It’s something of an annual tradition for the president. On Sunday morning, as the eastern half of the country endured driving snow and frigid winter winds, Donald Trump asked on Twitter how climate change could be real if it was so cold outside.
“Be careful and try staying in your house,” he said. “Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”
Trump has raised similar concerns about that “good old fashioned Global Warming” nearly every year since 2012. If it snows near Manhattan, the president says he isn’t sure about climate change.
Read: [Trump, climate change, and the future of U.S. democracy]
Unfortunately, even as New York has occasionally been blasted with frozen precipitation, the world has kept warming. The past four years have been the four warmest years on record—a fact that NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were due to announce this past week, were the government not shut down. Earlier this winter, Washington, D.C., experienced a shocking 22 days of above-average temperatures, and the Northeast as a whole saw a balmy January. President Trump did not seize that opportunity to affirm that global warming was real.
The simple, tedious fact is that two things can be true at the same time: The world’s average temperature can be clearly and dangerously increasing, and it can still snow sometimes in the northeastern United States. Climate emerges from averages, and the averages are unambiguous. Snowpack and ice cover are decreasing, especially in the Mountain West. The Great Lakes’ winter-ice cover has declined by 71 percent over the past 40 years. The average time between the last frost of spring and the first frost of fall has increased in every region of the country since the early-20th century.
None of these facts is likely to convince Trump, for Trump seems to have decided that he does not want to be convinced. As I wrote last year, he has expressed no interest or curiosity in updating his beliefs to reflect new facts. Instead, he has fought to keep those facts from the public: In November, every U.S. scientific agency affirmed the fact of human-driven climate change. The White House responded by trying to bury the report by releasing it on Black Friday.
“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump told The Washington Post while rejecting his own government’s dire climate conclusions last year. Believers is an unfortunate choice of word because facts, alas, keep being true whether you believe in them or not. It is dangerously icy in the Northeast, and by all means local residents should stay inside. But a brief cold spell does not undo decades of scientific fact.
Pete Davidson has been largely absent from Saturday Night Live for the past couple of months. The 25-year-old comedian has had a tabloid spotlight trained on him since June 2018, when his engagement to the pop star Ariana Grande became the story of the summer. Davidson, whose comedic approach is raw and personal, would often stop by SNL’s “Weekend Update” segment to joke about the volatility of his relationship, which eventually collapsed. In November, he apologized to then-incoming Republican Representative Dan Crenshaw for mocking the veteran’s combat injury on the air. Less than a month later, Davidson posted on Instagram about feeling suicidal, alarming people enough that a police officer was sent to the SNL studios to check on him.
This is all to say that when Davidson showed up behind the “Weekend Update” desk in the most recent Saturday Night Live episode, the first of 2019, the jokes felt even more charged than usual. “I’ve had a really crazy month, and I want to talk about something that matters a lot to me,” he said. “Oh, okay. Mental health?” the “Update” host Colin Jost asked. “No,” Davidson replied, “the new Clint Eastwood movie The Mule!” As Jost and his co-host, Michael Che, confessed that they had not yet seen Eastwood’s latest auteur effort, Davidson tagged in a friend and “Mule appreciator,” the comedian John Mulaney, kicking off the only truly outstanding segment of the night.
Mulaney was a staff writer on SNL from 2008 to 2013, co-created one of the show’s most legendary “Weekend Update” characters (Bill Hader’s Stefon), and has since returned to host. But of late, Mulaney has forged a curious public bond with Davidson, something the guest acknowledged in his introduction. “I didn’t actually realize that you guys hung out together,” Jost remarked. “We do, but a lot of times it looks like I’m Pete’s lawyer,” Mulaney joked. “For real, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Pete to try to show him that you can have a life in comedy that is not insane, a sober, domestic life,” he continued. (Mulaney himself has been sober for many years, a subject he has incorporated into his stand-up.)
“Yeah, and after observing John’s life, I publicly threatened suicide. I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t make that joke, but it is funny,” Davidson said with a chuckle, toeing his usual line between confessional comedy and cringe-inducing shock humor. “Pete, look me in the eye,” Mulaney said. “You are loved by many, and we are glad you are okay. Now, back to The Mule.” It was a jolting, sweet, and undeniably sensitive moment—a way for the show to acknowledge Davidson’s struggles without dipping into pure, po-faced sincerity (something Davidson would likely despise). The duo’s connection is also clearly genuine—Mulaney recently talked about his trip to a Steely Dan concert with Davidson on The Tonight Show and has posted several Instagrams while on the road with the comic.
Their shared delight at the plot details of The Mule, which stars Eastwood as a late-in-life drug runner, was equally genuine. “You remember when Clint Eastwood berated an empty chair at the Republican National Convention?” Mulaney asked. “It’s like if that was a movie!” Davidson replied. The pair marveled at Eastwood’s character still being allowed to drive at the age of 90: “This was a superhero movie for old people about a guy whose superpower is that he can drive unsupervised,” Mulaney quipped. “Fulfilling another elderly grandpa fantasy: that a 90-year-old white man can do any job better than a Mexican, even when the job is Mexican drug trafficking.”
Beyond the jabs at Eastwood’s movie, though, what elevated the segment was Davidson and Mulaney’s vibrant odd-couple chemistry. Mulaney has the clipped, precise delivery of a veteran, Johnny Carson–esque comic (his talent as a stand-up includes knowing exactly which syllables to hit hardest in every joke), while the hyperactive Davidson seems like he could misread a cue card at any moment or break into unplanned guffaws. Their pairing felt more alive than the show’s ongoing “Update” team, Jost and Che. The segment has long been in need of revamping, and unfortunately, Mulaney, who has for years been an obvious pick for the hosting job, is likely too busy with his own career to return to SNL full-time.
New year or not, this SNL season remains in flux, quality-wise. The political material is still quite wanting—this week’s cold-open sketch, starring Alec Baldwin as President Donald Trump, cast the ongoing U.S. government shutdown as a Deal or No Deal game show, a premise that would’ve felt stale even in 2006, when Deal or No Deal was popular (new episodes now air on the cable channel CNBC). Some of the episode’s other, sillier sketches were worth a laugh, such as a parody news report from an office where people were trying to change their (ridiculous, sometimes obscene) name, but it was an overall lackluster return to the airwaves for the show, with the host, Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), feeling lost in the shuffle. SNL’s season cannot be saved with a Mule appreciation alone, but the authenticity of Mulaney and Davidson’s glee, and their unmistakable bond, certainly gave the episode a much-needed boost.
Last week, The Washington Post reported that President Donald Trump has gone to extreme lengths to conceal the details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. On at least one occasion, the Post reported, Trump took possession of the notes of his own interpreter. While questioning the interpreter about the substance of Trump and Putin’s talks would constitute a breach of norms, “pretending now that the old rules can function as intended is not only delusive, but dangerous,” David Frum wrote. “Subpoena the interpreter now.”
In his arguments for subpoenaing Trump’s interpreter, Frum ignores the fact that the Supreme Court now has five conservative justices. Frum himself lists excellent arguments that these five justices could use as justification for ruling in Trump’s favor. If there were a robust dissent by the four liberals, Frum would get the worst of both worlds: The interpreter would not testify and, because the decision was merely 5–4, foreign government officials would be reluctant to be candid in their meetings with a U.S. president.
Jack Harllee
Washington, D.C.
If we were willing to force Secret Service agents to testify about what they saw or heard while with the president, what’s so different about subpoenaing an interpreter?
Pat Southward
Lake Mary, Fla.
I have not seen anyone raise the issue yet of the information that is being lost to history and to future historians. Trump’s appalling ignorance of history makes it clear that he has no respect for the subject.
Susan Rappoport
Fallbrook, Calif.
I respect that Mr. Frum is concerned about the potential gravity of private conversations between President Trump and Vladimir Putin; however, I don’t believe that subpoenaing the American interpreter who was present for one of their meetings at the G20 summit in Hamburg is the correct course.
Three parties were present for the second Hamburg conversation mentioned in David Frum’s article: Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and the Russian interpreter. Assuming that Putin would not extradite himself or his interpreter to testify in front of Congress, the remaining option would be to directly subpoena President Trump to answer questions about what, specifically, was discussed during these meetings. The best avenue for this would be a closed-door meeting between the president and members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (chaired by Eliot Engel). The committee may then choose to release a public report that outlines the broad strokes of the meeting without delving into specifics that are sensitive for national-security reasons.
There is, of course, the counterargument that Donald Trump would either lie, plead the Fifth, or be so intentionally vague as to give no new information at all to Congress and the American people about what conversations are being had at the highest level of foreign affairs. However, lying under oath is itself a federal crime, and if Trump is not forthcoming, then an interview with the interpreter may be in order only to confirm or deny what President Trump stated under oath in his testimony. If inconsistencies exist, then a more thorough investigation could follow. David Frum is correct in his concern about President Trump’s cavalier approach to foreign affairs with Vladimir Putin. However, before Mr. Frum pushes for a breach in the ethical wall of interpreters, I’d just like to suggest that he first consider going directly to the source of all these conversations: Trump himself.
Colten Michael
Logan, Utah
“Mr. Interpreter, could you please tell the court what the accused said three sentences ago?”
“I’m sorry, your honor, but I honestly have no idea. Please just ask him the question over again.”
As a professional courtroom interpreter for 15 years, I had exchanges like this on a regular basis. Was I hiding something from the judge? Was I protecting the defendant that I was interpreting for? Not at all. It’s simply that the mechanics of interpreting, especially simultaneously interpreting, involve not really paying attention to what is being said. It is an almost automatic process. Zen, if you will. Or to be less mystical, it’s like your drive home. “Ma’am, could you tell us what business you passed three blocks before you got home?” Absolutely not. You were driving, not thinking.
Questions of ethics aside, to expect an interpreter to recall a conversation from months back is simply an impossible request. And it would have been just as impossible one minute after the exchange.
David Frum’s piece is sending chills through the interpreter community.
Robert Jackson
Miami, Fla.
It is with undivided horror that I read your article, which advocated compelling testimony from Trump’s interpreter.
An interpreter must perform a very demanding task: rendering on the fly a set of ideas expressed in a foreign language. Among other difficulties, the interpreter must choose between synonyms, with no opportunity to weigh the consequences of his or her choice.
This work is intensely stressful, performed within an immediacy that affords no delay. An interpreter cannot be a reliable witness unless he or she dwells upon what is being said, and in the process fails to perform adequately.
Compelling the interpreter to provide testimony would have a severe chilling effect and damage useful diplomacy.
Philip Buchet
San Francisco, Calif.
CLAREMONT, N.H.—Elizabeth Warren wants the look on her face to be funny. It’s somewhere between stern and confused and disappointed, complete with fists briefly on her hips, like she’s playing a mom in a commercial who just found an adorable kid making a mess on the floor.
That’s how the senator from Massachusetts responds late Friday when I ask her what she thinks will happen if the rest of the Democratic primary field doesn’t follow her lead and put talking about the economy at the center of their campaigns.
“I don’t know how anyone could not talk about the economy—and corruption!—and diagnose what’s wrong in America today. I just don’t know how they could do it,” she said, then added with a little snark creeping in to her voice, “Good luck …”
[Read: Elizabeth Warren doesn’t want to be Hillary 2.0]
The long photo line was done, and she was still standing on the small platform where she’d just done an hour-long town hall in front of 300 people. They’d come out on a cold night to the (naturally) Common Man restaurant, which offers free crackers and cheese out of big crock jars in front of the dining room and New Hampshire beer on tap. She’d started by laying out her three-part pitch to change Washington, to change the economy, and to change the rules of politics—and not just “little pieces around the margins, little nibbles here,” she said, but “big structural change in this country.” She’d ended with another thread of her stump speech, placing herself in an American tradition that connects abolition, women’s suffrage, and the civil-rights movement: “They organized, they persisted, they made real change.”
Warren would like this all to end with her and her husband and the dog she’s slowly making famous by attaching a body camera to his leash all moving into the White House. But even if they don’t, she has a vision for what she wants her campaign to do in changing the rules for corporations and lobbyists, and in changing how her party works—beginning with how it picks a nominee.
Some campaigns decided that they weren’t quite ready to announce; others decided that there were specific advantages to waiting. Between them, there was a lot of snickering at Warren’s timing, announcing her exploratory committee early in the morning on New Year’s Eve. Most people were on vacation or sleeping in, they said. What a ridiculous time to announce, they said.
But now that the dam of Democrats is about to burst open, the result of Warren’s decision is that she had two weeks largely to herself to help define what’s ahead for all of them.
“If Democrats are going to win and make real change, we’ve got to build a movement, and that happens at the grass roots. It doesn’t happen from super PACs or self-funding billionaires or corporate money. It happens because we built it one person, one $10 contribution at a time all across this country,” she said.
[Read: There’s a reason many voters have negative views of Warren—but the press won’t tell you why]
Of course, that’s a pitch that describes exactly the campaign she wants to run, and that cuts at the campaigns some of her strongest competitors may try to mount.
Until Kirsten Gillibrand walked out onto Stephen Colbert’s set on Tuesday and then flew out to Iowa for the weekend, the only competition for attention among the expected heavyweights was Kamala Harris, who was doing a mostly biography-focused tour to promote the book she obviously wrote as a placeholder for launching her campaign. (Julián Castro announced last weekend and was here in New Hampshire on Wednesday, and John Delaney was campaigning here on Saturday after flying in from Iowa, but so far neither has generated nearly as much steam.)
For Warren, that was two weeks dominating media coverage, two weeks getting crowds of hundreds who probably would have showed up for whoever the first heavyweight to go to Iowa was.
That gave her the first crack at questions that dominated early speculation and coverage of the 2020 Democratic primary race: When was it going to get started already? What were people going to do about taking super-PAC money? What happens when Donald Trump tweets his way in? What happens when people bring up Hillary Clinton? How are people going to handle women running this time around? How open are campaigns going to be to reporters chasing them down for comment on everything?
[Read: Elizabeth Warren illuminates the left’s foreign-policy divide]
While the rest of her opponents have been huddling, locking down the final logistics around their launches, Warren has been laying down markers. She was even the first 2020 candidate to be portrayed on Saturday Night Live, played by Kate McKinnon this weekend.
It’s early yet. More than a year until the Iowa caucuses. A lot of campaign to go. But Warren’s hoping these early moves matter, because she was the one who got to answer first.
Now no candidate can get away with accepting super-PAC cash without seeming to be going against Warren and the standard she’s set. No reporter can credibly write anymore about “likability” or echoes of Clinton—even her prospective opponents leapt to Warren’s defense when those topics, suffused with suggestions of sexism, became part of the early coverage of her exploratory-committee announcement.
Not just that: As big of a flop as the rollout of her DNA test in October was, and as much as it remains a topic for the chattering class, the issue has been neutralized among her opponents, at least for the moment. Trump greeted her entry into the race with two tweets. One mocked her percentage of Cherokee ancestry, and the other used his racist “Pocahontas” nickname and said that she should have live-streamed “from Bighorn or Wounded Knee instead of her kitchen, with her husband dressed in full Indian garb.” They will make it next to impossible for any of her opponents to pick at that controversy, or to employ similarly low-ball politics about her or anyone else, without seeming to play into Trump’s hopes of dividing Democrats.
[Read: Trump, Warren, and America’s racial essentialism]
Along the way, Warren’s decision not to respond to the cyberbully in chief and to instead pause before dismissing and condemning him has laid out a path that Democratic voters have been hungering for even if Democratic tweeters haven’t been.
“I can’t stop Donald Trump from hurling the racial insults that he throws out on a regular basis, but what I can do is decide how I’m going to live my life,” she said on Friday in New Hampshire to a man who was clearly a fan but also clearly frustrated that she let herself be drawn in by Trump on this.
After years of dodging almost every reporter and interview request that came her way, she’s now also trying to make a point about media engagement to her competitors, deliberately appealing to reporters in the most basic, but often most effective, way: talking to them. She only spent a few minutes in front of the microphones that assembled outside her house the day the announcement video went out, but that was enough to make an impression on a press corps battered by Trump’s abusive behavior toward the press and by Clinton’s dripping disdain and distance during all of 2016.
There’s an energy bubbling off Warren’s already growing team. They know she’s had a good couple of weeks; they like the crowds she’s getting; and they like hearing about each set of new staff hires, which have been impressing even skeptics in the political world for the level of skill and experience she’s been able to nail down.
That energy is also showing up in the response Warren has been generating more widely. Since she announced her exploratory committee, 50 percent of the people who’ve donated to her campaign had never donated to her before, according to Warren-campaign aides. Her digital staff, which by last year was already bigger than what most of the other campaigns will be able to assemble for months still, have been going through the data on those new people and comparing their issue concerns with those of the people on their existing list.
The size of that list of emails and phone numbers is a closely kept secret, and her aides declined to say how much it’s grown since New Year’s. But right after her announcement video went out, they turned the key on a personalized-texting operation. It centered on existing supporters in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, and has already begun generating a huge response from donors, sign-ups from volunteers, and feedback on issues.
From climate change to health care to voters’ struggles to pay their rent, Warren addresses issues with serious policy analysis. But so far, none of her prescriptions has become as much of a sensation as her tweets about her dog, to the point that some have looked into starting a separate Twitter account just for him.
At the town hall, another man asked how she expected to win, given the size and dynamics of the field. “I’d like to be able to tell you I have this really great strategy worked out,” Warren said, leaning in to the aw-shucks, never-thought-she’d-be-here-running-for-president story she tells. “I don’t.”
After the town hall ended, when her staff brought her over to the waiting reporters for three and a half minutes of questions, she seemed surprised when I asked her how she thought the race was about to change with a much more crowded field.
“I don’t know. I just don’t have any idea,” she said.
Afterward, speaking just the two of us, she insisted that was really the case. Politics? Strategy? Competition? Nah, she insisted.
“I’m in this race because everything I’ve fought for, for pretty much my whole grown-up life, intersects with this moment in time, and the only thing I can do is be true to that fight,” she told me. “I’m explaining why I’m in this fight. I can’t be in this fight for any other reason. This is the heart of what’s happening in America.”
The U.S. Navy recently asked Congress for $139 billion to update its fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. Unlike “conventional” submarines, which need to surface frequently, nuclear submarines can cruise below the sea at high speeds for decades without ever needing to refuel. Defense planners expect that the new submarines will run on one fueling for the entirety of deployment—up to a half century.
[Read: What it felt like to test the first submarine nuclear reactor]
The advantages of nuclear submarines over their conventional cousins raise a question about another component of the military arsenal: Why don’t airplanes run on nuclear power?
The reasons are many. Making a nuclear reactor flightworthy is difficult. Shielding it from spewing dangerous radiation into the bodies of its crew might be impossible. During the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear apocalypse led to surprisingly pragmatic plans, engineers proposed to solve the problem by hiring elderly Air Force crews to pilot the hypothetical nuclear planes, because they would die before radiation exposure gave them fatal cancers.
The Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi had introduced the idea of nuclear flight as early as 1942, while serving on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. As World War II drew to a close, the United States began work to realize Fermi’s dream of nuclear-powered flight. From 1946 until 1961, vast teams of engineers, strategists, and administrators toiled in a whirl of blueprints, white papers, and green bills in an attempt to get the idea off the ground.
The advantages of nuclear-powered airplanes mirrored those of nuclear submarines. Nuclear submarines did not need to surface for fuel, and nuclear airplanes would not need to land. A 1945 proposal at the Department of War (now the Department of Defense) promised, “With nuclear propulsion, supersonic flight around the world becomes an immediate possibility.” A secret Atomic Energy Commission memorandum now held in the Eisenhower Presidential Library explained the promise of nuclear flight in a more measured tone. Nuclear energy “should make possible ranges of one or more times around the world with a single loading of the reactor.” The idea of a nuclear-powered bomber became a strategic dream for the military; it could stay aloft for days to cover any number of targets throughout the world, before returning to the United States without refueling.
[Read: The true story of the government programs that tried to build an atomic heart]
The problem of refueling airplanes occupied many Cold War minds. Bombers would strain to reach their targets and strand in enemy territory with too little fuel to return home if they flew on only a single tank. Aerial refueling offered a solution, but a poor one. Planes caught in the act over enemy territory were prone to anti-aircraft fire. Evasive maneuvers would uncouple the two planes, prevent successful refueling, and endanger the mission.
To minimize the need for dangerous refueling, the United States relied on a global network of Air Force bases. Such bases—usually close to the U.S.S.R.—allowed planes to reach their targets and return on a single tank of fuel. Procuring the bases, however, proved expensive and unpopular. At one point, the United States offered $100 million in gold to purchase Greenland from Denmark and gain a new strategic location for bases. In the end, Denmark decided to keep Greenland, but the proposal illustrates the lengths the United States had to go to compensate for its planes’ limited range. A nuclear-powered airplane could avoid all of these issues.
But nuclear power came with its own problems. The reactor would have to be small enough to fit onto an aircraft, which meant it would release far more heat than a standard one. The heat could risk melting the reactor—and the plane along with it, sending a radioactive hunk of liquid metal careening toward Earth.
The problem of shielding pilots from the reactor’s radiation proved even more difficult. What good would a plane be that killed its own pilots?
To protect the crew from radioactivity, the reactor needed thick and heavy layers of shielding. But to take off, the plane needed to be as light as possible. Adequate shielding seemed incompatible with flight.
Still, engineers theorized that the weight saved from needing no fuel might be enough to offset the reactor and its shielding. The United States spent 16 years tinkering with the idea, to no avail. The Soviet Union pursued nuclear aircraft propulsion too, running up against the same problems. By 1958, an infamous article in Aviation Week, mostly made-up, claimed that the Soviets were already testing a functional nuclear airplane. Shortly after, President Dwight Eisenhower counseled calm and denounced the article as contrived. A representative of the Soviet program explained that “if we had flown an atomic-powered aircraft, we would be very proud of the achievement and would let everyone know about it.” Unfortunately for atomic-flight enthusiasts, both countries had little to brag about.
Neither program managed to overcome the problems of shielding and weight. The development of intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s, moreover, weakened the case for developing nuclear-powered bombers. The nuclear airplane became redundant from a military point of view, as ICBMs avoided the problems of manned nuclear flight. They had only one-way missions, needed no refueling, and did not have pilots to shield. Without a military justification for atomic flight, funding withered away.
The nuclear airplane began to die a slow death. In the late 1950s, the Eisenhower administration cut the program’s budget. Nikita Khrushchev slashed funding for the Soviet equivalent. By 1961, both countries had dismantled their projects for manned nuclear-powered airplanes. Atomic flight seemed doomed.
In a last-ditch effort to keep the nuclear airplane on the table, military strategists considered a radical solution: They could use pilots closer to death. The Air Force would use crews old enough to die of natural causes before the harmful effects of radiation could show up and thus, the logic went, sidestep the shielding problem. As the nuclear-policy expert Leonard Weiss explained in an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the proposal would have made radiation shielding unnecessary and decreased the weight of the plane significantly. It might have let the nuclear airplane take flight.
[Read: The 60-year downfall of nuclear power in the U.S. has left a huge mess]
The image of a corps of irradiated elderly pilots patrolling the world’s skies ready to unleash nuclear catastrophe drew on a form of ageism that pervaded Cold War apocalypse planning. In civil-defense plans for surviving a nuclear apocalypse, the old were always sacrificed first. Joe Martin at the University of Cambridge’s department of history and philosophy of science explained to me that Herman Kahn, one of the purported inspirations for Dr. Strangelove, made a ranking of food uses after nuclear catastrophe that reflected this Cold War age bias. The scale ranged from grade A (high-quality food reserved for pregnant women) to grade E (radioactive food only good for feeding animals). People over the age of 50 composed group D. Kahn put it bluntly in his book On Thermonuclear War: “Most of these people would die of other causes before they got cancer.”
Even that shocking proposal failed to save the nuclear airplane. The Eisenhower administration concluded that the program was unnecessary, dangerous, and too expensive. On March 28, 1961, the newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy canceled the program. Proposals for nuclear-powered airplanes have popped up since then, but the fear of radiation and the lack of funding have kept all such ideas down.
The Air Force still maintains its affinity for older pilots. It has the highest enlistee age limit of any branch in the military, and it increased that limit to 39 years old in 2014. Some pilots could be much older. Last year, in response to a shortage of nearly 2,000 pilots, the Air Force beckoned back retired service members as part of the Voluntary Retired Return to Active Duty (VRRAD) program. VRRAD gives 1,000 former airmen and airwomen the option to return to active duty, possibly including combat duty. Referring to the placements of these retirees, an Air Force spokesperson said last year, “Everything is on the table.” Almost everything, at least: None of these pilots will ever fly a nuclear aircraft.
Four decades ago, I was among the crowd jammed into the gallery of the Virginia House of Delegates chamber as the members of that august body refused to hold a vote on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. Conservative Republicans and Democrats had bottled the measure up in committee; supporters sought a vote to bring it directly to the floor.
They fell short; the ERA effort in Virginia seemed to have died.
That was a very different General Assembly and a very different Virginia. On January 15, 2019, the Virginia Senate voted to approve the ERA. The resolution now goes back to the House that rejected it 40 years ago.
If you’re confused about the ERA’s status, that’s only natural. Until recently, the Equal Rights Amendment itself—the heart of it says, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”—seemed like a dead letter. When Congress proposed the amendment in 1972, the resolution said it would become effective if approved by three-quarters of state legislatures “within seven years.”
[Read: The American woman who wrote equal rights into Japan’s constitution]
At the time, ratification seemed a foregone conclusion; both parties had supported the ERA for nearly 20 years. But the nascent religious right mobilized to block it. Ratification stalled at 35 states—three short of the three-fourths majority required. In 1978, Congress passed a new resolution extending the deadline to June 30, 1982—but no new states ratified.
Since then, women’s advocates have repeatedly tried to get Congress to adopt a new ERA resolution and begin ratification anew—to no avail.
But advocates also formulated a new path to ratification, which they dubbed the “three-state strategy.” It is this: (1) Win ratification in three of the 15 states that have not yet ratified the amendment—thus bringing the total number of ratifications to 38, and then (2) Win passage of a congressional resolution retroactively extending the deadline.
Step one is nearly complete; the Nevada legislature approved the amendment in 2017, and Illinois did so in 2018. If Virginia approves it this time, the three-state strategists will ask Congress to pass a statute proclaiming that the measure has been approved by 38 states.
Then the real fight will start.
The “new” strategy is actually 25 years old. It has its roots in 1992, after the adoption of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment.
Quick! What is the Twenty-Seventh Amendment? Don’t worry, nobody remembers: “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.” It means that one Congress can’t vote itself a pay raise; it can only raise (or lower) the pay of the next Congress, thus requiring the members to face voters at the polls before pocketing extra cash.
Although this congressional-pay amendment entered the Constitution in 1992, it had actually been proposed by Congress two centuries earlier, in 1789. It passed through both chambers and went to the states. There it disappeared, ratified by only six legislatures.
[Read: How the U.S. Congress keeps getting paid to do nothing]
Flash forward to 1982, when a University of Texas undergraduate named Gregory Watson wrote a term paper suggesting that citizens could still push the pay amendment to ratification. His instructor gave him a C, but Watson devoted himself to the project for the next decade, until on May 9, 1992, Michigan became the 39th state to sign on.
Final ratification took place amid a national outcry against Congress after a (by today’s standards) very mild scandal involving generous check-cashing privileges at a bank for members of Congress. Public opinion was such that no member had the nerve to obstruct it. So on May 18, 1992, the archivist of the United States certified the amendment as part of the Constitution, and both chambers later affirmed his decision.
Note that Article V of the Constitution doesn’t even mention time limits, and they didn’t come into use until the 20th century. In 1921, the Supreme Court held that Congress could put such limits into a proposed amendment—but not that it is required to do so. Of 20th-century amendments, the Eighteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-First, and Twenty-Second Amendments included limits in the text of the proposed amendment. The Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Third Amendments included no time limit at all. And the drafters of the ERA, by design or luck, did not put the seven-year time limit into the text of the proposed amendment itself—instead, as in three other 20th-century amendments, it is in the resolution language proposing the text.
All of this has led the ERA’s supporters to wonder: If the congressional-pay amendment could come back from the dead after two centuries, why not the ERA after a mere decade and a half? Since the ERA limit has already been changed once by Congress, why can’t another Congress change it again, retroactively?
The main theoretical work behind the three-state strategy is a student note by three University of Richmond students published in 1997. That’s a bit thin, but so was Watson’s term paper, and that led to the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. In fact, the process of constitutional adoption and amendment has since 1787 been marked by desperate improvisations and sudden power plays.
The delegates to Philadelphia weren’t supposed to write a new constitution, but they did so and sprang it on the public without warning. The Articles of Confederation weren’t supposed to be amended except by unanimous vote of the states; the Philadelphia delegates decided instead that the new constitution would be valid after nine of the 13 states signed on. The Harvard Law professor Michael J. Klarman recently published a book on this process called The Framers’ Coup. Pauline Maier’s brilliant book Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 details the sharp elbows Federalists used to bully the first nine state conventions into ratification. James Madison’s Bill of Rights amendments, for all their grandeur, were also a partisan ploy to block Patrick Henry’s campaign for a second convention that would dismantle much of the work of the first.
This pattern goes on. The Thirteenth Amendment was written by a wartime Congress without Southern members, but ratified by the North and South after Appomattox; the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted by a peacetime Congress that still excluded Southern members; the all-Northern Congress then required Southern ratification at the point of a bayonet. Church groups muscled the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) to ratification while American soldiers (who, by reputation, enjoyed a drink) were still overseas. The Twenty-Second (presidential term limits) was jammed through Congress by the Republican leadership as a petty slap at Franklin D. Roosevelt, then freshly in his grave. Adoption of the Twenty-Seventh, as we’ve seen, was a bit less dignified than an episode of Veep.
[Read: The students suing for the constitutional right to an education]
Toni Van Pelt, the president of the National Organization for Women, told me that NOW and a broad alliance of women’s-rights groups “are really focused on Virginia.” If that effort falls short, advocates will try in North Carolina and Arizona. If the amendment passes somewhere, “the legal scholars will determine” the validity of the ratification, she said.
In fact, the amendment would have to traverse two obstacles. The first would be congressional approval of a new time frame. Beyond that, after the ERA was proposed, four states that had ratified it subsequently passed resolutions of “rescission”—that is, claiming to void their ratification. Even before that, one state had included a “sunset” clause revoking its original ratification if the amendment did not gain approval by 1978. It’s unclear, however, if rescission or sunset is allowable.
During the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, two state legislatures rescinded previous ratifications; Congress rejected those moves and counted the states toward ratification anyway. The idea is that Article V mentions ratification but does not mention rescission; once a state has ratified, its role in the process is at an end. (By analogy, a state can’t rescind its ratification of the Constitution itself; what’s done is done. However, a proposed amendment hasn’t gone into effect yet. The Constitution has.)
During the extended ratification period for the ERA, a federal district judge held that Idaho’s rescission was valid—and, for good measure, held that the 1978 deadline extension was unconstitutional. Before the Supreme Court could hear the case, however, the deadline passed—so the high court vacated the Idaho decision as moot.
Note that at every stage of the amendment process, it is Congress—not the courts—that takes the leading role. The language of Article V puts Congress at the center of the action, but it doesn’t specify exactly how Congress should determine which amendments have been validly adopted. And Congress hasn’t covered itself with glory in that regard.
In short, ratification, rescission, deadlines, and extensions are a constitutional mess, and will continue to be one. I’ve been trying to make sense of Article V on and off since law school, and the more I think about it, the less clear it is. Underneath the high-toned language, it’s bare-knuckle politics all the way down.
Em 2016, o acampamento Leonir Orbak, em Santa Helena de Goiás, interior do estado, era um terreno fértil em meio à aridez dos imensos canaviais da região. Ocupada pelo MST, parte da área era tomada por uma extensa lavoura de milho orgânico – que, nos tempos áureos, serviu de matéria-prima para mais de 20 mil pamonhas distribuídas em uma festa do movimento. Em março daquele ano, porém, a lavoura foi destruída.
Dezenas de agricultores assistiram, estarrecidos, a um trator despejando glifosato, um tóxico herbicida, que desfolhou a plantação de milho. Abalados, perseguiram o pulverizador com carros e motos até cercá-lo. Após tirarem o motorista de dentro dele, incendiaram o veículo, avaliado pelo proprietário em R$ 300 mil.
A destruição do pulverizador foi uma das bases da primeira condenação do MST como uma organização criminosa no país.
Visitei o acampamento Leonir Orbak em dezembro. A paisagem contrasta com os arredores. O assentamento abriga dezenas de cultivos diferentes – para os agricultores, plantar é uma das maneiras para manter a calma em um tempo de incertezas.
Em outubro do ano passado, o juiz Thiago Boghi condenou quatro militantes do MST por formar uma organização criminosa: Borges, Luis Valdir Misneroviz e outros dois, hoje foragidos. Num país onde o presidente diz que pretende acabar com todos os ativismos, a decisão parece o prenúncio dos novos tempos.
Foi a primeira vez em que a lei, sancionada em 2013 por Dilma Rousseff logo após os protestos de junho, foi usada para enquadrar militantes do movimento. Na época, o objetivo da presidente era combater organizações criminosas. Cinco anos depois – confirmando os alertas dos ativistas – a lei ganhou um novo alvo.
Viajamos até Goiás para entender como esse processo judicial se desenrolou e quais foram as suas consequências. Essa decisão envolve uma empresa que deve mais de R$ 1 bilhão ao governo federal, acusações do Ministério Público embasadas em citações da Wikipédia, um trator incendiado por agricultores revoltados e um juiz que citou Jair Bolsonaro para lastrear uma decisão.
Foto: Piero Locatelli
Para entender tudo o que aconteceu, o primeiro passo é conhecer o grupo Naoum, antigo dono de diversas usinas de cana, inclusive do terreno que gerou a condenação.
Desde que entrou em recuperação judicial, em 2008, o Naoum se transformou em uma das maiores devedoras do governo federal. Hoje, deve uma sopa de letrinhas que inclui PIS/Cofins, FGTS, INSS e IPI, além de outros impostos e contribuições. A empresa, no total, tem uma dívida de R$ 1,2 bilhão com o governo, de acordo com os cálculos da Procuradoria Geral da Fazenda Nacional, o órgão do Ministério da Fazenda responsável por cobrar quem deve ao governo.
A empresa também deu calote em mais gente, inclusive seus trabalhadores, e foi condenada por apropriação indébita. Ainda responde processo por crime ambiental e milhares de reclamações trabalhistas.
Ao saber de parte dessa dívida, o MST decidiu ocupar o terreno da Naoum em Santa Helena de Goiás. Para a organização, já que os valores devidos pela empresa são maiores do que o valor da terra, o governo federal poderia tomar a área e destiná-la à reforma agrária. Desde 2014, o Incra pode criar assentamentos dessa forma, graças a um acordo entre a Advocacia Geral da União e o finado Ministério do Desenvolvimento Agrário.
O MST argumenta que é o seu direito ocupar a terra.Isso quase aconteceu com a terra da Santa Helena. Por um curto período de tempo, ela foi para as mãos do governo federal, quando a justiça de Anápolis determinou que a terra era da União. Mas outro juiz cancelou a decisão e, hoje, a terra é propriedade da empresa.
O MST argumenta que é o seu direito ocupar a terra. Diz que seu objetivo não é roubá-la, mas pressionar para que a justiça e o Incra façam aquilo que já está previsto na lei. “A pressão política causada pelas ocupações é a forma de participação popular do movimento social, e o protesto é a expressão do direito de cidadania, de manifestação do MST”, diz o movimento em sua defesa.
Já o juiz Thiago Brandão Boghi entendeu que a ocupação é, na verdade, um “esbulho possessório” – o nome pomposo para tirar alguma coisa de alguém. Para o juiz, os militantes “uniram esforços com intuito de tomarem para si propriedade alheia e utilizar dela como se sua fosse”.
Por isso, o movimento decidiu manter o acampamento em Santa Helena mesmo após reintegrações de posse. As famílias passaram a ocupar lugares diferentes dentro da fazenda, como costuma ocorrer no movimento. A vida dos agricultores seguiu normal: o MST chegou a plantar milho orgânico na fazenda e, nos tempos áureos, distribuiu mais de 35 mil pamonhas aos moradores da região – um recorde dentro do movimento, contam.
Foto: Piero Locatelli
A rotina no acampamento foi interrompida na última reintegração de posse do terreno, marcada pela justiça no dia 16 de março de 2016. As relações do MST com a polícia local costumavam ser amigáveis, e os acordos para aquela quarta-feira não foram diferentes. O movimento combinou de desocupar a fazenda desde que a plantação fosse mantida.
Deu tudo errado.
“Nós falamos para eles: ‘nós sai, mas nós volta para colher’. Aí antes da gente sair da área, o lazarento do Toninho montou uma arapuca para nós”, diz um militante que, por razões de segurança, não será identificado.
O “lazarento do Toninho” é quem toma conta da terra da empresa no dia a dia, o agricultor Márcio Antônio de Oliveira. É ele quem move os processos pela empresa no local, alegando que é o dono da terra.
A confusão começou quando alguns barracos pegaram fogo. Até hoje, o MST e Toninho empurram a responsabilidade de um ao outro pelo incêndio, que fez todo mundo por ali ficar ainda mais nervoso.
Sobrou para um motorista contratado pelo fazendeiro, que estava recolhendo as placas com os nomes dos militantes do MST que dividiam as plantações. Ele foi liberado em seguida, enquanto a sua caminhonete permaneceu com os acampados. No final do dia, o veículo estava na mão do seu dono novamente. Parece um detalhe, mas a caminhonete se tornou o ponto central na condenação de Borges: para a acusação, o militante roubou o veículo do motorista.
‘O bicho veio quase capotando, e a gente atrás. Quando ele chegou na descida, nós pegamos ele.’Mas o pior ainda estava por vir. Militantes do MST contam que viram um trator de Toninho de longe, jogando glifosato sobre a plantação de milho. O agrotóxico, extremamente venenoso, é usado para matar ervas daninhas. A acusação diz que não havia plantação nenhuma. Os dois lados, no entanto, concordam sobre o que aconteceu depois: revoltados com a destruição de sua lavoura orgânica, os militantes incendiaram o trator.
“Não deu nem tempo dele fechar aqueles braços, o bicho veio quase capotando, e a gente atrás. Quando ele chegou na descida, nós pegamos ele”, lembra um agricultor envolvido.
Para os acusadores, a ação foi premeditada. Para a defesa, foi um ato espontâneo, justificado pela indignação das famílias que iam perder a sua terra. Essa tese também é defendida pelo coronel Mota, antigo comandante da Polícia Militar na região e testemunha de defesa do MST.
No seu depoimento, ele disse que não acredita que alguém tinha domínio sobre o que aconteceu naquele dia. “Ali são pessoas que muitas vezes perderam os valores pela miséria e muitas vezes eles nunca foram alcançados pelo poder público. Então, são pessoas um tanto quanto revoltadas,” disse o PM no seu depoimento.
O Ministério Público, no entanto, defendeu a tese de que o MST é extremamente organizado e de que a ação foi comandada. A referência para a acusação foi a própria página do movimento na Wikipedia. “Obviamente, por ser [um movimento] organizado, há determinações que partem dos líderes para serem observadas e cumpridas pelos demais. Se não houvesse tal hierarquia, não se trataria de uma organização, mas de um movimento totalmente caótico, que jamais conseguiria atingir seus objetivos”, disse o MP na ação.
Valdir Misnerovicz cuidava da sua roça orgânica em Goiânia quando recebeu uma ligação dizendo que o acordo para desocupar a área pacificamente tinha dado problema. Surpreso, foi tentar entender o que acontecia e falar com os militantes.
Ele havia sido o porta-voz do movimento nas negociações com a empresa nas reuniões dos dias anteriores. No acampamento, Misnerovicz tinha estado quatro vezes para visitas pontuais. Embora seja membro do MST há duas décadas, ele nega ser uma liderança do movimento na região.
Não foi o que disse o MP. Por causa da teoria do domínio do fato, segundo a qual um comandante de um crime deve responder como se fosse seu autor, Misnerovicz foi acusado meses depois de ter comandado a ação. A teoria foi a mesma usada pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal para condenar José Dirceu no caso do Mensalão do PT.
Armado com um caniveteQuando se sentou para conversar comigo, Luis Batista Borges limpava seus dedos com um canivete. O pedreiro carrega o instrumento para qualquer lugar que vá desde criança. Ele é analfabeto e sabe que não há nada de ilegal em se portar um canivete – pelo menos na teoria. O artefato de estimação é uma “arma branca” citada na sua condenação.
Borges, Misnerovicz e os outros dois militantes tiveram a prisão preventiva decretada a pedido do Ministério Público. Borges se apresentou à polícia, e Misnerovicz foi preso pouco mais de um mês depois, em Veranópolis, no Rio Grande do Sul. Os outros dois estão foragidos até hoje.
Foto: Piero Locatelli
Durante o tempo em que esteve na cadeia, Borges perdeu o pai. Também se sentiu deprimido e tentou se matar. Com a repercussão da sua condenação, começou a receber visitas de políticos na prisão, como a deputada estadual Isaura Lemos, do PCdoB, o que incomodava os outros presos no local. Teve que pedir ao movimento que as visitas parassem, para que ele não tivesse problemas lá dentro.
Os dois militantes conseguiram sair da prisão temporariamente, mas acabaram condenados em primeira instância pelo juiz Thiago Boghi. Agora, aguardam o julgamento de novos recursos em liberdade. Misnerovicz foi sentenciado a seis anos e cinco meses em regime fechado. Borges foi condenado por roubo, com oito anos e oito meses, e por integrar a organização criminosa, com cinco anos e seis meses. O canivete que carrega para limpar as unhas foi uma das provas.
DesmobilizaçãoEnquanto os condenados aguardam o desenrolar jurídico, o acampamento se esvazia. “Daqui até a cidade dá cinco quilômetros, aqui era para estar apertado, cheio de gente”, lamenta um militante no local. “Mas aqui nós já colocamos fogo, teve três ônibus de gente detida, dois presos, dois foragidos, sete condenados a um salário mínimo. E não tinha ninguém ganhando terra nessa ocupação! Como é que o povo vai voltar?”
Condenações judiciais são uma estratégia eficiente para desmobilizar completamente um movimento, o que parece ter acontecido por ali. Nos tempos áureos, famílias faziam fila desde as 4h da manhã para se inscrever no acampamento. Hoje, há só três ou quatro inscrições por semana, e 300 famílias ocupam o local, onde já viveram mais de 3 mil.
Quando visitei o acampamento, numa sexta-feira a tarde, estava ainda mais vazio. Os sem-terra me explicaram que muitos fazem bicos na cidade para tentar se manter, e por isso a ocupação é maior no final de semana.
Foto: Piero Locatelli
Apesar das poucas pessoas, o local ainda é varrido por roças de dezenas de culturas. De variedades criolas de maracujá até a criação de porcos, há uma produção bastante diversa por ali. Um contraste com o resto daquela região, onde um mar de cana domina a paisagem.
Os agricultores plantam para manter o seu cotidiano em tempos de Jair Bolsonaro, um presidente que, em sua primeira entrevista, disse que “não tem conversa”, com o MST. Em sua primeira semana de governo, Bolsonaro chegou a pedir que todo o processo de reforma agrária fosse interrompido, mas, como é de costume em sua gestão, recuou da decisão no mesmo dia. A relação do governo com o movimento, no entanto, é extremamente hostil. Luiz Antônio Nabhan Garcia, ruralista e secretário de assuntos fundiários, já disse até que quer fechar as escolinhas do MST, classificadas por ele como “fabriquinhas de ditadores”.
No acampamento em Santa Helena, o clima é de incerteza. Eles sabem que podem ser retirados daquela terra em breve, mas ainda fazem planos de longo prazo com a plantação.
Se depender da justiça local, as palavras do presidente devem ecoar nas decisões. Alinhado com o espírito do tempo, Thiago Brandão Boghi citou o então candidato como se fosse um jurista. “Parafraseando o presidenciável Jair Bolsonaro, era só o apenado não roubar, que não iria para o presídio”, diz outra de suas decisões.
Luís Borges diz que não roubou, mas foi preso. Na periferia de uma cidade próxima, Rio Verde, ele aguarda o julgamento dos seus recursos. Calmo, ele conta a sua história sem problemas. E só mostra indignação ao lembrar que a empresa, devedora, continua com sua terra.
“Todos nós aqui nessa terra somos errados de alguma forma. Eu não tenho revolta de ter sido preso, da justiça condenar a mim. Eu tenho, sim, da justiça não ter olhado pelo lado certo, o lado do fraco. Será que ela tá falando a verdade, ou é nós que está mentindo?”
The post Uma decisão inédita condenou quatro militantes do MST por formarem uma ‘organização criminosa’ appeared first on The Intercept.
Buzzfeed was once notorious for traffic-generating “listicles”, but has since become an impressive outlet for deep investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the news this week thanks to its “bombshell” story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story that, like so many others of its kind, blew up in its face, this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller’s office took the extremely rare step to label its key claims “inaccurate.”
But in homage to BuzzFeed’s past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news, the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets (particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end with (dis)honorable mention status.
Note that all of these “errors” go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle’s connection to it. It’s inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that’s being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories. That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its “errors” went in that direction, virtually all of its major “errors” in this story are devoted to the same agenda and script:
10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that C-SPAN “confirmed” it had been hacked. The whole story was false:
C-SPAN Confirms It Was Briefly Hacked by Russian News Site https://t.co/NUFD662FMz pic.twitter.com/POstGFzvNE
— Fortune Tech (@FortuneTech) January 12, 2017
Kremlin-funded Russian news network RT interrupted C-SPAN’s online feed for about ten minutes Thursday afternoon https://t.co/Z25LqoCW2H
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) January 12, 2017
Holy shit. Russia state propaganda (RT) "hacked" into C-SPAN feed and took over for a good 40 seconds today? In middle of live broadcast. https://t.co/pwWYFoDGDU
— Isaac Saul (@Ike_Saul) January 12, 2017
RT America ominously takes over C-SPAN feed for ten minutes @tommyxtopher reviews today's events for #shareblue https://t.co/uiiU5awSMs
— Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath) January 12, 2017
After investigation, C-SPAN has concluded that the RT interruption was not the result of a hack, but rather routing error.
— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) January 18, 2017
9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)
On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that “Russian hackers penetrated the U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont,” causing predictable outrage and panic, along with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor’s notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S. electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:
Breaking: Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont https://t.co/LED11lL7ej
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 31, 2016
NEW: "One of the world's leading thugs, [Putin] has been attempting to hack our electric grid," says VT Gov. Shumlin https://t.co/YgdtT4JrlX pic.twitter.com/AU0ZQjT3aO
— ABC News (@ABC) December 31, 2016
Washington Post retracts story about Russian hack at Vermont utility https://t.co/JX9l0926Uj via @nypost
— Kerry Picket (@KerryPicket) January 1, 2017
8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)
On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing “more than 200 websites” of being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.” It added: “stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times.”
Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute. – as “Russian propaganda outlets,” producing one of the longest Editor’s Note in memory appended to the top of the article (but not until two weeks later, long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the media ecosystem):
Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during election, say independent researchers https://t.co/3ETVXWw16Q
— Marty Baron (@PostBaron) November 25, 2016
Just want to note I hadn't heard of Propornot before the WP piece and never gave permission to them to call Bellingcat "allies" https://t.co/jQKnWzjrBR
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) November 25, 2016
Marty, I would like to more about PropOrNot, "experts" cited in the article. Their website provides little in the way of ID. https://t.co/ZiK8pKzUwx
— Jack Shafer (@jackshafer) November 25, 2016
7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)
On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network.
6. Russia Attacked U.S. “Diplomats” (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)
On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea what to make of it.
But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the “strange sounds” the U.S. “diplomats” reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean male cricket during mating season.
An @NBCNews exclusive: After more than a year of mystery, Russia is the main suspect in the sonic attacks that sickened 26 U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials in Cuba. @MitchellReports has the latest. pic.twitter.com/NEI9PJ9CpD
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) September 11, 2018
Wow >> U.S. has signals intelligence linking the sonic attacks on Americans in Cuba and China to *Russia* https://t.co/FbNla0vu9W
— Andrew Desiderio (@desiderioDC) September 11, 2018
Following NBC report about sonic attacks, @SenCoryGardner renews calls for declaring Russia a state sponsor of terror https://t.co/wrnubfecom
— Niels Lesniewski (@nielslesniewski) September 11, 2018
5. Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)
Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. pic.twitter.com/8f8n9xMzUU
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 1, 2016
It's time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia. https://t.co/D8oSmyVAR4 pic.twitter.com/07dRyEmPjX
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 31, 2016
4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)
On November 27, 2018, the Guardian published a major “bombshell” that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed to sneak inside one of the world’s most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators exploded.
Seven weeks later, no other media outlet has confirmed this; no video or photographic evidence has emerged; the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:
Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told. https://t.co/Fc2BVmXipk
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 27, 2018
The sourcing on this is a bit thin, or at least obscured. But it’s the ultimate Whoa If True. It’s…ballgame if true.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) November 27, 2018
The Guardian reports that Paul Manafort visited Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, the same month that Manafort joined Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, a meeting that could carry vast implications for the Russia investigation https://t.co/pYawnv4MHH
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) November 27, 2018
3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)
On July 27, 2018, CNN published a blockbuster story: that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that “contacted by CNN, one of Cohen’s attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment” (in fact, Davis was one of CNN’s key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however, to this date has refused to do either:
BREAKING: President Trump personally directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow in order to obscure his involvement. https://t.co/BEoMKiDypn
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) January 18, 2019
BOOM!https://t.co/QDkUMaEa7M pic.twitter.com/9kcZZ8m1gt
— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) January 18, 2019
The allegation that the President of the United States may have suborned perjury before our committee in an effort to curtail the investigation and cover up his business dealings with Russia is among the most serious to date. We will do what’s necessary to find out if it’s true. https://t.co/GljBAFqOjh
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) January 18, 2019
If the @BuzzFeed story is true, President Trump must resign or be impeached.
— Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) January 18, 2019
Listen, if Mueller does have multiple sources confirming Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress, then we need to know this ASAP. Mueller shouldn't end his inquiry, but it's about time for him to show Congress his cards before it's too late for us to act. https://t.co/ekG5VSBS8G
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 18, 2019
UPDATE: A spokesperson for the special counsel is disputing BuzzFeed News’ report. https://t.co/BEoMKiDypn pic.twitter.com/GWWfGtyhaE
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) January 19, 2019
To those trying to parse the Mueller statement: it's a straight-up denial. Maybe Buzzfeed can prove they are right, maybe Mueller can prove them wrong. But it's an emphatic denial https://t.co/EI1J7XLCJe
— Devlin Barrett (@DevlinBarrett) January 19, 2019
.@Isikoff: "There were red flags about the BuzzFeed story from the get-go." Notes it was inconsistent with Cohen's guilty plea when he said he made false statements about Trump Tower to Congress to be "consistent" with Trump, not at his direction. pic.twitter.com/tgDg6SNPpG
— David Rutz (@DavidRutz) January 19, 2019
We at The Post also had riffs on the story our reporters hadn't confirmed. One noted Fox downplayed it; another said it "if true, looks to be the most damning to date for Trump." The industry needs to think deeply on how to cover others' reporting we can't confirm independently. https://t.co/afzG5B8LAP
— Matt Zapotosky (@mattzap) January 19, 2019
Washington Post says Mueller’s denial of BuzzFeed News article is aimed at the full story: “Mueller’s denial, according to people familiar with the matter, aims to make clear that none of those statements in the story are accurate.”
https://t.co/ene0yqe1mK
— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) January 19, 2019
If you're one of the people tempted to believe the self-evidently laughable claim that there's something "vague" or unclear about Mueller's statement, or that it just seeks to quibble with a few semantic trivialities, read this @WashPost story about this https://t.co/0io99LyATS pic.twitter.com/ca1TwPR3Og
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 19, 2019
You can spend hours parsing the Carr statement, but given how unusual it is for any DOJ office to issue this sort of on the record denial, let alone this office, suspect it means the story’s core contention that they have evidence Trump told Cohen to lie is fundamentally wrong.
— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) January 19, 2019
New York Times throws a bit of cold water on BuzzFeed's explosive — and now seriously challenged — report that Trump instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress: https://t.co/9N7MiHs7et pic.twitter.com/7FJFT9D8fW
— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) January 19, 2019
I can’t speak to Buzzfeed’s sourcing, but, for what it’s worth, I declined to run with parts of the narrative they conveyed based on a source central to the story repeatedly disputing the idea that Trump directly issued orders of that kind.
— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) January 19, 2019
FWIW in all our reporting I haven’t found any in the Trump Org that have met with or been interviewed by Mueller. https://t.co/U4eV1MZc8p
— John Santucci (@Santucci) January 18, 2019
The morning of December 9, 2017, launched one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public. Within an hour, MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to have “independently confirmed” this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC videos here).
There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before. Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all got the date of the email wrong.
To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their “multiple, independent sources” got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating – and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.
Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he awkwardly struggles to pretend that it’s not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously is:
Knowingly soliciting or receiving anything of value from a foreign national for campaign purposes violates the Federal Election Campaign Act. If it's worth over $2,000 then penalties include fines & IMPRISONMENT. @DonaldJTrumpJr may be in bigly trouble. #FridayFeeling https://t.co/dRz6Ph17Er
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) December 8, 2017
boom https://t.co/9RPPltRq8k pic.twitter.com/eyYHkOMEPi
— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) December 8, 2017
CNN is leading the way in bashing BuzzFeed but it's worth remembering CNN had a humiliation at least as big & bad: when they yelled that Trump Jr. had advanced access to the WL archive (!): all based on a wrong date. They removed all the segments from YouTube, but this remains: pic.twitter.com/0jiA50aIku
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 19, 2019
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Dishonorable Mention:
ABC News’ Brian Ross is fired for reporting Trump told Flynn to make contact with Russians when he was still a candidate; in fact, Trump did that after he won.
The New York Times claimed Manafort provided polling data to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a person “close to the Kremlin”; in fact, he provided them to Ukrainians, not Russians.
Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC, claimed they had evidence that Russia hacked Ukrainian artillery apps; they then retracted it.
Bloomberg and the WSJ reported Mueller subpoenaed Deustche Bank for Trump’s financial records; the NYT said that never happened.
Rachel Maddow devoted 20 minutes at the start of her show to very melodramatically claiming a highly sophisticated party tried to trick her by sending her a fake Top Secret document modeled after the one published by the Intercept, and said it could only have come from the U.S. Government (or the Intercept) since the person obtained the document before it was published by us and thus must have had special access to it; in fact, Maddow and NBC completely misread the metadata on the document; the fake sent to Maddow was created after we published the document, and was sent to her by a random member of the public who took the document from the Intercept’s site and doctored it to see if she’d fall for an obvious scam. Maddow’s entire timeline, on which her whole melodramatic conspiracy theory rested, was fictitious.
The U.S. media and Democrats spent six months claiming that all “17 intelligence agencies” agreed Russia was behind the hacks; the NYT finally retracted that in June, 2017: “The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”
AP claimed on February 2, 2018, that the Free Beacon commissioned the Steele Dossier; they thereafter acknowledged that was false and noted, instead: “Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until after Democratic groups had begun funding it.”
The national media have offered multiple, conflicting accounts of how and why the FBI investigation into Trump/Russia began.
Widespread government and media claims that accused Russian agent Maria Butina offered “sex for favors” were totally false (and scurrilous).
After a Russian regional jet crashed on February 11, 2018, shortly after it took off from Moscow, killing all 71 people aboard, Harvard Law Professor and frequent MSNBC contributor Laurence Tribe strongly implied Putin purposely caused the plane to go down in order to murder Sergei Millian, a person vaguely linked to George Papadopoulos and Jared Kushner; in fact, Millian was not on the plane nor, to date, has anyone claimed they had any evidence that Putin ordered his own country’s civilian passenger jet brought down.
Special mention:
As I’ve said many times, the U.S. media has become quite adept at expressing extreme indignation when people criticize them; when politicians conclude that it is advantageous to turn the U.S. media into their main adversary; and when people turn to “fake news” sites.
If, however, they were willing to devote just a small fraction of that energy to examining their own conduct, perhaps they would develop the tools necessary to combat those problems instead of just denouncing their critics and angrily demanding that politicians and news consumers accord them the respect to which they believe they are entitled.
The post Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump/Russia Story appeared first on The Intercept.
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., listens to testimony from U.S. Attorney General nominee William Barr during his confirmation hearing on Jan. 15, 2019 in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Kamala Harris has a prosecutor problem.
She’s running for president as a progressive, but as attorney general of California, she criminalized truancy — making it a crime for kids to be late for school, and dragging into the criminal justice system even more disproportionately low income, predominantly black and latino families. She’s overlooked the misconduct of her prosecutors and fought to uphold their wrongfully secured convictions. She defended California’s choice to deny sexual reassignment surgery to a trans inmate, and in 2014, appealed a federal judge’s holding that the death penalty was unconstitutional.
The list goes on and on. But in some ways the details don’t matter. The problem isn’t that Harris was an especially bad prosecutor. She made positive contributions as well — encouraging education and reentry programs for ex-offenders, for instance. The problem, more precisely, is that she was ever a prosecutor at all.
To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system. As Paul Butler, former prosecutor and author of “Chokehold: Policing Black Men,” told The Guardian, “as a lawyer who went to law school with a goal of helping black people and using my legal skills to make things better, the realization that the law itself was a mechanism to keep African American people down was frightening.” He added, “Lawyers are competitive and ambitious, and the way that manifests itself in a prosecutor’s office is you want to get tough sentences. I got caught up in that world. You feel like you’re doing the Lord’s work — you tell yourselves that you’re helping the community.” But, he vividly recalls, the expectation is far from reality.
To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system.Compare his self-reflection with Harris’s reply when asked about her decision to become a prosecutor: “There is a duty and responsibility to be a voice for the most voiceless and vulnerable and to do the work of justice. And that’s the work I wanted to do.”
Harris’s response might be understandable coming from someone with less experience — a lay person, a law student, or even a junior DA. But who, especially in the era of Black Lives Matter, would flatly describe the enforcement arm of the criminal enforcement as doing “the work of justice?” What person with any experience in criminal court can claim to be an advocate for the “most vulnerable,” without recognizing that the victim in one case is often the defendant in the next — that the issues at play are systemic, and that the justice meted out by the court system is a rough one at best? Harris has stayed away from engaging with these deeper questions in interviews. Perhaps because, as a prosecutor, she understands that there are no good answers.
In a recent NPR interview, Harris’s revealed that her own parents questioned her choice to become a prosecutor. “My family and extended family thought, at best, it was a curious decision,” she recalled, saying that she had to defend it “like one would a thesis.” They asked, in Harris’s words, “why would you go and be a part of an institution that is not always fair and does not always pursue justice?” An understandable question from parents who met in Berkeley in the 1960s — a bastion of American progressivism at a time of rapid social progress — speaking to a daughter who was making the choice to jail people for a living at the start of the mass incarceration crisis of the 1990s.
Harris’s choices are thrown in a more unflattering light when compared to the relatively short tenure of former public defender and civil rights lawyer Larry Krasner, district attorney of Philadelphia.
In his first week, he fired 31 prosecutors who weren’t committed to his reforms, and last February, he promulgated a list of new policies with massive, “revolutionary” scope. The office no longer charges sex workers with fewer than three convictions — nor does it prosecute marijuana possession. It no longer starts the plea negotiation process with the highest possible sentencing — a practice which privileges leverage over substantive justice. And he instructed his prosecutors to tally the cost of incarcerating everyone sentenced with a crime, and to demonstrate why the expense—- upwards of $42,000 a year per person — is justified in a city where the average total family income is $41,000. Although it’s hard to make a difference from inside a prosecutor’s office, Krasner has shown that it can be done from the very top.
Notably, the dramatic reforms he has put in place were informed by his experiences on the defendants’ side of the courtroom, which offers a clearer view of systemic inequities intrinsic to the criminal justice system: Clients who languish in jail due to a failure to come up with a few hundred dollars in bail money; undocumented parents who go to trial because taking a plea would mean deportation and separation from their children; exculpatory evidence wrongly withheld, and, all too often, the lack of consequences for the prosecutors who withhold it.
Importantly, if Harris had to be tougher on crime because she is black, it wasn’t for the sake of some higher ideal. It was because her personal ambitions demanded it.As California’s “top cop,” Harris was no Krasner. While Krasner has made headlines for commanding the full scope of prosecutorial discretion in service of vulnerable communities, Harris most notoriously used her discretion to let Steve Mnuchin — a chief villain of the housing crisis cum Secretary of Treasury — off the hook.
The point here isn’t to judge Harris by Krasner’s standard. But it is important to acknowledge that Harris, who regularly describes herself as a progressive prosecutor, is not one, and criticizing her record is fair game.
But many of Harris’s defenders disagree.
Although the growing focus on Harris’s law-enforcement background is commensurate with her rising profile as a 2020 contender, to some of her supporters, the attention seems unfair.
Journalist Jill Filipovic argued on Twitter recently that she judges Harris’s history less harshly because black women “shoulder additional burdens” compared to white men, and because women have to prove that they are “tough.” Filipovic acknowledges that Harris’s race and gender don’t “excuse” her record, but, she insists, “context matters.”
It’s difficult to understand, though, how the context matters here except to provide some kind of excuse. I’m not without sympathy for the additional pressures exerted on Harris because she is a black woman — after all, unlike Filipovic, I am one too. But those sympathies do not eclipse the concern I have for the black women who bore the consequences of Harris’s prosecutorial misjudgment. Importantly, if Harris had to be tougher on crime because she is black, it wasn’t for the sake of some higher ideal. It was because her personal ambitions demanded it.
Filipovic is asking that we trade the representational benefit of having black leadership — or even worse, the careerist ambitions of one elite black woman — for the well-being of the black constituents she was ostensibly elected to protect. To become San Francisco DA, she notably defeated Terence Hallian — a committed progressive who, like Krasner, thought that sex workers and minor drug offenders should not be prosecuted, but who was also a white male. If anything, Filipovic’s tweets constitute an argument against electing black people to higher office — one that I don’t agree with, to be clear.
Filipovic argues that Harris is a victim of an Overton window shift, tweeting: “Now, the rules have shifted (and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they shifted right as more women began succeeding within the system).” Of course, the growing consciousness around criminal justice issues isn’t a conspiracy to keep black women out of office. But in one way she’s right. The world has changed.
Candidates who started laying the bricks of their path to the White House years ago will have to reckon with the fact that the public imagination has been expanded beyond the impotent incrementalism that has long been held up as America’s best option.It used to be the case that a well worn and respected path to politics started in law school and cut through the District Attorney’s office. Forty-seven members of the 115th Congress were former prosecutors. Two former state attorney generals, Bill Clinton and Martin Van Buren, even made it to the Oval Office.
That trajectory seems less tenable today — at least for those on the left — and candidates who started laying the bricks of their path to the White House years ago will have to reckon with the fact that the public imagination has been expanded beyond the impotent incrementalism that has long been held up as America’s best option. The more deft among the candidates — and we’ll see if Harris is among them — will figure out how to distance themselves from their records with sincere apologies and, even better, actions that manifest a commitment to change. Not everyone will successfully rehabilitate themselves. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
During a recent episode of her show, MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid didn’t even pause to question the expectation that Democrats pander to right wingers and moderates by tacking to the right on crime. “[Harris’s] criminal justice background is probably good in a general election because Democrats always like to run as, you know, criminal justice tough on crime etc. etc. etc. since the Clinton era,” she said.
Reid was, of course, right to observe that Democrats have run as “tough on crime” for the very same reasons Filipovic offered as a justification of Harris’s record: they were practically required to do so to get ahead. But I would suggest this: None of them were so obligated.
Perhaps the most enduring lesson of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign — during which he earned votes of 43 percent of Democratic Party primary participants despite starting with name recognition in the teens, enduring a corporate media blackout, and declining to take corporate PAC money — is that the traditional rules around how much you have to sell out to get ahead were wrong. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and myriad candidates who won or over-performed in last year’s midterms understood this, as do the leaders of the 2020 field, who have largely sworn off corporate PAC money, and who have adopted the bulk of Sanders’s 2016 platform. As it turns out, doing the right thing is actually a winning proposition.
Things have changed. For the better.
The post A Problem for Kamala Harris: Can a Prosecutor Become President in the Age of Black Lives Matter? appeared first on The Intercept.
Este texto foi publicado originalmente na newsletter do Intercept Brasil. Assine. É de graça, todos os sábados, na sua caixa de e-mails.
Os jornalistas da CNN em inglês usam constantemente o termo “extrema direita” para se referir ao presidente Jair Bolsonaro e já se referiram a ele como “um político brasileiro conhecido por seus pronunciamentos misóginos, racistas e homofóbicos”.
Anunciada na segunda-feira passada, a CNN Brasil deve seguir um caminho bem diferente, ao menos se depender do histórico dos seus dois sócios. Um deles é Douglas Tavolaro. Coautor da autobiografia do seu tio, o pastor Edir Macedo, foi ele o responsável pela aproximação entre o líder da Universal e Jair Bolsonaro. Antigo vice-presidente de jornalismo da Record, ele esteve por trás das entrevistas laudatórias feitas pela emissora com Bolsonaro durante a campanha.
O outro sócio do novo canal será o empresário mineiro Rubens Menin, fundador da MRV, a maior empresa de construção civil do país. Líder no Minha Casa Minha Vida, a empresa também conta com um histórico de trabalho escravo em suas obras, e uma participação no lobby contra o combate ao crime no Brasil.
Assim como Tavolaro, Menin teceu diversos elogios a Bolsonaro, aos generais do seu governo e até à proximidade com seus filhos. Assim como Bolsonaro, Menin mistura família e negócios, e hoje seu filho Rafael comanda a sua empresa. “A participação da família de forma profissional, legítima e justa é salutar na vida das empresas. Bolsonaro está demonstrando que na política isso também é possível”, disse ele em entrevista ao Correio Braziliense, após afirmar que os empresários são “eufóricos” com o futuro sob o novo presidente.
Na sexta-feira, Menin e Tavolaro se reuniram com o presidente e seu filho Eduardo no Palácio do Planalto. No início desta semana, Eduardo twittou seu ceticismo sobre a nova emissora.
Menin esperou a eleição passar para poder se posicionar sobre a contenda presidencial. Consciente de que o risco político não pode atrapalhar os seus negócios, já doou para candidatos de cargos inferiores de vários partidos, mas só começou a elogiar Bolsonaro um mês após as eleições. A assessoria de imprensa da CNN Brasil negou que essa posição política do dono haverá qualquer influência em seu canal.
Menin, que foi extremamente próximo dos três últimos presidentes brasileiros, agora está fazendo movimentos para se aproximar de Jair Bolsonaro. É um homem ligado ao poder, esteja ele na mão de quem estiver.
A CNN Brasil começará sua operação na segunda metade de 2019, e pretende contratar 400 jornalistas, um número impressionante para o atual mercado do jornalismo por aqui. Uma nota à imprensa afirma que a CNN Brasil terá total independência, mas poderá passar o conteúdo produzido em outras línguas. Não foi a primeira tentativa de trazer o canal para cá, mas aquelas feitas nos últimos vinte anos fracassaram.
Foto: Patricia Monteiro/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A CNN mantém, desde 2011, o Freedom Project, um projeto dedicado a “jogar luz sobre a escravidão contemporânea”. Ele tem entre seus objetivos “amplificar as vozes dos sobreviventes” e “responsabilizar governos e empresas”. Na sua descrição, afirma que “a escravidão não é coisa do passado.”
Em 2019, a escravidão perdura, mas a posição da CNN parece ter mudado ao conceder o uso da marca a Menin. Sua construtora foi colocada na “lista suja” do trabalho escravo por violações em três locais de trabalho diferentes. Mais do que apenas uma mancha de reputação, a lista impedia que as empresas contraíssem empréstimos do governo.
Quando a MRV foi colocada na lista, Menin defendeu veementemente sua empresa e começou a trabalhar obstinadamente para atrapalhar a luta do Brasil contra o trabalho escravo. A Abrainc, uma associação de incorporadores liderada por Menin, entrou com um processo no Supremo Tribunal Federal para suspender a lista.
O pedido foi atendido pelo então presidente do STF, Ricardo Lewandowski, durante o recesso de Natal. Menin recebeu uma decisão favorável em apenas quatro dias e a lista, considerada um exemplo por entidades como a Organização Internacional do Trabalho, foi imediatamente desmantelada.
A lista voltou mais enxuta, e não contém mais o nome da MRV. Além disso, ela também não tem mais o poder de cortar o crédito de ninguém. Se tornou um mero decorativo.
Quando Michel Temer tentou emplacar uma portaria para atrapalhar o combate ao trabalho escravo no Brasil, usou um exemplo da MRV para dizer que os fiscais estavam atuando de maneira exagerada. A MRV, claro, negou estar por trás disso.
A CNN não quis comentar os problemas em específico, e se resumiu a afirmar a mim por e-mail que “faz uma auditoria abrangente de todos seus parceiros de licenciamento. Esse é o caso dos licenciados que vão operar a CNN Brasil, que têm nosso total apoio”.
Rubens Menin fez sua fortuna rapidamente, de forma aparentemente milagrosa. Em quatro anos, sua empresa saltou do 12º lugar para o primeiro no ranking das maiores construtoras civis brasileiras, onde permanece até hoje. Em 2014, a Forbes estimou seu patrimônio líquido em US$ 1,2 bilhão.
Embora Menin defenda valores econômicos liberais em seus textos e entrevistas, sua fortuna foi feita com financiamento público. A empresa é a principal construtora do Minha Casa, Minha Vida. Ele opera principalmente nas faixas 2 e 3 do programa, voltadas à classe média e com financiamento baseado no FGTS.
Fox News do BrasilMenin anunciou a nova estação de televisão ao lado de seu sócio e futuro CEO da CNN Brasil, Douglas Tavolaro. Por quase 10 anos, Tavolaro atuou como vice-presidente de jornalismo da Record TV, que se tornou um porta-voz não-oficial do presidente de extrema-direita Jair Bolsonaro durante e após as eleições de outubro.
Depois de um punhado de aparições desastrosas na TV durante a campanha e de receber uma facada, Bolsonaro decidiu controlar rigidamente o acesso à mídia e não participou de outros debates.
Sem Bolsonaro, a Record cancelou o debate entre os candidatos que aconteceria no seu canal, ao contrário de outras emissoras, que levaram os programas adiante mesmo sem ele. No dia do último debate na Globo, a emissora do bispo exibiu uma entrevista chapa-branca com Bolsonaro enquanto os outros candidatos discutiam propostas no outro canal.
A proximidade continuou após as eleições. Entrevistas recheadas de parabéns ao novo presidente, sem jamais pressioná-lo, foram exibidas na televisão, sempre sob a supervisão de Tavolaro.
Em Outubro do ano passado, o Intercept publicou uma longa declaração de um jornalista do site da Record, o R7, que reclamou de novas diretrizes editoriais para beneficiar a campanha de Bolsonaro. Como resultado, o R7 publicou um ataque ao Intercept enquanto um repórter investigativo da TV Record começou a pesquisar uma matéria mais aprofundada, que nunca foi ao ar.
As relações políticas de Tavolaro não começaram com Bolsonaro. No ano passado, escutas telefônicas da polícia revelaram suas negociações com Aécio Neves, que iria ajudá-lo a conseguir verbas de patrocínio da Caixa Econômica Federal em troca da exibição de uma entrevista com o então-presidente, Michel Temer.
Em março do ano passado, o Intercept revelou que a esposa de Tavolaro, Raissa Caroline Lima — que era uma assessora bem-paga na Assembléia Legislativa de São Paulo — viajava regularmente pelo mundo com o marido durante as votações-chave em que deveria estar presente. O Intercept Brasil não conseguiu localizá-la em seu escritório. O trabalho remoto para os funcionários é estritamente proibido na Assembléia, uma medida para reprimir o uso de funcionários fantasmas. Alguns meses depois, Lima foi discretamente exonerada de seu cargo.
Nos últimos anos, Tavolaro teria se afastado de algumas das tarefas do jornalismo cotidiano para ser o co-autor da biografia e de dois roteiros de filme sobre Edir Macedo. Ele agora parece estar se afastando de Macedo para lançar a CNN brasileira, uma marca obtida da Turner Broadcasting System por uma quantia desconhecida. A assessoria de imprensa negou especulações de que Edir Macedo tenha envolvimento direto no novo projeto.
A Record tenta se aproximar da CNN desde 2007, mas a emissora norte americana rejeitou suas ofertas, pois não queria ser associada à poderosa mega-igreja evangélica de Macedo.
Há anos, a direita brasileira tem clamado por sua própria versão da Fox News, enquanto a Record e SBT deram passos nessa direção, é um sonho que nunca foi totalmente realizado. A chave para desvendar esse sonho pode estar na combinação de Rubens Menin e Douglas Tavolaro sob a bandeira da CNN Brasil.
Nem todos, no entanto, estão convencidos. Ativistas de extrema direita alinhados com Bolsonaro já foram ao Twitter para criticar a nova rede. “CNN BRASIL vai contratar 400 jornalistas para difamar a mudança pela qual o Brasil está passando?”, twittou um funcionário do blog de fake news Terça Livre. “É o [George] Soros quem vai mandar naquela joça”, referindo-se ao filantropo liberal, um frequente bicho papão em teorias de conspiração da extrema-direita (o fundo de Soros detém uma pequena participação na empresa-mãe da CNN). Luciano Hang, o empresário que o Ministério Público do Trabalho quis multar em R$100 milhões por coagir seus funcionários a votar em Bolsonaro, também tuitou criticamente sobre o acordo: “Mais uma TV comunista no Brasil. Alguém pode montar uma Fox?”
Então, será que a CNN Brasil será uma conspiração comunista apoiada por Soros, tentando acabar com o movimento Bolsonaro? Menin respondeu a Hang: “Luciano, não caia nessa história.”
The post A roupa suja da CNN Brasil: escravidão, grampos e Edir Macedo appeared first on The Intercept.
Last Monday, CNN announced that it will launch a Portuguese-language channel in Brazil. The U.S.-based cable news channel will roll out the latest foreign operation to bear the CNN brand through a license. However, the scandal-prone records of the two Brazilian partners behind the venture are already raising questions over the forthcoming channel’s credibility.
Principal funding for the venture will come from the new channel’s chair of the board, Rubens Menin, a construction magnate who is a vocal cheerleader for far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and whose company has been caught multiple times using modern slave labor. CNN Brasil also announced that it will bring on Douglas Tavolaro as its CEO. Tavolaro previously served as vice president for news of Rede Record, a channel that in 2018 earned the nickname “Fox News Brasil” for its fawning coverage of Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign and the preferential access it secured as a result. When orders from on high at Record demanded that journalists cease criticism of Bolsonaro and increase negative coverage of his competitor, a minor staff revolt ensued and multiple journalists resigned in protest.
On Friday, the two figures behind CNN Brasil — Menin and Tavolaro — met with Bolsonaro and his son Eduardo at the presidential palace. Earlier this week, Eduardo tweeted his skepticism of the new outlet.
CNN Brasil said it plans to hire 400 journalists and begin operations during the second half of 2019. A press release noted that the 24-hour news channel will have total editorial independence, as well as the rights to rebroadcast CNN’s non-Portuguese language content. CNN Brasil appears to be swimming against the tide in an industry in which wave after wave of layoffs in major TV and print news organizations have thinned out Brazil’s newsrooms in recent years.
Over the last 20 years, CNN has made several attempts to create a Brazilian channel, but previous negotiations have never gotten off the ground. A representative from CNN declined to respond to The Intercept’s questions and instead issued the following statement: “CNN does a comprehensive audit of all its licensing partners. This is the case of the licensees who will operate CNN Brasil, who have our full support. As with all licensing agreements, CNN Brasil will program the channel independently, but in line with CNN standards and practices.” But, according to the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas-Austin, CNN-licensed media companies abroad are not always viewed as hewing to the guidelines that govern the U.S.-based CNN operation’s journalism.
Brazil’s corporate media landscape is extremely consolidated and uniformly pro-business. In 2016, nearly every major publisher supported the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and her replacement by Michel Temer, who immediately undertook a campaign of austerity and neoliberal reforms.
Bolsonaro, for his part, regularly puts the media in his crosshairs, at times sounding like a carbon copy of U.S. President Donald Trump. In recent months, multiple outlets like Record and the television network SBT have scampered to curry his administration’s favor, often serving as an unofficial mouthpiece in exchange for exclusive interviews and the prospect of an increased cut of the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual government ad spending. SBT even gave Bolsonaro his own show. Other publishers, worried that they might lose this crucial revenue, have quietly ordered journalists to tone down their coverage and refrain from calling Bolsonaro “far-right” or “extremist.”
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is silhouetted during the appointment ceremony of the new heads of public banks, at Planalto Palace in Brasilia on January 7, 2019.
Photo: Evaristo Sa/AFP/Getty Images
In English, CNN news articles have regularly used the term “far-right” to describe Bolsonaro and have regularly referred to him with some variation of “Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian politician known for misogynistic, racist and homophobic remarks.” Ahead of Bolsonaro’s presidential runoff victory, a CNN columnist wrote, “While Bolsonaro is currently competing in a democratic election, we want to flag his previous statements calling for a return to Brazil’s dictatorship in light of what he’s called ‘irresponsible democracy’” — exactly the type of critical coverage that is unlikely to appear at kowtowing and deferential Brazilian outlets, like Record under Tavolaro.
In an interview with the newspaper Correio Braziliense early last month, Menin, CNN Brasil’s principal funder, sang Bolsonaro’s praises and said business leaders are “euphoric about Brazil’s future.” He said the three most positive aspects of the Bolsonaro government are the makeup of his economic team, the deep involvement of military officers in the administration, and the hands-on role of Bolsonaro’s sons. “This isn’t nepotism,” Menin said. “What father doesn’t want his sons close by?” He referred to the Bolsonaro children as “100 percent ethical.” A day later, the Estado de São Paulo newspaper revealed a possible corruption scheme centered around an aide to Bolsonaro’s son Flavio, which included a large payment to the first lady.
Photo: Patricia Monteiro/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Since 2011, CNN has run an ongoing series called the “Freedom Project” dedicated to “shining a light on modern-day slavery.” The brief mission statement for the initiative says: “Amplifying the voices of survivors. Holding governments and businesses accountable. Slavery is not a thing of the past.” In 2019, slavery endures — and CNN is issuing a license to a businessman associated with the modern-day version of the practice.
Menin, who will fund CNN Brasil, has been repeatedly accused of profiting off workers in situations analogous to slave labor. he is the founder of the largest homebuilder in Brazil, MRV Engenharia. The company was placed on a government slave labor “dirty list” for violations at three different work sites.
A 2014 report from the nonprofit Repórter Brasil said that, in five incidents up until that time, more than 200 workers have been rescued by authorities from work in slave-like conditions at MRV worksites. MRV was accused of degrading work conditions — such as toilets overflowing with fecal matter, and a dining area that reeked of urine — as well as debt bondage and human trafficking. (In a statement to Repórter Brasil at the time, MRV denied charges that it held workers in slave-like conditions.)
More than just a reputational stain, the list prevents companies caught using slave labor from getting government loans. When MRV was placed on the list, Menin vehemently defended his company and began to work doggedly to derail Brazil’s fight against slave labor. The Brazilian real estate developers’ trade association, led by Menin, filed a constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court to suspend the slave labor “dirty list.”
Menin’s clout was on full display during the challenge: His request was handled by the president of the Supreme Court, Ricardo Lewandowski, during the Christmas recess. In a notoriously sluggish justice system, in which important cases can drag on for decades, Menin received a favorable ruling in a mere four days, and the list, considered a model program internationally, was immediately dismantled. Eventually, the “dirty list” was revived, but with less expansive criteria, fewer names, and reduced penalties — and MRV was no longer included.
Menin’s fortune was built quickly — almost miraculously. In four years, his company jumped from 12th to first place in the ranking of Brazilian homebuilding firms, where it remains. In 2014, Forbes estimated Menin’s net worth to be $1.2 billion.
Although Menin defends free-market economic values in his columns and interviews, he amassed his millions thanks to government spending. MRV is the main builder for Brazil’s affordable housing program, “Minha Casa, Minha Vida” (“My House, My Life”), the largest of its kind in national history. Under the program, created in 2009, the federal government has subsidized or financed the construction of hundreds of thousands of low-income housing units built by private contractors at great profits.
Known for being reserved and media shy, Menin has been called a “hidden billionaire” in the local and international press. Behind the scenes, however, he was extremely close with the last three Brazilian presidents. Now he’s making moves to cozy up to Bolsonaro. With an eye on his business interests, Menin didn’t declare his support for any candidate during the presidential election. But, after Bolsonaro’s victory, he quickly began heaping effusive praise on Bolsonaro and defending him from critics.
From left, Douglas Tavolaro, José Serra, and Zacarias Pagnanelli at the studios of TV Record in July 29, 2010.
Photo: Cacalos Garrastazu/ObritoNews
Menin announced the new television station alongside his partner and future CNN Brasil CEO Douglas Tavolaro. For almost 10 years, Tavolaro served as vice president of journalism for Record TV, a network that has become an unofficial mouthpiece for Bolsonaro and his right-wing agenda. The Record Group is owned by Edir Macedo, the scandal-plagued billionaire founder of the conservative evangelical Universal Church. Macedo is Tavolaro’s uncle.
Tavolaro was a key player in establishing Bolsonaro’s new cozy relationship with the station, which came to be dubbed the “Brazilian Fox News.” And he was responsible for establishing the dialogue and subsequent alliance between Bolsonaro and Macedo.
After a handful of disastrous TV appearances during the campaign, Bolsonaro decided to tightly control media access and pull out of all future presidential debates. Record obliged and, controversially, broadcast a fawning interview with him in the same time slot as a debate on rival network TV Globo, sucking away the debate’s audience and giving Bolsonaro valuable, uncontested airtime. When Bolsonaro backed out of a debate Record was to host, the channel canceled the broadcast altogether.
Last year, The Intercept Brasil published a lengthy statement from a journalist working for Record who complained about new editorial guidelines that censored reporting to benefit the Bolsonaro campaign. Under Tavolaro’s leadership, various Record properties responded by launching a series of attacks against The Intercept Brasil and its journalists. Record’s online site R7, published a rushed hit piece on The Intercept Brasil and an investigative reporter for Record TV began researching a more in-depth piece that never aired.
In recent years, Tavolaro had reportedly stepped away from some of the day-to-day journalism duties to co-author the biography of and two screenplays about his uncle. He now appears to be stepping away from Macedo to launch the Brazilian CNN, a brand licensed from the Turner Broadcasting System, a division of AT&T, for an unknown sum.
This is not the first time someone linked to the Record media empire has sought to bring the CNN brand to Brazil. Record itself reportedly approached CNN in 2007 and again more recently. But the Atlanta-based broadcaster rejected its offers, not wanting to be associated with Macedo’s powerful evangelical mega-church. (A spokesperson for CNN Brasil told The Intercept that Macedo has no connection to the new network.)
Tavolaro’s political dealings did not begin with Bolsonaro. Last year, police wiretaps revealed Tavolaro talking with two intermediaries — a government minister and a senator who were under investigation for corruption — to offer a presumably softball interview on Record with then-President Michel Temer. In exchange, Tavolaro wanted Temer’s minister to lean on the state bank Caixa Econômica Federal to approve a sponsorship request that they’d submitted. But the bank denied the request and the interview never happened.
Last March, The Intercept Brasil revealed that Tavolaro’s wife, Raissa Caroline Lima — who was a well-paid staffer in the São Paulo State Assembly — was regularly traveling the world with her husband during key votes. The Intercept Brasil was unable to locate her at her office. Remote work for staffers is strictly forbidden in the Assembly, a measure to crack down against phantom employees fraudulently collecting paychecks. A few months later, Lima was quietly let go from her position.
For years, the Brazilian right has been clamoring for its own version of Fox News, and while Record and another channel, SBT, have taken steps in that direction, it’s a dream that has never been fully realized. The key to unlocking that dream might lie in the combination of Rubens Menin and Douglas Tavolaro under the banner of CNN Brasil.
Not everyone, however, is convinced. Far-right activists closely aligned with Bolsonaro have already taken to Twitter to criticize the new network. “CNN Brasil will hire 400 journalists to defame the change that Brazil is going through,” one popular right-wing blogger tweeted. “It’s [George] Soros that will call the shots there” — referring to the liberal philanthropist, a frequent boogeyman of the global far-right conspiracy theories whose fund owns a minor stake in CNN’s parent company. Luciano Hang, a businessman who has so fervently lobbied in support of Bolsonaro that prosecutors want him to pay a $27 million fine for coercing votes from his employees, also tweeted critically about the deal: “Another communist TV channel in Brazil. Can someone create a Fox?”
So will CNN Brasil be a Soros-backed communist conspiracy chomping at the bit to tear down the Bolsonaro movement? As Menin responded to Hang, “Luciano, don’t fall for that story.”
The post Meet the Team Behind CNN Brasil: A Businessman Accused of Exploiting Slave Labor and An Executive From a Fox News-style Outlet appeared first on The Intercept.
Os primeiros 15 dias de governo mostram que o bolsonarismo é mesmo o terraplanismo aplicado à política. Nada precisa fazer sentido. Basta se apegar a uma crença, ignorar a realidade dos fatos e seguir em frente. Até agora tem dado certo.
Depois de se elegerem ostentado um anticomunismo insano, parlamentares da bancada do PSL e outros bolsonaristas foram convidados pelo Partido Comunista da China para conhecer a tecnologia de reconhecimento facial em locais públicos — o Big Brother do regime. E lá foram cerca de 20 anticomunistas passear durante dez dias para conhecer as maravilhas tecnológicas daquele país. Toda essa mamata da trupe de Bolsonaro, incluindo hotel de luxo e passagem aérea em classe executiva, foi financiada pelo comunismo.
As violações dos direitos humanos na China não são motivo de repúdio como são as da Venezuela. Mas há uma explicação. Segundo o deputado pitboy Daniel Vieira (PSL-RJ) — aquele que destruiu a placa de rua simbólica que levava o nome de Marielle Franco —, a China é um “socialismo light”, e não uma ditadura como a Venezuela. Eu sei que já devia estar acostumado, mas ainda fico constrangido com a dificuldade com que esses novos políticos de extrema direita têm em lidar com conceitos básicos de política. Certamente o nosso pitboy considera o “socialismo chinês” muito mais brando do que a ditadura do PT.
Olavo de Carvalho, o farol intelectual do bolsonarismo, gravou um vídeo dando umas belas chineladas na turma que traiu o movimento anti-globalista e embarcou no trem da alegria. Prometeu não falar mais com sua amiga Carla Zambelli (PSL-SP) e chamou todos da comitiva de “semi-analfabetos” e “caipiras”. Olavo nunca teve tanta razão. De fato, alguns vídeos que os bolsonaristas publicaram em suas redes mostram um deslumbre que lembra a família Buscapé chegando em Beverly Hills.
A coisa fica ainda mais cômica quando se descobre que a viagem não foi uma iniciativa do governo brasileiro, mas de um amigo do Alexandre Frota (PSL-SP), o empresário Vinícius de Aquino. Ele combinou a viagem com a embaixada e escolheu os convidados. “Convidei os deputados de que gosto e confio, e que são web influencers, para que a esta viagem possa trazer o maior êxito possível”, afirmou o empresário que jura não estar ganhando nada fazendo essa ponte.
Entre os convidados, o influenciador digital de maior presença na internet é o deputado Luis Miranda (DEM-DF). Ele tem publicado muitos vídeos da viagem e parece ser o parlamentar mais entusiasmado no país da foice e do martelo. É sobre ele que eu quero falar nesta coluna. A sua trajetória até a Câmara dos Deputados é um troço meio inacreditável, mas bastante representativa do embuste que é essa viagem pra China e do bolsonarismo vigente.
Miranda se apresenta na internet como um empreendedor de sucesso. Um self-made man que saiu do Brasil sem um tostão e virou um empresário milionário em Miami. Durante anos, ele se dedicou a contar no YouTube as maravilhas do capitalismo na terra do Tio Sam, sempre comparando com as desgraças do “socialismo brasileiro”. Nos vídeos, ele aparece ostentando imóveis, carros, lancha e bolos de notas de cem dólares — algumas vezes falsas. Foi assim que ganhou fama na comunidade brasileira nos EUA e entre os brasileiros que sonham em migrar. Conquistou aproximadamente 800 mil seguidores no YouTube e 3 milhões no Facebook. Virou uma estrela da internet.
Sempre usando frases motivacionais e retórica de coach, Luis Miranda também deu palestras e vendeu cursos ensinando como conseguir o green card e ficar rico nos EUA. No Linkedin, se apresenta como um “multi empresário, que assim como seu ídolo famoso Steve Jobs, precisou se reinventar após um grande sucesso e queda”.
Acontece que o sucesso empresarial de Miranda é mais fake do que a mamadeira de piroca do WhatsApp. Simplesmente todas as empresas que ele fundou faliram e deixaram um histórico de calotes na praça.
Sua carreira empresarial se iniciou ainda no Brasil em 2008, quando fundou a Fitcorpus, uma franquia de clínicas de estética que chegou a aparecer mais de uma vez no programa Amaury Jr. como um modelo de negócio revolucionário.
Depois de aplicar muitos calotes e receber muitos processos, a Fitcorpus faliu. Foi então que Miranda decidiu viajar para os EUA e prosseguir no ramo da picaretagem.
O deputado eleito faz qualquer tipo de negócio. Em Miami, fundou a Gifts for World, empresa de importação e exportação, que seduzia brasileiros com produtos a preços baixos, mas que também ficou marcada por calotes. No Reclame Aqui, há diversos relatos de clientes lesados que pagaram e não receberam seus produtos.
Outra empreitada de Miranda foi a Dreamtrips, uma espécie de clube de viagens sob o modelo de Marketing Multinível, em que você paga um pequeno valor mensal e tem direito a diárias em bons hotéis no Brasil e no exterior. Quem aderir ao clube também pode ganhar dinheiro se conseguir atrair novos membros. Tem cara, cheiro e talvez seja mesmo uma pirâmide financeira.
A Dreamtrips oferece os produtos de outra empresa, a WorldVentures, que não tem permissão para vender no Brasil. Mas isso não é um problema para Miranda. Em um vídeo tutorial gravado no ano passado, ele ensina como se cadastrar no site da empresa e se tornar um membro do clube fornecendo número de identidade e endereço americano falsos! A própria WorldVentures teve que declarar que não está trabalhando legalmente no Brasil. Ou seja, Luis Miranda ofereceu um serviço ilegal para quem mora aqui. Os calotes relatados no Reclame Aqui não deixam dúvidas de que a Dreamtrips é mais uma empreitada picareta do deputado eleito.
Propaganda de um dos cursos de Luis Miranda que prometem milagres.
Foto: Reprodução/Site do Luis Miranda
Luis Miranda também tem o hábito de ameaçar quem o denuncia. Em uma das ameaças, mostra tacos de madeira expostos na parede do seu escritório que ele diz servir “para dar porrada em vagabundo”. Segundo ele, só não os usou ainda porque seus denunciantes “estão longe, senão já teria feito maldades”. Neste mesmo vídeo, ele também exibe um Lamborghini e plaquês de 100 dólares enquanto grita “dinheiro falso? Confere direito! Tira um print disso aqui, seu filho da puta! Vai, seu viado do caralho! Tira um print!”
Mesmo tendo sido desmascarado por vários outros youtubers, Luis Miranda continuou com seus negócios obscuros e começou a preparar o terreno para entrar na política brasileira. Em 2017, foi recebido pelo então deputado Jair Bolsonaro em seu gabinete, onde gravaram um vídeo demonstrando simpatia mútua. Seus vídeos passaram a falar cada vez mais sobre política, sempre surfando na onda bolsonarista. No ano passado, ele decidiu lançar sua candidatura a deputado federal pelo DEM.
Mesmo morando em Miami, Miranda foi o sexto deputado federal mais votado do Distrito Federal. Durante a campanha, vendeu a imagem do herói que abandonou uma carreira empresarial de sucesso no exterior para salvar sua terra natal do comunismo. O milionário condenado por não pagar aluguel fez uma promessa de campanha que dificilmente poderá cumprir: abrir mão dos salários e benefícios de deputado.
Depois da repercussão negativa da viagem no Brasil, Luis Miranda gravou vídeo na China ao lado do embaixador brasileiro exibindo sua megalomania: “acabei de receber a informação de que a bolsa tá bombando no Brasil porque um grupo de malucos veio fazer uma visita para aquecer a economia”. Em outro vídeo, ele deixou escapar que está usando a viagem para fins particulares. “A todo momento estou pedindo para a delegação me apresentar empresas de tecnologia que vendam produtos que eu possa comercializar no meu grande negócio nos EUA.” Aproveitou também para xingar os críticos da viagem de “burros, idiotas e palhaços”, e fazer novas ameaças: “me chama de safado na minha frente pra ver se eu não quebro um dente do vagabundo.” Miranda está mesmo muito à vontade nessa nova era.
Logo após o primeiro turno, o deputado já vislumbrava grandes negócios com Bolsonaro na presidência. “Mermão, se o Bolsonaro ganhar, tudo vai melhorar. A economia do Brasil vai explodir. Eu já tenho negócios articulados com pessoas do alto escalão”. Poucos dias depois, lá estava ele viajando com a bancada do PSL para fazer negócios na meca do comunismo.
Fale o que quiser de Luis Miranda, mas não dá para negar que se trata de um gênio da vigarice. Agora, um gênio com foro privilegiado.
The post Calotes, mentiras e ameaças – conheça Luis Miranda, o youtuber eleito deputado federal pelo DEM appeared first on The Intercept.
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