
GOP Cash Machine’s Behavior Is ‘Nothing Short of Scandalous’
Former FEC commissioner Ann Ravel reviewed WinRed’s filings, and called them “absurd” and “nothing short of scandalous.”
“I can’t think of any mechanism or loophole that would permit this. Really.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-cash-machines-behavior-is-nothing-short-of-scandalous?ref=home
1:19 PM · Aug 9, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
https://twitter.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1424706800239136770
5 things to know about the new UN report on climate change
11 minutes ago
GENEVA (AP) — The U.N.-appointed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report Monday summarizing the latest authoritative scientific information about global warming. Here are five important takeaways.
BLAMING HUMANS
The report says almost all of the warming that has occurred since pre-industrial times was caused by the release of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Much of that is the result of humans burning fossil fuels — coal, oil, wood and natural gas.
Scientists say that only a fraction of the temperature rise recorded since the 19th century — almost 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) so far — can have come from natural forces.
___
PARIS GOALS
Almost all countries have signed up to the 2015 Paris climate accord, which aims to limit global warming to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average by the year 2100. The agreements says that ideally the increase would be no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
But the report’s 200-plus authors looked at five scenarios and concluded that all will see the world cross the 1.5-degree threshold in the 2030s — sooner than in previous predictions. Three of those scenarios will also see temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius.
___
DIRE CONSEQUENCES
The 3,000-plus-page report concludes that ice melt and sea level rise are already accelerating. Wild weather events — from storms to heat waves — are also expected to worsen and become more frequent.
Further warming is “locked in” due to the greenhouse gases humans have already released into the atmosphere. That means even if emissions are drastically cut, some changes will be “irreversible” for centuries, the report said.
___
SOME HOPE
While many of the report’s predictions paint a grim picture of humans’ impact on the planet and the consequences that will have going forward, the IPCC also found that so-called tipping points, like catastrophic ice sheet collapses and the abrupt slowdown of ocean currents, are “low likelihood,” though they cannot be ruled out.
___
BIG CATCH
Meeting the most ambitious goal of the Paris accord — keeping temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century — will only be possible through what are known as “negative emissions.” That means sucking more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than is added, something the report suggests could be done after 2050. The panel doesn’t explain how this can be done though, and many scientists are skeptical it’s possible.
___
Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/Climate
https://apnews.com/article/science-climate-environment-and-nature-united-nations-climate-change-3939c763c2e9f69f08b0bcae3074752f?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter
Nagasaki marks 76th anniversary of atomic bombing
By MARI YAMAGUCHI
today
https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-bombings-63b48fdaf8e219c62663d48c138b6a3d
TOKYO (AP) — Nagasaki on Monday marked the 76th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of the Japanese city with its mayor urging Japan, the United States and Russia to do more to eliminate nuclear weapons.
In his speech at the Nagasaki Peace Park, Mayor Tomihisa Taue urged Japan’s government to take the lead in creating a nuclear-free zone in Northeast Asia rather than staying under the U.S. nuclear umbrella — a reference to the U.S. promise to use its own nuclear weapons to defend allies without them.
Taue also singled out the United States and Russia — which have the biggest arsenals by far — to do more for nuclear disarmament, as he raised concern that nuclear states have backtracked from disarmament efforts and are upgrading and miniaturizing nuclear weapons.
“Please look into building a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Northeast Asia that would create a ‘non-nuclear umbrella’ instead of a ‘nuclear umbrella’ and be a step in the direction of a world free of nuclear weapons,” Taue said as he urged Japan’s government to do more to take action for nuclear disarmament.
At 11:02 a.m., the moment the B-29 bomber dropped a plutonium bomb, Nagasaki survivors and other participants in the ceremony stood in a minute of silence to honor more than 70,000 lives lost.
The Aug. 9, 1945, bombing came three days after the United States made the world’s first atomic attack on Hiroshima, killing 140,000. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, ending World War II.
The mayor also called Japan’s government and lawmakers to quickly sign the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that took effect in January.
Tokyo renounces its own possession, production or hosting of nuclear weapons, but as a U.S. ally Japan hosts 50,000 American troops and is protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella. The post-WWII security arrangement complicates the push to get Japan to sign the treaty as it beefs up its own military while stepping up defense cooperation with other nuclear-weapons states such as Britain and France, to deal with threats from North Korea and China, among others.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said the security environment is severe and that global views are deeply divided over nuclear disarmament, and that it is necessary to remove distrust by promoting dialogue and form a mutual ground for discussion.
Taue also called for a substantial progress toward nuclear disarmament made at next year’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty conference, “starting with greater steps by the U.S. and Russia to reduce nuclear weapons.”
He asked Suga’s government to step up and speed up medical and welfare support for the aging atomic bombing survivors, or hibakusha, whose average age is now over 83 years.
https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-bombings-63b48fdaf8e219c62663d48c138b6a3d
Contractors who powered US war in Afghanistan stuck in Dubai
By ISABEL DEBRE
today
https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-business-health-travel-afghanistan-a5fe2dadffd222102d2875b776dbe794
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Some of the foreign contractors who powered the logistics of America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan now find themselves stranded on an unending layover in Dubai without a way to get home.
After nearly two decades, the rapid U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has upended the lives of thousands of private security contractors from some of the world’s poorest countries — not the hired guns but the hired hands who serviced the American war effort. For years, they toiled in the shadows as cleaners, cooks, construction workers, servers and technicians on sprawling American bases.
In the rushed evacuation, scores of these foreign workers trying to get home to the Philippines and other countries that restricted international travel because of the pandemic have become stuck in limbo at hotels across Dubai.
As the U.S. brings home its remaining troops and abandons its bases, experts say the chaotic departure of the Pentagon’s logistics army lays bare an uncomfortable truth about a privatized system long susceptible to mismanagement — one largely funded by American taxpayers but outside the purview of American law.
“It’s the same situation that affects foreign contractors all over the world, people who have little understanding of where they’re going and very uncertain relationships once they arrive determining their legal status and movements,” said Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“The terms of contracts in war can really absolve the employer of major responsibility ... even the right of return can be uncertain.”
While it’s unclear just how many remain stuck abroad after the evacuation, an Associated Press journalist saw at least a dozen Filipino contractors for engineering and construction company Fluor stranded at the Movenpick hotel in Bur Dubai, an older neighborhood of the city-state along the Dubai Creek.
The hotel management declined to comment, saying it “has no authority to disclose presence and information of any hotel guests nor hotel corporate partners details due to privacy reasons.”
The U.S. military’s Central Command declined to comment on private security contractors, referring all questions to their companies. The U.S. military’s contracting office and the Philippines Consulate in Dubai did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the stranded Filipino contractors.
As of early June, 2,491 foreign contract workers remained on American bases across Afghanistan, down from 6,399 in April, according to the latest figures from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
With the U.S. set to formally end its military mission at the month’s end, most of these workers have since made it home on flights arranged by their employers — the private military behemoths that over years of war won Pentagon logistics contracts in Afghanistan worth billions of dollars.
But other employees, brought first to Dubai on their way home after an abrupt departure on June 15, weren’t so lucky. The Philippines, along with Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, halted flights to the United Arab Emirates in mid-May over fears of the fast-spreading delta variant of the coronavirus and repeatedly renewed the travel ban.
Thus began a seemingly interminable layover that some Filipino workers described to the AP as one of anxiety and unrelenting boredom. The contractors spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the precariousness of their situation.
Drawn to Afghanistan by the promise of steady employment and wages far higher than in the Philippines, several of the stranded Fluor contractors spent years working in construction, equipment transport, visa processing and other military logistics. Some worked at Bagram Air Base, the largest military compound in the country, and at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan. They had nothing to do with combat operations but described nonetheless facing rocket attacks and other risks of war on base.
Those who spoke to the AP said they knew of scores more contractors from the Philippines and other countries including Nepal stuck in Dubai, but couldn’t provide more specific information.
With their cash dwindling over the two-month layover, most said they couldn’t afford to do anything but wait. They while away their time watching TV and video-calling with family in the Philippines from the hotel, where Fluor provides daily meals.
Construction giant Fluor, the Irving, Texas-based firm that was the biggest defense contractor in Afghanistan, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the AP. The Defense Department has spent $3.8 billion for Fluor’s work in Afghanistan since 2015, federal records show, most of it for logistics services.
With little publicly known about the evacuation process for the war’s contractors, it has become increasingly apparent that the Pentagon’s long-invisible foreign fleet may remain so.
“Everyone has been so focused on the U.S. troops, and also the Afghans, interpreters and others” who could face revenge killings by a resurgent Taliban, said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “About the stranded foreign workers, the Biden administration can say, well, their companies and their governments should have moved heaven and earth to get them home.”
___
Follow Isabel DeBre on Twitter at www.twitter.com/isabeldebre.
https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-business-health-travel-afghanistan-a5fe2dadffd222102d2875b776dbe794
The Latest: China punishes 30 officials for pandemic failing
By The Associated Press
today
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-latest-fauci-bf870737466323644b196c167ad69f20
BEIJING — More than 30 Chinese officials have been fired or received other punishments over accusations they failed to respond properly to the latest surge of the coronavirus in the country.
Among those fired were a vice mayor, heads of city districts and health commissions, and staff in hospital management, airport and tourism departments.
China’s National Health Commission on Monday announced 94 new cases of domestic transmission had been recorded over the previous 24 hours.
The latest outbreak is linked to the airport in the eastern city of Nanjing. The highly contagious delta variant spread among airport workers and has since spread from tropical Hainan province in the south to Inner Mongolia in the far north.
The outbreak has prompted renewed travel restrictions, community lockdowns and the sealing off of the entire city of Zhangjiajie, with a population of 1.5 million.
___
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-latest-fauci-bf870737466323644b196c167ad69f20
Care homes entrepreneur Gavin Woodhouse under fraud office investigation
Investigators are looking at what happened to money raised from amateur investors that were supposed to go to building care homes.
Simon Neville
https://www.independent.co.uk/business/care-homes-entrepreneur-gavin-woodhouse-under-fraud-office-investigation-b1899413.html
The Serious Fraud Office has launched a fraud and money laundering investigation into care homes entrepreneur Gavin Woodhouse.
https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/serious-fraud-office
Investigators will look at investments offered in care homes and hotels between 2013 and 2019 and are asking investors in the alleged fraud schemes to provide details by the end of September to build its case.
Mr Woodhouse raised more than £80 million from armchair investors during the period, promising generous returns of around 10%.
But an investigation by ITV News and the Guardian found that many of the projects were incomplete and his businesses had multimillion-pound black holes.
The media outlets found at the time that despite raising £16 million during the period under investigation for four new care homes, none were operational and three had not been built.
Millions of pounds ended up transferred to a consulting company owned by Mr Woodhouse and subsequently disappeared.
Before his empire came crashing down, Mr Woodhouse had promised investors huge returns for stumping up cash to fund his MBI Hawthorn Care and MBI Clifton Moor companies which were supposed to build care homes that never materialised.
He also persuaded investors to part with their cash to fund Afan Valley, which was supposed to build a £200 million adventure resort in South Wales promoted by TV adventurer Bear Grylls.
Concerns were raised that the value of some assets included in parent company, Northern Powerhouse Development, were inflated.
Inter-company loans, including £1.2 million to a former director – Mr Woodhouse was the only former one – had subsequently gone missing.
Some creditors took Mr Woodhouse to court in 2019, with a high court judge describing the business model as appearing to be “thoroughly dishonest”.
The SFO said the information provided by investors “will help us to establish the circumstances of the investments offered, to identify and pursue new information, and to progress the investigation as quickly as possible”.
https://www.independent.co.uk/business/care-homes-entrepreneur-gavin-woodhouse-under-fraud-office-investigation-b1899413.html
Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark can expect to be indicted for criminal conspiracy: legal expert
Tom Boggioni
August 08, 2021
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-doj-2654586827/
Appearing on MSNBC on Sunday afternoon, former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade claimed that former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark should be very concerned with being indicted for criminal conspiracy based upon a letter he wrote at Donald Trump's request that sought to overturn the 202O presidential vote count in Georgia among other states.
Speaking with host Yasmin Vossoughian, the animated McQuade said the letter -- revealed in a bombshell report by the Washington Post -- is damning evidence that Clark knowingly was participating in a criminal enterprise.
"So President Trump was urging the leadership of the justice department like Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy Clark, and they wouldn't play ball," McQuade explained. "Donald Trump did find a willing participant in the assistant attorney general for the Civil Division, Jeffrey Clark, and the public reporting is that Clark met privately with President Trump; completely forbidden under the department policies. communications are to be done in a formal way."
"The idea that the president is talking with an underling, planning a strategy is, alone, is highly irregular," she added. "Then we have seen this letter he drafted for the signature of the acting attorney general to send out to all the states, including Georgia, where the elections were close. This is so far out of the lane of the Justice Department -- providing legal advice to states about how they could engineer a different result in their state."
"He [Clark] laid out that road map for them," she continued. "So I think Jeffrey Clark and anyone else involved should be concerned with conspiracy charges."
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-doj-2654586827/
Austin warns of ‘catastrophe’ as Texas again becomes epicenter of pandemic
City implores residents to stay home, mask up and get vaccinated as ICU capacity in hospitals dwindles to single digits
Alexandra Villarreal in Austin, Texas
Mon 9 Aug 2021 02.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/09/austin-catastrophe-epicenter-again-pandemic
With Covid-19 cases skyrocketing exponentially and intensive care unit capacity in hospitals dwindling to single digits, officials in the Austin area are warning of “catastrophe” as Texas again becomes an epicenter of the pandemic.
Austin’s local governments issued an urgent message through their emergency notification system Saturday, imploring residents to stay home, mask up and get vaccinated.
The entreaty comes mere days after Austin Public Health elevated its risk-based guidance to stage 5, the highest possible tier.
“The situation is critical,” Desmar Walkes, Austin-Travis county’s health authority, said in a statement. “Our hospitals are severely stressed and there is little we can do to alleviate their burden with the surging cases.”
The Texas trauma service area that includes Austin only has six available ICU beds, 499 available hospital beds and 313 available ventilators – a stunning dearth of resources for a population nearly 2.4 million strong.
In Austin’s metropolitan statistical area, 510 Covid patients are currently hospitalized, 184 are in the ICU, and 102 are on ventilators.
About a third of recent hospitalizations have been among patients younger than 50, underscoring the Delta variant’s serious threat to younger Texans who have opted against vaccination.
“Hospital bed availability and critical care is extremely limited in our hospital systems, not just for Covid-19 patients, but for anyone who may need treatment,” Walkes said. “The community has to come together again and stave off disaster.”
As a whole, Texas currently ranks second behind Florida for the highest daily average Covid-19 cases, with infections up 134% over the last 14 days. And between early February and mid-July, roughly 99.5% of Texans who died from the virus were unvaccinated, the Texas Tribune reported.
In Austin’s Travis county, almost 64% of kids and adults 12 and older are fully vaccinated, compared to about 53% statewide. But in some neighboring counties and suburbs, vaccination rates are even lower than the state average.
Recently, San Antonio’s Bexar county had its daily average caseload jump by more than 300%, according to the New York Times. And infections are also surging in Houston’s Harris county, where only about 56% of those 12 and older are fully vaccinated and the 14-day average test positivity rate is a whopping 17.7%.
Meanwhile, local officials who want to implement proven public health measures to mitigate the spread have been hamstrung by Texas governor Greg Abbott, who has implemented a sweeping order restricting vaccine and mask mandates.
But some public servants, like Houston mayor Sylvester Turner, have simply defied Abbott’s order despite threats of retribution.
“The governor is preventing the city from keeping kids and adults safe,” Austin city council member Alison Alter told the New York Times. “He’s going to have a lot of deaths on his hands here. This is a matter of life and death for our community.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/09/austin-catastrophe-epicenter-again-pandemic
Climate crisis ‘unequivocally’ caused by human activities, says IPCC report
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states every corner of the planet is already being affected and it could get far worse
* IPCC report’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell
* Humans have caused ‘unprecedented’ and ‘irreversible’ change to climate, scientists warn
Damian Carrington Environment editor
@dpcarrington
Mon 9 Aug 2021 04.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/09/climate-crisis-unequivocally-caused-by-human-activities-says-ipcc-report
“It is unequivocal.” Those stark three words are the first in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new report. The climate crisis is unequivocally caused by human activities and is unequivocally affecting every corner of the planet’s land, air and sea already.
The report, produced by hundreds of the world’s top scientists and signed off by all the world’s governments, concludes that it could get far worse if the slim chance remaining to avert heating above 1.5C is not immediately grasped.
The scientific language of the report is cold and clear but cannot mask the heat and chaos that global heating is unleashing on the world. We have already caused 1C of heating, getting perilously close to the 1.5C danger limit agreed in the Paris climate deal. Downpours of rain have been accelerating since the 1980s.
Accelerating melting of ice has poured trillions of tonnes of water into the oceans, where oxygen levels are falling – suffocating the seas – and acidity is rising. Sea level has already risen by 20cm, with more now irreversibly baked in.
The greenhouse gas emissions spewed out by fossil fuel burning, forest destruction and other human activities are now clearly destabilising the mild climate in which civilisation began, the report shows. Carbon dioxide levels in the air are now at their highest point for at least 2m years.
When was the last time we saw heating this fast? At least 2,000 years ago and probably 100,000 years. Temperatures this high? At least 6,500 years. Sea level rising so fast? At least 3,000 years. Oceans so acidic? Two million years.
All this is already hurting people everywhere, the report spells out. Heatwaves and the heavy rains that lead to flooding have become more intense and more frequent since the 1950s, affecting more than 90% of the world’s regions, according to the report. Drought is increasing in more than 90% of the regions for which there is good data. It is more than 66% likely that the number of major hurricanes and typhoons has increased since the 1970s.
So what of the future? Some heating is already inevitable. We will definitely hit 1.5C in the next two decades, whatever happens to emissions, the IPCC finds. The only good news is that keeping to that 1.5C is not yet impossible.
But it will require “immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions” in emissions, say the scientists, of which there is no sign to date. Even cutting emissions, but more slowly, leads to 2C and significantly more suffering for all life on Earth.
If emissions do not fall in the next couple of decades, then 3C of heating looks likely – a catastrophe. And if they don’t fall at all, the report says, then we are on track for 4C to 5C, which is apocalypse territory.
The report is clear there are no cliff-edges to the climate crisis. Each tonne of carbon pumped out increases the impacts and risks of extreme heat, floods and droughts and so every tonne of carbon matters. It will never be too late to act, the report shows. Instead, the real question is how bad will it get?
For example, extreme heatwaves expected once every 50 years without any global heating are already happening every decade. With 1.5C warming, these will happen about every 5 years; with 2C, every 3.5 years; and with 4C, once every 15 months. More heating also means more disruptions to the monsoon rains on which billions depend for food.
More emissions also means the land and oceans become weaker at soaking up that carbon pollution, making heating even worse. With immediate rapid cuts, the natural world can still soak up 70% of our emissions. With no cuts, that falls to just 40%.
One of the most blunt sections of the report begins: “Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia.” This particularly affects the world’s oceans and ice, which absorb 96% of global heating, meaning ice will keep melting and the oceans rising towards our many crowded coastal cities.
The likely range is between 28cm and 100cm by the end of the century. But it could be 200cm by then, or 500cm by 2150, the report warns. Extreme sea level events, such as coastal flooding, that occurred just once per century in the recent past are projected to happen at least annually in 60% of places by 2100.
“That might seem like a long way away but there are millions of children already born who should be alive well into the 22nd century,” says Prof Jonathan Bamber, at the University of Bristol, UK, and a report author.
The many scientific advances since the last comprehensive IPCC report in 2013 mean better projections for specific regions of the world. It finds nowhere is safe. For example, even at 1.5C of heating, heavy rain and flooding are projected to intensify in Europe, North America and most regions of Africa and Asia.
“We can no longer assume that citizens of more affluent and secure countries like Canada, Germany, Japan and the US will be able to ride-out the worst excesses of a rapidly destabilising climate,” says Prof Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy. “It’s clear we’re all in the same boat – facing a challenge that will affect every one of us within our lifetimes.”
The report is the sixth by the IPCC but the first to assess the risk of tipping points thoroughly. These are abrupt and irreversible changes to crucial Earth systems that have huge impacts and are of increasing concern to scientists. The collapse of major Atlantic currents, ice caps, or the Amazon rainforest “cannot be ruled out”, the report warns.
“For the tipping points, it’s clear that every extra tonne of CO2 emitted today is pushing us into a minefield of feedback effects tomorrow,” says Prof Dave Reay, at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
So what can be done? The final section of the IPCC report addresses how future climate change can be limited. It finds that 2,400bn tonnes of CO2 have been emitted by humanity since 1850, and that we can only leak another 400bn tonnes to have a 66% chance of keeping to 1.5C.
In other words, we have blown 86% of our carbon budget already, though the report says the science is clear that if emissions are slashed then temperatures will stop rising in a decade or two and the increases in deadly extreme events will be strongly limited.
“Unless there are immediate rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to 1.5C will be beyond reach,” says Abdalah Mokssit, secretary of the IPCC.
“But we never dictate any policy to any country – it is for the governments to take the decisions.”
The scientists have now spoken, louder and clearer than ever before. Now it is for the politicians to act.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/09/climate-crisis-unequivocally-caused-by-human-activities-says-ipcc-report
Humans have pushed the climate into ‘unprecedented’ territory, landmark U.N. report finds
U.N. chief calls findings ‘a code red for humanity’ with worse climate impacts to come unless greenhouse gas pollution falls dramatically
By Brady Dennis and Sarah Kaplan
Today at 4:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/08/09/ipcc-climate-report-global-warming-greenhouse-gas-effect/
More than three decades ago, a collection of scientists sanctioned by the United Nations first warned that humans were fueling a dangerous greenhouse effect and that if the world didn’t act collectively and deliberately to slow Earth’s warming, there could be “profound consequences” for people and nature alike.
The scientists were right.
On Monday, that same body — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — issued its latest and most dire assessment about the state of the planet, detailing how humans have altered the environment at an “unprecedented” pace and cautioning that the world risks increasingly catastrophic impacts in the absence of rapid greenhouse gas reductions.
The landmark report, compiled by 234 authors relying on more than 14,000 studies from around the globe, bluntly lays out for policymakers and the public the most up-to-date understanding of the physical science on climate change. Released amid a summer of deadly fires, floods and heat waves, it arrives less than three months before a critical summit this November in Scotland, where world leaders face mounting pressure to move more urgently to slow the Earth’s warming.
Monday’s sprawling assessment states that there is no remaining scientific doubt that humans are fueling climate change. That much is “unequivocal.” The only real uncertainty that remains, its authors say, is whether the world can muster the will to stave off a darker future than the one it already has carved in stone.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres called the findings “a code red for humanity” and said societies must find ways to embrace the transformational changes necessary to limit warming as much as possible. “We owe this to the entire human family,” he said in a statement. “There is no time for delay and no room for excuses.”
But so far, the collective effort to slow climate change has proved gravely insufficient. Instead of the sort of emission cuts that scientists say must happen, global greenhouse gas pollution is still growing. Countries have failed to meet the targets they set under the 2015 Paris climate accord, and even the bolder pledges some nations recently have embraced still leave the world on a perilous path.
“What the world requires now is real action,” John F. Kerry, the Biden administration’s special envoy for climate, said in a statement about Monday’s findings. “We can get to the low carbon economy we urgently need, but time is not on our side.”
It certainly is not, according to Monday’s report.
Humans can unleash less than 500 additional gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of about 10 years of current global emissions — to have an even chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
But hopes for remaining below that threshold — the most ambitious goal outlined in the Paris agreement — are undeniably slipping away. The world has already warmed more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), with few signs of slowing, and could pass the 1.5-degree mark early in the 2030s.
“Unless we make immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to 1.5C will be beyond reach,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and senior adviser for climate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Each bit of warming will intensify the impacts we are likely to see.”
Already, we are living on a changed and changing planet.
Each of the past four decades has been successively warmer than any that preceded it, dating to 1850. Humans have warmed the climate at a rate unparalleled since before the fall of the Roman Empire. To find a time when the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changed this much this fast, you’d need to rewind 66 million years to the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen to levels not seen in 2 million years, the authors state. The oceans are turning acidic. Sea levels continue to rise. Arctic ice is disintegrating. Weather-related disasters are growing more extreme and affecting every region of the world.
If the planet warms much more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — a scenario all but certain at the current pace of emissions — such change could trigger the inexorable collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and more than six feet of sea-level rise that could swamp coastal communities. Coral reefs would virtually disappear.
Heat waves that are already deadly will become as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. Parts of the Earth that currently slow the pace of warming — such as the ocean absorbing excess heat and clouds reflecting sunlight back into space — will become less able to help us.
“The chances of unknown unknowns become increasingly large,” said Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute and a contributor to Monday’s report. “We don’t have any great comparable analogues in the last 2 million years or so. It’s harder for us to predict exactly what will happen to the Earth’s systems.”
‘Established fact’
The evidence for humanity’s influence on the climate system, once a fiercely debated topic, is now “overwhelming,” the IPCC report states. What began as a scientific hypothesis has become “established fact.”
That deepening certainty shows up not only in the changing composition of the atmosphere and the rising temperature of the oceans, but in signs large and small, from the dwindling of Arctic sea ice to the ever-earlier blossoming of Japan’s famous cherry trees.
The report’s 42-page “summary for policymakers” uses the phrase “virtually certain” nearly a dozen times. The words “high confidence” come up more than 100 times. The rate of sea-level rise, the retreat of ice sheets and glaciers, and the acidity of the oceans are all described as “unprecedented” in the past several thousand years.
Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb, one of the lead authors, said an array of new observational data from satellites and weather stations has given scientists more details about the Earth’s inner workings than ever before.
Equally important are the unmistakable real-world effects of climate change. Last year rivaled the hottest year in recorded history. Communities around the world have been battered by heat waves, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires so extreme that they cannot be explained by mere natural variability.
“The signals are just leaping out of the noise,” Cobb said.
Using sophisticated computer models, researchers are increasingly able to pinpoint the role of climate change in particular natural disasters, sometimes within days or weeks of the event.
Storms such as Houston’s Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and Tropical Cyclone Idai, which killed hundreds of people in Mozambique two years later, bore the unmistakable fingerprints of human-caused warming. The additional heat in the oceans provides more energy for storms, the report says, making intense Category 4 and 5 hurricanes more likely. Warmer air holds more moisture, increasing the amount of rain that falls during these events.
Likewise, scientists say the intense fires and blistering heat waves that have become summertime fixtures in both hemispheres would be almost impossible in a world unaltered by human activities. Warming has increased the “thirstiness” of the air, driving catastrophic wildfires in California and Australia over the past several years.
“It’s now become actually quite obvious to people what is happening, because we see it with our own eyes,” said Corinne Le Quéré, a professor of climate science at the University of East Anglia and a contributor to Monday’s assessment. “You don’t have to have a PhD. You don’t need to be a climate scientist. You just need to be a person who looks out the window.”
‘We’re going into uncharted territory’
The IPCC, a science-focused collection of experts from around the globe, does not issue policy recommendations. Monday’s report is merely the first of several scheduled between now and 2022 assessing the mounting effects of climate change and evaluating what it would take for humans to limit warming.
But Monday’s report does detail the likely consequences of varying emissions scenarios, drawing on decades of meteorological observations, sophisticated computer models and examples of past warming drawn from the geologic record.
In the best-case scenario, the world rapidly phases out fossil fuels, embraces renewable energy on a massive scale and overhauls how humans work, eat and travel.
People eliminate emissions of carbon dioxide from coal, oil and gas. Societies find a way to curb powerful but short-lived greenhouse gases — most notably methane, which largely comes from burping cows and leaky fossil fuel facilities, and nitrous oxide, of which a huge amount comes from fertilizers used on farms. Natural systems such as forests and human inventions such as carbon-capture operations pull more and more out of the atmosphere.
In this scenario, the world reaches “net-zero” emissions around the year 2050, and warming stabilizes at about 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Eventually, glaciers stop dwindling and sea-level rise slows. Humans adapt to the new planet we’ve created.
But with each degree of temperature rise, the consequences become dramatically more extreme, scientists underscored once again.
At 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, air can hold significantly more moisture than it does now, making droughts more likely and extreme rainfall worse. At 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit), intense heat waves that used to occur about once every 50 years will become annual events.
Mercifully, Monday’s assessment shows, the world for now seems to be trending away from the most ruinous potential path, as coal-fired power fades, renewable energy increasingly takes root and investors and voters alike demand climate-conscious policies.
But nations have not yet moved quickly enough to meet the Paris agreement goal to remain “well below” 2 degrees Celsius of warming.
At higher levels of warming, the report warns, it becomes much more difficult to predict how the planet will respond. Sophisticated computer models become uncertain. Scientists cannot easily seek clues in the past, because there is no recorded time in human history when change has been so extreme — and so fast.
“We’re going into uncharted territory,” Cobb said.
The more people emit, the greater chance of changes that take centuries or millennia to undo, Monday’s report warns. Already, ocean acidification will persist even if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere declines. At a certain point, the Greenland ice sheet will become so weak it moves into a state of irreversible decline.
Warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius also carries increased risk of setting off feedback processes that cause climate change to accelerate. Higher temperatures will thaw Arctic permafrost, potentially unleashing carbon that has been locked in a deep freeze for thousands of years. Methane trapped in the deep sea could make its way into the atmosphere. Wildfires could turn millions more acres of carbon-rich forests into a source of additional greenhouse gases. Air quality in many places could continue to worsen.
The more the climate changes from the one in which humans evolved and modern science was developed, the more likely we are to encounter challenges that exceed our capacity to adapt.
“We really don’t want to experience it,” cautioned lead author Fredi Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford who studies weather extremes.
The IPCC report does not recommend specific warming targets. But as someone who has seen how societies already struggle to cope with climate disasters, Otto urged policymakers to take the difficult steps necessary to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“It will be difficult,” she acknowledged. “But it’s still within our power to do this.”
‘Every little bit counts’
Monday’s report underscores that humans have a profound opportunity to shape a better future by sharply reducing emissions. But it also spells out how we can no longer avoid some measure of calamity in coming years.
The oceans will continue warming to 2100 and beyond, the authors write. Shrinking seasonal snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere is all but certain. The rate of sea-level rise is increasing and is destined to continue in coming decades. The likelihood and severity of extreme hot weather “will occur throughout the 21st century.”
How rapidly those changes unfold depends on how much humans continue to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the authors make clear. But even the most optimistic scenarios assume that emissions will continue over the next two decades, leading to higher and higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. And it may take several decades after humans begin shrinking their collective carbon footprint before the impacts of those changes are felt.
Yet greenhouse gases that are emitted now could be more difficult to remove later. The report cautions that declining carbon dioxide levels in the air could cause the land and oceans to release carbon it has absorbed. Efforts to pull carbon out of the atmosphere — using natural systems, like reforestation, or mechanical solutions, like machines that store the gas in rocks — probably will require huge amounts of time and energy.
In 2019, global emissions stood higher than in any other year in human history. The drop in pollution caused by economic shutdowns at the start of the coronavirus pandemic proved to be only a blip. Now the world is back on track to emit as much as ever, careening toward an ever hotter and more unpredictable future.
“Every place we look, we are seeing the evidence of past inaction. That should be a wake-up call,” said Jane Lubchenco, deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “We need to do everything possible to avoid even worse disaster.”
Meanwhile, the heaviest burdens from climate change have long fallen on the world’s most vulnerable, and on nations that played little role in causing climate change but can least afford to adapt.
For low-lying islands, rising seas present an ongoing and existential threat. Crippling floods have led to deaths and displacement for hundreds of thousands of people, from Sudan to Uganda. People who are unhoused, impoverished or sick are disproportionately likely to suffer in weather extremes. These disparities will only intensify as the planet continues to warm.
But recent disasters also show that climate impacts can hit without regard for national borders, income level and political clout. The Midwest this month is choking on smoke from wildfires hundreds of miles away in Canada. Germany, one of the world’s wealthiest nations, suffered billions in damage from July’s floods that killed scores of people.
Monday’s findings are undoubtedly grim, acknowledged lead author Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
But people should not dwell in regret for the failures of the past, Tebaldi said, or only despair over possibilities that are not yet inescapable. Instead, she urged people to focus on what can still be done, on what can still be salvaged.
After all, the hard math of science shows that a concerted push by governments and the private sector can still bend the world’s troubling trajectory. Each action to slow the pace of emissions gives society more time to adapt to changes we know are coming. Each degree of warming that humans avoid saves us from climate catastrophes that don’t have to happen.
“Things are going to change for the worse. But they can change less for the worse than they would have, if we are able to limit our footprint now,” Tebaldi said.
“Every little bit counts.”
By Brady Dennis
Brady Dennis is a Pulitzer Prize-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on the environment and public health. He previously spent years covering the nation’s economy. Twitter
By Sarah Kaplan
Sarah Kaplan is a climate reporter covering humanity's response to a warming world. She previously reported on Earth science and the universe. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/08/09/ipcc-climate-report-global-warming-greenhouse-gas-effect/
U.S. judge says Florida can't ban cruise ship's 'vaccine passport' program
Tom HalsJan Wolfe
August 9, 2021 3:01 AM BST
Last Updated 5 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/norwegian-cruise-says-us-judge-allows-it-ask-passengers-vaccine-proof-2021-08-09/
Aug 8 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge has allowed Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. (NCLH.N)todemand that passengers show written proof of coronavirus vaccination before they board a ship, dealing a major blow to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's effort to ban "vaccine passports."
In a preliminary ruling issued on Sunday, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami said Norwegian would likely prevail on its argument that the "vaccine passport" ban, signed into law by DeSantis in May, jeopardizes public health and is an unconstitutional infringement on Norwegian's rights.
The judge blocked DeSantis from enforcing the law against Norwegian, allowing the cruise ship operator to proceed with a plan to resume port activity in Miami on Aug. 15. Violations of the law could have triggered a penalty of $5,000 per passenger, potentially adding up to millions of dollars per cruise.
Raymond Treadwill, a lawyer for DeSantis, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ruling comes as big business and some government entities are responding to the rapid spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus with vaccination requirements, prompting legal challenges from vaccine skeptics and civil libertarians. read more
"We are pleased that Judge Williams saw the facts, the law and the science as we did and granted the Company's motion for preliminary injunction allowing us to operate cruises from Florida with 100% vaccinated guests and crew," the company's executive vice president Daniel S. Farkas said in the statement.
Norwegian has said Florida's law would prevent the company from ensuring at least 95% of passengers were vaccinated so it could comply with health regulations when it conducts its first post-pandemic voyage from Miami on Aug. 15.
DeSantis has become a national figure for opposing pandemic restrictions, even as the Republican governor's state has become a hotbed of infections and hospitalizations have hit record levels.
He has argued that Florida law prevents discrimination and protects privacy by preventing businesses, schools or governments from demanding proof of immunity in return for service.
Norwegian has said the law was not about protecting passengers but scoring political points.
Norwegian is ramping up its return to cruises, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shut down in March 2020 with its "No Sail" order.
In order to sail, Norwegian has attested to the CDC it would confirm that at least 95% of passengers have been vaccinated.
Norwegian said the law violates the company's First Amendment right to interact with customers and does not prevent discrimination because the company would have to segregate and mask passengers who declined to prove they were vaccinated.
The state argued that Norwegian could have opted, as rival cruise operators did, to seek CDC approval through a process of running simulated voyages and applying other COVID-19 protocols such as masking indoors.
Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware, additional reporting by Aakriti Bhalla; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Jonathan Oatis, Muralikumar Anantharaman and Diane Craft
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/norwegian-cruise-says-us-judge-allows-it-ask-passengers-vaccine-proof-2021-08-09/
Trump’s coup attempt grows even more worrisome as new details emerge
Opinion by Ruth Marcus
Deputy editorial page editor
The Washington Post
Yesterday at 5:00 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/08/trumps-coup-attempt-grows-even-more-worrisome-new-details-emerge/
What happened on Jan. 6 was horrifying: an attempted coup, inflamed by social media, incited by the defeated president and televised in real time. What happened before Jan. 6, we are coming to learn, was equally horrifying: a slow-motion attempted coup, plotted in secret at the pinnacle of government and foiled by the resistance of a few officials who would not accede to Donald Trump’s deluded view of the election outcome.
That is the unnerving picture that is only beginning to fully emerge of what was happening behind the scenes as Trump, enraged by his loss, schemed to overturn clear election results with the connivance of not only top White House aides but also senior officials at the Justice Department who were maneuvering around their chain of command to bolster Trump’s efforts.
Which raises the most disturbing question: What if? What if the senior Trump-installed officials at the Justice Department, notably acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, had been more willing to put loyalty to Trump over the rule of law? What happens, God forbid, next time, when the outcome may be further muddied thanks to changed state laws shifting power from election officials to partisan legislators?
I try not to be alarmist, but it is difficult to read the latest accounts and not be alarmed. The drip-drip-drip evolution of this story has served to mask how serious the threat was and how close it came to fruition.
We have known for months that Trump — heedless of constraints on hijacking Justice Department operations to his own political ends — had pressed Justice officials to intervene on his behalf. For example, he urged Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate unfounded claims of voter fraud.
We knew that when Rosen balked, Trump entertained a plan to oust Rosen and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the civil division, who was more willing to push Trump’s fanciful assertions of fraud. We knew that Trump was deterred only after threats of mass resignations from other officials.
We knew that Clark had drafted a letter to Georgia state legislators asserting that the department was investigating claims of fraud in the state.
The cockamamie letter itself recently emerged. Dated Dec. 28, 2020, it stated that the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.” This despite the conclusion by Attorney General William P. Barr, before he resigned that month, that the department’s investigation had not uncovered “fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
The Clark letter not only urged Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) to call the legislature into special session to consider “this important and urgent matter” but also advised the legislature of its “implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session for the limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors.” It was to be signed by Rosen, acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue and Clark himself.
Clark had insisted that his dealings with the White House were “consistent with law” and that he had merely participated in “a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president.”
This is not how things are supposed to work. At a normal Justice Department, the head of the civil division, rungs down the organization chart, does not end-run the attorney general to have “candid discussions” with the president. At a normal Justice Department, there are guardrails in place to prevent this sort of improper interference by the president.
Now we are getting accounts of what happened in those frenzied final days from Rosen himself. Over the weekend, he hastened to testify to the Justice Department inspector general and the Senate Judiciary Committee before Trump could seek to interpose assertions of executive privilege. Rosen’s former deputy, Donoghue, also appeared before the Senate panel. The testimony was behind closed doors, but as we learn more of what was said, I suspect there will be even more reason to be concerned about what might have been.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told CNN on Sunday that he was “struck by how close the country came to total catastrophe.”
“What was going on in the Department of Justice was frightening,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said on CNN’s State of the Union. “I think it’s a good thing for America that we had a person like Rosen in that position, who … withstood the pressure.”
Will that always be the case? Will the country be able to dodge future bullets, from Trump or his successors? I would like to think so. But if there is anything the past five years have shown, it is the disappointing fecklessness of too many of those in power in the face of the Trumpist onslaught.
Opinion by Ruth Marcus
Ruth Marcus is deputy editorial page editor for The Post. She also writes a weekly column. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/08/trumps-coup-attempt-grows-even-more-worrisome-new-details-emerge/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/08/trumps-coup-attempt-grows-even-more-worrisome-new-details-emerge/
‘Like a Mob’: Prosecutors Look at Trump’s Ice Rink Man
Jose Pagliery
Sun, 8 August 2021, 9:54 am·5-min read
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/mob-prosecutors-look-trump-ice-085436934.html
Ever since New York prosecutors hit the Trump Organization and its top financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, with tax fraud charges in July, it’s been obvious they have more evidence of wrongdoing than they’ve laid out. But now, it’s certain: Prosecutors also have evidence that the executive’s son, Barry Weisselberg, received the very same kind of corporate perks that investigators allege should have been taxed as income.
Barry Weisselberg is the longtime manager of the Trump-owned Wollman ice rink in Central Park. Details about the financial arrangement, as well as tax returns showing that the additional income was unreported, were delivered to the New York attorney general and Manhattan district attorney by Barry Weisselberg’s ex-wife, Jennifer Weisselberg. And The Daily Beast has reviewed the material, which includes a decade of tax returns and statements of net worth.
As Barry Weisselberg explained in a deposition when his finances were under a magnifying glass in his divorce case, the Trump Organization owned the one-bedroom flat in Manhattan’s expensive Upper East Side where he lived in 2018.
“It’s a corporate apartment that I was given temporarily,” he testified under oath in August 2018, adding that he had no clue if rent was being paid.
That deal was described as a tax-dodging “scheme to defraud” in the June 3 indictment against the Trump Organization and his father, the company’s chief financial officer. In it, prosecutors said the pad had “no reported rent at all.” The indictment noted that the company “intentionally failed” to report that income or pay associated taxes to federal, state, and local government agencies.
“The value of the lodging provided to [Allen] Weisselberg’s family member constituted income to that family member,” the indictment reads.
Barry Weisselberg was not named in the indictment, but he is the only person who matches the document’s description of a male Weisselberg family member who works at the company and lived there during that time.
Investigators are also examining how the company paid for two Weisselberg children to attend the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School. Although the indictment focuses on how grandpa was allegedly on the hook for getting $359,058 in tuition payments from 2012 to 2017 without it appearing on his taxes as additional salary, the checks that Donald Trump allegedly signed himself benefited Barry Weisselberg’s kids.
But there are other corporate perks not mentioned in the indictment that could become fodder for investigators. There’s the “corporate discount” that Barry Weisselberg got to station his car at a Quik Park parking garage, which he referenced in his divorce deposition as well. Prosecutors could also take a closer look at whether the Trump Organization used Allen Weisselberg to pass untaxed benefits through to his son.
In his divorce, Barry Weisselberg testified that his father paid the leases for his 2015 Lexus RX 350 and his 2018 Range Rover Velar—though his ex-wife maintains that these were company-provided cars.
“It’s all about control. The apartment, the car, the parking garage, the tuition, your vacations, your life, really,” Jennifer Weisselberg told The Daily Beast. “You’re embedded with them. You’re indebted to them… when you work there, you end up doing crimes.”
“You’re stuck. It’s like a mob. It all stays quiet because they end up owning you,” she said.
But if you were wondering why the ice rink manager has not yet been indicted alongside his father, part of the problem appears to be timing.
Some of the lowest-hanging fruit to charge Barry Weisselberg with is actually overripe. The state’s five-year statute of limitations has passed on a potential felony charge involving his company-funded stay at a previous luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, because he left the apartment in 2012. The renovations and rent-free perks there could add up to more than $400,000 in additional income that allegedly went untaxed, but it’s too late for the government to pursue that case.
Rent or mortgage payments there would have easily amounted to more than $60,000 a year, as the unit eventually sold for $2.5 million, according to a Bloomberg investigation that first revealed the deal. But as Weisselberg also explained in his divorce deposition, the unit at 100 Central Park South “was a corporate apartment, so we didn’t have rent.” His ex-wife has told prosecutors that the apartment was a 2004 wedding gift whose continuous rent payments were made from the Trump Organization in lieu of salary raises.
This arrangement was also mentioned in the indictment, but again Barry Weisselberg was not identified by name.
Were this a civil case instead of criminal investigation, Barry Weisselberg could still be sued, because the alleged fraud was only recently discovered, explained Daniel L. Feldman, a professor at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
It’s unclear if prosecutors are using the threat of an indictment against Barry Weisselberg to force his father to cooperate and turn on Donald Trump himself, who remains the ultimate target of the investigation, according to three people familiar with the investigation who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity.
Allen Weisselberg is the highest-ranking executive with a close relationship to Trump spanning decades who is not an actual member of the Trump family. The bond of trust was strong enough that the day before he started his presidency in 2017 Trump appointed Allen Weisselberg to run the entire company alongside Don Jr.
Both the Manhattan DA and New York AG declined to comment. Barry Weisselberg did not respond to text messages and emails requesting an interview.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/mob-prosecutors-look-trump-ice-085436934.html
Palmer Report @PalmerReport Dick Durbin confirms former Trump DOJ official Richard Donoghue will also testify this week about the Trump-Clark election plot. This means the two top Trump DOJ people from the final days are both eager to bring Donald Trump to justice. Makes for a slam dunk criminal case.
5:23 PM · Aug 8, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Dick Durbin confirms former Trump DOJ official Richard Donoghue will also testify this week about the Trump-Clark election plot. This means the two top Trump DOJ people from the final days are both eager to bring Donald Trump to justice. Makes for a slam dunk criminal case.
— Palmer Report (@PalmerReport) August 8, 2021
Purdue’s bankruptcy deal shields Sackler family owners from opioid liability
Critics say concessions in case regarding the company diminishes accountability in overdose scandal
Sujeet Indap in New York AUGUST 8 2021
https://www.ft.com/content/f0d6f014-dfa1-4d93-a11b-d9ede668be11?list=intlhomepage
Members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma will pay $4.5bn under a plan to settle the bankruptcy of the company that invented the powerful pain drug OxyContin. The high price comes with something in return: a shield against future financial liability in America’s deadly opioid epidemic.
The proposed release turns on a feature of US bankruptcy law that can protect third parties from lawsuits even though they have not filed for bankruptcy themselves. Critics say the provision allows powerful actors to exploit the legal system to escape full accountability.
Parties including two divisions of the US Department of Justice and Purdue’s home state of Connecticut have cried foul. But the deal appears likely to be approved by Robert Drain, a New York federal bankruptcy judge, in a court hearing scheduled to begin later this week.
Purdue filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019 as it battled lawsuits from municipalities, states, individuals and others over its role in opioid overdoses that have killed nearly 500,000 people. The proposed settlement transfers Purdue’s assets to a newly created company that would develop opioid abuse treatments and manufacture drugs unrelated to pain relief. The Sacklers’ cash would fund “abatement trusts” to bankroll campaigns against the opioid crisis and to compensate victims.
In return, the release would protect the company’s family owners from future civil lawsuits, even though they were not debtors in the bankruptcy proceeding.
These concessions to so-called non-debtor third parties originated in the 1990s, when Congress passed legislation shielding insurers in the bankruptcy cases of industrial companies facing asbestos liability.
But judges later began granting third-party releases more freely, in particular to private equity firms accused by creditors of stripping the assets of portfolio companies that had landed in bankruptcy court.
Now, members of the Sackler family who own Purdue would receive similar protection — a prospect some find troubling. The US Trustee, a division of the DoJ, wrote in a recent bankruptcy court filing that “the Sackler family release violates the United States Constitution”, adding that the “Sackler family will be authorised to buy hundreds of individual discharges for their role in the opioid crisis without actually filing for bankruptcy relief and subjecting themselves to the same rules of transparency and creditor protections that every consumer and business debtor who files bankruptcy must follow”.
As well, Audrey Strauss, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, submitted a letter to the bankruptcy court that said the release “violates due process”, depriving opioid victims of “their property rights”. William Tong, the state of Connecticut’s attorney-general who had sued Purdue and members of the Sackler family, complained the settlement would void his state’s sovereign “police power”.
Judge Drain early in the Chapter 11 case temporarily halted lawsuits against the Sacklers in the hope that mediation would lead to a consensual settlement. Purdue believes that permanently releasing the Sacklers from liability is justified because it will help ensure that family members, along with the company, make substantial contributions to opioid victims. Purdue’s law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell, warned of a “race to the courthouse” and “ruinous” litigation without a court-approved global settlement.
Purdue said that the company’s bankruptcy reorganisation plan “enjoys the support of over 95 per cent of voting creditors, and nearly 97 per cent of state and local government creditors”, calling the level of support “unprecedented in scope”.
A spokesman for the Sackler family said: “The proposed resolution enjoys overwhelming support from governmental and private creditors and is an important step toward providing substantial resources for people and communities in need. The Sackler family hopes these funds will help achieve that goal.”
In a court filing, descendants of the late Mortimer Sackler said the families “would not and could not agree to make the contribution required to finance the plan” without the legal releases.
“The Sackler families firmly believe that, if litigation were to proceed to conclusion, they would ultimately be vindicated,” they wrote. “But the burden of defending that litigation would be unrelenting; the cost of defence would be enormous; and it is impossible to overstate the chaos that would ensue as 750 current plaintiffs and untold other future plaintiffs raced to beat each other to judgment.”
Even some critics of the Purdue bankruptcy process have made peace with the proposed resolution. Letitia James, New York state’s attorney-general, has said that the “Sackler family have used every delay tactic possible and misused the courts all in an effort to shield their misconduct”.
Yet in July, New York and others signed on to an augmented settlement plan in which the Sacklers agreed to relinquish control of family foundations as well as not pursue any naming rights at cultural institutions. The Sackler name currently graces several prominent museums, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“While this deal is not perfect, we are delivering $4.5bn into communities ravaged by opioids on an accelerated timetable,” James said when the deal was agreed.
One longtime bankruptcy adviser who has represented companies who have faced allegations of harming thousands of customers believes a global compromise that resolves civil lawsuits was still the best possible outcome. “If the creditors are not happy with the Sackler contributions they can hold out for more or deny them the pass by voting no,” the adviser said.
Purdue has already paid out billions in the OxyContin scandal. Last autumn it agreed to plead guilty to three federal felony charges, including defrauding the United States, and to pay a $3.5bn criminal fine and $2bn in forfeiture. The company also agreed to pay $2.8bn to resolve its federal civil liability. Purdue had previously pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal charges of improperly marketing OxyContin.
No member of the Sackler family has been criminally charged over OxyContin. The settlement pending before Judge Drain would not preclude the government from bringing criminal charges in the future.
Documents released in conjunction with the company’s 2020 plea agreement said that between 2013 to 2018, several family members “approved an initiative that intensified marketing to high-volume prescribers and resulted in prescriptions of OxyContin that were unsafe, ineffective, and medically unnecessary”.
The relevant Sacklers in 2020 agreed to pay a federal civil fine of $225m alongside Purdue’s settlement with the DoJ.
Even as Sackler family members pay up billions, some contend that they are using the machinery of the justice system for their benefit as the bankruptcy approaches its conclusion. According to an analysis commissioned by Davis Polk, family members had taken $10.3bn out of Purdue in net cash distributions between 2008 and 2019.
“Courts and cases must not only be fair, but seem fair, to the public. From that perspective, the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy has a public relations problem,” said Melissa Jacoby, a bankruptcy law professor at the University of North Carolina.
Tong, the Connecticut attorney-general, believes the reorganisation of Purdue has been mistakenly conflated with the Sacklers facing the justice system. “The Sacklers poured gas on the opioid crisis. This outcome says powerful people in this world can get away with bad acts.”
In late-July Senator Elizabeth Warren and others in Congress introduced a bill to curb non-debtor releases, citing Purdue Pharma and bankruptcies such as the Boy Scouts of America and USA Gymnastics where they claimed that a “loophole” allowed wrongdoers to “escape personal accountability”.
Documents disclosed by the DoJ last autumn indicate some Sacklers had been on notice for years that they faced a financial reckoning over Purdue’s opioid franchise.
In an email from 2007, David Sackler, who had been a board member of Purdue, wrote to family members recounting that an investment banker once told him: “Your family is already rich, the one thing you don’t want to do is become poor.”
He went on to write: “My thought is to lever up where we can, and try to generate some additional income. We may well need it....Even if we have to keep it in cash, it’s better to have the leverage now while we can get it than thinking it will be there for us when we get sued.”
https://www.ft.com/content/f0d6f014-dfa1-4d93-a11b-d9ede668be11?list=intlhomepage
Vaccinated Americans can enter Canada starting Monday. Here are 11 things to know before a trip.
BAILEY SCHULZ | USA TODAY
2 hours ago
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2021/08/08/canada-border-reopen-what-to-know-before-travel-canada-covid/5505783001/
How Trump stiff-armed Congress — and gaslighted the courts — to build his wall
Congress’ power of the purse was ignored, but lawmakers remain divided over how to respond.
By DAVID ROGERS
08/06/2021 04:37 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/06/trump-congress-wall-pentagon-502652
Pentagon records obtained by POLITICO paint the clearest picture yet of how far the Trump administration went to get around Congress and speed the diversion of military construction funds to build its border wall in 2019.
The diversion, totaling $3.6 billion, disrupted scores of improvements for military operations and the quality of life for troops and their families. The newly released documents provide the first-ever look at the inner workings of how that money was moved around — and it’s not a pretty sight for congressional committees, which were left in the dark and denied basic answers about the accounting maneuvers.
The Defense Department ignored statutory language in the appropriations laws specifying how the dollars were to be used. Millions of dollars were moved to never-before-seen ‘’project lines” created by the comptroller and then written into the military services’ construction budgets without the knowledge of Congress. And even in the case of the Navy, DoD skipped past customary transfer requirements and made those dollars immediately available to the Army Corps of Engineers to write checks on those accounts.
DoD continues to defend its performance. But the records were sensitive enough that it took a yearlong struggle by POLITICO to obtain just those covering the Navy. The department took nine months to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request, and even then, the Comptroller’s office withheld or failed to include the most relevant documents. It took another three months before this was corrected, a full year after the FOIA was filed in July 2020.
With Trump gone and a new White House trying to recover the wall funds, many in both parties want to put the episode in the rear-view mirror. But more than $1 billion is not coming back. And left behind in its place is a legacy of distrust and nagging questions as to how Congress can better protect its constitutional power of the purse.
“I think we have to keep this on our radar screen,” said Senate Armed Services Chair Jack Reed (D-R.I.), who also sits on Appropriations. “Forewarned is forearmed.”
“If we should have another situation where a president wants to take money away from the military and put it into a domestic, personal, political agenda, then we should be able to stop that,” Reed added.
A 'national emergency'
Without doubt, the Pentagon enjoyed immense discretion once the White House invoked its singular construction powers after declaring a “national emergency” in early 2019. The relevant statute, enacted in 1982 and known in political shorthand as 2808, allowed DoD to proceed “without regard to any other provision of law.”
But what made the ensuing process so remarkable was its lack of transparency: It hid from Congress and the federal courts the full scope of what was being tossed aside in favor of the wall spending.
Deciphering the diversion was no easy matter for judges with no grounding in the appropriations process. There were repeated assurances that DoD was only “reprioritizing” dollars already in its hands. If a judge asked for more details, the administration calibrated its answers to explain as little as possible.
“You said 'reprioritize,’” asked U.S. Circuit Judge Daniel Collins in a 2020 hearing. “I want to understand as best I can … what actually happens. Is there a transfer and a reprogramming of money from one account to another account and then an expenditure differently? How does the money move in this case?”
“No, your honor, there’s not a transfer or a reprogramming of any kind,” Collins was told by a Justice Department attorney representing the administration at the hearing.
That answer was correct as far as it went. But the budget records plainly show that a big part of the story was left out. How could it be there was no “reprogramming of any kind?” Because DoD had exempted itself from the budget rules requiring such a reprogramming and notice to Congress.
Indeed, the whole exchange was akin to a city mayor telling his local traffic court judge that he was innocent of speeding — without explaining that he’d exempted himself from the speed limits.
A closer look at the budget ledgers released to POLITICO helps to illustrate this. The documents only apply directly to the Navy, but other military services saw the same pattern of transactions.
One document dated June 18, 2019 shows the fiscal 2019 Navy appropriations proceeding on course with DoD approvals, pretty much as Congress had anticipated.
But three months later, on Sept. 16, the corresponding ledger shows an entirely different world.
DoD had withdrawn its prior approvals and “deferred” further action on eight overseas projects for which Congress had appropriated $205.8 million to the Navy. Two-thirds of those funds carried with them statutory requirements that the dollars be spent “outside the U.S.” Nonetheless, DoD set out to do the opposite.
The full $205.8 million was “administratively realigned” with a newly created project line for the wall, inserted into the Navy’s construction budget under the heading “CONUS UNSPECIFIED.”
That sum was then “sub-allotted” fully to the Army Corps of Engineers for construction of the wall. This allowed the Corps to immediately write checks on the Navy account, avoiding a required transfer between the two services.
Sidestepping the law
Looking back, all these shortcuts were made easier by the budget exemptions assumed by DoD.
The Impoundment Control Act, adopted in response to Richard Nixon’s power grabs in the 1970s, went by the wayside early. That law requires a “special message notification” to be filed with the Government Accountability Office whenever a department defers prior appropriations such as happened with the eight Navy projects. No such notice was ever given, the GAO confirmed.
GAO has made no ruling on the matter, but DoD’s “administrative” realignment of the Navy funds had all the markings of a required reprogramming. As defined by GAO, a reprogramming occurs when an executive agency shifts funds “within an appropriations account … to use them for purposes other than those contemplated at the time of appropriation” by Congress.
In this case, the new Navy project line for the wall didn’t even exist at the time Congress appropriated the funds in the fall of 2018. Moreover, judging from its past decisions, GAO would typically weigh the tightly prescribed rules which have long governed any changes in military construction appropriations.
The Pentagon devotes pages to reprogramming procedures in its financial management regulations. Those rules are then referenced by statute in the military construction appropriations bills. And two of the Navy projects here — one in Germany and another in Bahrain — fell squarely in the title covered by this language in the fiscal 2019 appropriations act.
As to the “sub-allocation” of Navy funds to the Army Corps, that also required some sleight-of-hand.
In fairness to DoD, there are ample precedents where some military services “sub-allot” their annual construction funds to the Corps. But the procedure is so rarely used by the Navy that it’s a stretch in this case — and one seemingly designed to avoid telling the courts a diversion of this size had required transfers.
The Navy has its own engineering command, NAVFAC. In fact, a DoD directive — updated just a year before the diversion — designated NAVFAC to be the lead agent for Navy-funded projects in the U.S.
In the past five years, only 13 out of 287 Navy’s military construction projects required any such sub-allocation of funds to the Corps, NAVFAC told POLITICO. That’s less than 5 percent — compared with the 100 percent sub-allocation in the wall diversion.
“The Department used the same procedures in providing funds to [the Corps of Engineers] for 2808 projects as it has used for decades,” said Christopher Sherwood, a DoD spokesperson charged with defending the Comptroller’s office. “The components sub-allotted the funds to the Army for use by [the Corps], thus all funds retained their original appropriation identification. The funds were neither transferred nor reprogrammed
Congress responds
As a West Point graduate and Armed Services chair, Reed was most sensitive to the diversion’s impact on the military, especially its personnel. From Kentucky to Maryland and North Carolina, schools, day-care facilities, and water treatment improvements were caught up in the mix, affecting troops and their families.
But from his seat on Appropriations, there’s no ignoring that “the lack of transparency is a problem,” Reed said.
“We were not being told because their interpretation …was the normal reprogramming rules did not apply because it was under 2808,” he said. “But again, the spirit of 2808 was [that] in a national security emergency, a president should have some flexibility to move funds to deal with military necessities. Trump completely disregarded this. He defied the whole spirit of the law and used it for his own political benefit.”
Congress took the first steps to try to reassert itself last winter, with Trump on his way out after the 2020 election.
The annual defense authorization bill, enacted over the president’s veto, included a House-initiated provision designed to rein in DoD’s discretion under the 2808 authority.
The department will still be empowered to go around current laws, but the path is narrowed some and will require more notice to Congress. Moreover, a $500 million cap is imposed for all military construction projects undertaken using the 2808 authority during a future emergency. In the event of a national emergency declaration in which 2808 authority would be used only to build projects only within the U.S, a tighter cap of $100 million would rule.
Beyond this, it’s not clear whether the Appropriations leadership will demand further steps to ensure it is kept better informed in the future. There is a residue of bitterness toward DoD for its back-handed treatment of the panel and its staff — a stain not easily erased. “The Department of Defense was not forthcoming,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) in an interview.
But as a member of Appropriations, she said there has been little discussion in the panel. “There are a lot of people who would like to address it, but there doesn’t seem to be a bipartisan willingness to do that,” Shaheen said.
In fact, when the committee met this week to approve a new military construction bill — the first of the post-Trump era — the only public discussion of the wall was in reference to helping private landowners whose property was damaged by the construction. This silence illustrates how the diversion remains so identified with Trump that any further tightening of the budget rules risks being seen by Republicans as another attack on him and, implicitly, the GOP. For Senate Democrats, who know they must win over Republicans to make any progress on appropriations bills, it’s become a bridge too far.
Largely ignored so far is the bigger root of the dispute: the National Emergency Act. Enacted in the 1970s, it was intended to rein in White House power grabs but has since been twisted out-of-shape because of court decisions which put presidents like Trump in the driver’s seat. Reed acknowledged the NEA may need to be revisited, but thus far it is conservative Republicans with a libertarian streak, such as Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who have been at the forefront.
Unlike many in his party, Lee was willing to challenge Trump’s emergency declaration in 2019, and his so-called “ARTICLE ONE” bill now seeks to rein in the emergency act, which Trump used to open the door for DoD to use its 2808 powers. His approach is to limit future emergency declarations under the NEA to just 30 days, after which Congress would decide if they continued or not.
With a Democrat now in the White House, Lee’s ideas have drawn more attention from the right, worried about “emergency” action on climate change, for example. But Lee has found an ally also in Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent who has included Lee’s proposal as part of a much broader bill reasserting Congress’ power on a range of national security issues.
The SCOTUS factor
One last outlier: the U.S. Supreme Court. What the justices decide this fall could add to the calls for Congress to do more.
At issue is a petition for writ of certiorari filed on Trump’s behalf last year after his border wall suffered a defeat in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in October 2020. In that decision, a three-judge panel broke 2-1 against Trump and ruled that DoD’s use of its 2808 authority violated 2808 itself because the wall projects failed to meet the “military” standards set in the statute.
Trump sought to reverse this ruling by getting the case before the more conservative Supreme Court. It’s now Biden’s call, and to the dismay of the wall’s challengers, the new administration has effectively lined up with Trump and is asking the justices to vacate wall-related rulings which might impede Biden’s own executive powers going forward.
This strategy was first seen in June, when the Solicitor General’s office argued that an earlier wall ruling could become a foothold for meddlesome suits challenging the Pentagon’s transfer powers. The Court agreed to vacate that decision on July 2.
Smelling trouble, the wall’s challengers — a legal team led by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sierra Club and other environmental interests — struck back in filings to the Court on July 19. Their core argument was that much as the Pentagon may use its transfer powers on a regular basis, there is nothing so common about the use of DoD’s 2808 authority. In the plaintiffs’ view, the greater risk to the nation is that vacating the 9th Circuit’s decision will wipe out all its legal history and make it easier for future presidents to go down the same path as Trump did.
Some of Biden’s posture likely reflects the ingrained culture of the Solicitor General’s office, which rarely hesitates to defend executive power. But it’s a striking situation given the president’s long service in the Senate, and his administration has hurt its credibility by not being more straightforward about its intentions.
When POLITICO asked for guidance regarding the plaintiff filings, the Justice Department waited a full week before declining to comment on when it was filing a reply. Then, less than 24 hours later on Tuesday, the Solicitor General’s office did file, and its position was to vacate the Ninth Circuit decision.
"Multiple courts have already found that Trump's fake emergency violated the Constitution,” said Dror Ladin, the lead ACLU attorney on the case. “I think most people would be surprised to learn that the Biden administration is still trying to erase those rulings and open the door to future presidential abuse of emergency powers."
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/06/trump-congress-wall-pentagon-502652
What is it about Viktor Orbán that attracts so many rightwing sycophants?
Nick Cohen
Sat 7 Aug 2021 14.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/07/what-is-it-about-orban-that-attracts-so-many-rightwing-sycophants
Hungary’s leader and Fox News are natural bedfellows in peddling paranoia politics
Tucker Carlson is not much to look at. A little man with a face screwed into the scowl of a junior manager passed over for promotion, you might walk by him in the street with barely a glance. Only when he describes how “the elite has turned against its own people” should you take notice. Carlson is the dependable voice of the dominant force on the right that will destroy democracy in the name of “the people”.
Last week, Carlson’s Fox News beamed an admiring show from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, even though there is every indication that Orbán will make it Europe’s first rightwing dictatorship since the fall of Franco’s Spain in 1975. Fox News built its audience and Orbán built his power by creating paranoid fears of an enemy so dangerous, any tactics can be justified to defeat it. Usually, it is the globalised liberal elite that turns against its own people by allowing mass immigration. Orbán has added a fascistic twist to the great replacement conspiracy theory by blaming the Jewish financier George Soros for plotting to flood Christian Hungary with Muslims. If it is not migrants, it is the gay men he implies are paedophiles, and if it is not gay men, it is the European Union. The name of the enemy is incidental. The point about modern far-right politics is that there must always be an enemy.
For a long time, people who should have known better took authoritarian regimes at their own valuation and described Hungary, Turkey and, until it became too embarrassing, Vladimir Putin’s Russia as “illiberal democracies”. I can see why the idea appealed in theory. By ultra-progressive standards, all democracies, including ours, follow illiberal policies on crime and immigration. There is no necessary conflict between illiberalism and democracy. On the contrary, traditional conservative policies are often what a majority of the electorate wants.
But illiberal paranoid politics can never be compatible with democracy. Paranoia turns opponents into traitors engaged in an evil plot against “the people”. The only way to deal with traitors is to crush them and if the crushing entails the destruction of democracy and the perpetuation of the ruling elite’s power, that is a price the elite is happy for others to pay.
Like the unforgivably overrated Roger Scruton, Trump’s mentor Steve Bannon, that part-time defender of free speech Jordan Peterson, and until recently the leaders of Europe’s nominally anti-dictatorial Christian Democrat parties, Carlson was comfortable with his own hypocrisy. The right he represents says it believes in freedom of speech when liberals threaten it. Yet in Hungary, freedom of the press is in its death agonies. Regime supporters control state and most private TV stations and newspapers, while the rest must fear a government-appointed media council that can issue heavy fines for “immoral” reporting. Conservatives who cheer on Orbán are against cancel culture it appears but only when their opponents are doing the cancelling.
The right says it believes in free societies, yet in Hungary higher education is under state control so “liberals” cannot pollute the minds of the young. It says it is on the side of the people. Yet in Hungary corruption runs from Orbán’s elevation of a childhood friend into a billionaire to the everyday bribes ordinary Hungarians must pay to receive healthcare. Elections are gerrymandered and judges and state bureaucrats are chosen for their loyalty rather than their competence.
The next election in 2022 will be worth watching. If somehow the opposition manage to beat a rigged system, many are asking if Orbán would concede power. Like Putin and other thieves in office, he must fear he will go to prison if he does.
To Michael Ignatieff, the willingness not just of Fox News but of a stream of conservative intellectuals and politicians to abase themselves before Orbán, as leftists abase themselves before the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes, raises what he calls the most important question in politics today: will conservatives abandon the principles of constitutional government? Ignatieff is well placed to ask it. He was the rector of Central European University in Budapest. When I last interviewed him, in 2017, the Hungarian opposition felt he could fight Orbán’s attempts to drive the university out of the country. Ignatieff was a former opposition leader in Canada rather than an anonymous academic. He mobilised a global protest movement and the hope was it would force Orbán to respect academic independence. Today, he and the Hungarians who supported him are far gloomier. Dictatorial states brook no resistance and Orbán forced the university to move to Vienna in 2019.
The US Republicans have already made their choice. At the next election, they will not just suppress votes but have state election officials in place who will declare their opponents’ victories fraudulent.
The British right is harder to define. Boris Johnson is not an Orbán or a Trump. Outside the pages of the worst Tory newspapers there is no Johnson personality cult. He doesn’t terrify Conservative MPs into line as Trump intimidates Republicans. Privately, and increasingly in public, they show they neither respect nor fear him.
Yet I find it too easy for comfort to paint a picture of the Orbánisation of the UK. The attempt to exclude 2.5 million voters without ID cards from the franchise, the rise of property developers and Russian oligarchs exploiting their links to the Conservative elite, the attacks on the BBC that have culminated in state appointees attempting to politically vet journalists, the suspension of parliament and threats to the judiciary are symptoms of a system heading towards decadence.
After Hitler’s defeat in 1945 and the fall of the rightwing dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece in the 1970s, western conservative parties committed themselves to observing liberal democratic rules. But the 70s are a long time back and the 40s further still. The lesson of recent history is that the right can abandon the constitutional order and be rewarded rather than punished. It is not too paranoid a response to paranoid authoritarianism to imagine that one day Tucker Carlson will be broadcasting live from London and heaping sycophantic praise on Boris Johnson as he heaps it on Viktor Orbán.
Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/07/what-is-it-about-orban-that-attracts-so-many-rightwing-sycophants
For G.O.P., Infrastructure Bill Is a Chance to Inch Away From Trump
The former president’s efforts to bring down the bipartisan deal fell mostly on deaf ears among Republicans, signaling his waning influence on Capitol Hill. Can it last?
By Luke Broadwater and Emily Cochrane
Published Aug. 7, 2021 Updated Aug. 8, 2021, 12:45 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/07/us/politics/republicans-infrastructure-bill.html
WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump tried mightily to kill the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, hurling the kind of insult-laden statements and threats of primary challenges that for years sent a chill down Republican spines.
But the reaction inside the Senate, where many members of his party once cowered from Mr. Trump’s angry tweets and calculated their votes to avoid his wrath, was mostly yawns.
Now, the legislation appears on a glide path to pass the Senate with a small but significant share of G.O.P. support — possibly even including Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader who rarely crossed the former president when he ran the chamber.
It is one of the most significant steps to date by elected Republicans to defy Mr. Trump, not only by the moderates who have routinely broken with him, but by a wider group that may signal his waning influence on Capitol Hill.
The bill has survived largely because most of the key Republican senators involved in negotiating it are not operating under his influence. And others willing to join them found the allure of a politically popular bipartisan accomplishment that would benefit their constituents stronger than their fear of Mr. Trump.
Senator Rob Portman, the Ohio Republican who led negotiations for his party, is retiring. Senator Mitt Romney, the former 2012 presidential nominee who has made his disdain for Mr. Trump plain, owes him nothing. Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, moderates from Maine and Alaska, respectively, are not fans.
Even Mr. McConnell, who helped to orchestrate his two impeachment acquittals, now appears ready to buck the former president and embrace the infrastructure package.
“There is an excellent chance it will be a bipartisan success story for the country,” Mr. McConnell said last week, after joining 16 other members of his party in voting alongside Democrats to move forward with the measure.
He did so again on Saturday, when the bill scaled another procedural hurdle on its way to likely passage.
The collective G.O.P. shrug in the face of Mr. Trump’s attacks could be fleeting. If the infrastructure measure demonstrates an alternative model for Republicans in the post-Trump era, it is not clear whether it represents anything more than a prominent exception to the rule that the former president still enjoys outsize sway over members of his party.
The vast majority of Republicans are opposed to the legislation. House Republicans are as tightly bound to Mr. Trump as ever, with many continuing to support his election lies and conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol. And with the approach of the 2022 elections, members of his party will have less and less room to maneuver away from a figure whom their base still reveres.
Still, the success of the infrastructure effort was a notable — if tentative — move away from Mr. Trump. It suggested that at least some Republicans now believe there is more political upside to be gained from breaking with him than from siding with him unquestioningly, a shift from the calculus that drove them for years.
“I think they take their jobs more seriously than he ever took his,” said Republican strategist Scott Jennings, a former top campaign aide to Mr. McConnell, explaining why senators in his party were not swayed by Mr. Trump’s latest attacks.
Mr. Jennings said their motivation was not so much defying the former president as trying to undercut Democrats’ argument in favor of eliminating the filibuster — namely, that the G.O.P. is a party of unreasonable and irresponsible acolytes of Mr. Trump who will reflexively reject any proposal that Democrats support. (Mr. McConnell is particularly insistent on preserving the rule setting a 60-vote threshold to advance legislation.)
It was not for lack of trying by the former president. Banned from social media, he beat away at proponents of the deal — including five senators who voted to convict him during his second impeachment trial this year on a charge of incitement of insurrection — via a string of rageful press releases. He called them RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), describing them as “weak, foolish, and dumb.” “Don’t do it Republicans — patriots will never forget!” Mr. Trump warned in one such missive. “If this deal happens, lots of primaries will be coming your way!”
At first, Republicans braced for a familiar flood of defections from the infrastructure bill, recalling similar instances when Mr. Trump was president and any critical word from him about a legislative initiative prompted a swift evaporation of G.O.P. support for the measure in question.
Instead, the response was crickets.
Ms. Collins and Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, calmly pointed out that Mr. Trump had supported a much larger infrastructure plan in the past but failed to deliver. Mr. Portman, who had personally called Mr. Trump to encourage him to back the legislation, politely suggested that Mr. Trump change tactics and embrace the plan.
When the time came to vote to advance the measure on the Senate floor, the coalition of mostly moderate members found that, contrary to Mr. Trump’s efforts, the number of conservative senators supporting their plan had increased, not decreased — with members of Republican leadership, including Mr. McConnell and Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, who is also retiring, joining their ranks.
Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, said some of his constituents were “mad as hell” about his support for the bill — particularly about the idea of doing something that would make President Biden look good. But rather than follow Mr. Trump’s lead, he has made a point of talking up the agreement on conservative talk radio shows.
“I firmly believe that people — the longer they live with it, the more they look at it, the more they hear about it, the more they’ll like it, including conservatives,” Mr. Cramer said.
Several Republican aides said the developments left them feeling that while Mr. Trump’s influence over the Senate was not gone, he was diminished.
Indeed, many Republicans said they were puzzled over the point Mr. Trump was trying to make. The former president had proposed a $1.5 trillion infrastructure package while in office, so his opposition to a leaner bill seemed motivated either by personal pique or a simple desire to see his successor and the opposing party fail.
“It’s not really so clear what Trump’s substantive objection is here,” said Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “He’s certainly not saying doing an infrastructure bill is bad; he spent his whole four years talking about how great it would be. So all he’s really saying is, ‘Working with Democrats is bad.’ And for a lot of these senators from closely contested states, they figure their electoral base just doesn’t agree that bipartisanship is bad.”
That opinion may ultimately prevail with the bulk of his party. Many Republican congressional candidates are aligning themselves with the former president in opposition to the plan.
In the aftermath of the agreement, former Representative Mark Walker, a Republican running to replace retiring Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, applauded the nearly three dozen senators who voted against advancing the infrastructure bill for upholding fiscal responsibility. Josh Mandel, a Republican seeking Mr. Portman’s Senate seat who has been endorsed by Mr. Trump, has called the bill a “full-out assault” on cryptocurrencies. And, Kelly Tshibaka, Mr. Trump’s anointed challenger to Ms. Murkowski in Alaska, has also bashed the proposal.
“The political theater is simply to give the appearance of working across the aisle, with the Republicans being used as window dressing,” Ms. Tshibaka said in June. “Lisa Murkowski either doesn’t realize it, doesn’t care, or is reading off Biden’s script.”
Amanda Carpenter, who worked for the former Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, said the infrastructure bill is a safe space for G.O.P. lawmakers to break with Mr. Trump, because the party base is less focused on federal spending than it is on “culture war stuff,” like race and coronavirus restrictions, on which the former president has stoked outrage.
“The people who are getting most animated about this are the ones who are most likely to do whatever Trump says, because they depend on his endorsement for their political futures,” said Ms. Carpenter, the director of Republicans for Voting Rights.
Senators like Mr. Portman, Mr. Romney and Ms. Collins, by contrast “aren’t dependent on Trump for their political future.”
So when Mr. Trump issued his latest broadside against the infrastructure bill early Saturday morning, calling it a “disgrace” and suggesting falsely that it would impose new federal tracking on all drivers in an effort to tax them, there was little sign that the bill was in peril.
Even the former president seemed to be bracing for the possibility that a crucial bloc of Republican senators was no longer listening to him.
“If it can’t be killed in the Senate,” he wrote, “maybe it dies in the House!”
Luke Broadwater covers Congress. He was the lead reporter on a series of investigative articles at the Baltimore Sun that won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award in 2020. @lukebroadwater
Emily Cochrane is a reporter in the Washington bureau, covering Congress. She was raised in Miami and graduated from the University of Florida. @ESCochrane
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 8, 2021, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Key Senators Ignore Trump On Huge Bill . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/07/us/politics/republicans-infrastructure-bill.html
Trump’s Repeating Donation Tactics Led to Millions in Refunds Into 2021
Donald Trump and the Republican Party returned $12.8 million to donors in the first half of the year, a sign that their aggressive fund-raising tactics ensnared many unwitting contributors.
By Shane Goldmacher
Aug. 7, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/07/us/politics/trump-recurring-donations.html
The aggressive fund-raising tactics that former President Donald J. Trump deployed late in last year’s presidential campaign have continued to spur an avalanche of refunds into 2021, with Mr. Trump, the Republican Party and their shared accounts returning $12.8 million to donors in the first six months of the year, newly released federal records show.
The refunds were some of the biggest outlays that Mr. Trump made in 2021 as he has built up his $102 million political war chest — and amounted to roughly 20 percent of the $56 million he and his committees raised online so far this year.
Trailing in the polls and facing a cash crunch last September, Mr. Trump’s political operation began opting online donors into automatic recurring contributions by prechecking a box on its digital donation forms to take a withdrawal every week. Donors would have to notice the box and uncheck it to opt out of the donation. A second prechecked box took out another donation, known as a “money bomb.”
The Trump team then obscured that fact by burying the fine print beneath multiple lines of bold and capitalized text, a New York Times investigation earlier this year found.
The maneuver spiked revenues in the short term — allowing Mr. Trump to spend money before the election — and then caused a cascade of fraud complaints to credit cards and demands for refunds from supporters. The refunded donations amounted to an unwitting interest-free loan from Mr. Trump’s supporters in the weeks when he most needed it.
New Federal Election Commission records from WinRed, the Republican donation-processing site, show the full scale of the financial impact. All told, more than $135 million was refunded to donors by Mr. Trump, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts in the 2020 cycle through June 2021 — including roughly $60 million after Election Day.
“It’s pretty clear that the Trump campaign was engaging in deceptive tactics,” said Peter Loge, the director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University. “If you have to return that much money you are doing something either very wrong or very unethical.”
The Trump campaign has previously defended its online practices, with Jason Miller, a spokesman, saying that only 0.87 percent of transactions were subjected to formal credit card disputes last year, which would be about 200,000 transactions. Mr. Miller did not respond to questions this week about the Trump refunds.
An example of the prechecked recurring donation boxes Mr. Trump used in 2020.
Of the refunds issued this year, $8.1 million came from Mr. Trump’s shared account with the R.N.C., the records show. An additional $2.2 million came from his re-election committee and $2.5 million was issued by the party itself. The party stopped operating in tandem with Mr. Trump earlier this year but still owed refunds from 2020; most of its returned donations came in January and February.
The Times investigation had previously found that the Trump operation along with the party had refunded more than 10 percent of the $1.2 billion it had raised online through the end of 2020. President Biden’s equivalent committees refunded 2.2 percent of what had been raised online last year on ActBlue, the Democratic donation-processing site, records show.
The Federal Election Commission has since unanimously recommended that Congress prohibit campaigns from prechecking boxes for recurring donations, and legislation to do so has been introduced in both the House and Senate. The state attorneys general in New York, Connecticut, Minnesota and Maryland have also opened investigations into WinRed and ActBlue’s practices.
WinRed has sued in federal court to stop the investigation by saying that federal law pre-empts any state investigation. Last week, the attorneys general sought to dismiss the WinRed suit, arguing in a court filing that consumer-protection laws gave them jurisdiction.
The prechecked recurring box has become increasingly widespread among Republicans using WinRed, including burying the disclosure under extraneous text; Democrats have moved to stop using such boxes entirely.
The two Republican senators who lost the January runoffs in Georgia, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, used prechecked boxes to lead donors into weekly withdrawals, resulting in a rash of refunds. Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue combined to refund $10.4 million from Nov. 24 through the end of June 2021 — out of a total of $68.5 million raised online during that time.
The Democrats who defeated them, Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, raised tens of millions of dollars more online — and refunded less than one-fifth as much, around $2 million, during the same period.
Overall, WinRed issued refunds that totaled 12.7 percent of what it raised the first six months of the year; ActBlue’s refunds were 3.3 percent of what it collected.
The disparity was even more stark in January of this year, when refunds were surging for Mr. Trump and Georgia Senate Republicans. That month, refunds issued by WinRed equaled nearly 28 percent of what the platform collected in contributions, records show. There was even one day when WinRed issued more in refunds than it reported receiving in contributions.
WinRed said there was simply a greater volume of refunds immediately after elections, and noted that refunds had slowed in recent months. In the first quarter of 2021, records show that refunds issued on WinRed equaled nearly 20 percent of what was raised; that figured dipped to 5.7 percent in the second quarter.
Mr. Trump’s new political action committee, Save America, continues to precheck its “money bomb” and recurring donation box, taking out fresh donations monthly. In addition to the $12.8 million refunded by Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign and party committees tied to it, his new PAC issued nearly $800,000 in refunds in the first six months of the year, 3.75 percent of what it raised.
ActBlue, which previously allowed campaigns wide latitude to opt donors into repeating contributions, has clamped down on the tactic. In July, the site implemented new rules essentially forbidding political candidates and groups from prechecking a recurring box unless the link to the donation page explicitly says there will be repeating withdrawals.
Digital experts said that many donors do not notice the extra contributions for many months, if at all. Some decide pursuing refunds is too onerous or complex. Older contributors are seen as especially vulnerable to such aggressive digital tactics, campaign strategists say.
For Republicans, prechecking is something some strategists defend as a useful tool to shrink the traditional Democratic advantage of online fund-raising.
The three main Republican Party committees — one devoted to the House, one to the Senate and the R.N.C. — nearly matched the parallel Democratic groups in online fund-raising, collecting $68.8 million compared with $70.8 million for the Democrats in the first six months of 2021.
At the same time, those Republican Party groups issued more than $5 million in additional WinRed refunds compared with the Democratic groups — 11.2 percent of what they raised online compared with 3.7 percent, records show.
Rachel Shorey contributed reporting.
Shane Goldmacher is a national political reporter and was previously the chief political correspondent for the Metro desk. Before joining The Times, he worked at Politico, where he covered national Republican politics and the 2016 presidential campaign. @ShaneGoldmacher
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 8, 2021, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump’s Repeat-Donation Tactics Led to Millions in Refunds Into 2021. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/07/us/politics/trump-recurring-donations.html
Former Acting Attorney General Testifies About Trump’s Efforts to Subvert Election
Katie Benner
New York Times
August 7, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/07/us/politics/jeffrey-rosen-trump-election.html
WASHINGTON — Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration, has told the Justice Department watchdog and congressional investigators that one of his deputies tried to help former President Donald J. Trump subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the interviews.
Mr. Rosen had a two-hour meeting on Friday with the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and provided closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Saturday.
The investigations were opened following a New York Times article that detailed efforts by Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, to push top leaders to falsely and publicly assert that ongoing election fraud investigations cast doubt on the Electoral College results. That prompted Mr. Trump to consider ousting Mr. Rosen and installing Mr. Clark at the top of the department to carry out that plan.
Mr. Trump never fired Mr. Rosen, but the plot highlights the former president’s desire to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda.
Mr. Clark, who did not respond to requests for comment, said in January that all of his official communications with the White House “were consistent with law,” and that he had engaged in “a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president.”
Mr. Rosen did not respond to requests for comment. The inspector general’s spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. Rosen has emerged as a key witness in multiple investigations that focus on Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the results of the election. He has publicly stated that the Justice Department did not find enough fraud to impact the outcome of the election.
Mr. Rosen on Friday told investigators from the inspector general’s office about five encounters with Mr. Clark, including one in late December during which his deputy admitted to meeting with Mr. Trump and pledged that he would not do so again, according to a person familiar with the interview.
Mr. Rosen also described subsequent exchanges with Mr. Clark, who continued to press colleagues to make statements about the election that they found to be untrue, according to a person familiar with the interview.
He also discovered that Mr. Clark had been engaging in unauthorized conversations with Mr. Trump about ways to have the Justice Department publicly cast doubt on President Biden’s victory, particularly in battleground states that Mr. Trump was fixated on, like Georgia. Mr. Clark drafted a letter that he asked Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators, wrongly asserting that they should void Mr. Biden’s victory because the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in the state.
Such a letter would effectively undermine efforts by Mr. Clark’s colleagues to prevent the White House from overturning the election results, and Mr. Rosen and his top deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, rejected the proposal.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said Mr. Rosen discussed previously reported incidents, including his interactions with Mr. Clark, with the Senate Judiciary Committee. He called Mr. Rosen’s account “dramatic evidence of how intent Trump was in overthrowing the election.”
Mr. Blumenthal said Mr. Rosen presented new facts and evidence that led him to believe that the committee would need to answer “profound and important questions” about the roles that individuals in Mr. Trump’s orbit played in the effort to undermine the peaceful transition of power.
As details of Mr. Clark’s actions emerge, it is unclear what, if any, consequences he could face. The Justice Department’s inspector general could make a determination about whether Mr. Clark crossed the line into potentially criminal behavior. In that case, the inspector general could refer the matter to federal prosecutors.
Mr. Rosen has spent much of the year in discussions with the Justice Department over what information he could provide to investigators, given that decision-making conversations between administration officials are usually kept confidential.
Douglas A. Collins, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said last week that the former president would not seek to bar former Justice Department officials from speaking with investigators. But Mr. Collins said he might take some undisclosed legal action if congressional investigators sought “privileged information.”
Mr. Rosen quickly scheduled interviews with congressional investigators to get as much of his version of events on the record before any players could ask the courts to block the proceedings, according to two people familiar with those discussions who are not authorized to speak about ongoing investigations.
He also reached out directly to Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, and pledged to cooperate with his investigation, according to a person briefed on those talks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/07/us/politics/jeffrey-rosen-trump-election.html
Duty To Warn @duty2warn Former acting AG Jeffrey Rosen met with the Senate Judiciary today. Katie Benner of the NYT said Rosen wanted to share his account ASAP in case anyone sues to prevent him from doing so. Sen. Blumenthal said that Rosen gave them new information relating to people in Trump's orbit.
2:15 AM · Aug 8, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
Former acting AG Jeffrey Rosen met with the Senate Judiciary today. Katie Benner of the NYT said Rosen wanted to share his account ASAP in case anyone sues to prevent him from doing so. Sen. Blumenthal said that Rosen gave them new information relating to people in Trump's orbit.
— Duty To Warn 🔉 (@duty2warn) August 8, 2021
Homeland Security warns of 'increasing but modest' threat of violence from Trump conspiracy
DHS said it has no specific evidence of an imminent plot.
ByLuke Barr
7 August 2021, 01:02
• 5 min read
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/homeland-security-warns-increasing-moderate-threat-violence-trump/story?id=79324751
The Department of Homeland Security said Friday they have observed "an increasing but modest level of activity online" by people who are calling for violence in response to baseless claims of 2020 election fraud and related to the conspiracy theory that former President Donald Trump will be reinstated.
"Some conspiracy theories associated with reinstating former President Trump have included calls for violence if desired outcomes are not realized," according to a DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis bulletin obtained by ABC News.
There is no evidence that shows there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
"Over the last few days what has occurred is there's been much more public visibility, meaning the discussions and these theories have migrated away from being contained within the conspiracy and extremist online communities, to where they're being the topic of discussion on web forums, or more public web forums, and even within the sort of media ecosystem," a senior DHS official explained.
DHS says in the bulletin they do not have specific evidence there is a plot imminent.
"As public visibility of the narratives increases, we are concerned about more calls to violence. Reporting indicates that the timing for these activities may occur during August 2021, although we lack information on specific plots or planned actions," the bulletin sent to state and local partners reads.
The department "does not have the luxury of waiting till we uncover information with the level of specificity, regarding a potential location and the time of an attack" to act on potential threats due to the threat environment, the senior DHS official explained.
"Past circumstances have illustrated that calls for violence could expand rapidly in the public domain and may be occurring outside of publicly available channels. As such, lone offenders and small groups of individuals could mobilize to violence with little-to-no warning," the bulletin says.
The senior official said that one of the lessons learned from the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol is "that information that may reflect a growing threat may be communicated on public forums."
"The current threat environment is one which is fueled in large part by conspiracy theories and other false narratives that are spread online by foreign governments, by foreign terrorist groups and by domestic extremist thought leaders, and are consumed by individuals who are predisposed to engage in violence," the official said.
The official pointed to the events of Jan. 6 and the attacks on the synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, as examples.
The senior DHS official also pointed to the balance DHS has to walk when putting out products.
"We don't want to overreact, but we want to make sure that we are at the earliest stage possible providing awareness to law enforcement and other personnel who are responsible for security and are critical to mitigating risk," the senior official said, adding the bulletin was done with civil rights and civil liberties in mind.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/homeland-security-warns-increasing-moderate-threat-violence-trump/story?id=79324751
Manu Raju @mkraju ·1h Senate breaks filibuster to advance $1.2 trillion infrastructure package. The vote was 67-27.
Manu Raju
@mkraju
Replying to
@mkraju
GOP yes votes, per @alizaslav
— Roy Blunt, Shelley Moore Capito, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Kevin Cramer, Mike Crapo, Chuck Grassley, John Hoeven, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, Jim Risch, Mike Rounds, Mitt Romney, Thom Tillis, Todd Young, Deb Fischer, Cornyn
6:22 PM · Aug 7, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
GOP yes votes, per @alizaslav — Roy Blunt, Shelley Moore Capito, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Kevin Cramer, Mike Crapo, Chuck Grassley, John Hoeven, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, Jim Risch, Mike Rounds, Mitt Romney, Thom Tillis, Todd Young, Deb Fischer, Cornyn
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) August 7, 2021