Still Gone: Saudi Arabia has acknowledged the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, though Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has insisted he was never involved, leaving an incomplete outline of horrific events. Amid the ongoing crisis, a delegation of American evangelical Christians, including some of President Donald Trump’s advisers, moved forward on a meeting with the crown prince. “Do you believe MbS when he says he didn’t authorize the murder?” Sigal Samuel asked one of the delegates. Read his response.
Mueller … : Special Counsel Robert Mueller is spoken of often but never speaks himself (zero public words since his appointment 18 months ago), as Washington awaits his final report. With an acting attorney general reportedly skeptical of the Russia investigation’s scope, Mueller and his team may still have recourse should the new attorney general take steps to gut their work. In any case, Benjamin Wittes argues, there are multiple reasons why the window of opportunity to fire Mueller has passed.
Kristallnacht: On the 80th anniversary of a night of pogroms against Jews throughout Germany and Austria, David Frum reflects on the potent lesson history has to offer. And in this short film, several Holocaust survivors recall their experiences in Weimar Germany and the early days of the Nazi regime.
Snapshot
A wildfire whipped through Paradise in Northern California near Sacramento, burning down the city and displacing tens of thousands of people. Now wildfires are threatening other parts of the state. 13,000 residents of the beach city Malibu have been ordered to evacuate. What causes California’s wildfires, and how can they be stopped—or even just slowed? (Justin Sullivan / Getty)Evening ReadAs a narcotics officer, Kevin Simmers locked up hundreds of drug users—including his own daughter—as the opioid epidemic worsened:
Just nine days after [his daughter] Brooke’s release, Simmers awoke to tire tracks through the front yard—Brooke had apparently maneuvered around his car. Hours later, Dana Simmers received a call from Brooke’s friend Alison Shumaker, who told her she had spoken to Brooke in the predawn hours. Shumaker, who was trying to quit heroin herself, said that Brooke had relapsed and, full of self-loathing, had told her, “I’m a piece of shit.” In a recent interview, Shumaker recalled that Brooke feared her father’s response, and told Shumaker, “I can’t go home. He’s going to be so disappointed.” Eventually, the line went silent.
“She might have died talking on the phone with me,” Shumaker said. The possibility that faster action may have saved Brooke’s life haunts Shumaker, but her inaction is not unique. Research suggests that after decades of Simmers-style drug policing, the most important reason drug users don’t seek timely medical help is the fear of prosecution.
Simmers later changed his mind on the War on Drugs. Read on.
What Do You Know … About Culture?1. The final season of this Netflix drama, featuring a truncated season, ends “on the cynical cliché that every new master will be just like the old one,” writes our critic Spencer Kornhaber.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. “Sour Milk Sea” was one of the songs written for possible inclusion in this famous 1968 album, now reissued 50 years later to include the demos and sessions that ended up on the cutting-room floor.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. In The Front Runner, Hugh Jackman plays this American politician, whose promising 1988 presidential campaign came to a halt after allegations of an extramarital affair.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: house of cards / White Album / Gary Hart
Poem of the WeekSunday marks 100 years from the official end to the fighting in World War I. Here, a portion of “Red Seed” by Fannie Stearns Davis, published in our June 1919 issue, captures the uneasiness of the ensuing peace:
Now perhaps there is Peace.
But dare you say that you know it? …
The Wind caught a wild red seed,
And is wild to blow it
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
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Written by Madeleine Carlisle (@maddiecarlisle2), Olivia Paschal (@oliviacpaschal), and Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey)
Today in 5 LinesThe Wall Street Journal reported that President Donald Trump was involved in “nearly every step” of hush-money agreements with former adult-film star Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal. Trump has repeatedly denied any involvement.
A wildfire in Northern California killed at least five people in the city of Paradise, authorities said. Several thousand people have been evacuated in Southern California due to a second wildfire near Los Angeles.
Democrat Kyrsten Sinema gained a small lead over Republican Martha McSally in the Arizona Senate race, which is still too close to call.
The Florida recount for the governor and Senate races is still underway, and embroiled in lawsuits and allegations of voter suppression and voter fraud.
Cesar Sayoc, the man who allegedly sent at least 16 pipe bombs by mail to some of the president’s most vocal critics, was indicted on 30 counts.
Today on The AtlanticThe Activist Dilemma: Leftist activists are driving the Democratic Party’s agenda, writes Peter Beinart in the December issue of The Atlantic. Could they go too far?
It’s Too Late: With Jeff Sessions gone, many are worried that Trump might act to rein in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Benjamin Wittes offers 10 reasons why that probably won’t happen.
An Unexpected Upset: Here’s how a 27-year-old graduate student with no government experience toppled a highly respected Republican moderate in Houston. (Andrew Kragie)
Spaced Out: Trump needs Congress if he wants to create a Space Force. But the Democratic House will probably ground the project, reports Marina Koren.
Snapshot
A White House staff member, on the right, carries personal luggage and papers for President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump to Air Force One before Trump’s departure for Paris. A military aide follows with briefcases containing the military launch codes, known as the nuclear football. (Carlos Barria / Reuters)What We’re ReadingWhy Are Democrats So Sad?: They wanted the midterm elections to be a total rebuke of Trump, writes Amy Walter. And that didn’t happen. (The Cook Political Report)
Still No Governor in Georgia: Less than two percent of votes separate Democrat Stacey Abrams from Republican Brian Kemp—and Abrams won’t concede until every vote is counted. (Amanda Arnold, New York)
Big Money, Big Wins: Affordable-housing activists across the country were hoping to pass progressive reform policies in Tuesday’s midterm elections. But after the real estate industry got involved, many of their initiatives lost. (Jimmy Tobias, The Nation)
Not an Excuse: After every mass shooting, the National Rifle Association and its allies argue that the problem is the mental health of the perpetrators, not the guns themselves. That’s wrong, argues Elizabeth Bruenig. (The Washington Post)
On the Other Hand: Gun-control advocates argue that reasonable gun laws would prevent mass shootings. But those laws didn’t prevent the most recent massacre in California. (Jacob Sullum, Reason)
VisualizedPeople Showed Up: Turnout in midterm elections is usually much lower in presidential ones. However, these 13 states actually increased turnout compared to 2016. (Dan Keating and Kate Rabinowitz, The Washington Post)
Six for Six: These six first-time candidates attempted to flip their congressional districts from red to blue this year. All six won. (Diane Tsai and Charlotte Alter, Time)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
A delegation of American evangelical Christians met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman last week in Riyadh. The group included some of President Trump’s top evangelical advisers, though they weren’t there in any official capacity. They’d come to talk about religious freedom with the young, self-styled reformer. But they found the trip overshadowed by the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The kingdom has acknowledged responsibility for the murder. The crown prince, known as MbS, says he did not authorize it. While the delegation knew it would be controversial to visit him in the wake of the crisis, they decided to go ahead with the trip, which was planned before the Khashoggi affair came to light.
“I think it would have been immoral not to accept this invitation, because of the potential implications of it in the long-run,” Johnnie Moore, a delegate who serves on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me. He’d come to advocate for the religious rights of the 1.4 million Christians who are estimated to live in Saudi Arabia, though reliable figures are difficult to find (legally, all citizens are required to be Muslim).
This wasn’t his first such trip: He and his fellow evangelical delegates had just visited the United Arab Emirates, and last year they traveled to Egypt to meet with President Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Moore told me they aim to build bridges between Islamic and Christian communities across the Middle East as a means of “making sure our community is thought of and represented.”
Yet one could see his group’s decision to sit down with MbS at such a precarious moment as legitimizing the kingdom’s human-rights violations. Moore and I discussed that risk, as well as his impressions of the crown prince, whom he described as philosophical and introspective. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Sigal Samuel: What was the goal of your trip?
Johnnie Moore: Evangelicals are now 60 million in the United States, and there are at least 600 million around the world. It’s one of the largest segments of the Christian Church. So for a group of evangelicals to be invited for a dialogue in what has long been considered one of the most restrictive countries in the world as it relates to religious freedom, that’s really important to us.
Religious freedom was the focus. We all had the opportunity to ask questions along the way, and my specific questions related to churches in Saudi Arabia. Of course, right now, there isn’t a single church building, there’s certainly not a synagogue, it’s a country full of countless thousands of mosques. … That’s not to say there isn’t worship of other kinds that takes place quietly, in people’s homes. … But when it comes to public worship it’s a different story.
Samuel: What did MbS say about the possibility of churches being built in the kingdom?
Moore: He said, “I’m not prepared to do that now. And the reason is because it’s the one thing that al-Qaeda and [the Islamic State] and the terrorists want. If I did it now, bombs would fall, and it would not be the right thing for the safety of our people.” … He made the point that it would embolden the terrorists and extremists, so you shouldn’t plan on it anytime in the future.
I found it to be a thoughtful, logical response even though it’s not the response I hoped for. ... It wasn’t this visceral anti-Christian sentiment.
On the contrary, he made it a point to mention the wonderful meetings he’d had with the Coptic pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. … You can’t deny the significance of those actions. And I think they were not actions principally meant to send a message to the West. They were principally meant to send a message within his own country, that this is an appropriate and reasonable thing for Saudi leaders to do. And I believe that even more because it fits into the greater context of our discussion, which was about very strategic actions they’re taking to move the country in the direction of reform.
[Read Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Mohammed bin Salman]
Samuel: Did you ask MbS about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?
Moore: It was the first question we asked. We knew we were going in this context … so we weren’t going to dodge it. We just asked it outright. He was totally consistent with what he’d said publicly before—he said this is a terrible and heinous act and they were going to find and prosecute everyone involved with it. He emphatically denied involvement.
But then he got sort of introspective and he said, “I may have caused some of our people to love our kingdom too much, and therefore to take their delegated authority and do something heinous that they absurdly thought would be pleasing.”
He was making sort of a philosophical observation—which he did quite a bit actually—he’s a really interesting figure.
Samuel: Do you believe MbS when he says he didn’t authorize the murder?
Moore: I’m choosing not to have an opinion on that, because I’m focused on other things. My focus is on the long game, on the long-term status of religious freedom in the region. It’s not that I’m not disgusted by the whole thing, but … my choice is to take at face value what the Saudis are saying, and focus on the area that I can actually have an impact on.
I’m very much a realist in this way: I’m a religious freedom advocate. That’s the only thing I am.
Samuel: It seems to me that there’s an unbundling of religious freedom from human rights. Religious freedom is one part of human rights. It seems that under the Trump administration especially, there’s been a lot of talk about religious freedom, almost in a one-to-one mapping with human rights—as if the two are coextensive. But can we justify fighting solely for religious freedom concerns and putting to the side human-rights concerns like the war in Yemen, like the imprisonment of women’s-rights activists?
[Read: Pence declares global religious freedom a “priority of the Trump administration”]
Moore: I think it’s a totally worthwhile criticism. I don’t disagree with you. I do think that in previous administrations the value of religious freedom has been many degrees below the value attributed to general human-rights advocacy. This administration has a perspective that it’s easier to move the overall human-rights agenda through the religious freedom channel.
Oftentimes, the human-rights questions, you can’t untangle the politics from it. With religious freedom, when I sit down—as a devout Christian with degrees in religion, as an ordained minister—across the table from an Islamic leader who’s devout and theologically trained, I have other things to talk about than politics. So tactically, there is a perspective that we can move the needle more easily in the area of religious freedom, and the concomitant effect will be making it easier to move the needle on other human-rights issues. It’s like, when the ocean rises all ships rise.
The Saudi crown prince meets with evangelicals in his palace (Reuters / Saudi Royal Court)Samuel: I think that’s a really interesting point. To me, the risk of that approach is that focusing on religious freedom and appearing willing to unbundle that from broader human-rights concerns—it risks giving the Saudis the impression that it’s okay. That here are these devout U.S. leaders who are close to the president and they’re unbothered enough by the human-rights concerns that they’re willing to sit down and talk about other things. Do you perceive that as a risk?
Moore: Well, first of all, if you’re concerned about risks, you’re going to get nothing done in the Middle East, at any time with anyone in any way. It’s just the most complicated region in the world. Risk is not something I pay very much attention to. …
I actually think the exact opposite happened. ... As religious leaders we had another connection point [with MbS]. We didn’t find him defensive at all. And we didn’t find him spinning. If he was spinning, he would have given us a different answer on the church question. It was two and a half hours of an open conversation, I think precisely because we are religious leaders.
Samuel: I think that what people have difficulty with in regards to MbS is that, even as he paints himself as a reformer he does things that seem to cut directly against that. So for example, he depicted himself as being very pro-women’s rights, lifted the ban on women driving, but also imprisoned some of the very women who campaigned for that right to drive. People have difficulty squaring the two MbS’s.
Moore: The phrase you just used is a key to the observation: “squaring the two.” That’s a very Greco-Roman, Western way of Americans trying to get their heads around this—not you, I know you’ve spent time in the region. One of my favorite phrases when it comes to the Middle East is, it’s all true. And you can choose to take the long view or the short view. I take the long view.
If you take the long view, you engage when these people are ready to engage. And you do it on their terms.
In a little-noticed hearing this week before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, attorneys for Special Counsel Robert Mueller laid out how much authority the acting attorney general has over the Russia investigation, including the ability to reject a proposed subpoena and scuttle an indictment. Although on its face the hearing had little to do with Matthew Whitaker, the man President Donald Trump just appointed to the post, it raised fresh questions about how far Whitaker could hypothetically go in gutting the investigation—and how the special counsel could fight back.
On Thursday, a three-judge panel considered a legal challenge to Mueller’s authority brought by an assistant to Roger Stone, the longtime Trump confidant who is being investigated by Mueller for his ties to Russia and WikiLeaks. The aide, Andrew Miller, has been trying to fend off a grand-jury subpoena issued by Mueller earlier this year. Miller’s lawyers tried to argue that Mueller’s work isn’t lawful, saying that he’s effectively acting as a principal officer of the U.S. government without having gone through the proper Senate confirmation process that position requires. (“Principal officers” include Cabinet officials, among other posts.) But Michael Dreeben, Mueller’s lawyer, insisted that Mueller doesn’t qualify as a principal officer, because he “has a regular reporting obligation to the acting attorney general.”
Who Mueller reports to is of major consequence. Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, had recused himself from oversight of the federal Russia investigation, so Mueller reported to his deputy, Rod Rosenstein. Now that Trump has fired Sessions, those oversight responsibilities fall to his replacement, Whitaker, who has previously expressed skepticism about the scope of Mueller’s probe.
And in that role, as Dreeben explained in court, Whitaker has significant power: While Mueller’s team is “independent on a day-to-day basis,” if the acting attorney general found anything to be “inappropriate” or “unwarranted,” he could intervene. Indeed, the special-counsel guidelines allow the acting attorney general to overrule any “investigative or procedural step” proposed by Mueller if the move is deemed “inappropriate or unwarranted under established department practices.”
It’s unknown whether Whitaker would shut down Mueller’s investigation if the president asked. But Dreeben’s explanation suggests that Whitaker need not fire Mueller in order to stymie his work. Whitaker wrote last year that the Mueller inquiry had “gone too far” and opined on CNN about the ability of a potential Sessions replacement to grind the investigation almost to a halt. He could opt for a death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach instead of risking the inevitable political blowback from firing Mueller directly. And he could try to hinder Mueller from revealing his findings without having to justify his decision to Congress until after the probe is over.
“According to the regulations, should the attorney general determine that an action is so inappropriate that it must not be pursued, he or she has to report that to Congress along with the justification,” several national-security–law experts wrote in Lawfare earlier this week. “Such a report, however, is not required until the ‘conclusion of the Special Counsel’s investigation,’ so this oversight protection is unlikely to be helpful in the short term.
“Put simply,” they continued, “if someone in Whitaker’s new role wants to create big problems for Mueller, he has ample tools to do so.”
The D.C. circuit court is now examining what influence, if any, Sessions’s ouster and Whitaker’s appointment could have on the Miller case. It is possible that the court will decide that Rosenstein, not Whitaker, is Mueller’s rightful boss, according to Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama.
Short of that conclusion, however, Mueller may have some recourse in the event that Whitaker maintains control over the investigation and attempts to either suppress it or shut it down. Several legal experts have argued that Trump’s appointment of Whitaker may have been unconstitutional. At issue is the same question of who qualifies as a principal officer. Because Whitaker reports directly to the president, he is a principal officer, these experts say, and would have required Senate confirmation.
“That has a very significant consequence today,” Katyal and the conservative lawyer George Conway wrote in The New York Times on Thursday, citing Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in National Labor Relations Board v. SW General, Inc. “It means that Mr. Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker ... is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr. Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.”
Questions over Whitaker’s legitimacy could work to Mueller’s advantage, according to Jens David Ohlin, a professor at Cornell Law School who specializes in criminal law. Ohlin explained that Mueller could challenge Whitaker’s appointment in federal court on both statutory and constitutional grounds, the latter of which is “most likely to succeed.”
“In order to get either of these issues before a federal court, someone needs standing to bring the claim, which means they’ve been specifically harmed,” Ohlin told me. “If Mueller is fired, which is Whitaker’s ‘nuclear option,’ Mueller certainly has standing to object to Whitaker’s appointment.”
He added that Trump’s decision to appoint a “constitutional nobody” to head the Justice Department “is so far from mainstream practice” that a federal court would likely “scrutinize this carefully and would be skeptical that this is consistent with the [Constitution’s] Appointments Clause,” which outlines how appointments are to be made. Before he went to work at the Justice Department under Sessions, Whitaker served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa from 2004 to 2009, then worked in private practice and appeared as a cable-news pundit throughout 2017.
Marty Lederman, who served as the deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under Obama, is less sure, writing Thursday that the constitutionality of Whitaker’s appointment is “technically an open question.” But he tentatively assumed that “anyone who suffers an ‘injury in fact’ by virtue of something Whitaker does would have … standing to challenge his appointment in court.”
William Yeomans, a former deputy assistant attorney general who spent 26 years at the Justice Department, had similar reservations. “I think the constitutional argument is more complicated than many are suggesting and I am undecided,” he told me. Yeomans noted, however, that if Whitaker’s appointment was unlawful, Mueller “theoretically could refuse to carry out his instructions and could contest, for example, his firing.”
Whether Mueller would actually take such a dramatic step is another question. Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior counsel on the Whitewater investigation in the 1990s, doubted that Mueller would challenge Whitaker’s appointment, “both because it is no slam dunk legally and because he is bound” as a Justice Department employee by the opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel, which concluded in 2003 that “a Senate-confirmed position may be temporarily filled on an acting basis” by any “officer or employee” who “has served in the agency for at least 90 days in the preceding 365 days”—regardless of whether they are confirmed by the Senate. “It is also strategically incautious,” Rosenzweig said.
Still, if Mueller were to challenge Whitaker, one “solid way” to do it would be to defy him, Rosenzweig said, setting up a “live case” in which the court would have to address Whitaker’s legitimacy directly.
Mueller is not known for disobedience or public spectacles. In the 18 months since he was appointed, he has not said a single word about the Russia investigation, and his spokesman is best known for declining to comment in response to press inquiries. With his final report already in the works, however, and various elements of the investigation farmed out to prosecutors in New York and Washington, D.C., it is unlikely that Mueller’s findings—as they relate to a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia—will never see the light of day.
If Whitaker were to refuse to release Mueller’s final report, for example, Mueller and the grand jury could make their evidence available to Congress through a report transmitted by the court, as the former Watergate prosecutors Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton recently noted. And “with the fox now guarding the henhouse,” they wrote, “there is sufficient precedent” for them to do so.
A visit to the Swiss Museum of Transport, NATO soldiers on patrol in Afghanistan, a giant’s house in Russia, new advances in powered exoskeleton technology, Californians mourn the victims of a mass shooting as they brace for destructive wildfires, autumn colors pass their peak in the North, Victoria’s Secret holds a fashion show in New York City, Bonfire Night across England, observing the centenary of the end of World War I, and much more
“Women’s anger is not taken seriously as politically consequential and valid, in part because women are sucked back into a maternal or wifely aesthetic framework,” Rebecca Traister said in a recent interview with The Masthead, The Atlantic’s membership program. “We need to understand their fury as politically and socially catalytic.”
In November, as part of The Masthead Book Club, members read Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. Members discussed the book on The Masthead forums with Atlantic staff, and submitted questions for Traister via video. Watch the conversation, and read on for an excerpt:
Is female anger really always taken less seriously? While reading the book, a a member reminded me of the phrase, “When mama’s unhappy, everyone’s unhappy.” It seemed to her that, especially when women invoke their roles as wives and mothers when angry, their anger is extremely effective. — Caroline Kitchener
Rebecca Traister: That is historically the context in which women have been offered what power is on the table. Their power is within a domestic sphere, within familial relationships. But if the only way we can invoke our authority is by making a comparison to a domestic and maternal sphere, that’s a very limited scope. Part of what this book is about is the fact that women’s anger is not taken seriously as politically consequential and valid, in part because women are sucked back into a maternal or wifely aesthetic framework. And we need to understand their fury as politically and socially catalytic.
Are movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp making a difference? — Barbara Didrichsen, Masthead member
Traister: Sure, they are making a difference insofar as there’s actually a difference in how consequences are being meted out. For years, even for very specific men about whom allegations have been made, those allegations were out in public for years and years and years. Nobody did anything about it.
I reported on sexual-harassment allegations against Bill O’Reilly when I was a young reporter in 2004. He remained the top anchor of Fox News, a network that was so powerful, it propelled presidents into office. So am I shocked by what has happened in the past year, that some of those very specific men lost their perches? Yes. But we should also remember that they didn’t lose their power.
It’s important to note that the No. 1 book on the best-seller list is written by Bill O’Reilly. He may have lost his perch at Fox, and that’s important, but he has not lost his voice, or his ability to make millions of dollars.
Do you think that the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings, and Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, might allow women to hear each other in new ways, and make greater strides against institutional oppressions? — Barbara Kellam-Scott, Masthead member
Traister: What happened with Brett Kavanaugh long-term is going to be formative—ultimately, probably, catalytic—in a way that’s hard to recognize right now. What was made visible to so many Americans in those weeks of September and early October is going to have a galvanizing effect on young people.
I do some of the work I do today because I sat and watched Anita Hill 27 years ago in high school. There are young and old people whose lives and views of how power works in this country and is abused has been shaped by what has just happened. I believe that 30 years from now, there’s going to be a journalist telling us about how Ana Archila and Maria Gallagher demanding Jeff Flake look at them in the eyes in the elevator was a catalytic, communicative movement, a way of channeling the fury of so many millions of women who are isolated in their homes, who couldn’t be in that elevator and couldn’t be at that protest, but felt their fury communicated. We’re going to say that was a moment of political import, in ways that we can’t predict now.
The Masthead Book Club chooses a new title each month—previous selections include Educated by Tara Westover, Political Tribes by Amy Chua, and The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder. This month we’re reading The Library Book by Susan Orlean. To learn more about the Book Club and The Masthead, visit www.theatlantic.com/join.
The killing of 12 people Wednesday night in Thousand Oaks, California, represents the second mass attack against gatherings of country-music fans in a little more than a year. Unthinkably, among the patrons of the “College Country Night” at the Borderline Bar and Grill were people who survived the massacre at Las Vegas’s Route 91 Harvest Festival in October 2017.
Gun violence is a hazard of American life whether in city streets or synagogues, but the targeting of country fans involves its own sort of politics. Mass shootings regularly result in calls for gun control, which in turn prompt a response from gun-rights advocates—many of whom listen to and make country music. Taste of Country’s “10 Best Gun Songs” list had plenty of material to work with. The NRA has a branch devoted specifically to strengthening the bonds between the lobbying group and Nashville.
It is that bond that Rosanne Cash spotlighted with a widely discussed New York Times column published after the Las Vegas massacre, headlined, “Country Musicians, Stand Up to the N.R.A.” “Not everyone will like you for taking a stand,” she wrote to her peers as she urged them to support gun control. “Let it roll off your back. Some people may burn your records or ask for refunds for tickets to your concerts. Whatever. Find the strength of moral conviction, even if it comes with a price tag, which it will.”
The year since hasn’t quite seen a revolution in country’s politics on firearms. Many mainstream artists have stayed vague on the issue, though there have been statements on behalf of gun control from Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Maren Morris, and Jason Aldean, who was performing onstage when the shooting began in Vegas.
Cash is still speaking out. The day after the Thousand Oaks shooting, she tweeted: “12 killed, including the ‘good guy with a gun,’ plus survivors of Las Vegas shooting. We can’t go on like this. I don’t want to hear about thoughts and prayers. I want #GunControlNow.” She followed up with a specific call for a ban on high-capacity magazines.
I spoke with her that same day. This conversation has been edited.
Spencer Kornhaber: I wanted to get a perspective on Thousand Oaks from someone who’s a figurehead in country music and has been vocal about guns.
Rosanne Cash: We should clear up the fact that I’m not a figurehead in country music. In some ways, I’m persona non grata in country music. The Americana community has embraced me; I love country music and used to be part of the mainstream, but not anymore. So I can’t pretend to speak for country artists or that community.
I wish there were more people outspoken about this issue in country music. They all seem afraid to do it because of the blowback, and some of them have sponsorship relationships with the NRA, which is deeply troubling because somehow people have conflated country music, patriotism, and guns. Those threads have to be pulled apart.
Shootings like Las Vegas happen in the equivalent of a musician’s office. That’s where we work. So for people to say, “Shut up and sing; you don’t have a right to talk about this”: Well, it affects us. This Thousand Oaks shooting happened just 15 miles from where I grew up in Ventura, California. To read that some of the survivors also survived Las Vegas, it’s incomprehensible—the trauma these people have endured.
Kornhaber: How do you respond to those who say that guns are part of country music’s identity?
Cash: Look, I don’t vilify all gun owners. I don’t think a responsible citizen shouldn’t have their own handgun or shooting rifle. Most of the men in my family hunt. I don’t have any problem with that. But to be able to have a personal arsenal of military-style weapons is wrong. No civilized society should allow that.
I served for 10 years on the board of this organization [PAX, later renamed and merged with the Brady Campaign] that was devoted to protecting children from gun violence. And I met grieving parent after grieving parent until it was crushing me. These secret pockets of the deepest suffering imaginable are scattered throughout the country, and you can go your whole life without knowing they exist. When a child is killed by random gun violence, it shatters so many lives, from the parent to the family to the extended family to the school to the city. The suffering is multigenerational.
Kornhaber: You tweeted about gun control, and some of the replies pointed out that California already has strong firearm regulations and in fact recently passed some more.
Cash: It’s as if they think California is an island. Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws. People go across the border to Indiana to buy the guns. This should be a federal law.
Kornhaber: The attacker in Thousand Oaks was using a handgun that is legal in California, but also an extended magazine, which may have been banned there.
Cash: Yeah, I don’t know how he got it. Step back and take the wide view and see that we have a systemic problem in this country. These were college kids, right? We use young people as collateral damage for the Second Amendment, and it’s wrong.
Kornhaber: Have country artists taken up your call in the last year to speak out against the NRA?
Cash: No. There’s a lot of fear. Particularly from younger artists who know the blowback they’ll get. Look at the blowback Taylor Swift got for just telling people to vote. I’ve gotten threats for speaking out. Like I said in the op-ed, people wanted to kill us because we spoke out against gun violence. There’s a level of insanity that’s taken root.
I heard from some musicians, privately, after Las Vegas and the op-ed, [who] said, “Thank you; my mind has been changed by this.” But very few came out publicly.
Kornhaber: How have you tackled this issue as an artist?
Cash: There’s a song, on my new record, that I did with Kris Kristofferson and Elvis Costello called “8 Gods of Harlem.” I’d recently read about a kid being killed in Harlem by gun violence, and we played it out like a theater piece: I wrote the mother’s, Kris wrote the father’s, Elvis wrote the brother’s point of view. I think it’s a powerful song. I mean, I don’t know if it’s going to change anybody’s mind—people are entrenched. But you have to say what’s in your heart, don’t you?
Kornhaber: You also sang on Mark Erelli’s recent song about gun violence, “By Degrees.”
Cash: That’s a heartbreaking song. It was subtle and so sharp at the same time. Like, you can learn to live with the worst imaginable possible thing when it’s happening incrementally. You don’t notice until there’s carnage all around you and the fabric of your country is torn apart.
Kornhaber: Your New York Times column mentioned that gun-rights proponents often say your dad, Johnny Cash, wouldn’t be on board with your cause. What’s your line on that claim?
Cash: Oh, it’s so ridiculous, and I never use him to support my own agenda. But he was on the advisory board of PAX, the anti-gun-violence-against-children organization. So, come on. He had hunting rifles and antique Remingtons, but he didn’t have an arsenal of military weapons, and he never believed in that.
Kornhaber: Do you have anything else to say about the fact that country-music fans have been targeted twice in a very explicit way?
Cash: I wish they would take notice and start defending themselves by supporting more commonsense gun laws. Not by adding more guns to the mix.
For almost a year, the U.S. Olympic Committee has been struggling with the question of what is to be done about USA Gymnastics, the Olympic subsidiary accused of covering up decades of sexual abuse perpetrated by the sports doctor Larry Nassar. During a week-long sentencing hearing in January, 169 young women testified against Nassar, describing their assaults in wrenching detail. He was sentenced to a maximum of 175 years in prison.
After the hearing, the Olympic Committee fired the entire USAG board. Then USOC leadership overhauled the organization’s bylaws to increase the board’s accountability. A few months after that, they forced out the new CEO they hired in the wake of the Nassar allegations, after she became embroiled in a series of scandals of her own.
But on Monday, the USOC finally resorted to what gymnastics insiders are calling “the nuclear option”: The Olympic Committee is moving to decertify USAG, the organization that has overseen and financially supported gymnastics, one of the most popular Olympic events in America, since 1963. (If the decertification process goes smoothly, USAG will continue to exist as an umbrella organization for gymnastics clubs across the country—but without Olympic affiliation or funding, multiple sources told me, those clubs will probably stop paying for membership, and the organization will soon go bankrupt.)
“We believe the challenges facing the organization are simply more than it is capable of overcoming in its current form,” Sarah Hirshland, CEO of the USOC, wrote in an open letter to the U.S. gymnastics community. Instead of taking further steps to correct the toxic culture within USAG, which allowed a predator such as Nassar to cycle through dozens of victims undetected, the USOC has decided to get rid of the organization altogether.
[Read: Larry Nassar and the impulse to doubt female pain]
The #MeToo movement has sparked countless conversations about the culture of companies plagued by sexual harassment, particularly about how that atmosphere developed in the first place and how it can be fixed. Especially at the elite level, gymnastics creates an environment where it is easy for predators to take advantage of athletes, said Michelle Simpson Tuegel, the attorney representing several former gymnasts in a lawsuit against the USOC. Young girls practice, sometimes for weeks, at remote training facilities far away from their parents. And they are encouraged not to listen to their bodies, she told me, and are often praised for competing while injured.
Various leadership teams at corporations rife with sexual harassment have employed an array of strategies: Fire the alleged harassers, fire the CEO, hire a diversity and inclusion officer, and make commercials about the extent to which the culture has changed, then blast them across American TV networks. But the tactic that the USOC will likely employ—dissolve the problematic organization and make a new one—appears to be something of a new idea. And it’s not at all clear whether that tactic will work.
When the USOC announced its decision to decertify USAG, Nassar victims and other high-profile Olympic gymnasts praised the move. “THANK YOU,” tweeted Rachael Denhollander, one of the victims, after the announcement. “This is for every survivor.” The Olympic medalist Aly Raisman, who was also abused by Nassar, described the decertification as “a significant step forward that is necessary for the overall health and well-being of the sport and its athletes.”
[Read: Where Larry Nassar’s judge went wrong]
Still, the dissolution of one organization, and the possible creation of another, might not be enough to permanently change a culture of abuse that victims claim has existed within American Olympic gymnastics for more than 30 years. “Decertification is not going to overhaul the cultural problems inherent to the sport,” Simpson Tuegel told me. “The Olympic Committee will just be stamping a different name on the same thing.”
She suggested that the move might have something to do with the pile of lawsuits pending against both USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic Committee, filed by former gymnasts who say they were sexually assaulted while on the U.S. Olympic team. “It seems awfully convenient that the announcement comes now, right as these lawsuits are really starting to move,” Simpson Tuegel said. “It really appears that USOC is trying to distance themselves from USAG.” USAG, not the USOC, has borne the brunt of the criticism for its handling of the Nassar case, so establishing some distance between the two organizations, she told me, could work in the USOC’s favor.
The decertification announcement was noticeably lacking in detail. Hirshland said there might be a new organization—one that “lives up to the expectations of the athletes and those that support them”—but did not describe how that organization would function. The question of whom it will employ, Simpson Tuegel told me, is on everyone’s mind: “Will these be all new people?” The USOC has not made any public statements about who might work for the next manifestation of USA Gymnastics. But because there are relatively few professional sports administrators who specialize in gymnastics on the national level, multiple people with knowledge of the situation told me, it’s likely that at least some portion of former USAG employees will transfer over. So then the question becomes, How many firings are required to create a blank slate?
Even if the USOC fired every one of USAG’s employees and hired a completely new staff, the process still wouldn’t necessarily prompt a culture change, said Catherine Mattice Zundel, a professional workplace-culture consultant. When she helps companies combat a culture of widespread sexual harassment, she said, her first step is to determine what stopped people from speaking up in the first place. If an HR representative looks the other way after hearing an allegation, she said, that doesn’t necessarily mean that particular person is the problem. Firing that employee, who is likely acting out of fear of backlash from people at the top, she told me, probably wouldn’t have a tangible impact on company culture.
When building the leadership team at the new organization, Zundel said, the USOC would need to conduct extensive training with new employees and watch closely for what she called “sexual-harassment risk factors”: a lack of diversity, a bunch of men at the top, and obscure reporting mechanisms. “It’s not enough to say, ‘We’re going to start a new company,’” Zundel told me. “The new company has to do things differently.” In the world of gymnastics specifically, Simpson Tuegel said, the leadership has to put the health and well-being of its young female athletes above competitive success.
“What would have happened to Uber if they’d tried to rebrand?” Zundel mused as we wrapped up our interview. In 2017, almost 500 former and current employees filed a lawsuit against the ride-sharing company over incidents of harassment and workplace discrimination. The wave of complaints, prompted first by a viral essay written by an Uber alumna named Susan Fowler, was a PR nightmare. But if Uber had shirked its old name and identity for a second incarnation of itself—the path that the USOC has proposed for USAG—Zundel wonders whether the company could ever have actually transformed, as it seems to be trying to do. “There is a value to owning up to something that went wrong,” she told me, “as yourself, not as someone else.”
Graphic novels aren’t just for kids or comics enthusiasts. The written word can evoke rich imagery, but in graphic storytelling, every aesthetic and narrative choice—from the colors used, to the spacing of each frame, to how and when dialogue is portrayed—can affect a reader’s experience.
In The Sculptor, Scott McCloud depicts the grandest of ideas (life, death, family, fame) in small, detailed frames, through the eyes of a young artist. For Tillie Walden (the Eisner Award–winning cartoonist) and Lisa Hanawalt (the artistic brain behind BoJack Horseman), the visual medium makes way for their stunning worlds focused on women who disrupt the science-fiction and Western genres, respectively. And while Jérôme Ruillier’s The Strange features anthropomorphic animals, the story it tells about the anxieties of being an undocumented immigrant is very much of this world.
Sometimes, words are still the best medium. Seventy-one years after Anne Frank’s diary was first published, a new graphic adaptation visualizes Frank’s story for a new generation of readers, but what gets lost in the translation?
Each week in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas, and ask you for recommendations of what our list left out. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.
What We’re Reading
The Quandary of Illustrating Anne Frank
“The book’s carefully crafted images interpret elements of Frank’s story with beauty and humor. But … the girl who breathed dimension into an unfathomable history is flattened, her power diluted.”
📚 ANNE FRANK’S DIARY: THE GRAPHIC ADAPTATION, adapted by Ari Folman and illustrated by David Polonsky
An Intergalactic Tale Populated by Women
“Walden has created a science-fiction universe that is about women, queer love, old buildings, and big trees. It may piss off science-fiction purists.”
📚 ON A SUNBEAM, by Tillie Walden
Coyote Doggirl Gives the Western a Whimsical, Watercolor Spin
“Hanawalt’s graphic novel respects its heroine’s restlessness. Her freedom, it seems to argue, is sacred.”
📚 COYOTE DOGGIRL, by Lisa Hanawalt
The Graphic Novel That Captures the Anxieties of Being Undocumented
“The protagonist is not a ‘stranger,’ with the opportunity to become known, or perhaps to even become a friend; he’s a ‘strange,’ and therefore always alien.”
📚 THE STRANGE, by Jérôme Ruillier
Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor Proves How Much Graphic Novels Can Do
“The story boils down to a magical dilemma about weighing the urge for a family down the road against the desire for professional validation today. Only this time—thanks to a deal with Death—it’s a man whose clock is ticking.”
📚 THE SCULPTOR, by Scott McCloud
You RecommendLast week, we asked you to share your favorite novels and stories centered on a specific place or location. Deborah Green, from Moose Pass, Alaska, said Willa Cather’s classic My Ántonia “brings the Plains alive in all its complexity; from searing heat to blizzard storms, [it’s] a land that gives abundantly and can also reduce a person to the most desperate straits.”
Kathleen Parks recommended Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid, a novel about refugees and migration. Kathleen recalled a scene set in the “hillsides overlooking San Francisco and Marin County” as “an alternative vision of serenity, where relieved immigrants create new homes in tents and shelters on the hills. I can never see the coastline without remembering that scene.”
What’s a graphic novel that you think everyone should read? Tweet at us with #TheAtlanticBooksBriefing, or fill out the form here.
This week’s newsletter is written by J. Clara Chan. The book on her bedside table right now is This Little Art, by Kate Briggs.
Comments, questions, typos? Email jchan@theatlantic.com.
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Kevin Simmers is a former police sergeant in Hagerstown, Maryland. During his tenure as a narcotics officer, he aggressively pursued drug arrests—especially those related to heroin. “I believed my entire life that incarceration was the answer to this drug war,” Simmers says in a new documentary from The Atlantic.
Then his 18-year-old daughter, Brooke, became addicted to opioids.
In the short film, Simmers shares the personal tragedy that led to a radical transformation in his ideology. “I did everything wrong here,” he admits. “I now think the whole drug war is total bullshit.”
Read Jeremy Raff’s article, “A Narcotics Officer Ends His War on Drugs,” for more.
Subscribe to Radio Atlantic: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play
Executive Editor Matt Thompson interviews Atlantic reporters on what lessons they drew from the midterm elections, speaking in turn with: Vann Newkirk, Emma Green, Ron Brownstein, Adam Harris, and David Graham.
Links
- “The Democrats’ Deep-South Strategy Was a Winner After All”(Vann R. Newkirk II, November 8, 2018)
- ”Tuesday Showed the Drawbacks of Trump's Electoral Bargain” (Ronald Brownstein, November 7, 2018)
- “The Year of the Woman Still Leaves Women With Terrible Representation in Government” (Emma Green, November 7, 2018)
- “The Democrats Are Back, and Ready to Take On Trump” (David A. Graham, November 7, 2018)
- “America Is Divided by Education” (Adam Harris, November 7, 2018)
- “The Georgia Governor’s Race Has Brought Voter Suppression Into Full View” (Vann R. Newkirk II, November 6, 2018)
Robert Sherrill was an outsider by the nature of his work as a Washington correspondent for The Nation. A prolific anti-establishment voice, Sherrill was unafraid to play contrarian to the left or right of the aisle.
“He took the shibboleths of liberalism and exposed them as what he felt they were,” Ralph Nader told The Washington Post when Sherrill died in 2014. “He took liberals and progressives down a peg or two, or 10 pegs or two.”
But Sherrill was also an outsider for a more obvious reason: He was denied White House press credentials—and fought in the courts for a decade to obtain access in a case that has become an important precedent this week.
After receiving credentials to the House and Senate press galleries in 1965—a prerequisite for receiving White House credentials—Sherrill received a letter in 1966 from the U.S. Secret Service denying him access to the grounds. No explanation was given. When he asked why his request for credentials was rejected, the Secret Service replied, “We can’t tell you the reasons.”
Thinking that his writing got him in trouble, Sherrill did not try to appease the Johnson administration. His 1967 book, The Accidental President, and the book that followed in 1968, The Drugstore Liberal, were assaults on President Lyndon B. Johnson and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, respectively. If he was being shut out for political reasons, so be it.
[Read: The president and the press]
In January 1972, when Sherrill reapplied for White House press credentials, he was again denied without explanation. That’s when the American Civil Liberties Union took his case to federal court. With the ACLU’s help, Sherrill sued the Secret Service for violating his First and Fifth Amendment rights.
By the time a D.C. circuit-court judge ruled in his case in 1977, it had been 11 years after his credentials were originally denied.
When Donald Trump clashed with Jim Acosta, the chief White House correspondent for CNN, at his post-midterms news conference on Wednesday—and later revoked his press credentials—he most likely knew nothing about the precedent set by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Robert Sherrill’s case—precedent, experts said, that put the law squarely on Acosta’s side.
“Thank you Mr. President. I wanted to challenge you on one of the statements that you made on the tail end of the campaign in the midterms,” Acosta started, microphone in hand, staring ahead toward the president from the front row of the press conference.
Trump’s lips pursed and then released. “Here we go,” he said, practically breaking the fourth wall.
“If you don’t mind, Mr. President—” Acosta tried.
“C’mon, c’mon, let’s go.” The president let out a half whistle from his mouth and motioned to his rival to hurry up and ask his question.
“—that this caravan was an invasion.”
“I consider it to be an invasion,” Trump replied.
The exchange became testier and Trump’s complexion reddened. “Honestly, I think you should let me run the country. You run CNN. And if you did it well, your ratings would be better,” Trump told the reporter.
Acosta held on to the microphone as a White House intern tried to grab it back from him. “Mr. President, I had one other question, if I may ask, on the Russia investigation,” Acosta said. “Are you concerned that—”
Trump lifted a finger and wagged it from the podium. “I’m not concerned about anything about the Russia investigation, ’cause it’s a hoax.” He walked away from the podium momentarily, readying for his next hit. Acosta gave in and relinquished the mic.
“I’ll tell you what,” the president huffed. “CNN should be ashamed of itself, having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn’t be working for CNN … You’re a very rude person. The way you treat Sarah Huckabee [Sanders] is horrible and the way you treat other people are horrible. You shouldn’t treat people that way.”
When Acosta returned to the White House grounds later that evening to do a live shot for Anderson Cooper 360°, the Secret Service asked for his hard pass, which he had held since 2013, and confiscated it. They were just following orders, and he understood that; the orders came from higher up. His access was revoked: He was locked out of the Trump White House.
To explain why Acosta’s credentials had been revoked, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary, tweeted a highly edited video on Wednesday that appeared to show Acosta hitting the intern who tried to grab his microphone. Sanders wrote on Twitter, “President Trump believes in a free press and expects and welcomes tough questions of him and his administration. We will, however, never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern...” Acosta tweeted back, “This is a lie.”
In actuality, the video Sanders shared was doctored and originally posted by Paul Joseph Watson, a British conspiracy theorist associated with the fake-news website Infowars.
[Read: Video doesn’t capture truth]
CNN immediately issued a strongly worded protest: “The White House announced tonight that it has revoked the press pass of CNN’s Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta,” the network’s statement read. “It was done in retaliation for his challenging questions at today’s press conference. In an explanation, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders lied. She provided fraudulent accusations and cited an incident that never happened. This unprecedented decision is a threat to democracy and the country deserves better. Jim Acosta has our full support.”
The decision to revoke Acosta’s credentials has led to condemnation from other journalists.
The White House Correspondents’ Association denounced “the Trump Administration’s decision to use US Secret Service security credentials as a tool to punish a reporter with whom it has a difficult relationship.” The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press wrote, “This is clearly inappropriate and unprecedented punishment by the Trump Administration for what it perceives as unfair coverage by the reporter, and White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders’ false description of the events leading up to it is insulting not only to the nation’s journalists, but to its people.”
Journalists and a number of politicians shared support for Acosta, some calling for solidarity on both sides of the aisle and among the press corps. “News the White House pulled Jim @Acosta’s credentials is not an attack on one journalist but all of the press,” the veteran journalist Dan Rather, formerly of CBS News, tweeted. “There should be complete solidarity. This is a moment for any Republican who says they believe in the Constitution to stand up.”
Many Republicans and conservative journalists did stand up for Acosta.
“The media is not the enemy of the people,” the former Florida Governor Jeb Bush tweeted. “The freedom of the press is protected by the Constitution. Presidents never enjoy pointed questions from the press, but President Trump should respect their right to ask them and respect Americans enough to answer them.”
The conservative blogger Erick Erickson tweeted, “Y’all, I’m sorry to defy the tribe, but I’ve watched this video over and over and it looks more like @Acosta had his arm out pointing with his finger and when she tried to pull the microphone down, both his arms went down rather naturally.”
Howie Kurtz, the host of Fox News’ Media Buzz, said that while he criticized Acosta’s behavior, “The [White House] escalation is just making him into a journalistic martyr.”
“No ref would throw flags for the physical altercation,” Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary under George W. Bush, said in an interview. “It wasn’t a physical altercation; it was incidental contact. No flags should be thrown.” Fleischer refused to defend Acosta’s behavior or blame the White House for its actions, but he agreed that this was not about Acosta assaulting anyone.
Among those in media and politics, the widespread consensus was an obvious one: This was not about safety and security; this was not about an assault. Acosta was punished for the way he went about his reporting.
[Read: How does Donald Trump think his war on the press will end?]
“The White House Correspondents Association, the White House, and CNN should be sitting down together and separately to address this,” Frank Sesno, the director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, told me. Sesno is a former CNN Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent as well. “If there are professional concerns that the White House has about Jim Acosta or anyone else, they should express that professionally. They should be talking about that openly and there should be an effort to determine what, if anything, needs to change. The response is not engaging the Secret Service to pull someone’s credentials.”
“That’s just completely inappropriate and just this side of thuggery in my view,” Sesno added.
In public remarks on Friday morning, Trump seemed unremorseful about pulling Acosta’s credentials. The president threatened further punishment for reporters like American Urban Radio Networks’ April Ryan, calling her a “loser.”
“It could be others also” if they “don’t treat the White House and the office of the presidency with respect,” Trump said.
Sherrill never knew why the Secret Service had refused to issue him credentials; they wouldn’t tell him. Only in 1972 did White House counsel John Dean and John Warner, the assistant to the director of the Secret Service, inform the ACLU that “Sherrill had been denied accreditation ‘for reasons of security’ on May 3, 1966.”
The Secret Service cited two incidents that had little to do with the president’s safety or White House security: Sherrill had gotten into a physical altercation in 1964, while he was a political writer for the Miami Herald, when he punched the press secretary to Florida Governor C. Farris Bryant aboard a Johnson campaign train. (He was arrested and fined for physical assault.) Additionally, the Secret Service noted that Sherrill had been charged with assault in 1962 in Texas.
The D.C. circuit court ruled in Sherrill’s favor in 1977. While the court did not demand that the Secret Service issue him a press credential, it did set forth a series of new, transparent steps to ensure that no reporter’s First Amendment rights were violated.
“Once the government creates the kind of forum that it has created, like the White House briefing room, it can’t selectively include or exclude people on the basis of ideology or viewpoint,” said Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
The new steps enunciated in the Sherrill decision to ensure that reporters’ First Amendment rights are not violated include the requirement to give the reporter notice and the right to rebut a formal written decision, which must accompany any revocation. “We further conclude that notice, opportunity to rebut, and a written decision are required because the denial of a pass potentially infringes upon First Amendment guarantees,” the court’s ruling states. “Such impairment of this interest cannot be permitted to occur in the absence of adequate procedural due process.”
“If the Secret Service makes this kind of determination that they’re going to no longer let someone have access, or limit access from the start, there should be a really good reason for that,” Michele Kimball, a media-law professor at George Washington University, said. “And if you are denied that access, there should be some sort of procedural due process for you, [so] that you can find out what happened. And it’s sort of that check to make sure that, again, it’s being handled evenhandedly.”
CNN declined to comment on Acosta’s situation. The network did not respond to questions about whether Acosta planned to sue or whether he is taking the steps put forth in Sherrill that allow him to object, rebut the decision, and seek written explanation from the Secret Service.
“What they’ve done here is not only unwise, but probably illegal,” the ACLU’s Wizner concluded.
In 1990, The Los Angeles Times profiled The Nation in its 125th year.
Sherrill had continued to cover the White House in the Carter and Reagan administrations, and he kept up his role writing about major corporations.
“Sherrill is the ultimate outsider, journalistically speaking, which makes him the quintessential Nation writer,” the Times wrote.
He clearly relished that role as an outsider, because when he won his 11-year battle with the White House to get credentialed, he opted against it.
“The fun thing about this was that when I was finally going to get a press pass, I never applied,” Sherrill told the Times. “I didn’t want to be in the White House. I had been in Washington long enough to realize that was the last place to waste your time sitting around for some dumb [expletive] to give a press conference.”
When all was said and done, Sherrill knew his best work would be done far away from the place he was never allowed to visit.
On Thursday night, Acosta’s name was part of a triple-byline story on CNN.com. “Trump considering [Chris] Christie, [Pam] Bondi, [Alexander] Acosta for attorney general,” he reported alongside Jeremy Diamond and Sarah Westwood.
“When they go low, we keep doing our jobs,” Acosta said on air Wednesday afternoon.
Acosta, like Sherrill, had shown that the White House could revoke his credentials, but it couldn’t stop him from doing his job.
Yesterday, tens of thousands of residents fled their homes in Paradise, California, north of Sacramento, escaping a fast-moving wildfire driven by high winds that swept through their community. Within 24 hours, the Camp Fire has burned more than 20,000 acres, and has virtually destroyed the town. Thousands of homes and other structures in Paradise have been consumed or badly damaged by the blaze. As firefighters struggle to gain control of the Camp Fire, several other wildfires are threatening other parts of the state, including the Woolsey Fire near Malibu, which has just prompted evacuation orders for some 13,000 residents.
Last week, Eliot A. Cohen used The Lord of the Rings to analyze a phenomenon he observed among the “erstwhile NeverTrumpers” who “attempt to cleanse themselves of the stain of having signed letters denouncing candidate Trump by praising President Trump’s achievements and his crudely framed, rough-hewn wisdom.” When power is corrupt, Cohen argued, there is no way to escape its toxic influence.
I’ve long felt that The Lord of the Rings was underappreciated for its analysis of morality, honor, and the traps that power sets for the unwary and the ambitious. You’re quite right to compare Ross Douthat to Saruman.
However, some conservatives have made a worse bargain than Saruman did. They’ve taken the equivalent of one of the Nine Rings of Power that Sauron handed out to Mortal Men. And in doing so, they’ve become hollowed-out shells. They’ve thrown honor, decency, and everything else that conservatives used to claim was important into the flames in order to grasp political power above what they could have gained on their own.
Kirstjen Nielsen strikes me as a prime example of a thoroughly modern Ringwraith. She’s given up her morality and perhaps her soul to hang on to her position as the head of the Department of Homeland Security.
Unfortunately, no wise and just philosopher-king is lurking in the wilds of America to set everything right. Aragorn isn’t coming to save the day with the banner of the Kings. We must do it ourselves, and it’s going to be hard, if not impossible. My son told me that he believes this to be the task that is set before his generation.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Nancy Ott
Pittsburgh, Pa.
Professor Cohen has hit the nail on the head. The Lord of the Rings story characterizes the struggle of men and women at any time in history who try to fight temptations of personal gain at the expense of personal values.
Tom Houser
Sheppton, Pa.
Eliot Cohen writes a clever and insightful article on the morality embodied in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and he does a good job of applying it to the modern American political landscape. But he applies that lens a bit narrowly when he applies it only to former NeverTrumpers now finding accommodation with our president. Would Democrats have reacted any differently had Hillary won the election and a subsequent investigation turned up credible evidence of malfeasance on the part of her and her team? At the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings, it is not Frodo’s resolution or courage that saves Middle Earth (he cannot bring himself to destroy the Ring), but only his pity for Gollum. That’s a lesson Democrats would be well served to remember.
Daniel H. Smith
Highlands Ranch, Colo.
Eliot Cohen likens Ross Douthat to Saruman, who in The Lord of the Rings made a pitch to the good men of Middle Earth to recognize that Mordor’s time has come, and that they would do well to ally with it. They may even, according to Saruman, come to direct Mordor’s decisions.
It was a trap, of course. Cohen says a recent Douthat column about NeverTrumpers put him in mind of Saruman’s trap.
That is a deeply unfair characterization. I urge you to read the entire column. Douthat has never hidden his contempt for Trump. But he is trying to be what NeverTrumpers like the establishmentarian Eliot Cohen are not: realistic. In his column, Douthat recognizes that whether we like it or not, Trump has changed what it means to be politically conservative in America.
Rod Dreher
Excerpt from a blog post on theamericanconservative.com
Excellent piece. This is a perfect example of why the study of literature continues to be a critical component of a solid education. Despite our current focus on STEM education, it’s literature that gives us insight into how to understand human nature, politics, law, and culture.
Mary Vreeland
Fredericksburg, Va.
Andrew Parker wrote: Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the rise of fascism. This author’s metaphor is very germane.
Jary May Blige wrote: “The stakes are not nearly as high for conservative thinkers as they were for the inhabitants of Middle Earth.” Ehm, not so sure about this.
While I’ve been reading THE LORD OF THE RINGS aloud to my kids, I’m also reading @flemingrut’s magisterial commentary alongside; @EliotACohen’s in the same vein, letting Gandalf speak clearly & forcefully against any moral shortcut & excusehttps://t.co/C26qTD426G#LOTR #Tolkien
— Josh Hale (@expatminister) November 5, 2018Fwiw I think NeverTrumpers who want to resist Trump himself but see something of use or importance or necessity in populism are closer to Boromir than Saruman:https://t.co/Ol9mtB4Za3
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) November 1, 2018I think the important insight we can take from this piece is that the Presidency and, by extension, the whole of the Federal government and bureaucracy, is the One Ring, which must be cast into the fire and eternally destroyed. https://t.co/EJHs5mb0Bn
— Fr. Brendon Laroche (@padrebrendon) November 1, 2018Eliot A. Cohen replies:I appreciate the kind words about “The Saruman Trap.” The Lord of Rings is indeed a modern epic, but we should allow writers a bit of room for whimsy—having a bit of fun while making a serious point. Because it is an epic, LOTR addresses universal themes, and, Democrats being human, I quite agree that they are as subject to temptations of power as Republicans. But it is the latter who are in charge now. As for Rod Dreher, he uses the word establishmentarian in the way Douthat uses the words apostate and convert, i.e., as a way of reading out of a community those whose ideas he does not accept by using a label in place of an argument. I dislike that. I also reject the notion that “Trump has changed what it means to be politically conservative in America.” Just because the Republicans have abandoned conservatism does not mean that I have to. Like an Ent, I don’t change.
The past few months have been busy for the student activists of March for Our Lives, an advocacy group founded after a gunman killed 17 people at a Parkland, Florida, high school earlier this year. In anticipation of the midterm elections, organizers toured the country encouraging young people to vote for candidates who support stricter gun-control laws. That didn’t quite pan out exactly the way they had hoped on Tuesday night, as their favored Senate and gubernatorial candidates in Florida didn’t win outright, and those elections are currently still being contested.
And then two days after the election, they woke up to yet another mass shooting, as at least 13 people were gunned down during college night at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, which was frequented by students from the nearby Pepperdine University, California Lutheran College, and California State University Channel Islands.
[Read: A mass shooting in one of the “safest cities in America”]
Matt Deitsch, the older brother of two Parkland survivors and a member of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School class of 2016, is the chief strategist for and one of the founders of March for Our Lives. He spoke with me on Thursday about what happened in Thousand Oaks, the push March for Our Lives has been making for stricter gun control, and how the group plans on responding to the latest shooting.
Natalie Escobar: I want to start off by acknowledging that today must be hard. Could tell me about what’s on your mind?
Matt Deitsch: I had a thought of being back to those horrific moments [right after I learned about the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas]. I also thought about how before the midterm elections, politicians were talking about things that weren’t really a threat to American citizens [instead of talking about gun violence], and now after the election, mass shooters are still in the headlines. We’ve had over 300 this year, and it’s not going to slow down until we do something about it. I think now we have a Congress that will at least potentially take the conversation beyond where it’s stalled for so long.
Escobar: Reportedly, two of the people at the bar last night were there celebrating their 21st birthday—that detail hit a lot of us in the newsroom pretty hard. It’s supposed to be a milestone of adulthood, and I’m wondering if you think that how young people feel about coming of age has changed at all in a time when events like this keep happening.
Deitsch: We understand that we have a long life ahead of us, and we don’t want to live a long life in fear. And so we’re going to do something to stop this horror. I turned 21 last month. We hear about all the young people with so much potential gunned down, and we have to stop it, because the future is suffering and our youth are traumatized.
Escobar: March for Our Lives has recently been focused on the midterms and getting young people to the polls. What was your Election Day like? Can you tell me about the things you were doing in the hours before results came in?
Deitsch: A week and a half before the election, we did a tour of 25 colleges around the country. We came to Parkland for Election Day, and we created a “war room” with local students. In the war room, we set up a phone bank and called 18-to-21-year-olds across the state of Florida, and we made over 9,000 phone calls in one day. Then we went to a viewing party at night. The Florida numbers weren’t surprising, but it definitely reminded us where we are in Florida. The youth turnout was the highest it has ever been in American history, so it’s a huge step in the right direction.
Escobar: Are the election results going to change your strategy at all? What are you planning next?
Deitsch: Our organization has never really been candidate-centric or policy-centric. We hope to expand the electorate of the people who care about this issue, and understand the urgency of putting this issue first. We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing and create a blueprint for young people to have more of a force in the electoral process. Elected officials now know that they’re going to need young people to win these close races.
Escobar: I’m wondering what you observed in your Parkland community on the night of the election and if you’ve seen people change since February.
Deitsch: There’s a reason it takes you three times voting to become a lifetime voter, because you understand the wins and the losses and what’s necessary to be a part of the system, to feel your own power. I think Parkland is starting to see its own power. I felt really hopeful, and there’s so much to celebrate.
David Mackenzie is a great Scottish director who hasn’t really made a film set in Scotland in years. In 2003, he emerged with Young Adam (starring Ewan McGregor), a moody yarn set in 1950s Glasgow, but since then has only occasionally revisited his native land. His most recent films—the English prison drama Starred Up and the Texas bank-robber thriller Hell or High Water—were some of his best. But with Outlaw King, Mackenzie returns to his homeland to tackle one of its biggest legends: Scotland’s medieval battle for independence. It’s a tale that’s been covered before, most notably by Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning hit Braveheart.
Outlaw King has a star of its own—Chris Pine, in the role of King Robert the Bruce. Robert was portrayed in Braveheart as a calculating but gutless politician who ultimately abandons the rebellious cause of William Wallace (Gibson). Outlaw King chronicles what happened afterward, as Robert takes up the mantle of Scottish independence in the early 14th century and begins a guerrilla campaign against the English King Edward I (Stephen Dillane). The film is intent on dashing the romantic myths of Gibson’s movie and many other medieval dramas, laying bare the grimy truth of period warfare.
What was that truth? A lot of men charging at one another in fields, whacking folks off their horses with swords and halberds, and mud—lots and lots of mud. Robert was a noted tactician, and Mackenzie wants to dramatize that, though the king’s idea of tactics mostly involves baiting English soldiers to charge into slimy pits littered with spikes. As innovative as Robert was, he still lived during the early 1300s, and Outlaw King is caked with the grubby details of that time. The film may be too much of a bloody slog for some; others will be on board for every gruesome minute, as I was.
In Braveheart, Scottish independence was a matter of honor, and the initial Wallace campaign was more direct. Outlaw King picks up not long after Wallace has been defeated and sees Robert navigating the tricky politics of swearing loyalty to King Edward without losing the respect of his countrymen. Also in the mix are John Comyn (Callan Mulvey), a rival for Scottish leadership; Robert’s father (James Cosmo), preaching peace; and Prince Edward (Billy Howle), the king’s son, who has a chip on his shoulder about his own military prowess.
Initially, Robert tries to maintain the truce by marrying an Englishwoman, Elizabeth de Burgh (Florence Pugh), but the situation quickly disintegrates and war resumes, with Robert constantly retreating and scurrying around the country to gather soldiers and avoid being crushed for good. Pine plays the self-proclaimed King of Scots as a gruff, brooding strategist, less given to sentimental speeches and more concerned with outflanking his enemies. His accent is solid, but better still is his confidence; Pine never grandstands for the audience to appear more regal than necessary. His stoicism is balanced out by a far hammier ensemble, including a particularly unhinged Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the Scottish warrior James Douglas.
As a filmmaker, Mackenzie has always strived for verisimilitude no matter what the genre. A movie as pulpy as Hell or High Water worked because its actors (including Pine) felt like real people despite their heightened cops-and-robbers antics. Outlaw King is aiming for the same and largely succeeds, even as Taylor-Johnson and Howle mug for the camera. Pine and Pugh’s characters, in particular, form a crucial bond early in the film that makes their eventual separation during the campaign feel more high stakes.
[Read: ‘Hell or High Water’ offers an iconic vision of the modern West]
Mackenzie knows Robert is a politician who builds alliances carefully, but he also knows those alliances have to matter to viewers. Outlaw King does a strong job mixing the historical exposition with something a little more recognizably human. The movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in a longer form and felt bogged down (especially in its first act) with all the background information it was trying to deliver. Mackenzie has since trimmed the movie extensively, cutting some 20 minutes, and its final form on Netflix is much cleaner.
Outlaw King might not replace Braveheart in the public eye, given how actively it resists the inspirational trope of combat automatically conferring glory. In Mackenzie’s film, surviving any battle requires a mix of luck and daring, and even legendary figures like Robert (still lionized in Scotland to this day) struggle with the costs that come with freedom fighting. But Outlaw King is a necessary antidote, one that might catch audiences off guard at first before burrowing into the mind through sheer, mucky tenacity.
At the end of last month, with the midterms looming, I gave a talk before a small private audience in California in which I argued for optimism because—among other things—the moment for firing Robert Mueller had passed.
Eighteen months ago, I said, President Donald Trump had an opportunity to disrupt the Russia investigation: He had fired the FBI director and had rocked the Justice Department back on its heels. But Trump had dithered. He had broadcast his intentions too many times. And in the meantime, Mueller had moved decisively, securing important indictments and convictions, and making whatever preparations were necessary for hostile fire. And now Democrats were poised to take the House of Representatives. The window of opportunity was gone.
In the 48 hours since Trump fired Jeff Sessions and installed Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general, I have had occasion to wonder whether I was being overly optimistic a week ago. Whitaker is the kind of bad dream from which career Justice Department officials wake up at night in cold sweats. He’s openly political. The president is confident in his loyalty and that he won’t recuse himself from the investigation—notwithstanding his public statements about it and his having chaired the campaign of one of the grand-jury witnesses. There are legal questions about his installation at the department’s helm. And he’s known as the White House’s eyes and ears at Justice.
It’s bad—very bad.
[Read: Democrats quickly confront the limits of their power to stop Trump].
All of which leads Philip Lacovara, who served in the Watergate special prosecutor’s office, to conclude that it was Mueller, not Trump, who missed his moment. Writing in The Washington Post, Lacovara worries that “by waiting until after the midterms to issue his final report about President Trump’s possible culpability, Mueller has effectively missed his market and may have doomed the investigation.” With Sessions gone and the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, no longer in charge of the investigation, Lacovara writes:
The new attorney general, whether it is Whitaker or someone else, will be free to constrain Mueller’s investigation and suppress the special counsel’s findings: Any report by Mueller must go to the attorney general, who decides what, if anything, to do with it. Sessions’s replacement will be far more comfortable suppressing the report now that firmer Republican control of the Senate protects not only Trump but also the new attorney general from any risk of being ousted in a post-impeachment trial.
Democrats have much to celebrate about the midterms, but their elation should be tempered by the realization that the election also may have spelled the end for Mueller’s Russia investigation, which was too long in getting to the punch line.
Leave aside for now the question of whether Lacovara’s critique is fair to Mueller. To assess, after all, whether Mueller should have moved faster, one would have to know more about the state of his investigation than I, at least, know. Lacovara is certainly correct about one big thing: The prospects for interference with the Mueller investigation went up dramatically with Whitaker’s appointment.
Yet, that said, I stand by my conclusion. I am still, if only tentatively, of the belief that the prospects for interference are dimmer than fear and panic and another Trump-busted norm have us imagining. Here are 10 reasons to think that Whitaker may have less capacity to foil Mueller than the current moment—and his formal powers—may suggest.
[Read: What Sessions’s resignation means for Robert Mueller]
First, Mueller has spread the wealth around. The normal critique of special-counsel investigations is that they hoard jurisdiction, endlessly expand, and become personal roving inquests into their political subjects’ lives. The opposite is the case with Mueller. He has not merely referred to other Justice Department components matters at the margins of his investigation, such as the Michael Cohen situation in New York. He has also let other components handle matters involving core questions of Russian interference in the U.S. elections, such as the Maria Butina and Elena Khusyaynova prosecutions. The result of this strategic step is not just that Mueller is relatively invulnerable to the charge of any kind of power grab or mission creep. It is also that firing him or reining him in only does so much. If Trump imagines these investigations as a cancer on his presidency, they are a cancer that has already metastasized.
Second, the investigation has already progressed very far. It is one thing to squelch an investigation in its crib. It’s another thing to squelch an investigation that has already collected important evidence and brought key cases. The effort to do so cannot take place invisibly, as a great many prosecutors and FBI agents will be aware of what is happening. None of them has to leak anything for that awareness to find its way to Capitol Hill, because the Hill is already aware of the problem and looking for signs. Mueller is by many accounts writing a report, a step that signals a completed investigation or a completed portion of an investigation. The effort to suppress that report could be politically galvanizing and, in its own way, as damaging for the administration as the contents of that report when they eventually become public.
Third, Mueller does not have to remain silent. Mueller has used silence as a powerful strategic instrument throughout his investigation. He has done this for a variety of reasons, and the silence has served him well. Among other things, it has given his voice, if and when he ever chooses to use it, enormous moral and political power. The day that Mueller holds a press conference or stands before cameras and declares that his investigation is facing interference from the Justice Department will be a very big day, perhaps a game-changing day. If the department suppresses his report, he has the capacity to, as James Comey did after his firing, testify before Congress about what happened. Mueller has not hoarded power or jurisdiction, but he has hoarded moral authority. If Whitaker or his successor seeks to frustrate the probe, Mueller can spend down those huge reserves of credibility.
[Adam Serwer: Trump will only get more dangerous.]
Fourth, the midterms matter—and they mean investigations. Squelching a high-profile, politically explosive investigation of the president is hard enough in this country under any circumstances. When the opposition party controls powerful congressional committees and is committed to oversight, it’s that much harder. The Democratic takeover of Congress means that key committees will be watching every move Whitaker and his successor make with respect to the investigation. It means subpoenas for any report they may try to suppress. It means an open and receptive forum for Mueller to testify should he have something to say. It means constant investigation. And it means that the threat of impeachment hangs over everything. This is a very big change, and Mueller is as aware of it as anyone. As a result of Democratic control of the House, he could, for example, write an unclassified summary of his report and conclusions with every expectation that major congressional committees would demand it and release it publicly. He could also, say, write an impeachment referral—if he thought he had evidence Congress needs to see—and dare Whitaker to prevent its transmission to Congress. If Whitaker were to do so, Mueller could resign and announce what happened and let Congress do the rest. Having Democrats in control of the House matters enormously.
Fifth, the confirmation process for the attorney general still matters. Whitaker is ultimately a placeholder. He can do damage while in office, but ultimately the president is going to have to name an attorney general, and the Senate is going to have to confirm that person. That means two big things: Trump has to name someone who can win confirmation, and the nominee has to personally face the Senate Judiciary Committee. The midterms strengthened the president’s hand in the Senate, both by increasing the Republican caucus and as a consequence of the departure of Republicans such as Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, who might have been expected to take a stand against an unacceptable nominee. But there are still senators who might well draw some lines. And that has mattered in the past. The reason Chris Wray, and not someone wholly unacceptable for the role, is FBI director today is that confirmability required it. Moreover, the confirmation process offers a genuine and meaningful opportunity for senators to force a nominee publicly and under oath to commit himself or herself to supervising the investigation in a nonpolitical manner. These things matter. During Watergate, Elliot Richardson resigned as attorney general, rather than firing Archibald Cox, precisely because he had given the Senate his word that he would protect the special prosecutor.
Sixth, corrupting the Justice Department is harder than you think. Trump has tried very hard. He openly declares his ambition that the department’s function should be to protect him and prosecute his enemies. And yet the norms and traditions of the department have proved uncommonly robust and sticky and have frustrated him at every turn. Yes, cultures can be corrupted. And we should certainly worry that Whitaker comes into the department’s leadership in service of Trump’s declared goal of corrupting its culture. But don’t underestimate the difficulty of the project, particularly with Congress watching and journalists making the rounds every day. The culture has defended itself remarkably ably so far and will continue to do so.
Seventh, senior Justice Department officials, both career and political, can draw lines. This point is closely related to the previous one, but also distinct. One indication that the system has held so far is that we have not seen mass resignations or resignations in protest over matters of principle. That will change if Whitaker or his successor moves against the investigation in a fashion that officials regard as unacceptable. Rosenstein, for example, has assiduously defended and protected the Mueller investigation, staking his personal credibility on the endeavor. Will he and Wray, who has to think about how the FBI rank and file will react to his sitting on his heels while a major FBI investigation is buried, really do nothing if Whitaker impedes Mueller? Even if they are inclined to passivity, the norms and expectations of the department will demand more of them, particularly if underlings threaten to resign if they do not act.
[David Frum: Forcing out Sessions is an attack on accountability.]
Eighth, Whitaker will get briefed and assume responsibility for the department. It may sound naive to say that this will matter, but let’s at least consider the possibility that it will matter. It is one thing to spout off #MAGA nonsense about Mueller on CNN while you’re a private citizen. But Whitaker, assuming he does not recuse himself, will now get briefed on the actual Mueller investigation, having taken an oath of office to preserve and protect the Constitution. Let’s assume for a moment that Mueller will have compelling facts and his briefing will be impressive. It would be hard to look Bob Mueller in the face, discussing his actual investigation with the facts and legal theories squarely on the table, and then carry water for a subject of that investigation. If Whitaker does this, the nakedness of it will be transparent to all involved and trigger some of the cultural and normative reactions described in the previous two points. It’s also possible—if unlikely, given Whitaker’s background—that Whitaker will actually be moved by reality when confronted with it. Moreover, the norms and history of the Justice Department are extremely powerful and act upon those who show up. Think of Sessions, a political animal who got confirmed and then immediately recused himself on the advice of career officials. Perhaps Whitaker will defy all of this, but it’s not an easy thing to do—and if Whitaker does it, he will do it knowing that he will go down in history as a John Mitchell figure. That should at least be food for thought on his part.
Ninth, the public actually cares. Thursday evening, tens of thousands of people around the country protested Trump’s move against Sessions. That’s before Whitaker actually does anything. People around the country care a great deal about protecting Mueller, about learning the truth about Russian intervention in our elections, and about Trump’s abuses of power. Expect political pressures to grow proportionately to the increased threat to accountability. This public vigilance and anger is not just #resistance noise; it’s actively useful.
Finally, 10th, these points all work in tandem with one another. They are not discrete. They operate in an ineffable combination of bureaucratic maneuvering, congressional action, journalism, personality, and public pressure. And in this dangerous moment—and Whitaker’s installation does create a profoundly dangerous moment—the combined effects here will be a powerful defense against misdeeds.
In November 2000, some 250 miles above Earth, a capsule carrying one American and two Russians docked to the International Space Station (ISS). A hatch leading to their new living quarters swung open, and the crew members floated in and got to work. They hooked up cables and computers for easy communication with the ground. They installed life-support systems to maintain breathable air. They activated the toilet. For the next four months, the ISS was their home.
Over the years, crews came and went, sourced first from the United States and Russia, and then from Japan, Germany, Italy, France, Canada, and other countries. New pressurized modules and other hardware arrived, growing the station in size and scope. So did science experiments spanning a myriad of fields, prepared by researchers eager to learn how stuff works in zero gravity.
One thing hasn’t changed in the past 18 years: There have always been people on board. When one crew departed, another remained inside, waving through the thick glass windows as it watched the capsule descend to Earth.
This fall, that guarantee seemed to be in jeopardy.
The trouble began back on Earth, at a launch facility in Kazakhstan for ferrying people to and from the ISS. On October 11, the American astronaut Nick Hague and the Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin wriggled into a small capsule atop a rocket and blasted off into the sky. Minutes into their flight, the launch vehicle’s computers detected a malfunction in the rocket and automatically triggered abort procedures. The crew capsule was shoved away from the rocket and parachuted safely to the ground.
[Read: A harrowing failed launch in Kazakhstan]
Rescue teams scooped up the crew members, and Russia, which operates the launch system, opened an investigation into the incident, the first launch failure of a crewed Soyuz mission in 35 years. None of the world’s space travelers—from the United States, Russia, or elsewhere—would fly until the Soyuz system was deemed safe, officials said.
Three remained, however, on the ISS: Serena Auñón-Chancellor of the United States, Sergey Prokopyev of Russia, and Alexander Gerst of Germany. The trio arrived in June. They’re scheduled to leave in mid-December, when the Soyuz capsule responsible for transporting them reaches its time limit for remaining in space. Hague and Ovchinin were supposed to be on board to see them off.
The emergency landing created an unsettling question: What if the trio comes home before another crew goes up?
“We want to have people living and working there, so that would be a disappointment,” said Kjell Lindgren, a NASA astronaut who resided on the ISS in 2015 and part of the backup crew for future SpaceX missions to the station, in an interview. “It would be a very new thing for us not to have someone on the space station.”
It’s important to note that the ISS doesn’t depend on the presence of a crew to fly. Mission controllers on the ground can operate the station as it coasts through space, traveling at an average speed of 17,500 miles an hour. ISS systems are built to be redundant; a failure of one of several identical systems doesn’t signal a major catastrophe. If necessary, Russia can also deliver uncrewed Progress capsules to dock to the ISS and, as has been done in the past, fire their thrusters to elevate the station, keeping it in its usual orbit.
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, completed its investigation of the incident last week. It concluded that the problem had originated with one of the engines on the Soyuz rocket and could be fixed for future launches. It has set the next crewed launch to the ISS for December 3, 10 days before the current crew is scheduled to depart. If the schedule sticks, the space agencies won’t have to face the possibility of an empty ISS.
But just in case, before Russia finished its investigation, NASA spent several weeks preparing for the possibility of leaving the ISS unoccupied. The space agency has a “de-crew” document for this scenario, which instructs the departing astronauts to make sure systems are running fine, install backups, and top off science experiments. “We primarily focus on what actions the crew would need to take in order to leave the station in an optimal configuration for the ground-control team until we are able to return crew onboard,” said Kenny Todd, the station’s mission-operations-integration manager.
But NASA’s protocols don’t specify exactly how long the ISS could theoretically operate without a crew. “I don’t believe we have a defined time limit,” Todd said.
Although the station can be operated remotely, there’s no substitute for having people on board. Astronauts conduct repairs inside and outside the station, replace aging hardware, and perform regular checks of life-support systems. Flight controllers can track the status and health of virtually every piece of the station, but astronauts are their eyes and ears. They know far more about what’s going on, especially during emergencies.
One night in August, as the crew slept, flight controllers on Earth noticed that the air pressure on the ISS had dropped slightly—a sign of a leak somewhere on the station. The air wasn’t escaping quickly, so flight controllers decided not to wake up the slumbering crew, which consisted at the time of three Americans, two Russians, and one German.
When the crew woke up the next morning, it was instructed to scour the station to find the source of the leak. The crew members found it inside a Soyuz capsule docked to the ISS, in a section that burns up during the re-entry to Earth—a two millimeter hole they’d never seen before. The crew plugged the hole with sealant and gauze. It took photographs and video footage of the scene and sent them to Earth, where an investigation was launched into the cause.
Russian officials are still working on it. They have ruled out an impact with micrometeoroids, space rocks that travel at thousands of miles an hour and can easily cut through metal. They believe someone drilled the hole, but they don’t know who, why, or even when.
[Read: What the heck happened on the International Space Station?]
In this emergency situation, mission controllers could talk to the crew and walk it through patching up the mysterious hole. But what would happen if the ground couldn’t communicate with the station?
In 2007, Michael López-Alegría, a NASA astronaut, and his crewmates woke up one weekend to find that half of the lights were off in the ISS. As they floated through the station, they realized half of everything was down, from the systems that regulate the temperature to the scrubbers that remove carbon dioxide from the air so it doesn’t become toxic. On top of that, communications were down. Mission control didn’t know what was happening on board, and vice versa.
The crew turned to the printed manuals stowed away on board, looking for fixes. Within two to three hours, it had restored communications with the ground, and flight controllers guided the astronauts through rebooting the rest.
“That was the type of thing that would be problematic if you don’t have crew on board,” said López-Alegría, who retired from NASA in 2012, after three flights on the Space Shuttle and six months on the ISS.
Even without people on board, the ISS is a chatty environment. The station transmits data back to Earth constantly, relaying thousands of signals about its tranche of systems and its condition. López-Alegría said that during the communications blackout, this information didn’t make it to the ground.
López-Alegría points out that the ISS was younger then. “I do think the systems are more redundant because the systems are more complete now,” he said.
But if a similar outage were to occur while the ISS was empty, mission control would be flying the station blind. Officials wouldn’t know, for example, about a small change in breathable air that suggested a leak was afoot.
When I asked Lindgren whether there were any hidden upsides to an unoccupied ISS, he mentioned an autonomous physics experiment in the Japanese segment of the station. The experiment is designed to study the Marangoni effect, in which differences in surface tension drive the motion of liquids. On Earth, the phenomenon creates problems for semiconductors, degrades heat-radiation devices in computers, and, most delightfully, produces the tiny streaks on your glass of wine as you swirl it around.
On the ISS, the experiment involves building tiny bridges out of liquid suspended in microgravity. “Those bridges will break up even with the slightest vibration, so they’re often done at night when the crew is asleep,” Lindgren said. “This would actually be an opportunity where it would be fairly quiet.”
There could also be a hygiene advantage. Astronauts on board the ISS spend several hours each weekend on household chores like wiping down surfaces and vacuuming filters. But most of the debris comes from the crew itself, in the form of clothing fibers, hair, and skin. So the ISS may actually be cleaner without any human inhabitants.
“If there was nobody there to do that cleaning, that would also suppose that there’s nobody there to make the mess,” Lindgren said.
If The White Album were a concept album, the concept would be this: The world’s greatest four-piece, comprising two geniuses, one great and searching songwriter, and a magical, melancholy drummer-clown, is breaking up—it just doesn’t know it yet.
Mid-1968: The Beatles, newly returned from their trip to the Maharishi’s meditation commune in Rishikesh, India, are in an undirected and febrile state. Brian Epstein, manager and whip-cracker, is dead. At Abbey Road, where they have the run of the studio, a combination of loosey-goosey late-night scheduling, wild productivity, and ever more fussy recording habits (99 takes of a George Harrison song—never to be used, in the end—called “Not Guilty”) has worn out their greatest musical ally, their supreme editor and controller of quality, the producer George Martin. And band telepathy is out of whack: John has fallen ego-dissolvingly in love with Yoko, who goes everywhere with him.
[Read: How the Beatles wrote ‘A Day in the Life]’
So after the noospheric jackpot—the global love-ripple that was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—and the misfire of Magical Mystery Tour (both highly imagined, overtly conceptualized, McCartney-determined projects), The Beatles. Or The White Album, as the world knows it. Thirty songs pulling in 20 different directions, multipolar, spiking and troughing, inventing genres or exhausting them, earthy, heavenly, now dazzled by clear light, now plunging willfully into chaos and carnality.
“Long, Long, Long” is George’s waltz with God, murmuring almost shapelessly upward out of an abyss of yearning—of longing—toward the awesome punctuation of Ringo’s drum fills. John’s “Yer Blues” is cosmic gutbucket, arch primitivism, an ironic howl from the floor of the universe: “In the morning / Wanna die / In the evening / Wanna DIE.” Paul, more protean than ever, is at once the immaculate primping formalist of “Martha My Dear,” widening his eyes at the keyboard; the crystalline innocent of “I Will”; and the frazzled distortion addict of “Helter Skelter.” And Ringo sings “Good Night” with shimmering, doleful, consoling authority, an impresario of dreamland.
What, then, to make of this enormous reissue package, The Beatles (White Album) Super Deluxe Edition? Seven discs—demos, sessions, a remastering—and a great big book. Doesn’t it just magnify the sprawl, increase the luggage, barnacle with further add-ons and special features this already ungainly rattlebag of a record? Answer: Yes but no, or yes but who cares, because this is the Beatles, and we want it all.
We want the rough acoustic take of George’s “Sour Milk Sea,” a superb little pro-meditation, anti-negativity rocker that didn’t make the album: “Get out of the Sour Milk Sea / You don’t belong there / Get back to where you should be.” We want to hear John, before a run-through of “Cry Baby Cry,” muttering, “Semolina semolina pilchard green snot pie / All mixed together with a dead dog’s eye.”
We want the sensation of the Beatles playing as a band, a unit, electrically self-aware, which we get from take 19 of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” Through the lopsided chug of the verse they go (“Man in the crowd with the multicolored mirrors on his hobnail boots,” sings Lennon, in what now sounds unavoidably like a future-flash of a suicide bomber, “Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime”) before landing with beautiful, unanimous, flat-as-a-pancake, concentrically spreading heaviness on the first syllable of the chorus: “I need a FIX ’cause I’m GOING down.”
To the nuances of the remastering, by George Martin’s son Giles, I cannot speak, having vulgarized my ears with decades of heavy metal. But the selections from the sessions are glorious. Listening to a full-tilt take of “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” I heard it for the first time as John’s Rishikesh anthem, his unleashed-by-meditation leap into the All. There’s no madly clanging fireman’s bell on this version, but there is a fantastically wiry, preying guitar line from George, as John issues his manifesto for the embrace of metaphysical extremes: “The deeper you go / The higher you fly / The higher you fly / The deeper you go / So c’mon!”
The demos, meanwhile—recorded unplugged at George’s house in Esher, outside London—are a revelation. “Dear Prudence,” as every Beatles fan knows, is John’s other Rishikesh song, written for Mia Farrow’s sister Prudence: Part of the company, she was meditating so hard that she seemed to have lost contact with reality. On the Esher demos, John delivers the prescription: “The sun is up, the sky is blue / It’s beautiful, and so are you.” Then, continuing to strum, he starts busking, mumbling first about something that happened “in the middle of a meditation course in Rishikesh, India,” and then his voice strengthens, assuming a storyteller’s lilt: “Sooner or later,” he recounts, “she was going to go completely berserk under the care of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi … All the people around her were very worried about the girl because she was going in-saaannnnnnne …” And then he says it, simply and world-healingly, a broken Beatle using the last of his powers: “So—we sang to her.”
The White House has revoked the press pass of Jim Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, after a testy exchange between the reporter and President Trump at a news conference on Wednesday. Acosta posed a question about the Central American migrant caravan, challenging Trump’s framing of it as an “invasion” meant to reap political advantage. An irritated Trump tried to move on, but Acosta resisted relinquishing the floor. When a White House press aide—a young woman—attempted to retrieve the microphone from Acosta, a light skirmish ensued, and was captured on film.
The White House called Acosta’s exchange with the aide an inappropriate physical contact. In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that President Trump “believes in a free press” but will “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman.”
The original incident has exploded into shrapnel. Trump’s disdain for the media appears to have crossed over into suppression, only a day after U.S. midterm elections produced a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives—and with it the promise of intense new scrutiny on the president. Critics have also accused the White House of deploying false information about the incident. When White House press secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted about suspending Acosta’s press pass, she included a video of the pressroom incident as evidence that supposedly justified the censure. But observers quickly pointed out that the clip she shared didn’t appear to be the original video, but a “doctored” version, which had been sped up in order to make the contact between Acosta and the aide appear more aggressive than the original footage had done.
Journalists and Trump opponents have sprung into action, investigating the doctored video, defending Acosta and the media, or even calling for a boycott on the part of the White House press corps. Though valiant, those efforts might miss the point. The incident shows how adept and deliberate politicians have been, for decades now, at deploying words, images, and video to advance their ends—even absconding with the ideas, words, and values of their opponents in the process.
Photographs and moving images have long been thought to record the world as it actually appears, capturing a scene or an event dispassionately and without bias. Unlike painting or writing, the photograph and the cinema camera are thought to have a special relationship to actual fact: They appear able to point at reality and capture it in an evidentiary way.
That capacity has come under fire in recent years. Thanks to machine-learning techniques, it has become possible to digitally manipulate video to construct new footage that never really took place. These “deepfakes,” as they are sometimes called, pose a threat to the trustworthiness of film.
Read: The era of fake video begins
Now that the public is attuned to the risk of technological manipulation of moving images, that great bastion of documentarian truth, it has become more attuned to the erosion of that truth. Sanders’s dissemination of apparently manipulated footage of the Acosta incident raised hackles in part because of that concern. But worse, the clip appears to be the same one that was first shared by an editor at the conspiracy website Infowars, which might have been created purposely to mislead observers.
At BuzzFeed News, Charlie Warzel dug into the creation of the Infowars clip, establishing that it was made by zooming in on a GIF excerpt from the original video. GIFs can drop frames when constructed, and video-encoding methods can introduce other changes. In the end, Warzel couldn’t decide whether the video had been doctored or not. Citing experts, Motherboard concluded that the video wasn’t doctored, but that it was altered—a distinction that might confuse as much as it clarifies.
But as Franklin Foer argued in The Atlantic earlier this year, advanced techniques like deepfakes are just the latest example of a longstanding problem. Trust in filmic reality was never as sound as it seemed. “Unedited video has acquired an outsize authority in our culture,” he writes. “That’s because the public has developed a blinding, irrational cynicism toward reporting and other material that the media have handled and processed.” Lens-based media were never really as impartial as people came to believe they were, even before digital alteration, and then artificial intelligence, made it easier to manipulate their contents outright. The Acosta clip only reinforces that state of affairs.
Before alteration or doctoring, photographs and videos impose many unseen prejudices, even before computational manipulation enters the picture. Filming strips acts from their broader context. The qualities of an optical instrument and the film or sensor used to capture a scene can change the way it appears. So can the framing of a shot, the perspective from which the scene is shown, or the way audio is captured for it. No computers are even required.
For example, the CSPAN footage of the Acosta incident is shot from two cameras, one behind Acosta and framed on President Trump, and the other from the side, showing a wider shot of Acosta in the front row, addressing the president. The latter shot is the one from which the interaction between Acosta and the aide can be seen. But because the two are close to one another at some distance, the image flattens the viewer’s perspective, making it difficult to tell how their arms and bodies are interacting as they grapple for the microphone.
When the aide finally lays her hand on the mic, her reach looks bold, although not combative, and Acosta attempts to defuse the situation: “Pardon me, Ma’am, I’m—” he attempts. Then the aide, having been gently reproached, physically crumbles before Acosta. She crouches to the floor between him and the president. She was probably trying to clear a line of sight between the two, but from side of the room, she appears meek or servile, subordinating herself to Acosta. In that moment, the wide camera shows the two men in profile but the aide facing the camera in the foreground. Viewed from the angle of a news camera in a slightly different position, she becomes the subject of the shot, and it becomes difficult not to empathize with her accidental embarrassment, now captured and broadcast globally.
A still from the press conference as seen from a CBS News camera. (CBS47 KSEE / CBS News)Lens-based media are media of perspective. Whether or not the pretzeling of arms was “doctored” by Infowars, and whether or not it was knowingly disseminated in its manipulated fashion by Sanders, the video itself never captured “truth” anyway; it recorded a sequence of events in space at a moment in time, offering them as raw material for interpretive effort.
Interpretation is at the heart of this conflict. Before the dispute over the mic began, Acosta had been challenging Trump on his characterization of the migrant caravan as an “invasion” of immigrants. “Why did you characterize it as such?” Acosta asked. “Because I consider it an invasion,” Trump responded. “You and I have a difference of opinion.”
Trump knows that the visual and verbal rhetoric of an “invasion” has political utility. Invaders come to steal and ransack. Images of the caravan—also captures of “real reality” by the lens—can easily be selected to represent different views on the caravan, from a hulking mass of anonymous people, extending to the horizon, to the fragile desperation of an individual family. Acosta accused Trump of an interpretive act that can’t be defended. “They’re hundreds and hundreds of miles away,” he charged. “That’s not an invasion.”
But for Trump and his supporters, the idea of an “invasion” need not entail the literal seizure and occupation of a sovereign nation. Invasion also has a metaphorical connotation. All those immigrants, fleeing from worse fates to confront still bad ones, can be characterized as a threat to American sanctity even from far away. Yes, that threat is partly a racist one—the brown-skinned Hondurans sending affronts to a dying dream of a white America that never was. But that fact doesn’t reduce the effectiveness of calling it an invasion. And in the process of defending the idea, Trump managed to get Acosta to repeat the term several times, reinforcing its attachment to the caravan.
Read: The man who broke politics
The GOP’s mastery of language for politics began in the 1990s, when the political strategist Frank Luntz started conducting polling and research for conservatives like Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. Luntz was instrumental in Gingrich’s steamrolling of Congress, having helped author the Contract for America’s aggressive Newtspeak, which used previously off-the-table terms like sick, corrupt, and traitor to describe Democrats.
Luntz soon became the craftsman of specialized language for the GOP. For example, he urged his clients to use the phrase “climate change” instead of “global warming,” and “death tax” instead of “estate tax” on behalf of the Republicans. Their purpose was to change the emotional content of issues. Global warming sounds threatening, but climate change? Some change can be good, after all. An estate tax sounds like it’s for the wealthy (which it is), but a death tax sounds like it penalizes everyone. Luntz’s terms remain powerful and effective even today—climate scientists now embrace the toothless term climate change even as it undercuts the threat of global warming.
You can see this same kind of thing in today’s political discourse. Take “fake news.” It takes a real threat that existed thanks to the internet—websites and Facebook accounts posing as news outlets in order to spread propaganda—and recasts it upon actual, non-fake news organizations whom the president or the administration doesn’t like. Trump parried Acosta’s invocation of the “invasion” with a “fake news” accusation during the press conference. But the press just leaned into it. Defending Acosta against Sanders, CNN vice president Matt Dornic called the supposedly doctored video of the incident “actual fake news.” His attempt to undermine the White House by calling them out for hypocrisy only reinforced the term’s connection to CNN. The statement played right into Trump’s hands.
CNN accused the White House of having done so “in retaliation for his challenging questions at today’s press conference.” It’s clear that Trump does want Acosta, CNN, and the press in general out of his business. That desire, and this act in service of it, is chilling. But focusing on those matters alone ignores another victory for Republican rhetoric: the White House’s clever, if ignoble, contortion of a #MeToo-style intervention as justification for revoking Acosta’s press access.
Acosta fell into the trap when he tried to defend himself against Sanders: “This is a lie,” he posted on Twitter, in response to the claim that he had “placed his hands on a woman” during the encounter. Acosta can’t really deny that he came into physical contact with the White House press aide. He could observe that the contact was initiated by her, not him, to put an end to his questioning. But that’s a losing move too: It casts a woman in a powerless position as an instigator of aggression, when she was simply trying to do her job. He could invoke his own right to offer an interpretation of the incident, but as a white man in his own position of authority— the chief White House correspondent for CNN—doing so also risks unseemliness. Acosta has no good options.
The same is true for his profession by extension. To journalists, Acosta’s attempt to keep hold of the microphone looks like good reporting—an attempt to press a man in power for satisfactory answers to reasonable questions. That’s what NBC News White House correspondent Jim Alexander seems to have celebrated when, after receiving the mic after Acosta, he defended the latter as a “diligent reporter who busts his butt like the rest of us.” But the same scrappiness that reporters celebrate as a virtue of their profession, and their civic duty, can seem like aggression and disrespect to some of the very citizens that reporters hope to serve.
Read: A cultural history of mansplaining
That discord is made worse by the fact that the badgersome, persistent male interlocutor has become a figure of general cultural disdain—the guy who won’t let anyone get a word in edgewise, bumping and scrabbling to keep the floor. From that perspective, calling Acosta “rude,” as Trump did, not only squares with some people’s understanding of rudeness but also conforms to one of the left’s common positions on informal male aggression—men who talk over women or won’t cede the floor to them, men who take up more physical space than they deserve, men who think they always know the answers, men who use their more-imposing bodies in physical space to gain advantage, and so on.
These habits apply much more to President Trump than they do to Jim Acosta, both in this circumstance and in general. For those who want to exert strength to achieve a goal, hypocrisy just isn’t a concern. The White House managed to catch the left, and the media, in a trap they themselves had help set.
All of these examples show that unraveling the truth of the Acosta encounter isn’t so simple as determining if the video Sanders posted was doctored. Even the idea of “doctoring” the video is subject to interpretive slippage. And the irony of the doctoring controversy is that the White House might not even have needed a more aggressive-looking version of the encounter between Acosta and the aide to ground the position it eventually took in order to revoke his White House access for supposedly inappropriate behavior toward a woman.
That’s not necessarily because the Trump White House really believes in preserving the sanctity of respecting women—on that front Trump’s position of disrespect has been eminently clear. Rather, it’s because the idea of such disrespect, particularly as it has been focused and amplified by #MeToo, makes it easy to weaponize when the opportunity arises, as it did here.
HAGERSTOWN, Md.—Kevin Simmers relished locking up drug users, no matter how little crack they had on them. “If they just had a pipe—fine,” he said. “At the end of the night, I wanted to have an arrest. I wanted a body.”
Decades later, despite his efforts, the opioid epidemic was in full swing in Hagerstown, “a small town with big-city problems” an hour outside Baltimore. In 2013, Simmers received an unusual phone call from his 18-year-old daughter, Brooke, who was typically defensive of her independence: “I need your help, Dad.” Simmers braced himself and met her for breakfast at a Waffle House near the so-called heroin highway, an intersection of interstates that connects major drug markets up and down the East Coast. Brooke told Simmers that she was addicted to opioid pain pills and didn’t know how to stop. Familiar with their street price, Simmers asked how Brooke, with no obvious income, could afford the expensive pills. “She told me she was selling her body,” he recalled.
Simmers sprung into action, and over the next year he helped Brooke into a half-dozen rehabs, but none seemed to work. Eventually, out of options and fearing a fatal overdose, Simmers used his police connections to jail his own daughter. But the disaster that followed made him reconsider not just his decision to lock up Brooke, but also his role as a willing combatant in the decades-long War on Drugs.
“I now think the whole drug war is total bullshit,” he said.
“Drugs are menacing our society,” intoned President Ronald Reagan in a 1986 televised address. “They’re killing our children.” Fresh out of the Air Force, Kevin Simmers was driving a milk truck. Reagan was “an inspiring speaker,” Simmer said, so he decided to apply to become a Hagerstown police officer.
Tall, opinionated, irreverent, and fiercely competitive, Simmers was “larger than life,” said Nick Varner, a Hagerstown police detective who trained under him. His policing philosophy was simple, Varner said: “Lock up the problem.” Sergeant Simmers liked contests: Whoever brings in the most arrests tonight gets free dinner.
Simmers (second from right) joined the Hagerstown police in the late 1980s. (Courtesy of the Simmers family)In Clear Spring, Maryland, a Hagerstown suburb and a real-life Norman Rockwell painting, Varner shot hoops with Simmers and Brooke. A gifted athlete, “she wiped the floor with both of us,” Varner recalled. Brooke had no problem swimming the formidable Potomac River clear to its West Virginia bank. “Kevin was very strong willed,” Varner said, and “she was a lot like him.” Varner remembered how Brooke once walked into the church where he was a pastor and said, “Do you really think that Jesus could walk on water?”
“If there was a tenth gear, she was in it,” said Brooke’s mother, Angie von Gersdorff. “She needed that extra adrenaline rush.” Von Gersdorff and Simmers split up when Brooke was a baby. Within a few years, they both remarried. Von Gersdorff said Brooke’s antics overlaid a darker struggle already underway. “She began to fester in puberty,” she said.
Clear Spring, Maryland (Jeremy Raff)Brooke was given to angry outbursts that worsened as high school began. Finally, in a heated argument, she punched her stepmother, Dana Simmers, in the face—hard, leaving bruises. The Simmers and von Gersdorff got together to decide what to do. “She’s going to have to learn a lesson. We’re going to report it,” von Gersdorff remembers the group deciding. “Tough love.” They called the police and Brooke landed in juvenile detention. But von Gersdorff now regrets feeding her daughter to the justice system at such a young age. “I really thought that it was going to help, but it did not. It did the complete and utter opposite,” von Gersdorff told me. “It’s a huge guilt that makes me so angry. I can’t hit something hard enough to get any relief.” In the years after juvenile detention, Brooke starting hanging out with a rougher crowd and eventually got hooked on pills.
[Read: No family is safe from this epidemic.]
Brooke was addicted to opioid pain pills by age 18. (Courtesy of the Simmers family)After she told Simmers about her addiction, the unsuccessful rehab attempts grinded the family’s patience and finances. Simmers said waiting lists often stymied their attempts to get help—by the time a spot opened up, Brooke was out on the street again. Then, when she was accepted, she did not receive medication-assisted treatment, which much of the medical literature describes as the gold standard of care. Such treatment combines therapy with low-dose opioids like buprenorphine to help control cravings, but it is still often stigmatized as a way of replacing one addiction with another. Brooke’s rehabs embraced a strict prohibition on medication of any kind—one even kicked her out when staff discovered ibuprofen in her luggage. Abstinence-based drug treatment is astonishingly ineffective but deeply entrenched in the United States. Leading public-health organizations including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the World Health Organization all recommend medication-assisted treatment, but only about 12 percent of people with a substance-use disorder receive specialty treatment.
After another relapse, Brooke was living in a Motel 6 next to the highway. Afraid for her life, the family turned to the institution they knew best: law enforcement. Simmers called friends in the Hagerstown police who had previously turned a blind eye to Brooke’s drug use—“professional courtesy,” Simmers called it— and asked them to throw the book at her. She was arrested and sentenced to four months in jail.
Brooke arrived at the Washington County Detention Center with some fanfare. “It was like fresh meat,” said Amanda West, her cell mate. “You could just hear whispers down the hallway, ‘It’s Brooke Simmers, it’s Brooke Simmers, it’s Brooke Simmers!’” Having arrested some of the inmates himself, Sergeant Simmers was well known inside the detention center.
Even when Brooke was dope sick, she kept the pod entertained. Like her dad with his officers, she goaded inmates into contests: Who could brush their teeth the fastest? Who could design the best jailhouse outfit? Brooke tie-dyed an oversized -shirt with Hawaiian Punch and crushed-up colored pencils and declared herself the winner.
A drug-treatment class at the Washington County Detention Center (Jeremy Raff)When West was suffering severe heroin withdrawal, Brooke “put socks on my hands so I wouldn’t scratch my face,” she recalled. West remembered Brooke returning to the cellblock in tears after visits from her father, crushed by guilt. “She wanted her dad to be proud of her,” West told me, “but she felt like he could not separate her from his law-enforcement life. It was insulting to him that he had a child that was committing the same sins of the people that he had incarcerated.”
West had been sober for about a year when we met. She told me that she had also tried to convince her parents—a banker and a Christian schoolteacher—that her addiction was not meant to hurt them. As if to prove her point, she rolled up the sleeves of her cardigan to reveal thick, glassy scars blanketing her forearms. She explained that in a fit of desperation she’d used “krokodil,” a synthetic heroin substitute from Russia made with a toxic swirl of chemicals and gasoline. Her skin had bubbled, swollen, and turned black. Now it looked like skin grafts after a severe burn. “I almost lost both my arms,” she said. “Who wants to do this?”
Severe scarring from “krocodil,” a synthetic heroin substitute made with gasoline (Jeremy Raff)Brooke was released on April 4, 2015. Redoubling her commitment to sobriety, she attended abstinence-based Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Overdose deaths exceeded 72,000 in 2017, but fewer than half of drug-treatment programs provide low-dose opioids to treat cravings, though they can cut the risk of an overdose death in half. After being clean for four months in jail, Brooke was in an exceptionally precarious position on the outside. The risk of an overdose death is 129 times higher in the two weeks after being released from jail, a 2007 study found.
Simmers feared Brooke would relapse, so at night he parked his police cruiser close behind her car to prevent her from sneaking out of the house.
Just nine days after Brooke’s release, Simmers awoke to tire tracks through the front yard—Brooke had apparently maneuvered around his car. Hours later, Dana Simmers received a call from Brooke’s friend Alison Shumaker, who told her she had spoken to Brooke in the predawn hours. Shumaker, who was trying to quit heroin herself, said that Brooke had relapsed and, full of self-loathing, had told her, “I’m a piece of shit.” In a recent interview, Shumaker recalled that Brooke feared her father’s response, and told Shumaker, “I can’t go home. He’s going to be so disappointed.” Eventually, the line went silent.
“She might have died talking on the phone with me,” Shumaker said. The possibility that faster action may have saved Brooke’s life haunts Shumaker, but her inaction is not unique. Research suggests that after decades of Simmers-style drug policing, the most important reason drug users don’t seek timely medical help is the fear of prosecution.
“You can love someone to death,” Simmers said. (Jeremy Raff)The next day, a search party finally found Brooke’s red Volkswagen Beetle in a church parking lot. Detective Varner arrived on the scene to find Brooke lying in her own vomit in the back seat, a sweatshirt rolled up like a pillow under her head and a basketball near her feet. Parked beneath a hoop where she had once practiced layups, Brooke died of a heroin overdose on April 14, 2015.
More than three years later, the pain has hardly abated. Carefully out of sight behind the Christmas decorations in the basement, Dana Simmers, Brooke’s stepmother, preserves clothing that still carries Brooke’s scent. In a glass case in her living room, von Gersdorff keeps a lock of her daughter’s hair she snipped off at the funeral home.
In his home office, lined with old badges and a black-and-white police-recruit photo, Simmers is still mulling over what went wrong. After decades of locking up low-level drug dealers and users, including his own daughter, Simmers said he realized that “we’ve tried to incarcerate our way out of a lot of problems in this country and it has not worked.”
“Maybe if she wouldn't have went away for that four months, she wouldn’t have overdosed and died,” he said. Though he can’t point to a single cause, he said he feels “guilty everyday.” Simmers told me that Brooke’s death, and the powerlessness he felt while repeatedly failing to find effective drug treatment for her, fundamentally changed his mind.
Brooke’s obituary (Courtesy of the Simmers family)“Twenty years ago, most people thought arrest and incarceration were the answer to this drug war,” he said. “I think most people were wrong—I think I was wrong.” Now Simmers says he’d rather see the roughly $47,000 a year it takes to jail drug offenders spent on jobs programs instead. He’d like to see 24-hour, on-demand treatment available to anyone who wants it—no waiting lists. The former narcotics officer is even open to the idea of decriminalizing heroin.
Simmers also now detects a racial injustice in the harsh punishment he once meted out. His own crack-era targets mostly went unnoticed, but the details of Brooke’s life and death were covered heavily in the local media and elicited a wave of sympathy from police officers and elected officials. “This problem was happening in the African American community for years and we did nothing about it,” Simmers said. But Brooke was “a pretty white girl who lives in the suburbs, lives in middle-class America. I think that could be why people were more attracted to the story.”
Simmers said that when Brooke was sober, she told him that she hoped to open a sober-living house for women. They struck a deal: One year sober, and he’d help her make it a reality. She overdosed before she made it to a year, but Simmers decided to go ahead with the plan anyway. Soon after her death, he and Dana began fund-raising, and a friend donated a leafy patch of land outside Hagerstown. Volunteer construction crews are at work on a 16-bed living facility and treatment center.
Simmers and Brooke (Courtesy of the Simmers family)On a brisk morning last May, about 100 supporters—grieving parents, people recovering from addiction, police officers—gathered for the ground-breaking ceremony. “I don’t think anybody wants to build a house in memory of their daughter,” Simmers told the crowd, “but this was her dream and we’re going to do our best to fulfill her dream.” Brooke’s House is slated to open early next year.
When gunmen whose names are best forgotten killed 12 classmates and one teacher at Columbine High School in 1999, I never imagined that a mass shooting on that scale would be a minor news story.
Almost 20 years later, the latest massacre of like size is destined to fade quickly from headlines. The dead include 12 innocents and one gunman, all killed at a Thousand Oaks, California, bar where college kids line danced to country-and-western songs. Sergeant Ron Helus died heroically as the first police officer on the scene, rushing inside to try to stop the gunman rather than waiting. In the wee hours Thursday morning, as a still-unknown number of victims lay inside, local-TV-news reporters stood asking practiced questions of survivors who had stuck around. Some described having imagined and prepared for such an emergency.
With the killer not yet known, people speculated about the motive: Was it a disgruntled employee? A jealous boyfriend or husband? A person radicalized online by Islamists, or white supremacists, or misogynists? A person suffering from mental illness? Later Thursday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the killer was “a former U.S. Marine machine gunner who may have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.” He had served a combat tour in Afghanistan and was 28 years old.
[Read: A mass shooting in one of the ‘safest cities in America]’
“Are military veterans more likely for shooting sprees?” The San Diego Union-Tribune asked last year, citing eight occasions when a veteran of one of the wars fought since September 11, 2001, perpetrated a mass killing.
Experts cautioned against sweeping conclusions, stressing that there is no evidence that veterans of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan are any more prone to violence than the general population; the overwhelming majority of those who return home from war are thriving.
“Combat veterans, on the whole, are not going to be lethally violent,” said Shoba Sreenivasan, a University of Southern California psychology professor who was the lead author of a 2013 paper examining the topic. She noted that a small segment of combat veterans may be triggered to commit violence because of their battle experiences. These individuals often have mental or emotional issues other than war-related post-traumatic stress disorder.
“There are some people—a very tiny, tiny percentage—whose combat experience creates some mental instability, along with other factors like drugs and alcohol, that then may contribute to lethal violence stateside.”
Thomas Burke, a pastor in the same US Marine Corps regiment where the Thousand Oaks killer served, spoke to CNN about their time in intense combat. “PTSD doesn’t create homicidal ideation,” he argued. “We train a generation to be as violent as possible, then we expect them to come home and be OK. It’s not mental illness. It’s that we’re doing something to a generation, and we’re not responding to the needs they have.”
[Read: Should veterans with PTSD be exempt from the death penalty?]
If so, what are those needs? The killer tried college but failed to earn a degree. He was reportedly a patron of the bar, but obviously turned on that community, if it was one for him. Absent better answers about whether this man was among the tiny percentage who wouldn’t have killed at home but for being sent to kill “over there,” or what exactly would have altered the course of his life once home, it seems safe to at least conclude that his combat experience made him a more skilled assailant.
And whatever the factors in this particular case, it is past time that America embarked on a sustained experiment in waging foreign wars only as a last resort—and did more to support those it sends abroad to fight when they come back home.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing to travel to the future of the gerrymandering war.
Tuesday brought wins for independent redistricting commissions that Schwarzenegger backed in three of the four states where they were on the ballot—Michigan, Missouri, and Colorado, with Utah still counting, but also trending toward yes. Now the former California governor has begun planning a summit for advocates, donors, and the people behind some of the successful campaigns to brainstorm and build to more wins.
It will be held at the Schwarzenegger Institute at the University of Southern California. Plans are being made to bring the group together within the next few months.
With Tuesday’s ballot questions, now nearly one-third of House districts will be drawn through independent redistricting according to a new report by the Schwarzenegger Institute, by commission or other methods. Schwarzenegger’s goal is to get that number to half by the end of 2020, and he already has his eyes on Virginia, among other states.
“My biggest complaint is always when people say, ‘This is [what’s] wrong with politics.’ Now I say, ‘What do you do about it?’” Schwarzenegger said in an interview on Thursday. He compared the effort to some of his other passions. “We’re going to make a plan, and this is going to be a new family. It’s like the environmental family or the fitness family.”
[Read: Schwarzenegger is back in a wonky campaign fight against gerrymandering]
Schwarzenegger became obsessed with redistricting reform after successfully pushing a ballot initiative in California, which passed narrowly in 2008 for statehouse races followed by another in 2010 for House seats, with opposition from both Republicans and Democrats. The measure took the power to draw the lines of House and state legislative districts away from politicians and gave it to a nonpartisan commission.
At the time, California was one of only a handful of states that did this, and the results changed the makeup of who voters ended up sending to Sacramento and Washington.
After the four ballot questions Tuesday and the federal judge who on Wednesday threw out the Maryland congressional map on the grounds that it violated the Constitution through excessive partisanship, Schwarzenegger said he sees “a wave” of its own, albeit one that most election coverage has missed.
“The only thing I can come up with is that people are so dissatisfied with how things are going that they think this is the next best thing, that they can get power and change,” he said, explaining what drove the wins.
Last month, Schwarzenegger hosted a raffle that raised $50,000 on Crowdpac for redistricting reform. The winners, a physical therapist and a nurse who had never made a political donation before, got to visit him on the set of the latest Terminator movie in Budapest. He also spent a day in mid-November campaigning at rallies and fundraisers in Michigan and Colorado for the ballot amendments there. Ahead of the Ohio ballot question that passed in the spring, he allowed signatures to be gathered at the Arnold Classic bodybuilding competition in Columbus, and did a series of videos promoting it.
Schwarzenegger said he’s ready to do more of that.
“If that’s what it takes to get the signatures, I will be the one to do it. I’m not ashamed of standing in a mall and asking people for signatures,” Schwarzenegger said. “Anything that works and gets us there, because in the end the only thing I care about is to actually achieve our goal. We’ll improvise as we go along, because every state has different needs, and we don’t know where it’s going to take us.”
My colleague Marina Koren recently posted to social media: “Patiently waiting for the mandarin duck’s wistful ‘Why I Left New York’ essay.” Imagine my delight, some hours later, when this article submission came to me:
I remember now, with clarity that stirs the feathers of my nape, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my bill upon the moment it ended.
It was autumn, and I landed on a pond in plumage that had seemed very smart on the forested edges of a river in eastern China, but seemed less smart already, even some blocks from the couture of big-city streets.
Of course, it might have been some other city, might have been Tokyo or Manila or even San Francisco. But because I am talking about myself, I am talking New York. That first night, all I could do was think of the stories I would tell the female mandarin duck I already knew I would not mate with this spring. “I could see the skyline of Brooklyn from my pond in Prospect Park,” I would muse at the end of my travels.
As it turned out, the pond was in Central Park, and I would depart westward.
[Read: Why flamingos are more stable on one leg than two]
In retrospect, those days before I knew the location of my pond were happier than the ones that came later, when crowds began to line up, gawk, and tag me on Instagram. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is a city only for the obscure or the very famous. But I was then in love with the city, the way you love a female at mating time, only to depart once the eggs hatch, leaving your mate to care for perhaps a dozen ducklings.
I still believed in possibilities, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day. I could attract a photographer from an international wire service, be featured on all the morning shows, or spitefully defecate on patrons leaving the Peking Duck House on 53rd Street, and none of it would matter. It never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. I imagined I would stay only until the marathon or, at the latest, Thanksgiving.
I am not sure anyone brought up in America can appreciate entirely what the idea of New York means to mandarin ducks. To a Far East duck, New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic duck tale, the mysterious nexus of population density and relatively clean air. “Plenty of bread crumbs, yet easy on the lungs,” the proverb goes.
Some weeks passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder. Like A&E’s reality-TV killers, I began to cherish attention, the sense that at any given time, untold millions would know exactly where I was and what I was doing. I liked the seductive and satisfactory rhythm of attracting and thrilling birders, social-media influencers, and web producers, my plumage resplendent on retina screens and 4-K TVs and glossy print spreads. New York even named me the city’s most eligible bachelor.
[Read: Songbirds can hear tornadoes long before they form.]
On a short day trip, I completed an aerial tour of The Big Duck in Flanders, on Long Island, which pleased me obscurely. So did sneaking up behind a food vendor in the wee hours one morning and quacking, “Aflac!”
I nailed the accent.
I was not then guilt-ridden about spending New York minutes on flights of fancy or practical jokes. I still had all the time here in the world.
But daytime highs will drop to 40 degrees by next Wednesday. I’m dreading the tourist crush that Thanksgiving week will bring. And the Tom Turkey float planned for the Macy’s parade is a sight I’d rather not see.
So take your final photographs now, humans of Central Park. For I am one to profit from the experiences of others, and intend to migrate to Los Angeles before the despair of winter sets in and you’re all sick and tired.
The mandarin ducks I know will find my new residence a curious aberration. But the ponds of Los Angeles do not freeze, the tortillas and the cornmeal that surrounds tamales are tasty West Coast treats, the birds on the Venice canals are sometimes fed bread from Gjusta, Disneyland visits are easily made with the promise of churro bits, I am eager to swim in Drake’s pool in Hidden Hills, and I relish proximity to the NHL’s finest franchise, not to mention LeBron. I will nibble avocado toast on the Pacific, smell jasmine all around, and know that I am home.
House Democrats barely had a chance to celebrate the new majority they won on Tuesday before Donald Trump confronted them with their first test. Hours after warning Democrats of retaliation if they harassed him with congressional investigations, the president ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions and replaced him with a loyalist who had criticized the probe that has placed Trump in legal jeopardy.
And so, a day after voters elected them to serve as a check on the Republican president, Democrats responded swiftly by marshaling the full force of their power: They fired off a few strongly worded letters.
Specifically, Democrats insisted that Republicans hold emergency hearings on Sessions’s firing, and they wrote to the White House demanding that officials there preserve all records having to do with Trump’s decision to replace him on an acting basis with the departed attorney general’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker. Their fear is that the shake-up is a prelude to a move by the president to end or severely curtail Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation—from which Sessions had recused himself—into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election and whether the president himself obstructed justice by trying to shut down the FBI’s initial inquiry. Trump has railed against the probe as a “witch hunt” and pointedly refused to pledge that he would not shut it down. “I could fire everybody right now,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
Democrats quickly called for Whitaker to follow his old boss’s lead and recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller probe—a step Whitaker reportedly has no intention of taking. “It’s basically a constitutional crime scene, and we want to try to rope it off with yellow tape as quickly as possible,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a constitutional scholar who serves on both the House judiciary and oversight committees, told me in a phone interview on Thursday.
Yet writing letters and making requests is about all the Democrats can do right now. As a practical matter, they won’t actually hold the House majority until January. At that point, they could back up their demands with the authority to subpoena records and testimony from officials at the White House or the Department of Justice. But even then, it’s unclear whether Democrats would be able to force the president’s hand or ensure that Mueller’s investigation—if it doesn’t conclude in the next two months—could proceed unimpeded.
[Read: The latest drama in Trump’s slow-walking Saturday Night Massacre]
Raskin told me that lawmakers are actively looking into whether Trump violated the Constitution by appointing someone to serve as acting attorney general who has not been confirmed to a high-ranking post by the Senate. “You can’t appoint people to be principal officers of the United States without Senate action,” he said, using the phrase in the Constitution that refers to what are now called Cabinet members. “That’s the question anyway.” In an op-ed published in The New York Times on Thursday, Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, and George Conway III, the husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, argued that the president’s appointment of Whitaker was unconstitutional.
Once Democrats assume power in the House, Raskin said, they could vote to initiate a lawsuit challenging actions taken by Whitaker on the grounds that his appointment was unconstitutional. House Republicans used a similar legal tactic against former President Barack Obama to argue that he exceeded his power in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and when he unilaterally chose to grant protections from deportation to undocumented immigrants.
Whether such a lawsuit would go anywhere is another question. Tara Leigh Grove, a professor at William & Mary Law School, has argued that institutions such as the House of Representatives do not have standing to sue the president over claims of constitutional violations. But, she said in an interview, there is a vigorous ongoing debate in the legal community over this question. “It’s a really tricky area because there’s very little Supreme Court precedent,” Grove told me on Thursday.
In bringing cases against the Obama administration, lawyers for the Republican-controlled House argued that one or both chambers of Congress could sue the executive branch on the grounds that actions exceeding presidential authority infringed on powers reserved for the legislature in the Constitution. But, Grove wrote in her paper, it is individuals who are directly affected, not institutions such as Congress, who are offered the right to sue when constitutional violations occur.
Nor are Democrats particularly confident they could win a legal battle. “The first line of defense is always going to be in Congress itself,” Raskin said. “Nobody is looking to the courts for salvation here, especially when [Republicans have] been packing the judiciary from the Supreme Court on down.”
Come January, Democrats could also try to shield Mueller using legislation. On Thursday afternoon, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi convened a conference call of Democrats to discuss how they might respond. In a statement a day earlier, she renewed her call for including language protecting the special counsel’s investigation as part of a spending bill Congress must pass in the lame-duck session this fall. The Senate Judiciary Committee adopted such a measure earlier this year, but it hasn’t come up for a full vote in either chamber. If she becomes speaker again in January, Pelosi could bring the bill up for a vote, but it would need a two-thirds majority in both the House and the GOP-controlled Senate to overcome a possible Trump veto.
So far, Pelosi has not made inclusion of the measure—or cooperation by Trump in congressional investigations—a condition for Democratic votes to prevent a government shutdown under the GOP’s watch. For the moment, Democrats acknowledge, their options are limited. “We’re hopeful that the president will honor our congressional authority to do oversight,” a senior Democratic aide with knowledge of the party’s deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the leadership’s thinking, told me on Thursday. “We’re operating on that hope right now.”
Judging by Trump’s posture at his post-election news conference on Wednesday, that hope may be wishful thinking. He suggested that he would refuse to turn over his tax returns even if House Democrats subpoenaed them in an effort to find out whether he had foreign income that could constitute a conflict of interest in his dealings as president with U.S. adversaries such as Russia. And he threatened Democrats bent on using their new power to investigate him with retaliatory investigations by his Republican allies in the Senate. “They can play that game, but we can play it better,” Trump warned.
For the remainder of the year, Democrats will be where they were for the last two years—in the minority and reliant on Republicans to stand their ground against the president’s excesses. Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Jeff Flake of Arizona all issued statements of support for the Mueller investigation on Wednesday, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a local station in Kentucky that he didn’t see “any chance” that Trump would halt Mueller’s probe before it could be completed on its own. But Republicans in the House have thus far ignored the Democratic requests for hearings when Congress returns next week.
[Read: The Democrat who could lead Trump’s impeachment isn’t sure it’s warranted]
The back-and-forth over Sessions and Whitaker is sure to be the first of many skirmishes between Trump and the newly christened Democratic majority in the House. They have vowed to hold the president accountable, and to use whatever power they have to ensure that he follows the rule of law. At the same time, the party leadership appears to be in no hurry to escalate the confrontation into what some of Trump’s fiercest critics see as an inevitable climax: impeachment. Pelosi has repeatedly downplayed the possibility, and the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Jerrold Nadler, set a high bar for its use when I interviewed him this past summer.
The Democrats’ preference is to move deliberately—to hold hearings before issuing subpoenas once they get the gavel in January, and to wait for Mueller to issue a report before determining what action, if any, to take against the president. But the ever-impatient Trump, it seems, is eager to confront the new foil of a Democratic House majority. And by ousting Sessions and installing Whitaker now, he’s making moves while the Democrats are still powerless to try to stop him.
Na manhã de 9 de novembro de 2016, milhões de americanos acordaram como numa névoa. Em New Holland, no estado da Pennsylvania, Annie Weaver parou na loja de conveniência Wawa no caminho para a escola onde dá aula, e não conseguia olhar as pessoas nos olhos. Brandi Calvert, uma corretora de imóveis em Wichita, no estado do Kansas, só conseguiu sair da cama porque precisava levar o filho de 11 anos para a escola. Antes de sair, ela contou a ele o que tinha acontecido, mas ele se recusou a acreditar.
Levei minha filha a pé para a escola naquela manhã em Washington, D.C., e entrei com ela para a aula aberta quinzenal da salinha do jardim de infância. Um aluno do terceiro ano tinha sido sorteado para a tarefa de ler as notícias do dia no alto-falante, e começou com uma breve história da expansão do direito ao voto. Ingressou então em assuntos mais recentes: “Em 2008, Barack Obama foi o primeiro afro-americano a ser eleito presidente. Este ano, em 2016, Hillary Clinton foi a primeira mulher candidata à presidência. Numa eleição surpreendente, ela foi derrotada por Donald Trump”, disse ele. “Passem pela sala 308 para ver nossa linha do tempo. Tenham um bom dia.”
Minha filha – que estava “torcendo para a menina ganhar” e tinha descoberto que Trump era um canalha e um valentão ofensivo – permaneceu excepcionalmente quieta, e sua professora, que vestia um jeans preto e um hijab verde-oliva, virou o rosto para esconder as lágrimas.
Não havia nada a dizer, nada que pudesse ser dito, para consertar a realidade nua e crua de que, depois de uma campanha virulenta e cheia de ódio, um número suficiente de pessoas nos Estados Unidos tinha votado em Donald Trump para torná-lo o 45º presidente do país.
De volta a Wichita, Brandi dirigiu até em casa e ligou para sua mãe. “Eu alternava entre as emoções de chorar e sentir raiva e não acreditar, certamente tinha sido um erro e seria corrigido” – recorda-se.
Depois de elaborar seu luto, um processo que, segundo ela, levou duas semanas, Brandi Calvert, como milhões de outras pessoas em todo o país, foi consumida pela necessidade de “fazer alguma coisa”. Não havia nada a dizer, mas havia algo a fazer. E o que seria esse algo?
Os últimos dois anos de construção partidária e resistência pertencem a um grupo multiétnico, multigeracional e multifacetado de ativistas.A maior parte dessas pessoas, até então, tinha pouca experiência com ativismo político, mas muitos já haviam se envolvido bastante em eventos comunitários, nas escolas locais ou em ações de caridade. Elas ainda não sabiam, mas já eram organizadoras políticas. Convencidas de que não era possível que Trump pudesse realmente ser o presidente, elas lidaram com a destruição iminente do país partindo para o tudo ou nada. Mais de 160 mil pessoas doaram, conjuntamente, 7 milhões de dólares para que Jill Stein, candidata do Partido Verde, financiasse uma recontagem, na esperança de que Hillary tivesse obtido votos suficientes para sair vencedora. Quando essa estratégia não funcionou, os recém-criados ativistas se voltaram para os membros do Colégio Eleitoral, pressionando incessantemente para que mudassem seus votos e elegessem alguém, qualquer um, que não fosse Trump. Se os membros do Colégio Eleitoral não podiam fazê-lo, insistiram os ativistas, eles poderiam pelo menos encaminhar a eleição à Câmara dos Deputados, não? Talvez o Presidente da Câmara, Paul Ryan, pudesse cumprir seu dever de estadista e salvar a União. Com certeza os líderes do Partido Democrata em Washington conseguiriam evitar que o pior acontecesse.
Logo ficou claro que não viria ninguém ao resgate, e que as pessoas que queriam fazer algo precisariam fazê-lo por conta própria. Não havia garantia de que surgiria uma resistência ampla e potente ao governo Trump, ou que em menos de dois anos os Democratas pudessem representar uma ameaça plausível ao controle dos Republicanos sobre a Câmara. A bem da verdade, as lideranças do Partido Democrata estavam tendentes a aderir a uma solução de compromisso, mesmo depois que pessoas próximas a Trump elogiaram o ex-presidente Franklin D. Roosevelt e seu uso de campos de concentração durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Os últimos dois anos de construção partidária e resistência pertencem a um grupo multiétnico, multigeracional e multifacetado de ativistas, liderado principalmente por mulheres que apoiam mulheres, e ativado por uma eleição catastrófica que libertou uma força latente que há muito tempo permanecia inativa no cenário político. Candidatos e voluntários disseram repetidamente que a última vez em que haviam visto uma mobilização tão ampla e apaixonada fora em prol da campanha presidencial de Barack Obama, em 2008. Porém, diferentemente de 2008, este ano não há uma liderança centralizada. Isso significa que, mesmo depois de computados os votos na terça-feira, não há ninguém para mandar as pessoas de volta para casa. O Partido Democrata está preso a elas.
Foto: Brad Barket/Getty Images para Ozy Fusion Fest 2017
Quando chegou o Dia de Ação de Graças em 2016, a maior parte dos liberais já tinha saído do estado de choque eleitoral e entrado em modo de organização. Ezra Levin e Leah Greenberg, ex-funcionários do Legislativo federal, que então trabalhavam para organizações progressistas sem fins lucrativos, estavam visitando suas famílias no feriado quando se encontraram com uma amiga da faculdade em um bar em Austin, no Texas.
A amiga contou a eles que estava administrando um grupo no Facebook de resistência a Trump. O grupo Dumbledore’s Army [A Armada de Dumbledore, da série de livros Harry Potter] tinha 3 mil membros entusiasmados, mas sem um direcionamento claro, confessou a amiga. “Eles estavam indo às manifestações, mandando cartões-postais a Paul Ryan e ligando para os eleitores” – o pessoal do Colégio Eleitoral – “e de certa forma sentiam que estavam batendo a cara na parede”, Levin contou ao Intercept.
Levin e Greenberg então explicaram à sua amiga como, exatamente, os manifestantes do “tea party” [a ala de extrema-direita do Partido Republicano] tinham conseguido sacudir o Congresso em 2009 e 2010, e explicaram que tipo de pressão funciona sobre um parlamentar, e, mais importante, o que não funciona – por exemplo, mandar cartões-postais para o presidente da casa. A amiga estava mesmerizada: isso era exatamente o que ela e seu grupo precisavam saber.
Na época, apareceram inúmeros guias de resistência ao fascismo, mas nenhum deles dava orientações práticas para as pessoas que buscavam o que fazer de forma cotidiana ou muito frequente.
Levin e Greenberg, marido e mulher, condensaram seus pensamentos em um documento de texto que foi compartilhado com amigos de Washington entendidos em política, e começaram a refinar o guia aos poucos. Quando chegou a hora de publicar o documento, no entanto, nenhuma das pessoas do grupo queria que seu nome aparecesse nele.
Afinal, eles trabalhavam para os Democratas, e o conteúdo do guia provavelmente não seria bem recebido por sua chefia. Metade do problema dos ativistas, segundo o guia, era o próprio Partido Democrata, que não se poderia presumir que integraria a resistência contra Trump, e que precisava ser empurrado e instado a agir.
O documento, que foi chamado “Indivisible Guide” [Guia Indivisível] foi publicado em dezembro de 2016. Logo na sequência, representações do movimento Indivisible começaram a aparecer pelo país. Os Socialistas Democráticos da América, por sua vez, atraíram os apoiadores do senador Bernie Sanders, o mais conhecido socialista democrático assumido, que engrossaram em peso as fileiras da organização. Um grupo chamado Our Revolution [Nossa Revolução] nasceu das cinzas da campanha presidencial de Sanders. Em algumas regiões, ativistas de base criaram suas próprias organizações, como a Lancaster Stands Up [Lancaster Se Levanta] na terra de Annie Weaver em Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Havia rumores sendo espalhados no Facebook e na imprensa nacional sobre uma Marcha das Mulheres em Washington, D.C. no dia seguinte à posse de Trump. Weaver resolveu ir da Pennsylvania até lá, mesmo que precisasse ir sozinha. Brandi Calvert, recém-saída da tristeza pós-eleição, também planejava comparecer, mas acabou tendo outra ideia: por que não organizar uma marcha em Wichita?
Milhares de pessoas compareceram à escultura do Guardião das Planícies, em 21 de janeiro de 2017, para participar da Marcha das Mulheres em Wichita, Kansas.
Foto: Travis Heying/The Wichita Eagle via AP
Ela contou que nunca tinha organizado nada além de uma excursão de campo, mas percebeu que sabia o suficiente para colocar as coisas no lugar. Dentre as 5 milhões de pessoas que se estima terem participado de manifestações em diversas cidades dos EUA em 21 de janeiro de 2017, aproximadamente 3 mil manifestantes estavam nas ruas de Wichita.
James Thompson, um veterano militar e advogado de direitos civis, estava entre eles, e o tamanho da multidão lhe deu uma ideia. O representante local no Congresso, Mike Pompeo, havia acabado de ser nomeado diretor da CIA, o que significava que haveria uma eleição especial para substituí-lo. Por que não concorrer?
O pico de energia se traduziu em milhares de pessoas interessadas em se candidatar, e milhares de outras buscando se filiar ao moribundo Partido Democrata.O pico de energia se traduziu em milhares de pessoas interessadas em se candidatar, e milhares de outras buscando se filiar ao moribundo Partido Democrata. “Eu estou ocupado este ano como estive ao longo de todo o ano passado, no meio de uma eleição enorme”, foi o que me disse no começo do ano Mark Fraley, presidente do Partido Democrata de Monroe County no estado de Indiana, quando as representações locais do partido em todo o país começaram a precisar de espaços maiores para realizar suas reuniões, antes modorrentas, agora cheias até o teto. “O que está muito diferente é que o partido ficou mais jovem”, disse ele. “Os jovens nunca quiseram ser parte significativa da infraestrutura do Partido Democrata. Agora isso parece ter mudado.”
Concorrendo a um Cargo EletivoTão logo Thompson anunciou sua candidatura para a eleição especial no 4º Distrito Congressional, a representação local da Indivisible, fundada pela amiga de Calvert, tomou a iniciativa de conduzir sua campanha. Embora Trump tenha levado o distrito por quase 30 pontos, o exército popular de Thompson foi à luta, espantando os comentaristas ao perder por apenas sete pontos. (Ele anunciou de imediato que concorreria novamente ao cargo em novembro de 2018.)
A temporada das eleições especiais começou em dezembro de 2017. O Partido Democrata do Delaware havia indicado Stephanie Hansen para concorrer numa eleição especial em fevereiro em uma vaga no legislativo estadual que decidiria o controle da casa. O candidato Republicano, um policial aposentado de Nova York, tinha concorrido em 2014 e perdido por apenas dois pontos.
Enquanto fazia sua campanha porta a porta, Hansen assistiu de camarote a um despertar histórico. “O que vi pessoalmente, começando em dezembro, foi que os Democratas da comunidade estavam deprimidos, muito tristes. Havia muita angústia, de 21 de dezembro até mais ou menos a data da posse”, ela me disse à época.
“Tão logo [aconteceram] a posse e as Marchas das Mulheres, os Democratas e todos aqueles que pensam de forma semelhante sentiram muita raiva”, contou ela, recordando a indignação que cercou a proibição de ingresso de muçulmanos e outros decretos que foram disparados da mesa do então assessor da Casa Branca, Steve Bannon. “Eu acompanhei desenrolar do processo. Aquela raiva se transformou em algo diferente. Ela se transformou em determinação.”
Uma inundação de voluntários e pequenas doações veio de todo o país, e Hansen trucidou seu adversário por 16 pontos. Quando conversei com ela, quase dois anos depois, ela me disse que a energia que sente quando vai às ruas só tem aumentado desde então. Ela disse que ainda recebe volumes esporádicos de doações de pequeno porte, e que consegue saber por sua página de captação de recursos na ActBlue quando Trump fez algo especialmente horrível.
Os doadores comunitários, movidos pela necessidade de “fazer alguma coisa”, investiram milhões na disputa, e efetivamente empurraram o partido adiante.Naureen Akhter, uma jovem mãe da cidade de Nova York, sentiu-se compelida a agir depois da eleição de Trump, e seu primeiro telefonema como voluntária de campanha foi em prol do Democrata Jon Ossof na eleição especial de 2017 no 6º Distrito Congressional do estado da Georgia. O Comitê de Campanha Congressional Democrata [DCCC], o órgão do partido responsável por vencer eleições, não queria competir lá, preocupado com a baixa probabilidade de vitória de um Democrata, muito embora Trump tivesse vencido no distrito por apenas 1,5 pontos. Mas os doadores comunitários, movidos pela necessidade de “fazer alguma coisa”, investiram milhões na disputa, e efetivamente empurraram o partido adiante.
Akther se decepcionou quando Ossof teve pouco menos de 50% no primeiro turno de votação e perdeu no segundo turno, mas ainda queria se filiar ao Partido Democrata local. Isso se revelou um desafio, pois os detalhes de data e local das reuniões eram mantidos em segredo, e os membros do partido nunca lhe davam essas informações, embora prometessem que o fariam por e-mail. Ela finalmente descobriu um evento organizado por um senador estadual da região [o Legislativo estadual é bicameral nos EUA]. Ela compareceu e descobriu que ele era membro da Conferência Democrática Independente [Independent Democratic Conference, IDC], um grupo de Democratas que fazia convenções com os Republicanos. (O IDC foi formalmente extinto em 2018). Nada muito inspirador.
Por um acaso, porém, ela se deparou com um evento de campanha de uma candidatura diferente. O nome da jovem candidata era Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, e ela estava concorrendo em uma disputa quixotesca contra o deputado Joe Crowley, que se esperava vir a ser o próximo presidente da Câmara depois de uma virada Democrata. Akhter decidiu que, se não podia se filiar ao partido, iria derrotá-lo. Ela se tornou uma das principais voluntárias de Ocasio-Cortez, e posteriormente diretora de organização da candidata de 28 anos – nas eleições do dia 6, ela se tornou a mulher mais jovem já eleita ao Congresso.
“If something needs fixing, then lace up your shoes and do some organizing,” @BarackObama
Gathering petition signatures for candidate we believe in here in NY-14! @Ocasio2018 pic.twitter.com/KOpPxJjrzE
— Naureen Akhter (@NaureenAkhter) 10 de março de 2018
Organização Vale a PenaToda essa energia difusa bateu de frente com a estrutura oficial do Partido Democrata, que não estava preparada e, em alguns casos, nem disposta a recebê-la. O partido, gerido de cima para baixo pelas lideranças em Washington, avaliou sua performance e decidiu manter todos os mesmos líderes, dando inclusive ao deputado Ben Ray Luján um segundo mandato como presidente do DCCC.
Enquanto isso, o deputado Sean Patrick Maloney, um Democrata conservador de Nova York, recebeu a tarefa de conduzir uma autópsia do que teria dado errado para os Democratas na Câmara. O relatório que ele elaborou no primeiro semestre de 2017 foi imediatamente enterrado, e até hoje não foi divulgado.
Os líderes nacionais do partido tinham uma estratégia em mente: recrutar candidatos centristas com capacidade de captar recursos de grandes doadores. Por essa razão, ignoraram ou rejeitaram todas as recomendações para combater Trump que envolvessem uma alternativa progressista forte – como as que foram feitas pelas representações da Indivisible, pela Lancaster Stands Up, pelo Partido Democrata local, pela Swing Left, ou pelos Socialistas Democráticos da América [DSA].
Era confuso lutar contra o Partido Democrata oficial, mas o Guia Indivisível havia preparado milhões de pessoas, e os 50 mil (e em crescimento) membros de carteirinha dos DSA estavam prontos para entrar na batalha. Usando força bruta, despontaram nas primárias por todo o país, vencendo diretamente algumas delas e puxando os candidatos para seu lado em outras.
As lideranças nacionais do partido ignoraram ou rejeitaram todas as recomendações para combater Trump que envolvessem uma alternativa progressista forte.O ato de organizar, de lutar por alguma coisa, se tornou terapêutico. A energia, em vez de se dissipar, se retroalimentou, formando e fortalecendo conexões. Houve uma transformação fundamental na esquerda: milhões de pessoas reconheceram que a organização e o ativismo não são necessariamente um ônus, nem são atos exclusivamente altruístas, e podem ter um efeito rejuvenescedor e ajudar a encontrar sentido num mundo cada vez mais sombrio. No último fim de semana, voluntários da organização Swing Left, fundada depois da eleição de 2016, fizeram contato, batendo de porta em porta ou telefonando, com 2 milhões de pessoas em 84 distritos. Um representante declarou que aproximadamente 4 de cada 10 dos voluntários mais ativos nunca tinham participado de organização política antes das eleições de 2018. Desses, três quartos eram mulheres.
O que mostram praticamente todas as pesquisas e entrevistas feitas com os eleitores do país é que os rompantes racistas de Trump podem até ser eficazes para seus apoiadores – talvez aumentando seu nível de ódio de 11 para 12 – mas produzem o efeito oposto sobre eleitores com nível superior nos subúrbios e zonas rurais, em especial sobre as mulheres.
Representações da Indivisible que eram organizadas essencialmente por mulheres com ensino superior agora podiam atrair novos eleitores abertos à persuasão. As discussões que aconteceram no Facebook e em encontros presenciais contribuíram para um êxodo em massa dessas mulheres em relação ao Partido Republicano. As mulheres brancas com ensino superior votaram confortavelmente no candidato Republicano à presidência em 2012, Mitt Romney, mas mudaram para Hillary em 2016 com pequena margem. Em 2018, elas estão prontas para votar nos Democratas com pelo menos 15 pontos de vantagem.
Foto: Evan Vucci/AP
Pesquisas de boca de urna mostraram, em 2016, que Trump venceu com 52% do voto das mulheres brancas, um número que contribuiu para a intensa demonização dessa categoria em todo o espectro político. Esse dado, porém, ignora uma distinção fundamental, a religião, e vem sendo usado para produzir uma narrativa amplamente equivocada. Evangélicos brancos representaram um quinto dos votantes em 2016, e entre eles Trump venceu com uma impressionante maioria de 80% dos votos. Segundo o instituto Pew, cerca de três quartos dos evangélicos não têm ensino superior, o que significa que, se olharmos para as mulheres brancas não evangélicas, elas votaram maciçamente em Hillary Clinton, independentemente de terem ensino superior ou não. Esse grupo de mulheres tende a se agarrar com mais força ainda aos Democratas em 2018, embora a relevância desse realinhamento se perca quando as mulheres brancas são todas agrupadas e o foco recai sobre a estatística de 52%.
No mínimo, esse realinhamento permite dar aos Democratas o controle não apenas das áreas urbanas em expansão no país, mas também dos subúrbios mais elegantes, o que deixa os Republicanos apenas com as regiões rurais e os exúrbios – território das classes trabalhadoras que enfrentam longos trajetos até o centro, onde não há uma identidade orgânica, onde as escolas públicas são apenas razoáveis, e onde se concentra uma crescente população de imigrantes.
Mas até mesmo esse último reduto se encontra sob ameaça, agora que há grandes chances de que ativistas e candidatos Democratas que ignoraram a recomendação do partido de que era impossível vencer nas áreas rurais obtenham importantes vitórias na terça-feira.
O DCCC pode ter ocultado a autópsia de Maloney, mas ele mostrou uma prévia do trabalho para o Washington Post. Sua análise era de que os Democratas simplesmente não conseguiriam vencer em certos distritos rurais, embora alguns distritos suburbanos se mostrassem como oportunidades de retomada. Esse segundo ponto era uma extensão do consenso de 2016, e se mostrou acertado neste ciclo. O primeiro, porém, era um engodo. Os dois distritos rurais que ele usou como exemplo foram o 2º de Minnesota e o 1º de Iowa. O DCCC acabou investindo recursos em ambos, e foi uma decisão sábia: os Democratas foram eleitos nos dois distritos, antes considerados impossíveis de vencer.
James Thompson, candidato do Partido Democrata ao Congresso pelo Kansas, à esquerda; Senador Bernie Sanders, Independente por Vermont; e Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, candidata do Partido Democrata ao Congresso por Nova York se reúnem no palco depois de um comício em Wichita, no Kansas, em 20 de julho de 2018.
Foto: Jaime Green/The Wichita Eagle via AP
Não era esperado que Thompson vencesse no 4º distrito do Kansas (e ele realmente perdeu), mas sua candidatura teve alguns benefícios complementares. Uma voluntária de sua campanha original concorreu à Câmara Estadual, mas acabou derrotada, e outra concorreu a comissária do condado de Sedgwick – Lacey Cruse acabou se tornando a única mulher eleita no condado, derrotando o republicano que buscava reeleição ao cargo. Além disso, há uma onda de eleitores se registrando. Essas novatas deram impulso à Democrata Laura Kelly, que se elegeu governadora na disputa contra Kris Kobach, secretário de Estado do Kansas em fim de mandato. Os Democratas também tiveram chance na disputa pela sucessão de Kobach, com o co-fundador do Google Earth, Brian McClendon, concorrendo a secretário de Estado. Embora derrotado, ele construiu uma ferramenta simples de registro de eleitor com o objetivo de expandir o direito de voto, numa tentativa de desfazer o legado de Kobach de supressão de eleitores.
A candidatura de Thompson teve alguns benefícios complementares.Duas outras cadeiras na Câmara, juntamente com o palácio de governo, estão ao alcance dos Democratas no Kansas, e, em Oklahoma, os Democratas se valeram das eleições especiais para virar quatro cadeiras do legislativo estadual em distritos profundamente Republicanos. Na esteira da greve de professores, eles conseguiram o governo do Estado.
Nas regiões rurais de Iowa, Virgínia, Pensilvânia, Virgínia Ocidental e na Península Superior de Michigan, os Democratas progressistas estão ganhando terreno em distritos há muito considerados fora de alcance. Toda a região do Cinturão da Ferrugem e do Meio-Oeste está se revoltando contra Trump, e os Democratas ameaçavam ganhar todos os assentos de Iowa na Câmara e até o governo do Estado – no fim, perderam apenas uma das disputas legislativas, mas o governador Republicano conquistou a reeleição.
Em Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma e Ohio, os Democratas entraram no dia das eleições com chances de tomar dos Republicanos o governo estadual – e ganharam nos quatro primeiros.
Doações ComunitáriasUma característica definidora do crescente ativismo liberal é o tratamento dado à captação de recursos. Em vez de cortejar doadores ricos, como o Partido Democrata fez por muito tempo, os candidatos que pretendem tomar das mãos dos Republicanos os governos estaduais e o Congresso buscaram os doadores de pequeno porte, as pessoas que só poderiam contribuir com menos de 200 dólares para uma única campanha. As doações em frações de 3, de 5 e de 27 dólares se tornaram a marca registrada das campanhas progressistas em todo o país.
O partido em geral só adotou essa estratégia de captação de recursos por meio de consultores de Washington que bombardearam as caixas de entrada com e-mails que pareciam cobrança de dívidas. Porém, a despeito de ter praticamente deixado de lado as doações corporativas pelos PAC [Political Action Committees, os Comitês de Ação Política], os candidatos Democratas à Câmara captaram um total recorde de 250 milhões de dólares, apenas no terceiro trimestre de 2018. Mais de 60 candidatos captaram acima de um milhão de dólares no trimestre. Quando as pesquisas mostraram que o deputado nacionalista branco Steve King poderia ser derrubado no 4º distrito de Iowa, ativistas comunitários enviaram, em dois dias, 641 mil dólares ao ex-arremessador de beisebol da série B, J.D. Scholten, mesmo ele não estando na Lista “Red to Blue” [Vermelho para Azul, Republicano para Democrata] do DCC.
Em janeiro, a ActBlue, plataforma sediada em Boston que arrecada e distribui doações de pequeno porte para candidatos Democratas, celebrou a marca de 2 bilhões de dólares arrecadados desde sua fundação em 2004, quando a campanha presidencial de Howard Dean abriu espaço para a era das pequenas doações.
No final de outubro, essa marca chegou a 3 bilhões.
Republicanos, perplexos com essa corrida do ouro, insinuam que possa se tratar de alguma trama nefasta. “O outro lado de alguma forma conseguiu que as pessoas mandem dinheiro a esse grupo em Massachussets, para ser encaminhado ao outro lado do país”, declarou um confuso Pete Olson, deputado Republicano em exercício há cinco mandatos que teve dificuldade para manter sua cadeira da Câmara em um distrito no subúrbio de Houston que, embora produto de rearranjos na composição dos eleitores [conhecidos como “gerrymandering”], está em rápida mudança.
O oponente de Olson, um ex-funcionário do serviço de pessoal estrangeiro, Sri Preson Kulkarni, fez campanha telefônica em pelo menos 13 línguas, buscando atingir comunidades asiáticas e africanas existentes nas subdivisões do distrito. Kulkarni não trouxe ninguém de avião de Massachussets para isso – quem fez suas ligações foram voluntários que analisaram a lista de eleitores para categorizar os residentes por origem étnica, e então fizeram contato de forma personalizada, muitas vezes em suas próprias línguas. “Nós vemos que os verdadeiros líderes comunitários são as forças organizadores nas comunidades específicas”, disse Ali Hasanali, parte de um batalhão de jovens organizadores que aprimorou essa técnica na campanha de Kulkani. “Não dá para ter uma representação apenas simbólica. Isso não oferece o conhecimento sobre a comunidade que alguém de dentro dela tem.”
Thara Narasimhan, à esquerda, apresentadora de um programa de rádio hindu no Texas, conversa com o candidato Democrata ao Congresso Sri Kulkarni durante um evento de arrecadação de fundos em Houston, em 29 de julho.
Foto: David J. Phillip/AP
Se você conversar com o bando de operadores de campanha, planejadores de mídia, estrategistas, e mandarins políticos que controlam a ala centrista do partido, eles explicarão como dominaram o ciclo de 2018, canalizando a energia anti-Trump para candidatos moderados com perfil de negócios, que devolverão a Washington um equilíbrio bipartidário. Em setembro, a Third Way [Terceira Via], a mais eloquente defensora do centro político, liberou uma análise preliminar, mostrando que os candidatos apoiados pelo DCCC e pelo NewDemPAC, o braço político da coalizão de centro da Câmara, a New Democrat Coalition [Nova Coalizão Democrata], venceram um número extraordinário de disputas, enquanto grupos de esquerda como Brand New Congress [Congresso Totalmente Novo], Justice Democrats [Democratas da Justiça], e Our Revolution [Nossa Revolução] tiveram um índice muito mais baixo de vitórias. Jim Kessler, cofundador da Third Way, tem brandido esses números como uma arma. Ele se gabou de que “20 milhões de Democratas não podem estar errados” em um e-mail enviado internamente para alguns Democratas e encaminhado ao Intercept.
Um mergulho nos números mostra que esses sucessos foram francamente exagerados.Mas um mergulho nos números, como fez o Progressive Change Institute [Instituto Mudança Progressista], mostra que esses sucessos foram francamente exagerados. Por exemplo, as estatísticas da Third Way alegam que 32 dos 37 candidatos do NewDemPAC incluídos nas listas de acompanhamento da organização antes das primárias venceram suas disputas. Mas em oito dessas disputas (9º distrito de Arizona, 2º distrito do Kansas, 2º distrito de Minnesota, 22º distrito de Nova York, 6º distrito da Pensilvânia, 4º distrito de Utah, 5º distrito de Washington e 6º distrito de Wisconsin), o candidato apoiado pelo NewDemPAC não teve oponente na primária. Em outras 17, a disparidade de captação de recursos entre o candidato NewDem e a alternativa foi tão absurda – 2,4 milhões de dólares contra zero, em um caso – que é possível dizer que eles foram virtualmente incontestes. Assim, em mais de três quartos das vitórias o candidato do NewDem não tinha concorrência real.
Usando a lista da própria Third Way, permanecem 12 primárias competitivas para avaliar.
O NewDemPAC, porém, também reivindica para si candidatos da Califórnia como Harley Rouda e Katie Hill, ambos tão favoráveis à proposta de um sistema de saúde “Medicare para Todos” que receberam apoio do PAC Medicare para Todos, da deputada Pramila Jayapal. Isso não casa com a tímida proposta do NewDem de “promover maior cobertura de seguro”, e com a insistência da Third Way de que defender essa política seria a morte para os Democratas.
No caso de Rouda, ele tem apoio de grupos comunitários locais, inclusive a representação Indivisible do distrito, que se uniram ao DCCC para apoiá-lo. Curiosamente, o NewDemPAC colocou em sua lista tanto Rouda quanto seu oponente nas primárias, Hans Keirstead, o que garante a vitória na disputa. Duas outras disputas (2º distrito de Arizona e 11º distrito de Nova Jersey) não envolviam nenhuma alternativa progressista ao candidato do NewDem.
Isso reduz a lista da Third Way a oito disputas.
Quando você se limita às disputas em que há uma efetiva batalha ideológica entre candidatos viáveis e bem financiados, o NewDemPAC perdeu cinco, e ganhou apenas duas ou três, dependendo de como o resultado for caracterizado. Katie Porter, uma especialista em fraudes de hipoteca apoiada por Elizabeth Warren, derrotou David Min, ex-membro da equipe de Chuck Schumer e apoiado pelo NewDem, na disputa pelo 45º distrito da Califórnia. R.D. Huffstetler, apoiado pelo NewDem, foi derrotado de forma tão acachapante por Leslie Cockburn nas convenções locais do 5º distrito da Virgínia, que desistiu da disputa e declarou apoio a ela. Josh Butner (50º distrito da Califórnia), Jay Hulings (23º distrito do Texas), e o ex-deputado Brad Ashford (2º distrito do Nebraska) também perderam para adversários mais progressistas. Uma ausência intrigante na lista do NewDem é a disputa no 14º distrito de Nova York, onde Ocasio-Cortez derrotou Crowley, o presidente da New Democrat Coalition de 2009 a 2013.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comemora com seus apoiadores, inclusive Naureen Akhter, em uma festa da vitória no Bronx, em 26 de junho de 2018.
Foto: Scott Heins/Getty Images
Fora do restrito enquadramento do NewDem, os progressistas derrotaram os centristas em diversas disputas importantes das quais o NewDemPAC não participou ativamente. A progressista Jahana Hayes derrotou Mary Glassman, que tinha o apoio da Câmara de Comércio dos EUA e da máquina partidária local, em Connecticut. Jess King em Lancaster, Pensilvânia, estava perto de derrotar sua adversária da situação, Christina Hartman, quando Hartman desistiu da disputa e se mudou para outro distrito. O oponente da situação a Richard Ojeda na Virgínia Ocidental, o prefeito de Huntington, desistiu depois que Ojeda decolou. Dana Balter derrotou a candidata apoiada pelo DCCC, Juanita Perez Williams, em Syracuse. O candidato do DCCC Colin Allred de fato venceu uma disputa contra a progressista Lillian Salerno no Texas, mas isso foi depois que o favorito original do partido, o consultor político de Hillary Clinton, Ed Meier, não participou.
Lauren Baer (que captou bem mais recursos que seu adversário no 18º distrito da Flórida), Abigail Spanberger (7º distrito da Virgínia), e Lizzie Pannil Fletcher (7º distrito do Texas) saíram vitoriosas em batalhas diretamente ideológicas – muito embora Pannil Fletcher só tenha vencido porque o candidato preferido do DCCC também não participou dessa prévia. E, mesmo então, o NewDemPAC só apoiou Fletcher depois da primária (onde ela foi a mais votada) e antes da disputa no Texas com Laura Moser, que se tornou uma heroína do movimento de resistência contra Trump em 2017, como criadora da ferramenta de mensagens de texto Daily Action, que canalizou a raiva progressista em uma dose diária de ativismo. O DCCC atingiu Moser com uma campanha de difamação antes da primária, atribuindo a ela a pecha de “infiltrada de Washington” (o que é um pouco contraditório vindo de uma operação de campanha sediada em Washington). E a ala centrista não se orgulha de uma de suas vitórias de mais alto nível, quando Donna Shalala foi impulsionada em uma primária em Miami contra a oposição progressista. A aprendiz do governo Clinton, de 77 anos, correu riscos de perder a disputa, mas acabou se elegendo com 51,7% dos votos.
O maior problema com a promoção que a Third Way faz da “proporção de vitórias” é o próprio conceito, que encoraja a forjar números e a evitar a concorrência em disputas em que o resultado seja mais incerto. Se o grupo Justice Democrats estivesse preocupado em primeiro lugar com sua taxa de vitórias, nunca teria investido com tudo em uma candidata “millennial” que não podia fazer campanha em tempo integral porque ainda estava trabalhando em um bar quatro dias por semana.
![Membros da organização National Nurses United [Enfermeiras Nacionais Unidas] e apoiadores do “Medicare para Todos” manifestam-se em apoio a um programa nacional de seguro saúde de pagador único em 15 de janeiro de 2017, na cidade de Nova York.](https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2018/11/medicare-para-todos-protesto-1541789838.jpg)
Foto: Michael Nigro/Sipa via AP
Para além das divisões na cúpula do partido, no entanto, os ativistas perceberam que entre as pessoas que estavam nas ruas, aquelas que haviam apoiado Hillary Clinton e aquelas que haviam apoiado Bernie Sanders queriam essencialmente as mesmas coisas: “Medicare para Todos”, um salário mínimo de 15 dólares por hora, universidade sem dívida (ou gratuita), um New Deal Ecológico. Até os candidatos apresentados como moderados ou centristas se manifestavam em prol de várias dessas causas.
O fatalismo dos primeiros dias da era Trump, combinado com o discurso que propunha um acordo com o presidente, foi afastado no meio desse ano pela esperança de que, havendo pressão pública suficiente, o Affordable Care Act [Lei de Cuidado Acessível, o ‘Obamacare’] poderia ser salvo.
Mesmo sofrendo vários reveses, a energia dos liberais permanecia em alta porque os ataques de Trump à dignidade do público não cessavam. Cada vez que Trump se sentia encurralado, ele encontrava novas formas de reunir o público “MAGA” [“Make America Great Again”]. Ele nunca abandonou seu veto aos muçulmanos, até conseguir que uma versão fosse aceita pela Suprema Corte. Ele anunciou o fim do programa Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [Ação Diferida para Ingressos Infantis], que oferecia proteção legal aos “Dreamers”, os filhos dos imigrantes (embora a extinção do programa tenha sido suspensa pela justiça). Ele desencadeou uma crise na fronteira com o México, separando pais e filhos e colocando todos eles atrás das grades.
A incessante demonização dos inimigos de Trump fomentou o ódio: supremacistas brancos encorajados fizeram manifestações em Charlottesville e em outras partes, e extremistas de direita iniciaram e executaram planos de terrorismo doméstico. Apenas 10 dias atrás, 11 fiéis foram massacrados numa sinagoga em Pittsburgh.
O etno-nacionalismo de direita com um toque autoritário está em ascensão em todo o mundo, mas há também uma esquerda fortalecida que resiste.O risco para os Republicanos de abraçar a “Southern Strategy” (a “Estratégia Sulista” de atrair eleitores brancos recorrendo ao racismo contra os afro-americanos) sempre foi o de restringi-los, bem, ao Sul. Mas a exploração da questão racial tem alcance nacional, e é possível dizer que isso os levou ao domínio nacional que agora possuem.
O etno-nacionalismo de direita com um toque autoritário está em ascensão em todo o mundo, da Rússia à Índia e ao Brasil. Mas há também uma esquerda fortalecida que resiste. No começo do ano, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, concorrendo com uma plataforma populista- progressista, conquistou o poder no México; os socialistas ascenderam na Espanha; Jeremy Corbyn continua muito popular no Reino Unido.
Os anos 1930 na Europa, e os anos 2010 no Brasil mostraram que os movimentos de centro-esquerda sem base popular não são capazes de enfrentar o desafio do fascismo em tempos de crise econômica. O Partido Democrata em 2017 e 2018 começou uma transição para se tornar um Partido do povo, cada vez mais ligado a doadores e ativistas comunitários. Mais de 2 milhões de pessoas se envolveram na organização dos Democratas nos últimos dois anos.
Na manhã de 7 de novembro, ganhando ou perdendo, eles acordaram novamente.
O conteúdo jornalístico desta matéria foi baseado no livro prestes a ser lançado de Ryan Grim, “We’ve Got People: Resistance and Rebellion, From Jim Crow to Donald Trump” [“Nós Temos o Povo: Resistência e Rebelião, de Jim Crow a Donald Trump”, ainda sem tradução no Brasil]. Inscreva-se aqui para receber um e-mail avisando do lançamento.
Tradução: Deborah Leão
The post Como Donald Trump salvou o Partido Democrata da autodestruição appeared first on The Intercept.
On Friday, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration would end mid-air refueling support to the Saudi- and UAE-led coalition that has been bombing Yemen, cutting off what is widely seen as the most significant pillar of American support for the brutal campaign.
But progressives in Congress are pushing for more, aiming to cut off weapons sales and pass a measure in both chambers that would force the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Yemen. The measure, which was introduced by Rep. Ro Khanna (D.-Calif) in the House and by Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Mike Lee (R.-Utah) in the Senate, relies on the legal theory that intelligence and logistical support amount to “hostilities” under the 1973 War Powers Act, and therefore must be authorized by Congress, which has not approved U.S. involvement in the war between the coalition and a rebel group known as the Houthis in Yemen.
In a phone interview on Friday, Khanna told The Intercept he was “cautiously optimistic” about the news, but wants to pass the measure to ensure the Trump administration follows through on its decision.
“This is a major change. It could avert a humanitarian crisis,” Khanna said. “From everything that I’ve understood, from activists on the ground, from people who are briefed on policy, the war could not continue without the assistance of U.S. refueling.”
It is not clear whether that is the case, however. Citing anonymous sources, the Post reported that the administration’s decision “was prompted at least in part by the Saudi military’s increased aerial refueling capacity,” suggesting that the withdrawal of U.S. support may not have as much impact as Khanna and others hope.
“I do think that Congress should memorialize it by passing Senate resolution 54, and House resolution 138,” Khanna said, referring to the measures by their respective bill numbers. “Similar to what we did in Somalia’s case, when the White House said that we weren’t going to have any intervention, Congress went ahead and passed both of the War Powers Resolution [measures], just to make sure that was definitive.”
Sanders, too, said he would press for the resolution’s passage. “I’m glad that the Trump administration is ending U.S. refueling of Saudi aircraft in Yemen’s devastating war… U.S. participation in this conflict is unauthorized and unconstitutional and must end completely,” he said in a statement Friday evening. “I will soon bring Senate Joint Resolution 54 back to the floor for another vote, so the Senate can compel an end to U.S. participation in the Yemen war as a matter of law, not simply as a matter of the president’s discretion.”
Murphy also stressed that the administration should cut off all forms of support, not just refueling. “Why are we still helping the Saudis with targeting? Why are we still selling them the bombs at a discount?” Murphy asked in a statement. “Now that it’s no longer a secret that the war in Yemen is a national security and humanitarian nightmare, we need to get all the way out.”
The U.S. has been assisting Saudi Arabia and the UAE in their intervention since March of 2015, after the internationally-backed President, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, was deposed by the Houthis. The U.S. is not directly involved in combat operations against the rebel group – which has received a small amount of support from Iran – but has provided weapons, intelligence, and mid-air refueling for the coalition.
In terms of the day-to-day fighting, mid-air refueling is the most important form of U.S. help because it allows coalition aircraft to stay in the air longer, flying missions deep into enemy territory. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis explained in March that it also allows pilots to circle their targets and take longer to make targeting decisions.
“When you look at such things are air refueling — when you’re a pilot in the air and you’ve got bombs on your wing and you got somebody calling on you to drop and you’re watching you fuel gauge go down, you say, ‘No, you don’t. We’re going to refuel you. There’s no need for a rash or hasty decision there,’” Mattis told reporters in March.
The post The U.S. Will Stop Refueling Saudi-led Coalition Jets in Yemen, but Progressives in Congress Want More appeared first on The Intercept.
The first new segment of border wall to be constructed under President Trump will bisect a butterfly conservation center, a historic church, and a state park along the Texas border. The construction is set to begin in February.
In March, Congress appropriated $1.6 billion to build Trump’s border wall — his signature campaign issue. But Congress earmarked most of the funding to reinforce or replace already existing segments of border fencing. The southern border already has nearly 700 miles of border fencing and barriers built in the last decade. In October, Trump had a gold plaque attached to a two-mile stretch of border fence in Calexico, California, with his name on it to commemorate the first new stretch of Trump’s wall. But the fence was a replacement for an older fence built in the 1990’s. The recently announced 6 miles will be the first new segment of border wall built in a new location by the Trump administration.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced the new border wall last Friday — four days before the midterm elections — in a press release. But CBP did not say where the new wall would be located, only that it would be in Hidalgo County, Texas. Several calls and emails to CBP to confirm the location went unreturned.
But Steve Lightfoot, a spokesperson for Texas Parks and Wildlife, confirmed today that Trump’s new segment of border wall would be built through Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park and surrounding areas in Mission, Texas. The park will more than likely close after the wall is constructed, since the land was deeded in a family trust to be expressly used as public parkland. The border wall will also run through national wildlife refuge land and through the nonprofit National Butterfly Center, also in Mission. The center is home to at least 200 species of butterfly, and serves as critical habitat for the migration of the threatened Monarch butterfly and endangered species including the ocelot and jaguarundi.
Marianna Treviño Wright, director of the center, said that CBP has been deliberately secretive about where new segments of wall will be built because the majority of residents there do not want it. “There’s been no public meetings, no outreach and no effort to reach out to Spanish-speaking residents,” she said.
Photo: Verónica G. Cárdenas for The Intercept
In August 2017, more than 1,000 people walked several miles from the Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Mission to the historic La Lomita Chapel — a 120-year-old mission chapel also in the border wall’s path — to protest construction of the wall. This August another protest with several hundred people was held at the National Butterfly Center, which has become the de facto headquarters for border wall resistance in the area.
“I feared that we’d be the first to get the wall,” Treviño Wright said. “The bulldozers could be rolling in here as early as February.” In the summer of 2017, she discovered private contractors with chainsaws destroying critical habitat at the center, to make way for the wall. In December 2017, the center filed suit against the federal government, citing unlawful incursion and deprivation of due process as well as violation of the Endangered Species Act and other federal protection laws.
But under the Secure Fence Act passed in 2006, the Department of Homeland Security can waive hundreds of federal laws to build the wall. And Treviño Wright thinks that the Department of Homeland Security will file a “quick take” condemnation. “Under eminent domain the federal government can literally seize the land and do whatever they like before anything is negotiated or adjudicated,” she said.
Because of the expansive Rio Grande floodplain, the border wall is being built as far as a mile from the river, which serves as the international boundary with Mexico. This means that the wall would bisect the butterfly center, leaving 70 acres between the wall and the river, with the visitor’s center on the north side. It will also more than likely destroy La Lomita Chapel, built in 1899, because CBP also wants to create a 150-foot “enforcement zone” south of the wall, which will include an all weather road, camera towers, and other surveillance.
Father Roy Snipes, a popular Catholic priest who holds services at La Lomita Chapel, has led several protests against the wall. “If they put a wall on the levee, our chapel will be on the other side of it,” he said. Snipes said CBP, which is in charge of the wall construction, has told them very little about its plans for the historic church. “It’s like what you hear out of the White House. Nobody knows anything.”
According to the CBP press release, the new structure will be a “pedestrian, levee wall,” which means that an existing earthen levee that is used for flood control more than a mile from the Rio Grande will be replaced with concrete and topped with a steel bollard wall. Some levee border wall, built nearly a decade ago, already exists in Hidalgo County and ranges from 18 to 30 feet high.
Treviño Wright said CBP has deliberately kept border communities in the dark. And that there’s been a lot of confusion about when and where the border wall will be built. “I’ve heard many landowners in the area say we need to stop Trump’s border wall from being funded,” she said. “They’re not even aware it’s already been funded. And guess what? They’re building it here.”
The post New Border Wall Will Destroy Butterfly Center, Historic Chapel, and Texas State Park appeared first on The Intercept.
When former Michigan Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer faced a populist, progressive rival in the state’s Democratic gubernatorial primary earlier this year, she had a little help from her health insurance industry friends.
Whitmer was hosted at a fundraiser thrown by lobbyists for Blue Cross Blue Shield. She netted $144,000 during a single day at the event.
The company’s interest in the race came as no surprise, as Whitmer’s chief rival, former Detroit public health chief Abdul El-Sayed, was campaigning on establishing a statewide single-payer health care system. Essentially, he was running to put the company out of business.
But it appears that Blue Cross Blue Shield gained more than just the defeat of single payer. This week, Whitmer won the governor’s mansion, putting the state back in the Democratic column. She quickly announced the composition of her transition team.
One of the “honorary co-chairs” is Daniel Loepp, the president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.
In a 2015 interview, Whitmer credited Loepp with being the first person to suggest that she enter politics, back when he worked in the state legislature.
During the campaign, Gretchen Whitmer — whose father is Richard Whitmer, formerly the head of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan — was defensive against criticisms that she was too close to the health insurance giant. “It’s extremely sexist to say that a woman is beholden to her father’s former employer,” she told CNN.
The governor-elect’s team did not respond to a request for comment. Though Whitmer ran to the right of El-Sayed, her platform was still broadly progressive and pro-labor.
Whitmer’s transition team isn’t the only one bringing corporate interests onboard post-election. In Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp has declared victory, despite an ongoing legal effort by his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams to chase down enough provisional and absentee ballots to take the race to a run-off.
Kemp announced Thursday that his transition team would be led by David Dove, Kemp’s former legal counsel and chief of staff. More recently, Dove was added to the new lobbying arm of the litigation and regulatory law firm Robbins Ross Alloy Belinfante Littlefield LLC.
The newly minted Robbins Government Relations Group opened October 2, just over a month before the election. In an interview with a legal publication, partner Josh Belinfante explained why the firm decided to open a lobbying arm. He emphasized the potential to influence regulations.
“A lot of our clients’ problems can be resolved through the legislative branch more easily and effectively than through the judicial branch,” Belinfante said. “Or our clients may have a win in the judicial branch that may need to be protected in the legislature — particularly clients who are highly regulated, and particularly when legislation or regulations pass that govern what they do.”
According to disclosures, Dove is not currently registered to lobby. But presumably, the firm’s clients now have a chain of communication to the man responsible for staffing the next governor’s mansion. The Intercept reached out to the firm and to Dove to ask if he would be taking a leave of absence while serving on the transition team, but they have not yet responded.
The post Michigan’s Democratic Governor-Elect Puts Blue Cross Blue Shield Executive on Transition Team — After the Company Funded Her Campaign appeared first on The Intercept.
The armored jeeps were lined up single file along a Guatemala City street on August 31 in an ominous queue. By mid-morning, images began circulating of the jeeps outside the offices of a U.N.-backed anti-corruption commission that has played a key role in bringing down corrupt officials. More jeeps were spotted in the vicinity of the National Palace, along with military personnel. In a country with a not-so-distant past of military coups and massacres, the photographs and videos spread like wildfire, raising alarm as people scrambled to find out what was going on.
To Feliciana Macario, the show of force evoked the worst years of military rule in Guatemala, during the 36-year armed conflict between the U.S.-backed military and paramilitary forces and left-wing guerrilla groups. Macario is one of the national coordinators of CONAVIGUA, a national human rights organization founded by women whose husbands were killed or disappeared during the conflict.
“It creates the threat of a return to the 1980s,” said Macario, an Indigenous Maya Kiche woman who works with victims and survivors of conflict-era state violence.
The armed conflict left more than 200,000 people dead and another 45,000 disappeared. More than 80 percent of victims were Indigenous Maya civilians, and the military was the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. A U.N.-backed truth commission and now two Guatemalan courts have determined that the military committed genocide in the early 1980s. Peace Accords ended the armed conflict in 1996, but Macario said that Guatemala’s current president, Jimmy Morales, is violating the terms.
“One of the Peace Accords that we highlight is the accord on the role of the army within society. It says that the army has to reduce its numbers, its budget, and everything. But on the contrary, what Jimmy Morales is doing is militarizing. He is increasing the army’s budget and wants to remilitarize the country,” Macario told The Intercept.
Roughly two hours after the jeeps were first spotted outside the offices of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala — CICIG, by its Spanish acronym — Morales stood inside the National Palace flanked by military and police officials and announced that he would not renew CICIG’s mandate, sparking legal challenges, protests, and an ongoing political crisis. The deployment of the jeeps deepened concerns among many Guatemalans about Morales — all the more so when the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala revealed that the vehicles had been donated by the United States for use in border regions, not the capital. Morales and his backers have been courting the support of the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers against CICIG, and there are signs that the U.S. government’s longstanding support for the commission is weakening.
“They were donated by the United States to combat drug trafficking on the borders and they were used to intimidate CICIG, violating everything the agreement says.”Two months after the jeeps lined the street outside the CICIG offices, the official justification for their use on August 31 is as murky as ever. It was a routine patrol to combat criminal activity, said the Minister of the Interior. It was to protect public institutions and buildings, according to police documents. It was to deter possible violent protests, said the president. Nearly every time a government official makes a statement or a new document comes to light regarding the Jeep J8s, the story becomes a little bit — or a lot — different.
Regardless of the shifting rationales, one thing is now clear: The Guatemalan government violated an agreement with the United States regarding the latter’s donation of Jeep J8s. Both the U.S. Department of State and the Department of Defense confirmed to The Intercept that the vehicles were donated for use by specific Guatemalan interagency task forces for counternarcotics operations in border regions. Their transfer or use outside of those parameters would constitute a violation of the donation agreement, both departments indicated to The Intercept. However, Guatemalan police documents obtained by The Intercept show a pattern of such J8 transfers and use in the months leading up to and including the August 31 deployment in Guatemala City.
“They were donated by the United States to combat drug trafficking on the borders and they were used [August 31] to intimidate CICIG, violating everything the agreement says,” said Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman Jordán Rodas, who has challenged the August 31 deployment in Guatemala’s Constitutional Court.
Photo: Orlando Estrada/AFP/Getty Images
The public standoff between Morales and CICIG has been brewing for over a year. CICIG has operated alongside the Office of the Public Prosecutor for more than a decade, but its success with high-profile cases has soared over the past few years, during the tenure of head commissioner Iván Velásquez, a Colombian former prosecutor and judge. Thanks to their joint investigations, dozens of politicians, lawyers, and corporate executives are now behind bars for corruption, including one former president.
Morales, a former television comedian with hard-line right-wing military backers, was elected president in late 2015 on a wave of anti-corruption fervor and promised to support CICIG throughout his presidency. Within a year and a half of taking office, however, that promise went out the window after Morales, two of his relatives, and his political party all became the subjects of criminal investigations. In August 2017, Morales tried to expel Velásquez from the country, but was blocked by the constitutional court. This time around, Morales acted while Velásquez was outside the country. His declaration barring Velásquez has also been declared unconstitutional, but Morales and several members of his cabinet have spoken of illegal orders and international manipulation, and stated that they would not permit Velásquez to return. The Ministry of Defense and the army announced that they would respect the court rulings, but Morales and his closest allies remain in open defiance of the Constitutional Court. With U.N. support, Velásquez continues as CICIG head commissioner from abroad.
“What Jimmy Morales is doing is militarizing. He is increasing the army’s budget and wants to remilitarize the country.”As political instability and protests mounted, government officials’ stories about why the J8s were in front of CICIG immediately before Morales announced plans to shutter the commission shifted. At a press conference early on, Interior Minister Enrique Degenhart, Foreign Relations Minister Sandra Jovel, and others claimed that the J8s were out on a routine patrol, part of ongoing operations to combat crime. A Ministry of the Interior report drawn up after the fact obtained by The Intercept shows plans for Guatemala City operations extending a month prior to and after August 31. However, the specific task scheduled for August 30 and 31, according to the document, was different from other days. The task was to monitor and protect government institutions and buildings. Officials highlighted a version of this reasoning in later statements.
Then, in an October 3 radio interview, Morales publicly contradicted his ministers — and reports from his own office obtained by The Intercept — and stated that the J8s had been sent to CICIG in case of violent protests.
Ministry of Defense spokesperson Oscar Pérez referred The Intercept to the Ministry of the Interior for all questions regarding the J8s, including a request for comment on the contradictions between statements by other officials. Pérez repeatedly declined to answer the question of whether any soldiers or army personnel were present in the August 31 operations involving the J8s. The jeeps and task forces are under civilian command, he said. Spokespeople for the Ministry of the Interior and Morales did not respond to The Intercept’s repeated requests for comment.
The State Department is closely monitoring the use of the U.S.-donated jeeps, a State Department spokesperson told The Intercept in an email, noting that the embassy expressed its concern in a public statement when the jeeps first appeared. “The US government, including the State Department, takes allegations of misuse of U.S.-donated vehicles seriously and will respond appropriately once the review into the alleged misuse is complete,” according to the spokesperson.
According to another State Department spokesperson, the documents specify that the J8s are to be used for counternarcotics operations. They also specify that the task forces focus on eliminating criminal activity, especially drug trafficking, on Guatemala’s borders, according to the official. The Department of Defense highlighted the same point, but in more detail.
“The J8 Jeeps were provided between 2013 and 2018 to support the operations of three Guatemalan Interagency Task Forces (IATFs), Tecun Uman, Chorti, and Xinca that are combined police, military, and tax authority border interdiction units led by a senior police officer and under the control of Ministry of [the Interior],” Department of Defense spokesperson Johnny Michael told The Intercept in an email response to a series of questions.
“The documents under which these vehicles were donated specify that the IATFs focus on eliminating criminal activity, in particular narcotics trafficking, on Guatemala’s borders, and that the J8s are expected to be used in a manner that prioritizes border security and high-crime areas. The donation documents specify that the J8s are to be used for counternarcotics operations,” wrote Michael.
The Guatemalan government has not notified the United States of any transfer or change in mission for the donated jeeps, but the Department of Defense is investigating “comments insinuating an apparent transfer for varying uses of the Jeep J8s” and is consulting with the State Department on any further actions, according to Michael.
There is no question that transfers occurred. The Intercept obtained more than 100 pages of national police and Ministry of the Interior documents and reports filed with the Constitutional Court in fulfillment of a court order requiring the institutions to explain and justify the presence of Jeep J8s outside CICIG on August 31. According to police reports, J8s were deployed in Guatemala City beginning in April 2018 “with the goal of reducing the crime rate.” The transfer of four J8s each from the Chorti and Xinca interagency task forces was ordered on April 23 for a two-day Guatemala City citizen security initiative. Police officials continued to transfer even more Jeep J8s from the task forces to a variety of police initiatives and operations all over the capital over the course of the next four months, leading up to August 31.
“Is it ‘three strikes you’re out’? Is it a freeze on future aid? We don’t know.”In fact, as the pattern of transfers to and between other capital city police operations demonstrate, J8s have been used outside the scope of each of the three major points the State Department and Department of Defense highlight with regard to the donation documents: purpose (combat drug trafficking), geography (border regions), and control (interagency task forces).
Details on how the U.S. government monitors its donations to foreign security forces can be hard to come by, according to Adam Isacson, director of the Washington Office on Latin America’s defense oversight program. Between 1990 and 2005, there was a total restriction on U.S. government aid to Guatemala’s army due to past human rights violations.
Since then, according to Isacson, most aid to Guatemala’s army, including the join task forces, has come from the Pentagon. “Specifically, one Defense Department program. They used to call it Section 1004 and now they call it Counterdrug and Counter-Transnational Organized Crime, and as the name implies, that aid can only be used for that,” Isacson said.
The Department of Defense has fewer reporting requirements than State, he added. Often the program’s only reporting even to Congress is a periodic spreadsheet containing just the country name and category, with no further details on the aid.
“We have not seen the end use monitoring agreements. We never really do. They keep those classified usually as a matter of course,” said Isacson. As a result, the specific consequences of agreement violations are unknown. “Is it ‘three strikes you’re out’? Is it a freeze on future aid? We don’t know,” he said.
Photo: Luis Echeverria/Reuters
On the afternoon of August 31, Rodrigo Batres, a researcher working with the El Observador political research and analysis association, showed up to an impromptu rally in the capital city’s central plaza just hours after Morales’s announcement.
It was not the first time that citizens protested their government’s attempts to derail the anti-corruption commission, and some people had pro-CICIG signs ready to go. Others were waving Guatemalan flags when the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala issued its statement about the jeeps being donated by the United States. Earlier in the day, the embassy had responded to the news that CICIG’s mandate would not be renewed.
The U.S. was “aware” of the decision, the initial statement said, noting that the U.S. government believes CICIG “is an effective and important partner in fighting impunity, improving governance, and holding the corrupt accountable in Guatemala.” But then the embassy stated that the U.S. “will continue to support Guatemala’s fight against corruption and impunity” and views that fight as an integral part of the bilateral relationship between the two countries. For many Guatemalans, the lack of a clear condemnation of Morales’s decision and the continued support for Guatemala’s efforts to combat corruption — without CICIG — amounted to an endorsement of Morales.
“I think that statement is key. The statement says [the U.S.] respects the government’s decision and that it will continue to support the struggle against corruption. I think it is a huge show of support for the government, and that the change happened when the government changed up there in the U.S.,” Batres told The Intercept.
The U.S. has been CICIG’s biggest funder, providing $44.5 million between 2007 and 2017, which amounts to more than a quarter of the commission’s total budget. In the past, the U.S. has joined the other main donors — Canada and the European Union — in vocal support for CICIG, but it was conspicuously absent from donor country joint statements lamenting the Guatemalan government’s decision to bar Velásquez from entering the country. Observers suspect that the change in tune may be due to aggressive lobbying by Morales and his supporters, who have positioned Morales as a key U.S. ally in the region.
Guatemala was one of just a handful of countries that supported U.S. President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital — and it relocated its own embassy to Jerusalem just days after the U.S. did so. Morales was also slowest among Central American leaders to condemn the Trump administration’s policy of family separation at the U.S. border. Claims from Guatemala’s right-wing that CICIG is an agent of radical foreign elements also gained traction with U.S. lawmakers, including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who placed a freeze on $6 million in CICIG funding in May. (The hold on the funds has since been lifted.)
Following the initial August 31 statements from U.S. Embassy in Guatemala, Trump administration officials have reiterated their support for the Guatemala government. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did so the following day in a tweet that read “we greatly appreciate Guatemala’s efforts in counternarcotics and security,” with no mention of CICIG. Pompeo then called Morales on September 6 to express U.S. support for Guatemala’s sovereignty and “continued United States support for a reformed CICIG,” promising to work with Guatemala to implement the reforms in the coming year, according to the State Department. The details of those reforms were never specified.
Batres expects the trend of U.S. support for Morales to continue, despite lip service to efforts to combat corruption and impunity. “Even though they support institutionality, they are not going to stop supporting one of the main subordinate governments in the region,” he said, raising his voice over the protesters’ chants and noisemakers in the background.
The post U.S. Gave Military Jeeps to Guatemala to Fight Drug Trafficking. Instead, They Were Used to Intimidate an Anti-Corruption Commission. appeared first on The Intercept.
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