Pentagon proclaims failure in its war on terror in Africa after 75,000% increase in terror attacks

America’s Global War on Terror has seen its share of stalemates, disasters, and outright defeats. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, the United States has watched its efforts implode in spectacular fashion, from Iraq in 2014 to Afghanistan in 2021. The greatest failure of its “Forever Wars,” however, may not be in the Middle East, but in Africa.

“Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated,” President George W. Bush told the American people in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, noting specifically that such militants had designs on “vast regions” of Africa.

To shore up that front, the U.S. began a decades-long effort to provide copious amounts of security assistance, train many thousands of African military officers, set up dozens of outposts, dispatch its own commandos on all manner of missions, create proxy forces, launch drone strikes, and even engage in direct ground combat with militants in Africa. Most Americans, including members of Congress, are unaware of the extent of these operations. As a result, few realize how dramatically America’s shadow war there has failed.

The raw numbers alone speak to the depths of the disaster. As the United States was beginning its Forever Wars in 2002 and 2003, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in Africa. This year, militant Islamist groups on that continent have, according to the Pentagon, already conducted 6,756 attacks. In other words, since the United States ramped up its counterterrorism operations in Africa, terrorism has spiked 75,000%.

Let that sink in for a moment.

75,000%.

A Conflict that Will Live in Infamy

The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq opened to military successes in 2001 and 2003 that quickly devolved into sputtering occupations. In both countries, Washington’s plans hinged on its ability to create national armies that could assist and eventually take over the fight against enemy forces. Both U.S.-created militaries would, in the end, crumble. In Afghanistan, a two-decade-long war ended in 2021 with the rout of an American-built, -funded, -trained, and -armed military as the Taliban recaptured the country. In Iraq, the Islamic State nearly triumphed over a U.S.-created Iraqi army in 2014, forcing Washington to reenter the conflict. U.S. troops remain embattled in Iraq and neighboring Syria to this very day.

In Africa, the U.S. launched a parallel campaign in the early 2000s, supporting and training African troops from Mali in the west to Somalia in the east and creating proxy forces that would fight alongside American commandos. To carry out its missions, the U.S. military set up a network of outposts across the northern tier of the continent, including significant drone bases – from Camp Lemonnier and its satellite outpost Chabelley Airfield in the sun-bleached nation of Djibouti to Air Base 201 in Agadez, Niger — and tiny facilities with small contingents of American special operations troops in nations ranging from Libya and Niger to the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

For almost a decade, Washington’s war in Africa stayed largely under wraps. Then came a decision that sent Libya and the vast Sahel region into a tailspin from which they have never recovered.

“We came, we saw, he died,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked after a U.S.-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, but Libya slipped into near-failed-state status. Obama would later admit that “failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi’s defeat was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

As the Libyan leader fell, Tuareg fighters in his service looted his regime’s weapons caches, returned to their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that nation. Anger in Mali’s armed forces over the government’s ineffective response resulted in a 2012 military coup. It was led by Amadou Sanogo, an officer who learned English in Texas and underwent infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, military-intelligence instruction in Arizona, and was mentored by U.S. Marines in Virginia.

Having overthrown Mali’s democratic government, Sanogo and his junta proved hapless in battling terrorists. With the country in turmoil, those Tuareg fighters declared an independent state, only to be muscled aside by heavily armed Islamists who instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, causing a humanitarian crisis. A joint Franco-American-African mission prevented Mali’s complete collapse but pushed the militants into areas near the borders of both Burkina Faso and Niger.

Since then, those nations of the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have evolved, splintered, and reconstituted themselves. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on motorcycles — two to a bike, wearing sunglasses and turbans, and armed with Kalashnikovs — regularly roar into villages to impose zakat (an Islamic tax); steal animals; and terrorize, assault, and kill civilians. Such relentless attacks have destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger and are now affecting their southern neighbors along the Gulf of Guinea. Violence in Togo and Benin has, for example, jumped 633% and 718% over the last year, according to the Pentagon.

U.S.-trained militaries in the region have been unable to stop the onslaught and civilians have suffered horrifically. During 2002 and 2003, terrorists caused just 23 casualties in Africa. This year, according to the Pentagon, terrorist attacks in the Sahel region alone have resulted in 9,818 deaths — a 42,500% increase.

At the same time, during their counterterrorism campaigns, America’s military partners in the region have committed gross atrocities of their own, including extrajudicial killings. In 2020, for example, a top political leader in Burkina Faso admitted that his country’s security forces were carrying out targeted executions. “We’re doing this, but we’re not shouting it from the rooftops,” he told me, noting that such murders were good for military morale.

American-mentored military personnel in that region have had only one type of demonstrable “success”: overthrowing governments the United States trained them to protect. At least 15 officers who benefited from such assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror. The list includes officers from Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, and twice in 2022); Chad (2021); Gambia (2014); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, and 2021); Mauritania (2008); and Niger (2023). At least five leaders of a July coup in Niger, for example, received American assistance, according to a U.S. official. They, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as that country’s governors.

Military coups of that sort have even super-charged atrocities while undermining American aims, yet the United States continues to provide such regimes with counterterrorism support. Take Colonel Assimi Goïta, who worked with U.S. Special Operations forces, participated in U.S. training exercises, and attended the Joint Special Operations University in Florida before overthrowing Mali’s government in 2020. Goïta then took the job of vice president in a transitional government officially charged with returning the country to civilian rule, only to seize power again in 2021.

That same year, his junta reportedly authorized the deployment of the Russia-linked Wagner mercenary forces to fight Islamist militants after close to two decades of failed Western-backed counterterrorism efforts. Since then, Wagner — a paramilitary group founded by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former hot-dog vendor turned warlord — has been implicated in hundreds of human rights abuses alongside the longtime U.S.-backed Malian military, including a 2022 massacre that killed 500 civilians.

Despite all of this, American military aid for Mali has never ended. While Goïta’s 2020 and 2021 coups triggered prohibitions on some forms of U.S. security assistance, American tax dollars have continued to fund his forces. According to the State Department, the U.S. provided more than $16 million in security aid to Mali in 2020 and almost $5 million in 2021. As of July, the department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism was waiting on congressional approval to transfer an additional $2 million to Mali. (The State Department did not reply to TomDispatch’s request for an update on the status of that funding.)

The Two-Decade Stalemate

On the opposite side of the continent, in Somalia, stagnation and stalemate have been the watchwords for U.S. military efforts.

“Terrorists associated with Al Qaeda and indigenous terrorist groups have been and continue to be a presence in this region,” a senior Pentagon official claimed in 2002. “These terrorists will, of course, threaten U.S. personnel and facilities.” But when pressed about an actual spreading threat, the official admitted that even the most extreme Islamists “really have not engaged in acts of terrorism outside Somalia.” Despite that, U.S. Special Operations forces were dispatched there in 2002, followed by military aid, advisers, trainers, and private contractors.

More than 20 years later, U.S. troops are still conducting counterterrorism operations in Somalia, primarily against the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab. To this end, Washington has provided billions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance, according to a recent report by the Costs of War Project. Americans have also conducted more than 280 air strikes and commando raids there, while the CIA and special operators built up local proxy forces to conduct low-profile military operations.

Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the U.S. has launched 31 declared airstrikes in Somalia, six times the number carried out during President Obama’s first term, though far fewer than the record high set by President Trump, whose administration launched 208 attacks from 2017 to 2021.

America’s long-running, undeclared war in Somalia has become a key driver of violence in that country, according to the Costs of War Project. “The U.S. is not simply contributing to conflict in Somalia, but has, rather, become integral to the inevitable continuation of conflict in Somalia,” reported Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ Ṣóyẹmí, a lecturer in political philosophy and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. “U.S. counterterrorism policies are,” she wrote, “ensuring that the conflict continues in perpetuity.”

The Epicenter of International Terrorism

“Supporting the development of professional and capable militaries contributes to increasing security and stability in Africa,” said General William Ward, the first chief of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) — the umbrella organization overseeing U.S. military efforts on the continent — in 2010, before he was demoted for profligate travel and spending. His predictions of “increasing security and stability” have, of course, never come to pass.

While the 75,000% increase in terror attacks and 42,500% increase in fatalities over the last two decades are nothing less than astounding, the most recent increases are no less devastating. “A 50-percent spike in fatalities tied to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel and Somalia over the past year has eclipsed the previous high in 2015,” according to a July report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research institution. “Africa has experienced a nearly four-fold increase in reported violent events linked to militant Islamist groups over the past decade… Almost half of that growth happened in the last 3 years.”

Twenty-two years ago, George W. Bush announced the beginning of a Global War on Terror. “The Taliban must act, and act immediately,” he insisted. “They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.” Today, of course, the Taliban reigns supreme in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda was never “stopped and defeated,” and other terror groups have spread across Africa (and elsewhere). The only way “to defeat terrorism,” Bush asserted, was to “eliminate it and destroy it where it grows.” Yet it has grown, and spread, and a plethora of new militant groups have emerged.

Bush warned that terrorists had designs on “vast regions” of Africa but was “confident of the victories to come,” assuring Americans that “we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.” In country after country on that continent, the U.S. has, indeed, faltered and its failures have been paid for by ordinary Africans killed, wounded, and displaced by the terror groups that Bush pledged to “defeat.” Earlier this year, General Michael Langley, the current AFRICOM commander, offered what may be the ultimate verdict on America’s Forever Wars on that continent. “Africa,” he declared, “is now the epicenter of international terrorism.”

“Rap Sh!t” blows up the practice of artists being exploited on their way up (or out)

HBO Max's hit series "Rap Sh!t" is back for Season 2 and off to a spectacular start. And it's not just about the funny – don't get me wrong, the show is still hilarious – but it's the decision to focus on the nightmare that comes with being an up-and-coming artist that takes the series to the next level.

In case you missed it, "Rap Sh!t" is about an unconventional trio that fate forced into the hottest rap duo in Miami and maybe the country if they can maintain focus. There's Shawna (Aida Osman), the conscious, backpack-rapping emcee who sacrificed everything she thought she believed in for industry relevance. Shawna's partner in rhyme is Mia (KaMillion), a multitalented single mom who can rap, dance, influence and do makeup. Together, they seduce and scheme.

Mia wouldn't be rapping without Shawna, and Shawna would never have any attention without Mia. And both of them would be lost in the industry without Chastity (Jonica Booth), an inexperienced pimp with a knack for getting into VIP parties, events and backstage functions she was not invited to.

"Insecure" star Yvonne Orji reflects on DMX and her destiny: "God's out here playing tricks on me"

Season 2 picks up with the girls going on their first music tour. No, they are not headliners, no, they are not featured openers. They do not have their own set; they are not even getting paid. Shawna and Mia are being brought on to assist Reina Reign (Kat Cunning), a cheesy culture vulture white rapper who identifies as "light-skinned."

What if you were in your early 20s and presented with an opportunity to travel the country, doing what you love?

Watching the show and hearing this tour idea pitched to the crew, knowing everything that has happened on their turbulent ride during the first season even to get them to this point, would lead you to believe that a disaster is about to happen. Still, part of the fun is imagining life through the lens of the characters. What if you were in your early 20s and presented with an opportunity to hang around with and even travel the country, doing what you love?

I was 31.

Thirty-one years old, and writing was my second act. I was fresh out of the streets without any knowledge of publishing or the writing industry and didn't even know I had value. I also didn't have direct access to a writing community dedicated to helping new writers who were unfamiliar with how to make careers for themselves.

I cut into the world of publishing through a former professor, whom I won't name because I don't want to expose him, force him to lose a position or elevate the legend of his corniness.

"You are so talented, Mr. Watkins," he told me after class one day. "Your prose are just gripping; I feel it!"

"Thank you," I replied. "I'm just trying to get better."

"I have a big-time friend in publishing coming in town next week," he said. "I'd love to introduce you."

I'm about to make it, I thought. I spent my week all excited, thinking I would get a chance to begin my career. I thought this big-time publishing guy would read my work and like it too. I thought he would give me some advice on landing an agent, thought he'd give me some secrets he wished he would have known before entering the industry, thought maybe he would even see a piece of me in him. We could build that mentor-mentee relationship that is needed for success.

I thought wrong.

That professor called me two days before the meeting and said, "You tapped into what's happening?"

"What do you mean?"

"I am just looking for something to smoke, you know, from my big-time publishing buddy."

"You talking weed or crack? Because I don't sell that stuff anymore."

I looked the nervous professor over; his sweater was frayed, his desert boots raggedy, and the semi-homeless hipster look wasn't really out back then, or maybe this guy was ahead of his time – so I leaned in a little closer and said, "You talking weed or crack? Because I don't sell that stuff anymore."

The professor laughed hard, exposing his back teeth, and said, "Crack, Mr. Watkins, you are one wild guy! Weed, I'm looking for some weed, and remember I am about to give you the intro of your life."

The professor told me to bring the goods to his office the day before the event, and then I could meet his big-time publishing guy, and the three of us could discuss my career after.

"By the way, can you recommend some safe strip clubs? Because I want to show him a good time while he is in town," the professor said with a wink, "trying to stay away from the thugs and Yo's, if you know what I mean."

I knew exactly what he meant because many police officers, disconnected people and random racists have identified me as a "thug" and or a "Yo," but whatever, I'm up-and-coming so I'll just stick to the plan.

I gave the thirsty professor a nugget of grass when he requested it. Good weed, too, Grade A, maybe a $50 sack of purple haze that was super chunky, lavender-colored and wrapped with orange hair. It stunk through the plastic, the napkin I covered it in,and my jeans.

"So sorry, my publishing guy won't be able to meet with you this time, but we are so thankful for the party favor," the professor said. "Do I owe you anything?"

"No, it's a favor."

As you can probably imagine, the next time had never come, and I never met his "big-time publishing guy."

I would meet more writers who would have me take professional-level pictures at their events, where they introduced me to no one, posted the the pics and never tagged me. I would write sections of books and never be acknowledged. I would go to countless events, help with marketing and promotion, and not even get an opportunity to read my work. I will use my money to put myself in position to be close to successful writers I knew, writers who would take a liking to me and then try their hand at using me as well. I will give these writers my work, listen to them tell me I'm not ready, and then see them stealing lines directly from my pages, my work, my mouth – all before I published my first essay.

That is the game, for some of us at least. We get an opportunity to do a reading or to go to an event where the only pay is, "You will get to network with great people, "or "This will get you a whole lot of exposure," knowing damn well that nobody can eat exposure. The two young women on "Rap Sh!t" are doing what plenty of artists had to do entering show business, working their a** off for exposure that might lead to something else, but it also may not.

Some of the other writers who were doing the same things I did at the beginning of my career aren't even trying to break into this industry anymore; some are so tired that they have stopped writing altogether. Abandoning art because you lack success or resources in general is a terrible reality that no creative should ever face. But unfortunately, many of us do.

If I could talk to somebody who was thinking about taking on free work in an effort to get to the next level, I would say do not do anything you can't handle. Meaning, if you write words for somebody without a contract or a deal, and their book becomes a popular bestseller – then you have to be OK with seeing them going on every television show, podcast and social media whatever and excitingly not mentioning you. Because that is what happened to me and so many other people.

That is happening to the two young women on "Rap Sh!t" as they are starting their tour without their names being listed on the marquee. We'll have to keep watching to see if they make it, fold or starve after trying to eat exposure.

"Rap Sh!t" streams new episodes Thursdays on Max.

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Donald Trump calls Kim Kardashian “the world’s most overrated celebrity” in latest diss

Former President Donald Trump recently took to social media to call Kim Kardashian "the world’s most overrated celebrity” while criticizing a newly released book that takes aim at his presidency.

Trump slammed Jonathan Karl’s book, “Tired of Winning,” which alleges that the ex-president and 2024 presidential candidate had asked Kardashian to leverage her celebrity connections to get football stars to come to the White House after she sought his help with several clemency cases.

“In the ‘book’ he [Karl] has the World’s most overrated celebrity, Kim Kardashian, supposedly telling me that she ‘would leverage her celebrity to get football stars to come to the White House,’ if I would commute the sentences of various prisoners,” Trump wrote in a Wednesday Truth Social post. “This story is Fake News in that she would be the last person I asked to get football players.”

Trump continued, noting the athletes and professional sports team he had at the White House during his time in office. He also said that he did grant more prison commutations, but claimed he did them more for Kardashian’s husband at the time, Kanye West, than Kardashian.

“I did help with prisoner commutation, but only if deserving, and much more so for Kanye West than for Kim, who probably voted for Crooked Joe Biden, and look at the mess our Country is in now,” Trump added. “Many other false stories in Karl’s very boring book, but nothing worth mentioning!”

Karl’s book “Tired of Winning” was released on Tuesday. An excerpt was published by Axios on Monday.

“Now I’m concerned”: Legal experts alarmed over “Judge Cannon’s bias” in new order setting up delay

The federal judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s documents case in South Florida on Thursday denied a request from special counsel Jack Smith to set a deadline on issues related to classified materials in the case.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, denied Smith’s request to schedule a hearing under Section 5 of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), where a defendant has to disclose what classified information he intends to use at trial.

Cannon in her order said she would set all remaining deadlines in March 2024.

NEW: Judge Cannon denies request by Special Counsel that she set CIPA Section 5 deadline in Trump classified docs case — where defendant is required to disclose what classified info he intends to use at trial — and says it will be set in March 2024 (!) pic.twitter.com/OrxxplLTuq

— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) November 16, 2023

"Solidly pro-Trump ruling masquerading as neutral": Experts rip Judge Cannon for setting up delay

The order is a “clear indication May trial date won’t happen,” tweeted Brandon Van Grack, a former federal prosecutor on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team.

“DOJ's request was very reasonable—defendants already have 5000 classified docs so let us know which ones they want to use,” he added. “Refusal to schedule hearing shows the Court is not going to move with urgency.”

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance agreed that Cannon is “on track to delay past the election.”

Some legal experts argued that Smith could turn to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to try to reverse Cannon’s scheduling order.

“Unreal. Now I’m concerned. No way this thing gets to trial in May 2024,” tweeted national security attorney Bradley Moss.

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“I have long been opposed to Smith’s team getting the 11th Circuit involved with respect to Cannon’s scheduling rulings. I just didn’t see it as worthwhile and expected any such step would cause the very delay Smith was trying to avoid anyway,” he added. “At this point, it might be needed.”

But Moss said "the problem" is that Cannon "has not done anything (yet) that triggers the ordinary emergency statutory appeal relief afforded by CIPA. Her actions so far have been only procedural and scheduling," meaning that Smith has "limited options."

Former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann argued that “Judge Cannon’s bias is showing over and over again.”

“Smith has to be weighing whether, when, and how to seek her reversal by the [Court] of Appeals and her removal,” he wrote.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

“Not scheduling a CIPA section 5 hearing, which is routine, is a clear sign she is just as much in the bag for Trump as when she issued her horrendous pretrial rulings (both reversed in scathing language by the conservative 11th Circuit),” he added. “What a piece of work is she.”

MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin pointed out that by the time May 2024 rolls around, Trump will be three days away from the opening of his D.C. federal election interference trial, “which itself could bleed into May.”

“I'll predict now that the date for the classified docs trial will slip away like, well, a Trump-held classified doc,” she wrote.

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Millions of people go out to eat for Thanksgiving: Here’s what the day is like for restaurant staff

I spent one single Thanksgiving at a restaurant in 2002 with my mom, dad, nana and brother. We were at a restaurant in Pompano Beach, Florida — and, from a culinary perspective, it was far-and-away the weakest Thanksgiving I can recall. I recall lackluster stuffing, immensely dry turkey and unappealing gravy. It just wasn't great or especially festive across the board (at least to my family and the palate of a 13-year-old).

Lots has changed, though, in the ensuing decades. Restaurants across the country have elevated up their holiday meal prowess to new heights and for many, going out to eat for Thanksgiving dinner is a much lighter lift than making a feast of your own at home.

Are restaurant dining rooms getting louder (again)?

In 2011, Paula Forbes at Eater reported that about 14 millions Americans go out to eat for Thanksgiving. This number has most likely increased exponentially in the years since. As reported last year by Jennifer A. Kingson and Kelly Tyko at Axios, "for the first time in decades, it's more economical to dine out on Thanksgiving Day than to shop for, cook and clean up after the traditional meal, a Wells Fargo analysis finds." With skyrocketing costs, inflation and food insecurity at a fever pitch, this year's holiday meal is ostensibly even more of a strain on the purse strings.

But from a restaurant perspective, what does the prep look like when you’re cooking for 150 rather than ten — especially if that dining room is dotted with vegans, vegetarians and those with food allergies? And how do they manage to blend the traditional dishes of the holiday with whatever their restaurant is about the rest of the year?

“We work on original dishes, traditional Thanksgiving items with a Spanish twist,” said Pete Elias, the owner of Spain Wine Bar in Ocean City, Md. “Actual prep begins the week-of, as we do everything fresh.”

Some of those options might include Spanish ham and pineapple pintxo, slow-roasted pork belly or cranberries gussied up with chilies; there are no courses at Spain Wine Bar, per se. “Dishes are served immediately on completion” Elias said. “In this way, guests are taking a bite at a time while waiting for the element of surprise.”

The concept of infusing traditional stand-bys with global flavors isn’t unique to Elias. For his Thanksgivings while growing up, Elias’ mother made a combination of American dishes and Middle-Eastern dishes.

“So on our table, you would have turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry dressing, rolled grape leaves, meat pie, cheese pie, macaroni bechamel,” he said. “I loved eating all of this together and just having an explosion of flavors.”

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Jason Berry, the co-owner of KNEAD Hospitality + Design in Washington. DC, is also a fan of the “perfect bite” which he defines as “a bit of turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry and a swap of mashed potatoes. It’s my favorite meal of the year. Stuffing is a big deal, as it’s hard to get right for a lot of people.”

The Thanksgiving experiences their restaurants offer are similarly varied: It is one of the busiest days of the year at Chef Ed Lee’s Asian-Southern fusion restaurant Succotash, while restaurants like Mi Casa, Mi Vida and Du Jour "offer Tex Mex, Mexican or French-inspired versions of the American classics." Gatsby, an upscale diner, offers an approachable version of the classic Thanksgiving meal.

There are some commonalities across the menus, however. Elias shares that Spain Wine Bar serves a butternut squash soup with balsamic reduction, pumpkin seeds and micro cilantro, while Jason Berry concurs and says that butternut squash soup is also a "staple."

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If you're looking to drink — no matter if at home, a friend or relative or at a restaurant — Berry recommends bourbon-based cocktails and "lighter bodied red wines," such as pinot noir, while Elias likes red wine, eggnog and spiced, mulled wine. If you or your guests aren't drinking though, there are a slew of amazing non-alcoholic options now on the market.

As far as staff wanting to spend time with their own families, friends and loved ones, Berry says their restaurants are open for limited hours on Thanksgiving. “We hope our team has the option to spend some time with their families,” he said. “We also create a big spread for our staff to enjoy during their breaks."

Furthermore, he notes that some teammates have family who aren't nearby "and if not for work, wouldn't have somewhere to celebrate.”

“By offering them a true meal and time with their colleagues, we hope they are getting a bit of that Thanksgiving experience,” he said.

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The secret to the most buttery, decadent cornbread is in my family’s easy recipe

Cornbread is the most popular and most beloved quick bread in the South.

I have no actual proof of that, but there is ample evidence in my world to say it is empirically true. We are a corn-loving people. Grits, cornbread, corn-on-the-cob, corn casserole, succotash, spoonbread, dressing — I could go on like Forrest Gump about shrimp — we just have a special love for most all things corn.

I realize the South is not alone in this. The entire country loves corn and as a nation we produce a whole lot of it: 350 million metric tons last year, about a third of all that was grown in the entire world. I understand it is plentiful and available everywhere, but cornbread is not.

Your kitchen will smell so good after making this southern sweet potato pie with an orange twist

You might think all cornbread is pretty much the same: Cornmeal, flour, rising agent, egg(s), a pinch of salt and sugar . . . but that is where you would be wrong.

Like snowflakes, every home recipe is unique, with subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) differences. Despite the countless fluctuations among them all, the vast majority have two things in common: an iron skillet and bacon grease. Drippings is perhaps the more elegant term, but grease is what is written. You can make “good" cornbread without either, but there is a reason both are used in virtually every treasured family recipe.

I have lots of written copies of my family’s cornbread recipe. A few look ready to be framed, but most are in my mother’s hand on all sorts of scraps and notecards where she evidently jotted the recipe down in haste many times over many years. I have one from 1967. The date is among all the doodling at the bottom of the page. I imagine she called her mother — just like years later I would call on her — yes, I have it written down somewhere . . . I just want to make sure I remember how much baking powder . . . I need to put my book where I can always find it!

And so history repeats itself. None of us were ever very organized; I am still not. But in this case, I am glad. These written out versions of our cornbread recipe — my grandmother’s, my mother’s and mine — are like diaries of our lives. You can surmise so much just by our penmanship: stressed and rushed (mostly mine during my college years), relaxed and happy; it’s all there, our curves and loops changing as we aged.

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In light of it being almost 2024, I cannot imagine there is anyone who has not tasted cornbread as the world is so small and cultural cuisines now cross every geographical boundary, but you might not have had good cornbread. No, I am not asserting that mine (my family’s) is the best, but it is without a doubt “good.” Sort of like “pretty” shrimp, “good” cornbread is a mark of excellence. And if the cornbread you have eaten was light and cake-like, remarkably sweet, or taken out of the oven in a anything other than an iron skillet, there is a chance you haven not had “good” cornbread and need to sample more.

I have to address the sweet cornbread deal and I don’t want to sound hypocritical, because there are only a few things any better than a warm piece of cornbread slathered in butter and honey (or syrup). But — and it is a big but — your entire batch of cornbread just should not be sweet. The little lean towards salty is what makes the “dessert-piece” you create with honey so perfect. Like salted caramel or chocolate, you need a little yin-yang or push and pull.

There are lots of people who sweeten their cornbread quite a lot and . . . honestly, I need to leave it at that. It is not a dealbreaker necessarily. I understand it is simply a matter of preference, like iced tea, and you can have good cornbread that is a little sweet, I really should leave it at that. (But it really just should not be sweet-sweet.)

All the best cornbread is moist and soft on the inside, crispy on the bottom, crusty on top and melt-in-your-mouth delicious. It is served with a generous amount of butter and is the perfect accompaniment for most any meal, but especially greens, peas, beans or anything with pot liquor to soak up, as well as most soups and definitely chili. It should be made with a medium to coarse grind cornmeal, not corn flour.

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Aside from enjoying it sliced hot and right out of the oven, my grandmother, Frannie, and many of her generation, loved nothing more than to crumble leftover cornbread into buttermilk and eat it with a spoon. For all I know, that is brilliant, but I have never tried it. She certainly loved it.

Most of the time, I make “plain” cornbread with no add-ins, in large part because my husband customizes the leftovers for breakfast toast or a sweet snack with honey, but I will include some options for when you want to change it up. Two of my favorites are Mexican Cornbread with cheese and fresh jalapeños and Herbed Cornbread with a variety of fresh snipped herbs. Broccoli & Cheese Cornbread is a popular add-in, but not in my family. I have enjoyed it that way on numerous occasions, but never enough to make a whole batch of it.

You can add pretty much anything you like as long as you adjust your wet and dry ingredients. As a rule, you want your mixture to be on the wet side when it goes into the oven. There is nothing worse than dry cornbread. It tastes raw and a little like sawdust, so if what you have tried in the past was anything like that, you are in for a real treat.

This is my family’s original recipe, but check out the Cook’s Notes sections for optional add-ins as well as tips for making it vegetarian and/or gluten-free.

Cornbread

Yields

6 to 8 servings

Prep Time

10 minutes

Cook Time

25 minutes

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups medium to coarse grind cornmeal

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

3 teaspoons baking powder

Hefty pinch of sugar

**1 cup milk or buttermilk, plus more (see below)

Optional: a heaping spoonful of mayonnaise

1 large egg

2-3 tablespoons bacon grease (or butter), enough to coat and slightly pool in bottom of skillet

Directions

Preheat oven to 425F
Mix dry ingredients and set aside.
**Using a large measuring cup, quart size will do, pour in 1 cup of milk or buttermilk. Then add egg. Either add more milk or buttermilk to make 2 cups, or add a heaping spoonful of mayonnaise (as much as you like) and then top off with more milk or buttermilk to total 2 cups.
Whisk wet ingredients until egg is fully combined before adding to dry ingredients.
Do Not Over Mix! It should be well blended but use mostly a folding-in method rater than a hard, aggressive stirring.
Place bacon grease or butter in skillet and put in hot oven for 4-5 minutes or until really, really hot.
Pull out skillet, pour in cornbread mixture (it should sizzle quite a lot) and quickly return to the oven.
Bake 20 to 25 minutes or until a deep golden color. A wooden skewer should come out clean once done.
Serve from the skillet with lots of butter.

Cook's Notes

Do not double this recipe!

Bacon Grease: You can substitute butter or other fat of choice. It must be able to handle high heat.

Gluten-free or Dairy options: If you choose to make this gluten-free, make sure to use a “fat” dairy or dairy substitute like whole milk or buttermilk, or a fat dairy free version. If you choose to use a thin milk like almond milk, consider using more of the mayonnaise option in the recipe to keep it from drying out as it bakes.

Add-ins:

For Mexican Cornbread: Grate 1 1/2 cups of cheddar cheese of choice and chop fresh jalapeños, the amount is up to you. Add green onions or onion powder, garlic powder, etc. Fold it all into the batter before baking. You can also layer it in by pouring half the batter, then half the add-in mixture, then the rest of the batter and topping it with the last half of the add-in mixture.

For Herbed Cornbread: Add up to 4-5 teaspoons of a variety of fresh snipped herbs of choice, I like to include sage and chives with additional herbs that complement what I am serving.

about this topic

Santos goes on bonkers rant after damning ethics report finds spending on OnlyFans, Botox and more

House investigators found "substantial evidence" that Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., knowingly violated a number of ethics and criminal laws, a House Ethics Committee report released Thursday said, according to The Washington Post.

“Representative Santos’ conduct warrants public condemnation, is beneath the dignity of the office, and has brought severe discredit upon the House,” Reps. Michael Guest, R-Miss., and Susan Wild, D-Pa., the committee’s chairman and senior Democrat, said in a joint statement.

The report recommended that the allegations against Santos be referred to the Department of Justice but did not call for his expulsion from the House or another form of discipline. Guest told reporters Wednesday that it would have taken the panel several more months to recommend punishment for the New York congressman. Instead, he said, the report would be released publicly to allow legislators to read it and “take whatever action that they felt necessary.”

In order to reach its conclusion, investigators compiled more than 170,000 pages of documents and testimony from dozens of witnesses, including financial statements, the committee said in the report. After a month-long investigation into the Republican representative, the report concluded that Santos "knowingly caused his campaign committee to file false or incomplete reports with the Federal Election Commission; used campaign funds for personal purposes; engaged in fraudulent conduct in connection with RedStone Strategies LLC; and engaged in knowing and willful violations of the Ethics in Government Act as it relates to his Financial Disclosure (FD) Statements filed with the House,” Guest and Wild said.

"If you come for me, you best not miss": Santos gloats after vote to expel shakes out in his favor

Santos released a lengthy statement in response to the report on X/Twitter Thursday.

"If there was a single ounce of ETHICS in the 'Ethics committee', they would have not released this biased report," he began. "The Committee went to extraordinary lengths to smear myself and my legal team about me not being forthcoming (My legal bills suggest otherwise)."

He went on to dub the report a "disgusting politicized smear" and declared that all the participating investigators should be "ashamed" of themselves. Santos also called for an Article V Constitutional Convention, which would convene legislators to propose amendments to the Constitution, pointing to a slew of hot-ticket Republican topics, including the nation's debt, the government's potential to shut down, the southern border and the unsubstantiated claims of the Biden family's improper business dealings.

"I will remain steadfast in fighting for my rights and for defending my name in the face of adversity," Santos continued. "I am humbled yet again and reminded that I am human and I have flaws, but I will not stand by as I am stoned by those who have flaws themselves."

While stating that he'd continue to serve his constituents for as long as he allowed, he announced that his time in Congress would end with this term.

"I will however NOT be seeking re-election for a second term in 2024 as my family deserves better than to be under the gun from the press all the time," he said, concluding his statement by reiterating his commitment to his conservative values during his remaining time in office.

If there was a single ounce of ETHICS in the “Ethics committee”, they would have not released this biased report. The Committee went to extraordinary lengths to smear myself and my legal team about me not being forthcoming (My legal bills suggest otherwise).

It is a disgusting…

— Pants On Fire with George Santos (@MrSantosNY) November 16, 2023

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Among the findings alleging Santos' misuse of campaign contributions and fraudulent conduct outlined in the attached 55-page report was that the representative used $50,000 donated from two contributors to make payments toward personal credit card bills and other debt, make a $4,127.80 purchase at Hermes and pay for smaller purchases at Only Fans and Sephora, meals and parking.

The report said that Santos also put campaign funds toward personal travel expenses — including $2,281.52 spent at resorts in Atlantic City in July 2022 — spa services and cosmetic procedures, highlighting $1,400 spent on the campaign debit card at Virtual Skin Spa in Jericho, New York in July 2022 and a $1,500 purchase on the card at Mirza Aesthetics during his 2020 campaign. The latter expense, according to the committee, was not reported to the Federal Election Committee and was noted as "Botox" in expense spreadsheets turned over to the Investigative Subcommittee by Santos' ex-campaign treasurer Nancy Marks, who pleaded guilty to filing false reports with the FEC.

The ethics panel's report also described Santos' lack of cooperation with its investigation and how he "evaded" straightforward requests for information, The Associated Press reports. What information he did provide, the committee wrote, “included material misstatements that further advanced falsehoods he made during his 2022 campaign.”

Federal prosecutors charged Santos in May with 13 counts, including defrauding his donors, using their money for his personal benefit and wrongfully claiming unemployment. A superseding indictment made public in October revealed Santos faced 10 additional charges, including stealing his family members' identities and using donors' credit cards to spend thousands of dollars. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Santos relieved himself of his committee assignments in January and had previously announced in April that he would run for reelection.

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The initial indictment and Santos' proclivity for telling untruths — including claims that he's the grandson of Holocaust survivors and that he worked at companies that never employed him — prompted Democrats to pursue his expulsion from the House. The issue was referred to the House Ethics Committee, where a panel with an equal split of Republicans and Democrats had already launched an investigation into the New York conservative.

The committee expanded its probe in June to include allegations that he fraudulently obtained unemployment insurance benefits, and at the end of October, it said in a statement that the investigation's jurisdiction included the “23 counts charged over two indictments, as well as multiple allegations of criminal and ethical violations that are beyond the scope of the indictments.”

The federal charges — the second round of which came as House Republicans sparred over electing a speaker to replace Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., after his ouster — also pushed five Republican freshmen from New York to introduce what became a failed expulsion resolution to be considered by relevant committees.

"The House's 55-page report WILL trigger another effort to expel Santos. This one could… actually succeed," Politico's Sarah Ferris reported on X. "House Ethics Chair Michael Guest will file privileged motion tomorrow — guaranteeing a vote after Thanksgiving break."

The House's 55-page report WILL trigger another effort to expel Santos. This one could… actually succeed.

House Ethics Chair Michael Guest will file privileged motion tomorrow — guaranteeing a vote after Thanksgiving break, sources tell me & @Olivia_Beavers

— Sarah Ferris (@sarahnferris) November 16, 2023

During his time as House speaker, McCarthy repeatedly said that Santos deserved due process. Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has echoed that sentiment while acknowledging the difficult position House Republicans are in because of their "razor-thin majority" in the chamber.

“Here’s the reality … we have a four-seat majority in the House,” Johnson told Fox News' Sean Hannity the day after his election to the speakership. “It is possible that number may be reduced even more in the coming weeks and months and so we’ll have what may be the most razor-thin majority in the history of the Congress. We have no margin for error and so George Santos is due due process, right?”

“We have to allow due process to play itself out,” he continued, referring to Santos’s case. “That’s what our system of justice is for … if we’re going to expel people from Congress just because they’re charged with a crime, or accused, that’s a problem.”

In addition to Santos' former treasurer, another individual in the New York congressman's circle pleaded guilty to campaign-related charges. One of his aides took a plea deal earlier this week to a federal fraud charge related to a scheme that included impersonating the then-chief of staff for McCarthy to attract donors to Santos' campaign.

about George Santos and the GOP

Common pesticides linked to reduction in sperm count, study finds

Pesticides are commonly used to protect the foods that we eat from insects and pathogens — but, according to a recent study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, they may also be destroying the vitality of sperm in the process. As American and Italian scientists demonstrated, there are two commonly used pesticides linked with plummeting sperm counts: organophosphates and N-methyl carbamates. The researchers analyzed the sperm concentration in men who work in agriculture and are therefore exposed to unusually large quantities of these chemicals, then compared them to the sperm concentrations of men with the least exposure.

“While there are likely many more contributing causes, our study demonstrates a strong association between two common insecticides — organophosphates and N-methyl carbamates — and the decline of sperm concentration," senior study author Melissa Perry, dean of the College of Public Health at George Mason University, told CNN.

As Perry noted, pesticides are not alone in targeting sperm for destructions. Over the past half-century sperm concentrations have declined by roughly 50% all over the world for a number of reasons. A study published last year in Environmental Health Perspectives linked lowered sperm quality to so-called "forever chemicals," or PFAS. It found that when pregnant mothers were exposed to a a mixture of seven common PFAS during the first trimesters of their pregnancy, their male children had "lower sperm concentration, lower total sperm count, and higher proportions of nonprogressive and immotile sperm in young adulthood." Obesity and plastic pollution are also linked to lower sperm counts.

“Ridiculous” cost of new postpartum depression pill spurs maternal health providers to push back

In August, news broke that for the first time the FDA approved a pill sold to specifically treat postpartum depression.

Sold under the brand name Zurzuvae (zuranolone), the announcement raised hopes about an effective and targeted treatment for a condition that affects one in eight women. In clinical studies, some mothers who took the pill significantly improved symptoms of depression and anxiety just three days after starting the two-week regimen. The effects lasted one and a half months out.

Typically, postpartum depression is treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), like Zoloft, Prozac, or Lexapro. But those can take up to 12 weeks to start working — and sometimes, not at all. For many with mild cases of postpartum depression, SSRIs combined with support and therapy can be an effective treatment. But for those with severe and debilitating cases, news of the first-ever FDA-approved pill was certainly a welcome advancement in maternal mental health, which stands as an ongoing crisis in the United States.

"I was melting from the inside": My struggle with postpartum anxiety

But last week, the pill’s manufacturers Sage Therapeutics and Biogen confirmed the worst fears of many. The 14-day course will be priced at $15,900. While the manufacturers emphasized in the announcement that they are prioritizing access to treatment with “minimal restrictions” and “little to no co-pay,” details on just how accessible the pill will be and how it will be covered by insurance are currently unclear. As a result, maternal mental health providers are concerned that those who need it the most won’t be able to access it, and that the initial hype around the news was all for nothing.

“The fact that it's priced at almost $16,000, I think, is ridiculous,” Dr. Melissa Simon, an obstetrician gynecologist at Northwestern Medicine, told Salon. “It is highly prohibitive.”

Especially, Simon said, for patients who are underinsured, uninsured or who have insurance that will not cover “the exorbitant cost” of this medication.

Many people “grossly underestimate” the out of pocket costs women face to get treatment already.

It’s already difficult for women with postpartum depression to get access to treatment in America, she added. First, it requires going to a clinic and attending an appointment, which could mean having to take a day off of work or getting childcare secured. For others, there could be transportation costs involved. Simon said many people “grossly underestimate” the out of pocket costs women face to get treatment already.

“All of these out of pocket costs impact people who are from lower socioeconomic conditions in our country, and who face larger social and economic determinants,” she said.

The risk of postpartum depression is much higher for women of color. Black women are not only more likely to have postpartum depression, they are less likely to receive support and treatment. Medicaid finances an estimated 4 in 10 births and only covers a woman 60 days postpartum. While more states are offering coverage to women postpartum up to 12 months, with specific qualifications, it’s unclear how much coverage, if any, it would provide in regards to Zurzuvae.

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Treatments for postpartum depression depend on the severity of it. Options range from medication to talk therapy to a support group. In 2019, the FDA approved a medicine to treat PPD called brexanolone, sold under the brand name Zulresso, which is in the same drug family Zuranolone. These medications target the GABA receptors in a person’s brain, which is believed to affect stress.

Studies have shown that Brexanolone is associated with rapid improvement in major depressive symptoms. However, there are also many barriers for those who need it to access it. It has to be given by a doctor or nurse through an IV for two and a half days. It is also not safe for breastfeeding. Since it’s been approved, the treatment has only been offered in a limited number of healthcare settings. And its cost is also high: $34,000 without insurance.

Karen Kleiman, a maternal mental health therapist and founder of the Postpartum Stress Center, told Salon there’s also very strict criteria to offer Brexanolone as a treatment option. Zurzuvae is similar to Brexanolone, but in pill form. Certainly this is part of the appeal. Kleiman said she wasn’t surprised to hear about the hefty price tag for Zurzuvae, as “we've seen this before,” referring to what happened with Brexanolone.

“This is sort of the pattern of what happens,” she said. “It's certainly disheartening, but I'm not shocked by it.”

“It's certainly disheartening, but I'm not shocked by it.”

Postpartum depression is diagnosed when a woman is experiencing more than two weeks of a depressive mood and loss of interest in activities, usually when the common phenomenon known as the “baby blues” has been ruled out. The exact cause of PPD remains unknown, but experts have long speculated that a range of factors contribute to someone developing it. For example, hormonal changes like the significant hormone drop after a woman gives birth can likely trigger symptoms. Other studies have found that women with moderate or low social support are more likely to have postpartum depression, suggesting there are external contributors at play as well.

The fact that there are so many potential variables when it comes to the causes of postpartum depression can make a treatment far from a one-size-fits-all solution. Some women with more moderate depressive symptoms respond well to standard antidepressant treatment coupled with therapy, Kleiman said.

“We're finding success with the treatments that we have,” Kleiman said. “For the women who are severely disabled by their depression, this is obviously a very exciting proposition and we hope that things will change so that it will be more accessible.”

Kleiman said she didn’t want to sound “discouraging” and pointed to positive news that, in light of the FDA approval, people are talking about postpartum depression and solutions. She added that there are certainly systemic issues that factor into what it’s like being a mother in America right now. Notably, she said she is seeing more young mothers burn out faster than she’s ever seen in her career.

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“Our system is broken and we don't have systemic responses to help make things like childcare and healthcare affordable and accessible,” she said. “It goes all the way back to women being witches and hysterical, and not being taken seriously, having babies and living in a society that doesn't tolerate mothers talking about how bad they feel.”

Simon said there are many steps forward that healthcare needs to take to better support new mothers and reduce the risks of postpartum depression, and it starts with having more than one to two visits postpartum with their doctors.

“People who give birth should follow up every two to three months postpartum, there should be more routine visits and all of the healthcare needs included in those visits should be covered,” Simon said. “Mental health, contraception, breastfeeding support and physical health.”

about parenting

Trump co-defendant’s lawyer scolded by judge after confessing to leaking damning testimony videos

An attorney representing a fired county election employee charged with conspiring with former President Donald Trump as part of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia revealed during an "emergency" court hearing Wednesday that he was the person who leaked a video of evidence that set the media ablaze earlier this week. Jonathan R. Miller III, who represents Misty Hampton, unexpectedly admitted in court that he released to a news outlet the videos showing former Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis sharing damning details with prosecutors as part of their recent plea deals, according to The Daily Beast.

The video leak prompted Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to renew an urgent request to Judge Scott McAfee to cut off access to materials shared between authorities and defendants, leading to Wednesday's hearing. When the judge asked Miller why he leaked the proffers, Miller defended his actions. “Judge, all four of those people who did their proffers. They stood in front of you. They did their plea. It was all recorded… to hide those proffers that show all the underlying things that went into those pleas misleads the public about what’s going on,” Miller said.

McAfee seemed unconvinced that journalists should have access to evidence prior to trial and voiced concern about “having open files to have people start litigating the case before we’re inside a courtroom.” When Miller pushed back, saying that the "public has a right to know," McAfee replied, "Well, that’s a good slogan. But do we have any case law that says pretrial discovery is part of our First Amendment concerns?” Though he seemed to side with the DA's office, the judge did acknowledge that there's not much case law allowing for a "blanket" restriction on this information. “We’re a bit unmoored in Georgia on this issue,” he said, though he gave no indication he would punish Miller for the release.

“Unvarnished antisemitism”: Musk says conspiracy that motivated mass shooting is “the actual truth”

Elon Musk on Wednesday declared on X/Twitter that a paid X Premium user's peddling of an antisemitic conspiracy theory attacking Jewish people was the "actual truth," media watchdog Media Matters for America reports. The user claimed, in part, that Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them," to which Musk responded, "You have said the actual truth," screenshots of the exchange show. The antisemitic post Musk praised came in response to another user who wrote, "To the cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and posting 'Hitler was right': You got something you want to say? Why dont you say it to our faces…”

The conspiracy theory the Musk-endorsed tweet spews — that Jewish populations are pushing "hatred against whites" and supporting "hordes of minorities" coming into the country — is the same one that motivated the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh, The Atlantic's Yair Rosenburg emphasized online. "Elon Musk pushing unvarnished anti semitism at a time of rising antisemitism and violence against Jews," CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X. "Meanwhile, America's richest man chimes in to say that Jews are getting what we deserve for being liberals," Bloomberg columnist Matthew Yglesias tweeted. "The ADL clearly had Musk all wrong, the dude has zero tolerance for anti-semitism and just wants the world to know that 'Hitler was right' about the Jews because Jews advance 'hatred against whites," Yglesias snarked, seemingly referencing Musk's recent feud with the Anti-Defamation League after the watchdog criticized the changes he made to X for boosting the spread of antisemitic and extremist content on the platform.

The ADL clearly had Musk all wrong, the dude has zero tolerance for anti-semitism and just wants the world to know that “Hitler was right” about the Jews because Jews advance “hatred against whites.” pic.twitter.com/dHc31IUoRD

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 15, 2023

Experts: DA put Trump on notice by cracking down on co-defendant whose conduct “pales in comparison”

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Wednesday asked a judge to revoke the bond of one of former President Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the sprawling election interference case after accusing him of intimidating witnesses.

Willis asked Judge Scott McAfee to revoke the bond of Harrison Floyd, who previously led a group called Black Voices for Trump, according to The New York Times. Floyd was charged in the RICO indictment along with Trump and 17 others after he pressured election worker Ruby Freeman to falsely say she played a role in the debunked election fraud claimed by TrumpWorld.

Willis’ team in a motion citing Floyd’s hostile social media posts attacking Freeman, former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and others “in an effort to intimidate co-defendants and witnesses.”

Expert: Lawyers who flipped on Trump may try to pull out "due to threats" — but Willis has a plan

In one Nov. 8 tweet, Floyd warned that Raffensperger “needs to call his lawyer” because “he’s about to go through some things!”

“Does this sound like Ruby Freeman is being PRESSURED?” he wrote six days later, posting a video of Freeman on a police body camera.

Prosecutors asked the judge to revoke Floyd’s bond, which could potentially send him back to jail, calling the posts “intentional and flagrant violations of the conditions of release.”

"Witness Ruby Freeman has been a frequent target of the Defendant's intimidating communications," the DA's motion reads. "Because of and in response to the Defendant's intimidating communications, witness Ruby Freeman has been the subject of renewed threats of violence from third parties."

Ex-DOJ official warns Fulton DA's trial schedule could give Trump a chance to wriggle out of case

Floyd’s attorney disputed that the posts violated his client’s bond conditions.

"There's no violation of any bond," attorney Christopher Kachouroff told WXIA-TV. "Are some of the things borderline untasteful? Sure. But nothing that would overtly violate the order."

Legal experts questioned why Willis went after Floyd but not Trump, who has repeatedly lashed out at witnesses and co-defendants on Truth Social.

“Equal treatment?” asked former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team. “Let's say you agree with the below motion to revoke Floyd's bail, how is it that the same motion has not been made as to defendant Donald J. Trump, who has engaged in at least as threatening conduct and indirect communications as that alleged against Floyd?”

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Weissmann later told MSNBC that Floyd’s conduct “largely pales in comparison” to what Trump has done.

“It's hard to see how you bring it against Mr. Floyd and not against Donald Trump, with the threat and a risk of violence is far greater based upon the words that he has used,” he said.

Some experts believe that Willis may have been sending Trump a message with the motion.

“Perhaps DA Willis is angling to set a precedent for … someone else?” tweeted conservative attorney George Conway.

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“There's a secondary audience for this motion, and he's running to be President of the United States,” agreed former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman.

Former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade told MSNBC that Willis and judges are giving Trump a “slightly longer leash” because he is running for president and “so that he can respond in the public arena to these charges against him.”

But Trump also “says all kinds of things about people, including about people who might be witnesses or might be co-defendants,” she said. “I think Fani Willis has to be careful not to be seen as holding herself to double standards,” she added.

about the Fulton County case

America’s future demands hope: Is Joe Biden up to the task?

Everyone is angry.

I’m watching people snap.

Late last week, when I was stopped at a red light, a naked man streaked past me on the crosswalk, through the fruits and vegetables, being chased by a fully clothed and highly capable police officer. Both of them looked angry. The naked man looked even angrier when his range of motion was severely curtailed shortly after the police officer made his acquaintance. The officer seemed angry that he had to tackle a sweaty, fat, wide-eyed and extremely pale naked man.

Of course, things are far angrier than that in the world, and not nearly as Pythonesque. Wars, human trafficking and mass shootings continue, and seem to increase in direct correlation with the rising temperature of the planet. Many people are losing faith that things will get better.

The next president of the United States must successfully harness hope — or I fear a further descent into madness for all of us.

Cancel the Donald Trump reality show: War in the Middle East makes Don's courtroom antics irrelevant

That is a tall order. Internationally, the world continues to be mostly run by people nobody would invite to a neighborhood barbecue. Take your pick of festering, lingering or growing conflicts across the planet. Humanity, faced with the challenge of turning the world into a paradise, continues to consume everything, even itself.

After seeing this, millions of people in the U.S. just want to close the doors and make it all go away. But isolation doesn’t work and isn’t an option — especially in the age of connectivity.

Tuesday began on a note of hope. President Biden spoke in the morning to reporters in the South Court Auditorium about climate change initiatives. Of course, without other large industrial nations being involved, like China, fixing the problem remains a dubious proposition.

Millions of us just want to close the doors and make it all go away. But isolation isn't an option.

China is on the president’s mind this week. After making his climate presentation, Biden took a few questions from the press about his upcoming meeting in San Francisco with President Xi Jinping. Standing just 10 feet away from me, Biden looked as if he felt personally injured, and as if he believed that all our foreign policy problems could be fixed if Xi would just pick up the phone and call his pal. Did Biden get ghosted after calling Xi a dictator? He sounded like it was personal, and he was trying to come to grips with losing a good friend. In truth, they have known each other long enough. Yes, this is still sarcasm.

By late Wednesday, it appeared the two leaders decided to stop blocking each other’s calls. They emerged from a four-hour summit in San Francisco announcing they have agreed to restore high-level military communications and will take steps to curb fentanyl production.

After months of tension, both leaders made clear they wanted to stabilize their countries’ relationship. Ah, there. Now we can be friends again! (Val Kilmer, from “Tombstone.”)

Of course it all ended with a short news conference during which Biden again called Xi a dictator.

I ask those older than myself for a better frame of reference and a clearer view. I can remember 1968: That was one angry year. Assassins claimed the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. The Tet Offensive led to lots of American boys returning home from Vietnam in body bags. Riots at the Democratic National Convention introduced us to “Daley cops” — the brutal, violent officers led by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, last of the big city bosses.

Those riots at the Chicago convention led to a disastrous election between Richard Milhous Nixon and Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Nixon came into office and it was a preview to the Trump presidency, only slightly less salty. It was a Quaker’s version of despotism. Then came Reagan, the Old Hollywood studio version. Donald Trump was the closed drive-in version.

At least 1968 ended on an upbeat note when Apollo 8 circled the moon. I was a kid. I naively clung to hope.

For those older than me: What was worse, then or now? I’ve put that to everyone I’ve met recently who lived through both times as an adult. Many of them have said we’re living through the worst times of our lives right now. Really? The worst? What? Post-COVID? Could you be any crazier? (Read that line as Matthew Perry playing Chandler Bing.)

Me? I don’t know. I do know that since the dawn of man, when we crawled out of the caves, humans seem to be engaged in a never-ending rerun of the opening battle scene among the hominids in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

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If life is a video game (to follow current deep thinkers), would the child running this app kindly press the fast-forward button? It’s getting a bit repetitive here for my taste.

I believe in free will. The test of that is this: What do we do about the situation in front of us? Do we react as others have for thousands of years? Or do we try something different? Sentience has to include learning. But we don’t learn. We barely remember what it is we haven’t learned. Most of us haven’t bothered to read enough to find out what we haven’t learned.

Still, believing in free will, I share the optimism we see from Joe Biden on the rare occasions we are actually allowed to be graced by his presence. If you find that sentence dripping with clichéd sarcasm, congratulations — as Don Rickles used to say, you get a cookie.

No president in my experience, except Reagan, has escaped public view as successfully as Biden. That limited interaction has led to controlling the press so well that if reporters get the president to hang around at any public appearance for three questions, and if Biden offers more than four words for any one answer, then it’s considered a huge victory for the press — at least by the press.

I believe in free will, and I share the optimism we see from Joe Biden — on the rare occasions we are actually allowed to be graced by his presence.

Biden always embraces hope. He says there are better days ahead and we’re getting there together. You have to wonder why that hasn’t been turned into a campaign slogan. If people ever needed a breather from the vicissitudes of our daily conflicts, now would be a good time. People used to say, “Tell me a funny story.” Today, we settle for, “Tell me a story where nobody dies.”

People need a reason to be hopeful. Anger we have aplenty.

After Biden left the stage on Tuesday morning, he turned and took a question about the Israel-Hamas war. He gave hope to the hostages in Gaza, saying, “Hold on, we’re coming.” Sam and Dave would be proud.

A few hours later, tens of thousands of Israel supporters from across the country gathered on the National Mall. Social media erupted in anger for a variety of reasons. I saw very little anger on the ground, once I ignored the insipid speakers, just as a good portion of the crowd did. There were a lot of families, young kids and young adults. I saw one guy who looked straight-up like a 1950s CIA agent standing in the crowd. Turns out he was there to conduct a tefillin ceremony. I’m a sucker for a good fedora.

There was hope. I saw Palestinian and Jewish supporters bonding. There was anger, when the crowd chanted, “No ceasefire.”

It was a public demonstration well within the parameters of acceptable discourse.

To put it another way, it was less violent than a few Philadelphia Eagles home games I’ve been to.

There was even hope on Capitol Hill Tuesday. OK, quit laughing.

Now, it’s true that at about the same time Joe Biden was being gracefully introduced on Tuesday by a ninth-grader he described as a “future president,” Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, accused former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of elbowing him in the kidneys while Burchett was talking to a reporter. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, still sore that McCarthy hadn’t shut down the ethics investigation Gaetz faces,, filed an ethics complaint against McCarthy. Go ahead and say it: The ninth-grader displayed more maturity than duly elected members of Congress.

And while Biden was on his way to San Francisco to meet with Xi and talk about peaceful coexistence, over in the Senate, Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican, challenged the head of the Teamsters union to a physical fight in a hearing meant to showcase how labor unions are making families’ lives better. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the committee chair, broke it up by reminding Mullin that he was a U.S. senator.

So there was plenty of anger. But hope again visited the world late in the afternoon when the House passed a continuing resolution to keep the federal government open. Speaker Mike Johnson got 209 Democrats to vote with 127 Republicans to approve the stopgap funding bill. That’s more Democrats on his side than Kevin McCarthy ever managed. (In fact, only two Democrats voted against it, while 93 Republicans did.)

Anger wasn’t far away, though, and Johnson brought it back later in the day. Ignoring the Age of Enlightenment and our Constitution, he said in an interview that the separation of church and state was a “misnomer.”

Donald Trump looms large over this continuing anger. The Grand Old Party is his. He owns it, and he’s as angry as a feral child who’s soiled himself in the sandbox.

Anger is what drives Donald. Fear of prison drives the anger. Still, you think he’d be happy: Recent independent polls are driving the narrative that Trump is favored to win the 2024 election.

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The Biden administration’s response to those polls has been odd — but also hopeful.

Last week close to two dozen members of the press were invited to a meeting where it was explained that it’s OK if Biden “appears” to be trailing in “a few” polls. The election is nearly a year away and people aren’t thinking about it yet. Therefore, Biden will start reminding people what a great guy he is — not now but later, closer to the election.

While some called it a “hopeful long-shot strategy,” others called it confusing and a few tried to visibly stifle their chuckles. I guess it could have been the edibles.

Why would you wait? It isn’t about lack of money. What conceivably sane political strategy in this day and age consists of telling your story later? Could you be any stupider? (Chandler Bing again.)

Trump has shown that to be successful, you don’t just create your message and shout it every waking minute, you also wake up from a sound sleep and blare it out at 2 a.m. on a late-night call-in show.

Trump's administration accomplished little and told us way too much. Biden's has accomplished far more, and wants to tell us about it later — you know, when we have a moment to spare.

We all know why Biden trails in at least some polls. He’s doing his job, but he ain’t talking about it enough. He didn’t even acknowledge me in the East Room last week when I asked him to join us in the briefing room. I used my Sam Donaldson voice. I know he heard me. Biden has had little to no communication with us except during staged events, so the press is left trying to tease information out of the administration in dribs and drabs. I don’t know anyone who considers this a good strategy. I hope I’m wrong. I’ll be plenty angry if I’m right. I’m angry now.

The last administration accomplished very little and told us way too much. This administration has accomplished far more, and wants to wait to tell us about it until later — you know, when we all have that moment to spare.

I can appreciate the manners, but you are supposed to be running a re-election campaign — and you may be facing a man who is far more desperate and psychotic than the last time you faced him. Let’s face it: Donald Trump is nuts and remains dangerous.

Before Biden even gets to Trump, there’s also Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who has jumped into the Democratic race. You’re also facing a third-party challenge from a guy with great name recognition: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And then there’s Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who isn’t running for re-election but, as NBC News reported on Wednesday, is also considering a third-party run for the presidency.

Meanwhile, plenty of Arab and Muslim Americans are angry with Biden over his unqualified support for Israel in the Gaza war. They’re not going to vote for Trump, but plenty are saying that they’ll simply stay home and not vote at all.

And Biden? What is he, a Stoic? Step up: The bully pulpit is yours.

So, you know, there’s that anger again.

But I still naively cling to hope, just like when I was a boy.

Mr. President: You got a minute?

I mean, before we see someone else pulling their hair out and running down the street naked, maybe you could explain a few things to us.

Start with hope.

from Brian Karem on Trump, Biden and 2024

These 5 animals have culture. Here’s what they can reveal about our shared evolutionary experience

In 2018, a group of French scientists covered a male fruit fly in pink dust before introducing him to a room full of virgin females. In a parallel room, they did the same thing but dusted him in green dust instead. Then, as the males made their entrance, adorned in their colors, they mated with one of the females.

What scientists observed was that virgin females in the room who observed the mating scene caught onto something: Not only did they seem to learn who was the preferential mate based on the colors he was adorned in, but they also passed that knowledge onto the rest of their colony. In other words, the male colors were trending — almost like how different hairstyles wane in and out of fashion for humans.

“Our study shows one major way by which culture can affect evolution as it changes the selective social context of every individual,” the authors wrote in Science.

Monk parakeets have “voiceprints” that identify themselves in groups just like humans, study finds

Although some scientists avoid ascribing “culture” or “language” to animals because their connections and communication are different in nature from human beings, a growing body of research suggests culture — defined as behaviors or artifacts that are socially learned from others and sustained long enough that they are seen as traditions — is prevalent across many species in the animal kingdom.

In some cases, these social behaviors can lead to physiological changes that occur as the species evolves over time and it can take many different forms. For example, the teeth and jaw structures of orcas change in response to dietary differences across regional cultures while learned changes in bird song can help a bird identify itself to its neighbors. The study of cultural evolution in animals can have profound impacts on how we understand evolutionary biology, as well as how our own species fits and relates into the ecosystems around us.

While some evidence suggests brain size correlates with complex cultures, such that more intelligent animals are more likely to learn behaviors and pass them on, recent evidence suggests even invertebrates like the fruit fly can have culture. Here are five animals whose evolutionary biology has been shaped in some way by their culture.

Chimpanzees

Chimpanzees (Getty Images/Anup Shah)

In the 1990s, researchers noticed regional differences in chimpanzees that lived in different parts of Africa. While hungry chimpanzees in West Africa, for example, used big pieces of wood like hammers to crack open nuts to snack on, chimps in central Africa used stout sticks to dig into underground termite nests, not unlike a human digging a hole with a spade. Then, they thread long grass stems through the tunnel they made with the stick, which the termites latched onto so the chimp could fish them out.

A 1999 study in Nature examining all of the different cultural behaviors in chimpanzees altogether found 39 such patterns, which was "far more extensive" than had previously been documented for "any animal species except humans," according to the paper.

There is little evidence of genetic differences in chimpanzees that could explain this, and these behaviors are too complex for each individual chimpanzee to sort out on their own. Instead, it seems chimpanzees watched others perform these feeding techniques, learned them and passed them on through tradition, said study author Andrew Whiten, Ph.D., an emeritus professor in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St. Andrews who studies animal culture in the U.K. That’s further supported by archaeological evidence.

“We know that these behaviors have a long history because archaeologists have gone in and excavated at the sites where chimpanzees are cracking those nuts in West Africa using stones,” Whiten told Salon in a phone interview. “You can tell from the marks on the stones and the nuts and so on what was happening over 4,000 years ago.”

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Orcas

Orcas (Getty Images/slowmotiongli)Image_placeholder

Weighing up to six tons and stretching the length of five adult humans, orcas are one of the most intelligent mammals in the sea. They get a bad rap for “playing” with their food, with viral videos showing them tossing seals back and forth among their pod. These animals have strong familial bonds that are matriarchal, and some instances where orcas are seen to play with their food may actually be mothers teaching their inexperienced calves to hunt.

Although all orcas use echolocation to hunt, regional pods have different preferences on what they like to eat. Although orcas off the coast of Norway, for example, primarily rely on Atlantic herring for their food source, 29 years of observations in the region revealed that four specific groups of orcas there preferred to eat seals instead. Meanwhile, orcas in the Salish Sea feast on chinook, and orcas in the Antarctic eat penguins.

These aren't exactly minor details. One study in Nature Communications found cultural variations in diet, similar to New Yorkers eating pizza or Southerners eating fried foods, which have been linked to actual changes in the species’ genetics over time, with some evidence suggesting pods of orcas that eat seals have developed stronger jaw muscles and different digestive enzymes that can process seals. While this may be evolutionarily advantageous in allowing them to hunt with more efficiency, it could easily become disadvantageous as climate change and human impacts limit or change the availability of certain food sources, creating an evolutionary bottleneck.

“Given these findings, the almost-exclusive focus on humans by studies of the interaction of culture and genes should be expanded, and exploration of culture–genome coevolution models in suitable non-human animal systems encouraged,” the authors wrote.

Bumblebees

Bumblebees (Getty Images/Christian Gerst/500px)

Human beings have brains that weigh 2.8 pounds and are packed with 85 billion neurons, on average. In comparison, a bee brain is about the size of a sesame seed and contains fewer than one million neurons. Yet a study published in PloS Biology in March pushed back against the idea that only animals with big brains like chimpanzees or orcas could perform the sort of social learning that develops culture.

Using the same test given to species like chimps to see how the animals share information with one another, researchers gave bumblebees a puzzle box with red or blue tabs. When bumblebees successfully opened the box by pushing on red or blue tabs in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction, they were rewarded with sugar. Bees had already been shown to perform social learning in a similar experiment, but the study published in March took it a step further and reintroduced bees who had learned this behavior into naïve colonies, along with fresh puzzle boxes.

What they discovered was that the bees who had already learned how to solve the puzzle taught their new skills to the rest of the colony. Even when bumblebees in the colony found a new way to open the box, they still showed a preference for the way their neighbors had taught them, suggesting this knowledge had already begun to take root as "tradition," said study author Alice D. Bridges, a Ph.D. student at Queen Mary University of London.

It’s still unclear to what extent this culture translates to wild bumblebees because these experiments were done in a lab. Plus, each season, the only bumblebee in a colony to survive for the next season is the new queen, so it’s also unclear how long these traditions could be perpetuated, Bridges said.

“We just assumed that because it's a little insect this must be an innate behavior or it must be genetically coded, but when you actually look at what these things are doing their behavior is super complicated and really rich compared to a lot of species,” Bridges told Salon in a phone interview. “Clearly in this case, when they were presented with a puzzle that had the chance to develop into a local culture, that is exactly what happened.”

Song birds

Sparrows (Getty Images/Mai Tsugihara)

Of roughly 10,000 species of birds, 4,000 are songbirds, each with their own specialized calls to communicate about approaching predators, available food sources or potential mates. Evidence suggests songbirds can also learn variations in songs from one another and that these changes last across generations: One 2016 study found variations in yellowhammer bird songs were preserved for up to 100 years.

Bird song can vary among species by region, as one 2018 study published in Nature Communications elucidated in an attempt to explain what causes these variations. Sampling hundreds of swamp sparrows in the Eastern U.S., researchers found 160 different syllable types were involved in the sparrows’ repertoire that persisted in similar patterns for decades.

As baby sparrows grow up, they repeatedly listen to their elders’ songs, repeating the most common syllables. According to the study, this so-called conformist bias, paired with the extreme precision of the songbird’s notes, can persist as a tradition in swamp sparrows for hundreds of years. In a prior study, common notes were found to be more attractive to female sparrows than variations in the common dialect, suggesting this behavior may be evolutionarily advantageous. Just like humans, usually, a relationship goes smoother if they’re able to properly communicate.

“Our findings, then, suggest that the ability to transmit traditions with precision can no longer be considered a fundamental difference between how human and non-human cultures evolve,” the authors wrote.

Sperm whales

Sperm Whales (Getty Images/eco2drew)

The average sperm whale lives to be in its 60s, with a strong familial structure highly dependent on learning how to hunt, migrate and survive from its elders. Sperm whales, much like orcas and humpback whales, have a huge repertoire of songs they use to communicate.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year, researchers found seven different clans of sperm whales living in the Pacific Ocean differentiated from one another through variations in clicks they use to communicate called “codas.” In other words, sperm whales showed a sort of regional accent in their song researchers call “identity codas,” similar to how someone from Minnesota might say "pop" while someone from the East Coast would call the same thing "soda."

“These clans overlap in space, so it's not just like people from France and people from the U.S. that are separated by some boundary that can't cross,” said Shane Gero, a whale biologist working to decode sperm whale language as Project CETI's field biology lead. “These are multicultural areas of the ocean, but there's still this recognition of: ‘I'm from the Eastern Caribbean clan and you're not.’”

Although many questions remain about how variations in foraging patterns differ across clans because they dive 1,000 meters below sea level to hunt for prey, variations have been observed in how regional clans care for their young, with some clans having only mothers giving milk to their young but others having a designated wet nurse sperm whale to give milk to the babies, Gero said.

Project CETI is using artificial intelligence to track variations in sperm whale songs to help understand how they communicate. Distinguishing cultural differences among clans can help redirect conservation efforts to ensure that these rich and still widely unknown cultures don’t die out.

“This is a project about listening to someone who is fundamentally different from us and learning what’s important to them and then hopefully changing the way that we live because of what we’ve learned,” Gero told Salon in a video call. “Using these amazing technologies that humans have built to try and understand something else that we share the planet with is a pretty important overarching message given how humanity seems to be getting along right now.”

about animal intelligence

Televising Trump’s trial would make Jack Smith’s job harder. Here’s why it should be allowed anyway

It is more than understandable why special prosecutor Jack Smith does not want his upcoming federal election interference trial against Donald Trump televised. Smith's team argues, correctly, that streaming footage of the federal proceedings would create a "carnival atmosphere" featuring Trump grandstanding "like many fraud defendants try to do." Instead, they are asking U.S District Judge Tanya Chutkan to deny requests made by more than a dozen news outlets to break federal protocol and stream footage from the trial, which is scheduled for March.

The urgency around this matter increased this week when Trump's team filed a motion supporting the request for a televised proceeding. Having previously avoided the question of cameras in court, recently Trump has been out on the stump saying he wants "this trial to be seen by everyone in the world," claiming, "I want sunlight." Giving a defendant what he wants surely wouldn't be good for the prosecution, right?

That is assuming Trump actually does want cameras in the courtroom. He may want the appearance that he welcomes "sunlight," but it's doubtful he wants the actual sun shining on this courtroom for all to see. Trump and his lawyers know better than anyone that a televised trial would likely backfire on Trump in the 2024 presidential election by reminding voters that he's a lying, whining monster who tried to end our democracy as his last act in office.

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It would probably make the work of the trial easier for Smith and his team if they could avoid camera-caused chaos in and around the courtroom. But there's no reason to believe Trump won't try to turn the proceedings into a circus anyway, by lying his head off to the TV cameras gathered outside or other spectacles. At least if there are cameras inside the court, the public will have a chance to hear the prosecution counter Trump's claims with evidence.

There are two good reasons to believe the Trump team's request for cameras is wholly insincere. First, the filing itself appears to be written to be maximally insulting to Judge Chutkan, with its claim she has "denied President Trump his inalienable rights." It's a lie in every word, starting with the fact that Trump is not president. Insulting a judge would not be a productive move in a sincere request. On the contrary, it reads like they are baiting her into denying the request.

Second, as legal experts point out, Trump's team is playing a shell game by first claiming to have no opinion on the matter, then changing their minds once it became clear the request for cameras was unlikely to be fulfilled.

It's all a charade on Trump's part anyway. DOJ accurately advised Chutkan she doesn't have the power to order the trial to be televised — the Judicial Conference would have to change its policy. So it's just a phony stance by Trump to suggest he wants transparency & US doesn't. https://t.co/rr0mAqBo84

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) November 13, 2023

Why Trump's Jan. 6 indictment feels so different: This time, there are victims

A reasonable assumption is Trump wants the pretense of transparency without the risks. If the likelihood of cameras in the court shifted in favor, you can bet Trump's lawyers would suddenly find an excuse to argue against their presence. The reason is straightforward: The more attention people pay to this case, the worse it will likely be for Trump politically.

In general, Trump's popularity is inversely proportional to how much people have to hear about him on any given day. He is doing pretty well in the polls now; most Americans don't follow the news closely, which helps them forget how deeply aggravating his whining can be. That's how Trump can be confident enough to call more than half the country "vermin," promising to "root" them "out." He knows the only people paying attention right now are his base of fellow fascists and the politically aware liberals who oppose him. Those whose votes will be up for grabs likely have no idea what he's saying.

Trump's single best hope for a positive political outcome is for the news media to give his trials less coverage due to the lack of footage and visuals. As the January 6 hearings in the House demonstrated, when reminded of the Capitol riot and Trump's role in instigating it, a majority of Americans blame him for it. It's only when the memory starts to fade that swing voters start to entertain the notion that he wasn't so bad. In a televised trial, Trump would be sitting right there, glowering and muttering, just radiating guilty energy.

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Of course, if there are cameras, Trump will pull shenanigans. He suffers from a bouquet of personality disorders that make it impossible for him to behave. His stunts are also lucrative. While most people find Trump's unrestrained sociopathy repulsive, it does open up the wallets of the MAGA base. That's likely why his lawyers encourage his antics even as they undermine his legal footing: If they don't let him continue to bamboozle Fox News junkies out of their Social Security checks, will they even get paid?

It might be good for fundraising, but it's not a sound legal strategy. History shows Trump's big mouth only hurts his case, especially in a legal situation where his lies can be countered with facts and exposed with cross-examination. For instance, Trump's taped deposition in the E. Jean Carroll rape-and-defamation trial ended up nuking lingering doubts about his guilt. He all but confessed, and used the word "fortunately" when describing how men often get away with rape. It's worth remembering that Trump talked a big game about how he couldn't wait to testify in that trial, as well.

Breaking: Donald Trump rails against rape accuser E Jean Carroll’s “false accusations”, and tells us he will “probably” attend the trial in New York, which he calls a “scam” and a “political attack” – he says he will “confront” the claims, which he denies #Trump #Doonbeg pic.twitter.com/mZAYwVnjvB

— Stephen Murphy (@SMurphyTV) May 4, 2023

“That’s game over”: Legal experts say new Jenna Ellis revelation is beyond “devastating” for Trump

Spoiler: The coward never showed. Competent lawyers absolutely would not put him on the stand anyway — the man is emotionally incontinent and too proud of his crimes to avoid confessing.

This is a complicated situation in many ways, as demonstrated by the situation in Fulton County. District Attorney Fani Willis has seen a handful of guilty pleas entered in her racketeering case against Trump and his gang for their coup efforts in Georgia. This week, someone released videos of the interviews defendants gave in exchange for leniency. Willis is furious, accusing Trump allies of attempted witness intimidation.

But these videos are not good for Trump. The picture painted even by witnesses still loyal to him is of a man whose intent was always to overturn an election and illegally remain in power, and who only concocted the Big Lie as a justification. A former Trump lawyer even recalls speaking with Trump's right-hand man Dan Scavino and being told, "The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power."

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Will the people who need to see that video see it? Probably not. It's mostly being shared by liberals who already believe Trump to be guilty. The "not sure" voters who could determine the 2024 election's outcome are not paying attention. Televised trials could change that. Courtroom drama sucks in people who might otherwise ignore the story — even more so if there's a "carnival" atmosphere. The barkers and clowns that manifest when Trump and cameras are present would create a spectacle that reminds viewers what a vote for Trump really means.

Of course, Willis and Smith aren't focused on the election — nor should they be. Their job is to prosecute this case in court, and Trump's antics only make that harder to do while keeping their sanity. From that perspective, Smith's desire to keep cameras out of the court makes perfect sense. No one wants to do their job while someone is honking a giant horn in their face.

And yet, Smith indicted Trump on the grounds he had violated the rights of all Americans, specifically "the right to vote, and to have one's vote counted." If we are all victims of that crime — and I agree that we are — then we have a right to bear witness to the trial. Since they can't pack hundreds of millions of victims into the courtroom, cameras are the best option. If the concern is that cameras will somehow help Trump, it's time to get past it.

about Trump's legal strategies

“Our democracy hangs by a thread”: Expert panel says a Trump victory in 2024 will end it

Donald Trump and the movement he represents are not “just” a matter of politics: They are effectively a public health crisis that touches all areas of American society and life.

These assaults on democracy and a humane society are emotional, physical, spiritual, psychological, economic, intellectual and material. Trumpism and fascism attack reality and truth, seeking to replace them with what social psychologists have described as a state of “malignant normality."

The result of these assaults is a collective state of trauma, anxiety, lack of direction and growing despair about our futures as individuals and citizens of a supposed democracy. These negative emotions are amplified by existential fears about global climate disaster, disruptive technologies such as AI, wars in multiple areas of the world, past and future pandemics and other unpredictable crises.

Fascism and authoritarianism are like opportunistic predators. They seek out societies in crisis whose dysfunction and brokenness allow them to flourish.

Barbra Streisand says she “can’t live in this country” if Donald Trump wins the presidency

If Trump and his MAGA forces take back the White House, whether by fair means or foul — a once-unthinkable prospect that now seems increasingly likely — that might finally mean the end of innocence for those Americans who have deluded themselves into believing that “we are better than that."

This situation calls to mind James Baldwin's famous observation that “white people are trapped in a history they don’t understand” and that “ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

In an attempt to make some sense of our collective emotions, and how we can perhaps orient ourselves in this time of enormous uncertainty, I asked a range of experts for their thoughts and suggestions. Their answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Cheri Jacobus is a former media spokesperson at the Republican National Committee and founder and president of the political consulting and PR firm Capitol Strategies PR.

The cavalcade of chaos and instability is unnerving, even to the most seasoned practitioner of politics, news and civic life. President Biden's chilling but honest assessment this week that "the world is changing, and what happens in the next four years and the last four, five, six years is going to determine what this country looks like for the next six to eight decades" is mitigated only by the fact that he is the experienced, sober, thoughtful leader we have the good fortune to have as president in these precarious times.

But I look at the poll numbers and realize that half the country supports a lying, treasonous, dangerous, racist, sexist authoritarian who is under indictment, has been found liable for massive fraud, and who may be elected president because he's good for Fox News ratings and does Vladimir Putin's bidding. He's a lifelong criminal who likely sold or otherwise provided classified and top secret intelligence to our enemies and adversaries, and who managed to install a federal judge in the right jurisdiction to delay and obstruct his case, and generally assist him in covering up his crimes.

"Half the country supports a lying, treasonous, racist, sexist authoritarian who is under indictment, has been found liable for massive fraud, and may be elected president because he's good for Fox News ratings and does Vladimir Putin's bidding."

Failure is not an option. Trump and MAGA must be defeated at the ballot box, in courtrooms and in the media. We are reaching the crescendo that will make or break democracy. I believe we are close to the end of this part of the Trump Era — its final chapters — and that if he and MAGA are not defeated, a new story begins that will chart a new era of authoritarianism, oligarchy-driven economy, isolation from a world that doesn't trust us and the death of the free press, which is already coughing and gasping for air. The fact that the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is an election-denying MAGA insurrectionist who reports exactly zero assets on his financial disclosure forms and does not believe in evolution is just a peek at what's ahead on a much larger scale.

My hope lies in the courts — at least some of them. Justice is finally being served to Donald J. Trump and his thugs, after years of excuses and delay. My fear is that eight years of MAGA propaganda, lies and crimes have normalized and emboldened that which had previously been deemed abhorrent, unacceptable, shocking, dangerous and unfathomable. The reality that the 2024 election will likely be very, very close is frightening, and evidence we are closer to that second book than we may think.

Rich Logis is a former right-wing pundit and high-ranking Trump supporter. He describes himself as "a remorseful ex-Trump, DeSantis and GOP voter." Logis is the founder of Perfect Our Union, an organization dedicated to healing political traumatization; building diverse, pro-democracy alliances; and perfecting our Union.

What I really figured out about Trump, after leaving MAGA, was that his entire ethos, persona and political product are all inaccurate mythologies. He has, however, skillfully convinced millions into adhering to those mythologies (I was such a sycophant at one time). Many will continue to say, “I knew he was a con man years ago”; credit to those who recognized this. Now, I’d implore those who weren’t duped to welcome into the civic and democratic fold those who leave MAGA behind.

MAGA is a politically traumatic, exploitative mythology. Most who have fallen prey to this political Golden Calf are good and decent people; the MAGA mythology continues to be sold as a miracle elixir for many of the understandable, valid concerns (especially economic concerns) that led many Trump voters to support his candidacy. I give gratitude daily for my personal and political epiphany. Yes, Trump is afraid of prison. But he’s more petrified of his mythologies — about his malleable businesses, his “brand” and the false political messianism of MAGA — being rendered naked on the world stage.

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Trump has spent more than half a century carefully cultivating a deceptive facade; MAGA is an iteration of this. When all the legal cases are decided, after all appeals are exhausted, I expect the sentences will amount to a de facto life sentence. For voter registration groups, the goal for our upcoming elections is to labor to ensure the highest turnout in history. If that happens, I’m confident that the GOP in its current state will finally be mercy-killed, opening an opportunity for responsible Republicans to rebuild the party, and offer a mea culpa to We the People for allowing the GOP to become the MAGA party. I want to emphasize, however, that Biden's re-election is not guaranteed; and a Biden win doesn’t guarantee a Democratic majority in Congress. Also, don’t forget about your state, local and school board races; for years, right-wing groups have spent fortunes in time and money on state legislative elections, and although those don’t have the sexy allure of horse-race national elections, local and state policies affect our lives more than federal policies do. Let that be a reminder that you should vote in all elections! I was once a devout MAGA activist; now I’m committed to helping others leave MAGA.

"Before, during and after our upcoming elections, I will engage with MAGA voters — not by impugning them, but by showing them that realizing we were wrong, and acknowledging our errors, are traits of strength, not weakness."

Before, during and after our upcoming elections, I will engage with MAGA voters — not by impugning them, but by showing them that realizing we were wrong, and acknowledging our errors, are traits of strength, not weakness. Castigating MAGA voters only strengthens their already rabid support of Trump. Trump himself is in the final stage of cult leadership: martyrdom. So MAGA voters feel further validated with every Trump indictment, or with every former Trump administration official who correctly views Trump as unfit for office.

I understand why so many might feel despairing and hopeless about our democracy. We are not powerless; when history and the moment have demanded it, our country has an excellent track record of forming unlikely but necessary alliances. Now is such a time in our current epoch; such alliances are how our democracy and our democratic institutions have survived crises that would have irreparably damaged any other country. A second Trump presidency will almost certainly end the American experiment as we know it; no one knows what that would look like. It doesn’t have to be that way. Despite myriad efforts to cement minority rule across America, each of us can make a positive mark in the continuous work of perfecting our Union.

Brynn Tannehill is a journalist and author of "American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy."

How am I feeling? That’s a huge question that could be the basis for an entire book. For almost everyone else included in this online roundtable, the dangers of a second Trump administration are less personal. People forget that for most people living in a fascist autocracy, even people formerly associated with the loyal opposition, life is generally boring and normal. Unless you happen to be a part of the minority group that composes 0.5 percent of the population, yet the fascist movement blames them for every bad thing and promises to eradicate them once they come to power to restore the greatness of the nation. Then the danger is terrifyingly real and omnipresent.

"I happen to be a part of the minority group that composes 0.5 percent of the population, yet the fascist movement blames them for every bad thing and promises to eradicate them once they come to power."

Republicans have declared that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life.” Project 2025 declares that everything related to “gender ideology” is pornographic, and immediately thereafter that pornography must become illegal. The GOP answer to the “transgender question” is to ban transgender people from schools, sports, medical care, the military, public performances, media, public facilities and government jobs.

At the same time, they’re pushing for laws that strip trans people of civil rights that every other American has, while mandating that they carry IDs that out them as transgender. Literally every one of these has a direct parallel to actions taken by the Nazis between 1933 and 1939, which is why preliminary data suggests that up to 20% of trans people have already fled red states. The end of democracy is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for genocide. Unfortunately, the other conditions are already there: moral panic, scapegoating for the nation’s ills, media sources more than happy to stoke that panic (looking at you, New York Times), dehumanizing language ("vermin"), and promises of eradication to save the Herrenvolk from the transgender menace. It’s all there: The only thing holding it back is the vague semblance of democracy and a weak Hindenburg/Biden administration. There is no beginning or end: just pivotal moments.

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I fear that historians will remember Jan. 20, 2025, much as they do Jan. 30, 1933. Germany is still here, but the only thing that ended the Third Reich was the combined might of the world’s greatest powers pummeling it to dust. There will be no such rescue for the United States, a nuclear superpower, should we fall into such darkness. My hope comes only in the form of knowing that I have a few avenues to avoid the absolute worst-case scenarios: My wife of 23 years is Canadian, and getting a visa is not that difficult. My fear, however, is that blue states will follow the Hungarian and Russian path of quiet acquiescence, waiting for the Godot of future elections to save them from a federal government that has turned on specific minority populations. My despair comes from the polls, seeing that a plurality of Americans genuinely wants this outcome: They want not just fascism, but the absolute worst attributes of the worst fascist government in human history.

I would add that the institutional capture of the referees (i.e., the Supreme Court and several of the circuit courts) is a big reason why I subscribe to Masha Gessen's admonition: "Your institutions will not save you." Nor am I blind to how a Trump administration would not hesitate to weaponize the military, the Senate and the Department of Justice against SCOTUS if they failed to rule the way they are supposed to. If they choose to use every tool at their disposal ruthlessly and without regard for right and wrong, then you begin to understand how the Weimar Republic's rule of law collapsed in a matter of months.

To understand the worst-case scenarios, you have to think like a terrorist or a mobster or an insurgent in a bloody civil war (like I did in Iraq). Having zero moral compass opens up all sorts of opportunities for power, and that's where the GOP is now. They believe the ends — complete power, either for personal gain or religious reasons — justifies anything that they do to undermine a system they see as inherently corrupted to begin with.

That's the essence of MAGA.

Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of history at Grand View University where he specializes in apocalyptic religion and political violence. His essays and other writing have been featured in the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, the Bulwark and Foreign Policy.

Making sense of unending crisis feels impossible. The harder part is keeping yourself from reaching a level of numbness and despair — a feeling of hopelessness. It’s not only the horror of Hamas’ atrocities on Oct. 7 but the unending violence of the atrocity of Netanyahu’s response, the collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank by a far-right regime opposed by the Israeli people. It’s the unending violence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s the ethnic cleansing of Armenian territories invaded by Azerbaijan, it’s the earthquakes in Afghanistan and hurricanes in Mexico and violence in Sudan and Yemen and Ethiopia — and then you come home and see the political mess here, the violence and the threats and the promises of retribution and vengeance. And while there may not be a solution to any of it, not that I can achieve, avoiding resignation is critical to both surviving and trying to do something about it.

The fatigue aspect is a major problem. Biden’s reaction to the Israel-Hamas fight has many people justifiably angry, saying they won’t vote for him, things like that. I completely understand that reaction; no one’s vote should be taken for granted. But the ongoing crisis of democracy means that the next election is not about Joe Biden and the Democratic Party and whether or not they are right on really any of the issues we might want them to be. The next election is about the ability to have further elections — about the survival of the republic as a concept, let alone anything else. And that numbness and despair, the resignation, is the enemy of all possibility of fighting off a Christofascist takeover of the country. I say this not because of any sense of certainty that Trump or his allies could dismantle our democracy, but a deep-seated belief that if they win they would try.

"I try to remember, for all that the world seems to justify Thomas Hobbes’ narrative that man is monstrous and only tyranny can keep them in check, that in every disaster, manmade or natural, strangers rush into burning buildings to rescue children and the injured."

I think we are heading toward the end of the book of Trump. I do not think he will win the 2024 election (which may be more hopeful than is safe), and between his legal woes, his age, his increasing erratic behavior and his narrative of perpetual winning, a loss might finally put a nail in his coffin. But I think of the Trumpocene not as a single chapter book but a series, and what the sequel mightbe worries me a lot more than the conclusion of this one. Will the next volume be more moderated, or are we heading towards the traditional science fiction trilogy structure — "The Empire Strikes Back," as it were — where everything gets infinitely worse.

My greatest fears right now are twofold. The first is the acceptance of the mass murder of civilians as normal and defensible, based on how we feel about a region or religion or nation-state. This ties into both the grotesque violence of antisemitism and Islamaphobia in the United States, the way Americans choose to engage in both rhetorical and physical violence against marginalized communities here and abroad, and the way that mass violence by terrorist groups and also by states collectively punishes entire populations for the real or perceived crimes of a few. The other is that our ability to pay attention to the rest of the world seems to focus on single events for a small amount of time, and ignores everything else that is happening — which means while we are focused on one place, other areas take advantage of the media withdrawal to engage in atrocities we don’t pay attention to.

As for hope — I teach an honors class on hope, using post-apocalyptic literature as a lens. And I am constantly searching for that thin line of hope, that light in the darkness, to hold onto, to keep going forward. I find hope in people. Across the United States, communities rise up to protest violence — maybe not enough, maybe not in a way that shifts the levers of power, but Jewish communities across the country are leading mass movements protesting the killing of Palestinians, people are counter-protesting fascist marches in American cities, individuals are fighting back against the anti-trans violence of the state and local communities, groups like Doctors Without Borders and people like Chef José Andrés go to areas of pain and disaster to help. I try to remember, for all that the world seems to justify Thomas Hobbes’ narrative that man is monstrous and only tyranny can keep them in check, that in every disaster, manmade or natural, strangers rush into burning buildings or raging floods or bombed buildings to rescue children and the injured and perfect strangers. That for all of the darkness and hate in this world, people stand up for love and hope and to push back against violence. Hope is in the people who are still fighting for others.

Joe Walsh was a Republican congressman and a leading Tea Party conservative. He is now a prominent conservative voice against Donald Trump and the host of the podcast "White Flag With Joe Walsh."

It's easy, with all the conflict, chaos, unrest and dysfunction going on at home and abroad, to get pulled in and obsessed with current events, and lose sight of the much more important task in front of us: Making sure Donald Trump is not elected 12 months from now. The pain that Israel has suffered has hit me hard because I am such a huge fan of that country. It's been a struggle for me to focus elsewhere. I feel invested in making sure Israel wins this war and destroys Hamas. And as I'm obsessed with Israel's fight, I'm cognizant of the politics involved here. Biden's party is divided on Israel, and this is an issue that could and will hurt Biden politically. Because much of his base will abandon him and that means a Trump victory, and that means I must do all I can to help wake Democrats up to that danger.

"What scares me the most right now is what's always scared me the most: Trump back in the White House, and a radicalized former political party of mine taking a sledgehammer to our democracy and our Constitution."

World events and domestic dysfunction are conspiring to take America's eyes off this crucial truth: Our democracy hangs by a thread, and a Trump victory in 2024 will end our democracy as we know it. People right now don't see this, and I worry that all the noise and chaos going on all over the world will keep people from recognizing the looming threat right in front of us. Biden looks overwhelmed by it all. That only strengthens Trump. We must get through these next three or four months and refocus, after the first few Republican primaries, on the general election matchup. All these third-party candidates are an immense unknown and an immense risk when it comes to keeping Trump out of the White House. I continue to feel like we're sleepwalking right back into another November, 2016.

We are nearing the middle of this Trump era. Trump will be the nominee, and he has a fantastic shot at getting elected again. If he loses, he's not going anywhere. He could run again in 2028. But Trumpism — white Christian nationalism, authoritarianism and intolerance — is now the Republican Party, and that's never gonna change. So even though Trump may be gone in eight years, Trumpism is here for good.

What scares me the most right now is what's always scared me the most: Trump back in the White House, and a radicalized former political party of mine taking a sledgehammer to our democracy and our Constitution. The only thing that gives me hope is young people. Not because they understand any of this, but because they have the potential to understand. Older Americans are set in their ways. They're gone. Young people need to save this thing. I don't know if they will. But I know they can.

about Donald Trump and 2024

“Do they not realize I like to fight?” The 6 most revealing Fox News details in “Network of Lies”

Inside Fox News its hosts, producers and executives speak solemnly about “respecting the audience.” This is the opposite of a truth meter, understand – it describes the network’s insistence on letting the viewers drive its misinformation machine.

We can’t rightly describe this as coverage, because to call it that would imply that Fox News is in the journalism business rather than generating propaganda. As media analyst Brian Stelter determines in his newest book “Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy,” Fox News treats its news side as second-class citizens at best, or at worst, traitors.

Much of what “Network of Lies” discovers is more validating than shocking, mainly that Fox News lies to appease its faithful because that’s what they want. Following Joe Biden’s election to the presidency in 2020, the audience wanted coverage of fraud that didn’t exist. So Fox ginned it up.

Revelations from summary judgment briefs related to Dominion’s defamation case establish this as fact, not suspicion. Fox settled with Dominion in April for an astounding $787.5 million, preventing a court case that would have made its executives and on-air talent admit they were aware of the falsehoods they were perpetuating. Giving them oxygen nevertheless was and is good for business.

Dominion also leaked documents to the press that famously revealed, for instance, that its formerly top-rated host Tucker Carlson hated Trump; that Jeanine Pirro’s own producer thought she was “nuts”; and that none of the network’s main primetime hosts took Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell seriously.

Unfortunately for democracy, Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo did – and we’re still living with the ramifications of that today.

Much of this is known. But in “Network of Lies,” Stelter unearths other treasures from the Dominion filings that reveal the extent of toxic partisanship and irresponsibility with Fox.

Here are six of the most significant revelations in the book.

"It was damning": Brian Stelter excavates Fox News' culture, the Big Lie and Tucker Carlson's exit

Fox News could have been the first network to accurately call the 2020 election for Joe Biden. Instead, it was dead last.

Despite all the criticism concerning Fox News hosts’ antipathy toward fact-based reporting, its Decision Desk, powered by a system developed in partnership with the Associated Press, might be the best in the business.

Even the network’s rivals describe it as “aggressive” but “impressive,” Stelter writes. Fox’s early call of Arizona in Joe Biden’s column on election night exemplifies this. The Decision Desk, using modeling drawn from its Fox News Voter Analysis too (which AP calls VoteCast), outpaced other networks in calling Arizona by a wide margin.

Instead of being proud, Fox had to contend with its viewers and Trump’s team being livid. Lachlan Murdoch and other Fox executives quickly pivoted into “shoot the messenger” mode as digital politics editor Chris Stirewalt went on the air to explain, in the plainest terms, that the math wasn’t lying.

Cut to Friday night, Nov. 6, 2020, when Stelter writes that Stirewalt’s team members Arnon Mishkin and then-DC Bureau managing editor Bill Sammon were ready to call Nevada for Biden, thus handing him the White House. But Fox News president Jay Wallace held them back, giving CNN the honor of being first to project Biden had surpassed 270 to take the White House.

“Decision desks were inherently competitive,” Stelter explains. “Every team wanted to be first. But in this extraordinary case, Wallace believed the audience backlash wasn’t worth the journalistic benefit.” Or as Rupert Murdoch himself said to his son, “[At] least being second saves a Trump explosion!”

Or, for that matter, sixth.

Trump’s regular check-ins with Rupert Murdoch may have placed a target on Sammon’s back weeks before Election Night 2020.

A couple of months after the Decision Desk’s early and accurate Arizona call for Biden on election night, Fox fired Stirewalt and pushed Sammon into retirement. But among the redacted documents was proof that Trump may have placed a target on Sammon’s back six weeks before Election Day.

In a call with Rupert Murdoch, the former president informed Fox’s lord and master, “we have a bad person,” as Murdoch recounted in an email summary to Lachlan and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott.

“Talked a little about a few things but he insisted on talking about our people! Loved twice over Lou Dobbs, loves Hannity, loves Maria B (known her for thirty years), but we have a bad person (do you know him? Sammons [sic]). ‘Hates Trump!’

I didn’t tell him he might be right!”

The threats Sean Hannity and his team directed toward a news correspondent colleague’s fact-checking tweet were more extreme than originally revealed.

Among the more shocking details revealed in the court filing was a text chain between Carlson and Hannity expressing disdain for their news side colleague Jacqui Heinrich, who tweeted that top election infrastructure officials, including some in Trump allies, had issued a statement saying “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Carlson’s reaction of “Please get her fired. Seriously,” was widely reported. But Hannity, ever the MMA wannabe, took his anger a step further, sending Heinrich’s tweet to his producers along with, “Do they not realize I like to fight and the damage I can do here?”

His executive producer Tiffany Fazio’s reaction of “they better get the ‘news division’ under control” underscores the lack of respect Fox News' primetime opinion side has for colleagues who try to practice journalism, as well as the power those hosts hold relative to the news side.

A new civil suit filed this week against Fox News by its reporter Jason Donner, who claims he was targeted after continually raising concerns with his managers about false statements allowed on the air, only bolsters this impression.

Maria Bartiromo became Patient Zero in the Dominion fraud smear by taking a random conspiracy theorist at her word.

Long ago, Bartiromo was a respected financial journalist. The Trump era made her one of the earliest Big Lie believers and more than this, as Stelter points out, “a liaison between Powell and the Trump family.” Even by that standard, her willingness to take the word of a stranger who believes she has been “internally decapitated” and “The Wind tells me I’m a ghost” is simply incredible.

But that is precisely how one loopy email from Marlene Bourne dated Nov. 7, 2020, became the starting point of the infection that led to Fox’s handing nearly a billion dollars to Dominion. Bourne sent her “wackadoodle” (as she herself put it) email to Powell, Lou Dobbs and Judicial Watch wingnut Tom Fitton. A day later Bartiromo and Powell were discussing Dominion on the air, referencing Bourne’s entirely kooky fabrications as if they were scripture.

Stelter’s reporting in “Network of Lies” also shows that Bartiromo repeated sections of the email almost word-for-word. Even worse, as Dominion cited in its filing, she "never reported on the existence of this email."

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In Fox’s “bottom-up” power structure, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott is the “pain sponge.”

If you’re wondering why a massive news organization might allow its prime time hosts to fundamentally operate as if they’re running their own fiefdoms, then some of the lessons taught by “Succession” may have escaped you.

In “Succession” the Roy family is understood to be the stand-in for the Murdochs, but in the limited glimpses we see of how Logan Roy’s news conglomerate works, it’s clear that he leaves day-to-day business operations in the hands of people like Tom Wambsgans so, when things go wrong, he can take the blame. Unless that is, he has someone else to absorb the consequences for him.

This also explains why Scott, who oversaw Fox while Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, Bartiromo and other walking liabilities ran amok, is still its CEO.

In Stelter’s view, “Rupert and Lachlan wanted all of the profits from Fox, all the prestige, all the power, but none of the blame.” So, to quote the HBO drama’s tech billionaire Lukas Matsson, Scott became their “pain sponge,” enabling the Murdochs to operate like absentee landlords. House burning down? Need to disappear your top-rated host? Call Suzanne — Lachlan's likely on the other side of the world, and Rupert's mostly retired.

If you appreciated Rupert Murdoch’s unintentionally candid deposition testimony, thank an ex-Playmate.

Remember how amazed – delighted, perhaps – we were at reading Rupert Murdoch’s atypically honest admissions in his Dominion deposition that his hosts endorsed false election conspiracy theories, and he could have stopped it, “but I didn’t”?

This was not a matter of Murdoch suddenly growing a conscience or, conversely, demonstrating such total confidence in his wealth that he believed telling the truth would cost him much.

“Network of Lies” posits that Murdoch received “overly rosy” counsel by Fox’s top lawyer Viet Dinh and may have been lulled into thinking he didn’t have to prepare for the brutal barrage to which he was subjected by Dominion’s legal team.

This may be related to Fox’s triumph in a previous defamation suit brought by ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal, who sued the network over Carlson falsely accusing her of extorting Trump on his show. The case came before Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a Trump appointee, who sided with the Fox legal team’s argument. She dismissed the case, explaining that Carlson’s commentary qualified as “rhetorical hyperbole” and “opinion commentary” and was therefore “not actionable as defamation.”

That case’s outcome, Stelter posits, “may have lulled Fox’s executives and high-powered lawyers into complacency about future defamation claims. The First Amendment and the ‘hey, who would take any of this seriously?’ defense was always there to protect them, so why worry about a little voting company bashing?”

“Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy” is out now.

about Fox News

How lawmakers in Texas and Florida undermine COVID vaccination efforts

Katherine Wells wants to urge her Lubbock, Texas, community to get vaccinated against covid-19. “That could really save people from severe illness,” said Wells, the city’s public health director.

But she can’t.

A rule added to Texas’ budget that went into effect Sept. 1 forbids health departments and other organizations funded by the state government to advertise, recommend, or even list covid vaccines alone. “Clinics may inform patients that COVID-19 vaccinations are available,” the rule allows, “if it is not being singled out from other vaccines.”

Why the CDC has recommended new COVID boosters for all

Texas isn’t the only state curtailing the public conversation about covid vaccines. Tennessee’s health department homepage, for example, features the flu, vaping, and cancer screening but leaves out covid and covid vaccines. Florida is an extreme case, where the health department has issued guidance against covid vaccines that runs counter to scientific studies and advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Notably, the shift in health information trails rhetoric from primarily Republican politicians who have reversed their positions on covid vaccines. Fierce opposition to measures like masking and business closures early in the pandemic fueled a mistrust of the CDC and other scientific institutions and often falls along party lines: Last month, a KFF poll found that 84% of Democrats said they were confident in the safety of covid vaccines, compared with 36% of Republicans. It’s a dramatic drop from 2021, when two-thirds of Republicans were vaccinated.

The shift in health information trails rhetoric from primarily Republican politicians who have reversed their positions on covid vaccines.

As new vaccines roll out ahead of the expected winter surge of covid, some health officials are treading carefully to avoid blowback from the public and policymakers. So far, vaccine uptake is low, with less than 5% of Americans receiving an updated shot, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Wells fears the consequences will be dire: “We will see a huge disparity in health outcomes because of changes in language.”

A study published in July found that Republicans and Democrats in Ohio and Florida died at roughly similar rates before covid vaccines emerged, but a disparity between parties grew once the first vaccines were widely available in 2021 and uptake diverged. By year’s end, Republicans had a 43% higher rate of excess deaths than Democrats.

Public health initiatives have long been divisive — water fluoridation, needle exchanges, and universal health care, to name a few. But the pandemic turned up the volume to painful levels, public health officials say. More than 500 left their jobs under duress in 2020 and 2021, and legislators in at least 26 states passed laws to prevent public officials from setting health policies. Republican Arkansas state Sen. Trent Garner told KFF Health News in 2021, “It’s time to take the power away from the so-called experts.”

Few kids are getting the latest COVID shots. Is it misinformation or a lack of access?

At first, vaccine mandates were contentious but the shots themselves were not. Scott Rivkees, Florida’s former surgeon general, now at Brown University, traces the shift to the months after Joe Biden was elected president. Though Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis initially promoted covid vaccination, his stance changed as resistance to covid measures became central to his presidential campaign. In late 2021, he appointed Joseph Ladapo surgeon general. By then, Ladapo had penned Wall Street Journal op-eds skeptical of mainstream medical advice, such as one asking, “Are Covid Vaccines Riskier Than Advertised?”

As bivalent boosters rolled out last year, the Florida health department’s homepage removed information on covid vaccines. In its place were rules against mandates and details on how to obtain vaccine exemptions. Then, early this year, the department advised against vaccinating children and teens.

Scientifically vetted studies, and the CDC’s own review, contradict Florida’s conclusion against vaccination.

The state’s advice changed once more when the CDC recommended updated covid vaccines in September. DeSantis incorrectly said the vaccines had “not been proven to be safe or effective.” And the health department amended its guidance to say men under age 40 should not be vaccinated because the department had conducted research and deemed the risk of heart complications like myocarditis unacceptable. It refers to a short, authorless document posted online rather than in a scientific journal where it would have been vetted for accuracy. The report uses an unusual method to analyze health records of vaccinated Floridians. Citing serious flaws, most other researchers call it misinformation.

Scientifically vetted studies, and the CDC’s own review, contradict Florida’s conclusion against vaccination. Cases of myocarditis following mRNA vaccines have occurred but are much less frequent than cases triggered by covid. The risk is sevenfold higher from the disease than from mRNA vaccines, according to an analysis published in a medical journal based on a review of 22 other studies.

Since leaving his post, Rivkees has been stunned to see the state health department subsumed by political meddling.

About 28,700 children and adults from birth to age 39 have died of covid in the United States. Florida’s anti-vaccine messaging affects people of all ages, Rivkees added, not just those who are younger.

He points out that Florida performed well compared with other states in 2020 and 2021, ranking 38th in covid deaths per capita despite a large population of older adults. Now it has the sixth-highest rate of covid deaths in the country.

“There is no question that the rise of misinformation and the politicization of the response has taken a toll on public health,” he said.

Uptake in Texas is already low, with fewer than 4% of residents getting the bivalent booster that rolled out last year.

As in Florida, the Texas health department initially promoted covid vaccines, warning that Texans who weren’t vaccinated were about 20 times as likely to suffer a covid-associated death. Such sentiments faded last year, as state leaders passed policies to block vaccine mandates and other public health measures. The latest is a prohibition against the use of government funds to promote covid vaccines. Uptake in Texas is already low, with fewer than 4% of residents getting the bivalent booster that rolled out last year.

At Lubbock’s health department, Wells managed to put out a press release saying the city offers covid vaccines but stopped short of recommending them. “We aren’t able to do as big a push as other states,” she said.

Some health officials are altering their recommendations, given the current climate. Janet Hamilton, executive director at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, said clear-cut advice to get vaccinated against covid works when people trust the scientific establishment, but it risks driving others away from all vaccines. “It’s important for public health to meet people where they are,” Hamilton said.

Missouri’s health department took this tack on X, formerly known as Twitter: “COVID vaccines will be available in Missouri soon, if you’re in to that sort of thing. If not, just keep scrolling!”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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about the pandemic

Manchin says Trump will destroy democracy if he becomes president again

Just one week after making the announcement that he won't be seeking reelection, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is hinting at a third-party run for president as an alternative to Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.

In statements obtained from AP News, Manchin spoke out against the dangers of giving Trump a second term, going so far as to say that “he will destroy democracy in America.” And although the senator is against a two-party system, and "would never want to be a 'spoiler' who contributed to getting any other candidate elected," he'd give it a whirl if he was viewed as the right man for the job.

"I’ll do whatever I can to save this nation," Manchin said. “These parties have taken over to where they weaponized us against each other. And that’s wrong.”

Going more into his views on Trump specifically, he added, “You can’t have this visceral hatred spewing out every time you give a speech, denigrating Americans. And the only good American is the one that likes you and supports you; the only fair election is the one you win; the only laws pertain to everybody but you.”

Good times for the military-industrial complex: American arms makers cashing in on conflict

The New York Times headline said it all: “Middle East War Adds to Surge in International Arms Sales.” The conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and beyond may be causing immense and unconscionable human suffering, but they are also boosting the bottom lines of the world’s arms manufacturers. There was a time when such weapons sales at least sparked talk of “the merchants of death” or of “war profiteers.” Now, however, is distinctly not that time, given the treatment of the industry by the mainstream media and the Washington establishment, as well as the nature of current conflicts. Mind you, the American arms industry already dominates the international market in a staggering fashion, controlling 45% of all such sales globally, a gap only likely to grow more extreme in the rush to further arm allies in Europe and the Middle East in the context of the ongoing wars in those regions.

In his nationally televised address about the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars, President Biden described the American arms industry in remarkably glowing terms, noting that, “just as in World War II, today patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.” From a political and messaging perspective, the president cleverly focused on the workers involved in producing such weaponry rather than the giant corporations that profit from arming Israel, Ukraine, and other nations at war. But profit they do and, even more strikingly, much of the revenues that flow to those firms is pocketed as staggering executive salaries and stock buybacks that only boost shareholder earnings further.

President Biden also used that speech as an opportunity to tout the benefits of military aid and weapons sales to the U.S. economy:

“We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores, our own stockpiles, with new equipment. Equipment that defends America and is made in America. Patriot missiles for air defense batteries, made in Arizona. Artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas. And so much more.”

In short, the military-industrial complex is riding high, with revenues pouring in and accolades emanating from the top political levels in Washington. But is it, in fact, an arsenal of democracy? Or is it an amoral enterprise, willing to sell to any nation, whether a democracy, an autocracy, or anything in between?

Arming Current Conflicts

The U.S. should certainly provide Ukraine with what it needs to defend itself from Russia’s invasion. Sending arms alone, however, without an accompanying diplomatic strategy is a recipe for an endless, grinding war (and endless profits for those arms makers) that could always escalate into a far more direct and devastating conflict between the U.S., NATO, and Russia. Nevertheless, given the current urgent need to keep supplying Ukraine, the sources of the relevant weapons systems are bound to be corporate giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. No surprise there, but keep in mind that they’re not doing any of this out of charity.

Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes acknowledged as much, however modestly, in an interview with the Harvard Business Review early in the Ukraine War:

“[W]e don’t apologize for making these systems, making these weapons… the fact is eventually we will see some benefit in the business over time. Everything that’s being shipped into Ukraine today, of course, is coming out of stockpiles, either at DoD [the Department of Defense] or from our NATO allies, and that’s all great news. Eventually we’ll have to replenish it and we will see a benefit to the business over the next coming years.”

Hayes made a similar point recently in response to a question from a researcher at Morgan Stanley on a call with Wall Street analysts. The researcher noted that President Biden’s proposed multi-billion-dollar package of military aid for Israel and Ukraine “seems to fit quite nicely with Raytheon’s defense portfolio.” Hayes responded that “across the entire Raytheon portfolio you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking on top of what we think will be an increase in the DoD topline as we continue to replenish these stocks.” Supplying Ukraine alone, he suggested, would yield billions in revenues over the coming few years with profit margins of 10% to 12%.

Beyond such direct profits, there’s a larger issue here: the way this country’s arms lobby is using the war to argue for a variety of favorable actions that go well beyond anything needed to support Ukraine. Those include less restrictive, multi-year contracts; reductions in protections against price gouging; faster approval of foreign sales; and the construction of new weapons plants. And keep in mind that all of this is happening as a soaring Pentagon budget threatens to hit an astonishing $1 trillion within the next few years.

As for arming Israel, including $14 billion in emergency military aid recently proposed by President Biden, the horrific attacks perpetrated by Hamas simply don’t justify the all-out war President Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has launched against more than two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, with so many thousands of lives already lost and untold additional casualties to come. That devastating approach to Gaza in no way fits the category of defending democracy, which means that weapons companies profiting from it will be complicit in the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.

Repression Enabled, Democracy Denied

Over the years, far from being a reliable arsenal of democracy, American arms manufacturers have often helped undermine democracy globally, while enabling ever greater repression and conflict — a fact largely ignored in recent mainstream coverage of the industry. For example, in a 2022 report for the Quincy Institute, I noted that, of the 46 then-active conflicts globally, 34 involved one or more parties armed by the United States. In some cases, American arms supplies were modest, but in many other conflicts such weaponry was central to the military capabilities of one or more of the warring parties.

Nor do such weapons sales promote democracy over autocracy, a watchword of the Biden administration’s approach to foreign policy. In 2021, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, the U.S. armed 31 nations that Freedom House, a non-profit that tracks global trends in democracy, political freedom, and human rights, designated as “not free.”

The most egregious recent example in which the American arms industry is distinctly culpable when it comes to staggering numbers of civilian deaths would be the Saudi Arabian/United Arab Emirates (UAE)-led coalition’s intervention in Yemen, which began in March 2015 and has yet to truly end. Although the active military part of the conflict is now in relative abeyance, a partial blockade of that country continues to cause needless suffering for millions of Yemenis. Between bombing, fighting on the ground, and the impact of that blockade, there have been nearly 400,000 casualties. Saudi air strikes, using American-produced planes and weaponry, caused the bulk of civilian deaths from direct military action.

Congress did make unprecedented efforts to block specific arms sales to Saudi Arabia and rein in the American role in the conflict via a War Powers Resolution, only to see legislation vetoed by President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, bombs provided by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin were routinely used to target civilians, destroying residential neighborhoods, factories, hospitals, a wedding, and even a school bus.

When questioned about whether they feel any responsibility for how their weapons have been used, arms companies generally pose as passive bystanders, arguing that all they’re doing is following policies made in Washington. At the height of the Yemen war, Amnesty International asked firms that were supplying military equipment and services to the Saudi/UAE coalition whether they were ensuring that their weaponry wouldn’t be used for egregious human rights abuses. Lockheed Martin typically offered a robotic response, asserting that “defense exports are regulated by the U.S. government and approved by both the Executive Branch and Congress to ensure that they support U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.” Raytheon simply stated that its sales “of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia have been and remain in compliance with U.S. law.”

How the Arms Industry Shapes Policy

Of course, weapons firms are not merely subject to U.S. laws, but actively seek to shape them, including exerting considerable effort to block legislative efforts to limit arms sales. Raytheon typically put major behind-the-scenes effort into keeping a significant sale of precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia on track. In May 2018, then-CEO Thomas Kennedy even personally visited the office of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Robert Menendez, D-NJ, to (unsuccessfully) press him to drop a hold on that deal. That firm also cultivated close ties with the Trump administration, including presidential trade adviser Peter Navarro, to ensure its support for continuing sales to the Saudi regime even after the murder of prominent Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.

The list of major human rights abusers that receive U.S.-supplied weaponry is long and includes (but isn’t faintly limited to) Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Turkey, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Such sales can have devastating human consequences. They also support regimes that all too often destabilize their regions and risk embroiling the United States directly in conflicts.

U.S.-supplied arms also far too regularly fall into the hands of Washington’s adversaries. As an example consider the way the UAE transferred small arms and armored vehicles produced by American weapons makers to extremist militias in Yemen, with no apparent consequences, even though such acts clearly violated American arms export laws. Sometimes, recipients of such weaponry even end up fighting each other, as when Turkey used U.S.-supplied F-16s in 2019 to bomb U.S.-backed Syrian forces involved in the fight against Islamic State terrorists.

Such examples underscore the need to scrutinize U.S. arms exports far more carefully. Instead, the arms industry has promoted an increasingly “streamlined” process of approval of such weapons sales, campaigning for numerous measures that would make it even easier to arm foreign regimes regardless of their human-rights records or support for the interests Washington theoretically promotes. These have included an “Export Control Reform Initiative” heavily promoted by the industry during the Obama and Trump administrations that ended up ensuring a further relaxation of scrutiny over firearms exports. It has, in fact, eased the way for sales that, in the future, could put U.S.-produced weaponry in the hands of tyrants, terrorists, and criminal organizations.

Now, the industry is promoting efforts to get weapons out the door ever more quickly through “reforms” to the Foreign Military Sales program in which the Pentagon essentially serves as an arms broker between those weapons corporations and foreign governments.

Reining in the MIC

The impetus to move ever more quickly on arms exports and so further supersize this country’s already staggering weapons manufacturing base will only lead to yet more price gouging by arms corporations. It should be a government imperative to guard against such a future, rather than fuel it. Alleged security concerns, whether in Ukraine, Israel, or elsewhere, shouldn’t stand in the way of vigorous congressional oversight. Even at the height of World War II, a time of daunting challenges to American security, then-Senator Harry Truman established a committee to root out war profiteering.

Yes, your tax dollars are being squandered in the rush to build and sell ever more weaponry abroad. Worse yet, for every arms transfer that serves a legitimate defensive purpose, there is another — not to say others — that fuels conflict and repression, while only increasing the risk that, as the giant weapons corporations and their executives make fortunes, this country will become embroiled in more costly foreign conflicts.

One possible way to at least slow that rush to sell would be to “flip the script” on how Congress reviews weapons exports. Current law requires a veto-proof majority of both houses of Congress to block a questionable sale. That standard — perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn — has never (yes, never!) been met, thanks to the millions of dollars in annual election financial support that the weapons companies offer our congressional representatives. Flipping the script would mean requiring affirmative congressional approval of any major sales to key nations, greatly increasing the chances of stopping dangerous deals before they reach completion.

Praising the U.S. arms industry as the “arsenal of democracy” obscures the numerous ways it undermines our security and wastes our tax dollars. Rather than romanticizing the military-industrial complex, isn’t it time to place it under greater democratic control? After all, so many lives depend on it.

Barbra Streisand says she “can’t live in this country” if Donald Trump wins the presidency

Barbra Streisand is once again making it clear that she won't tolerate another Donald Trump presidency. The actor, singer and vocal Democrat appeared on Monday’s episode of “The Late Show” to voice her sentiments and ongoing disapproval of the former president.

“I can’t live in this country if he becomes president,” Streisand told host Stephen Colbert. She added that if she had to choose somewhere to relocate to, she’d probably move to England because “I like England.”

Streisand also revealed that she’ll consider rebuilding her “little, tiny” underground shopping mall — which is set up in the basement of her sprawling Malibu residence — if another Trump-led administration is on the horizon. The specific location is still to be decided.

This isn’t the first time Streisand has threatened to bid adieu to the states in anticipation of a Trump presidency. Ahead of the 2016 election, Streisand said in a “60 Minutes” interview that she’ll leave the country for good if Trump won.

“I’m either coming to your country, if you’ll let me in, or Canada,” she told Australian journalist Michael Usher at the time.

Unsurprisingly, Streisand failed to stay true to her words despite Trump’s victory. But that doesn’t mean she’s stopped launching attacks on the ex-president. Streisand previously called Trump “the Liar in Chief, the Groper in Chief,” “so stupid” and “so ill-informed.”

Watch the full clip below, via YouTube:

One woman died on an Alaska mayor’s property. Then another. No one has ever been charged

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Series: Lawless:Sexual Violence in Alaska

The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica are investigating sexual violence in Alaska, and why the situation isn’t getting better.

KOTZEBUE, Alaska — On a subzero Monday morning in March 2020, police found another woman dead at the ex-mayor’s property.

Two years earlier, the body of 25-year-old Jennifer Kirk lay curled at the foot of a bed, a rifle on the floor, strangulation marks on her neck and a bullet hole beneath her chin. City police swiftly closed the case, declaring it a suicide.

Now police were back at the property, where the lifeless body of Susanna “Sue Sue” Norton, 30, was discovered in an adjacent house, beaten and strangled. An autopsy determined the cause of death to be homicide.

Kirk and Norton, both Inupiaq, had each dated sons of the former borough mayor, and the sons had previously been convicted of beating each of them. One of the sons had admitted to strangling Kirk twice before. Another pleaded guilty to kicking Norton in the stomach when she was six months pregnant.

No one has ever been charged with a crime in connection to the deaths.

In a state where women are 2.5 times more likely than the national average to be killed by a man and Alaska Native women are especially at risk, elected leaders here have repeatedly pledged action. The Department of Justice declared a rural law enforcement emergency in Alaska following a 2019 report by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica on glaring lapses in local policing. Two years later, the governor created a state council on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons, and in 2022, new investigators were hired to solve cases like Norton’s.

Unexplained holes in the investigations into the deaths of Kirk and Norton call into question this commitment, a review by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found. More than that, the events leading up to the women’s deaths illustrate how police, prosecutors and judges here have regularly given pass after pass to people accused of domestic violence and strangulation.

Police records obtained by the newsrooms show that Kirk’s body revealed signs of strangulation. Her boyfriend, Anthony Richards, son of then-Mayor Clement Richards Sr., admitted to police that he had caused the marks on the day she died. After reviewing the records, former Kotzebue Police Chief Ed Ward said the 10 red flags that the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention instructs police to look for in cases of domestic violence killings all appeared to apply to the scene of Kirk’s death. (Ward did not work at the police department at the time of her death.)

Yet the Kotzebue Police Department closed the case after a single day of investigation, labeling it a suicide before receiving the final autopsy report.

In Norton’s case, police never told her family she had been strangled, family members said. Police didn’t ask the public to help catch the suspect, as they had the prior year when a fire department dog was killed in the same neighborhood. They never interviewed key witnesses and failed to obtain a search warrant, leaving evidence uncollected.

State troopers, who took over the investigation into Norton’s death in 2022, told her family they planned to travel to Kotzebue over the summer to investigate further. Norton’s family says that didn’t happen either. (A department spokesperson said on Oct. 27 that investigators had not yet visited Kotzebue for the case but planned to do so before the end of the year. He said the agency’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons unit is “taking investigative steps with the goal of finding the person responsible for Sue Sue’s tragic death and holding that person responsible for their actions through the criminal justice system.”)

Both Kirk and Norton had been victims of domestic violence at the hands of two of the Richards brothers. The Daily News and ProPublica found that state prosecutors repeatedly allowed the men to avoid felony domestic violence convictions for strangling or beating women, including Kirk and Norton. In those cases, the state offered the sons deals, allowing them to plead guilty to reduced misdemeanor charges such as “harassment” and receive slaps on the wrist, not prison sentences.

In one sexual assault case involving a different woman, state Superior Court Judge Paul Roetman granted Anthony Richards, the mayor’s youngest son, uncommonly low bail. Roetman explained his decision by saying he had worked with Anthony’s mother and knew his father held elected office.

Roetman and two prosecutors, now a magistrate and judge, declined to comment through a court system spokesperson. “Judicial officers cannot and do not comment on their cases, in order to maintain the integrity of their decisions and to ensure that, for fairness reasons, their thinking is reflected solely in the official court record without extraneous commentary,” the spokesperson wrote.

In the center of Kotzebue, Norton’s adoptive mother, Susanna “Mama Sue” Norton, is waiting for answers from Alaska’s criminal justice system. She lives three doors down from the house where her daughter was found strangled to death.

“My family is not going to have peace until they know that they found someone that did this to her,” she said in an interview in 2020. Three years later, as another winter begins, the case grows colder by the day.

A History of Criminal Charges

Kotzebue lies just above the Arctic Circle on a frying-pan-shaped peninsula, nearer to Russia than to Anchorage. Clement Richards Sr. was born here in 1961, two years after Alaska became a state. The city sold itself back then as the Polar Bear Capital of the World, where small planes carrying trophy hunters from across the globe parked on the sea ice. (One of the largest polar bears ever recorded was hunted here in 1963.)

In the 1970s, geologists confirmed what a local bush pilot long suspected: The red-stained creeks that veined the tundra hinted at a massive mineral deposit. In the ’80s, Kotzebue and surrounding villages voted to create a new Northwest Arctic Borough government, with the second-largest zinc mine in the world funding public services such as search and rescue.

Meantime, Clement Richards Sr. and Annette Richards were busy growing their family. The couple had two sons, Amos and Clement Jr., and another on the way in May 1989 when Clement Sr. kicked Annette in the stomach, according to charges filed in Kotzebue state Superior Court. Clement Sr. had previously struck her, Annette wrote in an earlier restraining order request. This time she was eight months pregnant.

The charges say Annette was “bleeding profusely from her genital area.” The couple’s third son, Anthony, was born the next day.

Clement Sr. pleaded no contest to felony domestic violence assault and received a six-month jail sentence. The conviction wasn’t mentioned by his opponents or the media a decade later when he won a seat on the city council in 1999 or still later when he became the city’s vice mayor, then mayor. Annette began working in a local office for the Alaska State Troopers where her duties involved assisting state prosecutors, including one who later served as the judge in domestic violence cases against her sons.

The sons wrestled in high school, competed in fishing derbies and sometimes worked at the nearby zinc mine. Now 34, 37 and 39, all three have listed the former mayor’s property as their home address for most of their adult lives.

All three sons have been charged with assaulting women at the mayor’s property but dodged serious punishment.

The Daily News and ProPublica reviewed 31 criminal court cases involving the three sons, including more than 800 pages of charging documents, testimony, sentencing orders and protective order requests. In 12 of those cases, one of the sons was charged with committing domestic violence. The victims — six different women — included the sons’ relatives and current and ex-girlfriends, including Kirk and Norton. (The other criminal cases involved driving while intoxicated, indecent exposure and trespassing.)

Seven of these domestic violence cases were filed while Clement Sr. held political office, from 1999 to 2018. All told, the three sons have been charged with a combined 16 counts of domestic violence, including five felonies. Yet none of the charges against them resulted in a felony domestic violence conviction.

While the details in each case differ, seven of the domestic violence cases unfolded in familiar ways:

First, one of the girlfriends or a worried neighbor called the Kotzebue police. Officers arrived to find the victim with visible wounds such as bruises, markings on her neck or a bloody nose. The girlfriend told police one of the sons punched, kicked or strangled her.

She told police the attacks began when she tried to stop the son from drinking, attempted to leave the house or refused sex. In two cases, police noted the mayor or his wife refused to cooperate with the active investigation. The Kotzebue Police Department then arrested the son but usually labeled the attack as a low-level misdemeanor rather than felony assault.

Next, the son appeared before a local judge or magistrate who was sometimes a former state prosecutor who had worked alongside the ex-mayor’s wife. The judge or magistrate agreed to set bail for the son — once even acknowledging on the record that the bail was unusually low and telling the victim that the mayor and his wife would help keep the son out of trouble until the trial.

But the cases never made it to trial. They were settled at a change-of-plea hearing where prosecutors dropped any felony charges and the son promised to do better. Within a few months, maybe a year, the cycle would begin again.

In one 2013 case, a woman said Clement Richards Jr. punched her in the face and police filed a charge of domestic violence assault. Clement Jr. eventually pleaded guilty to harassment and received a suspended sentence, scrubbing his conviction from the public record. In a sexual assault case filed the following year against Anthony Richards, Roetman reduced Anthony’s bail from $7,500 to $2,500 over the protests of the victim, who said in a quaking voice that she feared running into Anthony in the town of 2,900.

“I know Mrs. Richards from when she used to work for the troopers,” Roetman said at Anthony’s bail hearing. “She has a lot of experience with these types of cases and knows what these are like.”

The Alaska Judicial Code of Conduct states that a judge “shall not allow family, social, political, or other relationships to influence the judge’s judicial conduct or judgment.” Roetman did not respond to questions about his remarks in court, his work relationship with Annette Richards or the cases he presided over involving her sons. A court system spokesperson provided the newsrooms with a statement saying “judicial officers cannot and do not comment on their cases.”

Although a Kotzebue grand jury indicted him on felony charges of sexual assault and attempted sexual assault, Anthony Richards eventually pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of indecent exposure in the 2014 case. The deal allowed him to avoid registering as a sex offender. (The prosecutor, Rachel Ahrens, is now a state superior court judge and declined to comment through a court system spokesperson.)

“To say that you dodged a bullet is probably an understatement on this one,” Roetman told him at the change-of-plea hearing.

Increasingly Dangerous Attacks

Clement Richards Sr. won election as Northwest Arctic Borough mayor in November 2015, campaigning on his experience leading the city and his bona fides as a born-and-raised son of Kotzebue. He became chief executive of a region the size of Indiana with a population of about 7,500. As climate change threatened the nearby village of Kivalina, the Northwest Arctic moved into the national spotlight.

“What’s happening here is America’s wake-up call,” then-President Barack Obama said after flying over the village and touring Kotzebue just before Richards was elected in 2015.

Clement Sr. had been in office just a month when Kirk showed up at the local hospital. She told police that Anthony had punched her five times.

Kirk grew up in the village of Buckland, 75 miles outside of Kotzebue. She and Anthony sometimes lived in one of two teal homes that Clement Sr. and Annette Richards own on a grassy lot, one block from the police department and City Hall. Officer Nate Lecours came to the property to investigate the beating.

“Upon arrival the Borough Mayor, Clement Richards, who appeared extremely intoxicated, answered the door and stated how can I help you a total of three times speaking over me then slammed the door in my face,” Lecours wrote in a Dec. 6, 2015, affidavit. (In a brief phone interview, Lecours said he remembered that encounter but no longer works for Kotzebue police and referred all questions to the department.)

A few days later, Magistrate Judge Stephan Brady reduced Anthony’s bail in this new assault case to just $100. (Brady no longer works for the state. He did not respond to phone messages or emails.)

As the years passed, the attacks grew more dangerous. On March 14, 2017, Kirk told police Anthony strangled her until her field of vision began to shrink and she nearly passed out.

That would have been enough, under a 2005 Alaska law, to charge him with a felony for nonfatal strangulation. Alaska was one of the first states to recognize that strangulation is often a precursor to homicide and increases suicide risk, according to the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention.

The prosecutor, Ahrens, allowed Anthony to plead guilty to a single count of misdemeanor assault.

Despite the light punishment, Magistrate Judge Aaron Michels warned Anthony he could have killed Kirk that day.

“Strangulation is a very serious thing and it’s recognized that way by the Legislature, that’s why these types of cases can be charged as felonies,” Michels said at an October 2017 change-of-plea hearing. (He declined to comment through a court system spokesperson.)

“The result of strangulation — if it’s not stopped, if a person can’t breathe — is death,” the magistrate told Anthony Richards.

On May 23, 2018, Kirk and Anthony’s final argument began on the mayor’s property.

Alerted by a neighbor, two officers came to the house around 6 p.m. They found Anthony in the bedroom holding Jennifer Kirk’s body, according to police records, his hands and clothes coated in blood.

Anthony told police he had been watching TV with two children in the living room when he heard the pop of a gunshot and discovered Kirk dying on the floor. A .22-caliber rifle lay across her feet and a gunshot wound pierced the underside of her chin.

The police department’s investigator at the time, Thomas Milliette, measured the weapon.

“I noted the length of the rifle from the tip of the barrel to the tip of the trigger as being 27 1/8 inches long,” Milliette wrote in his report. Next he measured the length of Kirk’s arm: 26 3/18 inches. In interviews, members of Kirk’s family wondered how Kirk, who was 5 feet, 5 inches tall, could have shot herself with a long gun.

Robert Shem, a retired firearm expert for the state crime laboratory, said in an interview that such measurements can be useful in determining whether a death is indeed a suicide, but in this case, more information would be needed. (Shem was the forensic scientist who first established a link among the shooting victims of Alaska serial killer James Dale Ritchie in 2016.)

“Before I would write it off as a suicide myself,” he said, “I would probably try to locate somebody of the same size and build and use that rifle, or one similar to it, with the same length barrel and configuration, demonstrate that it’s completely unloaded and see if the person can lean over and potentially get their thumb in position to pull the trigger.”

Kirk’s father, Timothy Gavin, said Kirk gave no hints she might kill herself.

“We never seen that in her. No signs, nothing,” Gavin said. “So it’s hard to believe she did that to herself.”

Gavin knows something about policing and public service. A Buckland city councilmember and the former mayor, he served 11 years as a village police officer. He’s also no stranger to gunshot deaths. His stepfather shot and killed his mother, Kirk’s grandmother. (The stepfather was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to prison.)

Kirk’s mother, Dora Stalker, chatted with her daughter hours before the shooting and recalls that nothing seemed amiss. They even made plans. “She was trying to ask me to send diapers for her daughter,” Stalker said.

“We kind of had a plan to send each other some Native foods,” Stalker said. Kirk would trade her mother beluga muktuk in exchange for springtime smelt from Buckland.

Two days after Kirk’s death, the state medical examiner’s office phoned Kotzebue police and said her body “showed signs of strangulation,” according to the death investigation report compiled by police and obtained through a public records request.

In his first interviews with police, Anthony had not revealed that he and Kirk violently fought before she died. Once Milliette knew about the strangulation marks, Anthony admitted to causing the injuries to her neck. He said he acted in self-defense.

Anthony said Kirk slapped him and he “held her away by the neck and didn’t know how hard he was squeezing,” according to the police report. Anthony said Kirk continued to slap him so he pushed her to the ground, twice. He said he didn’t know if he knocked her unconscious.

Milliette closed the case after one day of investigation. He concluded his report with a note that the medical examiner’s office had called again and said Kirk’s death would be ruled a suicide, with the final autopsy findings to be sent to Kotzebue police when finished. Kirk’s mother, Stalker, said police never interviewed her or asked her what her daughter had said to her the day she died.

“They should have investigated a lot better, a lot more thorough before they said it was a suicide,” Stalker said. “It’s like they just rush and do whatever to get it over with.”

The Kotzebue Police Department did not answer certain questions about the death investigation, including any about what conclusions Milliette drew from the rifle measurements, referring questions to the former police chief. Milliette did not respond to interview requests. The Alaska Department of Law, which oversees state prosecutors, did not answer questions about why no charges were filed in the case.

“I would have prosecuted him for the strangulation before she died,” said Casey Gwinn, a former prosecutor and president of the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention.

A Missing 10-Year-Old Girl

Kirk’s death never made the news. Three months passed and the city of Kotzebue, along with the rest of Alaska, became absorbed with the case of a missing child. In this time of crisis, everyone turned to Mayor Clement Richards Sr.

Hundreds of volunteers hunted for 10-year-old Ashley Johnson-Barr, who disappeared in September 2018 from a playground at the center of town. The Northwest Arctic Borough Assembly chambers, adorned with antlers and a scrimshaw walrus tusk, served as the nerve center for the search with Clement Sr. acting as spokesperson.

“We’re a small community where everyone knows everyone, so we’re trying as hard as we can to find her,” Clement Sr. told the Daily News at the time.

“I’m deeply concerned she hasn’t been found yet,” he said, explaining that as many as 50 people were looking for the child at any one time. Norton joined in, her family said, cooking her best-loved food, caribou stew with pilot bread crackers, to feed fellow searchers.

After eight days, a volunteer spotted Johnson-Barr’s body in a brushy hollow outside the city. Federal investigators and state troopers raced to Kotzebue to aid local police and soon arrested a 41-year-old man for her death by strangulation. To solve the case, law enforcement used cellphone location data, DNA evidence, search warrants, surveillance video and the advantage of the FBI, who first arrested the suspect on grounds of lying to a federal officer. The killer, Peter Wilson, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and first-degree sexual abuse of a minor and is serving life in prison.

The response shows how cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous people can be solved when they are immediately prioritized by local authorities and when state and federal agencies give assistance. The state declared an annual Ashley Johnson-Barr Day and hired a retired Kotzebue-area trooper, Alaska Native Anne Sears, as Alaska’s first full-time Missing and Murdered Indigenous People investigator.

The message: Alaska would no longer tolerate the rape and killing of Indigenous women and girls.

But as the mayor prepared to leave office, nothing appeared to change for his sons. On Nov. 17, 2018, two months after Johnson-Barr was found dead, Kotzebue police received yet another report of domestic violence.

This time the victim was Norton, who by then was six months pregnant. Police found her crying, her right eye swollen shut. She said she had tried to stop her boyfriend, Amos Richards, from drinking by pouring out his beer.

City police Sgt. Norman Hughes described the attack in a report: “Susanna said the defendant became angry and grabbed her by the hair and drug her around the house. Susanna said the defendant kicked her repeatedly in the head, face, stomach and back. Susanna showed me her forearms which were swollen and told me she was holding her arms up to protect her head when the defendant was kicking her.”

Hughes categorized the beating in a criminal complaint filed in state court as misdemeanor, fourth-degree assault, the least serious form of assault spelled out by state law. (Hughes did not respond to interview requests or written questions.)

According to medical records, Norton flew to Anchorage, where her baby was born two weeks later at the Providence Alaska Medical Center. Doctors noted she had suffered “premature rupture of membranes.” Her family said the trip to Anchorage was medically necessary and believe the premature birth was brought on by the attack.

The baby weighed 3.1 pounds. Norton named her Eden.

“She is a tough baby girl,” Norton posted that day to friends and family. “Please remember us in your prayers.”

Doctors recommended the baby stay in Anchorage, even after leaving the hospital, because Eden had health problems unrelated to the premature birth and needed surgery to survive. Mama Sue Norton said the Office of Children’s Services became involved and planned to temporarily place Eden with a foster family so she could be closer to medical care.

Sue Sue sang to the baby in Inupiaq over FaceTime, said Lesley and Joel Sundberg, a foster family who housed Eden after she left the hospital and have since adopted her. Amos, for a time, frequently texted the foster parents to ask how Eden was feeling and discuss the upcoming adoption.

Up in Kotzebue, a new strangulation case captured the attention of City Hall and local police. Authorities did not hesitate to seek the public’s help.

“The Kotzebue Police Department suspects foul play and is pursuing all investigative leads,” said Milliette, the investigator who had closed Kirk’s case without an arrest the year before. By this time, he had become chief of police. Volunteers raised thousands of dollars in reward money and the story made statewide news for days. After police released a surveillance photo of the suspect, a tipster came forward and identified the killer, who pleaded guilty to a felony in Roetman’s courtroom.

The victim was a dog: the city fire department’s pet husky.

A Second Death

On Jan. 19, 2020, Norton changed her Facebook profile photo to display a red handprint across her closed mouth, the symbol of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement.

A few days later, Amos Richards appeared in court to face charges for kicking Norton while she was six months pregnant. Once again the magistrate was Michels, who approved a deal that allowed Amos to plead guilty to a single count of “reckless endangerment.”

Despite the plea, Norton and Amos made plans to fly to Anchorage to finalize adoption paperwork.

“I cant tell if she has me or Amos’s eyes,” Norton wrote on Jan. 30, 2020, after seeing the latest picture of Eden at the hospital. She sent the Sundbergs a selfie of her and Amos, heads together, to show the baby.

Like Kirk, Norton was a Leo. (Although born years apart, Kirk and Norton shared the same Aug. 21 birthday.) Norton had a habit of cracking her knuckles and dreamed of one day taking a Caribbean cruise. Her biggest fear, she once wrote, was losing her children.

Her mother remembers her, most of all, as a helper. The last time the whole Norton family gathered with Sue Sue, she sat on a square of cardboard on the tiled floor, separating the hide from the marbled meat of a freshly killed caribou.

Five days before Norton and Amos were to sign adoption papers, Amos stopped responding to texts from the adopting family.

The timeline of Norton’s last week alive is muddled by conflicting evidence. In a 2020 email to the Daily News and ProPublica, Kotzebue police estimated her date of death as March 5 or 6. But Norton’s sister, Vera Norton, said Sue Sue helped family prepare a caribou on March 7 or 8.

At 8:32 a.m. on March 9, police were called to the former mayor’s house, where they found Norton’s body, her head covered by a jacket.

Outside, the temperature fell to 13 below. Here above the Arctic Circle, graves must be carved into the icy soil and permafrost, and as Vera Norton was leaving home to look for a burial site, she saw police placing Amos into a patrol car.

Hughes later told Sundberg that police were unable to collect certain evidence. Asked to clarify by ProPublica and the Daily News, Kotzebue Police Chief Roger Rouse said in an email that Hughes had been referring to “the rejection of a search warrant from the judge in regard to some evidence.” The police chief would not say which judge he was referring to.

Amos skipped the funeral.

Mama Sue Norton said police never spoke to her about the case. She first learned the official cause of her daughter’s death was homicide when a death certificate arrived in the mail.

The certificate listed the cause of death as “asphyxiation due to obstruction of airways and compression of neck.” The autopsy also found that Norton had suffered “multiple blunt force injuries of head, neck and extremities.”

She’d been beaten. But it was the strangling that killed her.

“We’re Not Interested”

The homes on the Richards’ property are 440 feet from the Kotzebue Police Department lobby. City Hall is even closer. A dozen domed surveillance cameras circle the various government buildings, several within view of the former mayor’s house.

One day in June 2021, I knocked on the door of the main house, the first of three visits to the property where police found Kirk and Norton’s bodies. “What’s this about?” Clement Sr. asked.

Richards was no longer borough mayor at the time, having lost reelection in 2018. Norton’s family says the deaths on his property were common knowledge and gave voters pause. Other Kotzebue residents said the election was simply more competitive, with a new crop of respected candidates. When asked about the death of Norton, he said, “I have no comment,” and shut the door.

Clement Jr., the middle son, stood outside by a four-wheeler watching the exchange. He said he knew nothing about the case because he was in Anchorage with his father when Norton died. Asked how he thinks she died, Clement Jr. said he didn’t know, hasn’t thought about it and never asked.

Maybe she killed herself, he volunteered. “It’s a common thing in Alaska.”

In 2022, Sears, the state’s Murdered and Missing Indigenous People investigator, began looking into the case and met with Eden’s foster family to learn more. But Sears soon resigned, just five months into the new job. She declined an interview request.

The Daily News and ProPublica on June 14 of this year again attempted to interview Clement Sr. and his sons about the deaths. A man who answered the door at the back house refused to comment and closed the door.

“We’re not interested,” he said.

Last month, the newsrooms sent certified letters detailing the findings of this story to members of the Richards family; we didn’t hear back. The family also didn’t respond to letters, phone calls, texts and Facebook messages.

It’s all made for a long three years for Mama Sue, a devout Christian and a retired tribal doctor who practiced traditional medicine in Inupiaq villages. She suffered a stroke months after her daughter’s death and temporarily lost her ability to speak. On a recent weekday she sat in a formation of half-filled produce boxes, silently packing everything she owns as she prepared for her house to be demolished.

Her family built the home by hand decades earlier. Now a new house is arriving on a barge, and soon Mama Sue will have indoor plumbing and running water for the first time. Builders will place the new home on the same lot, 230 feet from the house where her daughter was found strangled.

As of September, Kotzebue police had never interviewed Mama Sue about the homicide. Nor had they talked to Norton’s other relatives and potential witnesses. Nor did they ever talk to neighbors who live between Mama Sue and the former mayor’s house, who regularly visit with Amos and Anthony Richards.

The new Kotzebue police chief, Rouse, said he could not comment on Norton’s death because it remains an open investigation, although the case is now in the hands of Alaska State Troopers.

In 2021, Lesley Sundberg, who adopted Amos and Sue Sue’s child, filed a formal complaint with the state regulators against the Kotzebue Police Department, accusing the department of “dishonesty and untruthfulness.”

“One must wonder,” Sundberg wrote to the Alaska Police Standards Council in November 2021. “If there are unethical reasons why a Native Alaskan woman, mother of 3, daughter, niece, sister, aunt, and well-known community member’s murder, has been swept under the rug.” (The executive director for the council said in an email to the newsrooms that the agency “does not investigate complaints of this nature until the involved criminal investigation is completed by the law enforcement agency working on it, so that we do not interfere with the criminal investigation.”)

She never received an answer.

Remember that Gwyneth Paltrow ski lawsuit trial? It’s been made into a musical

Gwyneth Paltrow’s infamous skiing trial is slated to premiere as a musical soon.

“Gwyneth Goes Skiing" will chronicle Paltrow’s legal battle against Terry Sanderson, a retired optometrist who alleged that the Oscar-winning-actor-turned-wellness-guru crashed into him at a Salt Lake City, Utah, ski resort in 2016.

“She’s the Goop-founding, Door-Sliding, Shakespeare-In-Loving, consciously-uncoupling Hollywood superstar,” reads the musical’s logline. “He’s a retired Optometrist from Utah. In 2016, they went skiing. On the slopes of Deer Valley, their worlds collided, and so did they — literally. Ouch. Seven years later in 2023, they went to court. Double ouch. This is their story. Kind of. Not really. But also, it’s at Christmas.”

Per court documents, Sanderson claimed Paltrow hit him in the back on beginner's slopes, "knocking him down hard, knocking him out, and causing a brain injury, four broken ribs and other serious injuries." Sanderson sued Paltrow for $300,000 in damages, while Paltrow countersued for $1, claiming that it was Sanderson who actually collided with her.

A jury ultimately ruled in Paltrow’s favor.

“Gwyneth Goes Skiing” stars Linus Karp as Paltrow and Joseph Martin as Sanderson. The musical will debut in London on Dec. 13 with a 10-day run at London’s Pleasance Theatre.

Expert: Lawyers who flipped on Trump may try to pull out “due to threats” — but Willis has a plan

The Fulton County district attorney’s office filed an emergency motion for a protective order following a leak of discovery materials in the Georgia election subversion case involving former President Donald Trump.

The filing came mere hours after excerpts of video deposition of witness testimony from lawyers Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro were published by ABC News and The Washington Post.

Segments of the proffer videos, which included recorded discussions between some of Trump's co-defendants and prosecutors, were leaked to several news outlets earlier this week. Powell, Ellis, Chesebro and bail bondsman Scott Hall were required to give on-camera statements to prosecutors as part of their plea deals. The four of them agree to plead guilty to reduced charges and avoid jail time in exchange for their cooperation in the case.

District Attorney Fani Willis, who brought the sprawling racketeering case, renewed a motion for a protective order of discovery materials and said that the “release of these confidential video recordings is clearly intended to intimidate witnesses in this case” by opening them up to “harassment and threats prior to trial,” CNN reported.

“That’s game over”: Legal experts say new Jenna Ellis revelation is beyond “devastating” for Trump

The prosecutors' motion contained what seemed to be an acknowledgment via email from one of Trump's co-defendants. In an email exchange with the DA's office, Todd Harding, Harrison Floyd’s attorney, said it was his team that leaked the videos, though Floyd's team later claimed it was a typo.

The protection of such statements may not be as crucial in this particular case, Atlanta defense attorney Andrew Fleischman told Salon. Unlike a gang case, where the defendants figuring out the name of the confidential informant before trial would be significant, in this case, witnesses have already publicly agreed to testify in exchange for lenient treatment. The public already basically knows all the things there are to know, he added.

“There are certainly some crazy people in the world who might try to threaten these witnesses as a result of the videos but if they became unavailable due to threats or violence, the state would have an ok argument that the defense procured their unavailability through wrongdoing (leaking the videos) and would be able to get their out of court testimony in through that exception,” Fleischman said. “If I were putting up any of these people, I would vastly prefer to do it without cross-examination.”

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However, there is a risk that the witnesses might not show up for trial, but Willis is getting ahead of that potential problem by saying that “if it happens, it’s the defense’s fault,” he continued.

“That’s smart, because it allows her to get around a later Confrontation Clause objection if she tries to bring in their out-of-court statements,” Fleischman said.

Ellis in her proffer told prosecutors that Trump’s former deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino dismissed her concerns that the president was running out of options to contest Joe Biden's victory and told her "the boss" was “not going to leave” the White House “under any circumstances.”

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Powell, Chesebro, and Hall disclosed additional information to prosecutors. Chesebro said he provided Trump with a summary of a memo containing advice on the creation of alternate slates of electors, The Post reported. These alternate slates were part of a scheme to submit fraudulent ballots for Trump despite Biden's victories in those states. Such statements could potentially serve as evidence suggesting Trump was aware of the plot.

Powell also provided insight into how she became a pivotal adviser to Trump in the final days of his presidency: “Because we were the only ones willing to support his effort to sustain the White House. I mean, everybody else was telling him to pack up and go.”

about the Fulton County case