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Pro Publica Releases Unedited Biden Interview In Wake of Debate Controversy

Pro Publica Releases Unedited Biden Interview In Wake of Debate Controversy

In the wake of President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, his opponents and most major media organizations have pointed out that he has done few interviews that give the public an opportunity to hear him speak without a script or teleprompters.

So much has been made of this limited access that the impressions from Special Counsel Robert K. Hur about his five hours of interviews with the president on Oct. 8 and 9 drove months of coverage. The prosecutor said Biden had “diminished faculties in advancing age” and called him a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden angrily dismissed these assertions, which Vice President Kamala Harris called “politically motivated.”

House Republicans on Monday sued Attorney General Merrick B. Garland for audio recordings of the interview as the White House asserts executive privilege to deny their release.

ProPublica obtained a rare interview with Biden on September 29, nine days before the Hur interviews began. We released the video, which was assembled from footage shot by five cameras, on October 1. We edited out less than a minute of crosstalk and exchanges with the camera people, as is customary in such interviews.

Today, we are releasing the full, 21-minute interview, unedited as seen from the view of the single camera focused on Biden. We understand that this video captures a moment in time nine months ago and that it will not settle the ongoing arguments about the president’s acuity today. Still, we believe it is worth giving the public another chance to see one of Biden’s infrequent conversations with a reporter.

Conducting the interview was veteran journalist and former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood, who requested it and then worked with ProPublica to film and produce it.

He did not send questions to the White House ahead of time, nor did he get approval for the topics to be discussed during the interview.

Recording began as soon as Biden was miked and sitting in the chair that Friday at 2:50 p.m. Earlier that day, Biden’s press staff had said the president would have only 10 minutes for the interview, instead of the previously agreed upon 20 minutes. We requested that the interview go the full 20 minutes. You can hear during the unedited interview a couple of moments when White House staff interrupted to signal that the interview should come to a close. Biden seemed eager to continue talking.



Reprinted with permission from Alternet.





How South Korea Scaled Virus Testing As US Lagged Badly Behind

How South Korea Scaled Virus Testing As US Lagged Badly Behind

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

By Stephen Engelberg, Lisa Song, and Lydia DePillis

In the aftermath of a 2015 outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome that killed 38 people and cratered the economy, South Korea took a hard look at what had gone wrong. Among the findings: A lack of tests had prompted people ill with the disease to traipse from hospital to hospital in search of confirmation that they had MERS, a coronavirus far more virulent than the one that causes COVID-19. Nearly half the people who got the disease were exposed at hospitals.

Korean officials enacted a key reform, allowing the government to give near-instantaneous approval to testing systems in an emergency. Within weeks of the current outbreak in Wuhan, China, four Korean companies had manufactured tests from a World Health Organization recipe and, as a result, the country quickly had a system that could assess 10,000 people a day.

Korea set up drive-through test stations, an approach only now being launched in the United States. Health officials initially focused their efforts on members of a secretive megachurch in Daegu with a branch in Wuhan, but they then broadened their reach to Seoul and other major cities. As of Saturday, South Korea had tested more than 248,000 people and identified 8,086 cases.

So far, 72 have died, or 0.9 percent of those infected. Compare that with the Chinese province of Hubei, where the coronavirus first emerged. With no forewarning, the fatality rate for the province currently stands at about 4.5 percent.

The contrast to the United States, which tested a few thousand people in the weeks when health experts say the outbreak was spreading across this country, could not be more stark. Instead of using the template approved by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set out to create its own test from scratch, only to see that effort plagued by delay and dysfunction that continues to this day.

America’s inability to know who is infected has broad implications. It means that infected people have wandered through offices, buses, restaurants, emergency rooms and malls, indiscriminately spreading the virus.

Testing vs. Not Testing

Gye Cheol Kwon, the chairman of the Korean Society for Laboratory Medicine, said South Korea’s experiences during the 2015 outbreak prompted the creation of a system for “timely and practical use of unapproved diagnostic products when there were no approved diagnostic tests.”

“With our past experience with MERS,” he wrote in an email, “we found it very important to diagnose people quickly and to prevent spread to the community through isolation of infected people.”

The quick fielding of a widely available test gave South Korea a key advantage in fighting the spread of the disease, said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “They used the WHO test, so they had a test that was validated early on. Then, they made a simple decision: Test as many people as possible. They organized themselves to get specimens and then made sure they had a very high throughput in the labs.”

He added, “This was crucial to figuring out where the infection was and where it was not, and then they used this knowledge to direct their public health efforts.”

What they did with that data, to contain the disease, could inform a science fiction movie. Beginning in February, the government posted the precise movements (without names) of everyone who tested positive — everything from the seat numbers they occupied in movie theaters to the restaurants where they stopped for lunch. The government obtained the information from cellphone records, credit card receipts and other private data it is authorized to collect in a health emergency. Other Asian democracies have taken comparably intrusive steps in the name of public health. Hong Kong has tracked some high-risk people under quarantine with wristbands.

Kwon acknowledged in his email that the posting of the information was a “double edged sword” that raised public anxiety about where they could safely go. “However, we believed that if the government did not post extensive details about infected people on social media, COVID-19 would have spread even more quickly.”

In America, the CDC initially set the parameters of who could be tested narrowly, reflecting the scarcity of the test kits. The rules limited testing to people who had been to countries with known hot spots, even while epidemiologists warned that such restrictive criteria would mean missing early detection of cases in which the virus was spread among people with no links to travelers. This limitation appears to have given the disease a head start in some communities, notably Seattle. Then, even when criteria were loosened, the ongoing lack of testing capacity meant that the disease continued to spread, untracked.

ProPublica reporters have heard from dozens of people, throughout the course of the crisis, who could not get a test despite having some or all of the symptoms of the novel coronavirus: fevers, coughs and such a hard time breathing they went to the hospital.

Among them was Caryl Helsel, 55, who returned to New York from a trip to Seattle. She developed a cough and then a fever of 104 with an “excruciating, painful headache” that felt like none she’d ever had. “I thought I was going to die,” Helsel said. She called her doctor’s office on March 5 and said she’d spent time at a Seattle Starbucks where a worker had tested positive. She was told she didn’t meet the testing criteria, since she hadn’t traveled out of the country or been in contact with someone suspected of having the coronavirus.

She was told that despite the “existing pockets” of cases in the U.S., Seattle wasn’t deemed a high-risk area. By this point, the virus was consuming Seattle and its suburbs. Officials didn’t — and still don’t — know the full extent of the outbreak, because not everyone there who is sick is being tested.

Kevin Sullivan, 41, lives just outside of Kirkland, Washington, where the virus tore through the Life Care Center nursing home, killing 22 people as of Friday. He was turned down for testing twice despite developing a “low grade” fever, dry cough and trouble breathing. The first time, he was told by his primary care practice that there were no tests available. “Excuse my language, but ‘what the fuck?’ was kind of my response.” He later called a local hospital, but was told that his symptoms weren’t severe enough to merit a test, and that the most he could expect from a visit was an inhaler.

Doctors who have suspected that people had COVID-19 say they have been unable to test them for it. “Throughout the country, the No. 1 issue is getting tests, because only the CDC and the Department of Health could test. So we had to call them, and they would say no,” said Dr. Celine Thum, who works at a busy trauma hospital in New York City.

She added: “I’m sure if you talked to other ER doctors, they might have sent home people who might’ve had it. … I’m getting texts from people who have flu-like illness, fever, who are tested negative for flu. And they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m going to get tested now,’ and then they’re like, ‘It’s all a lie, there are no tests.’”

With no solid numbers, state and local officials have offered wildly varying guesses of the level of infection. On Thursday, the director of Ohio’s Department of Health, Amy Acton, said as many as 100,000 people in the state could have the coronavirus. The next day, she acknowledged that she was “guesstimating.”

Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who has been analyzing the outbreak in Seattle, said this was “certainly a strong overestimate.” An authoritative count maintained by Johns Hopkins University puts the U.S. total of cases at 2,952 and the world’s at over 156,000, as of the morning of March 15.

Will America’s New Testing Plan Work?

President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on Friday and promised, as he has before, that tests would be available to anyone who needed them. At a press conference that day, Trump announced partnerships with major national health care providers even as regulators gave emergency approval for use in the United States to new tests designed by Swiss health giant Roche.

It is not too late for large-scale testing in the United States to make a significant difference, said Vanderbilt’s Schaffner and Eric Feigl-Ding, a researcher at Harvard who is also a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. “The U.S. doesn’t yet have a runaway epidemic like Wuhan or Italy,” Ding said. “Testing will be part of the containment that will flatten the curve,” the ongoing effort to slow the pace of infections so the health care system is not overwhelmed by a flood of patients needing intensive care.

Right now, additional testing will “clear the backlog,” confirming the illnesses of people who are already sick. But in the coming weeks, broader testing will help identify the “frontier” of the epidemic, the locations where new cases are breaking out, allowing epidemiologists to isolate the patients and trace contacts. “It’s like a battlefield,” Ding continued, “we need to get to the front lines. We can’t get there a week or two after the fact.”

Estimates range on how many tests the United States, with its population of 329 million, will ultimately need. Many put it at tens of millions in the coming months.

If the current approaches fail — and there are reports that key chemicals needed to run some of the tests are in short supply — American health care workers will be forced to treat everyone who has severe symptoms of the disease, a waste of resources since some will undoubtedly be suffering from other less serious respiratory illnesses and yet require the protective equipment and other precautions needed for COVID-19 patients.

Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist and professor at the University of Toronto, said deciding treatment without lab tests is “old school, but it works.” When China ran low on test kits, doctors started diagnosing COVID-19 based on people’s symptoms, Furness said.

“Whenever kits are short, there’s no question that’s what lies ahead,” Furness said.

“It’s a Failing”

While Trump said Friday in answer to a question from a reporter that “I take no responsibility” for the lack of tests, other officials have acknowledged flaws in the process. “It’s a failing,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the Trump administration’s COVID-19 task force, said on Thursday. “Let’s admit it.”

There seems little question that a critical misstep involved the CDC’s opting not to use the earlier test design approved by the WHO. On CNN Thursday night, Fauci was asked directly if that had been a mistake. He would not use the word but conceded that, looking back, it could well be seen that way. He offered little explanation for why the U.S. seemed so out of position on the question of widespread testing other than to admit the truth of it.

“The system is not really geared to what we need right now,” he said.

It will be months if not years before the U.S. failure to field tests in the crucial weeks in January and February of 2020 will be fully understood.

Jeremy Konyndyk said he saw a devastating lack of urgency in the White House’s approach to the pandemic. Konyndyk, who led the government’s response to international disasters as director of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, said the government should have moved swiftly in the early weeks of 2020 when the virus overwhelmed the health care system in Wuhan with an avalanche of untreatable pneumonia cases, much like Korean officials did.

“We know that it was floating around in China undetected for some time before we realized they had it,” he said, “so we have to realize it’s a vulnerability here.”

Instead, he said, the CDC tried to create a more complicated test than the WHO’s that could tell the difference among coronaviruses. “It’s a neat idea if it works, but it smacks of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good,” said Konyndyk, now a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, and a sharp critic of the government’s decision making regarding the virus.

“But that’s CDC’s normal standard operating procedure,” he said. “My impression is that it was less a conscious decision that, ‘We don’t like the WHO test and we don’t want to do it,’ and more just, ‘We’re going to do our own test because that’s how we do it.’

“I don’t think they saw it as urgent. And this, too, is inexplicable to me. We kept hearing from the administration that it was a low risk to the U.S., and I think they sincerely believed that. And it was low risk in the sense that if you see a forest fire sweeping towards you, burning up every town in its wake, but it’s three towns away, then they’re right, at this moment you’re not at risk of being burned alive.

“But that doesn’t mean you’re at low risk. It’s insane to me that they weren’t thinking of it that way. They were thinking that somehow between those three towns away — and us — there was some sort of fire break that would magically prevent us from being burned alive.”

Agnel Philip, Joshua Kaplan, Joseph Sexton, Nina Martin, Lexi Churchill and Beena Raghavendran contributed reporting.

Trump Inc.: Former FBI Official McCabe On Trump’s Ties To Russian Mob

Trump Inc.: Former FBI Official McCabe On Trump’s Ties To Russian Mob

Before he became infamous for working on the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails and the Trump Russia investigation, former acting FBI chief Andrew McCabe investigated the Russian mob in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. McCabe has been asking some of the questions we at “Trump, Inc.” have asked ourselves about Trump’s business. So we compared notes recently.

In this conversation with WNYC senior editor Andrea Bernstein and Pro Publica reporter Heather Vogell, of “Trump, Inc.,” McCabe discussed why it makes sense that some of the people he investigated in the 1990s have resurfaced in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, what questions he still has after the Mueller Report, and why he and former FBI director Jim Comey have said Trump’s management style reminds them of the mob.

Trump has long denied any wrongdoing, and he has said he was simply acting as an ordinary businessman in his Russia dealings.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein: I want to start by asking you about your FBI training. You write about being at Quantico and you say, “I embraced every bit of this culture, even the most arbitrary aspects of the discipline.” You say that you loved “wearing the same style of polo shirt every day for weeks on end, loved the fact that everybody around me wore the same polo shirt too.” Why was it important to you, to dress the part?

Andrew McCabe: You know, I think each of those little details, though not significant individually, were a way of communicating to us that we had joined an organization that was much bigger and more significant than our individual preferences or our lives.

Bernstein: I have to say, you definitely look like a G-man.

McCabe: I’m going to say thank you.

Bernstein: Early on in your career, you were assigned to investigate the Russian mob at a specific point in history in New York, and Brighton Beach was a big place where a lot of this activity was based. I’m wondering if you could paint a picture for listeners of what Brighton Beach was like then, and what the Russian mob was like then and how it all came to you?

McCabe: So the FBI field office in New York City had experience with developing new programs in what we called nontraditional organized crime. The folks who ran the organized crime program recognized the situation that we had with a very large Russian-speaking population in New York — one with a deep historical connection to organized crime activity in Russia — and so they made the decision to start a Russian organized crime squad.

So when I got there in ’96, it was really still in its infant stages. Pretty much everybody on the squad were very young, new agents. “First office agents,” as we call them in the Bureau. And so we found Brighton Beach to be just a fascinating, chaotic, confusing place filled with opportunity to identify and investigate criminal activity.

Brighton in those days was a thriving, bustling, Russian-speaking community. You’d drive down Brighton Beach Avenue and all of the signs for all the stores were written in both English and Russian. It was not uncommon to walk down Brighton Beach Avenue and just not hear anyone speaking anything other than Russian. Places like Tatiana’s, Rasputin, the Odessa. All these very fancy restaurants that also operated as night clubs. And there was a thriving kind of social scene around those nightclubs, which often led to criminal activity and became the kind of focus of the organized crime community in New York at that time.

ProPublica’s Heather Vogell: You wrote about how the Russian mob started turning more toward financial crimes and business to pursue its goals. Could you talk a little bit about that transformation?

McCabe: Sure. This was one of the fascinating things about working on that squad. You could be working an extortion or kidnapping case one day, and then a really esoteric financial fraud the next. The thing that set the Russians apart from their Italian counterparts in the organized crime community was their creativity. They very quickly became the originators of the new scams.

So they did things like the tax cheating scams on gasoline and diesel fuel that were very common in the New York-New Jersey area in those days. They really professionalized the auto insurance scams around false accidents and medical mills and clinics where people would go and get processed to increase the billings against auto insurance companies. We did a lot of that work. And then, of course, we spent a lot of time on what became known as the Bank of New York money laundering scandal. So a few enterprising employees of the Bank of New York essentially took their private banking and internal computer software, which they had access to because one of them had a position in, I believe, the private banking section of Bank of New York, and began operating their own financial institution with individuals for the purpose of transferring money from Russia first to New York and then to many other places around the world.

Bernstein: We have spent the last year thinking about whether there is a line from some of the small-time crooks in Brighton Beach to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The list of people who seem to matter now were in some way connected to this scene. There’s Felix Sater, who is connected to the Trump Tower Moscow deal; there was Michael Cohen. They later show up trying to build a Trump Tower Moscow. And then there’s Yevgeny Dvoskin, who was convicted in the gasoline scam that you were just talking about in Brighton Beach and is now a banker in Russia.

McCabe: That’s right.

Bernstein: So they were all connected to Brighton Beach years ago, and then they show up in negotiations and 2015 and 2016. What do you make of that?

McCabe: Well, it is at first blush curious, and then when you think about it a little bit longer, it makes perfect sense. Brighton Beach — we thought of it as kind of the Normandy landing in America for Russian organized crime folks.

So there were many people who had experience with organized crime in Russia who came to the United States and settled in Brighton Beach just because they thought it was the new frontier. And this is a place you can make a lot of money.

And then there were some who we believe were actually sent by organized crime criminal organizations in Russia for the purpose of organizing and developing business and things like that. So if you are someone, or you are an organization, that is not opposed to dealing with people with that sort of background, with those sorts of connections, with that sort of history, then you’re gonna find yourself negotiating with and being represented by people who had experience in those early ’90s heydays of Russian organized crime and Brighton Beach.

That doesn’t really surprise me that much that you see connections like that back to the Trump Organization.

Bernstein: OK, so let’s talk about that a little more, because to us we’re like, wow! That is crazy that these characters keep re-emerging in the story, and a generation later. So when you say it doesn’t seem strange to you when you think about it, can you unpack that a little more? I mean, why is it that they’re coming to work with the Trump Organization and the man who is now the president of the United States?

McCabe: Well, as I said, it makes sense to me as an investigator. I don’t mean to say that it’s a good thing. But these are the same folks in many cases — guys like Felix Sater and others people — who we investigated back in the early and mid-’90s. If you are an organization that doesn’t have a problem with dealing with someone who has a known organized crime past and has actually been convicted of federal crimes for that same sort of activity, then you know you’re going to find yourself making deals with and being represented by Felix Sater.

Bernstein: So how does that make you feel? Here’s the president of the United States, who is in a business deal or talking about a business deal with somebody that you investigated when you started, and when the United States started, investigating the Russian mob.

McCabe: It is to my recollection and experience absolutely unprecedented and deeply concerning. From a strictly counterintelligence perspective, these are the exact sort of connections and historical overlaps that you look for when you’re trying to determine whether or not a person or an organization could be subject to foreign influence.

If you think about it just in the context of a standard background check for access to classified information, one of the things that can slow down an unbelievably complicated background check for any individual is if they have a relative in a foreign country. That requires all kinds of other degrees of investigation because you have to understand who is that person and what position are they in and that sort of thing.

Now think of that in terms of someone who is taking extraordinary steps to develop a potentially billion-dollar real estate investment not in any foreign country, but in Russia. I mean, that is incredibly concerning to any counterintelligence professional who is trying to make an assessment as to when, how and where will that foreign government attempt to influence this person.

Vogell: So we have all these characters re-emerging from Brighton Beach. Can you talk about the significance of that in light of what we now understand in terms of the interplay between organized crime and the state security services and the top levels of the Russian government?

McCabe: Yeah. So there’s a lot there. But I would start, I think, by saying it is very hard to desegregate organized crime from the government in Russia. I mean, we learned from the Mueller report that Vladimir Putin met quarterly with the oligarchs. The oligarchs are the modern-day masters of organized crime in Russia. They are the folks who, by one way or another, rose to the top of that pile and now control massive assets as a result. Huge fortunes.

Vogell: So how, in your understanding, did this tie back to the Russian government?

McCabe: The place where those two things come together — the organized crime figures and the government — is through the intelligence services. So there’s always been this kind of synchronicity between the arm of the government that understands organized crime, knows who the players are, understands the businesses and the things that different individuals are engaged in, and has the kind of boots on the ground, if you will, to make those sorts of connections. Those are the intelligence services in Russia.

Bernstein: There is a mountain of evidence suggesting a Trump-Russia thing. But so far no one — not not us, not you, not Robert Mueller — has been able to say what that thing is.

And as you have puzzled over this relationship, does it seem possible that there in fact isn’t a thing?

McCabe: I think that mountain of evidence that you referred to makes it strongly likely that there is a thing. Does that mean we’ll ever figure out what it is? No. But it certainly means we should keep looking.

If you look at even just the Trumps’ history with Deutsche Bank: It’s almost impossible to look at those series of relationships and transactions and defaults and failures followed by more and more loans. There has to be a thing at the core of that relationship between the Trump Organization and Deutsche Bank. Do we know what it is just yet? No. Will we ever? I’m not sure, but we certainly should keep looking.

Bernstein: So after the Mueller report was released, we locked ourselves in the big conference room and read it for hours.

McCabe: I did the same thing.

Bernstein: And then when we read it, we were like, well, we still have so many questions about Trump and his business dealings in Russia and how that might have linked to foreign influence in the election. If I’m hearing you correctly, I’m hearing you say that you still have a lot of questions, too.

McCabe: Well, I think anybody who follows these issues can’t help but have a lot of questions. And I don’t think that Director Mueller and his team went about their work assuming that they would answer every question about Donald Trump and about the Trump business enterprises and about his historical business entanglements with Russians or anyone else. They tried to be as narrowly tailored in their remit as they could possibly be. But sure, I still have many questions about the president and his associates’ connections with Russia. I think you can’t help but walk away from the report with a lot of things that you’d like to see more information about.

Bernstein: So you just switched to the second person you said “you can’t help.” But we’re not you. We didn’t actually start this investigation; we didn’t work on this investigation; we weren’t investigating the Russian mob two decades ago. So I’m wondering what we are to conclude from that.

McCabe: What we are to conclude from the fact that I still have questions?

Bernstein: Correct.

McCabe: Well, I think you see it the same way that I do.

I mean, I think that the issues that you address in the podcast are the best indication of that. I think even such basic things as, why is this president fighting tooth and nail to continue to withhold and conceal his own personal financial records in a way that no other president — Republican or Democrat — has ever endeavored to conceal? Those are the sorts of questions that, if you are an investigator, and you know this as well as I do, give rise to the curiosity that leads you to investigate.

Like why is it that there are so many representatives, so many people, even if it’s just a handful, people who have official connections to sanctioned entities or banks in Russia who are interacting with the president, with his associates, with his family members? Have we ever seen that before by any president or really any high-level government official? I haven’t, in the years that I’ve been doing this. So those are questions that I think were outside the scope of what Director Mueller was doing to some extent, but certainly questions I’d love to see answered.

Bernstein: Trump says in his Russia dealings he was acting like an ordinary businessman. So let’s talk about the Trump administration for a moment. You know we are big students of the history of President Trump. And before he was President Trump, he was a businessman here in our city. And one of the tactics that he honed very well was to try to kill off investigations about him or that might potentially involve him before they started.

And just observing from the outside seeing these sustained attacks by the president on you, on Peter Strzok, both of you, forced out, forced off the Russia beat, makes me feel like there’s this incredible brain drain going on. Are you alarmed by that?

McCabe: Well, I think that there’s no question that this president, that’s his approach to perceived adversity. He attacks people personally. He will stop at nothing to undermine reputations and employment and everything else. That’s certainly what I’ve experienced. And Peter and others I think have been on the sharp end of that as well.

Am I concerned that there’s no one left in the FBI to investigate these sorts of things? No. The investigative experience in that organization is deep and significant and done, hopefully, by people whose names you and the president don’t know, so they can continue doing that work carefully and quietly in the way that it needs to be done.

Bernstein: In your book you write a lot about your private thoughts in the years that you were working in the Trump administration, and as you were having these strange and sometimes alarming conversations with the president. One of the strangest interactions at that time that you wrote about was a meeting with President Trump and the White House counsel Don McGahn when you were being pressured to say it was a good idea for the president to come and address the FBI. You were writing that your permission would somehow give him cover to do something he was planning to do. In the end, he didn’t make the trip but you wrote, “The president and his men were trying to work me the way a criminal brigade would operate.” What did you mean by that?

McCabe: You know, it’s a method of operation that I’d seen many times before in my own investigative history working in Russian organized crime. The leader of the crew, the leader of an organized criminal enterprise doesn’t come out and tell someone what to do. They throw it out as an option that they want that other person to select. And so that way after the fact they can say: “Oh, I was just doing what they asked me to do. I wasn’t forcing them to pay me $100 a week to protect their furniture store. I simply gave him the option to do that, and he selected it for himself.”

So it’s a kind of a subtle, passive-aggressive kind of bullying that comes with an unspoken threat. That’s very effective. I mean, organized criminal enterprises have been doing that for as long as organized crime enterprises have existed. And so that’s what it felt like in the Oval Office that day as I was being kind of progressively backed into the corner to state the words that they wanted to hear me state.

Bernstein: Just to follow up with that, Jim Comey in his book references La Cosa Nostra. He also says the way that the president operated reminded him of the way the mob operated. But what are you guys saying here?

McCabe: It’s impossible to interact with the president and the administration without drawing that comparison. If you’re somebody who comes from an investigative background, somebody like Jim Comey or myself or anybody else who’s had experience with organized crime, the parallels are undeniable. The parallels in the way business is conducted, the way conversations proceed, the way you are asked for personal loyalty rather than loyalty to the oath that you’ve taken, the way that everything is analyzed on this kind of black-and-white paradox: you’re either with us or you’re against us, or either on our team and a part of this effort or you are somebody that we need to destroy. It’s just such an obvious comparison. I’m not trying to undermine Jim Comey or myself, but it is an undeniable parallel between the way this president conducts himself and those around him support him and conduct themselves and the things that we have seen from organized crime groups.

Bernstein: So is there an inference to be made from that or is that just an observation?

McCabe: That’s just an observation. It certainly leads to another round of questions as to why somebody would conduct themselves that way. But until you see that entity actually conducting crimes, you’re not really in a position to call it an organized crime enterprise, right? And I think that effort is ongoing.

Vogell: So we wanted to talk a little bit more about Robert Mueller, who you worked very closely with when he was FBI director.

McCabe: Yes.

Vogell: You had some wonderful and revealing personal details about his work habits and his general demeanor in the book. Especially, the one I liked, was about how on charts that showed different networks of criminal connections, he hated it when there were too many bold colors on those. Tell us a little bit more about that and what that taught you about his personality and how that was important at the time.

McCabe: You know, through your interactions with the director you would pick up those little gems like, oh my gosh, you can’t use a diagonal line on your chart. They have to be straight lines and perpendicular lines. You can’t use bold colors, as you’ve mentioned. He hated some case names, the code names that were used for major cases. And so you’re constantly kind of navigating your work with an eye on like, oh you can’t do this because the director wouldn’t like it, or you should do that because he’ll like it better.

So it was hard to do at the time and it could be a cause of great stress, but it was also a very effective way of completely transforming the way that we approached our work at least in the terrorism area.

Vogell: It was a level of discipline, is what you’re saying?

McCabe: That’s right. A level of discipline and accountability.

Vogell: There was at one point more recently when you were sort of pining for the old Bob Mueller “say nothing” FBI, right in the middle of all of these political firestorms that were going on.

McCabe: Yeah.

Vogell: Did you feel that you had gotten a long way from where you were just a few years earlier with him? And not entirely necessarily because of the directors themselves, but the whole climate and environment had changed, and did you feel the whole organization struggling to adjust to that?

McCabe: You know, I did. It was a little bit of a nostalgic look back. There were many days I was in the Hoover Building wishing I was back in Brighton Beach. Those were simpler and in many ways more satisfying times. But we changed significantly as an organization, particularly in terms of the way that we approached our responsibilities to informing the public and informing Congress of what we were doing after Director Mueller left. And that’s because those things had changed around us. In the age of 24-hour news cycles and social media and constant reporting and everything that we were doing, there was certainly a need for the Bureau to evolve in its approach to public relations and things of that nature.

And Jim Comey was the perfect guy to do it, because he had such significant abilities as a communicator and brought a great understanding of the impact of social media and media in general to the Bureau. But it did get us to a place where, you know, once you invite that guest over you’re kind of stuck entertaining that guest for as long as they stay, which in this case was forever.

Bernstein: Forever is a long night.

McCabe: It is. It is.

Bernstein: So you have been through an awful lot in the last four years. How are you feeling now about the future of our country and national security?

McCabe: You know, like many people, I am still surprised day in and day out by the things, the developments that I see in the news each day. This latest constitutional crisis that we seem to be stumbling our way towards causes me great concern. Understanding that maybe we’re at a point in history now where the executive branch not only doesn’t cooperate with the legislative branch, but completely denies and ignores their constitutional responsibilities to conduct oversight. That’s not someplace I ever thought we’d end up. Seeing things like that is tough. And I think it reinforces for us the incredible challenges that we face with this current administration.

However, I try to step back and take the long view. I try to remind myself that we as a nation have been through really infinitely tougher challenges before. We have made mistakes in the past, and we’ve gotten past those mistakes by owning up to them and acknowledging them transparently and honestly and having leadership with the courage and the moral backbone to do that and to guide us to a better place. And I think that that will happen for us this time as well. I’ve no reason to believe it won’t. And so I am still confident and optimistic about the future. I don’t know how long this kind of period of chaos will last, but it won’t last forever. And I think at the end of the day we will navigate this in the same way we have every other challenge that’s faced this country.

Bernstein: Thank you very much, Andrew McCabe.

McCabe: Sure. Thank you for having me. It’s been really fun.

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Romanian Prime Minister Is Staying at Trump’s D.C. Hotel

Romanian Prime Minister Is Staying at Trump’s D.C. Hotel

By Ilya Marritz, WNYC, Justin Elliott, ProPublica, and Zach Everson

The prime minister of Romania stayed at President Donald Trump’s hotel during her trip to Washington over the weekend. She is the first foreign government leader known to have booked a room at the property in more than a year.

The stay at the Trump International Hotel by Viorica Dancila, who is attending the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, provides the latest piece of evidence that Trump’s company continues to do business with foreign officials. Such payments could violate the Constitution’s anti-corruption provisions, which prohibit the president from accepting gifts or “emoluments” from foreign governments.

Dancila was seen Friday night inside the hotel’s atrium surrounded by a group of about eight people after leaving the hotel’s BLT Prime restaurant. She made her way to one of the building’s elevators, which are operated with room keys of hotel guests. She was seen again on Sunday, entering an elevator shortly after 6 p.m. On Monday she tweeted a picture of herself meeting with Vice President Mike Pence at AIPAC.

Trump still owns the hotel through a trust from which he can draw money at any time. Trump’s lawyers have rejected the idea that a hotel visit from a foreign official can be construed as an emolument, saying instead that it is a “fair value exchange” not addressed in the Constitution. Trump faces several lawsuits over the emoluments issue, filed by the attorneys general of the District of Columbia and Maryland, Democratic lawmakers and a government watchdog.

The Trump Organization has pledged to donate all profits from foreign governments to the U.S. government. As of February 2019, the company had provided the Treasury Department with more than $340,000. The company has not explained how it calculates foreign profits or disclosed if those figures were audited by an independent party.

It is not clear how many rooms the Romanians booked, what price was paid or who paid. The Romanian Embassy in Washington did not respond to phone calls or emails. Last year, the Romanian Consulate in Chicago held its national day celebration at the Trump hotel in that city.

A spokeswoman for the Trump hotel declined to comment. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The last foreign leader known to have to stayed at the hotel was Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, in September 2017.

Romania, a member of NATO, has a range of military and trade interests with the U.S. It recently increased its military spending, in accordance with Trump’s complaints that European states should bear more of the costs of their defense. Dancila has said she would like Romanian citizens to be able to travel to the United States without a visa; so far, the State Department has not added Romania to its visa waiver program.

While Dancila was in Washington, she announced her intention to move her country’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, though it’s not clear whether that will happen. Last year, the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem, but few other countries have followed it.

Also during her visit to Washington, Romanian news outlets reported that Dancila met with executives of a number of companies, including three military contractors: Oshkosh Defense, Parsons and Textron.

Two key Trump allies have made overtures to the Romanian government since Trump was elected.

One of them is the president’s attorney in the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, Rudy Giuliani. Last August, Giuliani sent a letter to Romania’s president “to express my concerns about continuing damage to the rule of law in Romania being done under the guise of effective law enforcement.” Romania, which Transparency International ranks among the most corrupt countries in Europe, has seen several high-profile graft prosecutions.

Giuliani told the Washington Post he had been hired to write the letter by the consulting firm Freeh Group International Solutions, but he did not specify his client.

Giuliani was at the Trump International Hotel on Friday. He was not seen with Dancila, and his spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Another Trump associate, fundraiser Elliott Broidy, has also reportedly done business in Romania. The New York Timesreported Broidy’s security company, Circinus, sought contracts with the Romanian government.

In January 2017, the leader of Dancila’s political party was a guest of Broidy’s at a celebration of Trump’s inauguration at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. Liviu Dragnea posted a photo of Trump to his Facebook page the night before Trump was sworn in as president.

Broidy resigned from a Republican National Committee leadership post in 2018.

Dancila, who took office in January 2018, is an ally of Dragnea. Their political party, the Social Democratic Party, has a lobbyist in Washington, who was hired in 2017 to arrange a meeting between Dragnea and Trump, according to disclosure filings. Romanian media reported that Dragnea was invited to the AIPAC meeting but did not attend.

Dragnea himself has been a target of Romania’s prosecutors. He applauded Giuliani’s letter criticizing prosecutorial “excesses” in a statement on his website.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the U.S.-supported news agency, wrote in November that Dancila “has little executive power. Liviu Dragnea, the chairman of the ruling Social Democratic Party, basically runs the government but can’t be prime minister because of a conviction for vote-rigging.”

 

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Will Pelosi Open House Floor To Bipartisan Ideas?

Will Pelosi Open House Floor To Bipartisan Ideas?

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

Nancy Pelosi is returning as speaker of the House of Representatives amid a partisan standoff that has made it virtually impossible to move forward on major legislation requiring the support of both Democrats and Republicans.

Now, she has a chance to fix at least part of the problem.

Prodded by some House Democrats, in late November she agreed to establish a more open process for working on legislation and to allow more votes on amendments supported by both parties. The changes in rules, expected to come to a vote after the House reconvenes Thursday, will help set the parameters for Pelosi’s second stint as speaker.

Historically, amendment votes have been critical to legislation, allowing in a variety of ideas. They are one way for lawmakers to change a bill’s contents after it goes through committee, or when it skips that step entirely. They are often used on spending bills to get lawmakers on the record on important issues and to build consensus solutions.

But ever since the House began using electronic voting in 1973, minority party members have increasingly adopted the floor amendment — one of the few legislative tools available to them — as a way to force their opponents to cast politically difficult or symbolic votes. In response, House majority party leaders have clamped down on amendments to shield their members from those electorally risky votes.

With the House under Republican control during the past eight years, few amendments with broad bipartisan support made it to the floor. A ProPublica analysis of congressional voting data shows that from 1991 through 2010, amendments approved with bipartisan majorities made up one of every six amendment votes in the House. Since 2011, they have been only one of every 20 such votes.

“That is a remarkable change,” said Frances Lee, a University of Maryland political science professor and author of “Insecure Majorities,” a book about the workings of the modern Congress. “Floor amending is less important than it used to be.”

From 2007 to 2010, in her first term as speaker, Pelosi had more amendment votes with bipartisan majorities than any other speaker in recent history. During her final two years in the role, nearly one of every three amendment votes on the floor passed with majorities of both parties voting in favor. But as partisan tensions escalated, she eventually tightened control, allowing only amendments approved by the leadership.

The office of John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who served as speaker from 2011 to 2015, issued a statement in 2013 that praised open rules for making it easier for members “to improve bills and eliminate unnecessary government spending.” But he stopped using open rules after his caucus rebelled.

His successor, Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, led a House that did not have any legislation debated under an open rule. In the most recent Congress, which covered 2017-18, GOP leaders used amendment votes largely to highlight partisan differences that could be used for political purposes rather than to push legislation toward passage. There were 11 amendment votes in the House with a majority of Democrats and Republicans in favor, out of a total of 295 such votes.

“Legislating is truly a lost art up here,” said Rep. Doug Collins, a Georgia Republican on the House Rules Committee.

Bipartisan legislating through amendments could be hampered in the new Congress because few House Republicans have experience with it. Among the 200 House Republicans in the 116th Congress, just 25 will have had a bipartisan amendment approved on the floor during the previous 10 years.

In 2011, when Pelosi stepped down from her first stint as speaker, Democrats controlled both the Senate and the White House. This time, Republicans control them, meaning that any legislation coming out of the Democrat-led House stands little chance of success unless it embraces the views of both parties.

House majority leaders exert almost absolute control over floor debate. Lawmakers who want to propose amendments must seek permission from the rules committee, which writes the rules for floor debate and determines which amendments will be allowed. The committee is an arm of the leadership, and its votes nearly always fall along party lines.

In the most open scenario, any lawmaker would be able to offer a relevant amendment during debate.

The Democrats’ rules proposals that Pelosi agreed to in November include one that would give amendments with at least 20 co-sponsors from both parties an increased chance of seeing a floor vote. Another, less specific, proposal commits leaders to lessen their reliance on restrictive debate rules that limit amendments to only those with leadership approval.

“The American people are tired of hyperpartisan gridlock and want to see members of Congress working together to solve the major challenges we face today as a nation,” said Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a Florida Democrat and one of the lawmakers seeking the changes.

Rep. Jim McGovern, the Massachusetts Democrat set to lead the rules committee, said that the changes “give more voice to individual members.”

“One thing we can do is run this place like professionals,” he said. “My hope is that people are going to come together around good, legitimate ideas whether I agree with them or not.”

But Pete Sessions, the Texas Republican who was chairman of the rules committee between 2013 and 2018, said amendment restrictions were sometimes necessary to pass significant legislation.

“If you make an open rule, people will simply take advantage of it,” he said. “The majority has to have the ability to see its will being done.”

Sessions described organizing legislative debate when members of the majority party aren’t in agreement as a “struggle,” and he predicted that the same problems would force Democrats to scale back their legislative ambitions.

In November 2015, the Iowa Republican Steve King offered an amendment to remove prevailing wage requirements on most federal highway contracts. The requirement — set forth in the Davis-Bacon Act — is popular among Democrats, labor unions and some Republicans. Fifty-four Republicans joined 184 Democrats in defeating King’s amendment. The proposal had majority Republican support but forced dozens of King’s colleagues to cast votes that could anger conservative groups.

Democratic lawmakers seeking a more open process could eventually regret their request, said Lee, the Maryland professor. “They’ll quickly discover what Republicans discovered when they last took over the House: that they would like to be saved from the painful votes they’ll have to take.”

McGovern, who will lead the committee he jokingly describes as “the place where democracy goes to die,” said that he was hopeful that wouldn’t be the case. “I don’t want that to be my legacy.”

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Revealing The Hidden Money Behind Midterm Campaigns

Revealing The Hidden Money Behind Midterm Campaigns

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

Allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used a blind spot in campaign finance laws to undercut a candidate from their own party this year — and their fingerprints remained hidden until the primary was already over.

Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money in elections, are supposed to regularly disclose their funders. But in the case of Mountain Families PAC, Republicans managed to spend $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a mustachioed former coal baron who was a wild-card candidate for a must-win West Virginia Senate seat, in May without revealing who was supplying the cash.

The move worked like this: Start a new super PAC after a deadline for reporting donors and expenses, then raise and spend money before the next report is due. Timed right, a super PAC might get a month or more undercover before being required to reveal its donors. And if a super PAC launches right before the election, voters won’t know who’s funding it until after they go to the polls.

The strategy — which is legal — is proving increasingly popular among Democrats and Republicans. The amount of super PAC spending during the 2016 congressional primaries in which the first donor disclosure occurred after the primary election totaled $9 million. That figure increased to more than $15.6 million during the 2018 congressional primaries and special elections.

Backers of Mountain Families PAC didn’t respond to a request for comment. It is one of 63 super PACs this election cycle that have managed to spend money to influence races and postpone telling voters who funded them, according to an analysis by Politico and ProPublica of Federal Election Commission data.

Voters bear much of the cost when they head to the polls without information on who funded a PAC that tried to sway their votes, said Meredith McGehee, executive director at the nonpartisan watchdog group Issue One.

“The whole idea behind disclosure is that one of the factors that voters can, and understandably should, take into account in judging the message is who the messenger is,” McGehee said.

In total, super PACs have spent at least $21.9 million this cycle in 78 congressional races before disclosing who donated that money — $15.7 million of it during primary races. In many cases, that disclosure came after voters had gone to the polls.

Super PACs were created after the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision ruled that people and corporations had the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on independent expenditures such as funding ads or mailers, but that they couldn’t hide that spending from the public.

But while they can’t keep donors secret forever, super PACs are increasingly figuring out methods of temporarily masking donor identities that are either legal or fall into gray areas that rarely attract regulators’ attention.

One tactic is the one Mountain Families PAC used, which is likely to be replicated for the general election. A new super PAC that starts between Oct. 18 and Nov. 6 could spend money right before Election Day without having to disclose its donors until after the midterm results are tallied. (Among the 11 super PACs that together have spent at least $5.8 million since the primaries, all but one disclosed their donors on Oct. 15, when third-quarter FEC filings were due.)

Another involves going into debt to pay for advertising and other campaign-related activities, and fundraising later to pay off those debts. A super PAC that does this would not have to disclose donors until well after the money is spent.

In the case of Mountain Families PAC, Blankenship was increasingly popular among the state’s anti-Washington set. So D.C. Republicans behind the PAC avoided disclosing they were behind ads attacking Blankenship — “Isn’t there enough toxic sludge in Washington?” asked one of them — until after the primary.

Then they revealed their identity and dissolved the super PAC entirely.

Here are more examples of PACs that have delayed disclosing their donors this cycle — and how they did it:

As Republican Martha McSally battled two opponents in the Arizona Senate primary, a super PAC called Red and Gold spent $1.7 million attacking McSally, airing television ads that said McSally had supported an “age tax” on older people’s health insurance. But shortly after filing its initial paperwork with the FEC, Red and Gold notified the commission it was going to file on a monthly basis, which meant its first disclosure wasn’t due until Sept. 20, three weeks after the primary election.

When Red and Gold finally disclosed its funders, it was revealed that Senate Majority PAC, which is aligned with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, was the main funder of Red and Gold and had meddled in the primary in an attempt to hurt McSally’s chances of victory and boost a weaker Republican. Chris Hayden, spokesman for Senate Majority PAC, said that “Senate Majority PAC and Red and Gold have followed the FEC reporting schedule and follow the law governing super PACs.”

During the week leading up to a seven-way Democratic primary in Illinois in March, a super PAC called SunshinePAC blitzed the battleground 6th Congressional District with $130,000 in mailers and phone calls. Because it started spending money so late in the race, SunshinePAC didn’t have to reveal its donors before the primary.

But nearly a month after the election, SunshinePAC revealed its lone funder: Tom Casten, the father of primary contender Sean Casten — raising questions about whether the super PAC was really independent from the campaign. By then, Sean Casten had eked out a victory in the primary by 2,177 votes.

Tom Casten said in an interview that “there was no effort or conversation about reporting in the delayed form” when he gave to SunshinePAC, and that “I certainly didn’t ask for it.” Greg Bales, campaign manager for Casten for Congress, said in an email that “as with any outside group, there was no coordination between Sean or the campaign and that group on their spending or disclosure practices.” SunshinePAC did not respond to a request for comment.

A super PAC called Me Too Ohio, which was registered on Sept. 8, disclosed $27,004 as debt and no donors in its first filing with the FEC on Oct. 15. Me Too Ohio is registered to an address in Arlington, Virginia. It has spent money on ads and a website that resurfaced allegations against Sen. Sherrod Brown stemming from his divorce in the 1980s.

The committee filed a report disclosing $220,000 in contributions on Oct. 24 and another reporting the remaining $425,000 it raised on Dec. 6.

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How Federal Cutbacks Left HUD In Chaos And Dysfunction

How Federal Cutbacks Left HUD In Chaos And Dysfunction

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.
by Molly Parker, The Southern Illinoisan

When I pulled my Jeep into the Clay Arsenal neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut, in July, I knew intuitively that I had arrived by the sights of neglect: Beautifully crafted brick homes in varying stages of decay. Boarded up buildings. A feeling of isolation in an otherwise bustling city.

I had driven 1,100 miles from southern Illinois for an appointment with Josh Serrano. He was among a handful of tenants who had led a monthslong campaign to implore the city and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to take action against an absentee landlord over poor conditions. I wanted to meet Serrano because I had covered poor living conditions and seeming federal indifference in places like the Illinois cities of Cairo and East St. Louis, in my region, and he was optimistic that by speaking with one voice, a community could achieve change.

I recognized Serrano’s neighborhood from online photographs. It’s what journalists would call “distressed,” a catchall word that quickly and diplomatically describes many of the places I visited this year while reporting on the affordable housing challenges facing economically struggling rural towns and midsize cities for The Southern Illinoisan, and supported by ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

But the word distressed, as one might also describe a favorite leather jacket or piece of reclaimed furniture, has never felt like a strong enough descriptor for the virus of political indifference that plagues these places and the people who call them home.

Forget the rural-urban divide. Places like Serrano’s neighborhood in Hartford and the southern Illinois region I call home are connected by a resource gap as much as or more than we are divided by geographic boundaries. Few issues make that more apparent than the nation’s affordable housing crisis.

I knocked on Serrano’s door and he led a photographer and me upstairs. Serrano is 26 years old. He’s lived in this neighborhood his entire life. Before he was born, his mother moved to Hartford from Puerto Rico with his two older brothers, searching for opportunity. About 13 years ago, Serrano said his mom moved the family into a federally subsidized property, where she raised him, his brothers and four foster siblings who are cousins.

It was fine at first, he said, but complaints about safety concerns went unaddressed in more recent years. A number of tenants, including his mom, were afraid to speak out because they feared losing their homes and ending up in a worse predicament, he said.

Finally, Serrano said he’d had enough. Around his kitchen table, Serrano told me how he and a half-dozen of his neighbors met for hours each week over the course of months studying HUD policies, canvassing their neighborhood to gather feedback from other renters and pushing for accountability as the rats multiplied and the mold grew inside their homes.

Eventually, the tenants won action from HUD. In May, the agency announced that it was ending its contract with Serrano’s landlord, and that he and the 150 families living in his building and others would receive vouchers to subsidize their rent in the private market. But it’s hard to celebrate the dismantling of a neighborhood and the loss of affordable housing, even if that’s the best of bad options. There is a shortage of subsidized four- and five- bedroom units in Hartford, the state capital, making it challenging for some larger families to find alternative rentals that will accept their vouchers, commonly known as Section 8, in the neighborhoods where they want to live.

At the start of the year, my goal was to explore HUD’s failure to enforce legal standards for decent, safe, sanitary housing in apartments subsidized by federal tax dollars, particularly in regions like mine that modern-day HUD policy seems to have left behind. I visited Evansville, Indiana; Wellston, Missouri; Steubenville, Ohio; Peoria, Illinois; and Hudson, New York, and found that they are all dealing with similar challenges.

What started as a simple premise brought to light much greater challenges. HUD’s oversight failures are profound, and they have left thousands of children and their families, seniors and people with disabilities living in unsafe housing for years. As landlords have slapped paint over mold, cardboard over holes, and hid problems behind walls and “Do Not Enter” signs, the agency has often looked the other way.

But these failures are symptomatic of much broader problems. To some extent, HUD has been put in an impossible position, starved for years by congressional budget cuts and lacking adequate staffing levels to monitor public and private landlords. Republicans have spent years eviscerating HUD, beginning with the Reagan administration and accelerating after the GOP won control of Congress in 1994, promising to rein in spending on social welfare programs. Chronic underfunding has persisted since then, especially for programs that fund public housing authorities.

More recently, some have blamed HUD Secretary Ben Carson, trained as a neurosurgeon, as problems deepened, and his administration has done little to dislodge the inertia. But few Democratic politicians have publicly championed public housing or prioritized HUD either.

As buildings age, HUD is increasingly looking to the private sector to fund a backlog of repairs and to provide new affordable units, and the agency has offered few solutions to those places that cannot attract private landlords to replace what’s being lost to neglect. These policies are based on the belief that housing should follow the economy, thereby encouraging low-income families to move into areas with more opportunities for jobs and education. While that makes for a great political pitch, it infrequently plays out that way in reality.

The shortcomings of this push toward privatization are felt most in struggling rural towns and midsize cities — the places that rely the most heavily on HUD. This allows old, unsafe housing to deteriorate beyond the point of repair.

In the midst of a nationwide affordable housing crisis, the agency is sometimes forced to choose between looking the other way despite knowledge of unsafe conditions or forcing tenants to leave and find their way in a tight housing market with few better alternatives. This has paralyzed HUD, forcing agency officials to run from one embarrassing oversight failure to the next instead of creating systems and policies that proactively improve access to affordable housing.

Just last month, HUD told city officials in Wellston that it planned to dissolve the housing authority on Jan. 1, and then demolish or sell all of its public housing units. Nearly a fifth of Wellston’s 2,300 citizens live in public housing. Behind closed doors, a senior HUD official told Wellston’s council members that it was a tough decision to make, but that the federal government isn’t investing in public housing like it once did.

When Carson visited Cairo in August 2017, four months after agency officials told families their 1940s-era apartments would be torn down and not replaced, he told tenants that it “seems unfair” that people have to suffer the consequences of past failures, “but that’s the world we live in. There’s a lot of unfairness in the world.”

But unfairness implies some sort of bad luck beyond one’s circumstances, like a person who has never smoked but is diagnosed with lung cancer. The housing challenges in evidence today are solvable, advocates say, and ignoring them amounts to injustice.

As my year working with ProPublica draws to a close, I’m left with more questions than answers. Among them: Why will HUD officials only acknowledge what’s happening to their agency and the people they serve behind closed doors? Why are so few people aware that the dismantling of HUD over many years is having a devastating effect on communities? When will politicians stop pretending they are surprised and outraged by massive housing failures from Cairo to New York after decades of funding and staff cuts and indifference?

As I left Hartford, I wondered what would become of Serrano and his neighborhood. Several months later, Serrano told me by phone that he’d found another place nearby. He started working part time for the neighborhood advocacy organization that helped him and the other tenants organize, and he hopes to be able to pass on what he learned to others in similar situations.

“I’m not trying to sugarcoat it,” he said of the neighborhood’s challenges, including crime. “But what people don’t see is the other side of it: the love out here, the care we take of each other.”

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Documenting Hate In America: What We Found In 2018

Documenting Hate In America: What We Found In 2018

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

Swastikas drawn on the office of a Jewish Ivy League professor. Latinos harassed for speaking Spanish in public. Hijab-wearing women targeted in road rage incidents. Neo-Nazis bragging online about a murder. These are just some of the incidents that we and our partners have reported in our second year of Documenting Hate, a collaborative project investigating hate with more than 160 newsrooms around the country.

Since we launched the project in January 2017, victims and witnesses of hate incidents have sent us more than 5,400 reports from all 50 states. We’ve verified nearly 1,200 reports, either via independent reporting or through corroborating news coverage. We’ve also collected thousands of pages of hate crime data and incident reports from hundreds of police departments across the country.

Here are some of the highlights from the project this year, including ProPublica’s work and reporting by partners using our tips and resources. (Read all our reporting from the past year here.)

Dozens of Hate-Fueled Attacks Reported at Walmart Stores Nationwide, Univision

Univision’s Jessica Weiss identified dozens of harassment incidents at Walmarts and other superstores. Walmarts often act as “de facto ‘town centers,’” and people of color end up getting targeted, such as being told to go back to their country or to speak English. Just this month, two men in Louisiana were arrested for allegedly yelling racial slurs at a black woman leaving a Walmart and smashing a shopping cart into her car.

They Spewed Hate. Then They Punctuated It With the President’s Name, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting

Reveal went through hundreds of tips in which President Donald Trump’s name was mentioned, identifying incidents all over the country ranging from harassment to assault. Reporter Will Carless spoke to 80 people who reported these tips, and he found an additional 70 cases reported in the media or confirmed with documentation.

“Dozens of people across the country said the same thing: What hurts most in these attacks is being told that you don’t belong in America,” Carless wrote. “That you’re not welcome. That since Trump was elected, the country has been reserved for a certain group — a group that doesn’t look like you or dress like you or practice the same religion as you.”

A Killing at Donkey Creek, ProPublica

ProPublica’s Rahima Nasa reported on potentially bias-motivated crimes that weren’t prosecuted as hate crimes, including the killing of a Native American man in Washington state. Even though there were indications he was targeted and run over because of his ethnicity, prosecutors didn’t bring bias crime charges. The man convicted of the homicide received only 7 ½ years in prison.

Police Are Mislabeling Anti-LGBTQ and Other Crimes as Anti-Heterosexual, ProPublica

ProPublica’s Rahima Nasa and I discovered that some police officers were marking some crimes as anti-heterosexual, including anti-LGBTQ bias crimes and offenses that weren’t even bias-related. Those crimes were then reflected erroneously in the FBI’s national hate crime data. Some of the police departments we contacted said they’d fix the errors. “Thank you for bringing it to our attention, because we never would have known,” one records officer told us.

Hate in Schools, Education Week

Education Week’s Francisco Vara-Orta examined hate incidents in schools, which affect black, Latino, Muslim and Jewish students. He built on previous reporting our partners had done to analyze patterns, finding that hate speech, both written and spoken, was the most common occurrence, while the largest number of reports happened the day after the 2016 election. Swastikas were the most common hate symbol; the most common words were the n-word, various versions of “build the wall” and “go back to [foreign country].”

Hate in America, News21

This year, we partnered with News 21, a project of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. A team of News21 reporters did a deep dive into how hate crimes are investigated and tracked, how laws are enforced, and what groups are targeted. They found that more than 2.4 million suspected bias crimes were committed between 2012 and 2016, based on an analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey, but only 12 percent of the nation’s police departments reported any hate crimes to the FBI during this period. They also found that only about 4 percent of hate crime victims who reported to police had those crimes verified by law enforcement, and that only 100 hate crimes were prosecuted at the federal level from January 2010 to July 2018.

In The Name Of Hate, Muslim Women Face Road Rage Behind The Wheel, HuffPost

HuffPost’s Rowaida Abdelaziz identified road rage incidents affecting Muslims and people of Arab descent. Hijab-wearing women reported hearing slurs or seeing threatening gestures from drivers, or even nearly getting driven off the road. Those interviewed said it happens so often that they don’t see a point in reporting it, especially since it’s hard to gather evidence while driving. Abdelaziz also wrote about a road rage incident recorded by a college student in Texas, which prompted an open letter from the local mayor.

Hate in Maryland: From Racist Taunts to Swastikas to a Campus Stabbing, Bias Reports Up Sharply in State, The Baltimore Sun

The Baltimore Sun’s Catherine Rentz gathered and analyzed two years worth of hate crime data from Maryland police departments, and she found that police categorized more than half of reported hate crimes as inconclusive. Law enforcement only forwarded verified reports to the FBI to include in their annual data, leaving out potential bias crimes in which a perpetrator wasn’t identified. Ten of the state’s counties reported zero hate crimes.

Documenting Hate: New American Nazis, ProPublica and Frontline

In a two-part documentary, ProPublica’s A.C. Thompson and Frontline investigated white supremacist groups the Rise Above Movement and Atomwaffen, discovering members and associates’ involvement in violence and even murder. Reporters identified neo-Nazis who were active-duty members of the military, and one white supremacist with a government security clearance. The project had major impact. It led to indictments and arrests, a firing, a prison sentence and a change in Marine Corps policy.

Jewish Professor Finds Swastikas Outside Her Office at Columbia Teachers College, Gothamist/WNYC

While overall crime is down in New York City, hate crimes are on the rise, and our partner WNYC has been reporting on many of the incidents happening around the city.

We’ve received hundreds of reports about swastikas, and one report ended up going national after WNYC’s Arun Venugopal broke the story of anti-Semitic vandalism in a Columbia University professor’s office. The professor, who researches the Holocaust, said it was the second time her office had been vandalized. WNYC also reported that one of New York City’s top civil rights officials was targeted in a hate incident, but when she reported it to police, they allegedly discouraged her from making a report.

The Cities Where the Cops See No Hate, BuzzFeed News

Nearly 90 percent of law enforcement agencies that voluntarily submit data to the FBI claim to have no hate crimes. So Peter Aldhous of BuzzFeed News reviewed more than 2,400 incident reports of assaults from 10 police departments that reported zero hate crimes in 2016. In the process, he identified assaults that should have been classified as potential bias crimes but weren’t.

We’re still figuring out where the Documenting Hate project goes from here, but we’re proud of the work it has produced, both by our newsroom and by our partners. It’s a topic that, unfortunately, retains its relevance and its urgency.

Have you been a victim or witness of a hate incident? Please tell us your story.

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Immigrant Children Victimized By Sexual Assault In Shelters

Immigrant Children Victimized By Sexual Assault In Shelters

Reprinted with permission from Pro Publica.

A World Cup soccer match was playing on the shelter’s TV when the two older teenagers tackled Alex on July 1 and dragged him into the empty bedroom. Wrestling him onto his stomach, one of them, a tattoo on his forearm, got on top. As Alex struggled to move, he said he could feel the teen’s penis grinding against his butt.

“Take off his shorts!” he heard the other teen, who’d bragged he’d been a gang member in Honduras, shout. “Let’s get him naked!”

Just 10 days earlier, Alex, 13, had been caught by the Border Patrol after traveling from Honduras with his 17-year-old sister and 5-year-old stepbrother, to flee the country’s gang violence. Now, they were being held at Boystown outside Miami, one of more than 100 youth shelters in the government’s sprawling system meant to provide a temporary haven for migrant children caught crossing the border.

The two teens had been taunting Alex since he’d arrived at the shelter, making crude sexual jokes about his pregnant sister. Now, in the bedroom, Alex said, they yanked down the front of his shorts.

“At least your sister has already tasted a man,” he heard one of them sneer. “But you haven’t even tried a woman.”

Alex said he fought as hard as he could, somehow managing to pull up his shorts and kick until he broke free. As he lay on the floor catching his breath, he said, the boys fled, warning him to keep his mouth shut.

Over the past six months, ProPublica has gathered hundreds of police reports detailing allegations of sexual assaults in immigrant children’s shelters, which have received $4.5 billion for housing and other services since the surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America in 2014. The reports, obtained through public records requests, revealed a largely hidden side of the shelters — one in which both staff and other residents sometimes acted as predators.

Several of the incidents have led to arrests of shelter employees or teenage residents. And in one particularly heinous case, a youth care worker was convicted in September of molesting seven boys over nearly a year at an Arizona shelter. The employee had worked for months without a full background check.

Coverage of such incidents by ProPublica and other media triggered demands for investigations.

Arizona’s governor ordered a statewide inspection of the shelters, leading to the shutdown of two centers run by Southwest Key after the nonprofit failed to provide proof that its employees had completed background checks.

And late last month, federal investigators warned that the Trump administration had waived FBI fingerprint background checks of staffers and had allowed “dangerously” few mental health counselors at a tent camp housing 2,800 migrant children in Tornillo, Texas.

But ProPublica’s review of the hundreds of police reports showed something else about the assaults. Something that went beyond background checks. Kids at shelters across the country were, indeed, reporting sexual attacks in the shelters, often by other kids. But again and again, the reports show, the police were quickly — and with little investigation — closing the cases, often within days, or even hours.

And there are likely even more such cases. ProPublica’s cache of records is missing many police reports from shelters in Texas, where the largest number of immigrant children are held, because state laws there ban child abuse reports from being made public, particularly when the assaults are committed by other minors.

Now, as the immigration system struggles to house and care for 14,600 children — more than ever before — an examination of how federal and state authorities investigated the assault against Alex, one of those children, reveals startling lapses.

For a few days, Alex said, he didn’t report his assault, heeding his attackers’ warning, worried that speaking up would delay his release from Boystown. But as they continued to harass him, he decided to tell his counselor.

The counselor told him that a surveillance tape had captured the teenagers dragging him by his hands and feet into a room, and that there might have been a witness.

But Alex’s report did not trigger a child sexual assault investigation, including a specialized interview designed to help children talk about what happened, as child abuse experts recommend.

Instead, the shelter waited nearly a month to call the police. When it finally did, a police report shows, the shelter’s lead mental health counselor told the officers “the incident was settled, and no sexual crime occurred between the boys like first was thought among the staff.”

And instead of investigating the incident themselves, officers with the Miami-Dade Police Department took the counselor’s word for it and quickly closed the case, never interviewing Alex.

A spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Miami, which received $6 million last year to care for about 80 children at Boystown, said it handled Alex’s case correctly, blaming him for any delays. In response to questions, a Miami-Dade police spokesman said the department was reopening the case.

An examination of Alex’s case shows that almost every agency charged with helping Alex — with finding out the full extent of what happened in that room — had instead failed him.

The police closed Alex’s case 72 minutes after responding to the call.

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With Justice Pulling Back, Who Will Police The Cops?

With Justice Pulling Back, Who Will Police The Cops?

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.
by Christian Sheckler, South Bend Tribune, and Ken Armstrong, ProPublica

 

This article was produced in partnership with the South Bend Tribune, a member of ProPublica s Local Reporting Network. It was co-published with the New York Times.

Last month, a video was released of two police officers in Elkhart, Indiana, repeatedly punching a handcuffed man in the face. The episode was just the latest in a long-troubled Police Department where nearly all of its supervisors have disciplinary records.

This is the sort of problem that Congress sought to address in 1994 when it authorized the Justice Department to overhaul troubled local police agencies under court-monitored consent decrees. These agreements lay out a reform plan negotiated by federal law enforcement officials and the local government.

After seeing the videotaped beating, Elkhart’s mayor, Tim Neese, asked the Indiana State Police for a “very thorough and far-reaching” investigation of his Police Department. But the state police turned him down, so he asked the Justice Department for help. His timing could hardly have been worse. Less than three weeks earlier, Jeff Sessions, who was then the attorney general, had sharply limited the Justice Department’s ability to use court-ordered agreements to address abuses by local police departments. It was one of his last actions before he stepped down.

Sessions was a longtime opponent of these agreements, complaining that they damaged police morale and smacked of federal overreach. But his critics say his last-minute move is likely to further the Trump administration’s efforts to impede police reforms nationally. For instance, the Obama Justice Department had wanted to revamp the police department in Ville Platte, Louisiana, where officers have a long history of jailing people without probable cause. But once Sessions took over, the Justice Department settled on a watered-down version of the ambitious reform plan Obama administration officials had envisioned. As ProPublica has reported, illegal arrests remain a reality of daily life in Ville Platte.

Consent agreements were an important part of the Obama administration’s efforts to address misconduct allegations. Cleveland entered into a consent decree in May 2015, six months after an officer shot and killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old playing with a gun that fired plastic pellets. A report this summer on Cleveland’s continuing reforms cited a nearly 40 percent drop in officers’ use of force from the previous year. Ferguson, Missouri, approved a consent decree in 2016, two years after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown set off widespread protests. At a status hearing this year, a federal judge said she was seeing “a great deal of progress.”

Fourteen cities are currently under consent decrees, from big cities like New Orleans to smaller communities like Warren, Ohio. One frequently cited success story is Seattle, where a 2012 consent decree has been credited with reducing unnecessary uses of force and improving citizens’ trust in officers.

But Neese may be left on his own trying to fix a department with a tumultuous history.

Elkhart, sometimes called the “RV Capital of the World,” is a city of about 50,000 people near Indiana’s northern border with Michigan. Police problems are nothing new there. In the mid-1990s, a study by two policing experts commissioned by the city called out the department’s “reputation for brutality” and its failure to rein in officers who had “abused citizens, violated civil rights, [and] alienated segments of the community.” Many of the problems cited in that long-ago report can still be found today.

In early November, we obtained the video of the two Elkhart officers repeatedly punching a handcuffed man in the police station’s detention area. “If you spit again, we’re going to party,” one of the officers said just before the beating began. The police chief, Ed Windbigler, never mentioned the punches when he told the city’s civilian oversight commission that the two officers had gone “a little overboard” when taking the man to the ground.

The chief said he had opted to reprimand the officers, rather than impose more serious discipline, because of their clean records. But one of them had an extensive disciplinary history, with six suspensions and two reprimands in his first five years. Once, according to his personnel file, he arrested a woman for public nudity, then, after she was released from jail on bond, he sent her a friend request on Facebook and seven text messages, asking to “hang out.”

He isn’t alone. Of the department’s 34 supervisors, 28 have disciplinary records in their personnel files. One is the mayor’s son, a sergeant once reprimanded for firing 13 times at a dog, with at least two bullets striking a house. Fifteen of the supervisors have been suspended, including the chief, assistant chief and patrol captain. Three were convicted of criminal charges during their careers.

There’s also another set of numbers that is striking. From 2013 to 2017, Elkhart police officers fatally shot six people. In those same years, the police in New York City — population, 8.6 million — fatally shot 43 people. The New York Police Department had about seven times the shootings in a city with more than 160 times the people. In Elkhart, one of the shootings led to a lawsuit and settlement. Another generated protests when it was discovered that neither of the officers who opened fire had a working body camera.

As Neese awaits word from the Justice Department, Chief Windbigler has been placed on unpaid leave for 30 days, putting the department in the hands of Todd Thayer, the assistant chief. His disciplinary record includes a five-day suspension, seven reprimands and a two-step demotion, for making flippant comments about a fatal shooting. He said an officer who opened fire could now check that off his “bucket list,” according to his personnel file.

The assistant chief has been unwelcoming of outside scrutiny. At a town hall meeting in November, he defended the Police Department while criticizing the news media. He said that when his department began receiving public records requests from one of us, the department’s reaction was: “Who is this guy? … What’s all this digging?”

The police, he said, went to the city’s legal department and asked: “Does anybody know what’s going on? Everything’s going good in Elkhart. Why are they coming over here, into our backyard, and trying to disrupt everything we built?”

The South Bend Tribune and ProPublica are investigating criminal justice issues in Elkhart County, Indiana. If you have a story to share, please email elkhartjustice@sbtinfo.com.

Christian Sheckler covers criminal justice for The South Bend Tribune. Email him at csheckler@sbtinfo.com and follow him on Twitter at @jcsheckler.

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The Far-Reaching Impact Of Jeff Sessions’ Final Order

The Far-Reaching Impact Of Jeff Sessions’ Final Order

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

Jeff Sessions hides emotion poorly — his face is reflexively expressive — and last Wednesday night, it betrayed a mixed set of sentiments as he stepped out of the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in downtown Washington. He had the stunned appearance of a hostage emerging out of an underground prison for the first time in months. But for a moment, in the news-camera glare, another look flashed across his face: the impish grin of a man who knows he’d managed to leave a little surprise behind.

Earlier that day, Sessions had resigned as the head of the Justice Department at the request of President Donald Trump. But before he left the job, the soon-to-be former attorney general had some last-minute business to attend to. With a black-ink pen, he initialed, in an illegible scrawl, a document formalizing the terms of what will be one of his abiding legacies: a Justice Department disengaged from its role in investigating and reforming police departments that repeatedly violate the civil rights of the people they’re sworn to protect. Police reform had been a DOJ priority during the Obama administration, and that work played a significant role in the federal response to the deaths of black men at the hands of police in cities such as Ferguson, Missouri.

Sessions, however, had long opposed the federal police oversight and the consent decrees — long-term reform plans supervised and enforced by a federal judge — that defined DOJ’s approach during the Obama years. In his view, they undermine law enforcement and amount to improper federal meddling in state and local affairs. (This summer, I documented the human consequences of the dramatic extent to which Sessions and his deputies had scaled back federal police oversight.)

The seven-page memorandum Sessions initialed last week caught Justice Department officials by surprise, and many of them are still puzzling through what it will mean in practice. “People aren’t happy that this came out with no notice and no discussion,” one DOJ official said. “What does this really mean day-to-day? Nobody’s really sure because they weren’t included in the conversation.”

The memo places significant hurdles in the way of DOJ entering into consent decrees with state and city governments. It mandates closer control by the Justice Department’s most senior political appointees, requires sunset dates for consent decrees, and limits what the DOJ can require of state and city agencies.

And there was a broader significance that passed largely unnoticed in the press coverage of Sessions’ memo: Current and former Justice Department officials note that the new policy also applies to other areas of the department’s work, such as efforts to curb pollution. They worry its effects will be most profound and far-reaching in those realms.

That’s in large part because, as I reported earlier this year, Sessions had already succeeded in all but halting DOJ’s police-reform work. He wrote, in a 2017 department memo, that “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies,” and followed it up with an Op-Ed in USA Today further expressing his opposition to consent decrees.

Although most vocal about police reform, Sessions believed consent decrees with state and city governments in general constitute federal overreach. Within the Justice Department “everybody knew consent decrees were disfavored,” one department official put it. “I don’t know of anybody working on cases in the Civil Rights Division that thought, ‘We’ll get a consent decree,’ and now are thinking, ‘Oh no, now we won’t get to do it.’” Indeed in areas of civil rights enforcement such as fair housing and disability rights cases, the DOJ has also largely abandoned judicially administered consent decrees in favor of out-of-court settlements. In that sense, last week’s memo amounts to Sessions, on his way out the door, seizing a kind of dead-hand control over the department the president has wrested away from him.

But in at least two respects, Sessions’ memo does far more than merely memorialize the status quo. The DOJ had continued to rely on consent decrees in certain areas, like environmental protection and voting rights. As recently as a week before the mid-term elections, the Justice Department’s environmental unit filed a consent decree with Ironwood, a small town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, over cleanup of a shuttered gas plant that was leaching coal tar and other waste into the groundwater and the nearby Montreal River. In the past year, voting rights attorneys have entered consent decrees to fix absentee-voting procedures in Wisconsin and Arizona and to improve voter roll maintenance in New York City. Attorneys handling civil rights and environmental law cases fear last week’s memo may take these types of consent decrees off the table. (A spokesperson for the DOJ did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)

The second concern cited by current and former Justice Department officials is the message Sessions’ parting memo sends to states and cities already subject to consent decrees. “I don’t think you can overstate the chilling effect of this memo on the enforcement of existing consent decrees,” said Christy Lopez, who supervised attorneys handling police-reform cases for most of the Obama administration.

Career civil rights attorneys at DOJ already felt hesitant to push back against recalcitrant state and city officials for fear that their superiors wouldn’t side with them. Last week’s memo makes that lack of support — already obvious internally at DOJ — a matter of official policy. “Now DOJ’s position is public; the states all know,” one Justice Department official said. “This gives the states more leverage. Why would you do that — lay out to the people you’re regulating, your adversaries, the limits of your negotiating power?”

One example former DOJ officials point to is Ferguson, a city that became a flash point for the national dialogue over policing after a white officer in 2014 shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black resident. The police force there has been subject to a wide-ranging consent decree since 2016, but according to court records and complaints from local advocacy groups, it has been slow to implement many of the required changes, like dismissing illegal warrants issued prior to the consent decree. “DOJ just isn’t pushing back,” one former Justice Department official said, and Sessions’ memo only makes it harder for Justice Department attorneys to resist intransigence.

“They have no leverage,” the former official said. “This memo is just a clear signal to the whole world that these DOJ lawyers have no power, and they won’t be allowed to do anything meaningful. That’s a huge blow.”

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Shady Facebook Page Pushing Green Party Candidates In Midterm

Shady Facebook Page Pushing Green Party Candidates In Midterm

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.
by Jeremy B. Merrill, ProPublica, William Turton, VICE News

 

A Facebook page for a group called “America Progress Now” is running ads online urging progressives to vote for Green Party candidates in seven competitive races in the Midwest.

“People of Color NEED Marcia Squier in the Senate to represent them,” one of the ads says, promoting a Green Party candidate in Michigan. “Americans don’t have control over our government anymore. We’ve lost it to greedy, corporate capitalists,” says another, calling for voters to support Ohio Green Party candidate Joe Manchik.

The page features ads with images of prominent progressive politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Problem is, America Progress Now hasn’t registered with the Federal Election Commission, as all groups making independent political expenditures are required to do. Six of the Green Party candidates being promoted by America Progress Now say they have no affiliation with the Facebook page, and most say they’ve never heard of the group.

And there’s no sign of America Progress Now at the address listed on its Facebook page. When we visited 605 E. 132nd St. in the Bronx on Monday morning, none of the tenants we spoke to had ever heard of America Progress Now. The building’s landlord, Stephen Rosenfeld, said in a phone call that he hadn’t heard of the group either and that no tenants by that name were in his building. After reaching out to America Progress Now, the page removed its Bronx address.

The ads caught the attention of Sanders’ Senate office, which asked Facebook to take the ads down, but so far the company has refused to do so. Two of the ads mention Sanders and one insinuates that he supports voting for third-party candidates. “Bernie Sanders is leading the way,” the ad states. “It’s time to send him some allies in Washington. This November, don’t vote for a party, vote for Progressive values.”

“We asked Facebook to remove the ad last week because it is clearly a malicious attempt to deceive voters,” Sanders spokesman Josh Miller-Lewis said in a statement. “It is deeply troubling that after Facebook was used in similar ways by foreign actors in 2016 to swing the election, the company still refuses to act to combat deceptive and misleading ads run by anonymous organizations.”

In an email to a Sanders staff member that was shared with VICE News and ProPublica, Facebook said it had investigated America Progress Now and found no violations of its policies. Facebook said it had verified that American Process Now is authorized to run ads with “America Progress Now” in its “Paid For by” disclosure.

The group’s meme-like ads use publicly available pictures of the candidates, quotes and a rose motif reminiscent of that used by some socialist groups. One of the featured candidates, Randall Auxier, a Green Party candidate running for Congress in Illinois’ 12th district, said, “I did not say or write the text that is with my picture, although I do agree with the content, for the most part.”

Squier left a complaint about the ads on America Progress Now’s Facebook page. “Cease and desist NOW!” she wrote. “This site is NOT authorized to make up quotes I never said or run ads on my behalf.”

The ads, some placed on the eve of the midterms, appear intended to take away Democratic votes in key races.

“This clearly looks like an attempt to convince members of the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party to vote Green, thus benefiting Republicans,” said Daniel Kreiss, an associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies political communication. “During the 2016 election, folks on the right, shady groups were pushing Green Party votes as well.”

In a statement to VICE News and ProPublica, Facebook said it reviewed the ads, requested additional information from the advertiser and determined they do not violate its community standards or advertising policies. Facebook said the company received either an Employer Identification Number or an FEC committee ID from America Progress Now. It’s also possible that an individual bought the ads and that America Progress Now is not a political group, but an individual would still have to register with the FEC.

On the morning of Nov. 5, several of the ads said that they had been “taken down because it goes against Facebook’s advertising policies.” Later in the morning, the ads had all been restored.

America Progress Now did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but Facebook’s Messenger app indicated the page “read” the requests.

The page has spent at least $1,000 so far on the ads, which were still running Monday and have been viewed at least 108,000 times, according to Facebook’s ad archive. It’s a drop in the bucket in Facebook terms: Since May, advertisers have spent more than $353 million on political ads on Facebook. Yet the ads show how political groups and individuals are still using Facebook’s ad system to target voters anonymously.

There is no record of a group registered with the Federal Election Commission by the name America Progress Now; groups making online independent expenditures that urge readers to “vote for” a candidate incur legal requirements to register with the FEC. Nor does a group with the name America Progress Now exist in the corporate filings databases of LexisNexis, Washington, D.C., Delaware or other databases.

In May, Facebook instituted new political ad rules in response to Russian meddling: first, it verifies that the person placing ads has a Social Security number and a U.S. residential mailing address, then it requires the advertiser to add a “Paid for by” disclaimer that “accurately represent[s] the name of the entity or person responsible” for the ad.

However, Facebook last week acknowledged to ProPublica that it can’t “scalably” verify that the “Paid for by” disclaimers are accurate, all after VICE News was approved to run ads that said, falsely, that they had been “Paid for by Mike Pence” and all 100 U.S. senators.

At least one of America Progress Now’s ads was targeted to people whom Facebook categorizes as “very liberal,” according to one ad submitted by a participant in ProPublica’s Political Ad Collector project.

Several of the races targeted by the page — the Missouri Senate race, Ohio’s 12th Congressional District and Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District — are highly competitive and are rated as “toss-ups” by the Cook Political Report. Two others are “leans” and two, the Michigan Senate race and Pennsylvania governor’s race, are considered “likely” Democratic victories by the Cook Political Report. The logic of these choices is unclear: While there is a Green Party candidate in New Jersey’s “toss-up”-rated Senate race, America Progress Now hasn’t run ads about the candidate there.

“It has the potential to make a difference in close races,” Kreiss said, but he doubts it’ll be effective this year, where so much of the midterm election dialogue has focused on President Donald Trump. “You will see Democrats and progressives having party unity.”

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Texas: Voter Intimidation Reported At Early Polling Places

Texas: Voter Intimidation Reported At Early Polling Places

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.
by Blake Paterson

Tempers are flaring during early voting in Dallas County, Texas, and reports of voter intimidation are on the rise. The county’s nonpartisan election administrator said that the harassment — including name-calling and interrogating voters waiting in line — is the worst she’s seen in decades.

“I’ve been here for 30 years, and this harassment that’s going on, I haven’t ever seen the likes of this,” said Toni Pippins-Poole, the county’s election director. “I’ve seen some other things, props being used and whatnot, but nothing like this type of mentality or aggressiveness or demeaning type of actions.”

At the Lakeside Activity Center in Mesquite, Texas, election administrators received complaints of a partisan poll watcher looking over voter’s shoulders as they cast their ballots and questioning voters on their politics. The person was later escorted out by Mesquite Police Department officers on Monday after refusing to leave the premises, according to Pippins-Poole.

Texas law requires that any form of electioneering — including passing out political literature or advocating for or against candidates or issues — can only occur more than 100 feet outside a polling location. Within that distance, poll workers can kick people out for causing a disturbance. When the nuisance is farther away, Pippins-Poole instructs her poll workers to call law enforcement.

Poll greeters at Dallas’ Lochwood Library reported being “harassed” and “verbally abused” and described a person with a bullhorn driving by yelling about “baby killers,” according to a tweet by the Texas Civil Rights Project, an organization tracking voting-related issues in the state. Despite notifying law enforcement, Pippins-Poole said the person has not been identified and the reports of harassment are ongoing.

At the Richardson Civic Center, multiple reports emerged of a person standing beyond the 100-foot-perimeter accosting voters as they arrived to vote, calling people “bipolar” and “alligators who live in swamps.” A video posted on Twitter by the Texas Civil Rights Project shows a person pacing and yelling about similar subjects.

There is currently no evidence to suggest that the incidents reported in Dallas County have blocked voters from casting a ballot. When harassment occurs, however, it can be particularly discouraging for those inexperienced with voting, said Calvin Jillson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University.

“If you are a first time voter — say a young voter or a minority voter, a newly enfranchised Hispanic citizen voting for the first time — and you have some aggressive white guy yelling at you as you walk in, it might have a negative effect. It’s meant to dissuade people from voting,” Jillson said.

The secretary of state’s office has been in regular contact with Dallas County election officials regarding issues of harassment and intimidation, according to Sam Taylor, the office’s communications director. In written statement sent to ProPublica, Rolando Pablos, Texas’ secretary of state, said “everyone should continue to treat their fellow Texans with dignity” whether inside or outside a polling location.

“We strongly condemn harassment of Texas voters in any form or fashion. We encourage Texans to make their voices heard at the ballot box, and to be respectful and courteous to other voters wishing to do the same,” Pablos wrote.

Tensions are high across Texas. The state is in the midst of an unexpectedly close Senate race between Republican incumbent Ted Cruz and Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke, which has driven record-breaking registration and early voting turnout.

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Pump And Trump: How His Firm’s Crooked Operations Circled The Globe

Pump And Trump: How His Firm’s Crooked Operations Circled The Globe

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

This story was co-published with WNYC..

By Heather Vogell, ProPublica, with Andrea Bernstein and Meg Cramer, WNYC, and Peter Elkind, ProPublica

 

Since Donald Trump’s fortunes came surging back with the success of The Apprentice 14 years ago, his deals have often been scrutinized for the large number of his partners who have ventured to the very edges of the law, and sometimes beyond. Those associates have included accused money launderers, alleged funders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and a felon who slashed someone in the face with a broken margarita glass.

Trump and his company have typically countered by saying they were merely licensing his name on these real estate projects in exchange for a fee. They weren’t the developers or in any way responsible.

But an eight-month investigation by ProPublica and WNYC reveals that the post-millennium Trump business model is different from what has been previously reported. The Trumps were typically way more than mere licensors or bystanders in their often-troubled deals. They were deeply involved in these projects. They helped mislead investors and buyers — and they profited handsomely from it.

Patterns of deceptive practices occurred in a dozen deals across the globe, as the business expanded into international projects, and the Trumps often participated. One common pattern, visible in more than half of those transactions, was a tendency to misstate key sales numbers.

In interviews and press conferences, Ivanka Trump gave false sales figures for projects in Mexico’s Baja California; Panama City, Panama; Toronto and New York’s SoHo neighborhood. These statements weren’t just the legendary Trump hype; they misled potential buyers about the viability of the developments.

Another pattern: Donald Trump repeatedly misled buyers about the amount (or existence) of his ownership in projects in Tampa, Florida; Panama; Baja and elsewhere. For a tower planned in Tampa, for example, Trump told a local paper in 2005 that his ownership would be less than 50 percent: “But it’s a substantial stake. I recently said I’d like to increase my stake but when they’re selling that well they don’t let you do that.” In reality, Trump had no ownership stake in the project.

The Trumps often made money even when projects failed. And when they tanked, the Trumps simply ignored their prior claims of close involvement, denied any responsibility and walked away.

The cycle is exemplified in Panama City, where the Trumps were involved in a project to build a massive tower and complex known as the Trump Ocean Club. The project’s unfortunate turns included bankruptcy, then, years later, the forcible ejection of the Trump Organization from managing the hotel.

There, as elsewhere, the Trump Organization disclaimed responsibility. It emphasized that it had merely licensed the Trump name to developers who handled everything from construction to marketing. “The Trump Organization was not the owner, developer or seller of the Trump Ocean Club Panama project,” it said in a statement last year. “Because of its limited role, the company was not responsible for the financing of the project and had no involvement in the sale of units.”

That was false. For starters, Trump arranged financing — his promised commission: $2.2 million or more — by bringing in investment bank Bear Stearns, which issued the bonds that paid for the Panama project’s construction.

Trump touted himself as a “partner” of the developer. His daughter Ivanka briefly boasted that she had personally sold 40 units. (A broker on the project said he couldn’t remember her selling even one.) Meanwhile, Ivanka told a journalist at the time that “over 90 percent” of the Panama units had sold — and at prices five times as high as comparable buildings. Both statements were untrue.

Not only were the Panama sales figures inflated, but many “purchases” turned out to be an illusion. That was no coincidence. The building’s financing depended on obtaining advance commitments from buyers, often before concrete had started pouring. But in between the sale of the bonds in 2007 and 2013, the year the building went bankrupt, buyers of 458 units in the 1,000-unit building abandoned their purchase contracts. Those buyers forfeited more than $50 million in deposits, and they never took possession of finished units. Given that the “buyers” were often shadowy shell companies or other paper entities, it was nearly impossible to discern who the actual purchasers were, let alone why they backed out.

Trump licensed his name for an initial fee of $1 million. But that was just the beginning of the revenue streams, a lengthy and varied assortment that granted him a piece of everything from sales of apartment units to a cut of minibar sales, and was notable for the myriad ways in which both success and failure triggered payments to him.

Consider the final accounting: In the wake of the project’s bankruptcy, a 50 percent default rate and his company’s expulsion from managing the hotel, Donald Trump walked away with between $30 million and $55 million.

The Trump Organization did not respond to a long list of questions about its transactions. The White House didn’t have a comment.

Trump’s licensing strategy originated with his early-2000s comeback, as “The Apprentice” propelled him to international TV stardom and restored luster to a reputation tarnished by multiple bankruptcies. As Trump put it in one promotional video during that period, “When the first season of ‘The Apprentice’ finally finished shooting, I was able to get back to my core business, real estate, and I’ve made some really incredible deals.” That strategy is still playing out today. The Trump Organization, which pledged not to launch new projects during the Trump presidency, is aggressively pursuing existing ones, including in the Dominican Republic, Indonesia and India.

Some long-assumed beliefs about Trump are being re-investigated, with surprising results. This month, The New York Times published a 13,000-word examination of how Donald’s father, the late Fred Trump, and his estate, funneled millions of dollars to his children, in possible violation of tax rules and criminal laws. With copious documentation showing that Fred directed $413 million in today’s dollars to Donald — not the single loan for $1 million, with interest, that Donald has always claimed — it exploded Trump’s long-propagated claim that he is a self-made man.

This article examines another Trump claim: that his post-millennium comeback and global expansion rested on the brilliant purity of a licensing strategy that paid him millions simply for the use of his name. That, it turns out, is no truer than the notion that Donald Trump is self-made.

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The Hidden Money Funding The Midterms

The Hidden Money Funding The Midterms

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

By Derek Willis, ProPublica and Maggie Severns, Politico.

Allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used a blind spot in campaign finance laws to undercut a candidate from their own party this year — and their fingerprints remained hidden until the primary was already over.

Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money in elections, are supposed to regularly disclose their funders. But in the case of Mountain Families PAC, Republicans managed to spend $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a mustachioed former coal baron who was a wild-card candidate for a must-win West Virginia Senate seat, in May without revealing who was supplying the cash.

The move worked like this: Start a new super PAC after a deadline for reporting donors and expenses, then raise and spend money before the next report is due. Timed right, a super PAC might get a month or more undercover before being required to reveal its donors. And if a super PAC launches right before the election, voters won’t know who’s funding it until after they go to the polls.

The strategy — which is legal — is proving increasingly popular among Democrats and Republicans. The amount of super PAC spending during the 2016 congressional primaries in which the first donor disclosure occurred after the primary election totaled $9 million. That figure increased to $15.6 million during the 2018 congressional primaries and special elections.

Backers of Mountain Families PAC didn’t respond to a request for comment. It is one of 63 super PACs this election cycle that have managed to spend money to influence races and postpone telling voters who funded them, according to an analysis by Politico and ProPublica of Federal Election Commission data.

Voters bear much of the cost when they head to the polls without information on who funded a PAC that tried to sway their votes, said Meredith McGehee, executive director at the nonpartisan watchdog group Issue One.

“The whole idea behind disclosure is that one of the factors that voters can, and understandably should, take into account in judging the message is who the messenger is,” McGehee said.

In total, super PACs have spent at least $21.6 million this cycle in 78 congressional races before disclosing who donated that money — $15.7 million of it during primary races. In many cases, that disclosure came after voters had gone to the polls.

Super PACs were created after the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision ruled that people and corporations had the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on independent expenditures such as funding ads or mailers, but that they couldn’t hide that spending from the public.

But while they can’t keep donors secret forever, super PACs are increasingly figuring out methods of temporarily masking donor identities that are either legal or fall into gray areas that rarely attract regulators’ attention.

One tactic is the one Mountain Families PAC used, which is likely to be replicated for the general election. A new super PAC that starts between Oct. 18 and Nov. 6 could spend money right before Election Day without having to disclose its donors until after the midterm results are tallied. (There are 11 super PACs that together have spent at least $5.8 million since the primaries but should begin disclosing their donors on Oct. 15, when the next FEC filing is due.)

Another involves going into debt to pay for advertising and other campaign-related activities, and fundraising later to pay off those debts. A super PAC that does this would not have to disclose donors until well after the money is spent.

In the case of Mountain Families PAC, Blankenship was increasingly popular among the state’s anti-Washington set. So D.C. Republicans behind the PAC avoided disclosing they were behind ads attacking Blankenship — “Isn’t there enough toxic sludge in Washington?” asked one of them — until after the primary.

Then they revealed their identity and dissolved the super PAC entirely.

Here are more examples of PACs that have delayed disclosing their donors this cycle — and how they did it:

As Republican Martha McSally battled two opponents in the Arizona Senate primary, a super PAC called Red and Gold spent $1.7 million attacking McSally, airing television ads that said McSally had supported an “age tax” on older people’s health insurance. But shortly after filing its initial paperwork with the FEC, Red and Gold notified the commission it was going to file on a monthly basis, which meant its first disclosure wasn’t due until Sept. 20, three weeks after the primary election.

When Red and Gold finally disclosed its funders, it was revealed that Senate Majority PAC, which is aligned with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, was the main funder of Red and Gold and had meddled in the primary in an attempt to hurt McSally’s chances of victory and boost a weaker Republican. Chris Hayden, spokesman for Senate Majority PAC, said that “Senate Majority PAC and Red and Gold have followed the FEC reporting schedule and follow the law governing super PACs.”

A super PAC called Ohio First PAC has been in operation since the start of April and has spent $774,822 helping Republican Jim Renacci in the Ohio Senate race. But it has only disclosed raising $79,200 from donors. Instead of disclosing donations, Ohio First’s filings with the FEC show the committee has hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to vendors for advertising and mailers, and almost no fundraising yet. The PAC did not respond to a request for comment.

The FEC has sent the PAC two letters about possible late filings for some of its spending; the committee said in correspondence in August that it is working to resolve any issues.

During the week leading up to a seven-way Democratic primary in Illinois in March, a super PAC called SunshinePAC blitzed the battleground 6th Congressional District with $130,000 in mailers and phone calls. Because it started spending money so late in the race, SunshinePAC didn’t have to reveal its donors before the primary.

But nearly a month after the election, SunshinePAC revealed its lone funder: Tom Casten, the father of primary contender Sean Casten — raising questions about whether the super PAC was really independent from the campaign. By then, Sean Casten had eked out a victory in the primary by 2,177 votes.

Tom Casten said in an interview that “there was no effort or conversation about reporting in the delayed form” when he gave to SunshinePAC, and that “I certainly didn’t ask for it.” Greg Bales, campaign manager for Casten for Congress, said in an email that “as with any outside group, there was no coordination between Sean or the campaign and that group on their spending or disclosure practices.” SunshinePAC did not respond to a request for comment.

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Trump’s Favorite Coal Baron Blocks Natural Gas Plants — And Jobs

Trump’s Favorite Coal Baron Blocks Natural Gas Plants — And Jobs

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

Three years ago, a group of residents in West Virginia’s northern panhandle formed a new group, the Ohio Valley Jobs Alliance, and declared themselves a “voice for local jobs.”

A few months later, however, the group’s first major action was aimed not at creating jobs, but at blocking them.

In November 2015, the alliance, known as the OVJA, filed a legal appeal to challenge a key permit for construction of the Moundsville Power project, a natural gas-fired plant in Marshall County.

The move was puzzling. Backers of Moundsville Power said the project would be a significant boost for the area, providing 500 jobs annually during a three-year construction period and 30 permanent jobs once it was operational. Supporters said the project was a way for residents to capture more economic gains from West Virginia’s booming natural gas industry.

The legal action, it turns out, was funded by Murray Energy Corp., one of the nation’s largest coal producers, one of the group’s leaders testified in a deposition in the case. Murray Energy’s founder and CEO is Robert E. Murray, who is among the nation’s best-known advocates for reviving the coal industry and cutting regulations related to it.

The OVJA also is seeking to stop two other natural gas power plants proposed for West Virginia, and Murray Energy has acknowledged paying “certain legal fees” for the group. Like the Moundsville plant, the facilities proposed for Harrison and Brooke counties would provide hundreds of construction jobs for several years and then about 30 permanent positions. All told, the three plants would cost more than $2 billion to build.

Power plants need several kinds of government permits, and the jobs alliance has focused its legal attacks on air-pollution permits issued by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and utility “certificates of need” permits handled by the state Public Service Commission.

Testimony in the power plant cases before both agencies doesn’t reveal details about Murray Energy’s funding for the OVJA lawyers, and current financial records for the alliance aren’t publicly available.

In pursuing their cases, the lawyers paid, at least in part, by Murray Energy have relied on the same kinds of government regulations that Robert Murray has railed against. In the Moundsville plant case, those lawyers challenged a permit partly because it allowed an increase in carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. Murray has said global warming is a “hoax.”

Construction has not begun on any of the three projects, at least partly, because of litigation-related delays, developers say.

“It’s been very frustrating,” said Drew Dorn, president of Energy Solutions Consortium, the company that was originally behind the Moundsville plant and continues to promote the Harrison and Brooke projects.

OVJA officials and lawyers did not return calls and emails seeking comment. Robert Murray, through a spokesman, declined a request for an interview. The spokesman would not answer questions, pointing to a prepared statement:

“The Ohio Valley Jobs Alliance is a grassroots organization that seeks to preserve coal jobs in the Ohio Valley,” the statement said. “While we certainly support their mission, we have not provided financial support to the organization, other than assisting them with certain legal fees. OVJA members have the welfare of the people in the Ohio Valley as their first priority, as they work to preserve these jobs and family livelihoods. We are pleased to support their efforts.”

The influence of Murray and his company on the coal industry’s future is far-reaching. He is a funder and confidant of President Donald Trump. Trump has pledged to revive the coal industry, and Murray has praised the administration’s efforts. During an August rally in Charleston, the president — typically a supporter of large energy projects — touted coal as superior to natural gas. He played up the risk of terrorist attacks on gas pipelines and extolled the virtues of coal.

“We love clean, beautiful West Virginia coal,” the president told a crowd sprinkled with miners holding “Trump digs coal” signs. “And you know that it’s indestructible stuff in times of war. You can blow up those pipelines.”

But the OVJA’s approach — fighting against an industry competitor of coal — risks stopping developments that could diversify West Virginia’s economy.

The gas plants the OVJA has been fighting would make up for the closure of numerous coal plants across the region that were old, inefficient and unable to comply with modern air pollution limits.

The OVJA is certainly right about one significant point: The gas-fired power plants would employ far fewer workers than a large coal-fired power plant. Appalachian Power’s Mitchell Plant, a coal-fired facility south of Moundsville, has about 270 full-time employees, according to a company spokeswoman, compared to about 30 when the Moundsville plant is operational.

But Anne Blankenship, executive director of the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association, argued in a recent newspaper commentary that comparisons with coal ignore the broader economic benefits of the gas industry. It was an unusually direct response from one local fossil fuel industry to another.

“This argument fails to consider the hundreds of jobs required once that well is drilled, including: Well servicers, compressor station operators, pipeline inspectors, air permit compliance field specialists, environmental compliance inspectors, maintenance personnel, production technicians, division order analysts, accounting staff, reserve engineers and the list goes on and on,” wrote Blankenship, who is not related to former Massey Energy Co. CEO Don Blankenship.

James Van Nostrand, a West Virginia University law professor who has followed the cases, said Murray Energy’s financial support of the jobs alliance’s legal fight is “very unusual” but is unlikely to save coal from gas in the long run — and will just cost the state major gas investments.

“It’s very unfortunate,” Van Nostrand said. “We’re losing all these economic benefits and being able to diversify our fuel supply.”

Blocking the gas plants might delay the closure of some existing coal plants that are on the margins of profitability “in the very short term,” Van Nostrand said. But “it’s only a matter of time” before efficient new gas plants “finish off” more aging and inefficient coal plants, he said.

To be sure, state environmental groups have a variety of concerns about the growth of the state’s natural gas industry, and a Sierra Club leader spoke against the Harrison County plant at a public hearing, citing growing worry about the release of the powerful greenhouse gas methane all along the gas-production process.

But they have not filed formal appeals of the gas plant permits. They have focused their efforts on stopping two new gas transmission pipelines in the state.

Jim Kotcon, a longtime state Sierra Club leader, said there is more significant public opposition to the pipelines, largely because those projects are using eminent domain to take private property, an issue that resonates even with many conservatives in the state.

“As you may suspect, to have a meaningful chance of opposing fossil fuel plants in West Virginia requires a fairly significant public involvement campaign, and unfortunately, we have a few too many of these projects to take on all of them,” Kotcon said.

Committed to Coal

Robert Murray went to work in the mines when he was 16, to help support his family after a mining accident left his father paralyzed. Later, he studied mining engineering at Ohio State University, then spent many years at North American Coal Corp.

In 1988, he and the company parted ways and he mortgaged “everything he owned” to buy his first coal mine, according to Murray Energy’s website.

Since then, Murray Energy has grown to become the largest producer of underground mined coal in the United States.

Along the way, Murray has clashed with regulators, labor unions, environmentalists and journalists.

In 2007, Murray went on national television to blame the deaths of six miners and three would-be rescuers at his company’s Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah on an earthquake, a conclusion investigators had disputed. He’s also sued journalists and media personalities whose coverage or commentary he hasn’t liked, including HBO host John Oliver, The New York Times, and The Charleston Gazette, which later became part of the Gazette-Mail. (That lawsuit was settled when the newspaper agreed to run a commentary written by Murray.)

A Bloomberg News profile of Murray summed up his position as being that of “America’s pro-coal provocateur-in-chief.”

Over the past five years, as coal’s fortunes declined, Murray doubled down on the industry. In 2013, Murray Energy purchased the major coal holdings of Consol Energy Inc., which was largely exiting the coal business in favor of natural gas. Then, in 2015, Murray Energy bought a controlling interest in Foresight Energy, which has major holdings in the coalfields of Southern Illinois.

An early fundraiser for Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign during the 2016 Republican primary, Murray backed Trump when it became clear he was going to be the GOP nominee, and Murray Energy contributed $1 million to a Trump super PAC and donated $300,000 to the inauguration.

“I have personally spent time with Mr. Trump, and I know he will surround himself with the very best people to fix the many problems facing our country,” Murray said the day after the 2016 presidential election. “Indeed, Mr. Trump will finally implement a National Energy Policy whereby all energy sources will compete on a level playing field.”

When the OVJA filed its application for nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service, it said the alliance “is a grassroots organization and movement whose mission is to promote and protect the good-paying jobs in the Ohio Valley region.” It estimated that the group’s budget would be $10,000 a year in both 2016 and 2017. The IRS applications didn’t require the source of the money to be disclosed, and the OVJA didn’t do so.

The application did not mention coal, or Murray Energy.

But on May 22, 2015, the same day IRS records show that the OVJA officially formed, Murray Energy did what a lot of coal companies were doing at the time. The company announced plans for anticipated layoffs of hundreds of miners.

Along with “excessive” taxes and “the ongoing destruction” of the coal industry by then-President Barack Obama, a Murray Energy news release blamed “the vastly increased use of natural gas in the Ohio Valley to generate electricity.”

In a news release four days later, announcing the alliance’s formation, Bruce Whipkey, listed as president of the group, cited Murray Energy’s layoff announcement as a reason local residents needed to focus on protecting jobs. Whipkey said the alliance wasn’t against the gas industry, but that it simply opposed tax breaks that local governments were offering to the Moundsville power plant project.

“The Ohio Valley is blessed to have both coal and natural gas reserves,” Whipkey said in the news release. “These two industries can and should work together for the good of everyone in the Ohio Valley.”

Jim Thomas, a retired Wheeling area coal miner and leader of OVJA, has testified that the organization was probably formed before May 2015, but that it wasn’t made “legal” until then.

According to Thomas’ testimony at a 2016 Air Quality Board hearing about the Moundsville plant, Murray Energy’s involvement started sometime after Thomas visited one of the company’s mine offices to arrange for the company to fix a problem with his home’s water supply. Murray Energy had taken over providing Thomas water when it purchased Consol’s mines, which had damaged the original supply, Thomas testified.

“I had a busted water line where they were shipping water up to my house,” he said. “So I went out to talk to [a company official].”

At the time, Thomas was involved in a group called Marshall County Citizens for Better Government, which he and a few of his friends, along with some retired coal miners, started. Its members met at a local diner to talk politics and local affairs, and they made it a habit of attending school board, city council and other government meetings.

“There was probably 10 or 12 of us [who] would go up there and meet and eat breakfast and talk about stuff going on,” Thomas said. The group “discussed different political stuff or what’s wrong with Marshall County, what can we do to make Marshall County better, how can we get people involved in what’s going on?”

Then, Thomas said, he and his friends heard about the proposal for a gas-fired power plant to be built in Moundsville. They had watched one local coal-fired plant close and were concerned that more gas plants would cost the area more high-paying coal jobs, while not providing as many gas industry positions.

“This coal is important to Marshall County,” Thomas said in his testimony. “We’ve got to have it.”

So when Thomas was at the Murray Energy mine office, he met with a company foreman.

“I went in and talked to him and told him what we were trying to do,” Thomas recalled. “I said we’ve got to try to save these jobs. And I gave him my name and phone number.”

Shortly after that, someone from Murray Energy — Thomas doesn’t remember exactly who it was — called him and asked how the company could help the group.

Thomas said that Robert Murray played no role in forming the organization and never attended any of the group’s meetings.

Thomas said he asked his son, Greg, for help with paperwork for the group and with social media.

Greg Thomas is a longtime Republican operative in West Virginia who has been running the U.S. Senate campaign of Don Blankenship. (The state Supreme Court recently ruled that Blankenship could not appear on the ballot as a third-party candidate after he lost in the Republican primary.)

Jim Thomas did not respond to requests for comment for this report.

Greg Thomas said in an email that he has never had an “official role” with the OVJA and has never been paid by the alliance or by Murray Energy.

“My dad taught me to always stand up for what I believe in, and I am proud of him for being so successful with their efforts,” he said.

“Personally, I support any and all West Virginia energy production.”

Lawyers for the OVJA did not respond to requests for comment. The two law firms that represent OVJA also have done work on behalf of Murray Energy in unrelated cases.

Five months after the OVJA was formed, Murray gave a speech in which he encouraged Northern West Virginia business leaders to get involved in the group.

At an economic conference in Wheeling in October 2015, Murray repeated his frequent refrain against the Obama administration, blasting a “regulatory rampage” that he warned was destroying the region’s mining industry. Murray also targeted the natural gas industry and noted that, just a few months earlier, natural gas had — for the first time — surpassed coal in the amount of electricity generated in the United States.

Murray directed his criticism at the gas plant proposed for Moundsville, and he noted that it was only one of several such facilities in the works.

“If this concerns you, or you have a business here, we suggest that you become active in the Ohio Valley Jobs Alliance,” Murray told the crowd of business leaders, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. “We can provide information on it.”

About six weeks later, the OVJA filed its first legal action, an appeal of a state-approved air-pollution permit for the Moundsville gas plant.

OVJA later said it had 400 members. However, the West Virginia Public Service Commission said evidence from a similar case before the Ohio Power Siting Board showed that it had 242 members and that 76 of those were West Virginia residents.

This year, the IRS automatically revoked the OVJA’s tax-exempt status after the group did not file nonprofit financial forms for three years in a row, according to the IRS website and GuideStar, an organization that monitors nonprofit groups.

“It leaves the IRS and the general public without any basic information about the organization,” said Holly Ivel, GuideStar’s director of data services.

Funding Revealed

In the power plant cases, it hasn’t always been easy to confirm that Murray Energy was funding at least some of the alliance’s legal challenges.

During the Brooke case, a construction union coalition, whose members stand to gain work, wanted records on the challenge filed by the jobs alliance. The Public Service Commission initially refused to force the group to turn over records, saying they weren’t relevant.

But when that case came up for a hearing in October 2017, PSC Chairman Michael Albert asked Jim Thomas where the group’s money came from.

Initially, Thomas responded: “We don’t use much money. I had a couple donations and that was it.”

After another back and forth, Thomas responded: “Murray Energy’s paying for the legal work. But Murray Energy does not give me any money.”

In the utility commission cases, Thomas and his group focused largely on questioning tax breaks being awarded to the developers by local governments. The PSC generally rejected those concerns, saying that the deals still called for the plants to pay more money — in the form of leases for public property and payments in lieu of taxes — than if the plants weren’t built at all.

Thomas and his group also questioned whether the Department of Environmental Protection properly limited air pollution, including, in at least one case, greenhouse emissions — despite Murray having said publicly that the global warming “scare is purely political and not based on any science.”

Despite his stated concerns for the environment, Thomas offered confusing answers when asked about his specific objections to the Moundsville plant’s DEP permit during a deposition taken before the 2016 Air Quality Board appeal hearing.

“One of the issues that’s been raised is concern about greenhouse gases that would come out of the stack of the Moundsville Power project. Do you have a concern about greenhouse gases?” power plant lawyer Dave Yaussy asked.

Thomas responded, “Yes.”

Yaussy followed up, “Are you concerned about global warming?”

Thomas responded, “No.”

Air Quality Board members later wrote in an order that they were “somewhat concerned by the OVJA’s apparent lack of knowledge about the contents of its appeal, lack of cognizable purpose related to the environment, and overall express intent to stop the construction of the plant solely to benefit another industry.”

For the most part, Thomas did not focus on the environmental issues, instead saying his main concern was that natural gas was eating into coal’s market share and that coal provided more jobs — and better-paying jobs — than natural gas ever would.

“West Virginia is coal,” Thomas testified.

The Murray Energy-funded challenges are having some impact on the gas plant proposals. Supporters of the Moundsville plant, for example, say the project is on life support because of litigation-related delays.

Lawyers for the OVJA appealed its air-pollution permit to a state circuit court, where the case was pending for 15 months. Kanawha Circuit Judge Joanna Tabit ruled in November 2017, only after then-state commerce secretary Woody Thrasher — whose agency was not a party — wrote an unusual letter warning that investors were increasingly nervous about delays and asking the judge for an “urgent review” of the case. Tabit, who is now seeking a seat on the state Supreme Court, said she ruled quickly on the case after she was told it was a pressing matter.

Later, legislators passed a bill so that any future cases would bypass county courts and go directly to the West Virginia Supreme Court. The OVJA’s action also prompted legislation to require anyone who appeals such a permit to disclose who is paying their lawyers, but that bill did not pass.

In the most recent case, the jobs alliance’s challenge of the air-pollution permit for the Harrison plant, the state board ruled on Aug. 24 that the group “failed to offer sufficient threshold evidence” to support its objections to emissions limits and air-quality modeling for the project.

The Air Quality Board also ruled, contrary to its findings in the Moundsville plant case, that the OVJA did not have legal standing to bring the appeal.

In its decision, the board noted that Jim Thomas testified that he believed four OVJA members live in Harrison County, but that he could only identify the first name — Steven — of one such member, and that this member had not complained to him about any potential health effects of the plant and was not involved in the appeal.

“The OVJA, as an organization, has no demonstrated interest in protecting the health of the citizenry or the environment of Harrison County,” the board ruled.

And the case about the Brooke County plant is headed for the state Supreme Court, where an oral argument over the alliance’s challenge of the PSC approval is scheduled for early October.

Despite West Virginia’s dramatic growth in natural gas production, the state has only three gas-fired power plants, and they are built to run only when there is high demand. Brooke, Harrison and Moundsville would be larger facilities, meant to run during times of normal electricity demand — the first of their kind for West Virginia.

Just before a hearing in late July on his company’s Harrison plant, Dorn issued a blistering news release characterizing the OVJA cases as “frivolous lawsuits” and alleging that Murray Energy “is trying to kill thousands of jobs on these projects.”

Then, in late August, the Affiliated Construction Trades Foundation, a coalition of construction unions that support the gas plants and whose members would build them, purchased half-page newspaper ads across the state to complain that Murray Energy was supporting a “shadowy front group” that is “holding West Virginia jobs hostage!”

Steve White, director of the ACT Foundation, said his group supports the coal industry but believes that, if the gas plants aren’t built in West Virginia, they likely will go to Ohio or Pennsylvania, instead. For White, the issue comes down to this: Many coal jobs have disappeared, and they seem unlikely to return. So why should West Virginia pass up more jobs related to the gas boom?

“We’re terribly frustrated with the delays on these projects and extremely concerned that we may miss out entirely on these opportunities,” White said. “It’s just a lose-lose situation.”

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Bipartisan Furor As N.C. Law Closes Early Voting Locations

Bipartisan Furor As N.C. Law Closes Early Voting Locations

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

 

In June, the North Carolina General Assembly passed legislation mandating that all early voting sites in the state remain open for uniform hours on weekdays from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., a move supporters argued would reduce confusion and ultimately make early voting easier and more accessible.

But with the start of early voting only weeks away, county election officials across the state — who previously had control over setting polling hours in their jurisdictions — say the new law has hamstrung their ability to best serve voters. Some officials in rural counties say they’ve had to shrink the number of early voting locations to accommodate the law’s longer hour requirements and stay within their budgets.

A ProPublica analysis of polling locations shows that North Carolina’s 2018 midterm election will have nearly 20 percent fewer early voting locations than there were in 2014. Nearly half of North Carolina’s 100 counties are shutting down polling places, in part because of the new law. Poorer rural counties, often strapped for resources to begin with, are having a particularly difficult time adjusting to the new requirement.

The closure of polling locations increases the time it takes for voters to travel to the polls, and it could result in lower turnout, making matters worse for a state already dealing with Hurricane Florence. Early voting in North Carolina begins on Oct. 17.

We interviewed more than two dozen county election officials across North Carolina. None said they were in favor of the new law, and none said they were contacted by state lawmakers for counsel on the legislation. Some referred to the policy as “overkill,” a waste of resources and an “unfunded mandate,” particularly burdensome for cash-strapped counties.

“We know our county. We know when most people go to vote early. The 12-hour, 7-a.m.-to-7-p.m. requirement just ties our hands when coming up with a catered approach that fits our county best,” said Steve Stone, the Republican chair of the Robeson County Board of Elections.

Republican state lawmakers, who championed the new law, argue that the consistency it provides will eliminate uncertainty among voters and expand early voting by increasing hours and allowing those who work full-time jobs to vote before or after work.

“The purpose of the uniformity is to make it easier and more convenient and more accessible for the voter to participate,” said David Lewis, a state representative who supported the bill. “I think that access to the polls, access to the ballots in a uniform fashion, is more important than poll worker or election worker convenience.”

Lewis says the law has led to an increase in the number of aggregate polling hours across the state. Indeed, polls for early voting will be open 49,696 hours in 2018, a substantial jump from the 25,887 hours offered in 2014, according to a preliminary analysis from the North Carolina State Board of Elections & Ethics Enforcement.

But according to Robert Stein, a professor of political science at Rice University, aggregate hours are not nearly as important a factor to voter access as the number of early voting locations offered by a county.

“There is a lot of good research to suggest that when it comes to having a positive effect on early voting turnout, the important things are not the hours of operation but the location of the polling place and the distance and travel time it takes a voter to get there,” Stein said.

For many counties, the trade-off for more polling hours is fewer early voting locations. Take Gaston County, near Charlotte. In 2014, the county opened one main polling place at 8 a.m. and three additional ones at 10 a.m. According to Adam Ragan, the county’s nonpartisan director of elections, there are very few voters in the county eager to cast ballots early in the morning. The county, therefore, typically maximizes its resources by staggering voting hours across multiple locations.

“In elections administration, we have what we consider ‘non-usable hours,’” Ragan explained. “There are some locations where people won’t come at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. That’s why we’ve always opened our auxiliary sites at 10 a.m.”

The county originally planned to open five early voting locations, but with the new policy it can now only afford to operate three.

While county election officials from both parties have expressed near uniform discontent over the new requirements, state lawmakers were split along partisan lines on the measure, with support coming exclusively from GOP lawmakers.

“It will put a strain on local boards,” Democratic Rep. Marcia Morey said on the floor of the North Carolina House of Representatives. “We need local flexibility, not the strong arm of the state for political purposes to suppress the vote.”

North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper originally vetoed the bill, writing in a statement that “we should be making it easier for people to vote, not harder,” but GOP state lawmakers have veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly and handily overrode the veto.

In addition to setting uniform polling hours, the original legislation also eliminated the final Saturday of early voting, a day that historically attracts a large number of black voters, opening legislators up to further charges of voter suppression.

Republican lawmakers subsequently backed off on this and restored the popular voting day. Lewis acknowledged the move was a mistake, though he said it had been proposed to give counties more time prepare for Election Day. Still, given the sordid history of voting rights violations in North Carolina, many Democrats remain skeptical of GOP lawmakers’ dedication to expanding access to early voting.

“I do not see it as an isolated event, but rather a part of a larger voter suppression effort,” said Al Daniels, a Democratic member of the Bladen County Board of Elections, of the uniform-hours law. “I see it as anti-voter, period.”

In 2013, the GOP-led General Assembly passed far-reaching legislation in the name of combating voter fraud that cut back on early voting, established a photo ID requirement and did away with pre-registration of high school students, same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. A federal appeals court struck down the law, labeling it an unconstitutional attempt to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The 2013 law was passed in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which weakened a provision of the Voting Rights Act that had required a handful of jurisdictions — including parts of North Carolina — to submit voting law changes to the federal government to determine whether those changes had a discriminatory effect or purpose. Now, laws like North Carolina’s uniform-voting legislation don’t need to be given preclearance from the federal government before they can take effect.

“Given the context of the GOP legislature, it makes you want to raise your eyebrows that this just wasn’t some neutral requirement to have consistent voting hours around the state,” said Philip Lehman, the Democratic vice chair of Durham County’s Board of Elections and a former member of the state’s General Assembly.

Other arguments in favor of the law have only advanced suspicion of lawmakers’ motives. State Sen. Ralph Hise, one of a dozen Republican sponsors of the bill, said in an interview with ProPublica that the law was meant, in part, to rein in partisan maneuvering on county election boards. He said that, in previous elections, certain counties would strategically leave specific early voting sites open for longer to “impact the election.” When asked to provide an example of such conduct, during the interview and subsequently, however, Hise did not do so.

The new law came as a surprise to many local election officials who had already finalized their budgets. Elections in North Carolina, unlike some other states, are funded entirely at the county level, leaving some administrators scrambling to figure out how to work within the confines of their budgets while accommodating the new law.

“I’m a full-fledged Republican and a Republican supporter, and I’m just disappointed in the General Assembly for not reaching out to election officials in the state and asking, ‘What do you think would work well for this early voting law?’” said Stone, the chair of the Robeson County Board of Elections.

The law appears to have exacerbated the divide between urban and rural counties, putting a greater strain on poorer, less populous counties, which often have smaller budgets, fewer full-time employees and an older voting population that is less willing to volunteer for what could be a 12-hour poll worker shift.

Take Bladen County. When it approved its operating budget this year, election officials set aside funds for four early voting sites. Though sparsely populated, Bladen County is large — the state’s fourth biggest by area — and local election administrators wanted to provide ample access to voters across the region.

Their plan had precedent. In every statewide election over the past decade, Bladen voters could cast their ballots at one of four early voting locations spread out across the county. Now, with the strict hours requirement, Bladen County can only afford to staff and operate one early voting site.

“We’re a small county and the law has affected us pretty badly,” said Bobby Ludlum, the GOP chair of Bladen County’s Board of Elections.

Wealthier, more populous counties appear to be doing better at weathering the changes. Still, election officials acknowledged that the law may adversely affect their rural counterparts.

“One size does not necessarily fit all,” said Michael Dickerson, the nonpartisan director of elections in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina’s most populous. “I’m very fortunate in this county. I’ve got over a million people living here, so we can find poll workers.”

The legislation has contributed to an already chaotic and uncertain year for election administrators in North Carolina. In addition to the difficulties they will encounter getting elections up and running in a state dealing with a major natural disaster, election officials are still scrambling to deal with man-made crises. A federal court in late August ruled that the state’s congressional maps were unconstitutionally gerrymandered and ordered they be redrawn immediately, sparking widespread confusion among election officials on whether the general election would move forward as planned. The court later clarified that the current maps should be used for the coming election.

A separate series of court battles over ballot language delayed the preparation and printing of election ballots, and the reduced timeline has left little flexibility in case ballots need to be reprinted. Adding to all of this, federal prosecutors in early September issued subpoenas to 44 county election boards asking that millions of voter records be handed over to immigration authorities by the end of the month.

While North Carolina has a handful of consequential congressional races in this fall’s election — the Cook Political Report rates four as competitive — most officials who spoke to ProPublica worry about how the early-voting changes and other laws might affect 2020, when the swing state will vote for president, governor and senator.

“It seems that every time we have an election, the rules are different,” said Jake Quinn, a Democratic member of the Buncombe County Board of Elections.

“We’re looking at different district boundaries, or we have to have voter IDs, or you can’t vote out of precinct, or the hours have to be changed. This is a problem. When you change the rules for voting every single election, some people are going to get discouraged by that,” he said. “All of this is very destabilizing.”

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