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Michael Cohen reveals Trump’s “biggest fear” about having his tax returns released

President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on Tuesday that President Donald Trump has much to fear about having his tax returns released.

During an interview to promote his new book, titled “Disloyal,”Cohen was asked by Camerota why Trump is so reluctant to release his tax returns despite pledging for years to make them public.

Cohen replied that, for one thing, they would reveal Trump isn’t nearly as rich as he pretends to be.

“He doesn’t report the income he claims,” the former Trump attorney explained. “His wealth is not as significant, and I imagine they were probably lenient in how they took deductions.”

However, Cohen also said that being exposed for not being as wealthy as he has claimed is not the president’s biggest worry.

“His biggest fear is, if that tax return was released, there’s a whole slew of accountants and forensic accountants that will rip through it and he will end up with a massive tax bill, penalties, fines and possibly even tax fraud,” he said.

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

How Trump exposed his own “record of extraordinary failure” by venturing outside his Fox News bubble

In his column for the Washington Post this Wednesday, Greg Sargent contends that the ABC News town hall that featured President Trump this Tuesday was a prime example of how unprepared he is for hard questions when he’s not protected by the Fox News bubble.

“The questions from voters and moderator George Stephanopoulos were pointed, but they were largely premised on basic facts about Trump’s presidency,” Sargent writes. “Over and over, Trump tried to lie away those facts, but (and this is the rare part) he was then pressed with follow-up questions based on more facts.”

According to Sargent, it’s important to remember that Trump thinks he’s entitled to a ” 24/7 propaganda network that doesn’t commit such heresies.” And some conservative pundits, like Fox’s Laura Ingraham apparently agree, calling ABC’s town hall an “ambush.”

“In a way, the Tuesday night town hall really was an ambush. It was an ambush of facts and follow up questions that blew more big holes in the protective shield his propagandists have tried to construct around a record of extraordinary failure,” Sargent writes.

Read the full op-ed over at The Washington Post.

Laura Ingraham calls Trump’s town hall an “ambush” after he takes questions from undecided voters

Fox News host Laura Ingraham described President Donald Trump’s Tuesday ABC News town hall as an “ambush” after he was questioned by undecided voters and repeatedly fact-checked by moderator George Stephanopoulos.

Ingraham, who is essentially an informal Trump adviser, complained that the town hall was moderated by a “Clintonite” — a reference to Stephanopoulos’ time as an aide for former President Bill Clinton — and argued that the “DNC may have put the whole thing on.”

“The president loves mixing it up with everybody,” she claimed. “He did the interview with Jonathan Swan, the 18 tapes of Bob Woodward — now he did this. But this is an ambush.”

Guest John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s favorite famously-wrong pollsters, noted during the segment that Trump “was very sensitive and demonstrated empathy” when he was questioned by a woman who had just lost her mother.

McLaughlin did not mention that the woman’s mother died from cancer, but Trump repeatedly referred to the woman’s mother dying of “COVID.”

Trump had a tough night facing questions from actual voters rather than the White House press pool as he repeatedly attempted to deflect blame from his coronavirus response.

Julie Bart, a retired chemical engineer, asked Trump why he did not support a mask mandate — and why he did not wear his mask “more often.”

Trump insisted that the had worn masks in hospitals and other places before inexplicably blaming Democrats for not instituting a mask mandate.

“They said at the Democrat Convention . . . they’re going to do a national mandate. They never did it,” Trump said. “Because they’re checked out, they never did it.”

He went on to blame Democratic rival Joe Biden, who is not the president, for failing to call for a mask mandate, which he did.

“To be clear: I am not currently president,” Biden quipped on Twitter.

Trump claimed in the segment that “a lot of people think the masks are not good.”

“Who are those people?” Stephanopoulos pressed.

“Waiters,” Trump responded. 

Another voter asked why Trump chose to downplay the pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted low-income communities and people of color.

“I didn’t downplay it. I actually — in many ways, I up-played it, in terms of action. My action was very strong,” Trump insisted, even though he admitted to journalist Bob Woodward that he wanted to “always play it down”

Paul Tubiana, who said he voted for Trump in 2016, described himself as “conservative, pro-life and diabetic.”

“I’ve had to dodge people who don’t care about social distancing and wearing face masks,” he said. “I thought you were doing a good job with the pandemic response until about May 1. Then you took your foot off the gas pedal. Why did you throw vulnerable people like me under the bus?”

“We really didn’t Paul,” Trump replied, insisting that his leadership was better than previous administrations.

During another point, Stephanopoulos pressed Trump on his claim that the coronavirus would “disappear.”

“It would go away without the vaccine . . . but it’s going to go away a lot faster with it,” Trump doubled down, before claiming that “you’ll develop like a herd mentality. It’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen. That will all happen.”

Trump was apparently referring to “herd immunity,” which scientists believe would require well over half the country to be infected with a disease that often has serious longterm health impacts and would likely kill at least one million people in the U.S. alone.

Ellesia Blaque, a professor, pressed Trump on his push to repeal Obamacare, which includes protections for people with pre-existing conditions such as her.

Trump interrupted during the question to insist he does not support striking down pre-existing condition protections, even though his administration is suing to strike down the entire Obamacare law.

“Please stop, and let me finish my question, sir,” Blaque replied. “Should that be removed within a 36- to 72-hour period without my medication, I will be dead.”

Trump cited his executive order, which he dubiously claimed protected people with pre-existing conditions. Stephanopoulous pushed back.

“You fought to repeal Obamacare. You’re arguing the Supreme Court right now to strike it down — that would do away with pre-existing conditions,” he said. “I interviewed you in June of last year. You said the healthcare plan would come in two weeks. You could Chris Wallace that this summer it’d come in three weeks.”

“It doesn’t matter. I have it all ready, and it’s a much better plan for you,” Trump responded, offering no details on his better healthcare plan.

During another segment, Pastor Carl Day pressed Trump on his campaign slogan.

“You’ve coined the phrase ‘Make America Great Again.’ When has America been great for African-Americans in the ghetto of America?” he asked. “Are you aware of how tone-deaf that comes off to the African-American community?”

Trump responded by claiming he was doing well with Black voters in the polls (he is not) and bragged that Black Americans experienced “the best single moment in the history of the African-American people in this country” before the pandemic.

Day pressed Trump on why he refused to acknowledge there was a “race problem” in America.

“Well, I hope there’s not a race problem,” Trump replied. “I can tell you, there’s none with me.”

With no end in sight, Trump’s lies just keep making the pandemic worse

With the release of Bob Woodward’s book “Rage,” we’ve been given the opportunity to revisit the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic with the added insights of comments the president made in private at the time. Unsurprisingly, we have learned that Donald Trump was lying to the public every step of the way. Day after day, we hear more of the Woodward tapes, and each one reveals Trump to have been even more reckless and self-centered than we knew, leaving Woodward and millions of others unable to tell “whether he’s got it straight in his head what is real and what is unreal.”

The president had the presence of mind to tell Woodward in April that the virus is “a killer if it gets you,” but shortly after that told the public, “The Invisible Enemy will soon be in full retreat!” By July, he had stopped even trying to explain away his failure. He grew very petulant and upset with Woodward for questioning him on this:

On Tuesday night ,Trump attended a town hall sponsored by ABC News. He had to talk to regular voters in Pennsylvania rather than reporters, and it was a train wreck. He lied so often that the Washington Post fact check was headlined, “Trump’s ABC News town hall: Four Pinocchios, over and over again.”

His comments about the pandemic were especially egregious. Here’s just one example:

Lately Trump has taken to ridiculing Joe Biden’s mask-wearing, suggesting that the former vice president has a psychiatric problem. He sets an example for his tens of millions of supporters and they follow it, unfortunately for them and everyone with whom they come in contact.

We probably won’t know the full extent of the damage done by his mask-free super-spreader rallies until after the election, which is one reason why Trump — who clearly has little regard for his most ardent fans — now feels free to hold them. But it is certain that there will be fallout. People who attended a Trump rally this fall will die, and some will almost certainly spread it to others some who will die.

A recent study using some new and controversial techniques tracked the spread of the virus from the big motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, last month, which seemed to show a massive increase in cases around the country stemming from the 500,000-person gathering. While the overall numbers have been disputed by scientists at Johns Hopkins, there is no doubt about an increase in cases in the surrounding Sturgis area. USA Today reported this week that “a month after the controversial Sturgis Motorcycle Rally drew hundreds of thousands of bikers to South Dakota, COVID-19 infections are growing faster in North Dakota and South Dakota than anywhere in the nation.”

Contract tracing is tough in this country. We don’t have a good system to begin with, and many people refuse to cooperate. It’s fair to guess that Trump rally-goers are among the least likely to agree to it. So we may never know how many of the thousands of people who will have attended Trump rallies by Nov. 3 will be sacrificed to give the president the ego boost he craves.

But one has to look no further than the famous Maine wedding last month to know just how lethal these events can be:

At least seven people have died in connection to a coronavirus outbreak that continues to sicken people in Maine following a wedding reception held over the summer that violated state virus guidelines, public health authorities said. The August wedding reception at the Big Moose Inn in Millinocket is linked to more than 175 confirmed cases of the virus, the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday ….

The virus cases stemming from the wedding have spanned hundreds of miles in a state that had largely controlled the spread of the coronavirus through the summer. Maine has reported less than 5,000 cases of the virus in total since March.But the growing number of cases related to the wedding, which exceeded the state’s guidelines of 50 people or less at indoor gatherings, could undo some of that progress if it continues to swell. Authorities have said more than 65 people attended the wedding.

Trump’s rallies feature thousands of people, many of them older and the vast majority without masks, standing close together for long periods of time, cheering and shouting. They aren’t worried, because their beloved leader is telling them they don’t need to be:

While Trump’s followers believe everything he says, the damage is much broader than that. His lies and manipulation of the facts during this crisis have eroded the rest of America’s trust in the government to such an extent that, according to a new NBC News/Survey Monkey poll, “Fifty-two percent of adults say they don’t trust the president’s vaccine comments, while just 26 percent say they do.” Only 20% say they’re unaware of what the president has said. Here’s what has people nervous:

If you want to know the truth, the previous administration would have taken perhaps years to have a vaccine because of the FDA and all the approvals, and we’re within weeks of getting it.

Trump’s manipulation of federal agencies to allow unproven therapies, which in at least one case had to be withdrawn when it proved dangerous, doesn’t inspire faith in the process. How can people be expected to trust his administration to deliver a safe and effective vaccine under these circumstances?

America was once seen as the global leader in science and technology, but the nation’s reputation has plummeted around the world in the wake of Trump’s mishandling of this crisis. According to Pew Research, U.S. allies are appalled by Trump’s handling of the pandemic and find him less trustworthy than the presidents of Russia and China. People in all countries surveyed view the U.S. response as worse than that of their own country’s, the World Health Organization, the EU or China. (One of the great ironies of this whole disaster is that Trump pulled the U.S. out of the WHO ostensibly for lying about the lethality and spread of the virus — when that was exactly what he was doing every single day. )

Trump likes to say that “nobody’s ever seen anything like this,” and in this case, at least, he’s right. The consequences of the president’s psychological and intellectual shortcomings, which led him to downplay the pandemic, are so devastating that it led Scientific American to endorse a candidate for president for the first time in the magazine’s 175-year history: 

The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people — because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges. That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment.

It is hard to see how any rational person could come to any other conclusion. 

As the West goes up in flames, Trump couldn’t care less

The air outside my window is yellow today. It was orange yesterday. The Air Quality Index is over 200. The Environmental Protection Agency defines this as a “health alert” in which “everyone may experience more serious health effects if they are exposed for 24 hours.” Unfortunately, the index has been over 200 for several days.

The West is burning. Wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington are incinerating homes, killing scores of people, sickening many others, causing hundreds of thousands to evacuate, burning entire towns to the ground, consuming millions of acres, and blanketing the western third of the United States with thick, acrid and dangerous smoke.

Yet the president has said and done almost nothing. He’s in California today for a quick photo-op, and then high-tails back to Washington (or is it Mar-a-Lago?) as fast as he can. 

A month ago, Trump wanted to protect lives in Oregon and California from “rioters and looters.” He sent federal forces into the streets of Portland and threatened to send them to Oakland and Los Angeles.

Today, Portland is in danger of being burned and Oakland and Los Angeles are under health alerts. 

Trump couldn’t care less. These states voted against him in 2016 and he still bears a grudge.

He came close to rejecting California’s request for emergency funding.

“He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him,” said former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor.

Another explanation for Trump’s indifference is that the wildfires are tied to human-caused climate change, which Trump has done everything humanly possible to worsen.

Extreme weather disasters are rampaging across America. Last Wednesday, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration released its latest State of the Climate report, finding that just in August the US was hit by four billion-dollar calamities. In addition to wildfires, there were two enormous hurricanes and an extraordinary Midwest derecho.

These are inconvenient facts for a president who has spent much of his presidency dismantling every major climate and environmental policy he can lay his hands on.

Starting with his unilateral decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump has been the most anti-environmental president in history.

He has called climate change a “hoax”. He has claimed, with no evidence, that windmills cause cancer. He has weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide from power plants and from cars and trucks. He has rolled back rules governing clean air, water and toxic chemicals. He has opened more public land to oil and gas drilling.

He has targeted California in particular, revoking the state’s authority to set tougher car emission standards than those required by the federal government.

In all, the Trump administration has reversed, repealed, or otherwise rolled back nearly 70 environmental rules and regulations. More than 30 rollbacks are still in progress.

Now, seven weeks before election day, with much of the nation either aflame or suffering other consequences of climate change, Trump unabashedly defends his record and attacks Joe Biden.

“The core of [Biden’s] economic agenda is a hard-left crusade against American energy,” Trump harrumphed in a Rose Garden speech last month.

Not quite. While Biden has made tackling climate change a centerpiece of his campaign, proposing to invest $2 trillion in a massive green jobs program to build renewable energy infrastructure, his ideas are not exactly radical. The money would be used for improving energy efficiency, constructing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, and increasing renewable energy from wind, solar and other technologies.

Biden wants to end the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity by 2035, and to bring America to net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by no later than 2050. His goals may be too modest. If what is now occurring in the west is any indication, 2050 will be too late.

Nonetheless, Americans have a clear choice. In a few weeks, when they decide whether Trump deserves another four years, climate change will be on the ballot.

The choice shouldn’t be hard to make. Like the coronavirus, the dire consequences of climate change — coupled with Trump’s utter malfeasance — offer unambiguous proof that he couldn’t care less about the public good.

We need a new climate narrative: Not a dystopian movie, but a vision of hope, change and empowerment

As deadly wildfires raze millions of acres across the Western states, issuing a canopy of noxious smoke and eerie colors in coastal cities, and Hurricane Sally continues a historic pounding along the Gulf Coast, we have been overwhelmed by scenes of a climate emergency that the media is now headlining as a “wakeup call.” 

But a majority of Americans already got that call, according to a Pew Research Center survey this year, and consider our climate crisis as a threat to the well-being of our country. In fact, new polling shows that seven out of 10 Americans actually want more than news on our climate crisis. 

Framing this unfolding reality as a “climate apocalypse,” as the Los Angeles Times headlined last week, might seem like a media breakthrough. But the failure to place our unfolding catastrophes within the context of a century of the fossil-fuel industry’s political dominance, or to recognize the success of fossil fuel-free policies in other countries, risks a debilitating narrative of gloom and doom that plays into Donald Trump’s anti-science antics in California on Monday.

We need a new climate narrative that sets out a road map for a renaissance of thinking and action, not a new series of dystopian chronicles that paints our climate emergency as a roadside attraction. 

We need to get beyond “wake-up call” approaches in the media, and set out a game plan to bolster the needed public support to bring about urgent climate action on a policy level.

Like a chronicle of a climate death foretold, 11,000 scientists released a statement warning of “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” last fall, on the anniversary of the first world climate conference in Geneva in 1979. This came on the heels of a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018, detailing the horrific consequences of accelerated global warming, which UN Secretary General António Guterres called an “ear-splitting wakeup call.” 

And yet the period from 2016 to 2020 ranked as the hottest years in human history. And with the Trump administration in full-fledged denial, the majority of countries in the world have failed to update their pledges to the Paris Climate Summit.

Even with the near-worldwide lockdown during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached an all-time high this summer at 417 parts per million. 

In fact, we have a climate communication crisis as much as a climate crisis. 

This includes our media, our schools and our politicians on all levels — and it includes delusional frameworks that still pretend we can simply adapt to the mounting crises over the next couple of decades. 

We are simply not telling the stories that galvanize people to act with the urgency required to pull us back from the brink of oblivion.

The coronavirus has added a chilling lesson: A significant portion of the population won’t even put on a mask in the interests of communal public health.  

The climate crisis shares this disconnection to reality. 

One thing we learned when a level 4 land-hurricane “derecho” left our Iowa region in ruins last month: As we sat in the dark for a week or more, it became clear that most people didn’t even know the source of their electricity or understand the role of a centralized grid, let alone the impact of whatever extracted fuel was used on local communities and environments. 

We have an app for everything — but not for our connection to the planet.

We need a new climate narrative, or what Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg called “cathedral thinking,” after the fire that partly destroyed the cathedral of Notre Dame last year.

The Green New Deal, of course, is a good start in this reframing of the climate crisis. It proposes a 10-year national mobilization to transition to renewable energy sources, overhaul our outdated infrastructure and transportation systems, and set out employment guarantees.

But as I found when I first wrote about launching a Green New Deal in 2008, challenging then-presidential candidate Barack Obama to get beyond worn-out ideas and anachronistic schemes to subsidize the dying coal industry, this kind of centralized messaging of government intervention and green jobs will never gain the necessary political support to get beyond the “implementation gap.” That is, it never will until and unless we can craft a narrative that applies to ordinary people’s daily lives and generates the necessary community buy-in and engagement. 

The road to the Green New Deal is paved by Green New Farms, Green New Schools, Green New City Council plans, Green New State plans, Green New Businesses and Green New Enterprise Zones.

That doesn’t happen with a top-down jobs bill.  

It starts, for example, by making indigenous nations and frontline communities that must deal with industrial fallout and extraction — from coal mining and burning to fracking, drilling and pipeline construction — into showcases for a climate agenda. 

It starts by declaring that 2021 will be the year of the Great Shift or Great Transition or whatever other term of art we can roll out. Then we must establish a national climate “story corps” and send them out to every school, town and community gathering to make the climate transition discussion — including the linchpin topics of reducing growth and storing carbon — part of our daily lives. 

This is the missing link in our climate debates: Solutions to our climate crisis are not about averting some dystopian image on the news with a “Blade Runner“ soundtrack. They’re not about “jobs, jobs, jobs,” as Democratic nominee Joe Biden likes to say. They’re about rebuilding our local economies in ways that restore our relationships with nature and our communities, and regenerate the ecosystems we desperately need. 

This process is not about terrifying people with apocalyptic images but bringing them into the loop with stories, starting with people on the front lines of environmental ruin and injustice who are struggling for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — that’s at the heart of understanding how we will survive in an age of climate emergencies.  

Take, for instance, an urban planning meeting I witnessed in Gary, Indiana, considered one of the most polluted areas in the country, where requiems of the city abound amid entrenched poverty, unemployment and abandoned urban infrastructure. On the edge of the Indiana Dunes National Park, home to nearly 1,500 native plant species, a group of storytellers walked the audience on a trip from Gary’s past as a once-proud steel city to its possible future as a “regenerative city” in an age of climate change, re-envisioning ways to generate energy, food, transportation, green enterprise zones and a circular economy, neighborhood by neighborhood, garden by garden, bakery by bakery, character by character. 

Urban farmer and educator Walter Jones asked his audience to set aside the legacy of pollution for a moment — the ravages from coal that had led to skyrocketing rates of heart and lung diseases and birth defects — and join in transforming Gary into a “community of the future” by reclaiming the public commons. To restore the city streetcar, for example, from an era before the streets had been turned into corridors for a “petropolis,” a city dependent on fossil fuels.

Far from gloom and doom, a powerful sense of resistance, determination, excitement and vision for change was thriving in Gary. The event, in fact, took place at a church powered by solar panels, and surrounded by urban gardens and orchards. By providing a vision of a regenerative future, and a roadmap of stories to reach it, the stories mobilized action on climate change in a very real way.

That vision for Gary had come after sharing stories from Adelaide, Australia, one of the first cities in the world to lay out a plan to become carbon-neutral. In recognizing the climate crisis as a global opportunity for exchange — instead of a purely American transaction — a new narrative must also transcend borders.

Stories of regeneration and carbon neutral transformations abound, from Australia to Denmark to India. It’s not a utopian film, but a matter of actual climate policy in countries as different as New Zealand and Chile.

In Costa Rica, for example, farmers have been paid to reverse the destruction of Central America’s great carbon sink and help make biodiversity and reforestation part of the national experience. When I first visited the country in the mid-1980s, less than 30% of the country retained forest cover due to massive logging operations. Now on track to become a carbon-neutral country, Costa Rica has restored 60% of the country’s tropical forests in the last two decades by passing strict forestry laws, ending cattle subsidies, and promoting agroforestry and ecotourism.

Not only has Costa Rica gone through a renaissance of nature, it has become a model for the “Global Deal for Nature,” launched by scientists and advocates in 2019 to protect “at least 30% of lands by 2030 with an additional 20% in climate stabilization areas.”

In Meenangadi, India, facing drought, a village of coffee, pepper and rice growers on the front lines of climate destabilization is leading the first carbon-neutral initiative in that country.  

In Siena, Italy, an unlikely alliance of farmers, scientists and urban dwellers came together to transition to the first carbon-neutral town in the world — 10 years ago. Under the Tuscan sun, an Italian invented the first geothermal power plant — a century ago.

All of these solutions start with a story, as with the climate activists in Gary, who took seriously Thomas Paine’s admonition to a newborn America in 1776: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

That’s the kind of climate narrative that might really wake us up — and empower us to do amazing things. 

The U.S. presidential election: 2020 is not 2016

With the nominating conventions over, the U.S. Presidential Election Race has begun in earnest.

Donald Trump trails in the ten most recent national polls by an average of 7%. Races in some key battleground states are closer, but most show former Vice President Biden in the lead.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Hillary Clinton had similar poll numbers in the run-up to the 2016 election. She lost the general election, nonetheless.

Things are different now

But 2020 is different than 2016 in many respects. The 2020 poll numbers are driven by a wholly different set of factors, which could lead to an entirely different result.

Looking back to 2016, one finds that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2,868,686, giving her a 2.2% margin of victory. This was well below the average of national polls leading up to the election.

Importantly, Clinton lost in the two key swing states of Florida and Ohio by margins of 1.2% and 8% respectively.

More importantly, Clinton lost to Trump in three additional swing states that were thought to be in the Clinton column prior to the election. Clinton lost Wisconsin by 22,748 votes or 0.77%. She lost Michigan by 10,704 votes or 0.3%. And she lost Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes or 0.71%.

In these three states, Clinton lost to Trump by a mere 77,420 out of 13,233,376 total votes cast!

There were a number of reasons for this outcome and looking at those reasons provides a strong indication that the outcome will be different in 2020 than it was in 2016.

Joe is not Hillary

First and foremost, Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton. While neither Biden nor Clinton are particularly appealing candidates, Biden is seen as far more benign than Hillary. 

In 2016, many swing voters were turned off by Hillary, whose nomination was widely seen as a coronation. 

Her maintaining a private e-mail server when she was U.S. Secretary of State bred mistrust. More importantly, the server issue underscored a sense of entitlement that screamed “the rules don’t apply to the Clintons.”

Moreover, her accomplishments in the U.S. Senate were nearly non-existent and it was impossible to identify any tangible foreign policy achievements while she was Secretary of State.

Her vote to give President Bush authorization to invade Iraq and her orchestration of the removal of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi were seen as sell-outs to a foreign policy establishment that Trump had already vilified back then as the “deep state.”

And her insistence that people should vote for her simply because she is a woman failed to energize the party in any predictable way. If fact, it turned off many voters, including women.

And then Trump — in one of the few truths he actually ran on — was able to tag the Clintons as the chief culprits behind the mass incarceration of African Americans.

Biden gets a pass

While Biden shares some of this baggage, most notably the Iraq War vote and the Clinton crime bill, he is further removed from those realities than Hillary was four years ago. Importantly, there is no real taint of scandal attached to Biden.

In fact, the purported scandal involving Hunter Biden and Ukraine backfired on Trump and nearly got him impeached.

Of course, Joe Biden will be vilified more and more by the Trump campaign as the election approaches. But this vilification is likely to be confined to the inside of the right-wing echo chamber. There, outrage, deceit and conspiracy theories are the coin of the realm.

While this realm accounts for a stunning 40% of the total U.S. electorate, it also has hard limits. This fact significantly restricts the impact of the vilification strategy to the Trump base. It is not sufficient to get the current President re-elected.

The “other”: Trump and his scapegoat machinations

A second consideration in this election is the concept of “the other,” a classic Trump ploy.

In 2016, “the other” took the form of Mexican immigrants who were entering the United States illegally. In the 2020 election, “the other” is inner city blacks, as well as protesters and rioters organized around the Black Lives Matter movement.

There is a big difference between making illegal immigrants “the other” and putting that tag on African Americans.

Importantly, there was an economic element in making illegal immigrants “the other” in 2016. When combined with jobs flowing overseas, “the other” created a broad-based will to change the status quo. Simply put, “the (Mexican) other” was seen as taking jobs away from both natural born and naturalized American citizens.

While the smugly inept Clinton campaign responded to this by calling it racism, the majority of Americans, including large numbers of Latino immigrants and African Americans, saw the Trump charge as completely rational. 

They could see with their own eyes’ jobs being taken away by foreigners, either through illegal immigration or ineffectual trade pacts.

And those who perceived this as an economic and rational threat resented being called racist. It bred a sense of outrage, even among many of those who would ordinarily have supported Clinton.

No ambiguity in Trump’s racism

In 2020, there is no ambiguity in the racism embedded in Trump’s “other” strategy. And it is not resonating outside a portion of the Trump base. It fails to resonate especially among the college educated and women.

Importantly, Trump’s tagging of African Americans as “the (bad) other” creates an imperative among African Americans to vote the President out of office. Anti-Trump sentiment among black voters might bring turnout back to levels seen in 2012.

Furthermore, Trump’s race-based rhetoric threatens greater civil strife and does nothing to tamp down the anger that permeates both sides of the conflict. He comes down squarely on one side of the debate, a side that appeals only to a narrow segment of his most ardent supporters.

Many of President Trump’s most ardent supporters constitute the dark underbelly of American society. They strike fear into the hearts of more moderate Americans of all political affiliations. 

Trump is no mystery

A third important consideration in the 2020 election is that Donald J. Trump is now an open book. And the book is poorly written.

His antics during the coronavirus briefings provided Americans over a period of six weeks an overwhelming display of incompetence. Trump lacked compassion, made science up as he went along and at times engaged in outright buffoonery.

In 2016, many voters hoped and expected Trump to rise to the occasion of the Presidency. They liked his stances of immigration, trade and foreign entanglements. Accordingly, they were willing to overlook his many flaws and give him a chance to prove himself.

However, he failed miserably in becoming a focused and inclusive President. On Inauguration Day, he laid out a dark and frightening vision of America, describing a carnage that was nowhere in sight. Today, after four years of Trump, American carnage is on display everywhere.

Since the inauguration, Trump has been relentlessly skewered in books and interviews not so much by Democrats or “the left” — but by family members, former staffers, military leaders and legions of government bureaucrats. He has been disparaged on a personal level more than any U.S. President in recent history.

And these disparagements, reported from behind the scenes, ring true to many Americans because they are consistent among all of his detractors and mirror his public behavior.

Demographics

These three factors constitute major differences between the 2016 and 2020 elections. And they show up in various demographic breakdowns.

Trump continues to lead among male voters, but by a mere 2%. Among women, he is underwater by 16%. This constitutes one of the largest gender gaps in the history of U.S. politics.

Trump’s lead among voters with only high school education or less remains strong, at roughly 6%. But the lead quickly evaporates as you go up the educational scale.

Trump is down by 4% among registered voters with some college experience, down 28% among college graduates and down a whopping 40% among voters with post-graduate degrees.

Trump leads among voters over the age of 65 by 6%, but that lead narrows to 2% among voters between 50 and 64 years of age. Below that age level, the President’s support literally falls off a cliff. He is down by 22% among the 30 to 49 cohort and down 40% among those registered voters between 18 and 29 years of age.

Turnout matters

Turnout among younger voters will be a key determinant in the 2020 election. In 2016, many younger Democratic voters were apathetic toward a Clinton presidency, having already expressed their preference for Bernie Sanders. 

This is not the case in 2020, when antipathy toward Trump will be the overarching — and unifying — motivational factor.

Among African American voters, Trump barely shows up in the polling, with Biden showing an 82% lead. As with younger voters, turnout among black voters will be a key determinant.

After a summer of Black Lives Matter protests and with Trump coming down squarely on the side of the police brutality, it seems likely that black voters will be motivated to vote. 

In 2016, apathy among a segment of black voters resulted in an 8% decline in turnout compared to the 2012 election. In 2020, that 8% may be the determining factor in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Hispanic voters also come down heavily in favor of Biden, giving Biden a 34% lead. Trump’s treatment of illegal immigrants has been seen as unnecessarily cruel and racially tinged. 

His rejection of a path toward citizenship for the DACA recipients is also widely seen as callous and inhuman. These factors could affect the outcome in the key swing state of Florida.

Disclaimer

All of this should provide some degree of succor to anxious Democrats, disaffected Republicans and Moderates alike. But beware!

At the risk of trotting out one of the most hackneyed expressions in American politics, anything can happen in the two months until Election Day.

This article is republished from The Globalist: On a daily basis, we rethink globalization and how the world really hangs together.  Thought-provoking cross-country comparisons and insights from contributors from all continents. Exploring what unites and what divides us in politics and culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  And sign up for our highlights email here.

California inmates fight fires for pennies. Gov. Gavin Newsom finally grants them a path to turn pro

Inmate firefighters have battled some of California’s most destructive wildfires, including the Thomas Fire, the Mendocino Complex Fire, the Ferguson Fire, and the Camp Fire. But for years, most former inmates who had received firefighting training were ineligible to become professional firefighters; their criminal records prevented them from getting the state license necessary for employment.

That changed on Friday, when Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2147 into law. The bill, which was sponsored by Democratic Assemblymember Eloise Reyes, makes it easier for former inmates who have received training as firefighters to have their criminal records expunged. With a clean record, former inmates can obtain the emergency medical technician (EMT) certification that is needed to work in a municipal firefighting department.

“CA’s inmate firefighter program is decades-old and has long needed reform,” Newsom tweeted after signing the bill. “Inmates who have stood on the frontline, battling historic fires should not be denied the right to later become a professional firefighter.”

California has relied on inmates to fight wildfires for roughly 80 years. They are trained through the Conservation Camp Program, which is jointly operated by the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Cal Fire, and the L.A. County Fire Department. The program has long faced criticism from social justice advocates — inmate firefighters make just pennies per hour, with an extra $1 per hour when they are actively fighting a fire.

The state of California has also been criticized for relying too heavily on its inmate firefighting force. This year, there are more than 1,000 incarcerated firefighters fighting back the state’s devastating and historic blazes, but that’s only half as many as usual. Due to the pandemic, many inmate firefighters have been infected with COVID-19 and cannot work. Hundreds more have been released early from prison to curb the virus’ spread. As a result, Newsom has had to call in reinforcements from as far away as Australia.

With the passage of AB 2147, some former inmates have said they are eager to apply to a firefighting job. “The news is huge,” said Michael Gebre, a former incarcerated firefighter, in an interview with NPR. “With me being an EMT, I could do more for the community that I serve.”

Some advocates were more cautious. Sonja Tonnesen, deputy director of programs at the nonprofit Root & Rebound, said AB 2147 is “an important first step,” but that it falls short of a comprehensive reentry program for former inmates. “There is more work to be done,” she told KQED.

Another day, another Trump administration scandal

You’d think we could learn from our mistakes.

Of course, if you are Donald Trump, you never make a mistake.

So perhaps that’s why Trump learned nothing from the reactions to the Ukraine mess in which, among other things, the White House stepped all over a whistleblower in pursuit of its partisan goals rather than consider whether what it was doing was fully legal, truthful, moral or otherwise right. The resulting: impeachment proceedings.

That lesson might have tempered news of another whistleblower. This time it’s a senior Department of Homeland Security official. He filed a formal complaint that he had been pressured by his bosses to suppress facts in intelligence reports that Trump might find objectionable.

These included information to be shared with law enforcement nationally about Russian interference in the election and the rising threat posed by white supremacists.

The whistleblower is Brian J. Murphy, formerly principal deputy under-secretary in the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. He says Chad Wolf, Ken Cuccinelli and others at the top of his department wanted him to alter intelligence reports so they would reflect administration policy goals. Murphy said he was demoted for refusing to go along with the changes and for filing confidential complaints about the incidents to his departmental inspector general.

As it stands, the report at issue was never formally adopted, either as original or altered. Americans are no safer than they were before this incident, and, as with Ukraine, the substantive issues are thrust aside to come down on a guy for trying to do the right thing. We even have a congressional chapter to play out – likely futilely – once again.

And, importantly, we have another plank in the proof that Trump bends Intelligence to his political needs.

Threats to public safety

That report was an assessment of threats facing the country, including in Portland and other U.S. cities.

As written by Murphy, it nails Russian operatives trying to wheedle their way into elections and highly organized right-wing white supremacy groups as fomenting domestic troubles.

DHS top brass wanted the report toned down on both counts, because they do not comport with Trump’s campaign talking points. Yet Chad Wolf, acting DHS secretary, said he had hesitations about the information as presented. Coincidentally or not, Wolf finally has been nominated for confirmation as DHS secretary and would face questions about this.

For Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, this is a re-run of earlier attempts to rewrite intelligence to fit Trump’s partisan politics. He vowed a congressional deposition or more as part of looking into the federal response to Portland’s violence this summer.

Murphy said that he was directed by Cuccinelli, acting deputy DHS secretary, to modify the report to make the threat posed by white supremacists less severe. He was told to play up the threat posed by left-wing groups, a point that reflects what we repeatedly hear from candidate Trump. Murphy refused and was taken off the project.

Further, while Murphy said he had consistently reported on Russian disinformation efforts, Wolf told him to hold back any reports on Russian election interference because they “made the president look bad,” according to the complaint. He also said Wolf told him to report on interference by China and Iran, instead, on instructions came from White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien. Murphy said no and was out.

Indeed, Murphy has found himself here before, under pressure from previous DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to overstate the presence of armed militants and gang members among immigrants approaching the border.

As it happens, Microsoft reports that even the lean the White House is giving is incorrect. Contrary to an assessment by John Ratliffe, director of national intelligence last month, that China preferred Biden, Microsoft found that Chinese hackers have been attacking the private email accounts of Biden’s campaign staff and others. Only one of the Chinese targets detected by Microsoft was affiliated with the Trump camp.

What have we wrought?

To me, it sounds like Ukraine all over again, with different subject matter. We ask for professionals to assess a situation. Then we ignore the threat they discuss, and, worse, trash them for standing by their assessment. And the doctored report gets leaked to the public.

When I go to the doctor, I do it to gain a professional opinion and possible remedy, not to confirm that I am youthful and athletic.

It has been Republicans, among them conservative Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who most loudly defend whistleblowers as the necessary counterbalance in our information systems. Should Joe Biden win, be assured whistleblowers will be high on the agenda as sources of information for Republicans.

Yet Trump has a pattern of throwing out the inspectors general and the whistleblowers with the partisan bath of information that does not reflect his opinions.

In the end, this is not about Trump, except for his insistence on distancing himself from social truths that he will not recognize, from coronavirus effects to racism to health care and immigration. It is about respect for drawing out inconvenient truths that we should be addressing.

Like Murphy or not, the question here is whether we are doing anything about Russian interference and the continuing rise of armed white supremacists. The unfortunate answer seems to be no, because of whatever drives White House adoration of Russia and the political need to create a left-wing conspiracy of violence.

We are neither safer nor more trusting in government as a result. America is not Great in this.

It’s still a conservative Supreme Court, even after recent liberal decisions — here’s why

The new Supreme Court term begins on the first Monday in October, a date set more than 100 years ago by Congress. As expected, the court’s upcoming docket will include some politically controversial cases – as did the term that ended in June. Less expected, that previous term featured some notable liberal victories – in cases about immigration, homosexuality and abortion.

Nevertheless, the last Supreme Court term was far from a liberal triumph, and for several reasons.

First, as commentators have noted, the term also saw many conservative decisions. And as one court observer has argued, the liberal decisions were made on narrow legal grounds, with limited scope and future applicability, whereas the conservative ones were broader.

As a scholar who specializes in the Constitution and the courts, I see another reason why the last term was not a liberal triumph, and why the Roberts court remains a bastion of conservatism: the types of decisions that the court made.

Simply put, some Supreme Court decisions are enduring, while others are fleeting and easily changed.

Different kinds of decisions

The Supreme Court decisions that have the greatest impact on our governments and our laws are rulings that find violations of the Constitution, called “constitutional invalidations.”

When the court declares that some government action – a law or an executive order – is unconstitutional, that action must stop. Neither Congress nor the states can do anything to change this result, except through a constitutional amendment, which is almost impossible to attain (because it requires two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress, plus the consent of three-quarters of the states).

Notable historic examples of constitutional invalidations include Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ended racial segregation in public schools; Reynolds v. Sims (1964), which announced the celebrated one-person-one-vote principle; or Roe v. Wade (1973), the abortion rights ruling which, despite enormous public opposition, is still with us.

But most Supreme Court decisions do not declare constitutional violations. Most decisions either reject claims of constitutional violations, or else engage in statutory (as opposed to constitutional) interpretation – that is, they simply determine what a federal law requires in cases where that question is legally contested.

Unlike constitutional invalidations, the consequences of these other decisions are relatively easy to change.

First, the government can always stop doing what it has been doing, even if the court declared it has been acting constitutionally. And second, Congress can always amend or repeal the laws it has passed if it disagrees with the court’s interpretation of these laws.

The distinction between constitutional invalidations and other decisions therefore marks the difference between the most consequential exercises of Supreme Court power and decisions that are far less significant because they are more amenable to change by the other branches of government.

The liberal decisions

This difference shows why the recent Supreme Court term was far from a liberal triumph.

Two of the three principal decisions touted as liberal victories are the reinstatement of DACA – a program allowing people brought to the U.S. illegally as children to avoid deportation, which the Trump administration revoked in 2017 – and the prohibition on employment discrimination against homosexuals or transgender individuals. The decisions in both cases involved statutory interpretations, meaning they can be easily overriden.

The DACA decision rejected the claim that the government’s revocation of DACA violated the Constitution, ruling only that the revocation was carried out in a an arbitrary and capricious manner that violated a federal statute.

Either Congress or the Trump administration could therefore end DACA – the administration simply by following different, less arbitrary procedures. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it, “[T]he only practical consequence of the court’s decision…appears to be some delay.”

The decision providing protection from employment discrimination for gay and transgender people was also based on statutory interpretation. The justices found that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided remedies against such discrimination. Congress could therefore remove these protections by amending the Civil Rights Act – though it seems unlikely to do so.

The third ruling celebrated by Democrats – striking down a Louisiana statute that threatened to leave the state with a single abortion clinic – actually did find a constitutional violation. This 5-4 decision is therefore not subjected to legislative override.

On closer look, however, the case may actually undermine constitutional protections for abortion. The decision was based on a recent precedent which invalidated a similar statute from Texas merely four years earlier. But Chief Justice Roberts, who cast the fifth and crucial vote in last term’s case, made clear he was willing to weaken that precedent in the future.

The conservative decisions

By contrast, the three big conservative victories from the court’s last term involved two groundbreaking constitutional invalidations.

One constitutional invalidation weakened the independence of federal administrative agencies, a longstanding conservative ambition. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – which was established in 2010 to protect American consumers in the financial markets – violated the Constitution.

The decision made that agency – and theoretically others like it – more vulnerable to political pressure from the White House.

In a second major 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional for states seeking the separation of church and state to refuse government scholarships to pupils of private religious schools. This is a big victory for the religious right, which has long sought public funding for religious institutions.

Since these are constitutional invalidations, nothing short of a constitutional amendment – or a future change of heart at the Supreme Court – can undo these two decisions.

In a third decision, the court ruled against a Sri Lankan asylum-seeker who was ordered to leave the U.S. and was not allowed to appeal his deportation to the federal courts. A federal Court of Appeals found the unavailability of an appeal to be unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court reversed, ruling that the asylum seeker had no constitutional right to appeal.

The decision was not only a big practical win for the Trump administration, which has made the crackdown on asylum seekers one of its main policies. It also deprived liberals of what had been a significant migrant rights victory at the lower court – significant, because it came in the form of a constitutional invalidation, which the Supreme Court has now reversed.

A staunchly conservative court

In short, when evaluating the court’s performance, it is crucial to distinguish between different types of decisions. The most formidable and enduring are those that find constitutional violations.

That is why the Roberts court is so staunchly conservative: In pivotal areas – from the right to bear arms and campaign finance to affirmative action and religious freedom – conservative victories often come in the form of enduring constitutional invalidations.

Meanwhile, important liberal decisions are often easy to circumvent – and unlikely to last.

Ofer Raban, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Oregon

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

The fire this time: The West faces apocalypse, and we need a national solution

The clash between Donald Trump and Jo Biden over the roots of the West’s apocalyptic fire season has missed the crucial point – perhaps because neither candidate is targeting the solidly Democratic Pacific Coast.

Biden justly called Trump a “climate arsonist,” after four years of desperate efforts to accelerate climate change and convince the American people to ignore its threats. Trump is wrong to blame state forest management policies for the fires. But a major source of the conflagration was a misguided national century of treating fire, not fuel, as the enemy in the arid West, so arguably the president is stumbling around an important reality. 

But while climate change is igniting the great burn, and fire suppression is fueling it, communities faced with flames need investments that protect and counteract short-term threats, even while long-term climate and fuels management solutions can be implemented.

Neither candidate has offered such a package of meaningful short term solutions — but they exist. Nor has either offered equivalent investments to protect flood-prone communities in the heartland, or hurricane-threatened coastal residents. All three, which taken together loom over 25% of the U.S. population, desperately need federal leadership.

Smoke and fire have driven me from a family retreat north of San Francisco four times in the last three years. I’ve experienced the searing expansion of the fire season. Overstocked, understory-clogged woodlands stretch as far as my eyes can see. We must face these problems. But by the time we do, even if we are diligent, the cost in communities burned, economies shattered and lives lost is simply too high. 

While confronting the root causes, we must also minimize the price that blameless communities pay for all our past errors. That means making community protection the centerpiece of our fire response in the arid West, just as we make it the centerpiece of our flood control policies in the heartland and our hurricane preparation along the coasts.

In 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt inherited the Dust Bowl, which was itself a complex, multi-causal ecological disaster. He inaugurated a series of investments, focused on the Soil Conservation Service, that in five years cut wind erosion by 50%.  It began not with policies, but with capacities.

This year’s fires were not ignited by utility poles — mostly lightning was the igniter, as it has been for millennia. No easy fix there. Nor were the biggest fires in California turbocharged by high winds. So the problem was not transmission, meaning the way the fires spread. And unlike some of the fires in Oregon, California’s were not even fire tornadoes exploding in previously moist and densely grown canyons. Some raced across land that had burned only three years ago. 

So why did they spread so far and so fast?

There simply weren’t enough Pulaskis on the ground. (If you’ve never heard that term, it’s a firefighting hand tool that combines an ax and an adze, whose invention is credited to legendary Forest Service ranger Ed Pulaski.) There never are. Adequate resources, professionally deployed, are the key to community protection. 

We simply don’t take rural fire management seriously, fund it adequately or staff it professionally. The full-time staff of the U.S. Forest Service, or state agencies like California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, universally known as Cal Fire, are superb. But the full-time firefighting cadre in the Forest Service, with 191 million acres to protect is fewer than 5,000 strong, with only 5,000 more part-timers available. By contrast, New York City’s fire department has almost 11,000 full time firefighters for 200,000 acres.

Cal Fire also has fewer than 5,000 full-time firefighters. It supplements them with 5,000 seasonal staff and a normally roughly equal number of prison inmates — but this year only half the number of inmates were available, thanks to the pandemic. Oregon needed twice as many firefighters as it had available, and scrambled to find National Guard troops to fill the gap. 

Time and time again, reports have  indicated that for many of this year’s fires, efforts to contain their early spread were not even attempted. Firefighters were only able to stop imminent threats to lives and communities, and not always those if the communities were small or remote.New fires in remote areas simply had to wait.

There is a surprisingly simple, uncontroversial and — I, at least, will argue — clearly affordable solution.  

Take rural fire management seriously. Treat it like the Netherlands treats flood control: as a vital public service. Fund it appropriately, staff it professionally, and focus on preventing fires from reaching communities, not fighting them after they do. This is the heart of the concept of Community Protection. Imagine that the rural West, instead of relying upon a ramshackle, pulled-together seasonal fire force — sometimes reliant on prisons or National Guard units — could call upon a nationally integrated Fire Service Corps. It might perhaps mobilize 100,000 full-time fire professionals, federal, state and local. Most of the year these professionals, like Roosevelt’s Soil Conservation Service, would help rural communities properly manage fuel loads, ensure building safety and other facets of community fire risk (just as fire departments in cities do).  

When fire season comes — perhaps early, as it did this year — the first lightning storm to ignite multiple fires would not have sent Washington, Oregon and California scrambling to find needed firefighters. The Fire Service Corps would simply shift from work they might have been doing cutting brush on the outskirts of Berryessa Estates, California, to suppressing the Hennessey Fire and its companions in their first hours, so that the flames never got close to homes. And because the Service Corps would have deployed extensive controlled burning in key corridors, the fire would have largely followed predictable pathways where the corps, perhaps supplemented with seasonal and convict trainees, could have been ready to erect fire lines. 

Can we afford this? Since federal, state and local governments — along with insurance companies — already pay for our fire management failures, they can in fact profit from investment in fire management success. Cal Fire’s budget is $2.3 billion. The 2017-2018 fire seasons cost the state $40 billion. Imagine that the California portion of the budget for an integrated federal-state-local Fire Service Corps is $10 billion, and that with this enhanced investment we could cut the state’s long-term fire damage bill in half, from $20 billion to $10 billion. Every year we would save $2.3 billion on total fire management costs — and all of the uncounted costs of wildfire from lost human lives, damaged health and lost business activity would be additional benefits.  

How best to deploy the enhanced capacity of a Fire Service Corps would be a local decision, and would require extensive trial and error, just as the Soil Conservation Service did not begin with a detailed blueprint to stop the Dust Bowl. But I would argue that any serious effort to put community protection at the heart of a new American response to fire — or to floods and storms — must begin by creating an institution with the mission, the capacity and the professionalism to do whatever the crisis requires. And then give it the federal funding to prevent community fire damage — likely a lot less than we will otherwise spend repairing it.

“Transparent effort to retaliate”: Subpoenas issued in criminal probe of John Bolton’s memoir

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has opened a criminal investigation into whether President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton disclosed classified information in his recent book.

The DOJ convened a grand jury, which issued subpoenas to Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Bolton’s memoir “The Room Where It Happened,” according to The New York Times. The grand jury also issued a subpoena to Bolton’s literary agency Javelin, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Trump administration previously tried to block the release of the book — which was highly critical of the president — over claims that it contained classified information. The move was ultimately unsuccessful. Nevertheless, Trump’s handpicked director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe referred the matter to the DOJ’s national security division last month, which opened a criminal investigation, according to The Times.

Bolton has denied that his memoir contained any classified information. Though he agreed to let the administration review its contents in order to make sure it did not contain classified intelligence, the DOJ accused Bolton of allowing Simon & Schuster to release the book ahead of final approval. The agency unsuccessfully attempted to block the book’s release. 

“With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe — many in newsrooms — the damage is done,” D.C. Circuit Judge Royce Lamberth ruled in June.

But the opinion left open the possibility that Bolton could be criminally charged if he allowed the memoir to be released before final approval.

“Bolton has gambled with the national security of the United States,” Lamberth wrote. “He has exposed his country to harm and himself to civil (and potentially criminal) liability. But these facts do not control the motion before the court.”

Lamberth also said he was “persuaded that defendant Bolton likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement obligations.”

An attorney disputed the conclusion that Bolton “did not fully comply” with his obligations and accused the administration of slow-walking the approval process in an attempt to prevent the release of the highly-critical book. According to The Times, the National Security Council’s (NSC) top official for prepublication review also said in an email at the time that she was “satisfied with the edits that Mr. Bolton made to address her concerns about classified information.”

But the White House launched another review without notifying Bolton, and the official involved cited multiple instances of classified information, according to the report. Though Bolton did not receive final approval from the White House, he approved the memoir for publication.

The grand jury subpoenas came after Trump repeatedly called for Bolton to be prosecuted over the book’s release. The president has claimed that Bolton “broke the law” and “should be in jail” for “disseminating, for profit, highly Classified information.” At the same time, he simultaneously argued that the book was a “compilation of lies and made up stories, all intended to make me look bad.”

The memoir detailed Trump’s alleged attempts to pressure Ukraine and China to investigate Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, as well as his behind-the-scenes dealings with Turkey and North Korea.

Attorneys at both the DOJ and the NSC expressed concerns about launching a criminal investigation, because Trump’s statements “made it seem like an overtly political act,” The Times reported.

National security attorney Bradley Moss described the criminal probe as “absolutely an overtly political act,” but said it was unclear whether that would be enough to beat back potential criminal charges for Bolton.

Bolton also faces separate civil litigation, which could require him to forfeit the proceeds of the book for violating the prepublication review agreement.

Lamberth, who is overseeing the case, said in June that Bolton should have sued the government rather than prematurely approve the memoir for release before the process was complete.

“This was Bolton’s bet: If he is right and the book does not contain classified information, he keeps the upside mentioned above; but if he is wrong, he stands to lose his profits from the book deal, exposes himself to criminal liability, and imperils national security,” Lamberth said at the time. “Bolton was wrong.”

Some legal experts, however, expressed concerns about the DOJ pursuing a former official who has criticized the president.

“Bolton deserves nothing but scorn for how he’s behaved,” wrote Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, “but this is a transparent effort to retaliate against a former senior official for exercising his First Amendment rights and to chill those thinking about similarly coming forward.”

Frontline’s “Policing the Police 2020” shows Newark’s troubled police force slouching towards reform

In 2016, New Yorker writer, professor and historian Jelani Cobb produced an episode for “Frontline” titled “Policing the Police” in which he journeyed to Newark, New Jersey in the wake of two pivotal events. The first was the recent election of Ras J. Baraka to the office of mayor in 2014. The second, which happened that same year, was the release of a Department of Justice report that determined the Newark Police Department had engaged in a pattern of unconstitutional conduct that disproportionately targeted minorities. For one, it found that nearly 75 percent of documented pedestrian stops by the police were not justified.

And this explains, but does not excuse, why Cobb came up empty when he sought out paperwork on a questionably executed and highly disturbing stop he witnessed firsthand during a 2016 ride-along with Newark police. In the scene, the officers Cobb accompanies surround a Black man who was simply walking home, wrestle him to the ground, cuff him and rough him up as they go through his pockets, only to release him when they didn’t find any weapons or drugs. Their justification for such force was what he said to officers as they approached him: “Don’t touch me, man. Please don’t touch me.”

Much of the footage shown in first half of “Policing the Police 2020” recaps Cobb’s “Frontline” report from 2016 in order to contextualize the current conversations surrounding police reform and calls to defund or even abolish the police. Yet most of the footage filmed four years ago looks like it could have happened last week — a sobering realization I had while watching. 

But even if protests resulting from the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and the many other unarmed Black men and women killed by police before and since had never occurred, extreme shifts with regard to police reform between Barack Obama’s presidency and Trump’s presidency necessitate updates to that 2016 report.

Unsurprisingly, Cobb once again maintains an evenhanded approach to the updated report, resuming the conversations he filmed with Baraka in 2015 and 2016 and placing what was said then in a more current context. Helpfully, Baraka and Cobb have some history — both as friends and former classmates at Howard University.

Cobb’s intentional tight focus on Newark — as opposed to journeying to cities and police departments throughout the country — has a purpose beyond his personal connection with its mayor. In the years since the first edition of “Policing the Police,” Newark, in Cobb’s view, has become something of a laboratory for what can and cannot be achieved in the realm of police reform.

The aggressive gang unit whose cops the journalist accompanied on a shift in 2016 has been disbanded, and one of men featured in those interviews was fired. The city council voted to approve a civilian review board with the power to subpoena and recommend discipline for police officers who abuse their charge by utilizing extreme force against its citizens — a reasonable countermeasure given the DOJ’s finding that, during its three years of investigating the department, its internal affairs office dismissed 99 percent of complaints against the department’s officers.

Meanwhile, Baraka’s office has diverted funds to support community street teams dedicated to violence de-escalation and offering social and psychological services.

But while all of this might be seen as positive movement in Newark’s efforts to enact lasting police reform, the Trump administrations deprioritizing of civil rights reforms of all kinds has stymied much of the city’s progress. A recent decision by the New Jersey State Supreme Court significantly limits the power of civilian review boards, notably striking down their ability to issue subpoenas. And this loss likely is due to the lobbying efforts of the board’s most vociferous opponent, Newark’s police union.

“Policing the Police 2020” could have been two hours instead of one. There are enough topics Cobb touches upon in this episode, but doesn’t expansively explore to necessitate an entire series.

However, if there’s one salient difference between the 2016 edition of this report and this update, it is how public opinion has changed. In the past four years, the chasm has grown between how the public and the cops view the perception of use of force. 

That shift is most apparently when Cobb shows a video to James Stewart Jr., head of Newark’s largest police union, in which officers can be seen striking a man and punching him in the head while they’re on top of them, even as he tells him he’s not resisting. Cobb asks Stewart if what he sees looks like excessive force; without hesitation, the union head replies no.

In Cobb’s 2016 report, when Cobb shows the video of the case described earlier in this piece (of an unarmed man tackled and restrained by officers as he’s walking home) to a different officer, that law enforcement figure at least entertains the idea that, indeed, it may look excessive to the observer.

But the problem, then, is the same as the one the public is passionate questioning now. It stems from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that an officer can use force if they believe there’s a threat to his or her life or to the lives of others  — which, as Cobb points out, is a murky rubric.

Newark, at least, appears to be arriving at some versions of a “solution.” Cobb notes that at the height of nationwide protests taking place across the country this summer, the demonstrations in Newark were largely peaceful, with fewer violent incidents.

By continuing to work with federal oversight agents who came to Newark after the 2014 report, the city has implemented extensive training to help officers understand new standards and what they can do within the law. They note that in many cases officers didn’t know that certain stops and arrest practices were not actually legal.

As the episode shows, more recent polls indicate a slight rise in the community’s trust in the police. Yet that came with a corresponding rise in use of force – a number explained away by officials as a result of an increase in reporting.

While Cobb professes a sense of hope at the end of this 2020 update to “Policing the Police,” he does not underplay the glaring fact that the same problems that plague us in 2020 are similar to those he shed light upon in 2016 – and indeed, they are very much the same as those that brought Newark to the fore of our national conversation in 1967.

Nearly five decades ago, the beating of a Black taxi driver by Newark police sparked a violent protests and inspired New Jersey governor at the time to call for a study of civil disorder in New Jersey to understand why. The findings, released by the group that came to be known as the Lilley Commission (named for its chairman, businessman Robert D. Lilley), pointed to the same societal ills we’re living with today.

Frustration over racially discriminatory policing was a primary fuel for unrest, but the report doesn’t stop there. It included 100-page examinations of structural conditions contributing to the conditions that led to the violent uprisings back then, citing inequities in the public school system, housing and employment discrimination and government corruption.

Baraka makes these same connections in his summary of today’s problems with policing. “The police represent a larger system … they’re enforcing these people’s values, right?” he says, citing high maternal mortality rates among Black women as a statistical example. Conversations about systemic racism abound, and few consistently make this vital connection between discriminatory policing and other layers of inequity.

“Every institution in America has the same values that the police department has in America,” Baraka adds. “The police just got guns.”

“Frontline: Policing the Police 2020” airs at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 15 on PBS member stations and is available to stream online at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS Video App.

Can wildfires this destructive be prevented in the future? It’s complicated

This year’s west coast wildfire season is breathtaking in its scope and its destruction. More than 3.2 million acres have burned in California since the start of 2020; in Oregon, nearly 900,000 acres have burned in the recent series of fires, and five towns completely destroyed. To put that number in perspective: Oregon in the past decade usually would only see 500,000 acres destroyed by wildfires over the span of an entire year. Aside from the deaths and property destruction caused by these fires, their toxic smoke waves have wrought a secondary destruction on the economies and health of citizens who live in any of the nearby major cities, from Vancouver B.C. to San Diego. The extent and volume of smoke is so great that it blew over the east coast today. 

Experts agree that human behavior — land management, arson, and the effects of climate change caused by human industrial activity — helped spur these massive fires, worse than any in recent memory. But if these destructive wildfires are directly and indirectly caused by humans, does that also mean humans can prevent them in the future? 

That’s a more complicated question to answer. Salon spoke with experts who say it’s possible that we can stop them from happening to this extent, but doing so will be expensive and politically challenging. 

“There’s no doubt that climate change is playing a role here,” Professor Dean L. Urban, Professor of Environmental Sciences and Policy at Duke University, told Salon via email. “The complicated part is separating climate from weather: climate is essentially the long-term average weather. So in the west now we’re seeing a warming climate, plus a long-term drought, plus freakish short-term weather (for example, the lightning storms in [California], and the crazier than usual winds). Climate change and weather are linked, of course, in that under climate change we expect warmer weather but we also expect more extreme events.”

Understanding the basis science behind climate change and wildfires will be instrumental in both preventing and containing them in the future, Urban says. It also involves understanding wildfire terms like “fine fuels,” which FireWords defines as “fuel with a high surface-area-to-volume ratio that dries readily and is rapidly consumed by fire when dry,” and “prescribed fire,” or a fire that is deliberately set to meet ecological goals.

“In some areas forest thinning, removal of small and mid-sized trees and shrubs can make a significant difference,” Norm Christensen, professor emeritus and founding dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, wrote to Salon. “This is, however, expensive ($2,000 to $3,000 per acre). Logging that does not remove these fine fuels (non-commercial) will only make matters worse. Prescribed fire can be useful in some locations, but is not without risk and is also expensive. It also is challenging from an air-quality standpoint. Land planning and zoning must be considered for the future as well.”

He added, “In the long term, we must get much more serious about managing climate change.”

Urban elaborated on the importance of gaining control over natural fuels that exist in America’s forests, writing to Salon that policymakers need to create “fuel breaks, either natural (rivers, roads) or man-made with bulldozers. These can help protect humans and infrastructure locally.”

Professor Francis E. Putz, botanist at the University of Florida, explained that virtually any solution to the wildfire epidemic in America will cost a considerable amount of money.

“It costs money (or you potentially make less money) to manage forests properly,” Putz explained. “Companies are insured, so fire losses are covered, and they aren’t held responsible if houses burn down due to their greed.”

Putz had harsh words for President Donald Trump’s response to the crisis.

“If we do not address the climate change issue, no amount of forest management is going to avoid this sort of situation in the future — and note that the rate of change has increased, not decreased or stabilized,” Putz explained.

Christensen also told Salon that Trump simply does not understand the science behind wildfires.

“To quote the president, ‘You gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.’ This statement shows a complete and utter lack of understanding of what actually causes and drives wildfires!”

He added, “I have deleted all expletives from my first response to your question.”

Life changes overnight for researchers who specialize in Venus

On Monday, a group of scientists published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy revealing the presence of phosphine in Venus’ upper atmosphere. The researchers spent three years attempting to find a plausible explanation for the existence of the phosphine besides the presence of anaerobic organisms, and could find none.

“If no known chemical process can explain PH3 [phosphine] within the upper atmosphere of Venus, then it must be produced by a process not previously considered plausible for Venusian conditions,” the authors write. “This could be unknown photochemistry or geochemistry, or possibly life.” 

With that article, the world has changed — possibly forever — for scholars who specialize in studying the second planet from the Sun.

“Personally I find it exciting,” Noam Izenberg — a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and deputy chair of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG), which was established by NASA in 2005 — wrote to Salon. “The Venus science community is about as energized as I’ve seen it in well over a decade. Whether or not this specific finding is verified or falsified by follow up investigations, it drives us to learn and know more. It highlights how much we don’t know about Venus, and that fundamental new discoveries, possibly relevant to and reflective of the history of our own planet, await us next door.”

Izenburg said that his colleagues in VEXAG had been advocating for a Venus exploration program akin to the one currently in place for Earth’s other celestial neighbor, Mars. Izenburg told Salon that each new finding about Venus “shows us that Venus holds uncounted discoveries relevant to planetary science — including Earth, and including the almost daily growing catalog of exoplanets. If findings like this help push the needle to get people like [NASA] administrator [Jim] Bridenstine to tweet ‘It’s time to prioritize Venus.’ I am definitely encouraged.”

Salon also reached out to David L. Clements, who studies physics at the Blackett Lab of Imperial College London and was one of the paper’s co-authors.

“It is clear that finding phosphine in the upper cloud decks of Venus is a problem in the sense that normal chemical processes shouldn’t make anywhere near as much as we see,” Clements wrote to Salon when explaining the significance of the team’s findings. “That requires an explanation that goes outside what we think we know about the atmospheric chemistry or biology of Venus.” He added that he and other researchers had analyzed the various alternative explanations for why there might be phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere and they all “came up short.”

In terms of what scientists can do next to confirm or refute the possible presence of life on Venus, Clements told Salon that “the trick is to come up with something that is produced by life that isn’t produced by anything else. So, for example, if these putative anaerobic bacteria in Venus produced carbon dioxide as a waste product, we wouldn’t be able to tell because the atmosphere of Venus is full of carbon dioxide anyway.”

He added, “That is what makes phosphine so useful — it shouldn’t be in Venus’ atmosphere so finding it is a sign that something we don’t understand — maybe life, or maybe unexpected chemistry — is going on. Until we have a better idea how life in these clouds might work it is difficult to come up with any clear predictions.”

Ingo Mueller-Wodarg, who also teaches at the Imperial College London and is a co-author of the paper, echoed Clements’ observation about the significance of the presence of phosphine.

“We have looked into this quite carefully and cannot currently any alternative interpretation for the phosphine in the atmosphere,” Mueller-Wodarg told Salon by email. “This doesn’t mean a proof for life, but an absence for alternative explanations.”

Mueller-Wodarg argued that “more work needs to go into identifying minor constituents on Venus” as well as “better understanding the chemical pathways.” He added, “Much previous work has gone into studying the chemistry of Venus’ upper atmosphere, hence the surprise discovery of phosphine which hadn’t been expected. So, there exists reasonable knowledge already about Venus, though the intriguing question raised by our new observations is whether anything was missed.”

Robert Grimm, program director at the Southwest Regional Institute in Boulder and former VEXAG chair, wrote to Salon that he anticipates an increase in American studies of Venus as a result of the new discovery.

“US-led Venus research and exploration has been lagged behind other worlds since the completion of the Magellan mission in the 1990s,” Grimm wrote to Salon. “Venus is the cornerstone of comparative planetology and is key to understanding where Earth-sized means Earth-like elsewhere in the Universe. It has always been important, but this discovery adds new impetus. Detection of extraterrestrial life could be the most important scientific discovery in history, and the possibility that life exists on our nearest neighbor is eye-opening.”

Grimm did urge caution when it comes to believing that this could mean there is definitely extraterrestrial life.

“A flagship publication and extensive press coverage does not mean it is right,” Grimm explained. “This paper did a great job of demonstrating their results and laying out (and rejecting) many alternatives, but personally I think it will turn out to be abiotic [non-living]. In the meantime, lots of people are motivated to leave no stone unturned. This is how science should work.”

Mueller-Wodarg, by contrast, was extremely excited.

“Of course this is very exciting,” he explained. “Venus as a planet is highly complex and fascinating. As Earth’s twin it shares a common history and yet turned out so differently. Yet, the prevailing interest in the public often lies with Mars since it reminds us of Earth with its landscapes and many other similarities. Venus deserves a promotion!”

He added, “The broader implication of the discovery is also for us to consider other ‘hostile’ planets as potential hosts for life forms. This is hugely exciting, it opens up new areas of planetary science and astrobiology.”

Louisville settles wrongful death lawsuit with Breonna Taylor’s family for record $12 million

The city of Louisville settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the family of Breonna Taylor for $12 million on Tuesday, Mayor Greg Fischer revealed.

The sum marks the biggest settlement the Kentucky city has ever paid out in a lawsuit over excessive police force — and one of the largest involving a Black woman killed by police in U.S. history. Fischer announced at a joint news conference with the family’s attorneys that the city would also implement a number of police reforms as part of the agreement.

The reforms will require commanders to sign off on all search warrants. Louisville will implement an “early warning system” to monitor complaints against officers, create a program to include social workers at the police department and provide housing credits to incentivize officers to live in the low-income areas they patrol. The city will also require officers to wear cameras during currency seizures and undergo random drug testing.

“My administration is not waiting to move ahead with needed reforms to prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again,” Fischer said, adding that he was “deeply, deeply sorry” for the “tragedy” of Taylor’s death.

“For those who knew her, Breonna’s death is personal,” he added. “The pain is visceral — and the loss evermore devastating.”

Lonita Baker, an attorney for Taylor’s family, said the settlement was “nonnegotiable” without significant reforms.

“We do thank Mayor Fischer and his team for committing to the reform that is unheard of in these cases,” she said. “We finished the first mile in a marathon, and we’ve got a lot more miles to go to cross that finish line”

“This sets a precedent for other Black women — that they’ll be valued,” Ben Crump, another attorney for the family, said at the news conference.  

Crump also reiterated his call for the officers involved in the shooting to be prosecuted — and for charges to dropped against peaceful demonstrators who protested the killing.

“Regardless of this landmark step on the journey to justice, we still are demanding that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron bring charges immediately against the officers that murdered Breonna Taylor,” he said. “We see that there are two justice systems in America: one for Black America, and one for white America. In Louisville, Kentucky, we took significant steps today in . . . trying to correct this broken criminal justice system.”

Tamika Palmer, Taylor’s mother, echoed that sentiment at the news conference.

“As significant as today is, it’s only the beginning of getting full justice for Breonna,” she said. “We must not lose focus on what the real job is. And with that being said, it’s time to move forward with the criminal charges, because she deserves that — and much more.”

Overseeing the investigation into Taylor’s shooting is Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron. A grand jury, which will weigh whether or not to charge any of the three officers involved in the shooting, is expected to hear the case in the coming days. 

Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was fatally shot by police serving a no-knock warrant in search of her ex-boyfriend in March as part of a drug investigation in a different part of the city. Police claim they announced themselves.

Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend at the time of her death, believed someone was breaking into the home. According to Walker, Officers did not announce themselves. He fired what he described as a warning shot, which struck Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in the leg.

Mattingly and Detectives Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove returned fire, hitting Taylor five times. No drugs were found in the home.

Walker was charged with attempted murder of a police officer, but the charges were dismissed in May.

None of the officers have been charged. Hankison was fired earlier this year, while Mattingly and Cosgrove were placed on administrative assignment.

Taylor’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in April, alleging that officers used excessive force and the search warrant, which was filed under dubious circumstances, was negligent.

The family later filed an amended lawsuit alleging that Taylor’s death was the result of a city effort to clear out the block where Taylor’s ex-boyfriend lived as part of a large-scale redevelopment effort.

The city categorically denied that the police action was part of a gentrification plan, but police experts told Salon that links between police brutality and gentrification were not “uncommon.”

“If this were the case in Louisville, it would hardly be unique,” University of Colorado professor Brenden Beck, who studies the link between policing and gentrification, told Salon in May. “Cities often use police to pursue redevelopment ends and gentrification often coincides with increased policing.”

“Enemies of the State” director on the twisty new doc with “too many secrets still in the story”

The legal cases against Matthew DeHart are the subject of the fascinating documentary “Enemies of the State,” which received its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last week.

Directed by Sonia Kennebeck, and executive produced by Errol Morris, the film chronicles what happened after DeHart, who is described as “a pioneer with Anonymous and Wikileaks,”  is investigated for allegedly possessing child pornography. The accused, along with his parents, Paul and Leann, insist that these are trumped-up charges. DeHart claims he possessed sensitive information he received over the dark web that the government wants, and they are using the legal case to target him and get access to his computer files.

But, as someone in the film asks, “Where do you go if the U.S. government has you on National Security offenses?” Matt and his parents are a patriotic military family, however, given this situation, they pack up in the middle of the night and seek asylum in Canada. DeHart was eventually jailed; moreover, he claims he was tortured in prison.

“Enemies of the State” unpacks this twisty story, which was also covered by journalist Adrian Humphreys, who is interviewed in the film. Kennebeck uses recreations of events, original audio recordings, and testimonies from police, lawyers and others involved in the case, along with the interviews with the DeHart family, to ferret out the truth. What is revealed is both surprising and perhaps not. It all depends on who or what viewers believe: Is DeHart a criminal or a scapegoat? What happened to the USB drive with the sensitive files? 

Salon spoke with Kennebeck about the DeHart case and her intriguing new film.

Perhaps one of the most revealing anecdotes in the film is one that his high school buddy Josh Weinstein provides about Matt running for student body president. I am curious what your impression of Matt is?

I think he is an enigma. I spent so many years digging into the story, and it was a challenging investigation. I think what’s important to know is that we went into the story with an open mind. We didn’t know the outcome when we embarked on this investigation and journey. As time went along, we interviewed the parents and people who knew [Matt] as well as prosecutors and detectives. [We were curious] to hear from Matt himself — and not just through an interview on a prison phone line, where everything was recorded.

As Adrian Humphreys says about some of the questions we have in his case, Matt might be the only one to answer them in the absence of a number of documents and parts of the investigation.

What attracted you to tell this story which involves untangling the truth and lies? The real issue of “Enemies of the State” may be deciding who or what to believe. Someone is an unreliable narrator here.

I gravitate towards these types of stories. I’m interested in stories that have a lot of secrecy. I love researching and investigating. I first heard about Matt during production of “National Bird.” When I heard it involves Anonymous, Wikileaks, the FBI, child pornography, and torture — there are so many strange elements, I wanted to get to the bottom of it. My production team and I wanted to make a film about alleged U.S. government torture, so that connected us to the Matt DeHart story. But we realized very quickly there is another side to it, and we found different perspectives. As we went along, it was clearer to me that it was a film and a story about the truth. Through trying to find truth in the world we live in now, where so many strange stories exist on the internet, this film became a timely piece and a commentary on the times. We have trouble figuring out what to believe and how to get to the bottom of things.

You use interviews and reenactments as well as audio recordings to tell this story which practically folds in on itself. I admire the high-wire balancing act. Can you talk about access to the subjects and how you constructed the narrative?

What I tried to do is take the audience on the investigation we went on. We disclosed the steps and timeline as we received information, so the viewer could experience what we experienced, because that is the most accurate approach to a complicated story like this. When we started interviewing people it was clear how much was “he said/she said,” and how contradictory their statements were.

My editor did an excellent job. We gathered all the evidence and went through the story and timeline and used as many documents as we could to show as much reliable information and present that to the audience so they could piece together the story and form their own opinion. Human behavior is complicated.

That’s the beauty of the film too; you have the voices, and sound is important because there is so much original audio, but then the visuals and the music and what you see in people’s eyes — the film presents all these dimensions.

There is a discussion in the film by journalist Adrian Humphreys who talks about an image of DeHart. A photo of him looking bleary-eyed in an orange prison jumpsuit was sent for publication. DeHart, of course, preferred a smiling photo of him in a Canadian hockey shirt. There is a manipulation of representation. Can you talk about that and how you, as a filmmaker, confront the image that best reflects the story versus one that might show bias?

That soundbite has so much depth — it represents how on one hand, the journalist has to be fair, and should try to listen to and ask questions of both sides, whenever possible. The government too, often blocks interview requests, and has too much secrecy. As journalists and investigative reporters, we try to get to the bottom of things. But we must acknowledge that there are opposing viewpoints — that people try to present their story in the best possible way and in the best light. Humphreys understands this and tells us to pay attention and be critical about what you are being presented.

What we are doing, and the images in the film, are very important and the credit goes to my cinematographer. The images in the film often carry multiple messages. We have a shot of Matt sitting in his room reflected in multiple mirrors. That image represents the [multiple] sides of the story, and we tried to use film as a medium to its fullest.

The documentary has footage and recreations that were done with accuracy and thought. A lot of the film is what you believe — and want to believe — but also how the surveillance state induces paranoia. When we investigate stories like this, what we know is that the U.S. government has been doing terrible things: torture, the drone program, mass data collection, surveillance. etc. That is the world we live in. There is a history of government misconduct in this country.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but the film team makes a startling discovery. And someone does state what may have been on the USB drive, which would be pretty shocking if true. What surprised you about the DeHart case in making this film?

There were a lot of things that we didn’t see coming. What is on the USB drive, and when it was revealed to us — of course, you need to see the evidence as a journalist. All the attorneys were speculating where these drives could be.

One of the questions the film asks is how do people take a stance when there is incomplete information? I love the point that people need to think critically; it’s just not done enough. What are your observations on that?

What I take away is that you really have to go into a true investigation with an open mind and be open to different opinions and perspectives. I want people to probe and investigate, listen and question, and think critically. The story isn’t entirely over.

Where do your sympathies lie?

There is a reason I’m not including my voice in the film. I think there are too many secrets still in the story, and I think part of it is the responsibility of the government classifying too many documents. I have a lot more questions. I gave everyone who wanted to speak with us an opportunity to present their perspective. We presented all the evidence we could find. I’m not a judge or jury, but it is important for people to think for themselves and come to their own conclusion.

Trump administration pushed back against Mike Esper’s plan to make Pentagon more diverse: report

Defense Secretary Mark Esper has promised to make the White House a more diverse place, but according to a new report from POLITICO, the Trump administration has moved or promoted at least 11 white men to senior positions at the Pentagon in the past three months.

“The Pentagon declined multiple requests to provide a breakdown of its senior civilian ranks by race, but publicly available data reveals a department run overwhelmingly by white men,” POLITICO’s Lara Seligman and Sarah Cammarata report. “Esper and his deputy, David Norquist, are white. Six out of seven members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are white men; new Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown is only the second Black man ever to serve on the Joint Chiefs.”

Only the lower ranks of DoD leadership are slightly more diverse. “Out of six undersecretaries of defense, all are white and five are male. Out of 60 presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed positions, all but three are men.”

Read the full report over at POLITICO.

Trump’s big lies reveal a truth: Right-wing science denial was never about ignorance, just cruelty

Are they stupid or evil?

When I first started writing about politics, way back in the George W. Bush era, this was a legitimate question when it came to trying to understand the mindset of Republicans, especially when it came to their stubborn refusal to accept scientific truths. Republicans have denied or cast doubt on science in so many ways — denying that condoms are effective, that evolution is real, that climate change is actually happening and largely caused by human activity — and many liberals and progressives have felt legitimately confused about exactly why.

Was it that right-wingers were too ignorant or benighted to accede to scientific realities? Or was it more sinister than that: They knew full well what the science said, but were too selfish and cruel to care, and also selfish and cruel enough to lie about it to our faces?

Well, with the West Coast on fire, a pandemic spreading across the land, and a pathological liar in the White House as the Republican standard-bearer, I think we can consider that debate settled: It’s not ignorance. It’s malice.

The cruelty, as Adam Serwer of The Atlantic famously wrote, is the point. 

Donald Trump is a profoundly stupid man — so stupid that he appears to have actually believed it was a stroke of genius to suggest injecting household cleaners into people’s lungs — but even he, as we now know for certain, was only pretending not to understand that the coronavirus is deadly and easily transmitted. Famed journalist Bob Woodward has been steadily releasing audio clips from the interviews he conducted with Trump over the spring for his new book, “Rage.” These recordings make clear that Trump knowingly lied about the scale and danger of the pandemic. In one, he tells Woodward, “I wanted to always play it down” and “I still like playing it down”.

New tapes released on Monday indicate that, even as Trump was publicly claiming that the virus “would soon be in full retreat” and encouraging protests against lockdown measures, he was privately admitting that “this thing is a killer” and that the virus “rips you apart” if “you’re the wrong person.”

In other words, Trump gets it but simply doesn’t care. That was confirmed again on Monday by a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who confronted Trump about his decision to hold a packed (and largely mask-free) indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada, despite warnings from public health officials that such events easily spread the coronavirus. 

“I’m on a stage and it’s very far away,” Trump told the reporter. “And so I’m not at all concerned.”

So the safety of the thousands of people who showed up to show fealty to Trump is clearly of no importance. He was far away from them! So he’s “not at all concerned.” 

Trump’s odious attitudes towards the people who are being harmed by his failure to take science seriously were on display later in his trip, when he visited McClellan Park in Sacramento, California, where the skies are clogged from smoke from wildfires tearing up the West Coast. 

That the frequency and severity of wildfires around the world — and currently up and down the Pacific Coast at a level never seen in human memory — is a result of climate change is beyond dispute. But when a California state official asked him about the issue, Trump simply responded, “It will start getting cooler. You just watch.” 

“I don’t think science knows,” Trump insisted, while trying to pretend the problem on the West Coast is about forest management, instead of soaring summer temperatures that turn bone-dry wooded areas into kindling. (It was just nine months ago that similar summer fires in Australia reportedly killed more than a billion animals.) 

Claiming that the science is still unclear or that the continued existence of winter proves that there’s no climate crisis are standard issue deflections from Republicans. It worked for many years, however, because the consequences of climate change weren’t readily apparent to most people, and many people didn’t grasp that snow in December doesn’t negate the problems caused by record hot summers. (In fact, one aspect of the climate crisis is more extreme weather in all directions: Record heat, epic hurricanes and sometimes powerful blizzards.)

But the “I don’t see the problem here” act is a lot harder to pull off when you literally have to walk through a cloud of smoke to get to the microphone where you deny the problem. 

The term “gaslighting” —when someone pretends not to know something that both they and their target know is true — has been around in psychology for a long time and recently made the leap to politics, since it so perfectly describes the nature of Trump’s obvious lies.

That’s also what Republicans have been doing all along when it comes to denying science. Even the duller specimens within the party tend to be a little sharper than Trump, after all. So if he understands the facts and is just pretending not to, it’s safe to assume the same thing about the vast majority of Republicans whose lead he follows, and who are perhaps a bit more skillful at performing ignorance.

They aren’t ignorant. They don’t really believe the science is controversial. That’s just an act to cover for a sadistic agenda. 

This was always obvious to people who were watching closely. I spent years reporting on reproductive health care, and it soon became evident that no amount of common sense or scientific evidence would overcome the insistence by many conservatives — such as Vice President Mike Pence — that condoms don’t work to prevent HIV transmission and other sexually-transmitted diseases. That wasn’t, as some headline writers seemed to believe, because Pence was too dumb to understand the science.

Pence is not the brightest bulb on the tree, but it doesn’t exactly take a doctorate in molecular biology to see how a condom prevents virus from moving from one body to another.  He was just feigning ignorance to justify his hostility to policies that protect the health of people he hates, especially LGBTQ people and women who have sex lives outside of heterosexual marriage. 

It was comforting to believe that incomprehension was the main reason why conservatives resist scientific information on everything from STI transmission to the climate crisis to evolutionary biology. For one thing, that problem would seem to have a ready solution: Better education and reasoned discourse. So well-meaning defenders of science would hold “debates” with climate skeptics or evolution deniers, hoping that superior evidence and eloquent arguments would cause conservatives to see the light and embrace rational policies that are better for the planet and its people. 

Nah. Conservatives were just lying about this stuff the whole time. We know this, because they’ve rallied around Trump, a man who tells so many obvious lies that he clearly doesn’t care that everyone knows that he’s lying. In fact, that’s why he tells laughably obvious lies. It’s a power play — a demonstration that he can do or say whatever he wants, no matter how outrageous or offensive, and no one has the ability to stop him. 

This distinction matters, because it puts the fight over these issues squarely in the realm of a moral debate, instead of a debate about facts or science. And that’s a debate conservatives don’t want to have, because they know they’ll always lose a moral debate over, say, whether it’s OK to let the entire West Coast burn every summer and fall. The gaslighting and feigned ignorance was a tactic to keep the discussion mired in a pointless debate over facts that are abundantly clear, and to avoid these larger moral questions. 

Maybe now, with Trump giving the game away, we can stop letting the right waste our time with gaslight-fueled “debates” and turn to what really matters: Will our nation do the right thing, or will we continue to let a pack of bigots and sadists determine our national priorities? That fateful decision is long overdue, but with Trump in the White House trying to lie and cheat his way into a second term, we can no longer avoid it. 

USPS sends voters in numerous states “false” and “misleading” information about mail-in voting

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) sent voters in numerous states “false” and “misleading” ballot information as voting by mail gets underway. 

A federal judge on Saturday ordered the USPS to immediately stop sending “patently false” mailers to Colorado residents.

The mailers told voters that they must request a ballot 15 days ahead of the election; mail it back at least seven days before Election Day; and may not be able to vote if they lose it. However, Colorado automatically sends a ballot to all registered voters, and there are other options beyond returning the ballots by mail.

The mailers prompted a lawsuit from Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who said the USPS “refused” to delay or avoid sending them. U.S. District Court Judge William Martínez on Saturday granted Griswold’s request for a temporary restraining order.

“In reality, Colorado voters do not need to request a ballot at any time. Voters who receive a ballot do not need to mail the ballot back at least seven days before the election; they may alternatively deposit that ballot at a drop-box or may choose to vote in person up to and including on Election Day,” Martinez said. “The notice, if distributed, will sow confusion amongst voters by delivering a contradictory message.”

The USPS disputed the state of Colorado’s argument in a court filing. The agency asked Martinez to reverse the ruling, but most of the mailers have been delivered, Reuters reported. 

“Even if the court views the postcard as having the potential to confuse voters, the postcards do not make false representations about Colorado law,” the filing said. “They do not even describe state law. Rather, they alert voters that state rules vary, refer them to local election officials and provide links that make it easier for voters to locate their state’s rules.”

“The intention of the mailer was to send a single set of recommendations that provided general guidance allowing voters who choose mail-in voting to do so successfully, regardless of where they live and where they vote,” USPS spokeswoman Martha Johnson told Reuters.

But election officials in the states of California, Washington, Oregon, Utah and Hawaii — all of which also mail ballots to every registered voter — also said they may sue the USPS over the mailers. 

Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican, said her office was not informed of the mailers before they were sent out, adding that voters do not need to request a ballot.

On Monday, Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, also a Republican, joined election officials concerned over the mailer after the state passed a bill to mail ballots to all registered voters amid the pandemic.

“The secretary of state’s office was not made aware of the USPS postcard prior to it being mailed, nor was the office asked to provide input regarding the recommendations listed on the postcard,” she said in a statement.

Cegavske added that the mailer was “not accurate for Nevada voters,” including a part which said voters must add postage to the return envelope.

Linda Lamone, the elections administrator in Maryland, said she also asked the USPS to stop sending the mailers, telling local officials that she was “infuriated” by the mailers. The Maryland Board of Elections issued a statement urging voters to ignore the mailers: Ballot requests may be mailed until Oct. 15, and postage is prepaid.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla told Reuters he was “deeply concerned” that the mailers would lead to confusion.

“State and local elections officials have had to spend a significant amount of time correcting election misinformation and disinformation,” he said. “This USPS postcard, without input from elections officials, does not help.”

Though the officials did not accuse the USPS of intentionally misleading voters — and Griswold acknowledged the effort “may have started off as well-intentioned” — the concerns come as lawmakers express worries that changes made by recently-installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy could impact the expected surge of mail ballots this fall.

The New York Times reported last week that the agency was working to reassure voters and officials that it was “prepared to handle an expected surge in voting by mail as a result of the pandemic” amid “suggestions that they are trying to help President Trump win re-election by sabotaging mail-in voting.”

The effort comes after the USPS sent letters to 46 states warning that some mail-in ballots may not be counted, because “certain deadlines for requesting and casting mail-in ballots are incongruous with the Postal Service’s delivery standards.”

“Experimental concentration camp”: Whistleblower alleges women face hysterectomies in ICE detention

A nurse at a private Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) detention facility alleged that migrants face “medical neglect” and mass hysterectomies, according to a whistleblower complaint filed by multiple legal advocacy groups.

Dawn Wooten, a nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, which is operated by the private prison company LaSalle Corrections, claimed that migrants at the facility face “jarring medical neglect” in the complaint filed by advocacy groups led by Project South. The Intercept was the first outlet to report on the complaint. 

In addition to concerns surrounding the new coronavirus, the complaint cited multiple women at the detention facility who were allegedly subjected to hysterectomies, in which part of the uterus is removed.

“Recently, a detained immigrant told Project South that she talked to five different women detained at ICDC between October and December 2019 who had a hysterectomy done,” the complaint said. “When she talked to them about the surgery, the women ‘reacted confused when explaining why they had one done.’ The woman told Project South that it was as though the women were ‘trying to tell themselves it’s going to be OK.'”

“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp,” the detainee said. “It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies.”

Wooten alleged that the center repeatedly used a gynecologist, who appeared to perform hysterectomies at an unusually high rate.

“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy — just about everybody,” Wooten said. “Everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”

Wooten described the doctor at the “uterus collector.”

“We’ve questioned among ourselves like, ‘Goodness, he’s taking everybody’s stuff out,'” Wooten said. “Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out, or he’s taken their tubes out. What in the world.”

Many of the detained women said they did not understand why they were being forced to have the procedure, according to Wooten. 

The complaint provided additional accounts from women who said they underwent the procedure, including one who alleged that she had not been properly anesthetized. Another women claimed that she was given three different answers when she asked why the procedure was necessary.

Wooten further alleged that the facility had underreported coronavirus cases — and knowingly placed detainees and staff at risk of infection. Her complaint, which was filed to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, alleged a “silent pandemic” at the facility, where detainees faced neglect and were refused coronavirus tests even when they had symptoms.

Wooten told The Intercept that she had repeatedly complained to management before being demoted in July from her full-time position. She alleged that the reduction in hours was retaliation for speaking out.

Wooten, who has sickle cell anemia, claimed that she had been exposed to detainees with coronavirus — even though her doctor warned she could die if infected.

“Ms. Wooten’s whistleblowing disclosures confirm what detained immigrants have been reporting for years — gross disregard for health and safety standards, lack of medical care and unsanitary living conditions,” Priyanka Bhatt, an attorney at Project South, told The Intercept.

LaSalle, which operates 18 detention centers, has been accused of mishandling the threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic for months. Medical workers at a LaSalle facility in Louisiana told Congress in July that the company had withheld protective equipment from staff and detainees, as well as ignored coronavirus symptoms and positive tests. A complaint filed by asylum-seekers also alleged physical abuse by staff at a different LaSalle facility in the state last month.

Detainees at the Irwin facility who have staged hunger strikes and protests over fears surrounding the coronavirus have been met with punishment from guards, according to The New York Times. ICE reported that 31 detainees at the facility had tested positive since the start of the pandemic, but Wooten and another medical worker who spoke to The Intercept alleged that there were at least 50 positive cases by early July. More than 15 employees were also infected, Wooten said, including health services administrator Marian Cole, who died in May.

Wooten claimed that ICE bought two rapid testing machines for the facility but provided no training to staff. The machines were used just twice and stored away, according to the nurse.

LaSalle CEO Rodney Cooper said in a letter to Congress that the company was “diligent in operating our facilities at the highest level.” Cooper claimed that no detainees had “succumbed” to the coronavirus, even though two guards and a medical worker had died from the virus, according to The Intercept.

ICE did not comment on the report, but the agency told Law & Crime that it “takes all allegations seriously” and deferred to the Office of Inspector General to investigate.

“In general, anonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics, should be treated with the appropriate skepticism they deserve,” the statement said.

Azadeh Shahshahani, a human rights attorney at Project South, told The Guardian that the groups also plan to file the complaints to the United Nations, describing the alleged treatment as “gross human rights violations” for which “the U.S. government should be held accountable.”

“We are calling for people to be freed immediately,” she said, “and we have been calling for this facility to be shut down for a long time.”

Trump unveils weekly time slot on Fox & Friends, host corrects him: “Fox has not committed to that”

President Donald Trump was corrected by Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy on Tuesday after he announced that he would have a weekly time slot on the program.

Doocy’s remarks came at the end of a 47-minute telephone interview with Trump.

“We’re going to do it every week,” Trump said. “Every Monday, I think they said. And if we can’t do it on a Monday, we’ll do it on a Tuesday like we did today.”

“Sounds good,” co-host Brian Kilmeade agreed.

But Doocy shot down Trump’s news.

“You may want to do it every week but Fox has not committed to that,” Doocy said. “We’re going to take it on a case-by-case basis and Joe Biden, as well, is always welcome to join us for 47 minutes like we just did with the president.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs to be deposed in suit over Fox’s coverage of murdered DNC staffer: report

Two of the biggest names from the Fox Corporation are set to testify under oath in a lawsuit over a right-wing conspiracy theory that Russia did not hack the emails from Democratic National Committee that were released to help Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“Fox News star Sean Hannity was once his network’s most prominent booster of conspiracy theories about murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, only stopping the rumor-mongering after Rich’s grieving parents publicly begged him to knock it off,” The Daily Beast reported Monday.

“Now, Hannity will have to answer questions, under oath, about Fox’s coverage of Rich’s death. Hannity, along with Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and a host of Fox staffers, is set to be deposed in late October over the network’s debunked reporting on Rich, which falsely claimed that he had leaked thousands of Democratic emails to WikiLeaks—a leak, they suggested, that led to his politically-motivated murder,” The Beast reported. “The depositions have been scheduled as part of an emotional distress and tortious interference lawsuit that Rich’s parents, Joel and Mary Rich, filed against Fox, Fox News reporter Malia Zimmerman, and wealthy conservative and former Fox News guest Ed Butowsky.”

Both former special counsel Robert Mueller and the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee have debunked the conspiracy theory.

The report noted that Fox is seeking to block Laura Ingraham from being deposed.

 

In the end, it may not be Susan Collins’ vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh that costs her the election

On Tuesday, The Daily Beast broke down the biggest threat to re-election for Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). And it isn’t her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, or her vote against convicting President Donald Trump at the impeachment trial — it’s the way the election itself will be held.

“This fall, Maine is set to be the only state in the country to choose its president and members of Congress using a process called ranked choice voting,” wrote congressional reporter Sam Brodey. “Under that system, voters are instructed to list their candidate preferences in order, effectively offering up a first choice, a second choice, and so on. Those backup picks only come into play if no candidate cracks a majority of votes on the first ballot: that sparks what is essentially an instant runoff election, in which the lowest-performing candidates drop and their supporters’ second choices receive their votes.”

The problem for Collins is that, while a recent poll showed her Democratic challenger, Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, only leading her by one point, the third most popular candidate is the Green Party’s Lisa Savage, with 6 points. In any other state the Green Party would risk being a spoiler. But in a ranked-choice election, if neither Collins nor Gideon win a majority, Savage voters will be added to their count based on who their second choice is — and Gideon is likely to pick up more votes.

“Maine Republicans loathe this system and have fought it tooth-and-nail since voters in the state approved its use for federal elections in 2016,” wrote Brodey. “But an ongoing legal effort to overturn the system is losing steam, and time, with the November election fast approaching . . . Earlier this month, Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment to the evils of ranked choice voting, declaring that Maine Democrats were ‘trying to rig the outcome’ of the 2020 election through the system. His guest was Dale Crafts, GOP nominee for U.S. House in Maine’s 2nd District” — a district which flipped to Democrats in 2018 thanks largely to ranked-choice voting.

Moreover, Brodey wrote, “it’s not just Collins who could suffer as a result of the way the system plays out this year; Trump could, too. Maine, as Carlson noted in his Fox segment, is one of two states that awards its electoral votes by congressional district. In a tight Electoral College race, even the swingy 2nd District’s lone electoral vote could make a big difference for Trump, or for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, both of whom are targeting the district.”

You can read more here.